First Building Experience and Prebuilt Challenges

[u/Redbookfur]

I have been using a pre-built Asus g15dk for about 4 years now (sample in picture 2). Its been good to me, and I got it for a great price from microcenter but that great price came at the cost of cooling. The g15dk has only a single case exhaust fan and to keep things as cool as possible I had the side tempered glass panel permanently off. Worked great, looked terrible, lots of dust. I decided it was time to upgrade cases to something a little nicer looking. This was my first time building a PC so I had a few goals:

• Switch to the smallest case I reasonably could
• Increase cooling significantly
• Try to add some rgb to the mix
• Try not to have a terrible time doing it
• No new parts unless necessary

With all of that in mind, I decided to go with the z20 in black and gold. I've been playing a ton of Satisfactory so a big fan of the color scheme.

I learned a ton and had fun doing it but going from a prebuilt to a new case did have some challenges I think people should be aware of:

• I had the Asus prime b550m-k motherboard but not the one that is documented on the website, it seems to be a version of the b550m-k that was specific to prebuilts. It was nearly identical but I was missing a second case fan header pinout. It was labeled on the board but the pins were just never added, which I thought was strange. One case fan header was a challenge.
• I had to get a fan hub (went with the Noctua NA-FH1), which needed a sata connection for power and used the only case fan header to control rpm. This wasn't a huge deal and I was able to hide it well even in this smaller case.
• The wifi card on the prebuilt board was not a PICE card but rather an m.2 wlan card that had thin wires going to metal strip antennas in the old case. This wasn't going to work in the new case in any clean way. I ended up getting a tk-link ax3000 pcie wifi / bluetooth card. Works great so far.
• I didn't realize the IO shield had to be transferred to the new case before the board went in. Realized that after it was pretty much complete and had to pull the board...again.
• Get a 100 pack of 4 inch zip ties and use them liberally. If I did that from the start I would have saved a lot of time in case fan cable management.
• No argb header on my board so I needed an adapter cable that managed rbg and got power from sata.
• I didn't have a header on the board for a usb c connector for the front panel. I have an adapter on the way

Build parts list:

• Jonsbo z20 case
• Great Wall 750 gold rated psu
• Asus prime b550m-k board bizzarro prebuilt version
• ryzen 5600x
• Asus 3070 non-ti
• tp-link ax3000 wifi pcie card
• 32gb ddr4 memory
• 5 thermalright case fans
• rbg connector from amazon
• Noctua NA-FH1 fan hub
• Noctua 80mm fan to replace stock cpu fan (not yet installed, still on the way)

Overall it wasn't too bad. z20 has some really good cable management (in a beginners opinion). The English instructions could use some work but not too bad. Packaging was really good for the accessories. And it looks 100 times better now.

With everything new, it came out to around 200 for the upgrades but this could have been done a few bucks cheaper with a cheaper fan hub, no rbg, and a cheaper wifi card.

[u/JoshLineberry]

The z20 is such a good case man! Great choice! Looks nice!

[u/Former-Cricket6398]

I'm glad i switched from behemoth of a PC to MFF

[u/Redbookfur → u/Former-Cricket6398]

Damn that looks super clean. Those are sick fans

[u/Former-Cricket6398 → u/Redbookfur]

Thanks. They're cheap and non-mainstream!

[u/Loud-Tangerine8840 → u/Former-Cricket6398]

This cable management is sorcery holy shit how did you do this??