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. That was it. I was done with the MSI model. I looked up for an alternative Gigabyte A320 motherboard, and placed an order with the most reliable and Amazon Fulfilled seller I could find. Fortunately, it was brand new. This was the end of my motherboard woes and I breathed a sigh of relief.
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| All the parts delivered! |
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| Ready for the cardboard build! |
It
was time for the most exciting – and nerve-racking part – the
cardboard build. Basically, using the motherboard box as a test
bench. This reduces the hassle of dissembling any faulty components inside
of a case. If anything was going to go wrong, this was the time. And it did, but not in a way I had imagined. This process is completely toolless. To build inside a case, one only needs a Phillips head screwdriver. Hooray standardization! I carefully plugged in all the power and data cables, slotted in the CPU and ram, and flicked the power switch on the wall.
I held my breath - and nothing happened - no spinning fans, no blinking LEDs. Well, that was odd. That was when it hit me! I had no power button, which is normally included in a case. So I stole a couple of female wires from my Arduino kit, an LED, and a regular wire to put together ("or juggad") a power button and LED. It booted!
I was excited for exploring the BIOS, however, to no one's surprise, there was barely anything to tweak on this basic motherboard. Even the memory was JDEC spec, so no fancy XMP (DOCP for AMD, details) profiles or anything like that. The locked multiplier meant no overclocking (boo).
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| The UEFI BIOS (Yes, I did leave Ez mode to check for options) |
There was one option that did catch my eye - the ultra-fast boot option. More on that later.
Everything showed up in the BIOS, except for the SSD. That one really scared me - the SSD was the most expensive component after all. It turned out just swapping the SATA header on the motherboard solved the problem. I'm still not certain why the issue came up, will probably investigate in the future.
Now for the OS. Decided to go with Win10 for the primary OS, and partitioned the drive to dual boot into POP_OS!, an Ubuntu-based distro I've long been waiting to try! With Windows all set-up and functioning, I decided to move on to installing POP_OS! (Yeah, the entire caps and exclamation mark branding is a bit excessive). It was a fairly straightforward process, made easier by the experience I had in Dual-Booting my laptop. The desktop was the familiar GNOME environment with a great dark mode implementation and blue/cyan accents.
Next, I moved the build to the pc case left from an old WinXP pc. While physically slotting in all the components was easy (at the risk of sounding like a broken record - hooray standardization! ), not everything was all sunshine and rainbows. The front panel power button and LED did work, to my relief. So long juggad power button! The front USB and audio had different plans. First of all, the audio connectors were probably some form of AC97, which is an outdated standard. Current mobos ship with HD Audio pins. I did look up a couple of forum posts on compatibility, however, the pin-out didn't match up with anything. So no front audio. Okay, not a huge setback. Then the front USB refused to work. Now that was a problem. Fortunately, the motherboard has 6 USB ports, just (barely) enough. With all the drivers installed - the PC was ready!
Closing notes - The ultra-fast boot is pretty neat, but it fails to catch the BIOS key during boot. This makes it difficult for me to reach the BIOS, so I disabled it. Boot times are still fantastic, so no complaints there. The PSU came with zip-ties that helped me cable manage! It's a bummer to lose out on front panel I/O, so far it hasn't been a major issue. There's are PS/2 ports too - so I blew the dust off an old Microsoft PS/2 keyboard to use with it.
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