Our goal on Monday August 4th was to install the CPU into the motherboard and the CPU cooler on top of that. This is the motherboard -- an ASRock PRO Z790 PRO RS WiFi. I've used ASRock in the past and been happy with them, and this board had all the right features built-in and solid reviews on NewEgg.
The CPU, an Intel Core i9-14900KF, now installed in its slot. I used the same process I've always used successfully for selecting a CPU -- go to the PassMark CPU benchmarks, start at the top-performing, then go down the list until I find a few CPUs in my price range. It's a great way to find the top-performing CPU that fits into the budget for the build. This is an impressive 24-core i9, which should fit well with this gaming PC.
Now with the CPU cooler installed over the CPU. Being a KF-series CPU which is unlocked, this CPU doesn't come with a stock cooler, so we needed to research and buy a third-party cooler. This is a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black, which had solid reviews and wasn't too expensive. We don't plan on overclocking, so don't need anything too extreme, but still this is the largest CPU cooler I have ever used. As often seems to be the case, getting the CPU cooler attached was tricky. In this case, the challenge was attaching the fan to the cooler. The instructions were not very clear, but with some perseverance and teamwork, we figured it out!
We achieved our day-1 goal, so this concluded our building activities on August 4th!
Our goal for day 2, Tuesday August 5th, was to get the motherboard into the case, with video card, memory, and power supply, so we could do an initial boot up into BIOS. This picture shows the motherboard now installed into the case, a Phanteks XT Pro Ultra. This is a standard ATX case, but with great cable management and several RGB LED fans, which was one of my son's key aesthetic requirements for this computer.
It's a little hard to see, but now the power supply has been installed in the bottom of case. It's a Corsair RM750x, which is a fully modular power supply, meaning that you only need to connect the power cables that you need. Great for cable management! Since the computer is still a work-in-progress I'm just letting the power cables go wherever is easiest in the moment, but once things are done and working I can route the cables through the back of the case to get them out of the way.
In this picture, the memory has also been installed, a single DIMM of 32GB Crucial DDR5 memory, the most RAM I've ever had in a computer!
A rear view of the computer in the same state -- you can see the motherboard connector panel and also a nice view of the case fans.
After this picture, things didn't go perfectly. As planned, we installed the graphics card, an MSI-built Geforce RTX 5060 Ti card, and then tried an initial boot up. All the case fans and CPU cooler came on, but nothing came on the monitor. To rule out possibilities, we tried the video card in different PCIe slots, different power connectors to the video card, and also installed the M.2 hard drive. Across all these attempts, we couldn't get any video output. So we ended day 2 a little frustrated, but encountering issues like this is part of the challenge and pride of building a PC.
Day 3, Wednesday August 6th, kicked off by taking a very old graphics card from my last PC, Clementine, and trying that in this build. We were glad to see that it worked -- now we got video output and could see the BIOS menus, which made us start thinking that perhaps the MSI video card was the problem, not anything to do with the motherboard. So we continued with the build temporarily using this older video card -- installing Windows 11 and getting the OS set up.
We reached out to technical support both for the MSI video card and the ASRock motherboard to see if there were ideas for troubleshooting the video issue. We tried some ideas over the next couple of days, but the conclusion ended up being that it must be a defective video card. So, we returned the MSI video card and instead purchased a similar Gigabyte GeForce RTX 5060 Ti card.
This second video card arrived on Sunday August 10th. We installed it into the motherboard, powered the PC on, and were delighted to see video output from this new card. So it was the video card after all, and not too bad of a troubleshooting experience, although it did set us back a couple of days, and I was glad that I had a backup video card to experiment with. This picture also shows all the cables properly routed through the right spots in the case so you can barely see them!
Now with a proper video card, we were able to fully finish setting up the PC and installing modern games that actually will make use of this powerful configuration! It's paired with a nice 27-inch 4K Acer monitor, MSI gaming keyboard and mouse, and decent Logitech speaker system.
It's hard to capture the RGB LED lights well since they are cycling through colors fairly quickly, but the computer has a very striking look to it!
Overall, I was surprised in a way that, at a high level, the process of building a PC hasn't really changed in a long time. The biggest change was the introduction of M2 drives, which are great and really free up a lot of space, and the greater amount of cable management inside the case. These two things combined really lead to a cleaner looking PC, perfect for a clear side panel!