Can travelling damage a pc?

[Magnusva]

I want to do a portable pc since my parents are divorced, and I'm gonna be moving it at least once a week. And this is great, but a friend of mine is telling me that, pc's cannot tolerate being moved, and that it will easily be damaged. Is this true? And if so is there anything you can do?

 

[DSzymborski]

Nah, they can be moved, but you just have to be careful in some ways. Get a sturdier case for example over a less expensive one and use water cooling so that there isn't a massive heatsink on a moving PC. And if you can afford it, try to dispense with a physical hard drive entirely and go with a large SSD.

 

[Magnusva]

Nah, they can be moved, but you just have to be careful in some ways. Get a sturdier case for example over a less expensive one and use water cooling so that there isn't a massive heatsink on a moving PC.

Could you perhaps recommend a case?

 

[USAFRet]

I want to do a portable pc since my parents are divorced, and I'm gonna be moving it at least once a week. And this is great, but a friend of mine is telling me that, pc's cannot tolerate being moved, and that it will easily be damaged. Is this true? And if so is there anything you can do?

Thought experiment for you:
How does a prebuilt PC get from the factory in China to the shelf at BestBuy, and then to your house?

Spoiler

It was moved.

 

[Magnusva]

I want to do a portable pc since my parents are divorced, and I'm gonna be moving it at least once a week. And this is great, but a friend of mine is telling me that, pc's cannot tolerate being moved, and that it will easily be damaged. Is this true? And if so is there anything you can do?

Thought experiment for you:
How does a prebuilt PC get from the factory in China to the shelf at BestBuy, and then to your house?

Spoiler

It was moved.

I know, just thought about more than one more

 

[theyeti87]

It is best practice to lay the tower down in the vehicle so that the motherboard is parallel to the ground/seat. CPU heatsinks and GPUs are relatively heavy. If you were to put in the tower upright, every bump you hit would put a stress on the PCIe slot, since it would be holding ~500g (just an estimate) of mass at a 90 degree angle to the slot it occupies. Same concept applies to the cpu heatsink.

 

[USAFRet]

I want to do a portable pc since my parents are divorced, and I'm gonna be moving it at least once a week. And this is great, but a friend of mine is telling me that, pc's cannot tolerate being moved, and that it will easily be damaged. Is this true? And if so is there anything you can do?

Thought experiment for you:
How does a prebuilt PC get from the factory in China to the shelf at BestBuy, and then to your house?

Spoiler

It was moved.

I know, just thought about more than one more

Longer spoiler:

Spoiler

The life of a PC, from construction to your living room:
Factory -> conveyor belt -> forklift -> warehouse -> forklift -> truck -> forklift -> shipping container -> ship -> ocean -> big giant forklift thing to grab the shipping container -> ground -> forklift -> truck -> warehouse -> forklift -> truck -> Newegg warehouse -> forklift -> truck -> distro warehouse -> forklift -> truck -> local UPS center -> forklift -> truck all day in the summer heat (or winter cold) -> UPS guy drops it (literally) on your porch.

And you're worried about a couple of miles in the back of the car?

It is moved more than 'once'.

But just take care, don't drop it, lay it down flat.

 

[DSzymborski]

Nah, they can be moved, but you just have to be careful in some ways. Get a sturdier case for example over a less expensive one and use water cooling so that there isn't a massive heatsink on a moving PC.

Could you perhaps recommend a case?

People rave about the Bitfenix Prodigy and the Prodigy M (which can support a micro ATX motherboard) for portable builds, but I can't speak from personal experience here on moving a PC around; my various rigs are a bunch of giant, heavy, monsters that you could use as a battering ram in a pinch. It's been 20 years since I needed to transport a PC for a LAN party and that PC wasn't the least bit small or portable either!