The Disorientation

I finally built a gaming PC

A dream of mine as a teen was to build my own gaming PC and I finally did it.

It ain't much, but it's mine. Due to the outrages prices on RAM and SSDs, I had to dial in my budget. I became stubborn and forced myself to build around $500. This means my rig is definitely on the lower end. That said, I did choose parts with an upgradable path.

I built this PC with basic tasks and light gaming in mind.

Here are the specs (prices from last week and rounded up):

Luckily, I was able to find a 3-piece bundle on Newegg for the MB, RAM, and SSD for $220. This shaved off about $100, which kept it around $450 in total with a cooler and some extra fans.

The only thing I'm iffy about is the motherboard. It's quite low-end. It was the only motherboard that had a decent deal and accepted DDR4 RAM. I saw better motherboards, but they only accepted DDR5 RAM which is far more expensive. 16GB of DDR4 is about $125 right now and DDR5 is about double from what I've seen. No thanks.

The CPU is actually an APU, which combines a processor and graphics card. It's pretty lightweight and won't play any new games. That said, as a primarily console player, most of the games I'll be playing won't be on PC. I'm mainly interested in playing games like Stardew Valley, Terraria, Don't Starve, and so on because I prefer them with a mouse and keyboard. You can run those games on a toaster, so I'm cool with the CPU being low-end.

I'm also really excited because I finally switched to Linux. I couldn't stand all the bloat and spyware added onto Windows, so I figured now would be the perfect time to switch.

I opted for a beginner friendly distro called CachyOS. I was able to set it up no problem. Now I'm just familiarizing myself with it and transferring over some documents and what not.

That said, not everything was all hunky-dory. There were two points where I thought I screwed it all up.

The first was when I was connecting the EPS cable connector to the motherboard. This powers the CPU. Every video and article mentioned that connectors and components require a decent amount of force to properly connect and seat. So I pushed it in and saw it wasn't fully seated. I kept at it and, without realizing I was at an angle, heard this awful crinkling sound.

My heart sank. I thought I messed up the connector pins. Of all things to break, it was the CPU to motherboard connection. It's one thing to mess up an extra fan or something inexpensive, but this? Nah. Thankfully it ended up being alright. I removed the connector and inspected the pins and everything looked fine.

The next was testing the rig outside of the case. I had the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and SSD all set up. I connected everything up with the power supply and tried to turn it on. I got nothing. Tried again. Zilch. As I sat thinking about what I messed up, I saw the power supply unit wasn't even on. Whew. I tried again and... still nothing. At this point I start freaking out. I'm thinking "There goes a crap ton of money." Then, I realized the power cable wasn't even connected to the outlet. I plugged it in and everything worked out fine. The rig booted up.

I remember reading about how even experienced builders will forget something as simple (and essential) as plugging in the power cord or an HDMI cable.

Eventually, I might buy a GPU. If RAM prices weren't so damn high, I would've. But as it stands, that's a future upgrade.

For now, I'll stick with my little rig and start exploring the Linux system. For someone whose been using an old, crappy Walmart laptop, the difference in speed and reliability is astronomical.