One of my Battle Stations comes from late 2022; this one I call Level-Up. The years pass so quickly that our hardware is eclipsed almost as soon as we build it.
You might remember that I gave away a computer during my 2022 Labor Day LAN party. Well, this Thermaltake Level-10 GT was the original case from what I gave away. I wanted to save this case, so I had bought a new LAN COOL case in August to house the older components that were in the Thermaltake Level-10 GT (FX CPU, stuff like that). Meanwhile, I won the Rig of the Month contest in the AMD Forum September 2022 contest with my Purrfection build, so I had the two prizes of a B350 Gigabyte motherboard and an AMD 3600X CPU. I figured I would use those in the new build, but I also had an AMD 3950X CPU and an AMD 5600 CPU lying around too. What to do? Try them all, and that's what I did. An old case but one I like quite a bit for superior cooling.
But, nothing worked. I tried all three CPUs in this B350 motherboard and then I realized that the motherboard wasn't going to recognize these CPUs until it had a BIOS update (the Gigabyte website said these CPUs would work). But alas, I could not do a BIOS update on this motherboard without a working CPU to start with. I wasn't going to tear one of my old machines apart to get to an earlier Ryzen CPU, so instead I ordered a new Asus X570+ motherboard from Amazon (It arrived the same day!). I tried the AMD 3950X CPU in the new Asus motherboard and no joy. Apparently this CPU is dead. So, I put in the AMD 3600X CPU and it finally booted into the BIOS. Soon I had Windows 11 installed (remember to enable firmware FTM in the BIOS for Windows 11) and now I could proceed with the build into the case.
So now you see the importance of building up the system outside of the case. I would have been pretty upset pulling the motherboard out of the case multiple times as I swapped the CPU. The next steps were to put the new components into the Thermaltake Level-10 GT case (which I will now call 'Level-Up' as a new gaming machine on my LAN). That went smoothly, but I did add some RGB fans a few days later and now we have a snazzy looking gaming machine with a 32" 1440p, 170 Hz gaming monitor on the Big Al Computers LAN!
