My computer has been hanging on but just barely. Recently it has taken multiple restarts and the occasional CMOS reset to get it to boot. When it was new, the hardware was pretty good.
Asrock 990FX Extreme4
AMD FX-8350 Black Edition
32GB Corsair 1333 Mhz
Nvidia GTX 650
My friend helped me to choose the parts and he was a AMD fanboy. The processor did have 8 cores but probably won’t go down in history as AMD’s best design – but it is easy to pick on this from the side lines a decade later.
Picking out the parts to last a long time but also not breaking the bank was tricky but only because I needed a single feature on my motherboard. The one feature i really had to have was a 7 segment display to help debug any setup difficulties I may encounter. There are probably hundreds of websites that can help but after my research I settled on the following.
Gigabyte Aorus Z690
32gb 4400mhz DDR5
Noctua NH-D15
Intel Core i7-12700F
750 Watt be quiet! power supply
The parts are not a complete computer but rather just enough to upgrade most of it. I didn’t want to upgrade my graphic card in the middle of cryptocoin induced tech winter. I thought my existing card should be enough for the time being – wow was I wrong.
The GTX 650 is indeed a graphic card and it can pass on the video signal to a monitor or a television but there is one thing this card cannot do.
Unable to boot into the bios
It was simply not possible to boot into the bios to make any changes or select a different boot device. There were a few other people on the internet that also had this problem. They solved this by connecting the HDMI output to a newer monitor.
My monitor was not super but is only 1 year old, but that did not help. I tried connecting the computer to my television which is a higher quality than my monitor but no luck. With the GTX 650 I was only able to boot directly into the operating system.
I had heard that other people were able to modify the bios settings to once they were connected to another monitor and then were able to use their original hardware. I was able to boot into the bios once using a borrowed GTX 1650 OC which was not stone age old. With this graphics card I was able to boot into the bios and modify the settings.
I did not have the same luck as others who were able to use their old hardware. In the end I was compelled to get a newer card – Nvidia 1660 super.
