Introducing Michigan J. Frog
I didn't have a good sense of how long building it would actually take, but I figured it couldn't take as long as the movie marathon!
As I told a friend, I grew up building computers. I worked for my dad's business "sep Computers." (sep was dad's initialism for 'Specialized Engineering Products' but he eschewed capital letters and periods leading to many people thinking it was pronounced "sepp" rather than "Ess Ee Pee.") We did GeekSquad style work before GeekSquad was a thing. I built computers, pulled network cables, etc. But that was from roughly 1990-2005. I did build my last rig ("Marvin") but that was still around ten years ago. Things change, though not as much as I feared.
I was excited at the prospect of this new machine. After spending a few weeks evaluating options I settled on a build and got input from a few people. Once I had the build, I worked with a buddy of mine and traded Magic product for the parts. Over the past week-and-a-half the parts came in, and last night the final piece arrived.
So, I got up this morning, and starting around 7:00 am, I began putting it all together. I took it slow, and as soon as I hit something I wasn't completely confident in I pulled up manuals and double checked or found the answer. Overall, I'd say 95% of it was stuff I was familiar with, but there were a few things which were new and I had to learn.
First, this computer has a NVME SSD drive. Looking at the motherboard I couldn't find where it connected. I searched and hunted before eventually giving up. I referenced the manual and found where it was, under a plate which wasn't obviously labeled.
Second, I am utilizing an all-in-one watercooling unit from Corsair. My only previous experience had been heat-sinks and fans. This is largely the same concept, but I was very nervous to make sure I installed it correctly and had fans going the right directions, etc. This unit was also the last piece of hardware to arrive, because the original hardware spec used the upgraded version which had three fans - unfortunately that was too large for the case I had selected. So I had to order a replacement.
Otherwise though, it was all the same core concepts, plugging in wires. Screwing things down, etc.
I did make mistakes though.
- I had to unmount and remount the watercooling unit four times as I kept discovering it blocked access to things I needed access to.
- I also ended up removing the cover plate which goes around the motherboard's ports on the back of the machine, as I had mounted the motherboard and gotten very far in the build before I realized I hadn't set the motherboard correctly and some prongs intended to keep tension were unfortunately positioned inside of ports rather than on top of them. A minor issue overall.
- I installed the graphics card without removing covers on the video ports. The NVIDIA card had small covers on the three DP ports and the HDMI port, without realizing I had left them on, I mounted the card. Unfortunately the case was such that it held those covers in place and I couldn't remove them without removing the card. Again, a small issue.
One realization I had was how far computer cases have come. I can recall many times cutting myself on the cut metal inside cases, but the case I used was smooth and there was nowhere for me to cut myself. Not to mention the pathing to enable hidden wiring, etc. Just very cool steps forward in a very subtle area of the computer technology.
Once I had fully assembled and wired, I turned the machine on and it booted up first try. I have to admit, that felt pretty good.
As noted by a friend, I like themes with my naming schemas. The two Raspberry Pi computers I use in the house are both named for professional soccer coaches. So when it came time to name this machine, for a while, I was going to use 'Foghorn' but this morning it came to me to name it after the top-hat wearing frog.
I've spent a good bit of today getting Michigan updated, installing software, etc. It's using wifi and I'm seeing decent speeds, but I am wondering if I should run a network cable to this corner of the house for the machine. We'll see. Maybe a summer project. I'm also considering upgrading the keyboard from my Microsoft ergonomic one to something more nerdy, a split-hand ergonomic keyboard like the Glove80 or the Voyager but I'm not ready to pull the trigger on any of those purchases yet. We'll see.
Aside from getting Michigan up and running, I also had to spend some time relocating Marvin (the old machine) to its new home, out near the router. It's going to live-on as our dedicated media server. The move was simple enough, the biggest has was I had to spend some time sorting out its ethernet networking as it had been running on wifi and the ethernet had to be manually re-enabled. But, some googling and working on it got it solved and it's all set up.
As for gaming... Last week, I was discussing this build with a friend. I joked that one of my metrics for judging the computer's speed would be how fast it could make a new world of Dwarf Fortress. I just set Michigan to run with the maximum history and other settings which would make it really work. I watched the processor and it never went above 25%, which I was somewhat surprised by - I would have assumed it would just peg the processor during the world building phase. Now that I think about it, I'm assuming it only uses so many threads, etc. Concurrency doesn't really work for that and thus it can't take advantage of the extra cores in the processor. Which makes sense.
That said, it did work amazingly fast compared to the other machines I've played Dwarf Fortress on.
The Specs
PS - Only twelve more hours of downloading Baldur's Gate III.