Build Thread 3.0

[Bartimaeus]

I'd be pretty loathe to throw away a 30 G tube of the stuff that I've only used probably 6-7 times, so I'd hope it's fine, .

[Humanoid]

@BartimaeusI got 15408 on mine back when I built my PC back in early February. Cooler is a Noctua U14S which should be weaker than the Fuma 2. Used the standard NT-H1 included paste. Temps capped out at 89C, which is not a concern for this CPU. This is in a Fractal Design Define 7 case with just the stock fans, but I did leave the door open for the purposes of the test.

I was originally planning to set the CPU on Eco mode but on first try I couldn't get the setting to show up and I couldn't be bothered following it up.

 

____

And now for a significantly less glamourous build. I just picked up a i3 NUC, the older but ubiquitous NUC8i3BEH. I'd be planning to pick up something more powerful, but settled for this now at the basement price of $260AUD. Just couldn't wait any longer: my old Celeron NUC from circa 2015 which chugs on things as simple as YouTube at times. Just putting in a single 8GB stick of 2400MHz RAM and my old 250GB Sandisk SATA SSD in it for now, though there's a question mark regarding the health of the SSD, so we'll see.

What I really wanted was one of the Asus or Gigabyte Ryzen-based mini-PCs, but Asus have disappointed with their recent announcement of the new PN51 series, using only Zen 2 mobile processors and leaving out the new Zen 3 ones. That is, they're using the Ryzen 5300U, 5500U and 5700U which are Zen 2, and not the 5400U, 5600U and 5800U which are the interesting ones. (And shame on AMD for the idiotic naming scheme too). Meanwhile Gigabyte could hardly get any of their previous generation ones on the market and have said nothing about a refresh.

Incidentally, it's mildly interesting that this NUC8 has a build date of February this year, which means it's still being manufactured alongside the disappointing NUC10 series of the past year or two (which had a tiny improvement in CPU performance and a large drop in graphics performance), and the brand new NUC11s.

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

I got 15408 on mine back when I built my PC back in early February. Cooler is a Noctua U14S which should be weaker than the Fuma 2. Used the standard NT-H1 included paste. Temps capped out at 89C, which is not a concern for this CPU. This is in a Fractal Design Define 7 case with just the stock fans, but I did leave the door open for the purposes of the test.

I was originally planning to set the CPU on Eco mode but on first try I couldn't get the setting to show up and I couldn't be bothered following it up.

Thanks for the context. After a month+ of testing my system in various circumstances, it turns that it doesn't seem to be a particularly good idea to run the standard ECO modes anyways - can't recommend it, as it created stability problems in my experience. Weirdly, not at 100% usage - at 100% usage in like full threaded benchmarks, my system seemed to be perfectly stable, but it was instead at smaller utilization, like 10-20%, that was causing the instability. I ended up putting some smaller, less meaningful caps on my system instead. On the other hand, the power curve was a much better use of my time - gained a little power efficiency *and* some performance for it (my score in Cinebench R23 went up just about a thousand points with the stable limits of the power curve). I got a couple of additional Scythe case fans that were apparently well-recommended (up until I saw the FUMA 2 for sale, I'd never even heard of Scythe...now suddenly it seems like they're recommended everywhere for surprisingly good performance at great pricepoints), but the shipping seems to have been delayed. Once I have those, I'll try re-doing the cooler and reporting back to see if my system fares any better.

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

That is, they're using the Ryzen 5300U, 5500U and 5700U which are Zen 2, and not the 5400U, 5600U and 5800U which are the interesting ones. (And shame on AMD for the idiotic naming scheme too)

I seriously have never got why the numbering scheme is a whole implied generation ahead for mobile CPUs and APUs - pretty annoying. What do you use/plan on using this system for?

[Humanoid]

42 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

(up until I saw the FUMA 2 for sale, I'd never even heard of Scythe...now suddenly it seems like they're recommended everywhere for surprisingly good performance at great pricepoints)

I had a Scythe Ninja Rev B on my Core 2 Duo E6300 way back in the day based on a recommendation from SPCR. Ironically it was one of their more disappointing products as unlike the original version, it used Intel's default push-pin mounting and therefore didn't have enough mounting pressure for optimal performance. Speaking of which, too much pressure can cause issues too so you might want to play around a little with that. I also still have their top-down Shuriken cooler in my Haswell-based HTPC which is several years old now.

