» Fri Feb 12, 2016 1:27 am (Here is your official TL;DR warning)
A little back story, I am a 41 y/o firefighter/paramedic who got into PC gaming after playing Oblivion on my PS3 and being jealous of the modding community. I like to learn new things..ie.. I Iearned how to use Adobe CS3 back in 2003 to build a website to cover my local high school's football team.
Anywho my first "gaming rig" was just a modified 2010 Dell Inspiron that I had a friend add a decent GPU (GTX 560) and upgraded the PSU (500W). I didn't feel comfortable enough installing them into my new Dell. I played a lot of Skyrim on that thing.
Fast forward to BF4 release and I wanted a new rig. I spent hours upon hours reading articles, opinions, and suggestions on custom built vs. pre-built gaming PC's. After watching several you tube videos I decided to personally build my first custom gaming PC. First I had to decide on a budget, I decided a mid-range $1500-$1800 build was a good place to start. Then I searched for good builds within that price range. Now I had a parts list, and went to the www to order my parts. As you can guess some of the parts I wanted were back ordered. So I wasn't going to go down I went up and so did the budget. (Damn this is going like my house remodel).
It turned into the PC that is in my Sig minus the upgrades I have done in the last year (GPU & RAM). I get all my parts in, I feel like a kid at Christmas and as nervous as a paramedic going out on his/her first real emergency call. I get the trusty ole iPad out and go to Youtube and assemble this bad boy. I push that power button for the first time and them 7 fans on my HAF Cooler Master start humming. I am following my Youtube video and set up the BIOS (just hit default, lel) and then install OS. Bam I just built a friggin PC and the damn thing works. The last time I felt this excited was after the "first" time in the back of a Chevy Blazer many years ago. Well maybe not quite that excited.
This thing has run like champ since I built it Jan. 2014. I upgraded to the 980ti (my B-Day present to myself) in Nov. Last week I decide to max out the RAM my MOBO will run and order 16 more GB of Corsair Vengeance. It came in yesterday and I was excited to install it and adjust my ENBoost to use the extra RAM and if it would make any difference. I think no big deal, just plug in the 2 new RAM sticks and turn the PC back on and get to gaming.
Not so fast my friend, I hit the power button and my sweet lady is caught in a reboot loop. I am starting to panic like that time the condem broke on prom night. What did I just [censored] up? I get the trusty ole iPad out again and go to searching. Ok ok maybe this is not that big of deal. Sounds like my BIOS didn't automatically recognize the new RAM. The Tomshardware thread I was reading suggested remove the MOBO battery and let it reset. That solved the problem for the guy that started this thread. I do this and hit power, the PC comes on like normal but all I have are black screens. (Please don't let that test from prom night be positive panic sets in). I have really [censored] up now and I am going to have to deal with the consequences. So one more Google search catches my eye, it is a walk through on installing additional RAM on some obscure tech site. I came to the part in the instructions (like what does one or two pink lines mean) you might have to push the CMOS (many other names depending on MOBO) button to reset your BIOS to accept the new RAM. I check ASUS's website find where the button is on my MOBO (wasn't hard to miss anyways) push it and presto magic, I am now at the BIOS setup screen, done and the only other thing I had to do was reset the time and date in Windows manually for some reason to get everything back in order (after I did this it synced with windows time like it should).
P.S. The test was negative and thank goodness. That [censored] was crazy but awesome in the sack.
