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My expensive hobby of buying computer hardware I don't need so I can build computers I don't need continues!

I just bought another new case. I really like Lian Li cases.
LIAN LI O11D MINI V2 Flow.

I also bought another new motherboard, because why not? I think it's the same board Zema just recently bought, except I went for the "Ice" version.
GIGABYTE X870 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 ICE

I already have the previously purchased AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D.

Bought a nice air cooler.
SAMA A60W Dual-Tower CPU Air Cooler

I'll post pics of the build when it's done, assuming I don't break anything again.

Need? NEED? Want = need

Good for you, I'll look forward to pics and travails.

I'm very familiar with hardware addiction

Looking forward to seeing how your adventure unfolds

Awesome!

Finished the build in the new case. I didn't break a single thing!

The Lian Li case came with 5 pre-installed reverse blade non-rgb fans. Perfectly fine fans, I just decided to replace them with some reverse blade Thermaltake fans with rgb.

Sorry for all the reflections.

Less reflective pic with side panel removed.

Now all that's missing are the fish

It looks great, and you got it done expediently. Congrats on a good job (without breaking anything!)

That's a massive cooler. What CPU did you get? I see what the board takes, but you didn't mention what you got.

Nice! That came together really well. Mine came with the reverse fans too, first time I've encountered them. At first I was a little confused, it looked like they'd be blowing in the wrong direction lol!

Grogan wrote: Sat Feb 14, 2026 7:15 am Now all that's missing are the fish

It looks great, and you got it done expediently. Congrats on a good job (without breaking anything!)

That's a massive cooler. What CPU did you get? I see what the board takes, but you didn't mention what you got.

It's the Ryzen 7 7800X3D I purchased last Spring.

This Gigabyte X870 mobo so far seems pretty decent. It scared me because initially, the cpu cooler didn't spin up when plugged into CPU FAN on the board. I thought it was a dud cooler at first, but it would spin up if connected to CPU OPT. I was thinking I got another buggy Gigabyte board (probably!), but after updating the bios the CPU FAN header now works. Very strange.

More pics, LOL.

Backside with cable management appreciation. I think I'll leave the drive cages out, since I don't use them. Lian Li helpfully suggests that you can tuck excess cable into them if no drives are installed there, but I just used zip ties to corral all the cables. I may change my mind and put them back. I'm a chronic over-thinker.

One last pic!

This is my desk layout. Dual monitors from MSI, and Corsair keyboard and mouse, a Rodecaster Pro II, and an Electro Voice RE-320 studio mic.

The Rodecaster Pro II and studio mic are used for djing online, which I've been doing for many years. That all carries over from being a radio dj for many years, though now retired.

To do my online djing, I previously used a USB audio interface to get good quality audio from the computer, then I had to use patch cables to route that audio into a channel on a mixer, where I would mix in my mic. For the mic, I would route that through a dbx mic processor to add some punch and compression, as well as a noise gate. The objective there is to make it sound more "broadcast quality-ish." That meant more patch cables to route the processor into the mixer mic input. The main mix coming out of the mixer would then use more patch cables to route back into the USB audio interface to go back to the computer. Once back in the computer, there would be more audio processing such as compression, automatic gain control, etc before being streamed online.

I'm amazed at how much the Rodecaster does. It's a very cool device. It functions as a mixer. I'm old school and must have a physical mixer. I can't stand virtual mixers. It also has two independent USB audio interfaces built in, and lots of built in audio processing plugins. One device that replaces three other devices with associated patch cables, and even replaces the need for audio processing plugins running on the computer for the streaming.

Pretty slick overall setup. I've seen a lot of YouTubers using similar equipment, hardware mixers and tricasters etc.

I did the same, I left out the drive cages to make more room for the cables. I'm mostly using NVME drives anyway, and there were slots in back for the two sata SSD's I have in it. I never used to care that much about cable management and making everything neat and clean looking, every machine looked like a rat's nest. But these modern cases kind of force you to do proper cable management

Nice neat job at the back, too. So you were fast AND meticulous

That's a pretty nasty BIOS bug. Not weird, as that's what controls those fan ports. No excuse for that. Except for that, it probably wasn't as buggy as a MSI board.

I don't know when it will be (I'm good for now and hardware is stupidly expensive because of AI assfucks) but my next computer is going to be a Ryzen. Intel can take a long hard suck on my hairy ass. Especially since they are partly owned and controlled by fascists now.

