So, a new PC can be exciting, but also daunting. In my case, when taking over a computer from someone who put it together but didn’t look close at the finer points, there’s some research to do.

On my old PC it had originally come with a 250GB WD Green SATA SSD, which I swapped out for a few 250GB Samsung 850 EVOs before realizing that the motherboard had NVMe m.2 slots on it. This was the first computer I’d had with m.2, and when I purchased a few 1TB WD Blue and Black drives I made a brief attempt at moving Windows to one, but that ended badly, so I just kept the OS on the Samsung until later using Clonezilla to duplicate it to the M.2 Evo 860 on the Startech card. SATA vs NVMe drivers in Windows is a thing.

So with the new PC I made a boot disk, deleted all of the existing partitions, and mistakenly installed my OS onto the Gen5 SSD. This was only a mistake because my OS doesn’t really need to be on the fastest disk, as Gen4 speeds are crazy good and operating systems are by default a bit laggy and some patience is needed. I’d set up the PC and even started installing games before pausing, realizing what I’d done, and setting about doing it all again.

This time, after moving the downloaded games to one of the SPCC 2TB SSDs I nuked the Gen5 and installed Windows onto the first of the two SPCC disks. This went very quickly, using a little trick to bypass logging in with a Microsoft account, and I was back in business .

One of the frustrating things about the computer, as bought, was that the fans were LOUD. The Montech King 95 Pro has six 120MM aRGB fans, and add to that the three fans on the 360mm water cooler radiator. Nine fans is a lot, and it was loud. I’ve had a lot of experience with BIOS fan adjustments so I went digging and was able to quiet the three fans on the radiator, taking them from 3000 to 600rpm was a huge relief, but the work wasn’t over.

I continued to set up the computer, playing some games and enjoying the absurd frame rates, quality, OLED screen contrast and quality, and generally enjoying the experience. I started with the speakers, which sound quite good, but had to be a little bit noisy over the lingering fan noise.

However, there was also something else I wanted to fix, LED control. Modern computers have so many lights, but a unified standard means that most of them can be controlled from a single piece of software, in this case MSI Center, as I had a MPG Z790 Carbon WiFi motherboard.

Some tinkering soured in the software got me one tab with fan controls, and one with Mystic Light, their LED control. Frustratingly the LED controls only let me change the color and pattern of the logo to the left of the CPU, which was fun, but not what I was after. I did see that the RAM LED strips were another sub-tab and I was pleased that I could adjust those to another pattern.

Missing entirely, however, were the six Montech fans on the side, bottom, and rear. Some searching found an excellent and insightful post on Reddit that informed me, and others, that the front panel button below the power button was LED control, not a Reset button as I’d thought. When held for 3 seconds the fan controller was put into a mode letting external software control it. I’d likely have found this if I had a manual, and if Montech still had them available on their website. Thank you Manualslib or whatever site I later downloaded it from.

Now, in MSI Center’s Mystic Light section I was able to change the color and scene of all LEDS finally. Success was sweet, but now back to the other problem, as no tinkering was seemingly able to fix that yet.

Another search yielded the fix, which is so simple that I laughed when I saw it. Power from DC is, well, direct, and doesn’t have a frequency like AC. The replacement for frequency in a wave when you don’t have a wave is a pulse. PWM is used instead of a constant current, and can let you control something by giving it less power over time, slowing it down.

I simply needed to go in to the BIOS, enter the fans settings, and switch control from DC to PWM. Immediately the fans all slowed to a crawl, as I’d set them to, with very much exponential curves versus straight lines. The relief was immediate and finally I felt as though the PC was mine. I had conquered LEDs, fans, disks, and the setup was now feeling solid.

As mentioned in the last post, I got a new PC, but what do you do with the old PC? In this case I’m selling it to a family member who is younger, going to university, and whose game usage is much less graphically intensive than mine. Passing on savings is also a nice thing to do, especially for family.

Backing up whatever you have on the computer is of course the first step. I rounded up what I needed to move and dropped it on to my NAS, which you can read about here.

After that, it’s going to be a matter of pulling out a few things from the old PC and putting a few things back in. SSDs are being swapped, and the WiFi card is going back in, because there’s no guarantee of easy Ethernet access in the dorms.

I’ll be removing my 4TB Crucial disk on a Startech adapter, paired with a few m.2 SATA Samsung Evo 960s in 250GB flavor. This will probably get broken down into the big drive itself and mounted on the new PC’s motherboard, which has an incredible 5 m.2 slots. I’m sending the old PC away with a 500GB and 1TB SSD, which should do very nicely.

