Please look at the examples below. Validation requires:

• URL if applicable (all 3DMark benchmarks, Geekbench, SuperPosition, etc.)
• Full desktop showing taskbar, clock, etc. (no trimmed or cropped snips)
• CPU-Z x3 (first 3 tabs, CPU, Motherboard, Memory)
• GPU-Z x1 Graphics Card tab (if the benchmark includes GPU performance measurement)

Have fun and feel free to chat about anything related to overclocking and benching here. The dumb questions are those not asked.

See these examples for CPU-Only Validation and CPU+GPU Validation benchmark screenshots.

Edit: There is a link in this post for some old game benchmarks.

For drives I will install 4 8tb Seagates and run them in a raid array to give protection of data. If I can't get this to work correctly I may swap in a whole new board, chip and go that route for the server.  Either way,  it will be setup in the next two week for use! 

I will keep a progress report going once I start in on it!

HUANUO Standing Desk Frame with 220lbs Powerful Brushless Motor

HUANUO Double Crossbeam Standing Desk Frame

Can anyone here share their experience or advice on which system is more worth in 2025?Thanks in advance.

So to give some context in this upgrade going to have to rewind a bit. I had just finished doing another modification to the Alienware 17 R1, already had lost my sound due to BCLK tampering and now the screen started flickering when the GPU was screwed ever so slightly too tight. Frustrated and tired of tearing down the system I decided to make my way to MicroCenter. 

It appears this was the perfect time to buy a new system as AMD 3xxx had dropped so pricing on the 2700x was dirt cheap, and in the deals they have for buying a motherboard together with the CPU and it worked out to about 160 USD for the 2700x. I did splurge a bit with the X570 ITX board with the idea of, I would eventually buy what ever the top of the line chip was at the end of the line for AM4. Waited a bit as the pricing really sucked in comparison to when I purchased the 2700x, recently the price dropped to 270. Hence, here we are. Oh and 10850K makes a cameo appearance as well! 

Here are the specs for all systems involved. 

2700X @ 4.0Ghz w/ PA 120 SE w/3x Nidec Servo 2150RPM

32GB DDR4 3200Mhz (XMP)

RTX 3090 +100/+1200/@119PL

2560x1440 VSYNC OFF

5800X3D @ 4.450Ghz w/ PA 120 SE w/3x Nidec Servo 2150RPM

32GB DDR4 3200Mhz (XMP)

RTX 3090 +100/+1200/@119PL

2560x1440 VSYNC OFF

10850K @ 5.0Ghz w/ NH-D15 w/Arctic 140mm P14 

16GB DDR4 4400Mhz

RTX 3090 +100/+1200/@119PL

2560x1440 VSYNC OFF

Now on to some benchmarks!

Horizon: Zero Dawn had a rough launch, but I enjoyed playing it regardless as I resisted the temptation to buy a PS4 and was "rewarded" with a PC release. I think its in better shape now, might replay again soon.

From the above data, the 2700X does "just fine" for Horizon: Zero Dawn. However, benchmark does point out that it does drop to 38 FPS which is pretty noticeable on a 144hz panel. It doesnt happen often, but once a pattern is noted, its hard to not notice it. The 5800X3D does have a healthy bump across min/avg/max readings as well as surpass the tuned 10850K as well. Its not enough to justify switching platforms but it is note worthy.

Returnal - This was a new title in my rotation, ended up enjoying it more than I suspected I would. A challenging game that punishes you failing and rewards you for not failing. There is no succeeding in this game.

This title doesnt seem to benefit much from either the 5800X3D or the 10850K. There are definitive gains, but not enough to jump to either platform. Appears to be mostly GPU bound title.

Rise of the Tomb Raider - I've enjoyed the reboot TR games, for some reason I stopped playing Shadow of the Tomb Raider but I might pick it up again. didnt know before hand but it appears that Tomb Raider is one of the titles that L3 cache appears to play a larger role in. As a result I took more time with this title. The next 4 graphs will be ROTTR at various settings noted in each graph. 

ROTTR goes through 3 areas to capture FPS data. I abbreviated each run on the charts to simplify how its presented. STD shorthand for Standard, and AA shorthand for Anti-Aliasing.

-MP = Mountain Peak 

-S = Syria

-GV = Geothermal Valley 

and continuing...

Not sure why the 2700x seemed to be just taking a dirt nap under DX12 with lighter settings. The lows were abysmal, perhaps it has to do with still loading the run. That being said when you crank up the settings across the board a pattern more or less emerges. The demands on the hardware increase with each run save for the last graph. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Average FPS

Im not quite sure how to extrapolate all the data from SOTTR benchmarks so I just went with the averages. I still have the screenshots so if people let me know I can edit them re-submit. Also I followed the same presets as before, in this order. 

