Building a desktop....for the first time in years
/Hi there tech family! It’s been a busy few months at work, and I’ve mainly just sunk into a couch to watch a show or play a game after most days. I let things get to me too much, and am slowly learning to give myself space and take time for myself to chill out.
That said, one form of chilling out is working with your hands. I enjoy the process of refurbishing older laptops to bring new life to them. While I’ve been falling behind on my corebooted thinkpad projects (linked here), I have indeed finally finished a desktop build.
I went all-AMD this time just for simplicity of use with any linux distro. Here’s the full build spec and part page.
Here we have the motherboard as I left it previously. Two sticks of 4000mhz cl19 or cl16 DDR4 RAM and a Ryzen 5600x with a WD Black 512gb NVMe (3 not 4) under a heatsink. Now we just needed to open the new cooler.
With the help of kind fellow GloriousEggroll, I learned the below case I got secondhand wouldn’t work. Missing a food and the places where one would place standoffs had some ouchies.
So he gave me a massive fractal case and we built in that.
He also gave me some cabling so I could add a few SSDs and previously-server-used WD Red drives to this build in the future. The plan is to game on this and use it as a network share until prices return to normal, then I’ll relegate my older RX590 8gb and my RX6600XT to mining duty while gaming on a higher-performing GPU and Zen 4 processor. Anyway, here’s the build with everything good to go. He and I were cut quite often on this damn motherboard I had in my closet lol.
It also posted fine! I ended up installing Eggy’s fresh release of Nobara on it. Nobara is a spin of Fedora Linux, optimized for desktop use, gaming and feeling snappy. I’m trying out KDE this time. I’ll add a carousel of post-build images below.
