Build Thread 3.0

[majestic]

Well, if you use liquid metal in your build, you should probably know what you're doing, else you're going to brick expensive hardware. Or almost brick it, at any rate.

 

[Bartimaeus]

did a cartoon liquid metal bubble explode on this thing like from an episode of spongebob or something?

"there is liquid metal [everywhere], this is bad"

[Sargallath Abraxium]

On 12/16/2022 at 9:37 AM, Keyrock said:

My first PC was a Tandy 1000:

I was one of the cool kids because it had the brand new and HIGHLY ADVANCED 3.5" floppy drive.

 

...me first "PC"...still 'ave farkin' Jupiter Lander nightmares...

 

 

...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

[Humanoid]

Finally got around to upgrading my 1TB WD SN750 to a 2TB Kingston KC3000. Partly it's for that PCI-E 4.0 goodness, but mostly it's because the 700GB partition I had set aside for Game Pass games had proven woefully inadequate. It wasn't an actual practical problem as I had plenty of space left over on my other SSDs for the overflow, but it was bothering me that I had Game Pass games installed on the volume labelled "Steam". So now the new drive is partitioned with around ~300GB for Windows and user data, and the balance for non-Steam, non-GOG games (as those each have their own drives).

Unfortunately my laziness was my downfall here as I was too lazy to plug both drives into actual M.2 slots at the same time, instead choosing to clone the old drive to the new one via a USB caddy so I'd only have to do one switcheroo afterwards. 5-and-a-half-hours later it's finally done with the copy. Yeah...

Not sure what I'm doing with the old drive. I could just wipe it clean and put it back in, but I don't currently need any extra SSD space on my desktop, since I already have in excess of 5TB of SSD space now. I could upgrade my laptop drive, but it's not a gaming laptop and so the 250GB SSD that it came with isn't really a problem. I could just put it into the USB caddy and effectively turn it into a portable SSD ...but I already have one twice as large.

[majestic]

Hundreds and hundreds of moons ago I had a partition for everything. One for MP3s, one for downloads, one for games, one for school related files, one for silly joke programs, one for Windows, one for films, one for stuff I wanted to burn to disc and delete, and so on, and so forth. To keep everything properly separated but also because FAT32 was woefully inefficient with larger partitions. I do have a full backup of these on the external drive that is lying next to my screen right how. It contains folders up until "S", as I copied everything in folders named after their drive letters.

The practice has since fallen out of my favor, even though it is easier nowadays to handle partions than ever before (and it even is possible to use them without the silly drive letter clutter that one ended up with way back), for a number of reasons. The largest one: it simply became too much work for too little gain. Eventually that one partition for games turned into two, and then three, the videos one grew in number too over time, then inevitably some spilling happened, I added new hard disks and partitioned them, then a game came out that broke all my partition sizes (hello full installation of Baldur's Gate!).

There are other minor reasons too, one of which is a plethora of decently working and really fast file analysis and search tools. Running out of space for no obvious reason? WizTree is done telling you why in a couple of seconds. Need to find something and you cannot quite remember where it was? Everything has got you covered. It of course also helps that my desktop computer stopped being anything other than my private retreat from the real world. There is almost zero production software installed, for instance. I no longer have a printer, I no longer have compilers installed to fiddle with software as a hobby, not even a copy of Microsoft Office - or any other office suite. I barely ever do support for friends or favors any more, so there is no need to keep a large and well stocked driver library for the most common issues at hand.

It is funny, for all my need to properly fill out progress bars and subject myself to terrible TV shows for no other reason than because OCD drives me to finish them, the excessive amount of organizing I did to keep everything in neat little drawers on my computer? That went away. Work is work. This desktop here, is not. Working from home blurred the lines a little, but thanks to working exclusively on Virtual Desktops it is still fairly easy. That is the almost part of having almost zero production software. I do have Citrix Workspace installed, that cannot be helped (technically it could, by having a work laptop, but so far I successfully avoided getting one, much like I still have an ancient Nokia 2600 as work phone - ain't nobody expecting me to read emails after work on that device).

Edited April 8, 2023 by majestic

[majestic]

Fun video, but even more fun comment section. People have strange recollections of the time, really, although a handful of comments (at the time of posting) talk about the one really great point of 3dfx later lineup, the hardware antialiasing. That was a pretty neat feature, one not seen since.

