Hawk's By Design

It’s finally done! Phew.

A project that has been about 6 months in the making, my wife’s very first gaming PC, is finally complete. It’s a bit of a Frankenstein build of old, donated, and new parts, but it works.

She’s super happy with it, so I’m happy with it.

The Specs

My Wife’s First Gaming PC

The specs on this thing aren’t going to blow anyone’s socks off, but it’s a good mid-range PC build that suits her needs. She wanted to be able to play The Sims 4 and League of Legends, and this PC handles both of those with ease.

CPU, HDD, Motherboard

Asus Motherboard and AMD Processor

Starting with the obvious, the cpu and motherboard. These two pieces were given to us from my brother-in-law. He had recently upgraded and had these parts lying around and kindly gave us the parts to use.

Thank you Jamie and Terry!!!

The CPU is an AMD Ryzen 1700 3 GHz 8-Core Processor, and that is matched up with an Asus CROSSHAIR VI HERO ATX AM4 Motherboard. Keeping this guy cooled is my old Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. It’s not the quietest thing in the world, but it does the job and was just collecting dust anyway, so it works.

I had an old 1 TB Western Digital sitting around since I upgraded to all SSDs. We just went ahead and used that for her primary drive. I want to eventually get her an SSD or an M.2, but this works for now.

GPU, RAM, PSU

Geforce GTX 660 Graphics Card

The graphics card currently is my old one, an old GTX 660. This was in my rig when I first built it but has since been collecting dust in a box since I upgraded to a 1080. This may be an old card, but boy does it still work well. We haven’t had any issues with it thus far.

Two of the few things that are brand new in this build are the PSU and RAM. We went with a Corsair CXM 650 W 80+ Bronze Certified as this is a good PSU for the price, and happens to be the same one I have in my build. The RAM is G. Skill Ripjaws V Series 16 GB DDR4-3200.

She actually has better RAM than me, sad face.

Keyboard, Mouse, Case

Apevia Crusader Pink Case

The one thing that my wife wanted above all else, is that there be as much pink as possible on her PC. So, naturally, there is a crap ton of pink. The keyboard, mouse, and case are all pink. We have headphones on the list of stuff to buy, and they are probably going to be pink as well.

For the keyboard and mouse, she went with Razer’s Quartz line. The pinkest case we could find came from Apevia, and it is their Crusader-F-PK Mid Tower. It came with four RGB fans that are controlled via the case, which was enough for her.

Quirks of the Build

The build itself went along without a hitch. I had everything (well, almost everything) wired up correctly and it booted on the first try. Where we ran into issues was when we hooked this bad boy up to a monitor and didn’t get any output.

We went through the troubleshooting steps for probably a good two hours. This included swapping out the GPU and putting it in mine to make sure it works, and putting my 1080 in hers and finding it also didn’t work.

On a whim, I decided to try and hook up one of my monitors to her computer using HDMI instead of DVI that we were using for hers. Crazy enough, it worked. We got video. We paused for momentary celebration and then went back to work.

I installed Windows and made sure the graphics card had up to date drivers. My thoughts were that maybe the DVI wasn’t working due to drivers or something. Well, it still didn’t work.

What we found was it was actually the monitor. For whatever reason, it wasn’t reading the DVI output. I slapped on a DVI to VGA converter on that bad boy and the picture popped right up. It’s an older monitor, so this was the only option since it doesn’t have an HDMI port.

The only other thing was I had the CPU fan plugged into a chassis fan slot…In my defense, I don’t know why the motherboard designer put a chassis fan hook up right next to the CPU, and then put the CPU fan hookups in the top right of the motherboard. Furthermore, of the three, CPU Fan 1 is in the middle. What the hell?

Conclusion

All in all, the build went along quite well. Aside from the little quirk of trying to figure out why the video wasn’t outputting. That sucked. However, the problems could’ve been a lot worse. This was the first time I used a thermal paste pad instead of paste, so I was worried about overheating.

Everything is working great thus far. We got her running Wallpaper Engine off Steam so she can have some killer backgrounds which, as far as I’m concerned, is a must for any PC. I mean, c’mon, it’s $4 and you get killer moving backgrounds.

Now my peaceful gaming time has the added background noise of my wife frantically smashing buttons as she plays LoL. Side note, her keyboard is super clickity.

Thanks for reading.

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