My DIY Goes Digital

I am of the particular age that I started high school turning in writing assignments hammered out on an actual typewriter and ended high school turning in assignments created on a computer.  Okay, hammered out is a bit of an exaggeration, as it was certainly an electric typewriter, but I still recall a paper for sophomore biology where I explained the various adaptations of life in the desert and to insert graphics, I copied pictures with an actual photocopier, cut them out with actual scissors, and pasted them onto my paper with actual paste.  That experience really makes you appreciate the shortcuts of Ctrl-C, Ctrl-X, and Ctrl-V.

Computers were not always a thing in my youth.  I witnessed them creep into our personal lives one task at a time.  I cannot tell you how much I spent (meaning meagerly saved money but mostly begged at birthdays and Christmas) on my Commodore 64 system.  Computers were magical boxes.  Out of them came fun and distraction and productivity (and writing!).  Inside, they were strange green boards with parallel paths of silver tracing strange shapes from one delicately placed piece of metal to another.  You knew that electricity and something called data were running around those soldered paths, but you could not see it or hear it.  If you smelled it, that meant something was very wrong.  Aah, that burning smell of a burnt-out power supply!

At the cutting edge of all of it all, in my young mind, were the people who built their own computers.  They gathered those pieces of green board and attached various doodads that put the electricity and the data to work.  Factories can build anything, but people at home in their basement, garage, spare bedroom?  Come on…that seems crazy.

Everything boxed, except the case.  I was NOT reboxing that just for a photo.

Of the many computers I have owned in my life after that Commodore (I still have it), I was fortunate to get many of them for free as hand-me-downs from various friends.  Now, in my job, I have access to all the computers I can imagine, as nearly all new machines at the school where I work get set up by me.  I will admit that I keep my eyes out for special ones that catch my fancy.  The point is, other than a MacBook Pro that I purchased new in 2009 (and still functions, despite being castrated by Apple from ever getting another update), I have not invested a lot of money into computers.

The Commodore 64C (not the original 64), which I had, along with the newer 1571 hard drive and 1084 monitor.  At 10, I was not an early adopter.  Thanks to Bill Bertram for the photo of my childhood (as mine is stuffed in a box right now). [Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=133083]

Enter the Covid quarantine.  In this difficult time, Kris and I are fortunate.  We continue to have paying jobs.  We are spared the financial concerns of so many Americans (and I will say Americans, as many other countries gave very healthy amounts of money to their citizens in this crisis) who have lost jobs or have been put in uncertain circumstances.  I have flippantly stated that our plan was to spend our way out of the quarantine.  In truth, we are taking the opportunity to invest in our own happiness and well-being, and again, we are fortunate enough to be able to do that.  Sorry, I had to get that little bit of guilt of my chest.

The idea germinated in the past few months that I could use my working knowledge of the inside of PCs along with my interest in making things.  I could essentially buy a powerful computer for less money if I built it myself.  I could be that person sitting in front of a table full of widgets and boards and gizmos masterfully weaving them all together to build my own computer!  But I am also relatively risk averse, and so I turned my learning attention to Paul, the host of the YouTube channel “Paul’s Hardware”.  After viewing a few episodes, I liked his approach and his style.  No yelling and crazy Internet flash.  Just solid information and an easy-going manner.   Oh, and the more than one million subscribers gave some legitimacy, as well.  When I saw the video titled “Building the UPDATED $900 B550 Gaming PC!” I knew he was now in my ballpark.

It's Paul!

Let me cut to the chase.  Actually, can I even claim that when I am already 600 words in?  Never mind.  The video was a few weeks old when I ordered Paul’s list of parts two weeks ago and prices had floated up a bit.  I also spent a little more money to get a more efficient power supply, but I essentially grabbed his suggested nine components and put them together.  Total cost to me:  a pinch under $1,100.  The cost of computers with similar capability already assembled:  roughly $1,500 and up.  Some of you are thinking the $400+ difference is the labor, but I saw it as an opportunity to play!