Boy had we discussions in the classroom back in the day. Playing games in higher resolutions (for the time, which meant above 800x600) was only possible if you had a Riva TNT, or a Voodoo 2 SLI configuration. The Voodo 2 SLI was leaps and bounds ahead in performance, but it also necessitated having three graphics cards. With me being the computer equivalent of a freedom loving hippie at the time, I went with a Riva TNT card primarily because it offered almost (single) Voodoo 2 level performance without resorting to proprietary APIs, and it ran games in 32 bit color, which looked pretty good, but then I also had the hardware to back the card up, as 3dfx add-in cards generally scaled much better with lower end hardware, or cheaper alternatives, like the wonderful AMD K6-2, the absolute bane of my existence and the reason why until this day I will not use AMD hardware in my own builds. To be fair though, nVidia released improved drivers, named Detonator, at a later date that increased performance on lower tier hardware by a whole lot, but at the time, well, it was what it was. A Riva TNT was unlikely to compete with a single Voodoo 2 on any system that was not at a high end level - and even then not fully.

As a downside, some games only came with software rendering or glide (or, in the case of the Final Fantasy VII PC port, only worked with 3dfx cards, and nothing else), which was a bit of a letdown - although funnily enough, some 3dfx products of the time were not capable of running the entirety of their own API. Yes, looking at you, Voodoo Rush. That was an unmitigated disaster.

Always like strolls down memory lanes. Kind of want to bet that all those 3dfx fanboys in the comments are the same sort of people that complain endlessly about anti-consumer practices by greedy corporations while championing a company that invented trying to drive board partners out of the market and having an unhealthy grip on the market with a proprietary API that eventually was phased out because it hindered innovation and adaptation.

[Humanoid]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

in the case of the Final Fantasy VII PC port, only worked with 3dfx cards, and nothing else

There was a patch that added nVidia Riva 128 support to the game, which made it perform marginally less horribly. Terrible video card though, it took some cynical shortcuts to improve its performance (so nVidia could claim it beats the Voodoo 1) most notably horrible greyscale dithering. My Civ2 wonder videos which suddenly looked like someone had flicked cigarette ash all over them. Performance cheating proved to be very on-brand for nVidia over the coming years, so I suppose it's no surprise in hindsight.

[majestic]

5 hours ago, Humanoid said:

There was a patch that added nVidia Riva 128 support to the game, which made it perform marginally less horribly.

The demo version flat out refused to work with anything other than 3dfx add-in cards, as did the one I, uhm, "acquired" to check if I can play the game. That was a no, so no Final Fantasy VII for me, as I did not have a PS1 at the time. I should really check that game out at some point, although I doubt it will sway my opinion that Final Fantasy VI remains the best of the series.

5 hours ago, Humanoid said:

Terrible video card though, it took some cynical shortcuts to improve its performance (so nVidia could claim it beats the Voodoo 1) most notably horrible greyscale dithering. My Civ2 wonder videos which suddenly looked like someone had flicked cigarette ash all over them. Performance cheating proved to be very on-brand for nVidia over the coming years, so I suppose it's no surprise in hindsight.

The Riva 128 and Riva TNT 16-bit image quality was famously bad, yes, particularily compared to the popular combination of Matrox 2D cards with a 3dfx add-in card. I had a Riva 128 card for a short while, although not because nVidia claimed it could beat the Voodoo 1, but because I did not buy my own hardware at the time and it is what I got from my parents, and having very little money to spare, well, that is what they went with. Still a damned sight better than the S3 ViRGE card I had before.

The TNT was the first informed GPU choice I made for myself (paid out of my allowance), driven by my intense dislike for proprietary limitations. Shortcuts and specialized driver "features" to improve benchmarking performance was not something I considered to be as problematic as Glide. It was also a time when I still had Linux installed for private use, heh, there's a certain irony in nVidia cards being better supported on Linux at the time, although we also of course complained about the drivers not being open source. Kind of funny how that goes, in time, many of the things I tried or did in the past are much easier now, but I have lost all interest. Using Linux is much less of a chore than it used to be in '96, multiplayer is much easier to set up (even on legacy titles with virtual networking software like Hamachi), hardware is much more easy to transport these days, I mean, I used to haul my heavy ass 19" CRT screen and the computer several storeys up to a friend's place every time we had school breaks.

If it would be 1996 right now, I would probably not give a damn about Glide, really. Certainly not enough to have spirited discussions with other teenagers about it. Still good for the occasional bout of nostalgia though.

[Humanoid]

34 minutes ago, majestic said:

I should really check that game out at some point, although I doubt it will sway my opinion that Final Fantasy VI remains the best of the series.

It was a good game, but not a good enough game for me to bother looking into any other games in the series, past or future. Well, up until circa 2019 when I tried FF14. So I've played FF7, FF14, and am therefore due to play FF21 whenever that comes out. Perhaps that opinion was coloured by the PC port, especially as I played most of it with the software renderer - I only became aware of the Riva patch late in the piece when it was included on a PC magazine CD.

