I hate PCs

[kalniel]

Sure.. one of the best things about PC gaming is you can do things like drop a GPU upgrade into a system you built yourself and give it a new lease of life. Or so I thought.

Mrs has a nice 2500K based system. It had a 1gb gtx 560 which was doing great, but newest games like Fallout 4 and Witcher 3 were calling for more, so I picked up a nice Gigabyte windforce 4gb gtx 960. One of the non-mini ones. "Will it fit?" She says. "Oh, the graphics card" Say I. This turned out to be foretelling.

She has a full sized ATX build, in a Silverstone tower which I thought would have had plenty of room. But for all the lovely card, Gigabyte have a ridiculous plastic shroud containing the fans, which extends beyond the edge of the cards - possibly to stop cables resting against the heatsink perhaps. And this was bumping into the hard drive and stopping the card from seating. Bugger.

No problem, I thought. I'll just move the hard drive to a different slot in the HDD cage. If I just undo.. ah. I can't remove the hard drives from the cage without removing the whole cage from the case. Bugger.

OK, more bits of case removed, hard drive cage unscrewed. I can wiggle it and.. grr. It's being blocked by something. Sata cables from the motherboard. No problem, removed.. still blocked?? Oh you're kidding me. The Sata PORTS were blocking the cage removal. I'm going to have to remove the whole motherboard. Bugger.

So I did. Which was a pain as well as one of the stand offs came up. And I lost track of the number of times a screw fell down somewhere awkward and had to be found.

So to fit a slightly bigger (but by no means huge) GPU into a normal case, I had to remove the motherboard to remove the hdd cage to remove the hard disk... And assemble it all again. My hands are getting quite shredded at this point from having to work around sharp internal edges and thin heatsink fins.

And then it didn't boot. Bugger.

Cables all checked fine. Can't see any erroneous screws/shorts.

*sigh*

Refit the old card to check if new card was DOA.

Still didn't boot.

Bugger Bugger. Have I damaged a trace?

Remove old card and check carefully. What's that in the PCI-E slot? A spec of dust? Much blowing ensues. Old card back in again.

Much much relief when it boots fine.

Old card out again. Slot inspected and blown again. New card in.

Finally. Boots. Phew.

Sides back on. Now have happy Mrs playing all her games smooth on ultra.

As I conceal the left-over screws (it's fine - most are hard drive/cage related), I begin to ponder console gaming.

[scaryjim]

See, this is why I don't buy high end components.

And not at all because I'm tight.

Honest

[aidanjt]

Most newer cases are way less of a pain in the arse in that regard, thankfully.

[kalniel]

Most newer cases are way less of a pain in the arse in that regard, thankfully.

Yeah. I was thinking next upgrade for her would be storage since her drive is really old and quite slow.. but given annoying HDD cage it might have to be a new case first (or if we can afford a big enough SSD, stick that somewhere random outside the cage).

[Macman]

I kinda know what you mean Kalniel, I was pondering that thought when I was having issues with the HDD after reformatting the PC 3/4 times in less than 48 hours lol.

[shaithis]

This is why I only build in screw-less cases now.

Job is always much easier and faster, with no shredding of appendages!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would not have bothered with the longer one. I have the mini-ITX version and it boosts to 1.3GHZ consistently for FO4 and is not noisy and thats in a mini-ITX case.

Most of the large coolers for the GTX960 are mostly for show. If a £140 Sapphire Nitro R9 380 can have a more compact PCB and cooler it makes me wonder at times.

[Ttaskmaster]

Sure.. one of the best things about PC gaming is you can do things like drop a GPU upgrade into a system you built yourself and give it a new lease of life.

This is why you always need a BIG case!!!

While you can do such things, in the same way you can drop a completely different engine into your car... it's never *just* dropping it in.

[kalniel]

It isn't a small case by any stretch of the imagination.. just poorly thought out/not quite so compatible with ASUS hanging SATA ports over the edge or over the top plastic shrouds. Should have gone for the mini as CTF did - but this computer does tend to get a bit neglected so I usually allow a bit of extra margin on the temps/airflow.

First time it's ever been a problem in many many builds/upgrades to be honest. Had less trouble even when running an mATX cube thing!

[OniDooM]

Lesson learned, always get measurements of GFX cards before buying/installing them haha. Although I have done this plenty of times and still no lesson learned.

[kalniel]

Lesson learned, always get measurements of GFX cards before buying/installing them haha. Although I have done this plenty of times and still no lesson learned.

I did measure as best as I could find from reviews/picture :/ It *should* have fitted. But I don't mind the fitting issue (quite common for hard drives not to be able to go in line with a GFX card) as much as the hassle moving the HDD.

[MrComputerSaint]

Nice write up of a problem many of us face, I'm sure.
That feeling of "will this work if I replace this" and then the sinking feeling when it doesn't work and trying to think logically to get to the next logical outcome.

The PC building / troubleshooter / IT person is a slightly separate breed of human with a mind that is wired in a logical way and I think many of us are better off than the majority of humans because of this. There is of course the side of the brain that is irrational and this can overtake the logical side, the emotional side. If we let this overtake our logical side we are no better off than the majority any more, simply a mere mortal.

[kalniel]

Oh believe me, I came very close to finding some implement to cut the end off the plastic shroud. Each time I had to delve a little further to fix I was thinking it more and more.. but did get a little distracted by the 'well, I've already gone to the hassle of dismantling this.. I can't have to do all *that* much more?'

[DanceswithUnix]

Had less trouble even when running an mATX cube thing!

My wife has a Silverstone mATX cube thing. I should call it "The resigned sigh" from any hardware tweaks. Perhaps Silverstone just like making some of their cases awkward

I swapped the motherboard recently, and had the new motherboard installed and the CPU in place and was looking at the heatsink before I remembered it has a custom mounting plate. Thankfully the new motherboard isn't as tight a fit as the old one which only just scraped in, but it still a bit of a mind bender puzzle to get the thing out unless you remove the drive tray. Sadly with the airflow in that case it really needs the fancy heatsink, so back out that board came.

After all that occasionally the thing doesn't come out of sleep, at which point she kind of gives up and uses her Chromebook

[MrJim]

I recently upgraded my second ATX case PC with a spare ITX motherboard I had lying around. You'd think there'd be a ton of space putting such a small motherboard into a full size case - WRONG! The ITX motherboard layout is just horrible for anything other than an ITX case, it seems. The SATA cables only just stretched, & I needed a 24 pin extension cable for the power connector. Just horrible!

[Thorsson]

LOL. Been there. done that. I now always check the size of the new card against the existing.