My First Custom Pc

August 2023 (780 Words, 5 Minutes)

After countless years of using my Dell Optiplex I can finally say that I have a real PC.

This summer I finally made some money and with that money I decided that it would be wise to build a new PC, so I scoured the internet, trying to find some reasonable deal and then I found it.

Everything I needed, conveniently in one package and for €100, which is a good deal where I live. So the next day I went in the city and deposited my money hoping that it wouldn’t get snatched, and it didn’t! So there I was, waiting for my stuff to come, but I also needed somewhere to put it, so I looked on Alza (large e-shop in Czechia) and decided on getting the Gamemax Spark.

A nice, little, cheap yet well-built case for just around €40. I also bought a CPU cooler, case fans, thermal paste and a fan hub but I’ll get to that later.

Now that everything was on its way I just had to wait, and wait I did because Alza delayed my package two times! In all that free time I went trucking with my dad for a few days, went to a fair in my city and discovered that my spleen has shrunken a little.

But after 10 days it finally came, and I got right into work at 10am, I started with putting on the CPU cooler and right away I managed to fail.

The cooler was held in by clips, which I needed to loose up a little by loosening the screws on it, and of course my dumb ass though that it would just click in like a GPU. So there I was, trying to get the cooler on for 15 minutes. So that’s one fuck up but more stuff needed to go wrong since it was my first time building a computer, which I would not realise until later, when I was installing the fans.

Yeah, so I may have bought 80 mm fans instead of the 120 mm ones, but it doesn’t end there! The fan hub I bought is useless because the fans can be daisy-chained! So that’s €5 out of the window and 5 fans that I’ll replace later. Other than that there wasn’t many issues other than me plugging the front IO cables in incorrectly, but we can all agree that they’re a pain in the ass to connect unless it’s like a fractal design or some other fancy case. The cable management was pretty nice even though there wasn’t much space in the back. The PSU sits in the front and is covered by an SSD mount so it’s a good place to hide most cables.

(I know it’s a cheap PSU but I had it for some time and it didn’t fail on me so far) I only used a fraction of the cables, so I tucked most of them behind the bracket and now it’s impossible to see them. The only cable I had some problems with was the USB 3.0 cable which was pretty hard to shape and fit underneath the motherboard but most of them came in easily.

I originally only wanted to install the back fan and one in the bottom so see if they work but after booting on, some cable got caught in the fans and started making noises, so I took it apart again and installed them all, of course having to flip them, realise they’re the wrong way, flipping them again and having to put the cables somewhere. Now I run one in the back, two on the top and two on the bottom.

After that I considered the build complete, now having to clean my table and redo the cables, but that also didn’t happen so easily, I have a bench for lifting weights to the right of my table and I needed to get the bar down, but I had some weights on and I accidentally managed to slam the bar into my table like a battering ram, my old monitor made a horrible sound and that really scared me but as I later found out, nothing happened to it. Having everything clean made the to-do list even shorter, now only having installing drivers and doing benchmarks.

I just downloaded the fan utility, overclocking software and some game optimizer from gigabyte to test out. When I ran some benchmarks on it I got these results.

The PC is far from complete but it is still faster than my old setup and probably even quieter but I cannot judge that since my old PC was under my table.

I ran these benchmarks at night and this is how loud the PC got under max load.

This is by far my longest blog post ever and I would greatly appreciate if you could share it because it will really help me with indexing my page on google, right now it only shows when you search up kufd00m.xyz and back then when it popped up when i searched kufd00m it was the 3rd. Google is really a pain to deal with so please, help me out a little.