Birthday Upgrade for the Son's PC and Around the Block with Micro$oft

In a post of September of 2017, I talked about the build I had done for my son's birthday back in May. It had taken me a year to gather all the parts that went into the machine, but in the end, he was happy and it was worth the trouble. Three years later, as we finish out this year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that time again. My son is a rising senior headed toward his last year of high school and then on to college to study engineering of some sort...... Which mean this...... that machine driven by a Pentium G4400 and rockin' a GTX-750ti graphics card wasn't going to cut it. 

And with another birthday fast approaching, it was a good time to upgrade his "gaming pc" to a full-blown college-ready workstation! When I analyzed his equipment, it looked like the bones were there. The Corsair Carbide 380t case is compact enough to go if he goes and certainly is fine if he wants to stay at home and start locally. I had gotten him a pair of 22" HP business-class monitors last year so that was fine as well. What needed some sprucing up was the ASRock motherboard which had only 1 of 2 RAM sockets working, and a Pentium G4400 driving the system. So I set a $300 budget to get it all done; motherboard, processor and graphics card.

$86 went to a Skylake i5-6500. Four cores running at 3.2Ghz with a little bit of headroom to bump it up. Little Sis chipped in by buying an inexpensive, but effective CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Black HSF, but that turned out to be 1/4" too tall for his case, so I had to chase down an M4 low-profile HSF to replace it. Now, I have an extra Hyper 212 sitting in the closet! I found a GTX-1060 on eBay for $120 because it was a Dallas seller and I didn't have to pay shipping! Then things got complicated.....

I had decided that we should go with the higher end Skylake chipset boards; either the Z170 or H170. Looking around, I found that the Mini-ITX boards of that generation tended to run around $100, plus or minus regardless of chipset. I was able to find a Gigabyte Z170 board for $90 shipped, but missing it's I/O shield which cost another $10 out of China. Everything came in around the same time last weekend and we got to work. That's when the upgrade train went off the rails! 

It started out with the Hyper 212 being a quarter of an inch too tall and the rest was just downhill after that! Next, I couldn't find the other stick of RAM for his machine, then the board refused to POST. Then started the trouble-shooting routine. One thing at a time using everything including his old board and processor. It turned out that the board just wasn't going to boot. I even tried straightening a few pin in the socket that looked bent. No Joy! Luckily the seller was a good guy and refunded the money immediately. Then I found another board just like it in LA and the guy offered it to me for $60 shipped. It was sold "working" but with some bent pins in the socket! I took a chance anyway!

It came today and Whatayaknow!!!  It came right up.... bent pins and all.

I have to say that all was not "wine and roses". I'm sure some of you have already guessed it! ....... the upgrade cause the Windows10 load to "deactivate". One new key and an hour and a half of tech support later, I can say that "I'm very angry at Micro$oft"!!!

In the end, the whole thing came in under budget and his machine is ready for a few more years. Yeah, I'm going to have to pull the board and install the M4 HSF assembly when it shows up from Canada in a week or so and I have some parts to sell back off too. Now, if I can only figure out what I did with that other stick of RAM I squirreled away 3 years ago.....