One of the handy features of Steam’s library management is the ability to add disks, then move games between them. This usually has little consequence, though there’s usually the new install prompts once again and some settings may reset. My experience has been very positive, and I’ve been filling the big drive with all of those downloaded games that I want to maintain.

Don’t forget, however, to back up your Documents folder, as it has a lot of the save game files that some older games do not back up in Steam Cloud. One of my favorite go-to games, Crysis 2, works like this. It seems that some of the stats are backed up, but none of the saves and other small things.

I also like taking game screenshots while playing games and while I used to back these up to Steam, I stopped doing that and instead copy them to Google Photos and put them in an album. It’s kinda like a “what was I doing / playing / feeling like” in that month or season. Fun to look back on at times. Steam makes it pretty easy to find these on the disk from their interface when you open a screenshot, right click on it, and select the option to show it on disk.

One of the other interesting things about backing up a computer you’ve had in place for 5 years is that you find out what’s been using space. I’d had a Premiere Pro folder with 24GB of audio preview files, and it wasn’t even the newest version. Those were simply abandoned by the software and left. I’d also had a few Audacity mixtape projects using 15GB that I’d forgotten about.

I was going about the process of researching used replacements for my display setup at home on my gaming / video processing / other PC. I’d been using an AOC 24” curved WFHD display since 2020, and later got an MSI 30” UWFHD to use next to it, making for a very nice side-to-side curved setup. It’s worked for a long time, but for reasons I won’t get in to (and boredom) I wanted something bigger.

Used is how I go for a lot of reasons, price being a big part of it, but also I stand by the idea that if something is going to fail it will be within the first six months of it being used normally. Barring some sort of secret abuse that’s not visible or possible to perceive, it tends to work.

I was really debating the merits of a 16:9 32-34” display like the LG Ultragear, and even the 39” beast they’ve made. Wide as, or wider, than my 30”, they would make things a lot easier to read and make for a nicer editing and gaming experience. The 49” Samsung Odyssey is of course in the running, but I just couldn’t decide on anything.

One of the listings that came up showed the label on the back of a monitor, and when I looked at the ad title I saw something interesting . It was for a PC, the price had been slashed, but there were no details. I’d been mulling the thought of a new PC to replace my 9th gen Core i7 9700F and so when I clicked on the ad I was genuinely interested in what this was.

It later transpired that this PC wasn’t as first advertised, with a Ryzen 7 7700 instead of the 1390K i9 initially stated, written not in text on the ad, but along with the other details shown on a green lined note pad. The specs were good, the price was good, and it came with an acceptable LC smart monitor. I could work with this, but when I was informed of the CPU mistake I turned away.

There was also a local seller with a genuinely interesting alternative. It did indeed have the slightly slower i5 13600K CPU, and with a similar GPU, but with a tick down in spec. A very nice case, 27” display, and solid specs for the cost. However, they didn’t respond in a timely manner to my several inquiries, so I looked again.

This ad was even more intriguing. It wasn’t as well represented as the second one, but the price was similar, and the specs were incredible. A Core i9 14900K, 64GB DDR5, RX 7900 XTX 24GB, 2TB Gen5 Crucial NVME, two 2TB Silicon Power Gen4 SSDs, and in a nice Montech King Pro 95 case full of aRGB fans and a water cooling setup. My mind quickly did the math and I had to message this person, who was again quite local.

A quick response came, and within 30 minutes I was meeting at his apartment. He was a new young father getting into information security but needed out of the setup. I poked around at it and him a bit, finding that he did indeed know what he was talking about, and the PC was indeed genuine. He’d built it himself, I suspect using many parts sourced in the past two years from a local place that gets items sold in lots.

He’d had it connected to a nice OLED AOC 27” WQHD monitor and an WFHD Acer 27” next to it, all on a desk. Because I’d already talked to a family member about selling my current PC fully, I was curious about whether this seller would be interested in parting with the whole setup. He was, and after a few negotiations we settled on a price.

I pretty much took everything, really. This included HyperX headphones, EVO80 mechanical keyboard, Razer Deathadder Pro mouse, gaming pad, Shure SM7 mic with stand, GoXLR mic interface, Kensington USB-C dock, Edifier speakers, the two monitors with VESA stands, a standing desk unit, the desk itself, and a gaming chair. I mean _everything_, including many cables. What I did not get was spare parts and boxes and other accessories that I may want or need later, but that is a trade-off of buying used.

So, well, that escalated.

Between the two of us, with two cars, and a trip to the bank for cash, we got everything moved quickly and safely. I now had to wrap my mind around what I’d done and figure out what to do. And that’s for another entry, because it’s still not done, and there are some details to add on which haven’t even happened yet.