I’m a massive cheapskate who only gets the cheaper mid-grade components that are the minimum of what I need to do what I want, which in this case was play FFXIV + BG3 as well as glaze my art. With that in mind, here are the parts I ended up with.
Motherboard: AMD B550 Gaming GEN3 (2022) – 119.99 (Motherboard 2 year warranty: 24.99)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600XT (2024) – 149.99
CPU Cooler: Thermaltake Peerless Assassin 120 SE ARBG (2023) – 26.99
Thermal paste: MT-X Arctic Thermal Paste – 8.99
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ventus 2x 8GB GDDR6 PCIe 4.0 (2023) – Originally 334.99 but with my mom’s discount + gift card from buying the fridge, it was 148.99
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (2015) – 54.99
Other parts I had to purchase later:
HDMI to DisplayPort cable (19.99)
Bluetooth and Wifi USB dongle (19.99)
Cable organizers (little clippies that can attach to the underside of my desk) (4 buckaroos)
Putting it together
The last time I put a PC together was 2017 so this was an interesting hours-long ordeal. When taking my old motherboard out, I accidentally broke the locking mechanism for the GPU. Whoops! If my dad decides to use it (he asked), he’d have to either trust the GPU won’t fall out or use the second PCI-e slot. He really destroys his computers though, like they have a lifetime of maybe 3 years in his hands. What does he even do with them?? He spends so much time loading up on ‘cleaning software’ and ‘virus protection’. It’s always been like this. Me, I take as much off as possible.
I installed everything with a lot of effort. The wire situation inside is…well, I had it roughly organized last time and only took off one ziptie due to the GPU needing a PCI-e power supply. Fortunately my EVGA 500W power supply had a daisy-chained one to use (note: always use the END of a daisy-chained PCI-e power cable. Check diagrams for how to attach them if your GPU has bigger requirements and needs several plugged in). Beyond that, everything had to be pulled out and put back in and some things were in different spots on the B550. The B550 is also about 2.5 inches taller than my old one (ASRock B250M). It fills up the entire case! Whew. The fit in there is a lot tighter now.
One new thing I did was install a CPU cooler that was not the default one with the CPU. This one’s tall with a heat sink that looks like a city building. It barely clears the inside of the case. What kind of monster am I running in here?? The CPU came with a Wraith Stealth cooler, which I’ve read is only sort of okay at its job. For a while I couldn’t figure out how to attach the Thermaltake monster but then I realized the back plate under the MB had fallen away after I took the plastic screws out. I might be bad at this but also it’s my second build after 8 years so whatever.
I ended up plugging in the 4th case fan and it turns out that one glows blue. WTF? Good thing I don’t leave my computer on at night. Why are people so obsessed with lights in their electronics? Stop it! This is LED overuse!
The first hurdle was when it wouldn’t turn on. It turns out I had accidentally pulled out all the little power switch indicators in my fussing so that’s that problem taken care of.
The next hurdle was the RAM. I found the EZ Debug lights and discovered DRAM was the problem. It turns out I forgot to push down until they locked in. There was a lot of taking them in and out and figuring out the actual order they needed to be in. (Start with 2 and 4 for two, then my old single RAM went between them in slot 3). Why this is done this way is an entire fucking mystery. There are no indicators on the motherboard at all.
Then the most difficult and confusing problem was the alternating CPU, VGA, and Boot signals. The CPU ones were easy, I just had to check my connections. VGA and Boot were harder.
VGA, The First Trial
This one took me a while. The B550 has a DVI and HDMI port that are COMPLETELY USELESS. This board not only does not have onboard graphics (something most motherboards no longer have anyway), my CPU is a 5600 XT and not a 5600G. The G means it has iGPU, or integrated graphics. So those ports are a LIE. But then I plugged my HDMI into the GPU and nothing came up until I fixed the Boot signal, which ended up being as follows…
Boot, The Second Trial
It turns out that, out of the box with the particular components I had selected, the B550 requires a BIOS update. No monitor, no keyboard, no mouse. I went a-hunting and found this video about how to USB Flash BIOS an AMD motherboard. First, I had to back up my thumb drive on my mac (still there). Then I had to reformat the drive to be Fat32 and also use Terminal to hack it to do a diskpart clean (here) and convert it to MBR from GPT (here). Basically the following in Terminal:
diskutil zeroDisk short NAMEdiskutil partitionDisk /dev/disk4 MBR fat32 "NO NAME" 100%After that, I used the wrong BIOS version. It has to not only be one specific to the motherboard, which you can find on the MSI site by searching the motherboard name, going to that site, clicking Support, and going to drivers and downloads, but since mine was ‘older’ I had to go to a previous version instead. Even worse, had to not use the very latest BIOS at all but the one just previous to that, P8 instead of P9. You download those, rename their file to MSI.ROM, drop that on your clean drive, and then follow all the steps on that video. NOTE: Take out all your RAM and your SATA connections before doing any of this!
