PC Building V4 - "ok SSDs got cheap, now do RAM next" - Hardware & Software

I really dislike most Phanteks cases because their front panels totally choke intake fans, but that one actually looks okay.

Feels like most higher-end cases these days are going this way. Just a sleek flat front with tiny intake slits cut into the sides, how the hell are the fans supposed to pull any amount of fresh air through that? Anyway, I have a couple questions that I figure you guys might know Is the Arctic MX4 paste supposed to be really thick and not runny at all? I have an old tube that I hadn't used in 5 years, maybe it's already dried up a little inside it. I ended up putting a slightly bigger line than usual on the cpu and tighten the cooler down real good just in case. The temps are pretty good, so I'm not really worried about it, just curious. What's the best software for controlling PWM case fans? Turns out my motherboard is pretty crap at it by default, it basically keeps them at around 40% speed all the time regardless of the temperatures or fan control settings in bios. Unless it's basing the pwm strength on something stupid like hard drive temps. I've tried Speedfan already, but it's quirky at best and doesn't set the speeds correctly all the time. Maybe I need to spend some more time on it to properly set it up.

Have you tried messing with the sensor your BIOS is taking temperatures from? On mine, the only one that works is "Tctrl."

Don't think there's an option for that in my bios. The only case fan settings are something along the lines of: normal, silent, full speed and manual. The manual setting allows you to set the speed from 0.75 to 2.5 PWM value/degree C (whatever that's supposed to mean), but no setting for which temperature that's based on, and even changing the value to max doesn't seem to do anything. The only option that seems to have a noticeable effect is the full speed one, the others seem kinda broken as they all keep the fans at ~40% constantly. The weird thing is, the exact same manual setting for the CPU fan works perfectly, it reacts to cpu temps as it should and it even scales up when you select the higher PWM values.

That is some hot garbage. Unfortunately I've never found any good fan control software for Windows.

Well, I suppose I can still try out the other fan headers to see if they behave any differently. Another option would be to connect all of them to the cpu fan header. The fans I bought actually come with splitters attached at the ends of their cables so you can chain multiple of them off of one header. That's not exactly an ideal solution though. I'd rather have them react to GPU or even mobo VRM temps since those are the places where you really could use the extra airflow.

Much better solution would be to use a SATA powered fan controller and run all your fans off of the CPU_FAN PWM signal.

PC Building V4 I did this with my motherboard that has fake 4 pin PWM headers and a bunch of 3 pins which all run at different speeds for the hell of it, while I've now put $75(including heatsink) into fans for a case I spent almost half that on I'd still say it's worth it since I had to replace dying fans. I definitely wouldn't daisy chain more than two fans to anything and I'm not even sure I'd do that. You could probably control it with Speedfan but that takes a bit to configure right and for me it didn't seem to work properly at all. Just dealing with my lame stock fan curve works fine although it would be nice if the idle speeds were cut in half.

damn bitch that is a good-looking setup you've got there. Once my 1080 arrives my build will be complete and u know I'm gonna be posting pictures EVERYWHERE

