A brief recap – The old laptop was showing its age, hence we decided to build a custom PC. I went over my process of parts selection in the last post. This post comes with both its highs and lows – the euphoria of build and a delivery nightmare. Read on... The parts arrived earlier than expected, to my delight! The only part left was the motherboard – the one that tied it all together. This is where the hellish customer experience began. The product shipped was the incorrect model – slightly inferior in quality to the MSI A-320 A-Pro MAX that I had ordered. Fine, I returned it and ordered it again, this time from a different seller on Amazon. That was a mistake. They shipped a used (possibly a returned, faulty unit). It had clear signs of use – thermal paste marks, fingerprints on the I/O shield and the SATA cable pouch was torn open. Fuming, I returned it again, this time leaving a 1-star review for the sellar with proof. As if to add salt to the wound, Amazon rejected the review. Th...
The old laptop was starting to show its age, with the slow spinning drive and faulty display. Scouring the internet for deals on budget laptops, I was disappointed by the lack of options with 8gb ram and solid-state storage within budget. So it was clear – we decided upon a custom-built PC! This was it! Finally, with all the research I had done in custom pc hardware, I can now use it to select parts for a home PC. I was stoked, as I always wanted to get hands-on with it (3 years of JEE preparation, then the first year of college and so on). I first searched for the most important part- the CPU. Within the budget, I saw three options – the Pentium Gold G5400, Athlon 200GE ( really wanted the 300GE but wasn’t available in India at that time :-( ) and the Ryzen 3 2200g. The Ryzen 3, while being the fastest among all three, was a tad bit overpriced. The extra cost, I felt was better invested in good storage and ram. The Pentium and Athlon were pretty close in performance, edge ...