Desktop Setup Plan (Part 1)

At the beginning of the year, I saved 2000 yuan to buy a second-hand server for testing software and playing games. However, after looking around, I found that servers were too troublesome… they consume a lot of electricity and make noise. If you want to add a graphics card, you need to modify the case… since I have no experience with hardware… so I decided to buy a desktop computer that is both affordable and sufficient for my needs. Originally, I was going to buy something on 618… but due to work changes, I didn’t have time or energy to mess around, so I gave up… recently, I saw a motherboard on JD at a discount, so I couldn’t resist buying it… but when I checked, I found that the CPU I wanted was hard to find new… (probably sold out during 618)… after several weeks of effort, I finally got everything and assembled my first self-built desktop computer!

Component List

My configuration idea was a bit special because I had specific expectations for this machine. I hoped it could meet all the following requirements:

1. Personal bioinformatics computation testing (multi-core + large memory + Linux)
2. Basic gaming needs on Windows
3. Virtualize into multiple machines with my girlfriend playing games together (two entry-level graphics cards + Linux + GPU passthrough + Windows virtual machines)
4. A small and beautiful case

Based on these requirements, I chose a motherboard with 4 memory slots and 2 graphics card slots for M-ATX to support future upgrades to 32G or even 64G memory (some research institutions’ prototype software has huge memory consumption), and also to support dual GPUs for virtualizing two Windows machines. The CPU was difficult because the host needed an integrated graphics card, and I wanted AMD… so there wasn’t much choice, and the only model available at the moment was the 2400G…

Complete component list as follows:

Buying desktop components is really more complicated than buying laptops… I encountered:

• The CPU was out of stock, so I had to buy second-hand散片, but the second-hand散片 were also hard to find, and after looking at three places, I finally bought it, and even got 30 yuan in compensation for the appeal (out of stock but not taken off the shelf)…
• Although I knew it was a miner card… but I didn’t notice that the one I bought had only DVI interfaces… so I had to buy an adapter later
• Although the motherboard has two graphics card slots, you can’t directly plug in two GPUs because the lower graphics card slot would block the PIN lines and USB3.0 cables, needing additional adapters
• The power supply I wanted was out of stock, so when buying a replacement, I didn’t notice that it was a non-modular power supply… subsequent cable management was a headache
• The cooler size exceeded my expectations… fortunately, the case I bought was relatively large…
• The case turned out to be much larger than expected… and ended up being a hit with the cooler…

Buying components is already complicated enough… subsequent installation issues were one after another:

• Installed the cooler fan backwards, which made it difficult to take off later…
• The non-modular power supply cable management was a headache
• Installed the hard drive bracket backwards, almost couldn’t pull out
• Didn’t notice the instructions in the wind cooler manual, spent two and a half hours installing

After nearly two weeks of fiddling around, I finally got everything set up… as a buffer, I first installed Windows 10 to test playing Madoka Magica. It was quite surprising that the 2400G could run at 720p low quality smoothly… and since I was using my landlord’s TV… there wasn’t much difference between 720p and 1080p on this TV… which means if I just bought a machine to play Madoka Magica, cutting down 8GB of memory (250), buying a 2200G plus A320M set (1000元左右), using a 100 yuan power supply that came with the case, or even 1500 yuan could play Madoka Magica… so dependent… Madoka Magica is really affordable…

This is the hardware part of my desktop setup plan. I’ll update the software part later~