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RavenholmZombie

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  1. RavenholmZombie
    Wow, it really has been quite a while since I've last used this blog. So much has happened since then too!
    I hope you're all doing well and staying safe during these difficult times. I hope to be more active on here as time goes on .
    During this period of absence, I've built a new gaming PC that's more powerful than the one I built a few years ago (post about it here).
    Here are its specs.
    CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML120L RGB V2 120mm AIO liquid cooler. RAM: 32 GB DDR4-3200 Motherboard: MSI B350M Gaming PRO Micro ATX. GPU: ZOTAC GTX 1080 Mini Storage: Boot: 512 GB SanDisk SATA III SSD. Mass Storage: SeaGate Barracuda 2 TB 7200 RPM Mechanical Hard Drive. Additional Storage: 112 GB PNY SSD (carried over from that old build). OS: Microsoft Windows 11 Pro (originally Windows 10 Pro but upgraded when it was offered). Also involved in the Windows Insider Program, so I get new builds every week.
  2. RavenholmZombie
    WARNING: VERY Long Blog Post - Remember to pause and rest your eyes  
    Last November, I built my first custom PC, a simple budget-friendly rig with an Intel i3-6100, 8 GB of RAM, and a GTX 1050 Ti. Overall, it suited my purposes and did quite well. But, recently, the poor thing started to have problems, the biggest of which being just overall system instability. Shortly before the upgrade, it had gotten to the point where my system was crashing at least three times per day. After investigating, I determined that it was multiple things causing the frequent crashing. The biggest two were a dying motherboard and CPU. You see, when I built my system, I wasn't as tidy and careful with it as I should've been, it took a few tumbles...
    Anywho, back to this topic of this post, upgrading my PC.
    Recently, I had the opportunity to take $1250 USD and upgrade my PC. So, after much consideration with my friends in the PC building community, I settled on this parts list:
    CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Cooler: AMD Wraith Spire OEM Cooler I switched to Ryzen because it came highly-recommended by my friends, and it was cheaper than buying an Intel i7 and compatible motherboard. RAM: 16 GB DDR4-2400 Corsair Vengeance LPX RAM I just had to buy one stick, I salvaged the other one from my old PC GPU: ZOTAC GeForce GTX 1080 Mini PSU: EVGA 600W Semi-Modular Power Supply - 80+ Bronze certification This also came highly-recommended and has really good reviews. Storage: Primary: 480 GB SanDisk SATA III SSD Mass: 1 TB Seagate HDD This was also salvaged from my old PC because it has all of my games and programs on it Motherboard: MSI B350M Gaming Pro MicroATX Motherboard Chassis: Corsair Carbide Series 88R MicroATX Chassis with side-panel window  Now that the parts list is settled, let's discuss what actually happened and what went wrong.
    The night before the originally-expected delivery date, FedEx pulled up with a small package from Amazon for me. The package had the motherboard and RAM in it. At first, I was not pleased when I saw that FedEx was going to be handling a portion of my order because they've always had a hard time finding my address. So, imagine my surprise when I saw the FedEx truck pull up into my parking lot. They must've thought that I lived in the building next door because they drove right past us. My brother-in-law and I literally had to sprint after the FedEx truck in order to flag it down so I could get my package. In the end, I got my package and had to wait an addition day for the rest of my parts to arrive via UPS because everything got delayed due to a recent snowstorm.
    The next day was busy for us. The week before, we were all doing our Christmas shopping online and, consequentially, all of our stuff started showing up. So we had UPS trucks coming, FedEx vans literally coming one after the other and our P.O. box was overflowing with packages for all of us sent by every store from Walmart to Famous Footwear and the WWE Super Store.
    That afternoon, I was pacing back and forth waiting for a UPS truck that had the rest of my parts to show up, I was starting to worry since both Amazon and UPS' online tracker said that my package was preparing for delivery. I was worried that they lost my package, over $1000 worth of PC parts. So, as you could probably imagine, I was ecstatic when UPS arrived and the driver said that he had two packages for me. I was so excited that I could hardly contain myself. The first package, the big one that weighed in at a whopping 9kg (20 lbs), had the rest of my parts. The second package, a smaller one, had the PC toolkit that I needed and a Rick and Morty t-shirt.
    After getting the box opened, I got right to work taking inventory to make sure I had everything, and I did!
    Actually Upgrading:
    The first thing I did was rather simple, I took my new SSD, connected it to my old PC, downloaded the free version of Macrium Reflect, and cloned my old SSD's data to the new one. This saved me a lot of time (and frustration) because I'd have to do a fresh install of Windows 10 and download all of the updates if I couldn't clone my old SSD.
    After that was done, I got to work dismantling my old PC so I could salvage the RAM, 1 TB hard drive, and DVD optical drive from it. This didn't take too long, but the wiring was a real pain, especially when it came to removing the RAM because I had cables all over the place inside that old PC.
    Once I had all of the parts I needed, I set my old PC to the side and got to work assembling my new one. The first thing I did was prepare the motherboard. I took the motherboard out of its box and included anti-static bag, sat it down gently on my table, and got to work installing the CPU, RAM, and CPU cooler (this is where the first problem started). After the motherboard was ready, I started preparing the new chassis. I installed the power supply and routed its cables, mounted the SSD and hard drive into the chassis' included hard drive cage, and mounted the optical drive after popping off the face plate covering the optical drive bay.
    After the chassis was ready, I began the slow process of installing and wiring up the motherboard. The biggest pain was dealing with those annoying little front-panel I/O cables, but I got them wired up (not properly though, this is the second problem). After that, I wired up all of the power connectors and SATA data cables for the SSD, hard drive, and optical drive.
