Saturday Morning Gaming: Building The Dream Box Aftermath
Before she left, Maribou got me the last two non-video card items (yay birthdays). My CPU arrived on Monday. My CPU cooler arrived on Tuesday. My Arctic Silver thermal paste arrived on Thursday. And so, on Friday night, I finished building my dream box. (Well, I still need The Graphics Card that everybody is talking about and that nobody but scalpers seems to be able to get their hands on… but nobody can get that and the president of Nvidia is shrugging and saying that, hey, it’ll probably be next year.)
It was simultaneously easier and tougher than I thought. On one level, it was a lot like building legos. They’re all just parts and they all fit together, mostly, and all you have to do is have the right tools and the right workspace and read the manuals and watch the youtubes describing how to do it. On the other hand, they’re expensive as heck, the manuals are confusing, the youtubes have 3 minutes of “BE SURE TO SMASH THAT LIKE BUTTON SUBSCRIBE AND COMMENT” speeches before the guy even mentions the part you’re going to be working on, and you’ll be wondering why you didn’t just spend the extra $200 to have someone else do it for you. (You’ve already sunk enough money into this thing…)
Tonight was the harrowing experience of putting the CPU into the CPU slot. There’s a little gold arrow, you see, on the CPU. That gold arrow is on the one corner of the CPU that has a square cutout of little pins. The other corners, you see, have diagonal cutouts. The square cutout matches up with the square on the CPU slot that has a square (instead of a diagonal line of pinholes). And you have to put the CPU into the CPU slot juuuuust right, or you’ll screw up your CPU beyond repair and that’s one of the expensive parts you paid for.
Well, I managed to get mine into the CPU slot on the first try and it fell in and it even felt like it clicked. Oh, it was smooth and lovely.
And then we struggled with thermal paste theory. Some prefer the “pea in the middle of the square”. Some prefer the “five pips”. Some prefer the Z. Some prefer the X. The important thing is that you don’t drip any onto the board, or else you’ll ruin everything. Like, *EVERYTHING*. I went with the five pips.
And then it was just the simplicity of installing Windows, transferring files, installing Steam, whoops, installing/repairing steam on the 1TB D: drive, we wanted to install it on the 2TB C: drive, uninstalling and…
Oh crap. I deleted all of my saved games.
But I then realized: I’m Free.
That game I started and intended to go back to? I don’t have to play it again. Heck, I don’t have to *INSTALL* it again. I can go through my library and just install the games I want to play again. Oooh! Game Dev Tycoon! Ah, Little Inferno! Why hello there, Orcs Must Die! XCom-2. We meet again.
And the game that I had been intending to play out of a sense of obligation rather than out of legit desire? I don’t remember what it is.
Ah.
So now I can play whatever I want. Instead of whatever I thought I should want. I may start drifting again… but, man. It’s nice to be able to start over.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured Image is “Free Shrugs” by sfmission.com and is licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Ooooh, you mean the files are IN THE CLOUD!
I’ve been building my own since, I guess, the late 90’s. I’m definitely a “pea” guy when it comes to thermal paste. I’ve made messes with it and had to painstaking clean it all up (most thermal pastes are non-conductive, so getting it all over isn’t really a big deal). I’ve bent pins on a CPU and had to go in with a tiny set of tweezers to straighten them out (and hey…anybody remember slot-type CPU’s? I suppose I should spend 20 minutes on the google to learn why socket-type beat out slot-type). And in one particularly memorable event, I majorly screwed something up and, upon applying power to the machine, was greeted with that wonderful ozone smell and the odor of melting plastic. Something had gone horribly wrong and a short caused the CPU to weld itself to the plastic socket! Luckily it was all old parts and I was just rebuilding for fun, so no big deal, but I always think about that even whenever I’m building new…
Back when I was still active duty, we were training a young airman on how to build and service PC’s. We were building a PC for someone in the training or test and eval department and young airman was installing the parts under our supervision. He was a stocky chunk of a body builder and we were instructing him to carefully–CAREFULLY–apply pressure to card A as he seated it into slot B. The card put up a bit of resistance and we both saw him kind of gather himself and flex his shoulder muscles and we were juuuust able to stop him before he likely drove that card through the motherboard and case and embedded it into the table beneath!
Anyway, building PC’s is fun and I’m glad you finally got to build your dream rig and hey why no colorful pictures of your new rig in acton to accompany this post?Report
Primarily because I’m an idiot who cuts twice and measures after the fact. My computer is now sitting on a platform on the floor because it’s six inches taller than the previous computer… which fit *PERFECTLY* on the little hidden shelf at the back of the desk.Report
The townhouse we used to live in had a very finely-made cutout feature in the stairwell, painted and textured inside, with a nice mantel and a custom-made plug and cable-jack box inset in the wall for minimum profile, and it was sized to exactly for a 22-inch CRT television and was totally useless for any other purpose. We couldn’t even fit a birdcage in there because it was about an inch too short.Report
Yeah, going to Hotels that were built/upgraded ~2005 (and haven’t been upgraded since) will have you notice that they’ve got little alcoves for 29″ televisions and little reinforced bricks that will hold a security chain to keep guests from stealing said 29″ televisions.
Now they have flowers in them. Kleenex.Report
Similar to clothes made in the 2000-2010 era that have cell-phone pockets that are now useless because cell phones are now wide flat notepads instead of narrow fat candy-bars…Report
It’s actually rather surprising how *bad* thermal paste is at conducting, considering that the whole reason you’re applying it is to improve conduction…Report
I know you and others have said it, but it’s still stunning to go to newegg and look at the RTX 30-series cards and see that EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM IS OUT OF STOCK. Wow.
And a search on Amazon turns up only 20-series cards.Report
Welp, I just completed the story line in Red Dead Redemption 2 and, before I go for 100% completeness doing all the crappy questions, I pulled up Fallout 3 for a ride down memory lane. I didn’t catch that Halo had been updated, so I’ll do that before I go on to Fallout New Vegas, AFTER RDR2.
Of Couse, Cyberpunk drops soon, but I’ll wait until maybe Xmas before getting it.Report
I wish I had a rig big enough to play Star Wars Squadrons, but that’s not gonna happen in the same year we bought a generator for the house.
Honestly, I wish Disney had thrown some money behind Star Wars Squadrons as a league-play thing, setting up, like, local clubs and gearing them up and hiring something to actually organize (and referee).Report
There is no way in heck that I would have dropped more than two grand on a computer. Put a toy on credit? Crazy.
Even if I use it for work occasionally, it’s primarily a hobby tool rather than anything sensible and the good-enough Costco off-the-shelf box was good-enough for being a hobby tool.
Ah… but spending $200 here or there over the course of a year for one part at a time? That is much more doable. Especially when you’ve stopped going out to eat entirely.Report
> And then it was just the simplicity of installing Windows
But what about the onerous chore of configuring Windows to make it secure?Report