Okay we are in business

The SSD and another fan should come in tomorrow & then I can install an OS and start using it...

I mentioned before but I haven't bought a GPU at this point, I'm going to try it and see how well the integrated one works for general purposes. If it's usable then I'll defer that expense for a bit

first post from the new PC!! hello!! still plenty to do but it is now officially a Functional Computer

well even though I have not touched this in a bit I did install the Secret Weapon and it does work! the shiny new 2025 PC can still talk to a simple game boy

computers these days pretend they're above all that, like they're too good to just fire bits back and forth with something running a Z80 or whatever. ohhh nooo i only know usb and bluetooth i need a protocol
you're not so different really! you still speak zeroes and ones when it comes down to it

I finally swapped it out with the old PC. The glass side faces the wall so it just kinda lights up its corner
Stilllll not fully ready though because it doesn't work with the USB C-DisplayPort cable I have which I was relying on to connect one of my monitors to it 🙃

Well I bought an adapter and now the monitor works so I was about ready to say it's all good now but then it just fully crashed while I was browsing the web so. hmm

it crashed again, again all I was doing was watching a stream and browsing the web
The thermals seem fine, I'm running memtest86 now & no errors. Nothing is in the event logs before it crashes
How do I even figure out what the issue is here

updated the bios on friday and after no problems yesterday it happened again today
but i realised that in the "crashed" state it is still responsive to some things & i was able to sleep & wake it which brought it back to windows with the display drivers disabled. so that might be the problem area

after a full day of no crashes & even failing to trigger one by stressing the gpu (3d benchmark + streaming video + many browser tabs at the same time) it again randomly happened while web browsing tonight... but it actually recovered (w/display drivers disabled) without a sleep/wake cycle this time

argh this is so frustrating to debug, it happens so rarely and unpredictably
it's PROBABLY the igpu & hopefully the drivers but it COULD be a HW fault but it's so hard to confirm

i could just bite the bullet & buy a dedicated gpu (which i was gonna do eventually) & sweep all this under the rug.....

so after some experimentation it seems to only happen with a monitor connected via the usb c-display port adapter. using only hdmi i have had no crashes, even at 4k 120hz. so i CAN keep it stable but at the cost of using my 2nd monitor...
hmmmm that gpu purchase is looming ever closer isn't it.....

@lion you didn't get a GPU right? I have heard of some crashes being resolved by changing PCIe to Gen4 in the BIOS (should barely affect performance if at all) but I don't think that applies to integrated graphics

@Rib right yeah I didn't get one. my SSD is on gen 5 but i don't think there's a problem with that

i have reinstalled and updated the graphics drivers though & haven't had any crashes in a couple hours so we'll see...

@lion do you want a free gtx 1050

@mavica_again i think no thanks

whatever i end up getting i want it to last a while so i'm gonna try to get something like.. recent mid-range i guess. i have not done much research on it yet

thanks for the offer though

@lion that looks fake I think they put it in there to trick you

@lion that's a male SATA power connector. Generally it's for things like adapting SATA power into Molex or things like that.

@endrift @lion my case has that to power the ARGB "hub"

@kevin @endrift yeah I found out that's what it was eventually. It has RGB fans on the front with some kind of built in controller & I guess it's for powering that. At least I connected it to the PSU and it all worked and nothing exploded

@kevin @lion oh yeah I had something like that in my case too. I think it was for a fan controller.