It's been a looong time that most of these parts have been with me, bought everything new in 2010. The oldest stuff still in here is the motherboard, heatsink, ram and a spare 500gb Baracuda that got tossed in at some point early on. It's killed at least 8 fans, if not a few more since I tossed a couple leftovers and the 5870 killed one and the replacement was starting to die before I got a R9 280. This thing was even pissed directly into at one point and I'm not kidding, it literally survived someone pissing into, on and around it while powered on. It killed the Antec 900 top fan and the PSU about a month later. The top fan actually exploded while I was using the computer and half the blades broke off a few days after it happened... https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/144519/01d4c70f-99d7-4785-8ef4-2f98fe27af2e/IMG_20120813_031646.jpg https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/144519/9aa28f25-8ff4-4287-a8eb-3bf6815c13b9/IMG_20120813_031602.jpg Man old cases were awful, I had to remove the side panel fan holder for the Noctua NH-D14 and then for some stupid reason I didn't realize the screw mounts weren't deep enough to take the screws when I put the mesh of the side panel back in and more than half of screws poked through on the side of the case and could cut or poke you. I think I reinstalled it with JB Weld later on but that was years ago and if I actually cared I still have the case in a closet I think. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/144519/bbe24716-1705-4015-a1b0-1029ee469f2a/20180905_170854.jpg https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/144519/6f366966-f387-4b0e-abe6-cf1b70e9a1b3/20180905_170640.jpg https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/144519/7f75c785-7605-447b-9a0e-f00defda0887/20180905_172855.jpg This build is pretty great, it also includes highlights such as taping over the insanely obnoxious "overclock level" led's and prying off all the metal covers from the vrm/northbridge heatsinks since there was giant gigabyte logos glued onto them which serve no purpose at all. The heatsinks on my $200 set of 3x2gb G.Skill Pi series had to be removed for the NH-D14 but I didn't do that for years and didn't run it in triple channel until like 2016. The front panel audio connector is located next to the northbridge heatpipe near the rear i/o so you have to drape an ugly wire across the middle of the motherboard. This board has massive issues with grounding and if you use the USB2 headers and front panel audio jacks with a shared ground like the Antec 900 does it gets insanely worse. If you experience a loud noise like someone screaming on VOIP or plug in a headset it will get stuck in a feedback loop of unplugging and plugging back in your audio device until Windows 7 memory leaks and the computer locks up hours later. One time I actually reformated windows 7 since I couldn't be bothered to manually uninstall built in drivers and the audio service was entirely broken from sitting like that for like a day. Not using either is really the best solution for me. No USB3 header for the front panel, but the USB3 isn't built into the chipset and didn't work on Windows 7 without drivers anyways so a add-in card was an easy fix. The board has Sata 3 but it's not built into the chipset and the Marvell controller is notorious for being slower than the standard chipset's Sata 2 and causing microstuddering in games. This too can be fixed with a LSI raid card off ebay for like $20 flashed to IT mode but it will increase boot times too. The top PCI-E x1 is blocked by the northbridge heatsink entirely. Intel's chipset supports AHCI but not natively as it boots into a "second bios" to load the disks but this was standard back then and it's really a non-issue. The eSata also does this too so god help you if you enable it all and it takes 3x as long to get to your OS. It doesn't have UEFI or a functioning Intel ME and you get to overclock locked Xeons with the base clock since the PCI clocks aren't tied to it so it definitely has stuff going for it at least. Oh also the leg broke off my sata connector on the SSD, no idea how it happened but I definitely found out that if you literally plug in a sata cord upside down nothing bad happens and the drive doesn't work. It's also kinda fun to patch microcodes into the bios because your motherboard vendor only offers a bios update with microcodes for westmere hexcores which is broken and refuses to post if you touch the Uncore multiplier which must be change to keep down the required voltage to the IMC since that's really the only limit with these Westmeres other than thermals. Although, this is only an issue if you are overclocking but if you bought a Gulftown and didn't overclock it to at least 4ghz and adjust the uncore you were missing out big time. I got ripped off and didn't realize that there was a revision 2.0 of this board which has a better VRM setup and paid full price for it. My memory never wanted to do the advertised speeds with the original i7 930, nor did that hit 4ghz like was the big thing with Nehalem back then. Nowadays 1866mhz ECC ram from a used Mac Pro is $12 for a 4gb stick and you can get similarly clocked quad core 32nm xeons to the 45nm i7 options for $5 shipped or the hexcores for $25-40 so I guess spending a ton on high end parts was actually worth it for like the first time ever. Motherboards are still at a minimum of $100 with the good ones being upto $150 or $800-1000 for the unicorn EVGA SR2 dual socket board. Moving this computer onto the desk for the first time was a huge change too, I haven't had to dust the front panel at all in 3 weeks which usually on the floor I would have to rinse it in the sink or shower just to get it clean by now. It's just beginning to be visibly dusty. The 1080 also does great in it and keeps up with pretty much everything modern but the 8700K. It's really hurt some feelings when I talk about my 8 year old junk heap and that it gets better fps and higher benchmark scores than something they spent over a grand on very recently. The $299.99 GTX 1080 usually does that too though. I really wouldn't recommend anyone seek out X58 but if you get your hands on a motherboard for dirt cheap, it can really swing hard at modern stuff still. https://www.3dmark.com/fs/16132976 https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/144519/29c82d04-7669-4e51-ae93-139bba1cc210/1076cb.PNG My old i7-930 at 3.8ghz only made 572cb so a Westmere on it's absolute edge of stability is a massive improvement, 638 was a X5660 without an overclock. The next big upgrade will putting an M.2 into this thing and booting from it but I don't really want to go out of my way to blow money on that as I want at least a 500gb SSD and I've spent enough money on this thing lately for quite a while. I will probably end up with a 1TB SSD, a X58 based Plex/NAS and no more disks in this case so I'll probably avoid that upgrade until I have a serious reason to do it. Maybe it'll decide to go up in smoke randomly and I'll finally join this decade and get something Zen 2 next year, who knows.

My fans are rated between between 0.1 and 0.2A each, I should be fine running three of them off of one header. I'll look into getting a fan hub, but I'm not sold on the idea of running everything based on CPU temps, I'd still prefer a software solution that takes other temperatures into account as well.

Is there some kind of USB/software based fan control kit where I can install my own temp sensors? My SATA SSD (mounted below my intake fan) seems to be warming my intake's air during heavy use, which is leading to other temperature issues and generally unpleasantly high ambient case temps. My solutions right now are to either point a fan down onto it so the heat it emits doesn't rise straight up, or find a way to mount it near the top of my case instead. However, if I can find a way to install more temp sensors between the intake and my CPU/GPU (in places like the VRMs and my NVMe drive) I could just have the intake itself crank up to compensate when this starts to happen.