PS1 - DX11 | Max Settings | No AA | Low hair

PS2 - DX11 | Max Settings | Max AA | Max hair

PS3 - DX12 | Max Settings | No AA | Low hair

PS4 - DX12 | Max Settings | Max AA | Max hair

Also I didnt grab the full sweep of data for the 10850K. I'll add that in later if people want. EDIT: Went back and re-ran the benchmarks to finish this chart. Citations will be provided shortly.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider - Ray Tracing Enabled

Dont let this bar chart paint an incorrect impression of RT performance, the FPS range between all systems is 5 FPS. Wanted to see if there would be much impact on performance between the CPU's with RT On. There is a difference, but within this range it would be hard to make an argument for any of the processors.

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider (2013) by today's standards is quite dated. That being said I like to play it from time to time. One thing I usually derive from this game is why I dont care for new graphics features that often, above you can see the performance penalty of adding TressFX and AA. No setting should cost you 200 FPS. Performance is in-line from what you would expect however this title seems to favor the brute force method of the 10850K over the 5800X3D, albeit, not by much.

Shadow of War is one of those titles that somehow punched above its weight class. While some elements of the story were just ridiculous, the gameplay was quite enjoyable. This title does seem to favor the 5800X3D, particularly the minimum FPS. Perhaps the bad minimums for the 2700x and 10850K are a result of the start of the benchmark as for the short while that I did play I didnt see choppy FPS. It is what it is though.

The 5800X3D is an overall improvement over the 2700x, but if you are using the 10850K with some decent ram, there really isnt any justifiable reason to switch platforms. If you are sitting on an older AM4 motherboard with standard RAM the 5800X3D is very tempting in comparison to the 2700x.

Im getting tired, ill add more as I gather it together.

I think I saw that their AVX512 performance is hugely improved over Ryzen 7000, otherwise I'm not sure how much the uplift is?  From the reviews I saw it seems like their TDP is significantly lower but their power use is actually pretty similar in practice?  Definitely curious if that's the general trend or perhaps motherboard-setting dependent.

I'm back on the notebook train though, so unless I have a need for more power, I'll probably be sticking with my 5800H for a while.

As such I have already sold a fair amount of parts from it and have been putting together the following setup for now:

Ryzen 5 7700 with thermalright 240mm AIO

Asrock A620i Lightning wifi

32GB DDR5 6000 CL38 EXPO profile

Nvidia RTX 4070 12GB dual fan from MSI

2TB WD 770 + 1TB SN961

Intel AX211 Wifi card

Louqe ghost S1 mini ITX case with bottom hat and top hat extensions

500W Silverstone SFX-L PSU

Going for a nice quiet and compact build, I might swap out the motherboard later when I need the higher end IO or want to overclock the CPU but this will do me well for now and I got it for a good 2nd hand price.

At the moment the RTX4070 is in my old MSI GS30 dock and that's tiding me over.

I just got my car rental settlement. wasn't what I expected but its still nice being paid for hassle.

Im going to order a 1400 dollar chromebook like the masses. lol, that'll be the day. Im eyeing www.memoryexpress.com system builder. might buy a package deal for a 4060 or 3060ti or if the price is right a A770 setup, I want a A770 but I think the benefit of DLSS and FG with the 4060 mighy justify a few bucks. very excited.

Any experiences with this SSD, or perhaps some alternatives I missed?

How is the real-life reliability?

This has become a growing interest for me personally as well as professionally and was curious to what and how others make their own approaches to the topic. 

For me, since mining has been mostly curtailed these days I have finally repurposed all the equipment that I had, along with some equipment not used for mining and a few additional purchases. As such my starting point is probably different from most which means the learning curve is a bit up there...

Open Bench - Would like to setup a multi-head Gaming VM

10850K @ 5.0Ghz

16GB DDR4 @ 4000Mhz

256GB SSD
2x 5700XT's 
X520-DA2 10Gbps DAC SFP+

6x HP T630's - HA? Container/Docker? 
128GB SSD
16GB DDR4

Optiplex Micro 7050 - Remote End Point
i7 7700
32GB DDR4 
256GB SSD
Connected via switch + WiFi + Console

2x Precision 7810's

2x Xeon E5 2650 12c/24t

128GB DDR4 

2-3TB SSD (NVME/SATA)
4x1Gbps NIC

X520-DA2 10Gbps DAC SFP+
K2200

Cisco 48p 1Gbps PoE, 4 SFP 

Its way more than I need right now, but I have been wanting to get a better understanding of how SCCM/MECM works which is its own huge undertaking, then my friend at work told me about vcenter/vsphere and that it looked like what I should be dabbling with (at the time was dabbling with proxmox). As such took a step back and rebuilt everything with VMware.