I've generally had very good luck with MSI boards, other than the one I nearly destroyed with my clumsiness. I still have it. It most likely will still work, even though my "mishap" ripped the USB header for the USB-C port off the front of the board, and snapped off the latch on one end of one ram slot. I saved the parts in case I find someone who wants to work on it.

It seems like all of the tech giants are in bed with each other now. All they care about is making as much money as possible and shoving AI into everything.

My MSI board is very sensitive to ESD interference. I even bought a new case and made sure to do everything meticulously, thinking it was the mickey mouse case I first bought. It also doesn't know the difference between S4 and S5 power states. I had to enable a setting (worded greenly... but I can't remember what it said) that shuts down all power except standby for ATX "power good" signal, no power to video card, busses or anything. Off means off, not "touch the case" and have the discharge interpreted as a power button press lol.

I discharge myself every time I go near this computer. It's properly grounded and all, the interference comes from the electrons going through ground I think. Jay (Jayz2cents) showed a computer he built that had a similar problem. If he touched the case his display would black out. That stopped when my Assrock video card died and I replaced it, but the other ESD problems remained.

This board has a terrible UEFI boot implementation. It actually has no EFI boot vars, the only way to boot from UEFI is by path. It's not just me, because it was later added to an Arch Linux wiki. I had to discover this for myself when I couldn't get a bootloader to work on this board.

If you use the option --removable then GRUB will be installed to esp/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.EFI (or esp/EFI/BOOT/BOOTIA32.EFI for the i386-efi target) and you will have the additional ability of being able to boot from the drive in case EFI variables are reset or you move the drive to another computer. Usually you can do this by selecting the drive itself, similar to how you would using BIOS. If dual booting with Windows, be aware Windows usually places an EFI executable there, but its only purpose is to recreate the UEFI boot entry for Windows. If you are installing GRUB on a Mac, you will have to use this option. Some desktop motherboards will only look for an EFI executable in this location, making this option mandatory, in particular with MSI boards. If you execute a UEFI update, this update might delete the existing UEFI boot entries. Therefore, it is a potential fallback strategy to have the "removable" boot entry enabled.

On the other hand, that's nice and simple and I don't mind at all. It has no choice but to work that way. If I lost the data on my stupid FAT32 /boot partition I could simply copy the bootloader data there from an archive to fix it, and it would boot.

Well, the new dual monitor setup pictured above didn't last long. I bought those matching MSI monitors at the end of December 2025, and today one of them shit the bed. The lower two thirds of the left monitor suddenly started showing horizontal lines and artifacting while in use. I thought maybe it just glitched somehow, so I power cycled it several times, and the problem remained. I then rebooted my computer to see if it was possible to have a driver glitch that only affected one of two displays. No change. I then swapped the monitor cables at the graphics card in case the card had a hardware issue. The same monitor continued to show the problem after swapping the monitor cables at the graphics card.

Fuck.

MSI has a 3 year warranty on them from what I can tell, but those are not terribly expensive monitors. They're 144 Hz IPS, with built-in speakers. Not bad looking, and I didn't find a single dead or stuck pixel on either of them. I thought the price of $99.99 each was a steal. I guess I should've known better. I'll check with MSI to see if they cover shipping on a warranty claim. At the low price that model is sold at, it's probably not even worthwhile to ship it off to a service center in California unless MSI covers it both ways.

Bummer... it's the disruption of failed hardware (and the hassle of shipping it back etc.) that irks me more than the money.

That's exactly how I felt about an inexpensive Sceptre display that started doing a red vertical corduroy-like pattern against the opacity state of the diodes (anything black). I decided it would be easier to keep it and give it a smack or two when it's warmed up (if I ever use it long enough... it's connected to a PC that's off most of the time, and when I do turn it on it's just for copying stored files via NFS etc.) than to ship it back to Bumfuck Wherever and get another one that does the same shitty thing in a few months.

I have a 32" TCL TV that I was using as a monitor for YT streams while I was working, after a year it developed horizontal lines across the top third of the display. I didn't notice it from about 6 feet away where I was working, but up close it looked terrible. I have an older 49" TCL TV that works just fine.

Sceptre displays and TV's are on my don't buy list now, I have two of those, one has to have the power brick unplugged/replugged every other time it wakes up otherwise it stays black. I put up with that routine for over a year before I finally replaced it with a Gigabyte display that's been great. The other Sceptre worked great for about two years, but now there's a long delay, about 8-10 secs, before it wakes up. Other than that they work OK.