(It also notoriously had all the keybinds mapped to the numpad by default, and rebinding them meant ...using the numpad to access the menu. Yeah that needed a patch too, though to be fair tenkeyless keyboards were a rarity back then)

And yeah, I went from the pseudo-3D S3 Virge DX (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000) to the Riva 128 (Diamond Viper V330) to, I think, the TNT 2 Ultra (Diamond Viper V770). Third time's a charm. First one was just what came with the family PC, second one was my (stupid) choice but still my parents' money, third one was the first with "my" money - though it'd be a stretch to say I earned it: it would have been government student payments.

[majestic]

33 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

And yeah, I went from the pseudo-3D S3 Virge DX (Diamond Stealth 3D 2000) to the Riva 128 (Diamond Viper V330) to, I think, the TNT 2 Ultra (Diamond Viper V770). Third time's a charm. First one was just what came with the family PC, second one was my (stupid) choice but still my parents' money, third one was the first with "my" money - though it'd be a stretch to say I earned it: it would have been government student payments.

First money I ever earned from a (mandatory, for school) summer job went straight into new hardware. A "Deschutes" P2-400, 256MB RAM and a mainboard. Certainly not the best of times, because I blew most of my allowance savings on a Pentium 200 MMX upgrade just a handful of months earlier, as the Pentium 120 was slowly showing its age. Gotta say the Slot 1 P2s made for the easiest hardware setup ever. Slot CPU in, lock the retention mechanism, put mainboard into any old case, done.

[Azdeus]

4 hours ago, majestic said:

The demo version flat out refused to work with anything other than 3dfx add-in cards, as did the one I, uhm, "acquired" to check if I can play the game. That was a no, so no Final Fantasy VII for me, as I did not have a PS1 at the time. I should really check that game out at some point, although I doubt it will sway my opinion that Final Fantasy VI remains the best of the series.

The Riva 128 and Riva TNT 16-bit image quality was famously bad, yes, particularily compared to the popular combination of Matrox 2D cards with a 3dfx add-in card. I had a Riva 128 card for a short while, although not because nVidia claimed it could beat the Voodoo 1, but because I did not buy my own hardware at the time and it is what I got from my parents, and having very little money to spare, well, that is what they went with. Still a damned sight better than the S3 ViRGE card I had before.

The TNT was the first informed GPU choice I made for myself (paid out of my allowance), driven by my intense dislike for proprietary limitations. Shortcuts and specialized driver "features" to improve benchmarking performance was not something I considered to be as problematic as Glide. It was also a time when I still had Linux installed for private use, heh, there's a certain irony in nVidia cards being better supported on Linux at the time, although we also of course complained about the drivers not being open source. Kind of funny how that goes, in time, many of the things I tried or did in the past are much easier now, but I have lost all interest. Using Linux is much less of a chore than it used to be in '96, multiplayer is much easier to set up (even on legacy titles with virtual networking software like Hamachi), hardware is much more easy to transport these days, I mean, I used to haul my heavy ass 19" CRT screen and the computer several storeys up to a friend's place every time we had school breaks.

If it would be 1996 right now, I would probably not give a damn about Glide, really. Certainly not enough to have spirited discussions with other teenagers about it. Still good for the occasional bout of nostalgia though.

Damn, the most nostalgia I feel right now is being able to carry a 21" CRT from one end of Gothenburg to the other without breaking a sweat, I miss being fit

I still have my two Voodoo 2 cards lying about somewhere, and a TNT2 aswell.

[LadyCrimson]

---with the sizes of drives these days if I wanted to separate so much stuff I'd just stick in 6 interal drives + use externals or something like that. But yeah, I don't do much re: file organization anymore. I mean I have "folders" and sub and sub-sub folders up the yang but most are old and rarely added to, they just sit there unlooked at. I used to like digital files because no physical space, right, but now I don't even like that because it's become so unmanageable. When there is no physical space one has to take into consideration, like boxes in a room, the digital file hoarding becomes out of control. I've decided just like physical things, I truly don't need 99% of it.  So these days things get deleted, either almost immediately or in one fell swoop of periodic cleaning.

--all I remember about old gpu's was the Voodoo (offhand I can't recall now if it was 2 or 3) that I had. I know there was a period where it felt like I was buying a cheapish new gpu every year or so, but I couldn't tell you what they were. I paid little attention to gpu tech news then. I'd just go to Fry's and pick some cheap one off the shelf that was newer than the old one.