Then later he gave me a Cisco switch, then I realized I still had the t630's and the 10850K system was sitting dormant after I wrapped up the comparison thread. Things are a little out of hand. 

Im curious what you guys may have up your sleeves? 

 

my 13700kf reach 100° with ram oc and i would like to get a bit more stable values and i'm not 100% sure but i think that a direct die cooling could improve this.

thank you for your input 🙂

Case: Lian Li O11  Evo Dynamic White+Mesh Panel - i really like the Case, lot of customization possible, but you need to pay for every bit 😅. Good airflow, the inverse build option also really interesting for me because of the placement of the case on the left side, also if i will do a custom loop its adequate. And also not that big. I dont have a lot of space on my small desk. Price: 195 Euro+2o Euro mesh panel..really Lian Li..

Mainboard: i went with the Asus Strix B650-A Wifi - i went with it because is one of the few White Boards, i need white because of the white build that i am aiming for. Also the other good white x670 options are in my opinion to expensive for what they offer, the strix x670 and the Asrock taichi. Like i said, this is a build that will take some time, maybe until the CPUS that i am aiming for are here: the AM5 x3d chips so for sure the mainboard will be replaced in the future when more white options are available. Price: 248 Euro after i had some Amazon points 😅.

CPU and RAM: AMD 7900x with 32 Kingston Fury Beast 4800 CL38: ok here i got a little lucky and i got a new CPU with the ram in a package for 600 EURO. I know the ram is not the best but it came for free with the CPU so for the start it will do, it will be only for starting the rig and

will try to overclock the shit out of it and when ill find a good price for the 6000-6400 Trident Z in white i will sell it.

AIO: Lian Li Galahad 360mm SL V2 white - very good AIO from all the reviews and also one of the few good looking in white.

SSD: I will take the 2xSamsung  SSD 970 Evo from the Clevo and for the main SSD probably ill get a 2TB: the Firecuda or something similar, still open on this.

PSU: Corsair RM1000x 1000W 80+ Gold - not much to tell, one of the best 1000w on the market also got a discount on it. Price 150 Euro.

GPU: well here ill wait until RDNA 3 comes up or i can get an ARC770 just for the fun of testing it. Until then the place will be occupied by an EVGA 1660 Super SC Ultra Gaming, jeez what a long name 🤣.

Monitor: already here and used with the Clevo: the big boi Samsung 49 Odyssey G9 Neo

Keboard and Mouse: also already here: Razer Pro Type and Pro Click in white. Really good looking stuff, but i have some mixed feelings for the keyboard.. its disconnecting  a little to often out of thin air..Razer quality 😅

Small stuff like fans and the sort : Gonna go with the Lian Li 120 UN SL Fans and Lian Li RGB strimmers.

ll update with photos when the stuff here is

20+16GB 1333/1866 ECC 

200+GB DDR4 sodimm unbuffered

Anything interesting I can use these for? Looked to see if I could build a RAMdisk but that seems to have gone extinct with DDR2

Honestly if I were better at electrical engineering / PCB related stuff what I would love to build would be the following. 

A USB4 enclosure that can house an NVME drive that would clone to a 128GB RAMdisk that then reports (and behaves) as a (bootable) Mass Storage Device to a PC. My work does a lot of Windows deployment type stuff so it would interesting (to me, at least) to see how long a deployment would take when the PC and its own storage are the only limiting factors.

The NVME holds the data that we want to deploy (non-volatile) and clones to the RAMdisk (volatile), Naturally would need its own power source as well.

I dunno, I just have an abundance of random stuff and am trying to think of an interesting use case for it.

You guys got any ideas? 

I would like to get unlocked bios for my alienware x51 r1 and I can see that they can be found here: https://www.bios-mods.com/forum/Thread-Alienware-X51-unlocked-BIOS

it seems they allow only activated by the system users to download, but for some reasons my account does not get activated, I was trying to reach for help with admins but did not get any response, can someone pls download this bios and share within this post? 

Thank you! I will delete this post whenever I get the bios.

So i got i today and started looking at it and it has:

800 W PSU

2 Xeon Cpus e5 2690.

32 Gb DD3 1600, 4 GB x 8 Sticks - 4 sticks on Mainboard and 4 on that riser card where the 2nd CPU is located. BTW how cool is that riser card for a 2nd CPU.

 No GPU,  and no HDDs, they took them out

First think i tried was to test that PSU- so i got it out and did that BIST test like HP said, plug it in and see if its working and the fan started spinning and the LED turned Green - so i think its working like HP said, if led is turning green all is good?

Can this maschine even Post without a GPU inside?

Also i took of both Heatsinks and checked the paste and CPUS and here i found some red WTF spots on both CPUs, looks like corrosion, havent seen anytihing like that before? Is this normal for xeons?

