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One of my grandsons undertook a project to build his own gaming computer. Pretty ambitious for a 13 year old. So starting around his birthday, he began researching and gathering components for his dream machine.
He bought an MSI motherboard, a AMD Ryzen 5 9600 CPU, a PNY Nvidia GEFORCE 5060 GPU (with 3 fans!), a nice case and power supply, a liquid cooled CPU cooler, a 512 GB NVMe SSD, and 32 GB of DDR5 dual channel RAM. He also has a 240 Hz Sceptre curved 40" monitor and nice keyboard and mouse.
Unfortunately, after getting everything assembled (after a couple of months) he was unable to get it to boot.
So he brought the box to grandpa. I was kind of terrified, because this was way beyond my curmudgeonly, out-of-date computer experience - I'm sort of 10 years+ behind the times.
He suspected that the CPU socket had some bent pins, and after looking at them I agreed that was a problem. I have zero experience with these new fangled CPUs and sockets, which have over 1,000 pins!! Not having a microscope, we tried to bend some back using a magnifier app on an iPhone at 10x. We gave up and I took the motherboard to a local PC repair guy who had agreed to look at it. He gave up too.
Below are some pictures we took of the socket showing some misaligned and bent pins. These things are super delicate.
Here is an example of what can be seen without zooming in very much.
Here is about 5x magnification - one of the pins is clearly out of place
Here is 10x
So the obvious solution was to simply order a new motherboard. Only $160 - amazingly. Even if a competent repair shop had been able to fix it, they would have charged close to that. Once we set it up on the bench and transferred all the parts from the old motherboard and CAREFULLY dropped the CPU into the socket, latching it down tight, everything booted up to the BIOS. What a relief!!!! He was so happy and I had to calm myself down.
Then we created a Windows Media USB stick on another computer and did the Windows 11 install process. We had to load drivers for the MSI onboard WiFi adapters from a stick as well, and then we were able to complete the Windows 11 setup via the internet.
Then we loaded drivers for the AMD chipset the rest of the motherboard drivers and the NVIDIA drivers.
IMG_3039.MOVHere is a little video of the completed computer. You can see the round liquid cooler pump and hoses going to the top of the case where there is is a radiator and 4 more fans. I think there are 10 fans in all!
Note the cool RGB lights on the fans, memory and GPU. This is a new-to-me thing, although I have seen pictures, of the newer motherboard technology that allows for synchronized RGB lighting.
The monitor is displaying the MSI control center which displays CPU temp and a bunch of other metrics.
Nothing much is running so the CPU is loafing at 2.8 GHz; it can go up to 5.2 when busy.
We then tested several of his games that show how much this thing can do. He showed me War Thunder running at up to 160 frames per second, which I am told is pretty darned good. My monitor, which we used for this test is only 75Hz, so when it gets the rig home and hooked up to his 240 Hz monitor, it wil really scream.
Since I am not an action gamer, this was all new to me. Live and learn.
Once we had it all tested, we spent some time on cable management and making it neater before buttoning it up.
This was a fun learning project for both of us and a great bonding experience. It reminded me of the time when my son and I had build a pretty nice computer from parts before he went off to college in the early 2000's. That box was about 1/100th of the technology and power in this one, though.
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