--the biggest CRT monitor I picked up and moved room to room was the 19" one. Later there was the 27" CRT TV too, but for some reason monitors always felt heavier than the TV's, vs. size. For me it was all sorta heavy but workable short distance. These days I'd probably wrap such in cardboard, tie a rope around it and try to drag it across the floor. Pffft.

[majestic]

Ordered some more upgrades:

Rolling the dice on the 280mm AIO here, it should fit into the top mount of my case. If it doesn't due to mainboard clearance, I'll just send it back and change some things around, the DR4 I have will be able to deal with the i7 until replacements arrive. I can live with a couple of days of noise, although... what noise, really, I'm not going to be doing full core workloads anyway, and a 200W TDP air cooler can easily handle any gaming loads.

edit: Well, actually, the 280mm AIO would easily fit into the front of the case, but I don't really want to reduce my front intake airflow, so it would be a 360mm AIO, and that would get a bit crampy with the RTX 4070 TI in there. Eh. Should probably get a larger case too.

Edited May 6, 2023 by majestic

[Sarex]

@majestic Which MB/RAM did you get? I search a couple of previous pages and couldn't find it.

[majestic]

40 minutes ago, Sarex said:

@majestic Which MB/RAM did you get? I search a couple of previous pages and couldn't find it.

That's in the specs thread, but the Corsair Vengeance sticks without RGB, which by all accounts should be fine in terms of height. Not so sure about the Asus ROG Strix B660-A's heatsinks though.

[Keyrock]

2 hours ago, majestic said:

Rolling the dice on the 280mm AIO here, it should fit into the top mount of my case. If it doesn't due to mainboard clearance, I'll just send it back and change some things around, the DR4 I have will be able to deal with the i7 until replacements arrive.

The way things are going with GPUs, the mid tower may be going the way of the dodo. Within a generation or two anything above xx60 from either team green or team red (too early to tell how the naming convention for team blue will shake out) won't fit in a mid tower. 

 

[majestic]

Flashed my BIOS to the latest version so I don't forget and can't boot with the new cpu. Forgot to save the custom POST screen, which is more of a minor nuisance, it will just bother me for the next ten or so system boots until I get used to seeing the ROG logo instead of the XMG one.

Gotta say that not only is the ASUS download area pretty bad (the bios flash utility is hidden behind a "show more" button even though it is part of the same tool suite you're supposed to install), the tools themselves are not inspiring any confidence considering that they demand to turn off Windows core security features, and for funsies I watched the YouTube video manual which is full of hilarious Chinglish.

At least they offer a removal tool, which I just used to hopefully kill every trace of "EZ Updater". Sure, the actual flashing was more comfortable to do than the last time I updated a BIOS, which was, uhm... back in the day when it was necessary to go through a ridiculous song and dance with properly named files on a floppy disc and a prayer to the BIOS gods to not brick your system and all that, so I guess that is not exactly the best comparison point, but man, uhm, yeah.

On the other hand, last time I flahsed a BIOS, that was done and over with in 20 seconds, and it certainly never had to update any "LED firmware", really, the idea that SkyNet is going to use nukes to destroy humanity did not age all too well. It will just execute "shutdown_humanity -h now", and turn off every stupid gizmo that has software on it for no real reason.

[Sargallath Abraxium]

24 minutes ago, majestic said:

Flashed my BIOS to the latest version so I don't forget and can't boot with the new cpu. Forgot to save the custom POST screen, which is more of a minor nuisance, it will just bother me for the next ten or so system boots until I get used to seeing the ROG logo instead of the XMG one.

Gotta say that not only is the ASUS download area pretty bad (the bios flash utility is hidden behind a "show more" button even though it is part of the same tool suite you're supposed to install), the tools themselves are not inspiring any confidence considering that they demand to turn off Windows core security features, and for funsies I watched the YouTube video manual which is full of hilarious Chinglish.

At least they offer a removal tool, which I just used to hopefully kill every trace of "EZ Updater". Sure, the actual flashing was more comfortable to do than the last time I updated a BIOS, which was, uhm... back in the day when it was necessary to go through a ridiculous song and dance with properly named files on a floppy disc and a prayer to the BIOS gods to not brick your system and all that, so I guess that is not exactly the best comparison point, but man, uhm, yeah.

On the other hand, last time I flahsed a BIOS, that was done and over with in 20 seconds, and it certainly never had to update any "LED firmware", really, the idea that SkyNet is going to use nukes to destroy humanity did not age all too well. It will just execute "shutdown_humanity -h now", and turn off every stupid gizmo that has software on it for no real reason.

 

...ne'er install any o' that damnable ASUS AI Suite crap; all it does be clog shyte up...swears by ASUS mobos, I does, but I ne'er installs that "extra" shyte anymores an' me systems run smoother without 'em...

