Building a desktop....for the first time in years

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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.

Short & Sweet Dec Update

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Hi there everyone! Just checking in for this month. I still exist, believe it or not hahaha. I’m planning on working on cleaning up, corebooting and refurbishing some Thinkpads for 2022. Also plan on making a FOSS Meme PC build based around an Optiplex 9010 with a 3rd gen i7 and a low profile RX550 GPU. That’ll have a corebooted motherboard and fairly open-source-friendly components. The wifi module is all I’d have to search for…

One of the many greats

The projects that I’m actively working on are all over in the trackers page here if anyone wants to check them out. After finishing a few corebooted thinkpads and building the optiplex FOSS machine, I intend on making a Ryzen 5 desktop out of leftover parts from 2020-2021 and utilizing that for a secondary gaming machine or possibly a server host. Looking forward to seeing what fun little handhelds and mini-laptops 2022-2023 will bring us, with the upcoming AMD Rembrandt APUs using RDNA2 graphics looking to be pretty awesome.

That is all for now! Whether you celebrate or not, I wish you all a happy holiday and new year!

Here are some fun things I’ve found recently:

Side Projects and Small Updates

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Running stress tests on the x250 before repasting

Hello there again! Just thought I’d give a nearly-mid-month update on things.

While repairing the Thinkpad X250 I’ve been working on recently, I found that two separate replacement keyboards did not have ribbon cables long enough to fully plug in to the connector on the motherboard- this seems to mess with trackpoint functionality. Guess I’ll wait on testing other cable and board replacements on that before coming to a conclusion. Looks like the thermal paste on that core i5 4th gen may also need to be replaced, as it seems the processor hits a solid 99c after only a few seconds of being stress tested, whoa. I intend on giving this to a friend once fully repaired.

I also have a System76 Gazelle model gazp9 that I’m working on getting the body plastics and screen repaired for. Looks like the previous owner I received this from had a habit of punching their screen, so might need an entire display assembly to fix that. This’ll be the extra computer I keep in case a family member ever needs a computer, and are open to trying out Pop!OS. Once I get that guy into functioning order again, I’ll definitely see if I can get an Arch Linux rice as well as a Pop!_OS screenshot from it with inxi and neofetch information.

Looking forward to using my Framework Laptop and a future System76 mobile workstation as my daily drivers in the future. More cores on one machine means I can use one for Virtualization and application compiling for work, with the other being the modular thin and light for everything else. Here’s hoping the JingPad’s software matures as well, as that would be the perfect companion tablet that ran an Ubuntu-based distro. Keep an eye on those project and hardware tracker spreadsheets for when I update em- looking forward to testing some fun hardware soon, as well as next year.

That’s it for this week! I’ll throw some fun things I’ve been reading or watching below recently:

  • Foxes Afloat is a fun youtube channel with a couple who have lived on narrowboats in the UK Canals for a while. I especially like them because I can relate to Colin who is also on the Asperger’s Syndrome train

  • My coworker Nathan Dyer wrote a great blog post about his life hacks for better wrist support, and another one previously about how he’s improved his Bluetooth experience on Linux

  • Watched a fun video on why Tesla made their DOJO computer from a Tesla fan channel

  • Nick from The Linux Experiment channel gave an update on how his JingPad is performing, with updated software.

  • I have a PineTime and PinePower Desktop unit arriving from the fun folks at Pine64 soon, looking forward to seeing how the PineTime can replace my Pebble Time Round. Here’s their october update

  • Jeff Geerling recently reviewed a pre-production board of the Cutie Pi tablet. After running through my emails on my no-longer-used email account I used to have as a main account, it looks like I might be receiving one of those in upcoming months too!

Framework Laptop + eGPU on Fedora Linux

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Hi there! I’ve recently taken to moving to a more portable setup, which should allow me to travel more while getting more done.

Still working on finding a decent portable monitor setup that allows the Pangolin pang10 (HDMI-out only) and my Framework Laptop (USB-C out, plus various port expansions) to have a secondary display while traveling. I’ve also been gaming on an eGPU-based setup for the past month and some change with the Framework Laptop.

