$1500 Overkill PC

NotMrTaco · September 8, 2019

So I always wanted to get a gaming pc because my laptop had always held me back. It's an old Toshiba satellite p775-s7215. I was thinking of possibly putting in a 120gb ssd, and replacing the thermal paste on the CPU and re-purpose it as a server for Minecraft. I finally managed to get a IT internship over the summer, and racked in some cash which went to this PC and a couple of other goodies. Now having this PC for only a couple days I can say, this is overkill for my use case. I should have gotten a ryzen 5 3600, and a b450 tomahawk mobo, with 16gb of ram rather than 32. Everything else, is fine for my use case, the 500gb ssd, and 2 tb HDD, and the case and psu. Nonetheless, I enjoyed building this PC even though I was spooked for a bit, because it wouldn't go past the CPU debug light. I then reseted the RTC ram and it worked fine. I have a r9 280x vapor-x from Sapphire in there while my rtx 2070 super arrives.

1st Picture: r9 280x, borrowed from my cousin, he thought it broke, but then when I tried it, it worked perfectly.

2nd Picture: All of the parts (minus the r9 280x) and the rtx 2070 super.

3rd Picture: Testing the parts outside of the case.

4th Picture: After the first boot.

NotMrTaco · September 8, 2019

Here's some more pictures!

1st Picture: In the case when the CPU debug light was scaring me.

2nd/3rd Picture: After the fix, playing around with the lighting. Sleeved Cable Extensions go a long way.

4th Picture: After I reseted the RTC ram, during a bios update.

5th Picture: Downloading Forza Horizon 4, thanks to Xbox Game Pass. The clock in the front is a bluetooth speaker which is what I'm using for sound. It packs a punch.

leo1798 · September 8, 2019

Looks great! I honestly don't think that your choice of motherboard was a mistake as ASUS has been dominating the low-end X570 lineup and you have more upgrade headroom in the future. You'll also appreciate the 32 gigs of ram - I built just over a year ago when RAM was still super expensive so I got only 16 for what you probably paid for 32, lol. In hindsight you should have maybe ditched the hard drive/512 GB SSD and just gotten an Intel 660p 1 or 2 TB NVMe drive as hard drives are a pain in the ass and that drive is super cheap but performs well. But regardless, it looks great and I hope you enjoy it!

NotMrTaco · September 8, 2019

3 hours ago, leo1798 said:

Looks great! I honestly don't think that your choice of motherboard was a mistake as ASUS has been dominating the low-end X570 lineup and you have more upgrade headroom in the future. You'll also appreciate the 32 gigs of ram - I built just over a year ago when RAM was still super expensive so I got only 16 for what you probably paid for 32, lol. In hindsight you should have maybe ditched the hard drive/512 GB SSD and just gotten an Intel 660p 1 or 2 TB NVMe drive as hard drives are a pain in the ass and that drive is super cheap but performs well. But regardless, it looks great and I hope you enjoy it!

Yeah! As I was parting it out, I originally thought of just 1 big ssd because I didn't want to have to worry about configuring where files go, but then my co-worker who's also a pretty good friend of mine from school recommended I get a storage drive as well as a SSD because I'm going to go through 1 terabyte quickly. And besides i paid about $110 for the 500gb ssd and 2tb hdd, for that same price I would have only gotten like a 1tb ssd. I might later on, hopefully next summer, install another m.2 ssd, possibly of the pcie 4.0 kind because I believe my motherboard has a cover which acts as a heatsink for the m.2.