There are USB fan hubs, but I don't think any support custom/nonstandard temperature sensors. I'd recommend just getting an extra fan in there at faster speeds if you can.

I'm about due for a new case sometime soon anyway, might just rearrange things for better cooling efficiency when that time comes. Speaking of, that case is already likely to be accompanied by a PSU upgrade, but aside from that I'm having trouble figuring out my next step. My current core components, for reference: Ryzen 5 1400 @3.2Ghz 16GB DDR4 @2333Mhz GTX 1070FE @1506Mhz 128GB NVMe SSD (Boot) 1TB SATA SSD (Bulk) Are there any obvious bottlenecks here, as far as gaming, VR, and content creation are concerned? Or am I basically done for now? I want my next workstation-related purchase to be my last one for a while, so if there's anything else I'm missing, ideally now would be the time.

A LOT of photo manip and vector stuff, as well as some light video content and hobby game prototyping on the side. I was originally considering an upgrade to an R5 1600. Is that still a good fit for what I'm doing compared to the R7 1700? Or would the R7 be a better value?

As far as Ryzen goes, I think you're basically better off the more cores you go. And R7 1700s are going for like $220 these days, which is fucking amazing IMO, considering I bought my 6-core Intel part for just over $500 a couple of years ago.

Man, with the number of cores getting put into even consumer level chips, imagine if someone crafted a WOW64 hack that forced all processes to spread their instructions evenly across all available threads, whether or not they natively support high core counts

This post is the reason why we need the optimistic rating back, doing something like that would absolutely destroy performance due to the latencies between cores and a massive increase in cache misses. The CPU designers are decades ahead of you on this one because modern CPU cores basically already do what you mentioned, just way more efficiently. They reorder instructions wherever it's reasonably possible and beneficial to do so and execute several of them at the same time. That's why a typical high-end CPU core has multiple ALUs and FPUs so it can do multiple calculations in parallel - not just when the software is explicitly parallelized with special SSE/AVX instructions, but with the usual non-parallel instructions as well, as long as there's no data dependencies between the consecutive instructions. It's called a superscalar CPU design if you want to read up on it more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superscalar_processor

anyone have any experience with HDR? even the bad implementation of HDR10 on the chg70 should be better than HDR400 shouldnt it? i ordered a samsung CHG70 for 400 but amazon keep fucking up the delivery, the only alternative i can see at the same price point is the ag322qc4

It's really a mixed bag, while the better color-depth afforded by HDR should be a no-brainer, often the problems with compatibility and windows generally handing shit like garbage. I'm pretty unhappy with how HDR has rolled out in the PC space. I'm pretty convinced both of those monitors use the same VA panel (a Samsung panel), the AOC just probably doesn't use a QD membrane, so the colors might not be as vivid as the Samsung model.

CHG70 User, I don't really use HDR much since not many games support it, but I've been playing BFV and it kinda forces on and it looks great. It can be vivid but I'd say it had more depth. I would use it if more games and streaming services support it on PC. I say it's a nice addition to a really good screen so you don't really miss out on alot, but it's super nice to add more to your visuals in some games.

amazon somehow lost the CHG70 and its the last on sold by them the others are 80-150 more. is the lower dpi on the 32 inch model noticable? its a choice between that and the Predator XB271HU

i took a risk and ordered a used - like new 27chg70 from what i read it just means the box is damaged such a fucking ordeal just to get a new monitor

To be clear, if a Fiji GPU is significantly hotter than it used to be and the cooler is still seemingly okay, the AMD Toothpaste probably went bad, right? I'm trying to fix mine up before I donate it to my sister.

What are some cool ideas for a Mini-ITX build? I wanted to make a portable machine on which I could do some basic gaming (at decent framerates too), browsing without being too limited in terms of raw / graphical processing power

2400G enough GPU power?

It's the minimum I'd go for, judging by what I've read about it. Maybe a one-fan 1050ti?

https://puu.sh/BrOX1/8a3df4c88d.png Double upgrade for BF and me!

For the first time in my life, I'm completely satisfied with every single part of my PC setup. The only things I can possibly think of would be replacing my DualShock 3 with a DS4 and replacing my G203 with a G503, but I can't justify the cost of either since both work fine. I almost want to cry, I grew up pretty poor and had to repurpose some pretty old hardware throughout my childhood but now I actually, finally have an up-to-date, modern, almost fuckin top of the line system. It's a wonderful feeling.

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1879/044e6940-db3e-4cb0-8ac9-3bc6dc6996d7/image.png https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/mdYbyX Since I recently moved and shipping my pc + monitor here would cost upwards of €150 I decided to just buy a new one. Gonna buy it in a month or 2. Anyone got any suggestions on this build?