I have built many dozens of computers over the last 20 years and I've never ever seen any static-related problems. I don't wear a static wrist strap, but I do always touch something metal on the case before touching the internals.
Static does cause damage other than immediate catastrophic failure. It can degrade silicon in subtle ways, resulting in random errors or crashes or even slowness due to retrying transactions. Wearing the wrist strap is cheap insurance against mysterious badness.
Yeah, but it's also a little bit voodoo. Unless we can point to specific instances of things going wrong, it's kind of imagineering a problem where one does not actually exist.
That said I always advise touching something metal on the exterior case before touching anything in a computer, and that's how I have always done it.
Static damage to a chip may not result in an immediate failure. It may manifest as lessened performance, unreliability, or a shortened lifespan. I've seen this demonstrated in training videos for the electronics industry. (I think EEVblog has a static demo up on YouTube).
The semiconductor industry (i.e., the companies like Intel that made the parts on your circuit boards) spends many millions, if not billions, of $ a year on static-protective mitigations. They're pretty smart folks and also very cost-conscious. They would not be spending all this money if it were pure voodoo.
However, parts mounted on a circuit board are much more resilient than loose chips. I, too, use the "touching metal" method but am very careful about it.
I had a summer job building many computers, and have been ever since. Apart from making sure that you are not building up lots of static and then discharging it into components, its never been a problem for me either.
Same here. First PC repair skill I learned was grounding myself (wrist to grounded computer case, or other grounded metal). Never zapped a single component and I live somewhere with almost no humidity.
