Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

I started posting information about my new PC build here but as usual I completely failed to complete it, so here's what I finally ended up with and a 1 week report.

The final spec that I ended up with is:

-Corsair HX750i PSU
-ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero Z370 motherboard
-Intel i7 8700k hex-core processor
-Deepcool/Gamerstorm Captain 240EX RGB AIO liquid cooler
-32GB G.Skill Trident Z RGB DDR4 3466MHz RAM (4x8GB)
-ASUS Strix ROG GTX 1080Ti
-1TB Samsung 960 EVO M.2 SSD
-1TB Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSD
-1TB Samsung 840 EVO SATA SSD
-2TB WD Green mechanical drive (archive data)
-Corsair Crystal Series 570X case
-3x Deepcool 120mm RGB fans (replacing the standard Corsair ones for AURA control)

The 850, 840 and WD green drives were migrated from my old machine along with the 1080Ti, while that was repurposed as a home server (replacing the old Core 2 Quad). It also does video capture and encoding duties. The spec of that bundle of silence is:

-Corsair HX750i PSU (I got this one first for the 0rpm fan and was so impressed I bought another)
-ASUS Z97 Pro Gamer motherboard
-Intel Core i5 4690k processor
-Be Quiet! Dark Rock Slim CPU Cooler (it makes no noise)
-16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3
-120GB OCZ Agility3 OS drive
-MS Storage Space (two-way mirror mode) consisting of:
-2x 120GB Kingston SATA SSD (Tier 1)​
-4x WD Red 3TB (Tier 2)​
-Fractal Design R5 black
-A pair of Be Quiet SilentWings 120mm fans front and rear
-Quantum LTO4 SCSI tape drive
-HP PCIE SCSI card

So, the 1 week (roughly) update. The build of the new machine went as well as I could expect, however routing all of the cables for the front fans was tricky due to them having RGB control cables along with the standard 4-pin cable. The case has essentially a spine that the cables run down with a metal cover over the top, this is crammed full over cables so was tricky to get back on. Both the CPU AIO cooler and the three front fans both had a fan hub included, designed to control the speed of multiple fans from one motherboard header. Initally neither of these worked, the motherboard complaining about the CPU fan not being connected and the chassis fan showing a blank. I connected the two radiator fans to the CPU_FAN and CPU_OPT headers individually, no easy thing with the radiator fitted as it completely blocks access to the headers at the top of the board, and that solved the problem. The front fans began working after I fiddled around with the cables, the instructions don't mention it but one of the 4-pin headers on the Deepcool fan hub is white and it seems that this is the only one to relay an RPM signal back to the motherboard. They now work fine.

I also had a bit of trouble with the fan speed on the 1080Ti, a cable was stopping one of the fans from turning and apparently that fan is in charge of reporting the speed so it would randomly go to 100% fan speed while still showing 0% in the software. It's now fine.

The processor is very impressive. I'm not pushing it past its Turbo speed yet but it's already more than twice as fast as my previous machine when encoding a 50 minute 1080p h.264 video. After encoding for 45 minutes (3 50 minute videos) the temperature was up at 73C, the fans were just on the edge of ramping up to maintain that. It was still incredibly quiet compared to my previous setup with the stock Intel cooler. In Premiere Pro I was able to skip smoothly through 2.7k60 video with the preview set at full resolution, previously I was struggling to skip through 1080p60 video at 1/4 resolution at times. No doubt the memory and better SSD help here too.

Along with the 1080Ti it managed over 100fps at UHD resolution in Forza 7 and happily stuck to 60fps while recording at full resolution in OBS. Due to supply issues I had to pay over the odds to get this processor, I didn't realise there was a problem until after I had bought the Z370 motherboard and the due date from my supplier was pushed back by a month. It seems like there is still a problem.

The 960 EVO benchmarked at 3GB/s read and 1.5GB/s write and although it's very difficult to see that in every day performance I'm very impressed with how responsive the whole machine is. Boot time is less than 10 seconds. having everything on SSD makes it a dream to work on

I'm generally impressed with the RGB features and don't regret spending the extra to get them. I have had one or two teething problems with AURA, it has crashed and locked the colorurs once requiring me to switch the machine off at the mains to reset it. It also reverted to default settings for some reason yesterday. The Deepcool fans on the case and cooler all match and have a nice light spread, as do the RGB RAM modules. Every RGB item appears to be able to produce identical colours, which is something I was concerned about initially. I have it set to sweep between green and blue in a gradient at the moment. Video below of some of the stuff it can do, with added cat butt. The colours aren't a perfect representation unfortunately but whatever.

