In the past year or so I’ve had the most luck with Facebook Marketplace. Craigslist barely seems to get used these days for that stuff and OfferUp is full of flakes. Just my personal experience.
The PSU is 550W? That’s perfectly fine for the 1650 but might be on the cusp if an upgrade to one of the newer GPUs is a possibility. Might be worth the extra $10-20 for a 650 or 700W supply.
Never mind, thought you were talking about the system I just ordered. On reread I see you mentioned the 1650 specifically.
Final update - I converted my primary HDD to GPT and disabled CSM. Maybe a quicker boot time, tough to tell, but it’s now also telling me to get ready for upgrading to Windows 11.
I’m playing Far Cry 6 now, using the recommended graphics settings - mostly low due to “only” having 4Gb of video RAM. Looks great and easily maintaining 60+FPS.
What would be a good price – in terms of value – for my slightly used (~15 minutes; just enough to check fps in a handful of games, confirming it works) 3050 EVGA Black?
$200? $100? What’s the price where a person who bought it would feel like they got a sweet deal but not so low as to feel like it was a giveaway charity?
All the innards arrived yesterday, case just arrived a half hour ago. Looks like today is building day.
New is $329 so I’d say around $225. Could go $250 without feeling guilty and let them talk you than if they want.
At $100 I’d assume the card was broken or dropped in the toilet or something.
Ugh, got way too busy today to build anything. Hopefully tomorrow.
If that price sounds good to anybody, by the way, it sounds good to me too. PM’s welcome. I’ve got my eye on a Newegg wishlist item for exactly that price range. ($214 + tax currently.)
I thought I’d remember last time more clearly, but apparently 17 months is long enough that the details are foggy. A couple quick questions:
Windows 10 Home and Pro use the same installation media, yes?
Also, I should reformat and reuse the same thumb drive I set up last time, which I still have untouched since I built my gaming rig. But it’s lacking updates from the last 17 months, so best remake it first regardless?
I forget the order I installed stuff. I think it was:
Case fans first
Then CPU, Cooler, M.2, RAM into motherboard, in that order
Then motherboard into case
Power supply last
Good enough?
(I may need to switch around the order of the fans and psu due to the smaller case.)
Your install order sounds fine. If the case is small and you’re running cables along the back side of the case, you might want to route your motherboard cables first before placing the board in so you’re not stuck trying the jam power cable headers through a tight spot between the holes in the motherboard tray and the board itself.
You can Google the link for the Win10 media creation tool which you just put onto a USB drive.
As long as you are internet enabled during setup, it’ll install updates during installation anyway, so either way you’ll probably be fine.
For that matter, you can patch up even after the fact.
I always install Win10 without being internet connected so that way it forces Win10 to make a local account and not tie me into logging in with a Microsoft online account. Once that’s all done, I’ll go online and get updated.
Actual question first, then progress report: Can I use a twist tie to hold a fan cable to the corner of the fan? The zip ties I have are too bulky. Would there be a problem just using a regular black twist tie, like the ones wrapped around the cables that came with the power supply?
Zip ties are plastic while twist ties are metal wire covered with plastic, I believe. This would be about 2" above the motherboard and I would cut it down very short after twisting; just enough to hold the fan wire to the fan. Too risky?
You know those quick cut videos showing women with white gloves building a high-end system? They make a point to show peeling the plastic off everything. Turns out you don’t get plastic covering with budget parts. Not one single piece of plastic to peel on this entire build. Not even the stock cooler! I has a sad.
All the components are noticeably cheaper than my last build. The case is nice and light, but parts of it will bend and warp if you breathe on it hard. The screws just came loose in the case, not even in a bag. Unsurprisingly I’m missing around four of them, but I don’t need any of the ones I’m missing so no harm no foul. I pulled apart the entire case and inspected it as thoroughly as I could to ensure there’s no loose screws still in there stuck somewhere, meaning they wouldn’t make noise when I shook the case.
The stock cooler for the 12100 doesn’t screw in, it has little plastic grabby things that push through holes in the motherboard then snap open and hold fast. I have no idea how I would get that thing off if I wanted to replace it with a real cooler. Super easy install, I’ll give it that. It’s so short though that I’m giving it serious side-eye as to its cooling ability. We’ll see.
This budget ASRock motherboard has no heat sinks for the M.2 slots, which I knew going in but still bums me out. The cheapest one I could find with heat sinks was like $40 or $50 more. The MSI board on my gaming rig has heat sinks for both M.2 slots. It makes them feel more secure, less exposed.
