Gaming Computer Build

[vailpass]

Originally Posted by Fish

This gives me terrible anxiety....

[hometeam]

Agreed. I have been building pcs for 20 years, hundreds of new builds, and havent had that many components failed combined. Almost ALWAYS if someone thinks they have a dead CPU or MOBO straight from the factory, its been user errors, may have seen 2 dead mobos total in 20 years.

I think its a combo of too many/not installed properly NVME drives for not enough PCI-E lanes, and user error.

[DaneMcCloud]

Originally Posted by hometeam

Agreed. I have been building pcs for 20 years, hundreds of new builds, and havent had that many components failed combined. Almost ALWAYS if someone thinks they have a dead CPU or MOBO straight from the factory, its been user errors, may have seen 2 dead mobos total in 20 years.

I think its a combo of too many/not installed properly NVME drives for not enough PCI-E lanes, and user error.

The Gigabyte Z490 Vision D that I received had the Red LED light on the minute I started the computer. It never even made it to the BIOS. The Gigabyte customer service person said it was a bad power supply, so I returned the Thermaltake 850 watt and replaced it with a Corsair, which resulted in the same exact issue. Gigabyte gave me the choice of having it repaired under warranty, which would take a few weeks or return to Amazon, so I returned it.

Since the CPU light was lit with both power supplies and nothing the tech person said helped, I decided to return the CPU, just in case that was the actual problem. The ASUS motherboard and all of its ports are working properly, so it was definitely the motherboard, IMO. That makes three defective motherboards in the past 9 years alone.

As for the hard drive, I was shocked as well. It was seated properly and seemed to be okay but once Windows was loaded, there were multiple errors, so I contacted Microsoft Chat support. The tech reinstalled Windows twice, once from the internet and once from an ISO file and I thought the issue was solved but the next day, I received the same errors. Another tech reinstalled it from the Cloud but that didn't fix it either and I was advised to wipe the drive and fully reinstall, which meant that I would need to spend about 20 hours downloading and reinstalling all of my software again. Reluctantly, I followed their advice, only to have the same exact issues again. Finally, on Friday, a Microsoft tech saw a new error code and indicated that it was related to the hard drive, which led to that replacement.

I've been building since 1997 and while I've had defective motherboards in the past, I've only had a few hard drives fail or were defective out of the box, all of which were Seagate's back in the late 90's and early 2000's. I had a couple of old WD's fail after more than 8 years of daily use but that's to be expected. But this is definitely the first SSD that I've had fail out of the 8 or 9 I've installed in my computer and computers throughout the home.

I set aside 7 days to build and load software, which I thought was more than enough but it's taken damn near 3 weeks to get this box right. Hopefully, it'll last at least 5 years because after this experience, I'm in no hurry to do this again.

[eDave]

Augh. I'm gonna buy a pre-built.

Any recommendations for a moderate gaming laptop?