Regarding the case I love the way it looks but the positioning of the power button and USB ports on the top is a little tricky to access under my desk and I'm paranoid about scratching the glass panels or getting finger prints on them, to the point where I'm wearing gloves when I take the panels off and put them back on again.

 
The 960 Evo is indeed very nice. I use one for the OS and another one for games. Compared to the old 840 loading times have decreased drastically in several games.
 
Nice build. Does the spinning drive stop when you're not using it? Does that actually work for you? (I have a USB HDD storage device which I keep unplugged because otherwise it keeps spinning up randomly - I guess because of Windows search indexing & whatnot...)

Also, you're not taking advantage of the fan headers on the Strix? Because of the rendering workloads I guess? Have you tested your rendering temperatures on the CPU with the front fans stopped? Then again 73C at stock is already pretty high... that Intel TIM, feels bad man.
 
Jupix said:
Nice build. Does the spinning drive stop when you're not using it? Does that actually work for you? (I have a USB HDD storage device which I keep unplugged because otherwise it keeps spinning up randomly - I guess because of Windows search indexing & whatnot...)
Click to expand...

It does spin down, it gets used so rarely but I haven't really noticed how often it spins up. No doubt it's more noticeable with a USB drive. I had some problems with spinning down on the server that I forgot to mention, while the previous build would spin the disks down after a few minutes when set to the 'night' power plan this new build wouldn't spin down at all. Some digging led me to reports of a bug in the Intel Rapid Storage Technology drivers version 14+ which stop the disks spinning down correctly. Now the driver has been reverted back to the Windows standard AHCI driver (not a problem with software RAID through the Storage Space) they spin down fine. The machine is almost completely silent. The disks just spun up while I was writing this, no idea why but they don't stay running for long.

Jupix said:
Also, you're not taking advantage of the fan headers on the Strix? Because of the rendering workloads I guess? Have you tested your rendering temperatures on the CPU with the front fans stopped? Then again 73C at stock is already pretty high... that Intel TIM, feels bad man.
Click to expand...

You mean the Strix 1080Ti or the motherboard? Technically there isn't any Strix naming on the motherboard but they have so many different names it's confusing. I didn't feel the need initially to use more fan headers than necessary, after all the speed of both CPU fan headers is directly linked. While troubleshooting the problem with the front fans I attempted to use all three chassis fan headers but the cables are too short. I do have the coolant pump plugged in to the AIO header, that's also PWM controlled.

I haven't tried the temps with the front fans stopped, I do wonder if they're having a positive or negative effect on the air flow through the radiator. That temp was hotter than I would've liked but it doesn't seem like it's unusual even with an liquid cooler.
 
Matt2000 said:
You mean the Strix 1080Ti or the motherboard? Technically there isn't any Strix naming on the motherboard but they have so many different names it's confusing. I didn't feel the need initially to use more fan headers than necessary, after all the speed of both CPU fan headers is directly linked. While troubleshooting the problem with the front fans I attempted to use all three chassis fan headers but the cables are too short.
Click to expand...

I meant the 1080ti. You know you have 2 fan headers on the GPU which allow the case fans to be controlled according to GPU temps. After all, when exhaust is usually always present (with a big AIO) there is always some airflow to keep motherboard components, drives and RAM cool enough. That only leaves GPU particularly starved for cool airflow during gaming and therefore it makes sense that extra case ventilation spins up when gaming and is stopped (silent) otherwise.

The 1080ti fan headers are particularly awesome precisely because they stop the fans when the GPU is idling.

In my build, the bottom 4 fans are always stopped until I run a game for a few minutes:

WFpcWIo.jpg



I haven't tried the temps with the front fans stopped, I do wonder if they're having a positive or negative effect on the air flow through the radiator. That temp was hotter than I would've liked but it doesn't seem like it's unusual even with an liquid cooler.
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Yeah... makes sense. Dat garbage Intel TIM. Delidding drops the temperatures by like 20C on the 8700k. :(

 
I had no idea I had extra headers on the GPU. :lol:

AI Suite references the CPU and GPU temps for the fans so I hope that's spinning them up to provide enough airflow. I wouldn't want to change the way it works at the moment though, I want to keep the front fans spinning at all times for visual effect if nothing else. :)
 
There's more maintenance, though. The TIM they use at least lasts for the entire expected lifetime of the CPU, where as deliding and replacing it requires further procedures every year or so, less if you use liquid metal.
 