The External GPU enclosure I’m utilizing is the awesome CoolerMaster EG200 eGPU. This thing includes a 2.5” drive bay on the front, a separate-from-thunderbolt USB hub on the back, and a clean setup for the GPU. Wires are pre-ran from the built-in standard desktop power supply and all the parts are clealy marked, should you need replacements.

The Framework Laptop is still running Fedora Linux. I might try Arch or openSUSE around the beginning of 2022, but we’ll see. I decided to go with an AMD GPU this time around, as I’ve mostly used Intel and NVIDIA products most of my life. Starting with an older RX590 I found on eBay, I tested the GPU for 2-3 weeks and it was running most of my games fine, held back only by the performance of that older card.

Then, all of a sudden, I sprung upon a combo deal on Newegg. Get an AM4 motherboard at MSRP and get an RX6600XT at MSRP as well, as part of the bundle deal! I could likely use that motherboard in a small server build in the future, so I’m keeping that in storage for now, as I use the RX6600XT in the eGPU. Games are running great on the external monitor! While Risk of Rain 2 destroys framerates like it always does, games like Factorio, No Man’s Sky, Audiosurf 2 and Last Epoch are running perfectly fine from 50-140fps!

After receiving the RX6600XT, I used the egpu-switcher app from github to make sure the proper symlinks were setup to offload graphics to that, and grabbed newer mesa drivers via GloriousEggroll’s mesa-aco COPR, and I was good to go! I’ve heard mentions that kernel 5.14.x will allow AMD hotplug support, but it seems that isn’t ready yet, from my testing. Framework has promised a firmware update to their Framework Laptop soon too, that will fix the power delivery anomaly I was seeing. I’d need the eGPU hooked up along with a secondary power supply if I wanted to game for longer than four hours at a time. Once that update comes in, I’ll be able to take that port I’m sacrificing to a power adapter and switch out Expansion Cards to put an Ethernet port in and enjoy faster networking.

For the heck of it, I’ll include recent inxi/neofetch outputs from my docked Framework laptop and Pangolin pang10 laptop below.

## This info was taken from the inxi and neofetch programs on Oct 3 2021 from my Framework.

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Graphics: Device-1: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] driver: i915 v: kernel
Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 23 [Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6600M] driver: amdgpu v: kernel
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.11 driver: loaded: amdgpu,modesetting resolution: 2560x1440
OpenGL: renderer: AMD DIMGREY_CAVEFISH (DRM 3.42.0 5.14.9-200.fc34.x86_64 LLVM 12.0.1) v: 4.6 Mesa 21.3.0-devel

/:-------------:\
:-------------------:: ---------------
:-----------/shhOHbmp---:\ OS: Fedora 34 (Workstation Edition) x86_64
/-----------omMMMNNNMMD ---: Host: Laptop A8
:-----------sMMMMNMNMP. ---: Kernel: 5.14.9-200.fc34.x86_64
:-----------:MMMdP------- ---\ Uptime: 4 mins
,------------:MMMd-------- ---: Packages: 2334 (rpm), 17 (flatpak)
:------------:MMMd------- .---: Shell: zsh 5.8
:---- oNMMMMMMMMMNho .----: Resolution: 2560x1440
:-- .+shhhMMMmhhy++ .------/ DE: GNOME 40.4
:- -------:MMMd--------------: WM: Mutter
:- --------/MMMd-------------; WM Theme: Sweet-Dark
:- ------/hMMMy------------: Theme: Sweet-Dark [GTK2/3]
:-- :dMNdhhdNMMNo------------; Icons: Nebula [GTK2/3]
:---:sdNMMMMNds:------------: Terminal: gnome-terminal
:------:://:-------------:: CPU: 11th Gen Intel i7-1185G7 (8) @ 4.800GHz
:---------------------:// GPU: AMD ATI Radeon RX 6600/6600 XT/6600M
GPU: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics]
Memory: 3188MiB / 31880MiB

Outside of working on getting that eGPU setup running fine with the Framework, I’ve also been dabbling in Arch ARM recently and might try installing Parabola, Arch ARM and Ubuntu 21.04 on my Pi 400 recently. We’re also testing out how to “popify” the Ubuntu experience on a Pi 4/400 recently, so stay tuned for that!