Ashton George

Mar 06, 2023

Building My Own PC: Part 2

It has been almost a month since I wrote the first part of this small series. Since the beginning of February, I have built the PC and it is in working order. I will detail some of the bumps I had to overcome with the PC.

Firstly, once I received all of the parts, I quickly realized that the motherboard I had purchased was lacking in the department of features. No WiFi, no Bluetooth, no RGB Headers, and only two fan ports (one CPU and one SYS fan). While the heatsink I bought came with a splitter to plug both heatsink fans into the same port, I still only had one port remaining. My friend Josh recommended I buy an Arctis Fan Hub, which I bought. That took a few more days to arrive. During that period of shipping I attempted to load Windows 10 from my USB drive.

While this sounds simple, it truly was not. I thought all that I had to do was download the .iso file and put it on the flashdrive. I was wrong. Thankfully, Josh's knowledge came in handy once again. I had to reformat my flashdrive using my MacBook in order to allow it to be booted from. Unfortunately, my WiFi is not very good at my house so this process took much longer than it needed to. However, once everything was ready I was able to boot Windows 10 from the bios.

While that was a victory of mine, another loss was lurking in the background. After connecting an Ethernet cable and installing all of the necessary drivers, I was finally able to enjoy the PC. For the time being, I was swapping the cable between my PS5 and the PC while I waited on a second network cable. Here is where another issue lied. Although nothing was off with the port, I was having trouble making the connection. The indicator lights worked fine and everything, even the network settings showed that a connection was detected but it could not connect to the internet. After troubleshooting using the internet and the built in troubleshooter for something like an hour, I gave up.

Thankfully, I tried again the next day and the troubleshooter showed a different message. It said "DCHP connection disabled," or something along those lines. I applied the fix and everything worked great. Although it was working, I was still not satisfied. Not only did I receive a somewhat faulty board, but it also didn't come with any of the features I thought would be standard (I was severely wrong). So, what I ended up doing was returning it to Newegg and buying a better one, the Msi B660-A WiFi edition. Not only did this board have WiFi and Bluetooth capabilities, but it also had more fan headers (which somewhat rendered the purchase of the fan hub useless). Something that made me especially happy was the fact that it has a whole three RGB headers! Thanks to them you might have noticed that my fans match my keyboard.

This leads to where I am at now, with a working PC (that has all of the features I wanted!). While the performance in the graphics department is still lacking, it will still run Minecraft and League of Legends just fine. Some games like CSGO and Apex Legends suffer, but I am happy with it for now. Thanks for reading and have a great day.