Build Thread 3.0

[Zoraptor]

7 hours ago, Raithe said:

Now I'm rubbing my hands and cackling like an evil genius as I consider on Gigabyt's Z390 Aorus Ultra Motherboard and the balance of 9th generation i5 3.7Ghz, or the push towards an i7 3.0 Ghz.  Or what effect 32GB of DDR4 3600Mhz would have.  I'm curious on how an M.2 solid state drive would be for boot and windows install.

My friend, have you heard the good news about our Lord and Saviour Lisa Su AMD?

[Bartimaeus]

Unrelated, but did anyone else hear about MSI's well-liked CEO falling to his death from the top of their headquarters in Taiwan today? Unknown if accident, suicide, or homicide.

 

[Malcador]

Think I will go AMD this time, probably should start itemizing a build.  Curious how screwed I will be for being in Canada.

[Keyrock]

I'm kinda tempted to try my hand at a custom water loop this time around. This would be uncharted waters (pun intended) for me, but how hard can it be?  The case I bought can handle 3x140mm fans in the front, so I could mount a massive 420mm radiator there, which should be plenty to cool an overclocked cpu and an overclocked gpu.

 

Edited July 13, 2020 by Keyrock

[Sarex]

14 hours ago, Keyrock said:

I'm kinda tempted to try my hand at a custom water loop this time around. This would be uncharted waters (pun intended) for me, but how hard can it be?  The case I bought can handle 3x140mm fans in the front, so I could mount a massive 420mm radiator there, which should be plenty to cool an overclocked cpu and an overclocked gpu.

 

It's expensive and time consuming depending on how complicated you want to make it, but the end result looks awesome. I used to follow Singularity Computers on YT, he has awesome guides.

[Keyrock]

If I do go through with a custom water loop, I'll make a new thread and detail the process with pictures and such. It won't be flashy, I care not for fancy lights and such. I figure it might be helpful and/or interesting for other people that have never done a custom loop to see a fellow n00b do it. At the end they can draw their own conclusion. For example; that came out alright and didn't look so hard, maybe I'll try it, or, yikes, that looks horrible and that Keyrock guy it terrible, screw that. 

[Sarex]

My only recommendation, from what I know, is to use hard tubing, as the soft variant degrades and gets stained. This does increase the cost as you need fittings for any bends you may need (although I have seen people bend hard tubing with heat to various degrees of success).

[Keyrock]

I have a wacky idea for the tubing, but I'll keep that one in my back pocket for now.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Keyrock

[Azdeus]

I played around with the thought of doing a custom loop for my computer, using copper tubing. Gave up on that idea though and got an AIO, I wanted the computer up and running fast.

[Raithe]

Still playing around with temptation on Novatech's "Custom PC Build" setup...

Keep ending up looking at some variation of this:

be quiet! DARK BASE 900 Black XL-ATX Full Tower Chassis
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra Z390 ATX Motherboard
9th Generation Intel Core i7 9700K 3.6GHz Processor
Corsair Hydro Series, H100i PRO RGB, 240mm Radiator Liquid CPU Cooler
32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX Black DDR4 3600MHz Dual Channel Kit
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060 Super Windforce OC 8GB Graphics Card
Novatech Build Stock 240GB NVME M.2 Solid State Drive
Novatech Build Stock 480GB Solid State Drive
Seagate BarraCuda 4TB Desktop Hard Drive 3.5" SATA III 6GBs 5400RPM 256MB Cache
BeQuiet System Power 9 600W 80 Plus Bronze Non-Modular ATX Power Supply

[Azdeus]

 

11 hours ago, Raithe said:

Still playing around with temptation on Novatech's "Custom PC Build" setup...

Keep ending up looking at some variation of this:

be quiet! DARK BASE 900 Black XL-ATX Full Tower Chassis
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra Z390 ATX Motherboard
9th Generation Intel Core i7 9700K 3.6GHz Processor
Corsair Hydro Series, H100i PRO RGB, 240mm Radiator Liquid CPU Cooler
32GB (4x8GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX Black DDR4 3600MHz Dual Channel Kit
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060 Super Windforce OC 8GB Graphics Card
Novatech Build Stock 240GB NVME M.2 Solid State Drive
Novatech Build Stock 480GB Solid State Drive
Seagate BarraCuda 4TB Desktop Hard Drive 3.5" SATA III 6GBs 5400RPM 256MB Cache
BeQuiet System Power 9 600W 80 Plus Bronze Non-Modular ATX Power Supply

So out of curiosity, what makes you choose Intel?

 

Edited July 16, 2020 by Azdeus

[Raithe]

1 hour ago, Azdeus said:

So out of curiosity, what makes you choose Intel?

 

Years ago, I mean, seriously years ago I had an AMD and just kept having odd things with it, and then the Motherboard blew, and just become one of those things where I've always gone with Intel since then.

[majestic]

On 7/16/2020 at 1:15 PM, Raithe said:

Years ago, I mean, seriously years ago I had an AMD and just kept having odd things with it, and then the Motherboard blew, and just become one of those things where I've always gone with Intel since then.

I can empathize. My father had one of those machines from hell at work and most of his colleagues and partners had them too. At work... and at home. I spent hundres of hours (not exaggerating here) supporting these abominations. Nothing worked the way it should*, especially when you had one of them VIA mainboards that came with driver installers that potentially just killed your Windows.

