Jaeger - Mk1.3 Upgrade

Signs of Aging

It's almost 2018 and my gaming rig (Jaeger - i7-4770K - GTX780) is turning four.

Most of its parts are still significant even in today's standards.

• No issues with the storage drives
• 850W power supply still more than sufficient
• Motherboard recently replaced
• 16GB memory still acceptable
• CPU AIO (All-in-one) liquid cooler performing as expected
• CPU, despite being a Haswell (4th generation) processor, is an unlocked i7 that I've yet to overclock

The graphics card, though, despite performing similarly to a 3GB GTX 1060 card, can't keep up with new demanding games that are being released nowadays, at least not at Very High or Ultra settings at 1080p at 60fps. With Black Friday approaching, it was time for an upgrade.

Upgrade Path

I have a bias towards Nvidia graphics cards and with AMD Vega performance leaving a lot to be desired, I decided to go the route of the best Nvidia graphics card I can afford. After some research, my mind was set on the ROG STRIX GTX 1080 Ti from Asus. This is a beast of a card with a three-fan cooler design.

I was about to order the card online, but something made me do a double-check and discovered a slight issue - the card was too big.

I had a few options:

• Pick a smaller graphics card that will fit my current case
• Saw off some of the hard drive cage, just enough to squeeze-in the graphics card (like what we did with Qube PC)
• Or, buy a new case. A more modern one, tempered glass maybe? More space for cable management, better airflow. *gasp* RGB?

After some quick research, I added an Enthoo Pro M Tempered Glass ATX Mid Tower Case from Phanteks to my cart and finalized my order.

Disassembly / Reassembly

The parts quickly arrived after a few days and I immediately started building. The order of operations was simple enough -

• Unplug / detach / disassemble all the parts from the old build
• Consider cleaning and re-applying thermal paste to the CPU cooler
• Get lazy and pull off the CPU and CPU cooler as one unit
• Clean each part using an old sock and a can of compressed air
• Assemble / attach / plug all the parts to the new build

It took me five hours to do the build, install the necessary drivers and do some gaming checks. The system was working, but I knew that my cable management job wasn't the best. I could do better. The next day, I re-did all the cable management and, to the best of my abilities, made it as clean / perfect as possible.

Finished Product

(parts list)

Notes:

• I mounted the SSD in front of the power supply shroud. This required re-routing data cables and a longer power cable.
• I transferred the included 2 140mm fans to the front as intake fans while I snatched the old case's 140mm and 120mm fans and mounted them as top exhaust fans.
• Motherboard only had 2 CPUFAN headers and 3 CASEFAN headers (5 total). I had 5 fans and a pump (6 total). Ended up with 1 fan not attached until I was able to get a fan splitter.
• Graphics card has sag issue due to its size. Ordered a video card support brace to address that.
• Bonus: Motherboard always had front USB 3.0 headers but my old case did not have front USB 3.0 ports. New case has and it's finally able to make use of those headers.

Qube PC - Video Card Upgrade

Before coming to the US, I used to own a desktop computer in the Philippines called Qube PC. It's a namesake to a computer parts and assembly store in Gilmore, Quezon City, Philippines where my brother and I decided to purchase the rig. What we ended up with was a pretty high-end system with a 2nd generation Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a dedicated graphics card. The graphics card was always its weakest link but we never got to upgrade it. When it was time to leave for the US, I left Qube PC in my brother's hands and I've forgotten all about it.

After many years, I heard news that Qube PC's graphics card has kicked the bucket. The computer was still functional due to the on-board GPU but it can no longer handle most video games. Its other components were still quite decent given the number of years of service so I thought it would be a good idea to give life to it once more with a new video card.

I was planning to visit the Philippines so after checking which cards were still compatible with the rest of Qube PC, I purchased a 3GB GeForce GTX 1060 card from MSI. It was glorious!

I needed to make sure that it wasn't defective so I tested it by plugging it in my current rig. Jaeger recognized it immediately and I ran some games just to make sure.

I was in the Philippines last April, gave my brother the new card and helped install it into Qube PC.

Problem 1:

As we feared, the graphics card was indeed too long to fit the case. Qube PC's was an old case that doesn't have removable hard drive cages and generally wasn't built for long beefy cards that come out these days.

No matter, that wasn't going to stop us. We then proceeded to cut through the hard drive cages with metal shears, paying no heed to the case's structural integrity. With a big chunk of the hard drive cages removed, the new card was able to fit just right.

Problem 2:

The graphics card fans weren't spinning and Qube PC didn't recognize it. The proper drivers were installed, the graphics card LEDs were on and the monitor was displaying from the card so we weren't sure why the DirectX Diagnostic Tool (dxdiag) still showed the on-board graphics as the only display device.

