On-Hold: The Ultimate Gaming Machine

The details of this project will come soon enough in the form of a proper post, but I needed this brief mental break to decompress and focus on the next steps.

I am in the middle of building a new gaming PC with my son. The ideas are plenty, but we first need to get it assembled and powered on. This is proving to be a challenge.

The goal here is to throw in a beefy GPU / CPU combo, maybe a few TB of storage, max out the RAM, and make it look nice sitting next to the TV. It’ll unfortunately run Windows, but I wanted to play around with creating a minimal Windows 11 ISO so it’s less work to clean up after install.

Next, this machine is intended to be a cloud gaming platform via Moonlight and Sunshine. This will replace all our gaming computers since this will allow us to connect and play from any device.

The problem now is that it won’t POST (Power on). It just shows me an orange diagnostic LED and sits there like a chump with no video or beep. The fans power on and things get hot, but that’s not why I’m building this. Annoying little space heaters are readily available and much cheaper on Amazon.

The case I chose looks incredible from the outside, but is insane to work with. There’s no space and everything fits incredibly tight. There’s little working room or extra space for anything but critical parts.

The motherboard manual couldn’t be more useless. They visualize 11 steps to plug stuff in, but don’t explain what the POST diagnostic codes are. Thankfully Reddit is telling me that this static amber light means the RAM isn’t happy with a smaller likelihood of the CPU being angry. I ruled out the RAM and GPU, so that leaves the processor.

“Those things are so small! Using my precision microelectronics tweezers makes me feel like I’m Andre the Giant trying to change a mouse diaper."

As you can see by the super zoomed in picture above, 2-3 CPU pins are out of position. There’s no amount of adjustment that I can do that’ll put them back correctly. Even if I was able to, that board could no longer be trusted. It’s not worth potentially frying a CPU too.

See you again Wednesday after the RMA is delivered.