*Not even talking about gaming here. Those were work computers where the serial ports randomly stopped working until you manually (re)assigned port numbers, for instance. This was particularily fun with telephone systems or people who just wouldn't get any readouts from their manufacturing, laboratory or meteorological equipment. Getting games to run with some stability was a different kind of hell. Bonus points for having ATi cards.

 

[Raithe]

So out of curiosity, how many people actually put a Soundcard in their pc these days or who still relies on that fact that onboard Motherboard sound is pretty decent?

I'm having one of those old gaffer moments of "when I was a kid, you had to have a soundcard or you'd only get 4 tones of beep from your pc"...

[Keyrock]

24 minutes ago, Raithe said:

So out of curiosity, how many people actually put a Soundcard in their pc these days or who still relies on that fact that onboard Motherboard sound is pretty decent?

I'm having one of those old gaffer moments of "when I was a kid, you had to have a soundcard or you'd only get 4 tones of beep from your pc"...

I haven't used a sound card in well over a decade.

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, Raithe said:

So out of curiosity, how many people actually put a Soundcard in their pc these days or who still relies on that fact that onboard Motherboard sound is pretty decent?

I'm having one of those old gaffer moments of "when I was a kid, you had to have a soundcard or you'd only get 4 tones of beep from your pc"...

People nowadays either use a dac or an amplifier if they want some high end speakers.

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Raithe said:

So out of curiosity, how many people actually put a Soundcard in their pc these days or who still relies on that fact that onboard Motherboard sound is pretty decent?

I'm having one of those old gaffer moments of "when I was a kid, you had to have a soundcard or you'd only get 4 tones of beep from your pc"...

I still do, haven't actually compared the onboard sound to it recently though but the last time I had to use onboard I did not care for it.

[Azdeus]

3 hours ago, Raithe said:

So out of curiosity, how many people actually put a Soundcard in their pc these days or who still relies on that fact that onboard Motherboard sound is pretty decent?

I'm having one of those old gaffer moments of "when I was a kid, you had to have a soundcard or you'd only get 4 tones of beep from your pc"...

I still have one, and I like it. I did notice a little bit of quality increase, i.e. better separation of sound, and the software is better than it is for the onboard.

[Humanoid]

An external DAC pretty much is a sound card, just connected via USB instead of PCI. There is a belief that this is superior anyway because it isolates the circuitry from any electrical noise inside your PC. From there it's the same thing, connect it to ye olde powered "computer speakers" or better yet, a separate amplifier and proper hi-fi speakers. I'm of the belief that it's pointless to spend the money on a good sound card or DAC unless you're also investing in a pair of good speakers - and they are an investment, being something that can easily last you decades.

You don't need to have all the bits separate of course. A very good option is to go for a combination DAC + amp combo for convenience. Sure the amps contained within are generally just cheap T-amps, but in truth, plenty of this type of amplifier is sold by even high-end brands as "digital" amps for 10x the price. I use a budget Topping VX1 personally - probably discontinued now - but plenty such devices exist, some even with a headphone amp included.

__________

Important: a DAC and an amp are completely different things and fulfil entirely different functions, and you need both functions to actually make sound. It's just that they can both be in the same box. If you buy a DAC only, then you will need some sort of amplification later. If you buy an amp only, then you are implicitly using the DAC inside the PC (i.e. onboard sound).

To generalise how digital sound reproduction works, there are four links in the chain, and all the links are necessary. It goes source -> DAC -> amplification -> output. Any and all of these elements can be separate, or they may all be in the same device. Some examples:

1) One of those ubiquitous CD boomboxes in the 90. It is a source, DAC, amp and output together in one box.

2) A typical 90s PC would have the source (the CD-ROM drive or just audio files) and DAC (sound card) be inside the PC, and the amplification and output be within the powered speakers you plug into the PC.

3) Playing music through your smartphone. The phone is a source, and if you use wired headphones, the phone is also the DAC and the amp, with the headphones being the output. If you're playing through Bluetooth headphones, then actually your phone is only the source, and the headphones act as the DAC, amp and output.

4) A typical home theatre would have a Blu-ray player as the source, connected to an AV Receiver which acts as the DAC and amp, and the hi-fi speakers would purely handle the output.

(In the pre-digital days, e.g. for vinyl or tape, the DAC is omitted of course).

[LadyCrimson]

17 hours ago, Malcador said:

I still do, haven't actually compared the onboard sound to it recently though but the last time I had to use onboard I did not care for it.

That would be me as well.  Every time I've tried onboard I just can't stand it - likely it's just their drivers/softwares differences, but onboard always sounds tinny/screechy or muffled or awful in some way (using the exact same "desktop speaks"). When I built my rig last time I gave it a shot again and same thing.  Toss in one of my many soundblasters and suddenly those same $50-$100 speakers sound fantastic (for what they are, I mean, I'm not looking for/expecting audiophile sound in my gaming personally)).

[Sarex]

@Humanoid you are right. Although when I was looking for getting a set up myself there were a bunch of amp/dac combos.

[Malcador]

I am sure I am the only one that still uses an optical drive

[Azdeus]

24 minutes ago, Malcador said:

I am sure I am the only one that still uses an optical drive

pfft

[Malcador]

13 minutes ago, Azdeus said:

pfft

Hah. Yeah mainly I keep it to load up old games and I've a bunch of stuff archived on DVDs.  Back when I had a bandwidth cap I needed it for larger games - got the physical version of GTAV, 5 discs, blah.   Had to replace a bunch during my transition from XP -> 7 -> 8/10, as with my soundcard.

[Keyrock]

Y'all are gonna make me put in a 5 1/4 floppy drive so that I can out-grognard you.