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.