During Intel Burn Test, my 7700K with all cores running at 4.8 GHz goes up to 60 ?C. And that's after replacing the TIM with liquid metal. With the standard interface it was a lot toastier, even at default clocks. It feels like the standard TIM is just barely good enough to keep the CPU from throttling back at max load.

I can also reach 4.9 and 5.0 GHz, but the required voltage scales quite badly with the performance gain, and the fans have to work harder to keep the CPU cool. That's just not worth a 4% increase in clock speeds.
 
IceBone said:
There's more maintenance, though. The TIM they use at least lasts for the entire expected lifetime of the CPU, where as deliding and replacing it requires further procedures every year or so, less if you use liquid metal.
Click to expand...

If only they still soldered them like on Haswell-E and like AMD is currently doing. :(
 
The one thing i really love about my Ryzen build is that it tends to run really cool. I doubt I have hit 50C(damn funky temps), but I have not pushed it that hard. Most of the time the fans are barely spinning. when they do spool up, it tends to be for a few seconds at a time.

I really overbuilt for what most of my uses are. I do have plans on expanding those though.
 
Yep, my R3 1200 at stock maxed out at 43 Celsius, with the CPU cooler fan at idle. That's absolute, not delta over ambient. And it wasn't even undervolted. Pretty hilarious to be honest. It was totally runnable without any fan, but instead I decided to overclock for 23% more performance.
 
R3 1200 isn't exactly a powerhouse. Full package consumption is 40W, the i7 8700k's is over twice as much. It'd be more fair to compare it to the R7 1800X. Sure, temps would be lowered via soldering, but that completely removes the possibility of deliding for other purposes, because you destroy the die in the process.

?\_(?)_/?
 
My 1700x draws nearly as much as the 1800x. I do run an AIO, or CLC (depends on who prefers to call it what), and it is pretty quiet. The Intel TIM mess has been going on for sometime now. Do you remember when Intel said users should not overclock chips meant to be overclocked?


I will also say that I did buy a case with an open front and top for the airflow, and that makes a huge difference in comparison to what a lot of cases offer these days.
 
I have an overclocked i7 4790k with pretty shitty TIM too. 240mm CLC and the fans rarely exceed 1000 rpm on my custom curve.
 
Jupix said:
Yep, my R3 1200 at stock maxed out at 43 Celsius, with the CPU cooler fan at idle. That's absolute, not delta over ambient. And it wasn't even undervolted. Pretty hilarious to be honest. It was totally runnable without any fan, but instead I decided to overclock for 23% more performance.
Click to expand...

That about the same temps I get out of my i5 7400 with a Cryorig H7 at minimum rpm (300)
 
I recently realized that Spotify desktop (at least on Linux) does not have an equalizer, seems like basic functionality....
 
Random thoughts.... [Tech Edition]

I just want a main EQ on computers. I don?t want App specific ones so that web videos continue to sound like ass while iTunes and others have EQ?s. One thing HP did right with B&O speakers. There?s an app that has a graphic EQ. Great because the mid frequencies are a bit much. Typical for laptop speakers though.
 
93Flareside said:
I just want a main EQ on computers. I don?t want App specific ones so that web videos continue to sound like ass while iTunes and others have EQ?s. One thing HP did right with B&O speakers. There?s an app that has a graphic EQ. Great because the mid frequencies are a bit much. Typical for laptop speakers though.
Click to expand...

Depending on your audio chipset it does exist, at least on Windows. Realtek audio has EQ. I don't get how to properly use a EQ though so the sound coming out of my computer is pretty lifeless at the default (the presets that Realtek uses are bad and they replace the MS "Audio Enhancements" with their own ones which blow in comparison)
 
I think I'm finally gonna replace my aging DLink DIR-615. Don't want to spend an absurd amount of money on a new router. Narrowed it down to choice A or choice B. Any input/suggestions/recommendations? Both seem to have more or less decent reviews, but I'm leaning with the TP-Link. Also open to other options, but I want to keep it in the $40-60 price range.
 
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My much older ASUS router has served me pretty well, it did start acting up eventually but I put a weird Russian custom firmware on it and it's been great since.
 
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