Motherlord Reborn Red

This post was completed and published on 03/24/2024, but its event is dated as shown.

02/09/2024

The original Motherlord was an Acer Aspire M3985 purchased July 2012. It had a Core i3-2120, a single two-gigabyte DDR3 stick, a 500 GB mechanical brick, a DVD writer, and a five-in-one card reader on the case (!). She spent her life mostly as an auxilliary for video encoding and file archiving. Her strengths over our Acer Aspire 4925 gave her that name. She also played Amnesia (Dark Descent), Skyrim, and a bit of Minecraft. Her powers were later vastly surpassed by the Latitude.

About seven months ago, on her third session after five years of S4 hibernation, her brick committed suicide and refused to boot to Windows 10. Given her age, we decided to salvage. Only the stick got out and has since been donated; the rest were regretfully disposed because we thought that we no longer needed another Motherlord.

Sometime later at work, I did my very first build--with the help of my colleagues--to replace the boss's to the company's most modern PC at the time: A Core i3-12100, a single eight-gigabyte DDR4-3200 stick, and a 240 GB SATA SSD on an ASUS Prime H610M-K. The comparison of its performance to our aging Latitude inspired us for a Motherlord reborn, starting with the i3-12100.

However, the hours spent for drafting had gone to waste, as I suddenly got news that my ancient work PC will be replaced with one that is identical to the blueprint. This was three months later. Long story short, we then decided to look towards Team Red for the very first time. First, we acquainted ourselves to their product lineup. Then, we checked our seller for availability. Finally, we compared then picked our parts, of which the motherboard turned out to be a big mistake.

It took a week to secure our order and another to ship it. Our seller is not a good fast reader, skipping and misreading our questions. That in addition to their poor stock keeping means a lot more back-and-forth than necessary. One time, they upsold our memory sticks supposedly due to availability issues. We gave in, and thus ended the long week of getting our order to begin processing.

What should have been twenty minutes of amateur PC assembly turned to ninety: some for pre-heatsink-install pictures; some for removing and reinstalling the motherboard from and to the case due to its annoying retaining plate and an overzealous rear I/O shield; much for diagnosis on the big mistake. The board powered on but would not POST because its firmware had to be upgraded twice to support our CPU. Since it would be lifeless without one--we actually tried--we ordered a used, working, compatible CPU just for the upgrades. We also ordered a tube of thermal paste, a pair of case fans, and a couple of Molex-SATA connectors. The whole conundrum lasted for a week, but our service went relatively well.

The rest of the installation process went smoothly thanks in part to a recent SSD replacement on the Latitude that got us to update our OS installation procedures. The Debian part went by quickly: a step-by-step wizard, followed by a handful of scripts and text files; all semi-automatic. The Windows part however was painfully slow because (an explanation would be as large as Windows itself). Naturally, once everything was ready, we immediately tried some games.

The new Motherlord is an ASRock A320M-HDV R4.0 (big mistake) equipped with a Ryzen 5 5600G, two eight-gigabyte DDR4-3200 sticks, a main 512 GB PCIe (Gen 3) M.2 SSD, and an intermediate 256 GB SATA SSD. The integrated Vega 7 GPU is about twice as powerful as the GeForce 930MX on the Latitude. In the real world however, it is about equal to the GeForce GT 1030, therefore placing itself at the entry-level class. Still, we were very satisfied with its performance gains over the Latitude.

With the Motherlord reborn, the Latitude was finally set free from all the heavy lifting.

Side note: the Motherlord, Latitude, and my work PC have ADATA SX8200 Pro SSDs. This particular model is the poster boy for SSD switch-and-baits, even with the naked eye. We did not perform any systematic comparisons though because gigabyte speeds are considered overkill for our use, so differences are negligible.