https://pcpartpicker.com/user/RaincloudTheDragon/saved/gddLyc

LEMME TELL YOU MAN

So basically, we show up with everything, big monitor included. Hunter grabs me, nat, arex in that order. We roll up and get goin downstairs. Boys are playin smash and enjoyin sodies as I ramble. I realize I need PSU, compaq fan, and 2.5 hdd from me house. Yer parents come in and chat for a bit. Hunter and I leave to my house briefly basically right at 6 when evening conference sesh starts. Meanwhile your parents went on a date or sum and mason shares some popeyes biscuits with nat and arex. I remove the PSU and gather the rest, we return, I suffer for several more hours, the boys leave at around 9 as I continue to troubleshoot. Nat arex hunter take me monitor to nat's car, Hunter goes home, arex goes home, nat comes back but doesn't want to come back inside (which potentially created more problems than if he had just played it cool lulmao). The twins had like come and gone at some point, their friends too, ava's friends, idek who was going in and out the house tbh. But Ava gets home and asks me if the red car sitting outside is Hunter's and if he's chilling inside it and I was like nah it's Nat's but yeah I think he's just sittin in there. The exchange was kinda hilarious because she says sum like "i didn't know who was in there and I was scared" and I reply "yeah Nat's scary" and she says something like "yeah i know" :BAH::BAH::BAH:

why this crap took so long:

So besides the fact I knew pinout for PSU might be a little sus I thought it would be pretty plug and play. I was wrong af. Luckily I had a cheap 400w PSU I was using for tv room pc and I have another DI 750w to replace that so we good. I'll be owed a little money for it but that's fine. I also slapped the 2.5" 160gb ps3 hdd in there because I COULDN'T mount any of my spare hdds in there :ihe: I mounted the HDD with a SINGLE screw. Im boutta order like 500 ssd screws I swear on me mum. I grabbed a compaq fan for exhaust because there was neither exhaust nor intake and it was the least I could do and it was the only fan of that size I knew I had. The disk drive requires the stupid gay faggotron like micro sata power that they use in laptop form factor disk drives like that so we just gave up on that; there are adapters if he really wants to rewrite freaking dvds one day. The *real* problems arose with the mobo. The STRUGGLE was I *just* wanted to pop my SSD in to actually TEST gamign on it before we packed it up assuming it was ready. But for some inexplicable reason it REFUSED to recognize literally anything other than the HDD that came with it as a boot option. I was like ok so this ssd's boot options must just be frerfd so I'll just slap win11 on it right now and be done with it but NO my tiny11 usb didn't work either?? Luckily I had another one and I had laptop just in case. But MAN just trying to figure out if TPM was forcing me to not be able to boot without a specific boot config or something made me go INSANE. I had to remove and then replace the cmos battery, clear the cmos by physically ripping out the funni cmos thing and doin the manual pin short. And that didn't even fix it. The bulk of my time spent on this was JUST IN TRYING TO TEST IT WITH ANOTHER WINDOWS INSTALL. Because the mobo sucks and I want to take it out to the back and Old Yeller it. But anyway we ended up with a very interesting build in the end:

- i3-8100 quad core 3.6ghz 65w tdp, priced at $109 on amzn so that's already a massive W
- no intake on this case (gay) but side panel makes it ok to have a negative pressure profile since the psu and exhaust fan will pull into it so it's hot but not impossibly hot
- evga gtx 970 4gb 2-fan: fairly hot, but fairly freaking good. daisy chained 2x 6 pin :boohoonibba: BUT it's got driver support and packs a punch for 50 bucks that's a steal, thx for finding that deal. Only trouble is, its fans were being rarted and I can't explain why. I coulda sworn the temps and fans were fine when i testbenched it at home. But in order to get optimal performance you MUST configure MSI Afterburner to use its own automatically defined fan control. Otherwise it will be at 60 celsius at idle because the fans refuse to kick up properly. I dunno man. shreds like a mf tho. Got 175 fps in risk of rain. Your internet sucks btw, google fiber shafted yall and it's a crime. but all things considered downloading games and drivers and whatnot was the smallest timesink overall.
- poopy yet adequate default cooler was fine but behaved quite strangely. When the CPU fan was plugged into the CPU fan header, the case fan turned off after POSTing. Even when gaming it wouldn't ramp up. It said N/A in bios. Idk. But when I swapped them, the case fan would go slower than I would have liked, but at least both of them would turn on. Made me wish I had a splitter handy so I could just plug em both into the CPU header no trouble. But it works. If the STUPID MOBO just had an ADEQUATE BIOS with ACTUAL OPTIONS in it then maybe I woulda had NO ISSUES. But it has SMART-controllable fans and there are free programs for configuring those. It's not a requirement but it would be nice. I just wish Afterburner had case fan control in it??? Like why tf not retards?? Why does this always have to be the mobo bios' decision or some proprietary software?? Maybe I just need to find a software I like. Shouldn't be as hard as they make it tho that's for sure.
- Besides the mobo literally not giving me the option to just TELL THE FANS WHAT TO DO, it also kneecaps the system in OTHER ways :xemmyPissed: they did the retarded proprietary thing where the mobo has the pinout for additional ram slots, but they leave them unsoldered because they know most people won't need to upgrade for that. But that's not even a problem since we got a 8gb ddr4-3200 dimm with this system, right? Well no. I put it in slot A because for some reason it was installed in slot B and that causes problems sometimes. But either way it's shafted because the mobo has NO OPTION for changing RAM speed. It's not even buried man. It just doesn't exist. So ddr4-2600 is the best it can do. I wanted to switch him out with literally anything that wouldn't waste that additional speed but it would have taken too long. Like idk maybe I could say hey I'll trade you for 2x sticks of 8gb ddr4-2133 and then I'll subtract that from what you would owe me for the PSU or just call it even? Whatever the math was on that it woulda taken too long to figure it out. Either way idk if the bios can be flashed but if it can there may be a lot of immediate fixes. I'll say what's good about this mobo: plenty of USBs, front panel usbc, sd card reader, wifi chip and antennas wired right up, pretty efficient spacewise, built in TPM, all features pretty solid. Just the crappiest bios that shafts the hardware because american megatrends is a dick. Literally would have been perfect if they learned to code/think.
- sandisk extreme 120gb ssd: this thing is listed on amzn as $160 WTF HUH but for some reason I coulda SWORN it was win10, after I tested it on my ssd, it magically became win11. I swear I'm not schizo, the setup screens literally changed even tho it was the same SSD. Couldn't tell you how that happened.
- 160gb ps3 drive: it can store games i guess lol. woulda given him more but no 3.5" slots

For probably $20-30 over $150? Actually the best value system I've made to date. Couldn't have done it without your dealfinding. I wish I had gotten this value in 2016 or 2020. Cuz it's on par(ish) with pyro v1.0 performance-wise, but like 1/3 the price o that bad boy... Snowflame was like $700 and this thing DESTROYS it for value both then and now.