Now, even though I had done all that and finally, finally got it displaying on my cute mini-monitor the next day, it didn’t like my old Windows installation! I refuse to do a fresh install! I shouldn’t need to! So I had to go hunting for that solution, too. It turns out you need to enable the Legacy+UEFI option in the BIOS, since my SSDs are sooooooo old (one’s 2017, the other’s 2023, rude). Solution was here. To wit: “go to BIOS\settings\advanced\windows OS configuration\BIOS Mode” and set it to Legacy+UEFI. It seems like the computing industry is phasing out ‘Legacy’ and also ‘BIOS’ and will go to UEFI only in the future. Something to watch out for!
Anyway, after two days of this, it finally booted up with my SSDs and everything was beautiful. Except…
MY MONITORS!!!
Now here was my final problem, which wasn’t that bad compared to the Boot error. At this point, emotion-wise, I was…actually not that frustrated. Patience and wisdom come with age, I guess. I was working methodically through everything with a patience I wish I’d had ten years ago. Like, I’m working through lots of things with that kind of patience and determination right now, like career and art and social life, when a decade ago I would’ve been frustrated and given up very dramatically. So I’ve been applying life lessons to this, too. Fun times. I only called my dad up once to check everything (that’s when I discovered the power switches had been disconnected). I just want to say that life is so much easier when I don’t get frustrated. Frustration is truly the bane of my existence, it’s so severe it’s almost debilitating. All my bad decisions are made out of frustration and flashfire anger. I think it’s the ADD that makes it so bad. I have to be cool like water and then I’m suddenly a really clever adult and not a hot mess.
Anyway, my monitor problem was two-fold but very simple. The DVI and HDMI ports on the motherboard are USELESS, ABSOLUTELY USELESS FOR NO REASON, so I was stuck with the 4060’s ports. Well, they only have one HDMI port and 3 DisplayPorts. DisplayPort is a brand new thing. My monitors don’t have a DP slot at all. I can use an HDMI cable for my Sceptre monitor easily enough. But then my other, main monitor, well…
The monitors are mounted on a ‘universal x bracket’ type thing on my Flexispot drafting table desk. And, it turns out, one part of the X shape was blocking the HDMI port on my main monitor. I ended up going back to Microcenter yesterday afternoon with my dad and getting a HDMI to DP cable. But I also took a wrench, wrapped it in a cloth, and bent the bracket to make room. With that, I finally had my dual monitors back again.
Conclusion
To celebrate, I proceeded to play FFXIV and then BG3 the rest of the day. BG3 with a beautiful frame rate and not needing to wait 1 minute per zone to load everything in? I CAN SEE THE BUILDINGS IN THE CUTSCENES? Wow this is a pretty game! It looked so awful before! You know, I was aware the cutscenes were epic just because of the camera angles but the majesty was lost on me until yesterday. I have once again started a new game but this time I might actually finish it.
Oh, I also played Katamari REROLL because I also got a bluetooth dongle and could connect my controller without a cable. Hell yeah.
OH. I also started a little self portrait on the computer. Took some finagling getting CSP transferred over to the ‘new machine’ (turns out they check components and CPU now?? wtf man) and then my tablet settings correct but I’ve got a good start on it. Problem there is the ports on the 4060 again, though…
Total Cost: ~$544 and 2 days, actual total without mom’s discounts would be $744-ish. Not bad considering all the inflation and ‘the situation’ (as one microcenter worker was delicately putting it to another customer) going on.
Triumphant