After some more troubleshooting, we ended up with a reformatted hard drive with a fresh install of Windows 10. This, in retrospect, wasn't necessary after all but was a welcome upgrade to Qube PC's old pirated Windows 7 OS. The fans weren't spinning because most graphics cards these days won't even try to cool themselves if below a certain temperature, in our case, 60° Celsius. We confirmed the fans to be working after a quick GPU stress test. After a few minutes, the new card finally reflected on the DirectX Diagnostic Tool. It took a while for some reason.

A GTX 1060 is far from being the most high-end card out there but with 1080p gaming, it should be able to handle most games at high to ultra settings. As a last note, I gave my brother a few games on Steam and GOG so he can start enjoying this upgrade.

Dell Inspiron 1545 - Fresh Install of Windows

In my previous post, I was able to rescue my mom's laptop by replacing its internal HDD (Hard Disk Drive). The next step was to give it a fresh install of Windows. I've reformatted many a computer in the past so I thought that it would be a breeze but like usual, it wasn't.

Buy new Windows license?

Most laptops come pre-installed with Windows and most of the time, they don't bother giving you a copy of the disc installer. Instead, they stealthily suggest that you create a system repair disc which you can boot from in case you mess up your computer in the future. But I've read that system repair discs might not even be able to help if you're installing Windows to a new HDD as it needs information from the old HDD to do its repairs. The better option would be to restore from an image backup that was taken before the HDD failure but most people don't create backups of their HDD.

If you were able to extract the product key from your system before the failure, it should be possible to just download the installer disc image ISO from Microsoft, burn that to some bootable media and use the product key to reactivate.

Having none of these, I needed to buy a new Windows license.

Physical or digital

I pondered whether to buy a physical Windows installer disc or just buy the product key online and download the installer myself. I wasn't willing to drop over a hundred dollars just for an operating system (Windows 10 Home sells for $119.99 at the Microsoft Store as of writing) and I wanted to get it fast. I knew of a website where I could buy Windows licenses for cheap and I went with it and got one for $30. I downloaded the Windows 10 disc image ISO from Microsoft ready to be burned to some bootable media.

Lies, lies, lies*

I went out and bought a small pack of blank DVDs. Each one able to hold 4.7 GB of data. The Windows 10 ISO was 4.42 GB so it should fit, right? WRONG! It turns out that the people who thought of the DVD sizes were thinking in decimal while the computer thinks in binary. The 4.7 GB in the DVD label means 4,700,000,000 bytes (1,000,000,000 bytes per gigabyte). But the computer says there should be 1,073,741,824 bytes per gigabyte. So 4,700,000,000 bytes / 1,073,741,824 bytes = 4.37 gigabytes, the actual capacity of a DVD. No wonder my Cyberlink Power2Go says the disc wasn't large enough!

I went out again and looked for something that can hold 4.42 GB of data. I could have bought a blank Blu-Ray disc which was labeled to hold 25 GB (but was just actually 23.28 GB) , but then I remembered that the laptop's optical drive only supports DVD±RW. There was the dual-layer DVD option which was labeled to hold 8.5 GB (but was just actually 7.91 GB) but I opted for the 64 GB (but was just actually 59.6 GB) PNY USB 2.0 thumb drive I saw that was on sale at $17.

*some DVD packaging include disclaimers in the fine print where they explain the difference between the measurements, but still, it's pretty misleading up front

Making a bootable USB drive

Pro tip: USB thumb drives are not bootable by default

I first tried to just extract the Windows 10 ISO contents to the USB drive, plugged it into the laptop, changed the laptop's boot sequence to look for the USB first, restarted then expected to see the Windows logo. I was disappointed. The laptop was not able to boot from the USB drive. I did some googling and found a short guide on how to make a USB drive bootable. It involves running the Windows command prompt and making use of the diskpart command.

The whole process took a few hours (because formatting 64 GB, correction 57 GB proved to be slow) and I ended up with an unusable USB drive which Windows told me I needed to format before I can use. I knew that method worked in the past for smaller thumb drives, but maybe it couldn't handle 57 GB. Okay, screw that. I instead used Windows 10 Media Creation Tool. It re-downloaded the Windows 10 ISO and gave me the option to burn it to a USB drive, which it will automatically set to be bootable. Sweet!

It only took a few minutes and before long, I had a perfectly usable Windows 10 USB installer. The installation to the laptop went by like a breeze and now the laptop is sporting it's brand new operating system. After the usual drivers and utilities installations and Windows Updates, I plan to create an image backup of the whole laptop HDD to be used for a rainy day.