Everything looks ok, also i started the Workstation like this without GPU, HDD and its like he said. The blue light is turning on on the Mainboard and after 1 2 minutes the fans are starting to go very fast and loud.

Anyone has experience with HP Workstations? I am a total newb with servers

From what i heard is possible that the Mainboard is fried, i can get a cheap one from ebay so its no problem, also im looking at a cheap GPU aswell to test it.

Some pics with the CPUS spots and also with the machine, its heavy as hell but very nice build, its a shame to go to the dumpster, i would love to repair it and upgrade it a little bit for cheap. Think with some upgrades it can still be useful

You can highlight the build in whatever manner you feel appropriate, whether it is focusing on certain components, the customizations you have done, or simply posting pretty pictures of your pride and joy. If the details you are sharing are not already captured in your signature, please add a list of the components/specs.

WRAITH 2.0 - For Fun

BANSHEE 2.0 - For Work

@Papusan @pathfindercod @electrosoft @Talon @johnksss @Rage Set @Reciever - all of you have stuff worthy of bragging about here.

MINISFORUM TH80 Mini PC 11th Gen Core i7-11800H Micro Computer, DDR4 16GB RAM + 512GB PCIe SSD, HDMI/DP/USB-C(4K@60Hz) Outputs, 2.5G LAN, 5X USB3.2, Intel UHD Graphics Small Form Factor : Amazon.ca: Electronics

If I were to sell the Legion, I would go with something like the Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition that's currently on sale for $800. A Legion Slim 5 is out of the question as for some reason Lenovo has the fan curve programmed to start them when the CPU hits 40C. What temperature does the laptop idle at when connected to an external monitor - 40C, so the fans are turning on and off constantly. Very annoying. The TUF's build quality and screen are like the Slim 5, not outstanding but serviceable, but it's noticeably thinner and lighter than the Pro 7i. Also, the Type-C port that allows for charging also supports video out through the iGPU, so I can use the laptop at work with a single cable.

The other option will be for me to sell the desktop and keep the Pro 7i as more or less my sole personal computer. I would be fine with this because it's been performing very well aside from the small QoL problems that I'll just have to deal with over the long term. 

So far, Reddit is saying I should keep the Legion and sell the desktop, but I'd like to know what you all think about this.

2007 was the last time I had a desktop, that's when i switched over to laptop-land for travel and work purposes. Just 2 years after, I joined NBR to squeeze a bit more out of my Asus C90S and the rest is history 🤠

Now, after 3 friggin years, a worldwide pandemic, rise and fall of a cryptomining empire (and shortly before me and my lady expect out first kid due in mid-march and thus my gaming days are almost over!), I am finally ready to get back into the promised desktop land! 😁

Plan is to detail my components and reasoning behind my choices, as well as the building process, followed by setup, tuning, and of course some sweet sweet performance results.

Nuff around the bush beating, lets cut to the chase!

Components

Motherboard - Ordered 30-Sep, received 07-Oct

Asus ROG Crosshair X670E Extreme, AM5 Platform

Price paid (including tax, shipping, minus cashback) - 1025€

I chose AM5 due to its expected longevity vs. Z790, AMD quoted minimum support until including 2025, potentially longer. So could be viable until Zen 6, hopefully longer. With Intel, even if they manage to beat Ryzen 7000 with 13th gen in some (but not all) instances, ure 100% guaranteed to be on a dead platform.

That being said, if you look at my current machine (see sig), youll notice that im the type of guy who likes to invest into a solid baseline for a system and then prefers to tune it and upgrade it as much as possible rather than jumping to a new system every year. So in conclusion, I wanted to go with a flagship motherboard that includes the max features. Why Asus, and not MSI, Gigabyte, Asrock, EVGA you might ask?

MSI Godlike has the most highpowered VRMs out of all AM5 flagships, but lacks USB 4.0, less Gen5 M.2 slots and just costs WAY too much (yes, even more ridiculous than the Asus Crossfire Extreme 🤣)

Gigabyte Aorus Extreme is the cheapest of the flagships, but also sports the weakest VRMs and again lacks USB 4.0 just like MSI. Thats a no go, I need sturdy VRMs to be ready for any potential future AMD flagship CPUs down the road.

Asrock and Biostar are out of the question for me personally, due to their stupid behaviour towards the press (see Asrock blacklisting of HUB and GN), as well as a niche existence with barebones Bios and customer support (Biostar).

SO that leaves the Asus Crossfire Extreme with second strongest VRMs, USB 4.0 support, good Bios update support and not the most stupid ridonkulous pricing on the market (just second most stupid lulz).

Oh, one more goodie to add here: its so far the only AM5 motherboard to sport dual bios, thus u can safely flash a new bios version and test it for bugs and performance without having to worry about disabled flashback optionality (which, unfortunately, a lot of bios versions have implemented nowadays).

