Build a PC for Mum

What a day!

I made a trip to Bizgram at Sim Lim Square after having done my homework from the price list that Bizgram publishes, as noted before.

I like Bizgram---I've been buying parts from them to build various PCs for a very long time. Their prices are transparent and reliable, and more importantly, have a wide enough variety to make it really easy to get all the hardware in one place. Back in the old days, it was normal to go round grabbing the printed price lists from a few of the larger hardware retailers before retiring momentarily to the food court in the basement to work out the ``cheapest'' combination by scouting about. I think that I got into the PC-building game a little too late for these to make much sense---at best, we're talking about anything between ten and twenty dollars saved for the large items. It's still money saved, don't get me wrong, but for the effort it takes, I think I'd be happy to pay the extra.

One thing that I refuse to pay extra though is the credit/debit card percentage. It's always better to deal with cash in Sim Lim Square because it avoids the 4--5% surcharge from the credit card. Why the retailers don't ``eat'' that like other retailers in other sectors do is something that I do not quite understand; my guess is that the margins on the PC hardware are already thin as it is, and it could be a coalition thing where the majority of the vendors have decided to keep things that way.

Anyway, here's what I got for mum's new PC:

Description	Price
Gigabyte B560M DS3H AC + Core i5-11500 (μATX) bundle	SGD 475
Crucial DDR4-3200 (8G x2)	SGD 146
Seagate Barracuda 510 (256GB)	SGD 108
Seagate Barracuda HDD 3.5 (2TB)	SGD 78
Seasonic 80 Plus Bronze S12III-550w Silent	SGD 84
Corsair Carbide Series 275Q Mid-Tower	SGD 98
Total	SGD 989

I needed to get an HDMI to VGA converter to re-use the existing monitor, and got it for SGD 10 from Win Micro next door.

That means the whole build is SGD 999 even. That was not expected actually. In the original build, I was intending to get a ``Cooler Master SILENCIO S400 m-ATX CASE'' for SGD 110, but they didn't have stock, and so I ended up getting the Corsair one which is black with no tempered glass. Putting it together wasn't too hard, partly due to the stupid amounts of Linus Tech Tips videos that I have been watching.

In fact, I even did ``cable management''. Here's how the completed build looks like:

Back in the old days, I would never even think of managing cables out of the way of the main working area. This is by far, the neatest hardware set up in a chassis that I have done.

But the same cannot be said for the operating system.

As usual, I started with Xubuntu, and specifically, the Xubuntu 20.04 LTS release. The SSD was set up to be the operating system drive, while the HDD was used for /home. The on-board wireless radios had drivers working sort of out-of-the-box.

It was the Intel Integrated Graphics (IGP) that was somehow stuck in 1024×768 @ 75 Hz land. The problem is that the IGP shouldn't need an external device driver the way Nvidia graphics cards do since the Linux kernel already supports almost all modern IGP.

I tried everything I could, even installing the beta version of Xubuntu 21.04 to see if there was an update to the i915 driver (there wasn't).

In the end, the fix, as applied to the beta install, was simply this:

1. Use lspci to determine the device ID for the IGP (the IGP device ID for the Core i5-11500 is 4c8a).
2. Create a new file /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf as root.
3. The contents of i915.conf is just

   options i915 force_probe=device ID

   In my case, the line will be

   options i915 force_probe=4c8a

4. Reboot.

And that's it. After that little option setting, the HDMI output is a glorious 1920×1080.

I think the crux of the problem is the newness of the 11-th generation Intel processor. It is so new that lspci did not even return a string representing the discovered device IDs for all the PCI devices---I only realised this when I compared to the output of lspci in the currently still-working version of mum's PC.

I'm almost completely done with the build---I need to re-install the operating system to use the Long-Term Support (LTS) release version and check if this fix works (I think it ought to). Then I need to run some burn-in tests, before spending some time transferring the existing files that are in the old PC into the new one.

That'll take a while, and I have left the re-installation of the operating system to tomorrow---it should be stupid easy to do. For those who are curious about how it is done, it is as simple as the following:

1. Get a bit-torrent client like Transmission.
2. Find the relevant release directory, and grab the Torrent file to open in the bit-torrent client. For reference, this is 20.04 LTS, and this is the beta of 21.04.
3. Grab UNetbootin.
4. Once the ISO is done downloading, run UNetbootin with a thumb drive, select the ISO, and have it set up on the thumbdrive.
5. Armed with the thumb drive, load it into the target PC's USB port and boot it up.
6. When the motherboard's logo is showing, wail away on the F12 key till the boot menu comes up.
7. Select the thumbdrive from the list, and then follow the rest of the on-screen instructions for a live boot and/or install of Xubuntu.

I really want to play some Cyberpunk 2077, especially when Hotfix 1.21 was just dropped today, but I may take a rain-check---I'm feeling bloody knackered.

I think that's enough for today. Till the next update then.