My Second Computer-Building Journey
Yesterday I completed my second full computer-build. I say "full" computer-build because two and half years ago, I transplanted my Phenom II X4 965 Black build into a new chassis and upgraded its cooler, video-card, and added a RAM-stick. So that was technically half a build. This was my second "full" build.
I did not need a new computer. My old one works fine. It may be a little loud with five fans and a water-pump, but it's functionally great. The reason I decided to make a new build was that the white Corsair Graphite 380T was starting to sell out in stores like Newegg and Amazon. This is still the most gorgeous case I have ever seen. I always wanted to build in it, but I had already built a system recently, so I did not pull the trigger on a purchase. Upon realization that Corsair may never manufacture these cases again, I had to order one directly from Corsair, which took about a week to get here from California. Here is the beauty in a stock-photo:
Initially, I wasn't going to build in it right away. I just needed to get this case before it was sold out everywhere. I was going to budget my build every month, but as I started getting parts, I realized that if I started building a few months later, and a part was DOA, I might have missed an RMA-period or whatever. Slowly but surely, I ramped up the parts I ordered, and soon I had all the parts by yesterday.
I was so excited to build. My interest in computer-tech videos on YouTube had recently spiked because of this recent conviction, and I was doing a lot of research like looking at motherboard-manuals. Research is one of the funnest and most frustrating things about the computer-building process because there is so much possibility but no actuality.
I decided on the following parts:
Motherboard: MSI H170I Pro AC Mini-ITX
CPU: Intel i7 6700 3.4 GHz LGA 1151
CPU-cooler: Noctua D9L
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM 2400
PSU: Corsair SF600
Video-card: MSI GTX 1070 Founder's Edition
HDD: Western Digital WD40EZRZ 4TB Blue
The motherboard was the most difficult decision. I decided on the MSI H170I Pro AC because it had a nice color-scheme of charcoal-gray with blue accents, it wasn't too expensive, it had both USB 2 and 3 ports, and it had WiFi.
I thought about getting the 6700K but realized I wouldn't overclock, so I opted for the 6700. I tried overclocking on my Phenom II X4 965 Black, and it worked for a year, but then I got a blue screen, and so I returned to stock-settings. I didn't want to push my limits.
The CPU-cooler was also difficult to decide. I initially was bent on using the H55 from Corsair because I thought I wanted as many Corsair-parts as possible, but ultimately I went with Noctua's D9L for its compatibility with my case, its quietness, and the ability to mount it onto the motherboard outside the case beforehand. Also, you can't see the CPU-cooler from the outside of my case, so it doesn't really matter how big and ugly it looks.
The D9L claimed 100% RAM-compatibility so I could choose any RAM I wanted, but, like the CPU, I decided I wasn't going to overclock my RAM, so I went with a combination of looks and price and settled on a pair of black 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX sticks.
The PSU was something to really think about. The 380T technically supports a lot of full-size PSUs, but I played it safe, and got an SFX one instead.
I had always wanted a video-card with nVidia's reference-cooler so I opted for the 1070. The 1080 was too expensive, and I thought about getting a 770, 780, 970, or 980, but the savings wasn't big enough to warrant an older card that might lose support in a few years.
For the HDD, I thought about an SSD, but storage is more important to me than speed. I think modern HDDs are plenty fast for my taste, and I use my computer for internet-browsing anyway, which is bottlenecked by machines out of my control, so I decided I didn't need an SSD yet.
The final two components, the video-card and CPU-cooler, arrived at around noon via USPS yesterday. I was so excited. A few things I learned was that I was very smart in getting the SF600 because with the HDD-cage intact, it would probably have been impossible to use a full-size PSU. Getting the cables from the PSU to their destination, heck getting the PSU and SFX-bracket installed at all was the most difficult, physical part of building this computer.
Another problem I had was with Noctua's thermal interface material. I had no idea how to get the TIM to come out. I was squeezing and squeezing and nothing was happening. The biggest possible physical disaster came when a long blob of it came squirting out onto the CPU with the cap of the bottle on. I realized that there was a cap (although it didn't look like a cap to me), and I had been trying to squeeze it out with it still on. I felt so stupid. Luckily, it didn't spread very far. I got some coffee-filters to clean most of it off the CPU. At the time, I didn't want to clean it all of and reapply it. Maybe I should have; who knows?
The two PCI Express brackets from the case came off easily but when I wanted to secure the video-card to the case, the holes from the case and the video-card did not line up. I couldn't screw the video-card to the case, but there was a hole in which I could use a smaller screw from another location and not the case's original thumb-screw. Right now, the video-card is pretty secure but it's only being held in by its presence inside the PCI Express slot, and friction from the case and the video-card, and not a screw through a hole in the case and video-card. It's tough to explain.
