Meet "the Struggle"

[topblast]

Meet “the Struggle”

 

DISCLAIMER: I know my English is bad. I am actively working on improving it. Your feedback is welcomed.

 

 

A Little About Me

I am a student at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus. My interest in computers first sparked when my older brother somehow broke a computer in our house, and with me being youngest of three, I got the blame. I pushed myself to fine what I could have done, and learnt a lot about the systems. Later, I fell in love with programming in 2010 when programming game hacks for Combat Arms (I had to start somewhere). Now second year in university and the current president of the Computer Science Society. I am planning on developing a distributed world simulation for autonomous agents for my research year. An application/system that cannot be done on my current computer at home.

Intro to Betsy

I bought a barebones tower for my PC in community college about 4 years ago. I refer to her as “Betsy”. Betsy and I have been through some hard times. For example, the rain normally falls east to west in my area here in Barbados. This one day, 2 years ago, the rain decided to switch it up a little. It just so happens that my window was open above Betsy, which was powered on at the time compiling the Dolphin emulator. As I was not in the room, half my room, including Betsy was drenched with water*Note: my computer case is basically a workbench, it is from my brother’s old system*. Betsy survived and made a full recovery in less than a day.

  

 

Specs:

·         Gigabyte 970A- UD3 (Believe in that Ultra Durable)

·         AMD Phenom II x4 840 @ 3.2 GHz ~ 4.0 GHz (depending on time of the year)

·         NVidia GeForce GTX 465 from EVGA

·         8 GBytes DDR3

·         Kingston ssdNow 200 V+

·         Western Digital Green 2 TB HDD

·         Antec EarthWatt 650w 80+ Platinum

 [Image of Betsy]

Spoiler

The Beginning

Coming close to November 2015, Betsy was having issues powering on. I knew it was a bad sign, but as a university student, we all know where my time, money and effort is. Eventually, Betsy no longer powered on, her motherboard dies. Luckily I had a friend’s previous system which I used as a server for and experiments (The fun stuff). I now use this system as my “daily driver” as Linus would say. I name this system “the Struggle”.

Specs:

·      BIOSSTAR TA790GXE 128M

·      AMD Phenom II x4 940 @ 3.0 GHz (Don’t let the 9 fool you, it’s the older architecture)

·      4 GBytes DDR2

·      NVidia GeForce GTX 465 (I brought over Betsy’s GPU)

The Struggle

Let me just say, the struggle is real. Switch from Betsy to “the Struggle”, I reused some parts, such as my heatsink (Zalman CNPS10X Extreme), drives, PSU and case. Thermal paste here is $40 BBD (about $20 USD) and I do not work. *shame* Gel toothpaste & cocoa beach… On both the CPU and GPU. I will not say it is the best solution, I will say it is the most convenient solution. Of course the Struggle continues, with one of the RAM chips dying, rendering me with 3 GBs. It was this that pushed me for bigger better things. I didn’t know that when Google Chrome is out of memory, it will drop the contents of unused tabs. Forcing them to be refresh the page once they are selected again. In addition to desktop struggles, my laptop which I use at school is having HDD errors also refuse to power on, the screen cracked, etc, etc, etc…. Luckily a friend at school repaired the screen and got it to turn on again free of charge. So as long as I can live with the long boot times and Smart Disk/CPU Fan/Battery errors on start-up, I’m fine. (Patience is a virtue)

As shown in the Images below, that is the CPU Heatsink, from my brother’s old rig, bread tied to the GPU, resting on a fan before with a fan placed above……*shame*

[Images of “the Struggle”]

 

Spoiler

His Majesty

“The Struggle” is getting too real for me right now. I am sure that the Struggle cannot handle what I am planning for my research, so I try to exercise patience. At the same time “The Struggle” is preventing me from starting, the task of opening Visual Studio is so painful, but patience for “His Majesty”. For His Majesty, I plan for a system that I no longer have to worry will it turn on. I hope to approach His Majesty in steps.

Step 1 (Core)

·         Intel Core I7-6700K

·         ASUS Z170-A

·         EVGA GeForce GTX 970 with ACX 2.0

·         Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB (4 x 8GB) [or another 32GB kit]

·         Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound *(finally)*

 In this step I will fuse The Struggle and His Majesty as I am constraint by cost. Using the same case, heatsink and drives again.

Step 2 (The Final Form)

Sometime in the future, I plan on moving away from such an unstable build and finally have His Majesty enclosed.

·         Corsair Carbide 600Q

·         Corsair Hydro H115i 280mm

 

With Patience.

[TheRandomness]

Just saying, the 390 should be cheaper and perform just as good.

[topblast]

3 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

Just saying, the 390 should be cheaper and perform just as good.

Thank you, when I checked the price last week for some reason it was higher. I'll make sure to compare before buying.

[SeanAngelo]

damnnnnn, dat dust tho!