Adam Something is a favorite of mine.

Making an important distinction, my friend.

Loved this game.

Fun fact, the two lead characters showed up again as soldiers in Valkyria Chronicles.

Star Control I and II

Medieval II Total War (except that diplomacy was a joke)

Civ III was great, but Alpha Centauri may have been the best 4x game ever.

I liked Google+, mostly because it wasn’t Facebook, I guess.

RIP SGU

The setting for the IGPU is on some sort of dynamic setting that indicates it will scale as needed, up to 4 GB and beyond, so I left it. If forcing a value is better, I can absolutely do that. Do you think I still need to set a value?

Thanks, bro. You’ve been a help through the whole ordeal. I did get it working by doing a clean reset. It took forever. Once I got Windows working, I went back and enabled xmp profile 1. I’m not brave enough to try anything else right now 😂

Overall, aside from the windows issue, I’m happy with it. The SSD is a Patriot P300, which is apparently okay but no frills. The motherboard is an MSI B450M-Pro Max II–which is limited to two slots for RAM, but I was expecting that since it was advertised as machine at 64 GB. The RAM is Patriot Viper of some variety at 3600 MHz. The case and power supply appear to be MSI, as well.

The CPU appears to be the reported Ryzen 5 5600G.

A lot of the components are not top tier, but it does appear to have room for upgrades within reason as prices drop.

I was surprised by the packaging, btw. There was a shipping box, then a box within that with a few components like power cord, keyboard and mouse, and a USB wireless adapter separated from the final box containing the actual PC, with bubble wrap strategically placed throughout.

Also, the cables are all neatly managed.

I wonder if the OS issue was a bad install or something I did. It’s fully activated with the reset, so they did at least have a valid key. I saw some indications that UEFI settings or secure boot settings may have an effect. I don’t know.

One last question: is it worth it to download the MSI utility software? I don’t want to add bloatware, but if it does have useful features so I don’t have to boot to bios for overclocking or fiddling with fans, RAM, or whatever else, that might be nice. I just don’t know.

Thanks again for your input. I feel like I need you to mail me an invoice 😁

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Thanks for the heads up. I’m learning a lot about modern PC’s from my research, and this tracks with what I’ve been learning–it’s cool to realize I understand what you’re talking about. I have been enjoying this more than I expected. I’m seriously considering starting to look for old PC’s to play with for myself and maybe build a new one some day.

It should let me set the RAM to the highest speed it will handle, right? If I’m remembering right, that ought to be around 3200 or 3600 MHz for DDR 4, right?

Any other BIOS settings I should check when I fire it up?

Would I be better buying one of these xeon or other older intel conversions with an old workstation super cheap and waiting for AM5 socket processors to get cheaper? If I’m going to be looking for a new CPU anyway, and AM4 AND LGA 1700 are both reaching the end of their cycles, I’m tempted to buy something that’s just good enough now and get a whole new PC with a viable upgrade path when prices come down.

Throwing this in: my wife wants something to double for general home use, but I can’t imagine we’d run anything more serious than Office for that purpose.

Thoughts?

I enjoy Sam’s Club’s “Scan and Go” feature in their app. I scan my items and pay in the app. I never have to interact with a soul, and that’s peachy keen in my book.

I’m sorry I ever let mine go. It was a great emulation platform, and I ran all kinds of retro games on it. I also miss Skies of Arcadia, which I’ve always felt was underrated.

The high level of sheer incompetence at all levels, but especially in management. I’m lucky to work with competent folks directly, but the sheer amount of work created by stupidity outside of my department is soul-crushing. I can present definitive proof of systemic failures all day long, and no one is interested in doing a damned thing if the people or departments in question are politically powerful within the organization. Neither I nor my immediate colleagues are perfect, but we acknowledge our failures and try to create solutions. So many others, though, seem so invested in the status quo beyond all reason.