49 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I seriously have never got why the numbering scheme is a whole implied generation ahead for mobile CPUs and APUs - pretty annoying. What do you use/plan on using this system for?

It's extra frustrating because they solved one problem only to create another. They finally advanced the desktop branding to match the mobile branding with the 5000 series, only to make the 5000 mobile series a bastardised mix of Zen 2 and 3. This system is intended to be my bedroom HTPC, for streaming media from both my NAS and from the Internet. The Celeron proved utterly incapable of gaming, even struggling on basic 2D games, but maybe that'll be an option too. And if Asus or another company get their act together, I may just upgrade again anyway come Zen 4 or whatever.

And yeah, I've tried alternative options like the inbuilt Smart TV functionality (pretty weak on Panasonics) and an Amazon Fire Stick Lite, but they've disappointed. I've had this setup since 2017, and am happy enough to continue with something similar, even with the waning popularity of HTPCs (with Logitech's discontinuation of the Harmony line being another nail in the coffin). Also considered an Xbox Series S but ultimately I think that's something I'd want to run alongside the HTPC, and not as a replacement.

[Sarex]

8 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

And yeah, I've tried alternative options like the inbuilt Smart TV functionality (pretty weak on Panasonics) and an Amazon Fire Stick Lite, but they've disappointed. I've had this setup since 2017, and am happy enough to continue with something similar, even with the waning popularity of HTPCs (with Logitech's discontinuation of the Harmony line being another nail in the coffin). Also considered an Xbox Series S but ultimately I think that's something I'd want to run alongside the HTPC, and not as a replacement.

I have Xiaomi Mi Box S and it has been doing work for a couple of years now, although I only used it for 1080p and never tried 4k. You can sideload any app you need and can attach external storage to it. Alternatively Nvidia Shield is getting good reviews all around but it's price is higher than the rest of the competition.

[Humanoid]

Yeah, my ceiling for an Android media streamer is probably around $100, which is what the new Chromecast goes for here. But I opted to try the Fire Stick for $40. Unfortunately its Internet connection tends to drop out, necessitating a restart. Does the job with native Prime content well enough though, it's third-party streaming apps where it struggles.

A Shield TV is $200 and the Pro is $300, and when put up against the NUC costing me about $300 total (cheating a bit because I already have the SSD) I thought it was a pretty obvious choice. Was ready to spend a bit more too because I missed out on 40% off a HP Spectre OLED laptop (because the discount was for education and corporate partners) but again, nothing more powerful really ticked all the boxes, so I wait.

Edited May 6, 2021 by Humanoid

[Zoraptor]

2 hours ago, Humanoid said:

It's extra frustrating because they solved one problem only to create another. They finally advanced the desktop branding to match the mobile branding with the 5000 series, only to make the 5000 mobile series a bastardised mix of Zen 2 and 3.

AMD's naming schemes are probably the stupidest thing about the company. To be fair, they're miles behind Intel's mobile naming scheme in terms of stupidity- so bad that Intel's own marketing department doesn't even know what the model numbers mean- but AMD's is still unnecessarily confusing. Zen 2 and Zen 3 are both 7nm too, so they aren't even gaining extra capacity with the naming, and using the same naming scheme for CPUs and GPUs is moronic. 3600X/T is a (ok, pretty pointless for the XT) CPU, 5600X is a CPU, but 5600XT is a GPU... why? It's so easy to avoid.

[Keyrock]

Both AMD and Intel pale in comparison to Microsoft's XBOX division when it comes to sheer stupidity of naming schemes. 

[Bartimaeus]

hey guys, quick question, is your cpu cooler supposed to look like this

(image taken from someone else's reddit post but still accurate)

In completely unrelated news, my Cinebench R23 score jumped up to 15620 without any OC or making any changes, no idea why though, must be magic I guess, . Oh, and in other, even more completely unrelated news, I have been cancelled from working in IT or with computers ever again, this is my final message to all of you because my PC and other devices have decided that I'm no longer allowed to use them, goodbye forever

[Sarex]

Stupid things happen, don't beat yourself up for it. It's the confidence that gets you, a perfect example being my colleague, regarded as a PC expert, who was in a process of RMAing a PSU because he figured that it was the culprit for his newly built PC not starting up. What ended up being the case was he didn't plug in the CPU power connectors... Still chuckle to this day when I remember that story.

