Building myself a desktop PC

Midlife crisis? Waste of money?

This year I decided to build myself a computer, and use it to start playing some graphically demanding PC games. The plan had existed for a while, but was accelerated after I broke my Arch Linux installation on my Dell Optiplex 3080 Micro — I blogged about it previously — and decided I needed to ensure I had backup installations and SSDs to fall back onto in times of need. In this article I’ll talk about what happened.

It might come as a surprise to some of the people who know me that I never built my own desktop computer before. While I won’t claim to have the same knowledge as people who build computers as a job or hobby — that can be quite the expensive hobby — I’ve known my way around computer hardware after messing with plenty of laptops and a pre-built desktop my mother gifted me circa 2013. Building the computer from scratch itself wasn’t a challenge, but shopping for the right parts, saving the money up, and convincing myself it was a good idea to go click “place order” sure was.

The behemoth that is the PC on my desk, next to a can of coke.

The behemoth that is the PC on my desk, next to a can of coke.

I wrote on this blog about the performance of a micro form factor PC before. That’s been my main computer since late 2021 or early 2022, and was an upgrade from a ThinkPad X220 that I bought used in 2018. That machine still works well, and I’m likely to repurpose it to start a homelab, having it serve as a node in a Kubernetes cluster. I can’t stick a GPU into that, however, and though the CPU is socketed, the chassis drastically limits the size of the CPU heatsink. So here’s the configuration of the desktop I built:

I also added some case fans and an extra 3 fans to the AIO for a push/pull configuration. If you want this list presented in a better way, well, this is the PC Part Picker link. Note that I’m not an RGB kind of person. The only reason I went for the Pure Loop 2 FX was because the Pure Loop 2 was out of stock, and the only reason I went for a triple pack of the Light Wings fans for the AIO was to use the same model of fan for all 6 fans attached to the radiator.

Naming the machine

All my previous machines were easy to name: either I picked a theme for all home servers (e.g. Japanese northeastern prefectures) and went with that, or I named it after the product line (e.g. optiplex, inspiron). This time there was no theme — I have no space currently for any home servers — and there’s no OEM to name it after. So I had to take inspiration from one of the goals I had for this machine: to be fail-safe, or in other words immortal.

A quick lookup of myths about immortality led me to the Epic of Gilgamesh, a tale about a king who becomes obsessed with immortality and ultimately accepts that he can’t live forever. Heck, if that doesn’t fit the theme of “redundant wherever it is possible,” I don’t know what does. So I gave this desktop the hostname gilgamesh.

Redundancy

Does this mean I’ll have two drives in a RAID 1 configuration, perhaps with a spare GPU, motherboard and CPU, maybe even a spare power supply, AIO and a UPS? Well, no, I’m not rich. What I’ll endeavor to do is make the machine itself as reliable to myself as possible. That means should any reasonable component fail, I can most likely still boot into a working system. This is how I’m planning to achieve such a feat:

  1. There should be multiple operating system installations, with at least one of them on a separate partition or drive. Since third party support, necessary for some firmware updates, is much better on Windows, I have installed Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC — what a mouthful — on a separate partition.

  2. While the main bootloader (systemd-boot) will be used to boot into any of the available operating systems, there should be a spare installed just in case. EFI greatly helps with this, as MBR would’ve otherwise allowed for only one primary bootloader. Add the Windows bootloader to the list and I should have 3 bootloaders to choose from.

  3. If the filesystem for one of the operating systems gets corrupted — more likely to happen with the BTRFS partitions being used for GNU/Linux distributions — there is a bootable operating system on the machine still. Since Windows cannot use BTRFS, its mere existence already satisfies this requirement.

  4. There should always be a bootable live USB lying around close by, for system rescue purposes. This of course isn’t about the machine itself, but it’s worth mentioning that there’s a little tray in the PC case I chose, and that’s where my USB drives, including this installation media, are now kept.

  5. The machine should be able to function without a GPU, in case the GPU fails. This means the CPU should have integrated graphics. The AMD Ryzen 9 7950X has integrated graphics, so we’re covered.

All of these items are in one way or another about ensuring that the machine won’t be a brick should something fail. I’m not going to be able to replace the motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, PSU, AIO, or case fans on the spot, but in the event that I make a mistake and break something on the software side, it almost guarantees that I can still get some work done.

Besides, Gilgamesh fails to achieve immortality, so I shouldn’t beat myself up over not getting there either.

The Mediatek MT7921K

Apparently AMD and MediaTek have been working together for a few years and have a deal that encourages OEMs to use MediaTek’s WiFi chips in their laptops and motherboards. The ASUS PRIME X670E-PRO Wi-Fi has the Mediatek MT7921K adapter, and while it works okay, it’s not as good and consistent as the Intel WiFi adapters. I chose to deal with the MediaTek chip for the time being.

When testing hibernation on an encrypted swap partition, I found that upon rebooting not only did my resume configuration fail (for separate reasons), I found that suddenly my kernel detected no WiFi interface. Rebooting into Windows did not help. Trying to reboot back into Arch Linux showed that bootup wouldn’t get to my USB keyboard until the “USB initialization failed” messages had gone on for about a minute. The only thing that worked was unplugging the computer from the wall and plugging it back in.

Turns out power management for the MediaTek chip is a bit wonky, and once it is… powered down or put into a low power state, it has trouble coming back on. It’s a good thing this is a desktop PC, because the only way I found to curb this issue was to disable power management for the WiFi chip. Here is how I did that:

It hasn’t powered off on me while using the computer, and rebooting, resuming from hibernation, and so on have worked without a hitch ever since. Despite that, I recommend upgrading to another Wi-Fi adapter as I eventually will if and when I no longer wish to put up with this chip’s problems.