CPU - ordered 27-Sep, received 04-Oct

AMD Ryzen 7950X

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 850€

Welp, spending so much on a flagship motherboard and then going with a 7600X?! What did you expect, OF COURSE Im going with the 16 core monstrosity 🤣 Jokes aside, not only gonna do gaming on this but also get some work done, so its basically best of both worlds.

GPU - Ordered 12-Oct, received 13-Oct

Zotac Gaming Geforce RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO --> changed to MSI Geforce RTX 4090 Suprim X (read details below)

Price paid (expected, including tax and shipping) - 2050-2250€

GPU tier & chip was quite straight forward: I want the flagship and ill just take the one thats released first by either Nvidia or AMD. Look guys, Ive got a kid on the way, so a month waiting is a month of gaming lost! So, Nvidia 4090 it is, then 😄 

But which vendor? Now this was a tricky one. I originally planned to go with an EVGA, specifically FTW4 Ultra (or whatever the name would have been) due to their outstanding customer support and the option to extend the warranty to 10 freaking years! But, as you all know, EVGA is now out of the GPU game (power to them for showing Nvidia what consequences are!). So the first I checked out were Asus and MSI, both known for well built GPUs, sturdy VRMs and competent cooling solutions. Only thing lacking: warranties, both only provide 3 years. Im thinking Ill need at least 4 years if not 5, since earliest Ill upgrade would be in two generations or 4 years away in 2026. For this reason I am planning to go with Zotac, they actually offer an extended 5 yr warranty upon registration of the purchased GPU. Based on their company profile and customer support Ive seen so far, they are a bit like EVGA, but more of a "light" version. They arent are balls to the wall when it comes to ultra highend custom board like with the EVGA Kingpin editions, but they still seem to do a good job and treat their customers well.

In the meantime I was also able to get a bit of info on the cooling solution of the flagship AMP Extreme AIRO card: 9 heatpipes, vapour chamber, dual bios, 115 mm fans, 24+4 phases (Nvidia stock is at 21+2, with Asus Strix and MSI Suprim X also at 24+4).

Sounds good to me! Now to wait until 12-Oct before I snipe me one...

Edit: Sooooo, after the AIB reviews came out and the sales launch turned out to be a true shit show, I spent roughly 1.5 hours hopping between 10-15 online shops and price comparison portals, all the while trying to gulp down reviews on AIB cards as best I can to determine how good the initially planned Zotac card actually is! In the end, the Zotac turned out to be too expensive for its meager cooling (no improvement vs. FE) and the best overall cards to get were either the Asus Strix (waaaay overpriced even at official pricing, with added scalping going down basically immediately) or the MSI Suprim X. The latter's cooling is imperceptibly worse than the formers, but the MSI actually has beefier VRMs with 26 phases vs. the Asus card's 24. Plus, I was able to get the Suprim X at a comparably good price:

Price paid (including tax and overnight express shipping) - 2275€

In comparison, the Asus Strix went for at least 2550€, with most offers ranging 2600-2900€, completely insane if you ask me and definitely not worth all the extra dough. I can say I was lucky I got the Suprim X when I did, basically 5 seconds later the card was sold out at the vendor i got it from (lucky also for me, the vendor is a big reputable online shop so not worried about warranty stuff).

Speaking of warranty, MSI only offers 3 years vs. the Zotac 5 yr warranty, but at least includes cooler swap (or rather maintenance for my purposes), so thats at least a balancing out. Another thing to consider with the MSI card is its somewhat lower max power limit of 520W vs. the 600W of the FE, Asus Strix and Gigabyte Gaming OC. The FE is out of the question, since no dual bios and crappy cooler, Asus Strix is overpriced as mentioned before and the Gigabyte Gaming OC looks crappy and also has supbar cooling. But no worries here, TPU's vbios database already lists several 600W vbios versions, so when the time comes ill just flash and voila, problem solved 🙂 

Monitor - Ordered 09-Sep, Received a week later, now sitting on my Desk 😁

Samsung Odyssey Neo G8 

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 1060€

This is probably going to be a controversial one. The specs are absolutely amazing at HDR 2000 nits, UHD, 240 Hz, ultra fast VA panel. However, a lot of reviews found that the 2000 "marketing nits" of brightness did not stand up to scrutiny, but rather a still very respectable ~1200 nits. In addition, Samsung and its Odyssey line hasnt been known for their Quality Control, with panels arriving including weird "burn marks" (HUB), annoying scanlines at the full 240 Hz (various user reports and reviews), as well as other stuff like dead/stuck pixels or noticeable blooming.