    Once the motherboard was mounted and wired up, I got to hold my new GTX 1080 graphics card in my hands for the first time. It felt great, the card was heavy and had a sturdy all-metal back plate. Feeling like this was a truly magical moment, I slowly popped out the required PCI-e covers from the back of the chassis and slowly installed the graphics card into the slot on the motherboard, after hearing that click from the socket latching onto the card, I slowly pulled back and endured what I could only describe as a religious experience. I felt the ascension from being an entry-level PC gamer to being a part of the Glorious PC Master Race. After that life-changer, I connected the PCI-e power cables from the power supply to the graphics card and got to work on cable management.
    The task of cable management is not to be taken lightly and I grossly underestimated the difficulty of it. I never realized there were so many potential combinations for cable management, but one bag of zip ties later and the deed was done and my PC looked great (to me at least )
    After closing up the chassis and admiring my work for a few minutes, the most crucial moment in any PC build was upon me, the dreaded first boot, the period of time where you'll figure out if your parts work or if a battle between you and the retailer for a replacement or refund lies in the very near future. I was sweating bullets as I connected the required cables to the PC and pushed the button... A few seconds pass, and nothing happens. Oh no... I tried again, still nothing, then I pressed the reset button by accident and it turned on . Yep, I wired the power and reset buttons incorrectly, but at least the system powered on. Then I had to wait for it to cycle and run the Power On Self-Test (POST) and, boy oh-boy, you should've seen me when it booted and loaded Windows. I was actually, literally, jumping for joy. An hour and a half of work and it all paid off. I had it, the PC of my dreams.
    I spent the next three hours installing all of the drivers and getting stuff up and running properly.
    The Problems:
    As with almost every beginner PC builder's second build, there's usually one or two things wrong, and I was certainly no exception.
    The first problem, as mentioned above, had to do with the CPU cooler. You see, I'm used to installing Intel's stock cooler, it just clicks into place with little force needed. But AMD's Wraith Spire cooler required a lot of force for me to install properly, I was actually worried that I was going to break the CPU or damage the motherboard while I was wrenching down on this cooler and, oh man, it put up quite a fight. While I was installing the cooler, it would let go of the threads on another screw holding it to the included back plate, so I'd have to go and fix that, then another one would break, and I'd have to fix that.
    At the end of it, I thought that I had the cooler mounted properly, so I decided to play some games for benchmarking purposes. Halfway through benchmarking a game, I get a notice about the CPU overheating, so I downloaded AMD's "Ryzen Master" software and looked at the CPU's temperatures. It was idling at 70 degrees Celsius, uh-oh... So I had to power down the PC, unplug it, power cycle it so there'd be no residual voltage left on the board, and began round two with that damn cooler. This time though, I came prepared, I held the PC down by pressing my chest onto the case while I wrenched down on the screws with all the strength I could muster. Again, I worried that I was killing my CPU or motherboard, but I eventually got all four holding screws properly threaded and tightened. That was a pain, but with the task done, I reconnected everything and powered on the PC, and sighed in relief as it booted into Windows with no issue. Then, after logging in, I opened up Ryzen Master again and saw that the temperature was now idling at 35 to 40 degrees Celsius, the range AMD said to expect in the manual that came with my CPU.
    The second issue has to do with the power and reset buttons being inverted. Turns out I just connected the cables to the wrong jumpers. I haven't switched them yet though, mainly because it's not important. Leaving them "as is" won't damage anything since they both have the same required connections and voltage. I may fix it at some point, or I may not.
  3. RavenholmZombie
    I hope you all had a wonderful and joyous Hearth's Warming
    In the comments, tell me what you got for Hearth's Warming
    Here's what I got:
    A new gaming PC (you can read my "amazing" story about assembling it here) A Nintendo Switch with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and Super Mario Odyssey (I've already beat both of them ) A copy of Cuphead Some money from relatives, which I promptly spent on groceries because adult.
  6. RavenholmZombie
    Now, before I get going, let me say that, despite these major issues I've had with my own PC. Windows 10 is actually a really good operation system.
     
    Ever since I was able to upgrade for free, I've been running into a whole slew of problems. These problems are
    Sound Driver: My sound driver would literally stutter then die. The only way to fix this is to restart the PC. Video Driver: The source of so many Windows 10 Blue Screens of Death for me. Not to mention that Minecraft runs like absolute crap on Windows 10 for me, but runs smoothly on Windows 8.1. Wake Alarm: What's that? It's the driver that tells your PC to come out of sleep mode when you open your laptop, move your mouse, touch your keyboard, etc. it barely worked on my laptop under Windows 10. This would cause my hard drive to spin up then spin down, resulting in a rather gnarly crash and file corruption. Wireless Driver: Before upgrading, my wireless never had problems. But under Windows 10, I was frequently booted from my home network. Freezing: Under Windows 8.1, I've never had my OS lockup on me completely. Under Windows 10, however, my OS would frequently freeze and require a hard shutdown.

    Now, keep in mind that my PC is rather new (it's not even two years old) and that, while I was running Windows 10, I had all of the latest Intel, Realtek, and HP drivers installed onto my computer and I was still having problems with Windows 10.
     
    I heard that Microsoft is releasing their big Threshold 2 update in the first week of November. After it's released, I might (MIGHT) give Windows 10 another try.
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