The tiny front-panel connectors weren't too difficult to insert. The motherboard-manual did a decent job of explaining things, but it was more with pictures, words, and letters, and not a full, walkthrough-explanation, which I would have appreciated.
Earlier in the day, I had cloned my Windows 7 hard-drive from my old build, and thought I could just plug that into the new build and it would boot up. Wrong. These next few hours were the most difficult and stressful of the day. It's ironic that getting the software to work was more difficult than the hardware.
Error 1. When the cloned drive didn't work, I took the hard-drive from my current computer, which was in hibernation, and stuck it into my new build, hoping it would work. Bad idea. I tried to repair this drive, and it resulted in more errors, not just for the new build, but the old build. I stuck my old HDD back into my old build, and then now I couldn't boot it! This was my worst nightmare - having two nonfunctioning computers.
After a lot of research, stress, trial, and error, I was able to access System Restore and found a Restore Point that worked on my old HDD and hallelujah, my old build was back. Now, with a huge weight off my shoulders, I dove into getting Windows 10 into my new build.
I had thought about getting Windows 10 because bing.com offers extra points for using their Edge-browser, and now I had the perfect excuse to do so. I bought a download-copy of Windows 10 and got a product-key. I downloaded their installation-tool, but it wouldn't recognize my USB-stick. What the hell? I tried the other USB-stick I had and no luck. More stress and research followed, and then I decided to use Joanne Tech Lover's method of downloading the ISO and mounting it to a USB-stick myself using a program called Rufus. It worked, but then came the hell of installation.
This was my first motherboard that used UEFI and not BIOS. I had little idea of the differences. Windows 10 seemed to install fine, but after it restarted, it wouldn't continue with the installation. It would just restart the installation-program. What the hell. Also, there was the issue of partitions during installation. Why has Windows-installation become so complicated? When I installed Windows 7 in my old build, it was so easy. It used to be the easiest part of building a computer, but now it had become the hardest.
After multiple installation-attempts I tried going into the boot-menu and not booting from the HDD, (which I had done on my old BIOS-based build), but from the Windows Boot Manager. This did the trick! The installation-process restarted my computer one more time, after which I had to boot from WBM again, but Windows had finally been installed. Upon restarting the computer a while later, I realized that even though Windows was fully installed, it wouldn't boot from the HDD. I had to permanently set the boot-device to WBM. Weird. But at least I learned something, and I'm glad it works.
The one thing I'm still worried about is my mishap with the TIM on the CPU. My max-temps right now are in the low 60s. On Intel's website, it says the max Tcase temperature (whatever that means), is 71. Maybe I'll clean off the TIM and reapply it one day; maybe I won't. For now, I'm just gonna take it easy and play some SNES-ROMs on this mini beast.
I did not need a new computer. My old one works fine. It may be a little loud with five fans and a water-pump, but it's functionally great. The reason I decided to make a new build was that the white Corsair Graphite 380T was starting to sell out in stores like Newegg and Amazon. This is still the most gorgeous case I have ever seen. I always wanted to build in it, but I had already built a system recently, so I did not pull the trigger on a purchase. Upon realization that Corsair may never manufacture these cases again, I had to order one directly from Corsair, which took about a week to get here from California. Here is the beauty in a stock-photo:
I was so excited to build. My interest in computer-tech videos on YouTube had recently spiked because of this recent conviction, and I was doing a lot of research like looking at motherboard-manuals. Research is one of the funnest and most frustrating things about the computer-building process because there is so much possibility but no actuality.
I decided on the following parts:
Motherboard: MSI H170I Pro AC Mini-ITX
CPU: Intel i7 6700 3.4 GHz LGA 1151
CPU-cooler: Noctua D9L
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM 2400
PSU: Corsair SF600
Video-card: MSI GTX 1070 Founder's Edition
HDD: Western Digital WD40EZRZ 4TB Blue
The motherboard was the most difficult decision. I decided on the MSI H170I Pro AC because it had a nice color-scheme of charcoal-gray with blue accents, it wasn't too expensive, it had both USB 2 and 3 ports, and it had WiFi.
I thought about getting the 6700K but realized I wouldn't overclock, so I opted for the 6700. I tried overclocking on my Phenom II X4 965 Black, and it worked for a year, but then I got a blue screen, and so I returned to stock-settings. I didn't want to push my limits.
The CPU-cooler was also difficult to decide. I initially was bent on using the H55 from Corsair because I thought I wanted as many Corsair-parts as possible, but ultimately I went with Noctua's D9L for its compatibility with my case, its quietness, and the ability to mount it onto the motherboard outside the case beforehand. Also, you can't see the CPU-cooler from the outside of my case, so it doesn't really matter how big and ugly it looks.
