Sharing first time building experience.

[Snail Jerky]

Only building experience is swapping dead GPUs, adding memory/optical drives. Never built an entire PC.

Not comfortable at all, tinkering with any electronics. Pushing myself recently to replace a faulty cable in my G400 mouse was a pretty big deal. Donor cable from my ancient mx518.

 

Can't really compare parts/prices but I thought it would be cool to look at the cost of my previous PC built by a local store. The GTX 660 in the 2013 PC lasted about 16 months and I gave the refurbished replacement to my brother. The 2013 PC had a EVGA GTX 770 for most of its life. That card lasted 7 great years. Bought in 2014 for $320.

The 2022 PC should've been closer to $1100CDN, but due to availability issues I had to pick different parts. All my parts were picked up in store. If I stuck with getting my original cheaper priced parts, the shipping to get them made it a worse value.

 

Squeezing every drop of performance from the PC has never been my aim. It is getting what I paid for and keep it running as long as I can. E-waste is something that bothers me a lot and I try to minimize it.

I dragged that 2013 PC as far as I could with it running a GTX 550ti for the last year(having to downgrade to 720p & 900p really stunk). Wanted to get it to the decade mark, but with recent changes, announcements in tech I thought it might be a good time for a new PC.

As to performance needs, still enjoy late 90's to early 2000's RTS and city builders. My Steam backlog is about 100 games from mostly 2010-2018. I don't follow or have interest in most modern games, with that backlog there is no need to. A few exceptions of course, Dragons Dogma 2 & Homeworld 3 are probably the only games I'll pick up in the future and I'm guessing they should run okay.  And Anno 1800, if it ever goes to GOG. Well I'm highly doubtful of this. Been waiting long enough, probably won't care about it in the coming years.

 

 

 

 

 

CASE : 

     -original choice was the CM NR600, but no local availability. Shipping it in and buying an extra 120mm case fan to get it slightly better temp perf than a stock 4000D Airflow. The price gap shrunk, and paying a little more I could walk out the door with the 4000D, which overall I like better except for lack of optical drive slot...

     -hard drive cage was really tightened down; thumb screws, had some trouble loosening it due to lack of tools.

     -spent 1h30m actually building, deciding how to build. + 1h45m watching several build guides and videos of people installing the same specific parts that I had.

     -cable management,? hah. If it isn't in the way of anything, that's good enough. Was tired of course and I started in the evening. I wouldn't be surprised if you add another 30-60mins to the build, so that I could "learn" how to cable manage. Not to mention being able to physically do it properly.

 

CPU :

     -followed the basic advice. Line up the markings, and the CPU should just drop in. No force is needed, that is a bad thing.

     -3rd party cooler(paid $10 more, cheaper version w/o RGB just wasn't avail nearby), moderate difficulty. I had to figure out how to bend/contort the clamp for the heatsink and fan. Took a bit of time, being forceful with it did me no good.

     -Common opinion was getting a decent CPU cooler would best the included stock AMD cooler by 10c easily. [runs about 28c idling after bootup for 20mins - Win10]    

 

Motherboard :

     -straightforward, mostly easy to work with

     -had not thought about any cable management yet and plugged the cable into the USB 3.2? MB connector. Wasn't in a good spot, tried to take it out and the cable wasn't budging. The MB connector was doing all the moving, and I stopped and gave up on it. Don't want to wreck the MB on my very first self-build.

 

Memory :

     -only one tab to get the memory stick into this MB, which confused me a bit because my previous MB had two. So I was being too gentle with it and took 3-4 tries to seat it properly.

 

GPU :

     -quick, simple, that's it.

     -running at 1080p 60, due to my TV.

 

Power Supply :

     -smaller size, modular, made it easy.

 

Storage :

     -no issues here.

 

 

POST on first try, hurray!