The parts arrived in dribs and drabs.  I ended up ordering a few items from Paul’s sponsored links on Amazon when those prices were the best ones.  I am happy to support how he makes his living in return for his expertise.  Other items literally went out of stock while in my Amazon shopping cart as I compared prices elsewhere.  In the end, I found parts from Amazon, NewEgg, Office Depot, and Best Buy.  I will list the parts at the bottom, but first, I want to walk you through the assembly process of my very first DIY personal computer!

Step one, take a photo of all the stuff assembled.  This is completely unimportant unless you are writing a blog.  Step two, unbox everything.  Optional step three, take another photo.  Step four is to follow Paul’s how-to-assemble-a-PC video.  Just do what he says.  And since he is the expert, I will not bore you with the details pretending that I came up with all of this.  I will throw a little step-by-step in the photo captions if you are interested.

All parts present and accounted for.  Time to begin.

Here is the amazing thing to me:  I gathered only nine pieces.  Nine?!  In my childhood mind, this process was akin to open-heart surgery without the need for malpractice insurance.  In 2020, no soldering skills were needed to make those fancy silver paths of conductivity connect to the components.  I used one Philips head screwdriver for all the assembly.  No spanners, socket wrenches, micro tweezers, or magnifying glasses.  Actually, that’s not fully accurate.  My old age now demands that I employ reading glasses for doing about anything within arms-length of the old eyeballs.  But nine pieces?  A lot of people could make their way through connecting nine things together.  I do not know why this fascinates me so much.

At the end of the process, which took place on the kitchen island, Kris was sitting by reading a book and glancing my way often enough to acknowledge my excitement.  When the big moment arrived, I plugged in the power, turned on the power supply, and asked her if she was ready for the big moment.  Without saying a word, she may have looked over for a moment, but clearly was not getting her hopes up.  I went ahead and pushed that power button anyway and…and…nothing.  It’s like she knew.  My heart plunged.  “Okay,” logic said trying to push past the woe-is-me feelings like a salmon headed upstream.  “Let’s figure this out.”  What could cause the entire computer to not turn on?!  “Maybe we narrow that down,” logic encouraged.  What could cause the power button to not work?  My clearing mind immediately went to the two tiny plugs that connected the power button to the motherboard (the one big board that distributes power and connects all the components).  The optional connector seemed a little hinky (a technical IT term).  I removed the unneeded piece of plastic and directly connected the tiny one-pin connectors. 

Take two saw no dramatic drumrolls or pleas to the audience, but this time, the new computer fired right up!  Fans spun, one red LED light emanated from the motherboard, and, well, that was about it.  This machine is quiet.  It is also unassuming.  Gaming computers now-a-days often employ dozens of LED lights across the whole rainbow adorning the board, the fans, even the memory.  Serious digital bling.  None of it is required.  All of it seems garish to me, like the nerd version of adding dual glasspack mufflers to your jacked-up pickup in the 80s and 90s (and probably still today in places I do not frequent—a quick Internet search proves this to be correct: “5 Best Glasspack Mufflers of 2020”).

I survived the first little scare.  The second came before I even had a chance to install Windows.  In searching through the BIOS (the most basic of settings for the motherboard itself, even before an operating system is installed), I found the setting to change the speed of the RAM.  I do not know why RAM can operate at different speeds.  I do not know the purpose of the various speeds.  I do know that my AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU (central processing unit – the beating heart of the computer) feels most at home when the 16 Gigabytes of RAM chug along at 3600 MHz.  Installed, they only manage to make 2133 MHz.  This cannot be!  Well, I clicked on that setting and voila, everything changed immediately!  And by changed, I mean the computer went off and would not turn on again.  NO MATTER WHAT I TRIED. 