 

 

...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

[majestic]

12 minutes ago, Sargallath Abraxium said:

 

...ne'er install any o' that damnable ASUS AI Suite crap; all it does be clog shyte up...swears by ASUS mobos, I does, but I ne'er installs that "extra" shyte anymores an' me systems run smoother without 'em...

 

 

...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

My confidence in Asus mainboards took a hit lately. As someone who is pretty much exclusively #TeamBlue I can just look at exploding 7800X3Ds and laugh while I once again feel vindicated and have something to point to when inevitably the next colleague asks my why, but it does not inspire confidence in ASUS' quality control if their OCP cannot detect a short and it just blasts the CPU with enough power to melt the socket off.

Speaking of which, you should probably flash your BIOS too, just to make sure the mainboard doesn't put you on a fast track to a killed Ryzen CPU with some ridiculous SOC rail voltage that is higher than the setting in the BIOS, especially if you have EXPO on - and why wouldn't you. 7800X3Ds seem particularily susceptible, but they're not the only ones affected.

Edited May 7, 2023 by majestic

[Sarex]

I use the bios flasback feature. Safest and the most straight forward way to do it.

 

[Keyrock]

I've had some really crap luck with ASUS hardware over the last decade or so that's really soured me on the company. Nothing but problems, different problems every time. I lean Gigabyte for mobos these days.

[Humanoid]

I've been relatively blessed, haven't had a motherboard die on me since an MSI board for an old Athlon 1800+ around 20 years ago, and even then it was for the family PC and not my personal one (which was on a Soltek motherboard of all brands, was excellent). I have used all of the big four vendors over the past decade and all have been fine. Was careful to get the P55A board revision for my i5-750 since the initial launch had dodgy retention pressure which resulted in - wait for it - exploding sockets. What's old is new again, eh?

Even outside of motherboards I've been pretty lucky with outright failures. The scoreboard is 1-1 for video cards, with a dead Radeon 9800 Pro and a dead GeForce 7900 GT, but admittedly this doesn't count cooler fans conking out. One dead SSD out of a dozen or so, and perhaps most shockingly, the last dead HDD I recall is a 2GB Fujitsu from the late 90s.

 

EDIT: The quirks of each motherboard vendor can be a little frustrating, yes. Asus invented Flashback for example but have been oddly reluctant to add it to many boards, in order to create some artificial market segmentation. MSI do something similar. Gigabyte on their part deserve some praise for putting it on basically their entire product stack, down to their sub-$100 entry level boards with A/H-series chipsets. Meanwhile Asrock didn't implement it at all for a long time.

Edited May 8, 2023 by Humanoid

[Sargallath Abraxium]

22 hours ago, majestic said:

My confidence in Asus mainboards took a hit lately. As someone who is pretty much exclusively #TeamBlue I can just look at exploding 7800X3Ds and laugh while I once again feel vindicated and have something to point to when inevitably the next colleague asks my why, but it does not inspire confidence in ASUS' quality control if their OCP cannot detect a short and it just blasts the CPU with enough power to melt the socket off.

Speaking of which, you should probably flash your BIOS too, just to make sure the mainboard doesn't put you on a fast track to a killed Ryzen CPU with some ridiculous SOC rail voltage that is higher than the setting in the BIOS, especially if you have EXPO on - and why wouldn't you. 7800X3Ds seem particularily susceptible, but they're not the only ones affected.

 

...yeah, I's been updatin' the BIOS quite often lately an' the newest one limits SoC voltage ta 1.30V...I's not a #TeamBlue or a #TeamRed guy; went wit' AMD this time cuz it was a fair bit cheaper than goin' Intel an' I dunna push me rig ta the limits anymores, them days be long over...

 

 

...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

[Sargallath Abraxium]

20 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I've had some really crap luck with ASUS hardware over the last decade or so that's really soured me on the company. Nothing but problems, different problems every time. I lean Gigabyte for mobos these days.

 

...I honestly jus' dunna like the look o' most o' Gigabyte's boards despite their pretty reliable quality (had one in me kids ol' rig an' she lasted years wit' no issues)...find their Aorus boards ta be ugly; I knows, it ain't how she looks but how she performs, but I jus' canna get by the fugly designs o' most o' 'em...

 

 

...WHO LUVS YA, BABY!!...

[majestic]

Upgrades are live, the AIO fits and my Cinebench r23 scores seem to be in line with other results I've found online. Guess that works.

The pump is definitely more audible than the Dark Rock 4 was, but hey, well, the DR4 also wasn't on a 13th gen i7.

Edited May 12, 2023 by majestic