Asus z390-E Gaming Computer Build

Description

I was torn between installing Windows 10 onto my faithful 9 year-old Asus P6T running Windows 7 Ultimate, or buying a new computer. In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to messing up a perfectly good computer so I decided to buy a separate new Windows 10 machine for my safe banking and emails. When I started shopping, I realized that a mediocre Windows 10 computer would be at least $1,200 and a top of the line one is about $2,300 so I decided I might as well get the better one.

I couldn’t really find what I wanted off the shelf, so I decided to build it myself. First off, I researched for a few days and then went to Canada Computers in to buy the parts. The system I decided on was the following.

1. Asus z390-E Gaming — Motherboard
2. Nvidia GE-Force GTX 1660 — Video Card
3. Corsair RM750 P.S. — Power Supply 750 watts
4. Intel i5-9600k — Microprocessor
5. Fractal Cooler S24-A10 — Cooler
6. G.Skill RipjawV 32 GB — Memory
7. Kingston SSD 224 GB — Solid State Drive
8. WD Black 1TB — Hard Drive
9. LiteOn Slim DVD 8x — External DVD Drive
10. Windows 10 64-bit Home — Operating System
11. Fractal Design R6-USB-c — Computer Case

Total Cost $2264 Canadian Dollars or about $1650 US dollars in Feb/2020

I’ve worked on many computers but this is was the first system I built myself so it was a bit of a learning experience…took about a week as I had some problems.

1. Firstly I assembled all the parts and turned on the computer – the monitor was blank and the motherboard had an error light (Dram). After two days of messing around, I found that I had not inserted one of the memory chips properly so the monitor stayed dead. With this fixed the computer booted and took me to the Bios screen. It showed a CPU Fan error. During assembly, the instructions were not clear where to attach the fans from the cooler. Eventually I found the fans both get hooked up to the CPU_FAN and CPU_OPT terminals near the top of the motherboard.

2. Those problems out of the way, now I had an ‘unknown’ problem as shown in the below Bios picture. It required installing a Raid system to fix it. I installed a Raid-1 system according to the instructions in the enclosed CD Bios. That seemed to fix it as the error message did not appear anymore. The problem now is, I’ve lost my 1TB drive as it is part of the Raid-1 system running in tandem or mirror image of the 240 GB SSD card. So now I suppose I have to buy another 1TB drive if I want extra storage…oh well, I’ll worry about that when I start installing programs and run out of storage.

3. Installing Windows 10 was a real pain… it failed at least 10 times…would lock up as in the ‘freeze’ picture below. It tried to do a ‘repair-PC’ after the 3rd failure and then go to the ‘reinstall’ mode. One time the installation made it all the way to ‘lets see what’s new from Microsoft’ screen and then lock up. I was always online during the installs but this didn’t seem to help. Anyway, I changed the keyboard and mouse…I’m not sure if this had anything to do with it but finally Windows 10 completely installed via the USB 3.0 external DVD install disc.

4. With Windows 10 finally installed, I have a new problem which I could never have imagined. The monitor hurts my eyes.
I bought an Asus 28 VP28UQG 4K UHD Gaming monitor with resolution of 3840 x 2160 for $320.oo Canadian dollars. After a couple hours my eyes were blurry. I could barely read the text on the screen. I tried numerous brightness, contrast, modes, etc. settings but nothing helped. For the next two days I thought there was something wrong with my settings. After much researching, I discovered that a high resolution 3840 x 2160 will have terrible graphics for black on white text as in emails or word documents. Wow, what a disappointment — I just spent over $2500.oo and I can’t use my new computer for emails and writing documents…I’m writing this now on my 9 year-old Asus P6T running Windows 7. Am I ever glad I kept this old computer as-is for working with black text on white. After a week I took back the new Asus monitor for a refund. While at the store I looked at other monitors, sure enough they all had weak dim text on the new Windows 10 high resolution monitors. I took my Windows 7 laptop into the store and showed the staff the clear text on it’s screen. I then got them to load the identical website on their new high resolution monitors…mine was much clearer. They shrugged it off, and basically said it’s the way it is. Anyway, I’m in the process of trying to solve this problem as best I can and will keep updating on here. Apparently, there are some DPi settings in the registry which might help, and also I’m going to experiment with Samsung Qled monitors.