It’s funny, I ordered a used Radeon RX 6800 Graphics card from some guy online, Facebook Marketplace, got a good deal on it. Not amazing, but not bad either. And when it arrived, I pulled out the card and then was surprised to see a CPU free-floating (ie not wrapped, just kind “tossed in”, in the box. It turns out it was a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, some of the pins were bent but not too badly. Probably because of how it had been tossed in the box.
Then upon further inspection of the boxes contents, I found a 1tb NVME SSD drive hidden amongst the bubble wrap that had wrapped the GPU. So I ended up with a 1tb NVME SSD and a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU that I didn’t intend on getting. Ironically, my own gaming PC has a Ryzen 5 3600 CPU in it.

Then a few days later a local friend, and former coworker, of mine gave me some computer parts including a Platinum PSU, so I upgraded my computers Gold PSU to the Platinum. Now I have a spare Gold PSU.

So, what to do… I did contact the seller of the GPU card to see if they intended to include a CPU and NVME drive in the box, but days go by and they never respond. They’ve “gone dark”. So after a week of not hearing back from them, I had the choice of selling off the spare components or using it. I told this to my little brother and he reminds me that he has 2x8gb DDR4 Memory chips as well as a Nvidia 1650S GPU card, and a stock AMD CPU cooler + spare kryonaut thermal paste. All not being used.

Well my son’s computer is a 4th Gen i7 w/ 12gb memory and a Nvidia 1050ti graphics card. And he does use the computer, daily, but it easily plays the games he plays. Nothing is really pushing it. But still…

So yeah. I broke down and bought a used case and motherboard. But I had chosen a used HP Omen (OEM) motherboard from eBay for $60, because it had the B550 chipset. Any board with the X570 chipset was $120+, and the boards with the B550 chipsets were usually $85+. The HP Omen board did seem to have standard ATX mounts and such, so it should work.

Fast forward, we put all the pieces together. My little brother did the most of the work, I’ve assembled many a PC in my time so I didn’t really jump at the chance to do it again, lol. I mean I can, but if he’s good with doing it, I’m all for it.

Problem 1: We did discover that HP had decided to use Intel CPU mounts even on their AMD boards. I guess HP wanted to bulk produce or get a bulk discount on a certain type of CPU cooler, and it used Intel mounts, so they figured why not use the same thing on their AMD offerings. Makes sense as a business, but we discovered we can’t latch the AMD CPU Cooler onto the board. Not without having some kind of Intel to AMD adapter 3D Printed. Anyways, for testing we just decided to rest the CPU cooler onto of the CPU, along with some thermal paste of course, just to see if the Franken-PC POST’s.

Unfortunately, it did not. We couldn’t get anything from the display. It powered on just fine, everything seemed ok, but no video output. So using my brother’s PC as a guinea pig to test components, we checked the memory and CPU.

Problem 2: One of the 8gb memory chips is bad.

No problem though, with one good chip the HP Omen board should still POST. But nope. We tried the 2 known-good chips from my brothers PC, and still no POST. I was about to give up and just call the motherboard bad but just as a test, we put my brothers Ryzen 5 5600X CPU into the HP Omen board and I turned it on. At first nothing, was about to give up but then all of a sudden, it POSTs. We got video output. After some research we discovered that the HP Omen motherboard is very limited in what CPU’s it will support, even though it has a AM4 CPU slot and uses a B550 chipset. The 5700X CPU was on the list of supported CPU’s, but the 3600 CPU was not.

So. Buy another motherboard? or a 5000 series CPU? Anyways, after price shopping I discovered a 5600G (Motherboard supported) was $120 used. But I did find a newly listed Asus and MSI motherboard with B550 chipset on eBay for $60. So I bought the Asus, it had slightly better specs than the MSI. I’m going to return the HP Omen motherboard to the seller. I hate to do it, but it’s useless to me if it won’t work with the CPU that I have for it. Annoyed I “had” to buy an IO shield for it though, another $13. So $73 total. Meh. Hopefully round 2 of the Franken-PC build will be a success.

I actually want to print a type of “Credits” style list of PC parts and the contributo on a piece of paper and attach it to the side of the case.

CREDITS
——————————–
CASE……….. purchased by Dad
Power Supply… donated by Dad
Motherboard…. purchased by Dad
CPU………… donated by Dad
CPU Cooler….. donated by Uncle
RAM………… donated by Uncle
NVME SSD……. donated by Dad
Graphics Card.. donated by Uncle

Built by……. Uncle

Filed under: Personal - @ 2023-03-01 8:06 pm