Post scriptum

I noticed that my 64 GB PNY USB 2.0 thumb drive reports that it only had 32 GB. What?! Was I scammed in that OfficeMax store where I got the USB? I did some light googling and found out that this happened after I made the USB bootable. I wasn't sure if it was the diskpart tool or the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool that did it, but luckily, it was easily fixed by following instructions in a short tutorial. Turns out that only 32 GB was set as the active partition and the remaining space was unallocated. I only had to delete the active partition and re-allocated space to make use of the whole 57 GB.

Dell Inspiron 1545 - Postmortem

Symptoms

My mom's laptop of six years (Dell Inspiron 1545) crashed during video streaming and displays the following error when we try to start it up (image from the internet)

We loaded the BIOS and it confirmed that the internal HDD (Hard Disk Drive) cannot be recognized.

Troubleshooting

• Restarted the laptop
• Ran onboard diagnostics which only confirmed the missing internal HDD
• Reseated the internal HDD of the laptop

• Took the laptop HDD and plugged it inside another desktop computer, the desktop did not recognize the HDD. It was probably corrupted beyond recognition.
• Took the desktop's working 2.5 inch SSD (Solid State Drive) and plugged it into the laptop, the laptop did not recognize the SSD

I've seen videos of people upgrading their Dell Inspiron 1545s and swapping the default HDD with an SSD so this should have worked as both this HDD and my SSD use SATA (Serial AT Attachment) interface. When it did not work, I feared that it may not just be the HDD that was problematic, but also the interface it was connecting to inside the laptop. If this was the case, I wanted to use other means of connecting the HDD to the laptop. I was just guessing but USB (Univeral Serial Bus) maybe?

• Connected the HDD to the laptop's USB port using a SATA to USB adapter

This also did not work. I was almost sure that the laptop was broken beyond self-repair but I was willing to try swapping the HDD with another 2.5 inch HDD. I did not have any at the moment and had to order one online (WD Black 320GB Performance Mobile Hard Disk Drive).

The replacement HDD arrived after a few days. I swapped it in and lo and behold, the laptop recognized it!

Conclusion

I still don't know some things from this postmortem - What triggered the HDD corruption (was it old age?); Why the laptop did not recognize the SSD (was the laptop using some different kind of SATA controller that does not support SSDs?). The old HDD is now corrupted beyond recognition and cannot be recovered without professional help. The laptop is now using its new HDD with a fresh install of Windows 10 and is back to normal (link to fresh install of Windows).

Jaeger - Motherboard Replacement

In my previous post, I was able to confirm that my rig's motherboard needed replacement. The good news: the problematic component was finally identified. The bad news: it's the frigging motherboard!

The motherboard might not usually be the most expensive component of a system but it is, in my opinion, the most troublesome component to replace. Many times, replacing the motherboard means also replacing the processor. It means unplugging everything from the old board and plugging them all back into the new one. It means cleaning dried thermal paste from the processor and doing a new application. It's also recommended to reformat and do a clean install of the operating system to avoid driver compatibility issues down the road. In other words, it's like rebuilding the whole system using old parts.

Replacement and Preparation

Before anything else however, I needed a replacement motherboard. My old one (Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD3H) was a Z87 chipset motherboard which has an LGA1150 CPU socket supporting my Haswell Intel CPU. I could have bought the same exact model, but I learned that I could instead buy a motherboard with the newer Z97 chipset which still has an LGA1150 CPU socket. This means a newer board with more features at roughly the same price without needing to replace my processor. Sweet! I ended up buying a board from MSI (MSI Z97-GAMING 5).

Pro tip: Buy extended warranty for your precious hardware. The extra few dollars will be worth it down the road.

If I were to reformat, I needed a way to backup files from my SSD (Solid State Drive) boot drive. I only had my mom's laptop to do this but I still needed some sort of adapter so I can just plug the drive via USB (Universal Serial Bus). They sell SATA (Serial AT Attachment) to USB adapters online, perfect!

Reassembly

[✔] All the replacement parts and tools had arrived by mail.
[✔] The SSD had been backed up.
[✔] I had every piece unbolted, cleaned and organized in a messy array across the floor.
[✔] Newegg TV's "How to Build a PC" video was ready for reference.
I was ready to start building, and so I did.

It had been more than three years since the last time I was really familiar with the innards of my rig. Many a time I found myself asking "Where does this go again?" and "How the heck was I able to make that fit there before?" and eventually realizing "Oh.. now I remember, I had to do work-around A to avoid B, or I could do C". It was time for rediscovery, like rediscovering my CPU case had a manual fan controller all along which I never used.

