My new desktop build

A few years back I replaced my home-built desktop PC with a Lenovo laptop. My thinking at the time was wouldn’t it be great to be able to drag my production machine everywhere! This turned out to be bad thinking. Lenny never left my desk and only had his lid open when I needed to do an in-your-face reset. When I’m out and about I use a Chromebook. Small, light, all-day battery, and so cheap if I drop it I’m more excited to get a new one than disappointed. If I need to do real work, I ssh into my home machine and vim it.

So I built another desktop, and my goodness, she’s a beauty.

• Fractal Design Define S
  • Best case I’ve ever used. No drive cages, no DVD drives allowed.
• Intel Skylake i3-6100
  • Fast, low power draw.
• Corsair DDR4 3200 16GB RAM
  • Runs perfectly stable at 3200.
• Samsung EVO 850 500GB SSD
  • Splurged a little here and went with one SSD drive for everything. Crazy fast.
• MSI Computer ATX DDR4 Motherboard Z170A GAMING M3
  • Great MOBO. BIOS is smart enough to enable/disable UEFI based on the OS.
• Kingwin Stryker 500W Fanless PSU (new from eBay for $59)
  • A fanless first for me. So far, dead quiet and no problems. Case temp went up by ~3C. Couldn’t pass up trying it at that price.

She fought me at first. The graphics were glitchy from the MOBO until I updated the BIOS. I couldn’t get the Manjaro installer to boot without a kernel flag (Skylake graphics aren’t officially supported until kernel 4.3). The new-fangled Atheros NIC wasn’t working either, so I had to pop in a USB wifi dongle to get kernel 4.4RC7 installed, which fixed the NIC and the graphics. Phew! But now it’s stable and dead quiet. You can’t hear the thing unless you press your ear up to the case. It’s running at 31C with stock Intel cooling, which is basically a piece of tin foil with an angry bee attached to it.