Also this new cheapo board has a separate IO shield. My MSI board did not; the shield was part of the motherboard. Big thumbs down on separate IO shields, let me tell you. This was my first and hopefully last experience with them. Didn’t realize how much I lucked out with my original board on that score. (The cheapo case that easily warps sure didn’t help the IO shield experience.)
I did indeed have to pull the back case fan off before installing the motherboard. That was clearly necessary, not just for the board itself but also for the IO shield. After installing the motherboard I popped it back on, and also threw on an extra 120 mm intake fan in the front. That extra fan was one that came with my fractal case, but both it and the 80 mm exhaust fan that came with this new case use three pin connectors. There is a real chance I may replace both with PWM fans. Maybe Arctic or something.
Cable management in this Roseville case is minimalist at best. I can’t imagine trying to install an optical drive and a spinning hard disk and an SSD drive in this thing. I’m pretty sure you could, but it would be a nightmare. My philosophy on cable management is to not have cables.
So I got the CPU, cooler, RAM, and M.2 drive installed in the motherboard, installed the power supply, motherboard and case fans into the case, and connected the case fans and the motherboard power cable to the motherboard. Still have to connect the CPU power, then put the front panel back on and connect the front ports.
The big problem with the CPU power cable is that the power supply sits directly above the motherboard. There is no cutout along that entire side of the motherboard where the CPU power is. A perfectionist cable manager would probably hate this case.
On the plus side, the case is so tiny and cute and it looks very much like a mini-me version of my fractal define 7 compact. In terms of form factor after it’s built I just love it. Dust could be a factor since there isn’t a dust filter to be found. Time will tell.
I have done it, it should be fine.
ETA. To clarify, I have used plastic coated twist ties to attach RGB strips, not a fan, but same principle should apply. It shouldn’t be a risk for the MB.
I’ve used twist-ties to bind cables and I’m pretty sure I’ve used one at least once to hold a corner of a fan. I suppose there’s a non-zero chance it could unravel, fall off, land with both ends extruded from the plastic to touch two other metal bits and cause a catastrophic short but, at that point, just assume that some divine power is angry with you and you were doomed anyway.
That cooler mount with the twisty expanding “screws” has been around from Intel forever. My old Clarkdale and Lynnfield (i3-520, i7-870) processors had it and it was just as obnoxious in 2009. They are removable and reusable though. Twisting the heads of the pins should rotate the inside so it no longer expands the outside barbed bit then you just pull it off.
I’m not surprised that cheap cases feel especially cheap these days given steel prices. On the plus side, it looks like that one has solid side panels (no windows)? 'Eff cable management then 
All finished with the hardware assembly. I tried the twist tie, but it kind of ended up looking messier than without so I took it out.
Hopefully I can find some time tomorrow to install Windows and office and get everything set up. Fingers crossed that I didn’t mess anything up, but overall it went pretty well. And the case is just adorable.
Have you fired it up into BIOS yet? Or even if you get a splash screen from the motherboard, you’re almost certainly fine.
Too late to mention it now but, when building a new system, I like to put everything onto the motherboard and then plug in the PSU and fire it up (either jumping the power pins or some boards have a power button) into BIOS just as a check before putting it into the case. Easier to re-seat components and check things outside of the case if there’s any issue. Plus I’d rather do that as part of the building than feel like I’m all done then it doesn’t boot.
Oh well, lessons for next time! And I’m sure it’ll work just fine but fingers crossed for you.
Oh yeah, sure, it’ll be fine, no worries Jinxy McJinxalot.
But seriously, no, I didn’t fire it up for a POST yet. Maybe should have but I didn’t with my other one either. Fingers crossed!
So I was going to ask about that. For my build from last week (and my last few builds going back mumble mumble years), my cable management theory has been “make sure a cable doesn’t/can’t hit a fan or heatsink”. I rarely use cable ties or the like. Is there anything wrong with that beyond aesthetics? Because if I’m looking at the inside of my PC, something is wrong and I’m probably annoyed about it, so I don’t really care if the cable runs are neat.
Very bad cable management might adversely impact cooling, especially if you’re actively blocking a fan. Otherwise it’s aesthetics.
Short of putting a thick wad of cables in front of a fan, cable management is 99% aesthetics. You would need to have some serious issues before it impacted air flow in the case.
Edit: Ninja’d but I agree
Ironically, the cables I could see most impacting air flow were those wide IDE ribbon cables but no one cared about cable management back then. Though systems used less power back then as well.