No sponsored picks
Recommendations are never paid for. If a video is sponsored, the sponsor gets a clearly labelled slot and zero say over the content.
About
One person, one bench
I’m ComputerSmack. Computer Smack is where I put everything I’ve learned building, breaking and fixing PCs — as videos and as writing.
There’s no team here. No agency, no vendor deals steering what I say. Just me, a bench full of parts, and a habit of pulling things apart to see how they work.
The name is a joke about the thing everyone wants to do to a computer that won’t cooperate. The content is the opposite of that feeling: clear buying advice, start-to-finish build guides, honest reviews of hardware I actually paid for, and deep dives into the stuff that usually gets hand-waved — cache, cooling, power delivery, upscaling.
If something here helps you spend your money better or fix your own machine, that’s the whole point. If I get something wrong, tell me — corrections go at the top of the post, in public.
The blog and the YouTube channel cover the same ground in different formats. Subscribe to whichever one fits how you like to learn.
How I work
Four rules I don’t break
Hands-on, or it doesn’t ship
I don’t review or recommend hardware I haven’t used. Benchmarks are mine, run on my bench, with the methodology shown.
Written for real budgets
Most people aren’t buying a 4090. The advice here assumes you want the most performance per dollar, not the biggest number.
Corrections in public
When I get something wrong, the post gets an update note at the top — not a quiet edit.
The setup
Where the testing happens
A dedicated bench with a rotating cast of CPUs, GPUs, coolers and drives, a calibrated monitor, a power meter and a decibel meter. Benchmark runs and methodology get shown in the videos so you can check my work.
Bench photo coming soon
Come along for it
New builds, reviews and explainers every week. Subscribe on YouTube or grab the RSS feed.