A few hours went by and the build was done. It was POST-ing and was booting from the yet-to-be-reformatted SSD drive. I knew I had to do a clean install. I read that Windows ties itself to the motherboard and that I may need to call Microsoft to request for reactivation of my Windows 8.1 license. I was worried because mine was an OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) copy which basically means less to no support from Microsoft. Fortunately, my worries were unfounded and I was able to reformat and do a clean install without a hitch.

After installing some of the drivers, my mouse suddenly stopped working. It was working in the BIOS but not when Windows boots. I plugged in a different mouse in the same USB port and that worked fine. I did some quick troubleshooting and when nothing worked, I decided to re-reformat. It only took a few minutes and the mouse issue never happened again.

Windows 8.1 to Windows 10

I was using Windows 10 before the motherboard failure. I started with Windows 8.1 then got a free upgrade to Windows 10 sometime in the past. Unfortunately, that free upgrade offer ended last year. Although, there's a work-around if you can flat out lie to Microsoft's face about your usage of assistive technologies, meant for people with "significant vision, hearing, dexterity, language or learning needs". I lied 😐 but hey, free Windows 10 upgrade, amirite? 😉 (link to free Windows 10 upgrade)

Conclusion

After upgrading to Windows 10, I reinstalled all my hardware drivers and utilities then let Windows Update run until it can run no more. When I was sure everything was updated and the way I want it, the final piece was to create a system image for quick resets in the future. Now, Jaeger has fully recovered and thriving.

Jaeger - Postmortem

Symptoms

My gaming rig of more than three years (Jaeger - i7-4770K - GTX780) started to restart unexpectedly during light loads (surfing or playing Stardew Valley). I monitored the system using MSI Afterburner but did not notice anything out of the ordinary like overheating or memory usage spikes. Windows Memory Diagnostic reported no issues with the RAM. Windows Event Viewer proved useless and I was absolutely clueless as to what was causing the issue.

The issue happened more frequently and eventually, a standstill - the system was stuck in a never-ending loop of turning on and off. When it turned on, all the fans and pump started spinning, only to turn off immediately after. It didn't even get to POST (Power-on Self-test).

Troubleshooting

Time to put on the old PC building hat! I took the whole tower upstairs to my room, brushed off the dust from my PC building kit and prepared myself to hunker down until it's fixed. All my components were conveniently out of warranty and I did not have any spare parts to swap in. As per usual, my goal was to identify which part(s) is/are causing the issue.

• Any software or the operating system was out of the picture as it won't even get past POST, more so to get it to boot.
• Any peripherals were also disconnected.
• I unplugged each remaining component one by one. The video card, then the optical drive, then my SSD and HDD storage. The only components left were the processor (and its cooler), the memory, the power supply, the motherboard and the case itself.
• I heard that the case itself can sometimes short something out if the wrong metals are touching the wrong components, so I took the system out of the case as well.
• I switched around the two memory sticks and tried plugging them in the other two unused DIMM slots. I cleaned both sticks using the pencil eraser trick. I tried removing one. Then I removed both.

By this time, I had a bare-bones system with only the motherboard, the processor (and its cooler) and the power supply. The issue is still happening!

• I removed the CMOS battery. I went out and bought a brand new one.
• The motherboard had dual BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). I forced it to use the backup BIOS, then back to the main BIOS.
• To test the power supply, I plugged it out of the system and jumped it to run on its own using the paperclip trick. It was able to provide constant 12 volts to one of the case fans I attached to it. I went out and bought a multimeter then tested each pin for 12, 5, 3.3 and -12 volt readings.

I was almost certain that the power supply is not the culprit. But among the remaining three components, it was the power supply that was the most likely to have failed so I needed to make extra sure. I bought a cheap low-wattage power supply (EVGA 400W ATX Power Supply) and swapped that in just to make sure. True enough, the power supply was innocent. Now I have a spare power supply for future endeavors.

It was down to the motherboard or the processor. I didn't know a way to further test the processor and between the two, it was more likely that it was the motherboard. I finally decided to buy a replacement motherboard (MSI Z97-GAMING 5 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard). It arrived and with it, finally, the system POSTs!

Conclusion

Looking back, I'm still not certain what exactly was wrong with the motherboard. The motherboard itself is composed of multiple components like chipsets, capacitors, etc. But I have a hunch that it may be the BIOS getting corrupted, both main and backup BIOS. I've read that the BIOS chip can be replaced with a little solder and a fresh chip from the manufacturer or from some guy in ebay but it's too late to know now. It took two weeks, but Jaeger is now back to life and recovering (link to motherboard replacement).