But you know what? I didnt care 😂 I took the plunge when I saw an amazing deal (see price above) and I also noticed that a lot of user reviews had perfect panels without any of the mentioned shortcomings. So i played the panel lottery and won 🤠 Image is absolutely stunning, there are no noticeable scanlines, no dead/stuck pixels, no cosmetic blemishes and blooming is only noticeable when looking at the panel from weird off angles (i.e. from above or steeply from the side), likely due to its curve. But sitting right in front of it is just breathtaking... Be it as it may, this is also my very first HDR monitor, so take this as it is 😄 I for one am super happy and the highend specs will make any hardware sweat for years to come 🙂 Again, longevity was my goal here!

Storage - Ordered 03-Sep, received 3 days later, awaiting data transfer

Seagate Firecuda 530 4TB PCIe 4.0x4 with heatsink

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 580€

I am currently sporting a 970 Pro 1TB and 2x4TB 860 Evos for a total of 9TB SSD space. That might seem like a lot but my 1TB system drive is already 60% full, with the two 4TB drives both at approx. 75% filled. So I figured I might as well splurge on storage and get myself a new 4TB system & data combo drive. Unfortunately, highend MLC drives have gone the way of the Dodo, especially since Samsung as the last holdout decided it was a grand idea to switch to TLC for their 980 Pro (and their upcoming 990 Pro). In general, I'd consider myself a total Samsung fanboy when it comes to SSD storage, they are just THAT good and reliable (just check the reliability reports by Backblaze and ull see what I mean). But this time around....I dunno, I wanted to try something new, something different. The 980 Pro, albeit a sensationally good drive, felt a bit lacking for my tastes. Soooo, what else is there? With MLC out of the picture, TLC is where it's at now, QLC can rot in hell if you ask me.

Other musts for my requirements:

- NVME drive

- PCIE 4.0

- DRAM Cache

- 2.5 PB TBW at minimum

- 5 Years Warranty

In the end I chose the Seagate Firecuda drive for its 5 year warranty, high 5.1 PB TBW and 3 year data recovery service included in the warranty. Performance wise it is also pretty much at the top, even ekeing out the 980 Pro, Corsair MP600 and WD SN850 drives here and there. The only other drive that tops all of the mentioned would be the recently released SK Hynix Platinum P41, but that is neither available in Europe, nor does it come in 4 TB flavour. In any case, the 4TB Seagate should last me a while before additional storage becomes necessary. My plan is to RAID 0 up the two 860 Evo drives and set up a 18TB HDD spinning rust as backup for ease of mind.

PSU - Ordered 27-Sep, received 28-Sep

Seasonic TX-1600 Titanium

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 470€

This was another tough decision due to the newly published Intel ATX3.0 Power Supply standard, which is especially important for the next-gen of GPUs Nvidia 40 Series Ada Lovelace and AMD 7000 Series RDNA3. The main factor here is that ATX3.0 allows power supplies to temporarily exceed their rated spec by 2-3x in order to be able and buffer short spikes in the micro to millisecond range without giving out. Add to that the new 16 pin 12VHPWR PCIe 5 connector that is slated to replace the traditional 8 and 6 pin PCIe connectors for power supply to GPUs, which is also part of the new ATX3.0 spec.

So much for background info! So, where does that leave us enthusiasts who want to build a new system NAOH? The issue is, that already existing and upcoming PSUs following the ATX3.0 standard are "not up to snuff" for my Titanium and high wattage taste. The highest powered PSU for ATX3.0 currently available is the Thermaltake GF3 1650W, which "only" has 80Plus-Gold efficiency, "only" 10 years warranty (Seasonic provides up to 12!) and "Thermalfake" is also not really known for their outstanding product quality and customer support. Out of the question then. What about upcoming Seasonic PSUs for ATX3.0? Well, weve got the Vertex series which is slated to this December (too late for me, unfortunately), and will come in Gold and Platinum flavours (no Titanium goodness) and max. rating at 1200W. Pricing at up to 300USD also indicates a lower tier product vs. the Prime TX series of PSUs.

So I did some thinking and research to get a better idea. First, the TX-1600, although not officially certified for ATX3.0, does actually provide TWO PCIe 5 12VHPWR cables including the much discussed additional 4 sense pins. In addition, reviews by Toms Hardware and kitguru showed a max stable wattage in the range of 1850 - 2100W, leaving plenty of buffer for additional power draw of next-gen gpus and their dreaded transient spikes (not confirmed yet though). That, plus TItanium efficiency, Seasonic 12 yr warranty, an overabundance of superlong cables, cool design and last but not least an included free goodie (65W GaN super compact charger) in the end made me decide to go with the TX-1600.

Naturally, I will update you guys if I encounter any power delivery problems with the planned Zotac 4090 for this build. So stay tuned!

