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School boy error in spec
Spec'd my old man a new PC the other week. Spent a bit of time trying to find the perfect balance.
I figured I'd go for a Ryzen, people have been raving about them. I'm quite particular about only buying the latest generation kit - it always pays off in terms of maximising the life-span of a fairly expensive outlay. So I went for a Pinnacle Ridge 2600 - perfect for heavy media processing without the fuss of the enthusiast bits.
Carefully matched to an ASRock B450M Pro motherboard - which supports this chip from the outset, no worrying about BIOS compatibility.
The bits arrived, all assembled - aside from the ODD which wouldn't fit in the 5.25" if you also wanted a motherboard.
Flick the switch. Beep, beep, beep, beep.
Beep, beep, beep, beep? What does that mean!? Well after reseating everything, checking the grounding etc. I was stumped. Carefully went over the specs before I finally arrived at it.
AMD, the revolutioniser of the APU does not include GPUs in their latest gen mid-range desktop parts.
How embarrassing. I didn't even think to check - it's what AMD was known for.
I'm kicking myself now as if I had realised I would have specc'd the Intel option at £30 for a built-in GPU over the ~£75 for a 1030 (interesting that AMD don't do any cheap as chips graphics cards). Luckily, I managed to find a old and power hungry graphics card in my box of bits which adds a nice bit of noise to the computer.
Still lesson learnt!
This was my first AMD build I've done in eons, aside from my screw up, I wasn't overly impressed with the cooler mounting. Intel OOB, plonk-push. This one required unscrewing bits from the motherboard, fishing around to find out where the back-plate had slipped off too (finally know why cut-outs are a thing), undoing one side of the cooler because the other screws don't align if you screw one side in too far first etc. Minor niggles all of them, but still, if I was building PCs all day, I would definitely favour the Intel cooler. It also seems to have an unnecessarily large shroud which gets very close to RAM, especially if you have heat spreaders on.
Still after everything was fitted, it all came up wonderfully, I'm lost in the BIOS options on this board, there are a zillion of tweaks you can make to the AMD chips that are completely lost on me - and in true motherboard manufacturer style, the help text is missing on most of the acronyms.
Originally had a Thermaltake H15 case, but as noted above, with a motherboard fitted there isn't enough room for a CD in the 5.25" bay, let alone a whole drive. Only any good for a fan controller etc. So that went back for a Fractal Core 1000. For an extra fiver at this end of the market, it's much better. With replaceable expansion slot covers, and a top-mounted PSU position allows for fully sized ODD without any increase in external size. Drive mounting was a bit strange, but didn't use as went for M2. And you have to pay out for a 92mm exhaust (as who has a spare 92mm sized fan?). There is a 120mm at the front, but with the PSU being top mounted, it's better to get some heat out the back.
Thinking about it, I'm surprised I haven't seen any top-mount PSU cases with an inverted position and an intake on the top. Lots of cases have cut outs for top mounted fans, just not for PSUs. It would solve the old ODD space issue too.
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