\nMSI B450 Gaming Plus Max AM4 motherboard
\n16 GB of RAM
\nAMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU
\nDeepcool GAMMAXX 400-CPU Cooler
\nSapphire Radeon Pulse RX 5600 XT Graphics Card
\nAll in a Phanteks Eclipse P360X case<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/06\/IMG_2255-scaled.jpeg\")
<\/figure>\nShe also cashed out some money and bought a fancy gaming keyboard and mouse.<\/p>\n
She seems pretty happy. Now we just need her to start collecting some of that sweet YouTube ad revenue to make this worth it!<\/p>\n
Why build vs buy, you may ask? Well, when it comes to gaming computers, who can be a lot more cost effective if you pick and choose components and put it together yourself. This was probably 60\u201370% the cost of an equivalent assembled gaming rig, and comes without any bloatware to slow it down. The big downside is there\u2019s no warranty on the final, assembled product and any errors in construction are all on you.<\/p>\n
\n
Oh, and the girls enjoyed asking me, \u201cSooooo, how does it feel to be in the last year of your 40s?\u201d over and over while giggling. Did not love that part of the weekend.<\/p>\n
\n
Sunday was pretty chill. It was rainy here so we didn\u2019t ever open the pool. We needed the rain so that was fine. I read some. Worked on updating the site. Took the cardboard we\u2019ve accumulated over the past three months to the recycling. After dinner – grilled steak and chicken, although sadly on the gas grill rather than charcoal because of the rain – the girls took me out for ice cream. It was a big moment: the first time M drove the entire family somewhere. C and L tried very hard to remain quiet but about two blocks from home they got the giggles and couldn\u2019t stop. M did just fine. Then S and I watched \u201cKnives Out\u201d and enjoyed it.<\/p>\n
Pretty, prettyyyy, prettyyyyyyy solid weekend. Hope the other fathers out there had good weekends, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
First off, obviously some changes to the site\u2019s look. Big changes, for now. I know it\u2019s a little jarring and I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019ll stick with it, but as I was doing some other administrative work, I figured why not throw up a theme that looks like nothing else I\u2019ve used in my 17-year blogging career? I\u2019m happy to read feedback, good or bad, if you want to share in the comments. I won\u2019t waste your time with too many details but I changed hosts for the second time in a year. I moved last year to get around some security issues my previous host could not manage. When I made the move, I screwed a few things up royally with the new host and while I was able to fix most of them, a few things I never got right. With the contract coming up, I figured it was easier to make another fresh start than try to deal with tech support. So onto my third host in about a year. The transition seems to have gone smoothly, so far. The security features I wanted to add a year ago are now in place. I have access to everything I need to have access to. Hopefully there\u2019s not something I messed up Sunday that will show up in a month or two and make this a hassle again. Onto the weekend, which was all about me. Saturday was my birthday, Sunday was Father\u2019s Day. Obviously I tore it up. Saturday morning L took me to over to the pitch and putt course. Well, I drove and paid but it was her idea. She tried to play with me but got frustrated and gave up after the front nine and just putted on the back nine. It didn\u2019t help that even at 8:00 AM it was already very warm and muggy. She was more interested in running through the sprinklers that were on near a couple holes than actually working on her swing. As always there was one bad hole on each nine that kept me from challenging my lowest ever score. I shot a 67, well off my best of 63. Just couldn\u2019t buy a putt over three feet. – – – – After cooling down and eating lunch, L and I got into our big project for the weekend. A couple months back she started asking for a gaming PC. She\u2019s really into Fortnite and has a YouTube channel with one of her buddies where they post videos of their games. She also streams their games. They\u2019re up to 30-ish subscribers, which I think is pretty impressive for a couple of 11-year-olds. She\u2019s learned how to edit video, add graphics, do voice-overs, etc. She\u2019s gained some skills. Plus she\u2019s good at killing virtual people, which is a little concerning. I thought that she was fine sticking to the Xbox but she made a very persuasive PowerPoint presentation arguing her cause and a month ago we agreed that she could go forward with the PC. She\u2019s taken on a bunch of chores around the house and agreed that when her birthday rolls around and she is eligible for a phone, she will get a cheaper one that her sisters have. I did some research, found a recommended build list, and have been ordering parts for about three weeks. The final one arrived Saturday morning so we were off to the basement to start assembly. I had a bunch of YouTube videos queued up to guide us and had a general idea of what I was doing. But it is still pretty harrowing knowing that if I screw it up, I\u2019ll have several hundred dollars of useless electronic gear staring back at me. We hit a couple snags along the way that cost us about an hour. There are two cables that we never figured out how or where to connect. I spent a good 30\u201340 minutes trying to figure them out and eventually gave up. Turns out they aren\u2019t needed because eventually everything worked fine. The first time we flipped the power switch nothing happened, which next to sparks and an electrical fire is about the worst outcome. Fortunately after a quick review of some wiring, I realized I had connected the main power switch to the wrong pins on the motherboard. I clipped them to the right spot, flipped the switch, and the fans kicked on and the RGB lights lit up. But we had no video, our monitor a black rectangle. I troubleshot on Google. I checked connections. I was getting seriously concerned that the most expensive piece of hardware in the case, the graphics card, was defective. But it was L who realized that I had connected the monitor to the main I\/O HDMI port rather than to the HDMI port on the graphics card. I swapped them and – voila! – we had video. It took another hour or so to download new drivers, make a Windows installation disk, and get the operating system installed. But before dinner L was downloading all the software she needs for her gaming. Between dinner and my annual birthday cheesecake, she was playing Fortnite on her new rig. I\u2019m pretty pleased that we pulled it off. It\u2019s not super difficult, but as my issues with the power switch showed, simply putting the wrong cable in the wrong spot can throw the whole build off. Not sure if there are any gamers out there, but her rig contains the following components: MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max AM4 motherboard 16 GB of RAM AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU Deepcool GAMMAXX 400-CPU Cooler Sapphire Radeon Pulse RX 5600 XT Graphics Card All in a Phanteks Eclipse P360X case She also cashed out some money and bought a fancy gaming keyboard and mouse. She seems pretty happy. Now we just need her to start collecting some of that sweet YouTube ad revenue to make this worth it! Why build vs buy, you may ask? Well, when it comes to gaming computers, who can be a lot more cost effective if you pick and choose components and put it together yourself. This was probably 60\u201370% the cost of an equivalent assembled gaming rig, and comes without any bloatware to slow it down. The big downside is there\u2019s no warranty on the final, assembled product and any errors in construction are all on you. Oh, and the girls enjoyed asking me, \u201cSooooo, how does it feel to be in the last year of your 40s?\u201d over and over while giggling. Did not love that part of the weekend. Sunday was pretty chill. It was rainy here so we didn\u2019t ever open the pool. We needed the rain so that was fine. I read some. Worked on updating the site. Took the cardboard we\u2019ve accumulated over the past three months to the recycling. After dinner – grilled steak and chicken, although sadly on the gas grill rather than charcoal because of the rain – the girls took me out for ice cream. It was a big moment: the first time M drove the entire family somewhere. C and L tried very hard to remain quiet but about two blocks from home they got the giggles and couldn\u2019t stop. M did just fine. Then S and I watched \u201cKnives Out\u201d and enjoyed it. Pretty, prettyyyy, prettyyyyyyy solid weekend. Hope the other fathers out there had good weekends, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[48,26,14],"class_list":["post-9798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-blogging","tag-family","tag-parenting"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9798"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9801,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9798\/revisions\/9801"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dsnotebook.me\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}