I felt like building a new system for my dear old mum, who is still rocking my old Phenom II/R9 270X system. She's been wanting to get into playing some more recent games, and after pondering my options, I realized that I had accumulated nearly enough spare parts to put a relatively nice total system together for her. Through various upgrades of my own system and lack of motivation to sell my older parts on eBay, the only piece of the puzzle missing was a motherboard. After doing a bit of research, I landed on the MSI B450M PRO-VDH MAX to slot in my R5 2600 and RX 570.
It's a decent board for the price and is exactly what I was after. With a couple of 4-pin fan headers in addition to the CPU fan header, it's a step up from the absolute bottom of the barrel boards priced just below this one. I forgot to take a pic of it straight out of the box, so here is the box:
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Here's a nude. I installed my unused Wraith Prism cooler from my 3700X. Glad to put it to good use. The lighting effects on these coolers are, well, cool! I spent way to much time messing with the mirage effect settings lol.
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Here's the outside of the system before I drove it up to mum's place to surprise her. I spray painted the mesh front of my Cougar MX330-G white a couple of weeks ago. I thought it came out well; I found the black mesh just a bit bland. I still need to re-fill those PCI slot covers - I think I can get some cheap from Amazon.
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Oh, and I bought this electric chainsaw as a Christmas present to myself. No more screwing around with fiddly 2-stoke engines anymore! I tested it out yesterday and it cuts through some decent sized rounds like a hot knife through butter.
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