The "New Toys" Thread

First I had the HDD on rubber pads, but still a lot of vibration was transmitted to case. Then I hanged it with cloth covered rubber bands, and it is now better. For some reason there is still some resonance though. Feels like this is the noisiest HDD I have had, but then again I think it feels only like that because the rest of the system is so silent.
 
It is interesting that quieter the build gets, even more quiet I want it to be.

No kidding, a significant reason I got the Strix's was to get rid of the idling noise of the reference GTX 980's (the quietest blower cooler in recent history). The Strix's fans stop at idle. Also I can now connect my case intakes to actual fan headers on the GPU's so they stop at idle as well.

Now I'm tearing my hair out because there are some very quiet ticking noises from some fan bearings somewhere. :lol:

Some pics:

e3aUKLl.jpg


The sag is real.

Bo1NGLD.jpg


Size comparison. Suddenly a 980 looks tiny and adorable...

f7rnSH3.jpg


Dat framerate.

Oh and peak power consumption so far: 941 W.
 
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You wait until the cooling block for my 1080 ti arrives tomorrow... :p

In all seriousness though, nice PC.

(but the PSU is a bit dusty)
 
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First I had the HDD on rubber pads, but still a lot of vibration was transmitted to case. Then I hanged it with cloth covered rubber bands, and it is now better. For some reason there is still some resonance though. Feels like this is the noisiest HDD I have had, but then again I think it feels only like that because the rest of the system is so silent.

Put your HDDs in a NAS in a different and make your desktops and laptop all-SSD (or diskless, if you're nuts). Tht way the HDDs can make all the noise they want and you get to never hear em.

No kidding, a significant reason I got the Strix's was to get rid of the idling noise of the reference GTX 980's (the quietest blower cooler in recent history). The Strix's fans stop at idle. Also I can now connect my case intakes to actual fan headers on the GPU's so they stop at idle as well.

Now I'm tearing my hair out because there are some very quiet ticking noises from some fan bearings somewhere. :lol:

Some pics:

<snip>

The sag is real.

<snip>

Size comparison. Suddenly a 980 looks tiny and adorable...

<snip>

Dat framerate.

Oh and peak power consumption so far: 941 W.

I'm surprised you haven't built a full custom liquid-cooling loop that cools GPUs and CPU and have the fan control for that done via the liquid's temperature.
 
I'm surprised you haven't built a full custom liquid-cooling loop that cools GPUs and CPU and have the fan control for that done via the liquid's temperature.

Maybe later but honestly, full custom loops are a little hardcore even for me. Apart from the cost (approaches 1000? for a nice loop) it takes quite some effort and skill to get it right the first time, and requires maintenance... not to mention having to re-engineer parts of it later in case parts get upgraded like now. Air is so wonderfully easy and even good these days.
 
I'm not sure I've spent that much on my watercooling. And most of the stuff can be kept for a long time. The pump, radiators, fans, tubes, the cpu block (ok that depends on the mount holes of future sockets and the availability of conversion kits) can all be used over a very long period of time.

In order to keep my cooling blocks clean I installed filters before each of the blocks, and the maintenance is down to replacing the filters every 6 months and refilling the balancer tank while I'm at it. Apart from that I haven't had an issue with water cooling, and I've been using a custom loop for propably 6 years now.

The only annoying thing is that you really really really burn your money on full cover coolers for your graphics card, because they can only be used with exactly this type of graphics card, and when you sell the card usually people want the stock air cooler installed because they don't have watercooling (and the type of people that have watercooling don't buy 4 year old graphics cards).


Initially I ran my two GTX780 on air but the upper card was basically choked by the lower card, with only a very small gap remaining between the two. Therefore the upper card almost immediately went to 100% fan speed and reduced its gpu speed to the base clock. With watercooling both cards could be OC'ed to about 125% clock speed and remained at that speed because the temperature on both GPUs was around 45 ?C.

Right now I honestly have a new GTX 1080 ti sitting around since a couple of days because I'm waiting on the new full cover cooler before I replace my two 780s with it. And seeing how SLI is not all that well implemented for a couple of games I'm playing right now, I opted to go with only one card for now. I also downsized from 6048x1200 to 3440x1440, but now with 100 Hz instead of 60, so I guess the smaller amount of pixels is countered by the higher frame rate.
 
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No kidding, a significant reason I got the Strix's was to get rid of the idling noise of the reference GTX 980's (the quietest blower cooler in recent history). The Strix's fans stop at idle. Also I can now connect my case intakes to actual fan headers on the GPU's so they stop at idle as well.

Now I'm tearing my hair out because there are some very quiet ticking noises from some fan bearings somewhere.

I got the Msi Gaming X for the same reason. And now the noisy fan in my psu is pissing me off, it's even louder than the stock Intel cooler on my CPU... Still really glad I went diskless.
 
gtx1080_1.jpg


gtx1080_2.jpg


I never even bothered with the aircooler. Now that I installed the graphics card, just out of the box (ok with a powertarget of 120%) it runs at 1898 MHz instead of 1582 MHz. And a quick OC to 2000 MHz showed it still being stable* with default voltage and 39 ?C during Superposition Benchmark:

GTX1080quickOC.jpg


Me gusta.

*The stability was tested outside of the benchmark, obviously.
 