RAM - Ordered 08-Sep, received 10-Sep

G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-6600 2x16 GB (Black)

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 440€

This one was pretty straight forward: Just get the currently fastest available sticks with some RGB bling and call it a day 😄 I am sure brother @Papusan will cry himself to sleep tonight when he reads this, being such a fan of blacked out components but allergic to RGB haha! In any case, we all know that the age of big CPU OC gains are pretty much over, at most you can hope for like 5-10% at most with a nicely binned cpu these days, more often than not much less. Thus, RAM OC becomes a far more interesting endeavour, having shown that on newer platforms higher bandwidth and lower latencies can vastly increase workloads and gaming (i.e. minimum fps) in ranges of up to 20+30%!

Unfortunately I had a bad timing when buying this kit, its now available for like 360€ plus the new Hynix A-Die is slowly becoming available, which was shown to be able and reach up to 8000 Mhz on a single stick, with dual channel in the mid to high 7000s. Nonetheless, the Hynix M-Die that this G.Skill kit is based on can definitely do 6800 with "regular" VDIMM or even 7000 with high VDIMM (but that apparently needs active cooling with a fan pointed directly at the sticks). Curious to see how far Ill be able to push these sticks 🙂 

Keyboard - Ordered 26-Sep, received 10-Oct

Ducky One 3 Fullsize 100% Daybreak (MX Brown)

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 200€

For this one I had to do a bit of research, since I hadnt used or really cared about desktop keyboards for years. First thing I did was go to shops and check what kind of switches would be my thing. Turns out Blues are too clicky and loud, Reds are lacking tactile feedback, so Browns it was as the mide road / nice balance of the former two! Blacks, Silvers, Speeds, Low Height, etc, and all those other "special" switches didnt really interest me much. I needed something that felt good and that I could use for both gaming and work efficiently. Size was easy, I definitely couldnt do without my beloved NumPad, so fullsize FTW! Now came the tricky part: Which manufacturer and model? Lots of Cherry originals, Corsairs, etc. around. But then I noticed "Ducky", never heard of them before. Their designs intrigued me, it was something unusual and fresh, and not so "gamery gimmicky" looking, but still not too classic to be boring. Turns out they make super high quality keyboards, include swappable switches and keycaps, PBT keycaps for extralong lifetime and no "glossy" wearing off over time or disappearance of keycap labels.

Initially, I was planning to go with a Ducky One 2 in white, but then the One 3 came out and I really liked the Daybreak model, so here we are 🙂 

Case - Ordered 26-Sep, received 10-Oct

Phanteks Enthoo Pro II Tempered Glass

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 180€

For the case, the two main priorities were good airflow / temps, as well as lots of space! I keep tabs on GN case reviews to determine how well current model cases perform with their standardized hardware testing setup. The Phanteks Enthoo Pro II stood out quite comfortable and to this day is actually the case sporting the absolute best GPU thermals of all cases, add to that top third CPU thermal performance. It has tons of space in all dimensions, since it is actually capable of housing two systems at the same time (not interesting for me but that also means more space for hardware!). Further boons are USB 3.2 and USB-C connectors at the front, capability to install a 420mm radiator (or even up to 480mm!), fan mounts for days, sleek but not over the top "gamery gimmicky" looks, dust filters and cable management options and also a good reputation by Phanteks as a case brand. Not everything is 100% set in stone yet, since Ill need to have the case in front of me first, but so far I'm planning to mount a 420mm radiator for CPU cooling either up top (if space permits) or in the front in push/pull config, then do front and bottom as intakes, with top and rear as outlets for airflow. The gpu and RAM, as well as the mobo VRMs and SSDs would then be nicely covered with more than sufficient airflow. We are talking a total of 13 case fans plus 3 gpu fans and potentially one more fan each for direct RAM cooling and gpu backplate cooling 😂 Overkill? Nah.... 😛 

CPU Cooling - Ordered 06-Oct, received 08-Oct

Arctic Liquid Freezer II 420 A-RGB

Price paid (including tax and shipping) - 125€

For this one I was sure I wanted to go water cooling, but did not want to go full custom loop in order to keep the budget in check (i know, i know, thats ridiculous considering the rest of the build LOL). So in order to offset that, I wanted to go as large and thicc as possible for the radiator size, thus there was no way around the LF II 420. Not only is it one of the few 420mm AiOs on the market, but it's also the thickest of the bunch at a cool (pun intended) 38 mm. I chose the A-RGB version, so that I can use the fans in other positions inside the case and replace them with 6x Noctua IPPC 3000rpm in a push-pull config. Think THAT might be enough to cool the hot-headed 7950X? 😄 In any case, I'll plan to do some additional tuning (that goes for all the hardware in this build), to maximize peformance and minimize temps. Not sure if ill go bare die, but delid and liquid metal are definitely options.

