zushi's place

Assembled a new PC.

The idea to upgrade from the current laptop had four main motivations: screen real-estate, storage, games, and music production. Future VR compatibility was an auxillary consideration. My Dell XPS13 has been chugging along for 5 years now and lagging in all these metrics, and with the quarantine still in full force, it seemed like a good time to upgrade.

This is actually my first time building a machine, so I tried documenting it as a sort of a keepsake for the experience.

  Setup – everything new in box, except with an interior view of the case.

  Opening some things, the motherboard came with some gamer stickers shown in the middle of the box. One of the stickers says “WELCOME TO THE REPUBLIC OF GAMERS”.

  The Motherboard, which is by far the most visually complex part.

  Partially assembled, with the power supply and the CPU chip & fan installed. Installing the fan requires, according to multiple sources on the internet, pressing down on a lever hard enough that you feel like you are going to break it. I can now attest to it. Feels like I could have cracked the fan or the motherboard if I pressed harder.

  Low res image from first boot. I didn't think a graphics card was needed to show the startup boot sequence. But apparently with some AMD units, that's needed. I guess this was a good reason for Intel to provide integrated graphics on their CPUs.

Also, a BMO in the background for size.

  I didn't really have a preference for RGB vs. not and didn't pay attention to which one I ordered. As you can probably tell from the above picture, I ended up receiving the RGB version. After seeing it in action, I can understand a appeal a bit more now.

Close view of the RGB fan:

  I also enjoyed the mesh aesthetic of the case:

  So that's it for the pics. The current spec: – AMD Ryzen R7 3700X – Nvidia RTX 2060 – 32GB DDR4 – 2TB SSD – 750W Power Supply

One weird thing is that good consumer motherboards often seem to assume that I'm a hardcore gamer, so my motherboard came with a door tag that says:

And as if that side wasn't cool enough, the back side says:

This is a powerful and highly formidable door tag. I decided to hang it on the bathroom door for now.

— Categorized under: #irl