The Phoenix rise from the ashes!
The owner of this PC, who plays a lot of E-Sports titles like League Of Legends and PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and streams his gameplay regularly initially came to us to buy a brand-new Zotac GTX 1070 AMP Edition and WD SSD to upgrade his existing 3770K rig. The main reason being that he thought that his previous GPU was not working. He brought them home only to realise that he still did not get any video out from his brand-new GTX 1070 as well and called us for help.
We swung into action, did a diagnosis and discovered that the culprit was actually a damaged PCI-E slot and lanes, which in our experience is a fairly common occurrence for Haswell and older motherboards, before manufacturers realised the need for reinforced PCI-E slots to account for the new, bigger and heavier GPUs. Based on this assessment, the owner decided to take this opportunity to totally refresh his entire machine.
We stripped the CM Storm Scout 2 chassis of all its components, cleaned it out of rust, dust and dirt and replaced the corroded screws and standoffs with new ones. The CM Storm Scout 2 is still a excellent design with lots of room, so we recommended to the owner to salvage it, alongside the Seasonic 750W modular PSU he had. We also took the opportunity to totally redo the cable management and arrangement from scratch
Everything else however got replaced with brand-new parts. The 3770K was retired in favour of a Ryzen 5 1600, with 6 cores, 12 threads and modestly overclocked to 3.7 Ghz. Alongside a MSI B350 Tomahawk and 16 GB of G.Skill Ripjaws DDR4, this setup will not only allow him to play his games to the limits, but stream it as well easily to his audience. The GTX 1070 and WD SSD he bought earlier went in to complete this picture of bliss.
When it was all done up, we decided that such a revival deemed that we give her a new name. After much deliberation, we christened her Fenghuang (凤凰), a Chinese mythological bird bearing some similarities to the western phoenix and often representing loyalty, power and integrity. The Japanese term is Hō-ō (鳳凰), which should sound very familiar to Pokemon fans
Build Specs:
AMD Ryzen 5 1600 CPU
MSI B350 Tomahawk
G.Skill Ripjaws V 2400Mhz 16GB kit
Zotac GTX 1070 AMP 8GB GPU
Western Digital Blue SSD 250GB