The D9L claimed 100% RAM-compatibility so I could choose any RAM I wanted, but, like the CPU, I decided I wasn't going to overclock my RAM, so I went with a combination of looks and price and settled on a pair of black 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX sticks.
The PSU was something to really think about. The 380T technically supports a lot of full-size PSUs, but I played it safe, and got an SFX one instead.
I had always wanted a video-card with nVidia's reference-cooler so I opted for the 1070. The 1080 was too expensive, and I thought about getting a 770, 780, 970, or 980, but the savings wasn't big enough to warrant an older card that might lose support in a few years.
For the HDD, I thought about an SSD, but storage is more important to me than speed. I think modern HDDs are plenty fast for my taste, and I use my computer for internet-browsing anyway, which is bottlenecked by machines out of my control, so I decided I didn't need an SSD yet.
The final two components, the video-card and CPU-cooler, arrived at around noon via USPS yesterday. I was so excited. A few things I learned was that I was very smart in getting the SF600 because with the HDD-cage intact, it would probably have been impossible to use a full-size PSU. Getting the cables from the PSU to their destination, heck getting the PSU and SFX-bracket installed at all was the most difficult, physical part of building this computer.
Another problem I had was with Noctua's thermal interface material. I had no idea how to get the TIM to come out. I was squeezing and squeezing and nothing was happening. The biggest possible physical disaster came when a long blob of it came squirting out onto the CPU with the cap of the bottle on. I realized that there was a cap (although it didn't look like a cap to me), and I had been trying to squeeze it out with it still on. I felt so stupid. Luckily, it didn't spread very far. I got some coffee-filters to clean most of it off the CPU. At the time, I didn't want to clean it all of and reapply it. Maybe I should have; who knows?
The two PCI Express brackets from the case came off easily but when I wanted to secure the video-card to the case, the holes from the case and the video-card did not line up. I couldn't screw the video-card to the case, but there was a hole in which I could use a smaller screw from another location and not the case's original thumb-screw. Right now, the video-card is pretty secure but it's only being held in by its presence inside the PCI Express slot, and friction from the case and the video-card, and not a screw through a hole in the case and video-card. It's tough to explain.
The tiny front-panel connectors weren't too difficult to insert. The motherboard-manual did a decent job of explaining things, but it was more with pictures, words, and letters, and not a full, walkthrough-explanation, which I would have appreciated.
Earlier in the day, I had cloned my Windows 7 hard-drive from my old build, and thought I could just plug that into the new build and it would boot up. Wrong. These next few hours were the most difficult and stressful of the day. It's ironic that getting the software to work was more difficult than the hardware.
Error 1. When the cloned drive didn't work, I took the hard-drive from my current computer, which was in hibernation, and stuck it into my new build, hoping it would work. Bad idea. I tried to repair this drive, and it resulted in more errors, not just for the new build, but the old build. I stuck my old HDD back into my old build, and then now I couldn't boot it! This was my worst nightmare - having two nonfunctioning computers.
After a lot of research, stress, trial, and error, I was able to access System Restore and found a Restore Point that worked on my old HDD and hallelujah, my old build was back. Now, with a huge weight off my shoulders, I dove into getting Windows 10 into my new build.
I had thought about getting Windows 10 because bing.com offers extra points for using their Edge-browser, and now I had the perfect excuse to do so. I bought a download-copy of Windows 10 and got a product-key. I downloaded their installation-tool, but it wouldn't recognize my USB-stick. What the hell? I tried the other USB-stick I had and no luck. More stress and research followed, and then I decided to use Joanne Tech Lover's method of downloading the ISO and mounting it to a USB-stick myself using a program called Rufus. It worked, but then came the hell of installation.
This was my first motherboard that used UEFI and not BIOS. I had little idea of the differences. Windows 10 seemed to install fine, but after it restarted, it wouldn't continue with the installation. It would just restart the installation-program. What the hell. Also, there was the issue of partitions during installation. Why has Windows-installation become so complicated? When I installed Windows 7 in my old build, it was so easy. It used to be the easiest part of building a computer, but now it had become the hardest.
After multiple installation-attempts I tried going into the boot-menu and not booting from the HDD, (which I had done on my old BIOS-based build), but from the Windows Boot Manager. This did the trick! The installation-process restarted my computer one more time, after which I had to boot from WBM again, but Windows had finally been installed. Upon restarting the computer a while later, I realized that even though Windows was fully installed, it wouldn't boot from the HDD. I had to permanently set the boot-device to WBM. Weird. But at least I learned something, and I'm glad it works.
The one thing I'm still worried about is my mishap with the TIM on the CPU. My max-temps right now are in the low 60s. On Intel's website, it says the max Tcase temperature (whatever that means), is 71. Maybe I'll clean off the TIM and reapply it one day; maybe I won't. For now, I'm just gonna take it easy and play some SNES-ROMs on this mini beast.
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