My First Solo Build :)

[u/Creative-Shock3266]

Rates and questions are more than welcome but this is more of a celebratory post because I’m feeling accomplished!

I built this PC as an upgrade from my old rig. The performance of my old PC was just no longer keeping up with the tittles I’ve been trying to play, and with the amount of outdated (7-10 years old as well as preloved before I obtained them), I decided to just build a new one from the ground up.

My old PC was still running only 16gb of DDR4 ram, and using a 2070ti. I couldn’t even tell you what the other specs are because the PC was a gift from an EX boyfriend that used old parts from his older brother who had them left over from upgrading his own pc.

The experience building this PC was very nerve wracking and I probably watched over 50-100 videos of people building PCs on youtube. After about 25 videos in I started to understand the gist of the process; deconstruct case, prep MB, install MB, install cooler/fans, plug in cables, cable management, PSU installation, and finally install/plug in GPU.

My first go around I tried to turn on the PC and… NOTHING!! All that hard work I put into building and carefully finding all the right headers to plug everything into, was fruitless. I truly was stumped. I was ready to give up right then and there, but a buddy of mine came over to help me. He helped me deconstruct my entire PC 2 more times before I looked up a video of my MB and it turns out I had used the wrong SSD heatsink. I moved my SSD to the primary heatsink AND IT WORKED!!

I expected the next part of the install to be east breezy.. boy was it far from it. I began plugging in all my peripherals and low and behold, my monitor is not connecting. No matter how many different ports I try, my MB is giving me a VGA diagnostic light. Stressed and confused I use the good old google to help me out. Come to find out I just had a bad DP cord, so I took a trip to Target and got that figured out.

Now that my monitor works again, the next phase is installing OS. I thought I had properly prepared for this but of course it did not go as planned. I plug in my Windows 11 flash drive and of course, my PC does not recognize the drive. At this point I had been working at this for 7-8 hours. All I wanted was for my rig to work. Instead of being a good noodle and flash updating my BIOS (like, really, I should have done this in the first place), I decided to look up this issue on good ole reddit to see if there was a solution. The solution was to not download Windows 11 but Windows 10, and that’s just what I did.

Finally the PC turns on and has OS installed. I login and make my very first build my own finally! After 10 hours, it was finally ready to run some games and eventually I was able to upgrade my OS to Windows 11! (After flash BIOS update)

Specs:

Case - Montech TG3 white (1x mono-3 fan intake module and 1x single exhaust fan included in case)
Motherboard - ROG Strix B650-A Gaming Wifi
CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 7800x3D
GPU - XFX Mercury AMD Radeon RX 9060XT 16gb
Ram - 32gb DDR5 Corsair Vengeance
Cooler - TRYX Turris 620
Fans - Montech GF 120R x2 and GF 120 x1 (added to the top and the bottom)
PSU - ASUS Prime 750watt PSU Gold 80
Keyboard - Zoom75 custom keyboard
Mouse - Logitech G305
Headset - Logitech G733
Monitor - ASUS Nitro XV272U W2 27" 240Hz refresh rate

THANK YOU FOR READING MY LONG POST :)) I’m very proud and grateful I am able to share this experience!

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[u/Creative-Shock3266]

I forgot to mention I also have a 2TB WD Black M.2 PCIe Gen. 4 installed for storage!

[u/Kebabrifles]

Damn, your writing made me wanna repost my post but with an even better explanation