The first little scare was no big deal.  This time, I was instantly worried.  An image of a brick floated into my panicked brain.  “Bricked” (another technical IT term) refers to a fatal computer problem causing it to no longer function.  It then reverts to being something heavy that can do little else.  There are mysterious things you can do in the wrong moments that can brick a computer.  I thought I had stumbled into one.  My brand-new machine (it didn’t even have a name yet!) had not completely booted up yet and it was already clinging to life by a thread.

That thread, that one hail-Mary that I had left, was to pull the tiny little battery that keeps the memory of the motherboard alive.  Essentially, I had to perform a far-less dramatic version of astronaut Dave unplugging the HAL-9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey.   Without even humming a bar of “Daisy, Daisy…” I popped the small, quarter-sized battery out from its position on the motherboard and waited the requisite ten minutes for all signs of life to stop. 

Okay, that is a little dramatic.  What really happens is that the motherboard loses power, forgets anything that happened to it, and resets to its original state.  After pretending to work for ten minutes, I gingerly slid the battery back into its enclosure, gritted my teeth, and pushed the power button one more (one last?) time.  Once again, I was greeted with the understated hum of three fans quietly getting to work.  The screen lit up the announcement that my Aorus B550 Elite motherboard was resurrected and ready to begin life anew!

And that was the last exciting moment, to be honest.  What followed was hours of setting up drive partitions, installing Windows 10, running rounds of updates, downloading Microsoft Office 365, and installing various software.  Occasional mouse clicks and password entries followed by minutes, even hours of watching green progress bars slowly fill.

This Sunday morning, I sit in my office at home typing this very episode of Playing with Concrete and Stone on said machine, now christened “Kairos”, a Greek word for time that “signifies a proper or opportune time for action.”  I have a reason for the name.  Maybe I’ll share it eventually, but not yet.  Everything is set up and running smoothly.  World of Warcraft, the all-encompassing online fantasy game that occupies a healthy (some might claim unhealthy) chunk of my time and imagination, looks amazing with the graphics cranked literally up to 10 (sadly, there is no 11).  Even the things I do for my IT work are running more efficiently.  My life, as I currently have it arranged, is better.  What more could I ask for in the middle of the quarantine? 

If you are in need of a new computer, and want more for your money, head over to Paul’s Hardware!  On his YouTube channel, he tackles DIY computers from the least expensive starter PCs to the beefiest graphics-intensive machines.  My little gem comes right in the middle and perfectly meets my needs and my wallet.  Paul will help you set yourself up.  Or, if you like, I will gladly assemble those nine parts for you.  It was a load of fun and took far less time than the shed (is taking, more on that soon).  See you next time, and thanks for reading.

List of the computer components that I purchased.  No software is included here.  The rest of the photos are below.

The heart of it all.  My AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-core processor (simply, the CPU) about to be installed on the Aorus B550 Elite motherboard.  Soooo exciting!

Screwing down the Cooler Master Hyper 212 cooling fan on top of the Ryzen 5 CPU.  This is a beefed up cooling solution that is superior to the smaller fan that ships with the chip.  Air from the interior of the case blows through the radiator under that silver plate and then out of the box through the fan at the right, the rear of the case.

In my hand is a Seagate BarraCuda 2 TB mechanical hard drive for extra storage.  Already installed below is the ADATA 512 GB solid-state hard drive for Windows and the most important software.

The is the muscle in a gaming computer and was the most expensive single piece, an EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 KO video card.  Yup, it works so hard, it brings its own radiating fans to the party.

This is the least glamourous finished product photo ever, and frankly I'm disappointed in myself.  BUT, that feeling is outweighed by the lack of desire to move everything and take a sexy photo all unplugged.  Here is the computer, now called Kairos, under the desk looking like it looks at this very moment while I type this final caption, and while my wife waits for me to stop messing around on my new computer and get outside to split and stack some firewood that is in the way (can I draw this sentence out a little longer to buy myself some time--probably not).  So, that's it.  Off I go.  Now.  Okay, now.  Bye.