I finally got to make some upgrades to my desktop computer!
Before
Just for context, my desktop computer was a hand-me-down that a friend just gave me because he had gotten a much better one. I took it and played around with it. After all these years this was the first time I owned a computer with a dedicated GPU (I know, sad but true)
These were the specs:
Motherboard | CPU | GPU |
---|---|---|
GA-P55-USB3 | Intel Core i7 870 | Sapphire R9 280X |
The computer could keep up with daily tasks quite well but I really wanted to game on it, it could only keep up with CS:GO and other light Steam games, I also started tweaking and doing minor upgrades with time…
Here’s a picture:

Minor upgrades
My rental contract included “internet” in the amount I pay per month, what it didn’t specify was that my landlord would let me use a wifi repeater separated from his router by a concrete wall, so I needed a wireless network card… I got Asus PCE-AC56 , which worked out of the box on Manjaro Linux
Another minor upgrade I made was buying a bluetooth adapter, the excuse was that now that I could game a bit I should use my cheapo Shanwan PS3 controller clone. So I got Asus PCE-BT400, again, worked out of the box no need to deal with drivers
In Arch based linux distros this section of the Arch wiki explains that installing bluez
, bluez-plugins
, bluez-utils
issuing the command bluetoothctl
and pluging in the controller should register it as a paired device
Now
Of course it was not enough and I decided to upgrade more, so I got an upgrade package from a local store since it was on sale:
Motherboard | CPU | GPU |
---|---|---|
Asus ROG Strix B450-F | AMD Ryzen 5 3600 | XFX Radeon RX 580 |
Technically I bought the graphics card before the small upgrades I listed before, also I got what was available (Good luck trying to get either Nvidia or AMD higher end graphic cards as Linus would say) however I’m pretty sure the performance was choked by the old CPU, I’ll have to wait and see. I also bought a 1TB M.2 SATA SSD card and 2 8GB DDR4 2666MHz RAM sticks (same RAM as before, just double the speed)
Here are some pictures:



Please don’t judge my cable management. Can’t help but notice all I kept from the orginal gift was the case and the power supply 🙂
Day 48 of my 2020’s #100DaysToOffload
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3 responses to “Upgrading my rig”
@lopeztel Felicidades por el upgrade. Por cierto, pase por tu blog y esta interesante. Saludos.
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