Somebody stop me... (Gaming PC Build Thread)

[Tom Servo]

Got so annoyed at trying to get my bluetooth headphones to work with all the shitty usb adapters in Windows that I finally buckled and got a new motherboard with bluetooth onboard. Which of course means you have to get a new CPU as well, because if you're going to go through that effort, fuck it.

A lot of chips are hard to come by, so I ended up with a Core i9 11900K. I know there is a lot of criticism of the Rocket Lake procs, but it performs well in games and I'll still be doubling the physical cores over my i7 7700k. Lookin' forward to doublin' my goroutines.

[GreatScawt]

Yeah, I think the 11900K took some shit because it seemed like a lateral step from the 10900K. You had a slightly higher IPC, but less cores. That will be an awesome improvement!

[Tom Servo]

Put the whole machine together. One nvme drive isn't working, but I think that I've got a handle on why, I think the first two nvme slots share the same lanes with the first PCI-E port that go straight to the CPU, and you can either use two of the three or split up the lanes in the BIOS, which takes away some of the lanes from the video card. Right now, I'm using all three. Pretty sure if I move the other SSD over to one of the other two slots, it'll work. Annoyingly, I think the thing I'll see the most performance improvement in is Flight Sim, but that's on the drive that's currently not working.

Also, modern motherboards have all sorts of nutty heat sinks on everything, and they contain lots of sharp edges. It was a special thrill to cut open three fingers trying to encourage a chassis fan cable onto its header.

[Tom Servo]

Of course, the entire impetus behind this upgrade was because I was fed up with shitty bluetooth adapters and just wanted my fancy new headphones to work with my PC. Guess which component refuses to work?

[GreatScawt]

Fuuuuck.

Got some extra lanes for this?
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X462KRK...ing=UTF8&psc=1

[Tom Servo]

I do have an extra lane for that, I just wish I trusted *any* bluetooth devices at this point.

Ran into some weird issues after moving the one M.2 SSD over to another slot as mentioned a couple of posts ago. It worked, but it came up as drive I:, rather than drive H: which is where I'd previously had it. Normally I'd just change that with the Disk Management app, but that just hung at "Connecting to Virtual Disk Service...". Then a few other weird things came out - the "Add & Remove Apps" functionality claimed I had no apps installed. Some apps, like the Microsoft Casual games like Solitaire would freeze on start. Extremely annoyingly, the "Shut down" and "Restart" options off the Start->Power menu did nothing, clicking on them would just dismiss the start menu but nothing would happen. I had to either hit the reset button or hold power to turn the machine off/reboot. Ran through multiple reboots like this, then finally figured out a way to disable the drive. For some reason, this BIOS doesn't have a way to disable drives, but I was able to switch the mode of the M.2 slot the drive was plugged into to "disable" it. Windows boots and works perfectly again. I poked around, installed some updates from the Windows Store, a couple of Windows Updates (including the bluetooth driver which got me all excited but ultimately didn't work), and verified that all the apps that worked incorrectly previously were now fine.

Re-enabled the drive and....everything works. I was able to reassign the drive letter back and just got Flightsim to start. I have no idea what went wrong there, and it went *real* wrong, but now it's magically fixed. Hopefully it'll stay that way, dealing with the SSD heat sinks on this motherboard is kinda a pain in the ass, and you can't get to the normal SATA ports without removing the video card, which is also a pain in the ass. I was debating getting a new case, but I think I just don't want to touch anything now if I can help it.

[Tom Servo]

Well, newer bluetooth adapter also just doesn't work right with headphones. It'll work with my Bluetooth controllers, and it shows the headphones as paired, but connecting fails every time and it doesn't show up as an audio device.

Every time, after years of being unable to get this to work, I get this glimmer of hope that one day I'll be able to use Bluetooth headphones with my desktop, and then they're dashed yet again.

[Rare White Ape]

You replaced half of your PC but did you try different headphones?

[Tom Servo]

I've tried it with three different sets of headphones. Some Trekz Titanium bone conduction ones, a bluetooth dongle for a set of Bose QC25s, and Bose 700s.

FWIW, all three devices work flawlessly with my phone and my work-issued Macbook.

[Yw-slayer]

You could buy a Sound Blaster X7. Admittedly it's a bit old.