The only parts carried over from the old build are the 620W GeForce PSU, 16GB of Corsair RAM, the ancient MSI GT 760 GPU, and the ASUS motherboard itself.
The build process overall was exactly like every other time I've had to do anything with a desktop PC - fairly straightforward except for inexplicable irritations that always pop up.
After ripping everything out of the old case, I was stopped dead in my tracks by the realization that I did not have any screws with which to mount the 960GB M.2 SSD I'd acquired. The SSD did not come with any, and whatever ones were included with the motherboard are long gone. This led to an hour-long adventure of driving around town to every computer repair shop to see if they had the screws I needed. Finally a guy had a screw that kinda worked, and I gave him $10 for saving my day. I ordered a pack of official replacement screws online that I'll replace the hodge-podge one with when it arrives.
The next puzzle was figuring out what case screws went with what. Fractal Design had been kind enough to include a bag of assorted screws, but not kind enough to include any sort of inventory of them or directions on what to do with them. You're just supposed to Know.
So there was a lot of putting screws in then taking them back out and putting them somewhere else.
The rest of the assembly was fairly straightforward. All the fiddly little front panel wires and such were connected properly. The computer booted on my first attempt! The only issue was the UEFI didn't see my fancy new blu-ray drive nor my HDD for storage, only the NVMe SSD. A brief glance at the manual confirmed that installing an SSD into the M.2 slot disables 2 of the SATA ports - the exact two I'd decided to use. A change of connectors and I was off to the races!
Windows installed, no issue. Everything works. Just gotta get all my software set up.
One annoyance I've run into is trying to install Pioneer's Drive Utility software. It allows you to configure some options for the blu-ray drive. I primarily just want to switch the drive into whatever its "performance mode" is, so it prioritizes speed in ripping my discs over everything else.
And yet, no matter what I do, I can't get the damn software to install. It says it's extracting a .msi file, then I get a message that simply says "Not found" and then it says the installation was cancelled. I've done a dozen different things, I don't know what I can do to make it work. FML. But that's a minor inconvenience, the whole system Just Works otherwise!
I'll probably upgrade the GPU and PSU... Someday. It's really not top priority for me.
This $50 Fractal Design computer case I got is not immune from the Blue LED plague. The power indicator is a bright blue ass eye-searing dot of blue LED bullshit. Thankfully, PC's are cool, and I was able to quickly open the case and just Unplug the power indicator LED from the motherboard.
The blinking red LED for drive access is less offensive, but I'll probably end up unplugging it anyways too, because LEDs are just fucking distracting and this thing is going to be sitting in my room a few feet from my bed.
If these LEDs were simply, like, 25% the brightness that they currently are, I wouldn't have any problem with them. But as they are (as ALL LEDs in modern tech are), my astigmatic-ass eyes will look upon them and feel like I'm staring into a laser beam that's going to blind me in a few seconds if I don't look away.
Reminder that there is an ACTUAL PRODUCT you can BUY whose sole purpose is to reduce the searing brightness of modern LEDs in appliances and tech, and they sell extremely well. Like, this is an industry-wide problem that we all just Put Up With because we somehow got convinced this was Normal. Fuck blue LEDs running at full brightness in every single electronic product sold today.