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Look at all that sexy copper... :woot:
 
It's a shame that the card is mounted upside down.

Next week I'm gonna delid a 7700K and replace Intel's shitty thermal grease with something proper.

It's funny that nowadays I basically void the warranty on brand new hardware upwarts of 1000 ? without thinking too much about it. It is however sad that Intel basically forces you to replace their factory thermal grease because they use the shittiest stuff they can get their hands on, thus limiting the CPU (probably in the hope to sell you a 10% faster CPU in about a year - that will suffer from the same high temperatures).

It's also ridiculous how long CPUs nowadays last. I'm still running a 2600K right now, which is ancient by modern standards (slow RAM, low bandwidth on the PCIe port - it's only PCIe 2.0), but I still get within 2% of the Superposition score of someone running the same graphics card and same speed gets on a brand new 7700K.
 
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Completely deliding and putting the waterblock right on the die or just replacing the TIM?
 
Nah, I'm gonna put the heatspreader back. Apparently people get better temps when the heatspreader is back in place. Also it's kind of there for a reason (protecting that precious DIE) ;) And without it I would have to fiddle with the waterblock height and pressure.
 
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Can't decide which keyboard I should keep... I quite like the short keystroke of the Steelseries propiertary swithces, but still writing feels a bit more natural with the Logitech's brown ones. Writing seems to be about as fast with both, but I think it feel easier to make mistakes with the Steelseries.

A local online retailer was selling both for a real bargain price (49 EUR for the G610 and 89 for the M800). I didn't have previous experience with modern mechanical keyboards, so didn't really know what to expect. That's why I just ended up buying both and testing them out. I can then return the one I like less. The retailer lets you use the product for as long as 30 days before returning.
 
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I like the look of the larger spacebar on the Steelseries but using that would put me all about at work using a bog standard Dell keyboard. Still rocking a BlackWidow here with Cherry MX Blues.
 
I own a G610 with browns and I love it, FWIW. The media controls and volume knob are always welcome (got tired of Fn+key after my second laptop.) and I love how it feels to write in it (it makes the ISO Dell membrane keyboard at my office feel mushy and without enough key travel). Having said that, while I love the hardware, I find the software somewhat less palatable but still needed if you want to have anything but that annoying wave effect on.

The above is not an unbiased opinion, but you also seem to be siding with the Logitech (more natural writing, more difficult to make mistakes.)

A final thing to note is that the spacebar on the G610 is non-standard and so, should you want to switch keycaps later on, the included with your new set will probably won't fit.
 
Love love love the volume "wheel" on my Corsair keyboard, and it has browns. It's pretty nice, but sometimes i do wish the key travel was a little shorter...but that's my only complaint.

to reply to the comment below and to not thread-jack, I actually already installed rubber o-rings and it helped both the bottoming-out noise, and the travel.
 
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Adding o-rings will reduce overall travel a bit and quiet them down, though some people don't prefer the slightly different feel they give. As for the potential for issues with buying different key caps later on, the one set I've purchased came with, iirc, three different sizes for space bar and those alongside it.

Also, green switches or bust.
 
Maybe later but honestly, full custom loops are a little hardcore even for me. Apart from the cost (approaches 1000? for a nice loop) it takes quite some effort and skill to get it right the first time, and requires maintenance... not to mention having to re-engineer parts of it later in case parts get upgraded like now. Air is so wonderfully easy and even good these days.

As CD82 said, the big investment of everything besides the GPU blocks tends to last for ages, and in the case of the GPU, you can get EVGA's hydrocopper cards if you're particularly lazy.

As for maintenance, I gave it a really good think a while ago, and I reckon that using something completely inert like 3M's Novec-7500 would make it completely maintenance free. You'd likely need more pumps though - the various Novec formulations all hover around 1.4-1.6x the density of water and have about 1/3 the specific heat capacity (~0.4x the specific volumetric heat capacity of water). You also have to either use hardline or neoprene tubing - Novec and it's more annoying relative, fluorinert, apparently have a nasty tendency of leaching plasticizer from normal tubing.

It's not entirely unheard of either: a few people have done it with both Novec and Fluorinert and didn't report a pressing need to go back to water.

It is however sad that Intel basically forces you to replace their factory thermal grease because they use the shittiest stuff they can get their hands on, thus limiting the CPU (probably in the hope to sell you a 10% faster CPU in about a year - that will suffer from the same high temperatures).

Apparently Intel had issues with repeated thermal shocks cracking the small desktop dies and solder with their solder-based attachment when they hit 22nm (I later did some digging and found the papers they published - the issue definitely seems real enough). As a result, they replaced it with TIM for the desktop lineup. The big, bad HEDT and server chips keep their solder-based attach for efficiency, because the die is quite literally a lot bigger.

In the case of the Intel TIM chips, from what I've been told by other delidders and various forum posts, the issue isn t actually the TIM, but rather the thickness of the TIM applied due to how thick the heatspreader glue is. Delidding gets rid of said glue and brings the whole thing so much closer makes it run so much cooler.
 
Still seems like something that Intel could do better out of the box. Either use less glue or account for the glue by reducing the height of the heatspreader accordingly. They've had this issue ever since they switched their desktop models to TIM instead of soldering.
 
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