Mouse - Ordered 02-Sep, received 05-Sep

Corsair M65 RGB Ultra

Price paid (including tax, shipping and warranty extension to 3 years) - 100€

My current mouse that I am using with my laptop is the Mionix Castor with a total of 6 buttons, so thats what I set as the minimum when looking around for a new mouse to accompany this build. In addition, I definitely wanted to go wired, since I dont want to deal with degrading batteries in such a mundane thing as a mouse. We are talking stationary usage anyways, so why bother going wireless, right? Next thing I was looking at was the overall design (naturally very subjective), i.e. I didnt want anything completely bonkers like MadCatz models or ones with holes in their bodies (wth?! whyyyyy). I ended up narrowing it down to the Corsair M65 Ultra of the Roccat Kone XP Arctic White. I generally like the Roccat mouse design and I think their Kone series in white is pretty sexy! However, I have read for their Kone Aimo Remastered and Kone Pure Ultra that unintentional double clicks seem to pop up quite often after a short while on the left click button. Since I already have this problem with my current Mionix Castor, I wouldnt like to repeat this! Admittedly though, the Castor has now been in use for over 5.5 years, so its not a big shame that such things happen. Nevertheless, this double click issue plus the over the top RGB gamery lighting of the Kone XP drove me towards the M65 Ultra. The only challenge here was to actually get my hands on one, since they seemed to have been out of stock for almost a full year during the height of the pandemic, only recently returning back in stock at regular MSRP pricing. In any case, I got one at MSRP and also added an extra year of warranty to be on the safe side with any potential double click or other issues!

Accessories / Misc

This section will be for additional upgrades down the line that Ive got planned, i.e. case and radiator fans, fan adapter cables, LED strips, thermal pads, internal display for monitoring purposes (gotta use that bigass case, after all!), a display colorimeter to properly calibrate my monster display and a high capacity HDD for backup purposes. Ill update it step by step whenever I put an order in for items, thus WIP.

So having just made a few purchases for the purposes of nostalgia and humble submissions at HWBOT for Team @PremaMod, I had attempted to look around a bit for those odd or uncommon GPU's that we may have wanted but for w/e reason never pulled that trigger. 

I'd like to make a list of them and perhaps make a short article for the forum based on that :)

Anyhow, feel free to list anything you thought or know to be uncommon, Unique GPU's! 

To start things off: 

Sapphire 4850X2

EVGA GTX 460 2WIN 

EVGA GTX 560Ti 2WIN

KFA2 GTX 460 Wireless HD

Galax Single slot GTX 470 

Asus Ares I/II/III (5870x2/7970x2/390X x2)

GTX 295 Dual PCB

9800GX2 Dual PCB

While common "at the time" the Dual PCB design of the GTX 295 and 9800GX2 are over time becoming less and less common.

Galax GTX 1070 Katana (Single slot)

Gigabyte WaterForce 3x 980 SLI

Asus Mars I/II/III (295x2/GTX 580x2/GTX 680x2)

ATi HD 5950

PowerColor Devil13 390x2

@Mr. Fox  @Papusan @electrosoft @Clamibot @Rage Set @Hiew

Upgrading an Apple?  Possible if it's old enough!

The first computer to get an upgrade was the most difficult, my 2010 Mac Mini.  It had a 320 GB HDD, I'm not even sure it was 7200 RPM, but it was slower than molasses in January.  Put in a spare 80 GB SATA SSD that I bought in 2011, and it boots up in about 20% of the time it did previously.  Massive improvement.  Now the CPU is the main bottleneck, and sadly that isn't upgradeable, but the RAM is still a potential (and much easier) project.

But Apple sure doesn't make it easy to upgrade!  iFixit estimated 55 minutes, and it was at least that, and I broke a thermal sensor connector when trying to reconnect it (I felt like a giant trying to reconnect those miniature parts), so the fan thinks the hard drive is on fire and spins at its max speed.  Thankfully software exists to override that behavior.

Non-Apple laptops?  A dream by comparison?

Next was my newfangled laptop, 13 Philips-head screws and a spudger and you can upgrade storage and RAM to your heart's content, much better than an Apple.  I went whole hog with 4 TB of TLC SSD, and 64 GB of RAM, because prices are crazy low right now.

The Old Rig Gets NVME

Finally, my desktop got the laptop's old 512 GB NVME SSD, plus a PCIe card to connect it, as well as an extra USB 3.0 port caused by swapping out its old PCIe x4 USB add-on card to a PCIe x1 add-on that is a bit slower, but has more ports.  I call that a win.

Add up the three machines, and I match Weird Al's specs, with 100 GB of RAM (64 + 32 + 4).  Took a few decades to do it, and I don't have it all in one machine yet, but this is a milestone I've been looking forward to.

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So, what have you upgraded recently?  I know there must be RAM upgrades and new storage disks and GPU swaps happening all the time.  And most of you are probably sensible enough to spread it out a bit.