Edited May 17, 2021 by Sarex

[Bartimaeus]

14 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Stupid things happen, don't beat yourself up for it. It's the confidence that gets you, a perfect example being my colleague, regarded as a PC expert, who was in a process of RMAing a PSU because he figured that it was the culprit for his newly built PC not starting up. What ended up being the case was he didn't plug in the CPU power connectors... Still chuckle to this day when I remember that story.

I do have a little bit of an excuse in that I had actually been engaged in a multi-hour titanic battle with trying to mount the heatsink bracket, which on the FUMA 2 is designed in such a way that you have to either have mounted it onto the motherboard outside of the case OR you need a third hand to keep it together, and I'd already put my MB into the case and didn't feel like taking it out, and I'd been putting it together very early in the morning with no-one else around to help. I should've just taken the motherboard out or waited, because I was incredibly incensed at my new PC after trying a bunch of different ideas to do it without either of those - I finally concocted a harebrained solution to do it that worked, but I was mad and tired and just kinda tossed my heatsink onto it in the frenzy without really looking at it. Funnily, after getting it up and running, I actually had the thought "...did I take the plastic off? I specifically told myself to do that at some point, but I don't remember...I must have, it's working, after all!". No, past me, no I didn't. Shocked the temperatures were as good as they were during all of my benchmarking and testing for like an entire week.

[Sarex]

An unusual build from me this time around, a laptop. An old Toshiba (now 10 years old), that I got because it wasn't being used.

The biggest issue it had was that its battery was borked as it wasn't being used for years and so some of the cells went kaput as they they were completely discharged. I got a new battery double the capacity of the OEM (8800mAh) with the added benefit that it lifts the back of the laptop and provides better cooling.

Next on the block was the CPU, it had a i5-2430M (2 cores/4 threads) which I replaced with a i7-2670QM (4 cores/8 threads). There wasn't anything better that was priced reasonably, the extreme versions were too expensive and for the 3xxx series I wasn't sure the MB bios would support it, although the socket was the same. Now came the issue of CPU throttling, it would lock the CPU to its lowest frequency at random times and would not unlock it until a reboot. I could not figure out the reason why apart from the driver support on Win10. I got a new cooler to eliminate thermals (it wasn't it) and searched the whole net to find a solution. What I settled on was installing ThrottleStop and that remedied that issue.

Next on the agenda was the cracked plastic on the base around the cooler as is usually the case with laptops, I thought I lucked out with an ebay find of new old stock for the same model, but upon arrival and attempted assembly some of the MB screw holes were in a different position, I would have had to modify it to a point were the old case would be better. I was out of pocket on shipping both ways for that.

What caught my eye next was the wifi card. It had an old Qualcomm/Atheros wifi/bluetooth card that couldn't even connect to a 5ghz network (got 30-40mb max), took ages on startup to connect to a network (again old laptop with old drives and Windows 10) and bluetooth that not all my devices could connect to. Upon researcher I found that intel wifi chips AX210 are being sold with the newest wifi 6e and bluetooth 5.2 (there are older intel chip versions available too). I first started looking in the US, but all that was available were AX200 and with the wrong antenna sockets. Looking further I found a reddit thread that said aliexpress had cards that worked, the biggest trouble was finding a mini PCI e card with the right antenna socket as recently aliexpress shipping to my country has become an issue so there aren't that many products that are available anymore. Luckily I found a supplier that had good reviews and a manufacturer that I was looking for. In a couple of weeks I got the card, installed it in the laptop downloaded the drivers from Intel and so far it works perfectly, I can even cast to another display now. So if you guys want the latest wifi/bluetooth standard on your laptop there is an easy and cheap way to do it.

One more thing I tried was getting a 1080p display for it, but I figured out that the flat cable connector the MB has doesn't support it. Which sucks as it has a HDMI connector that can do 1080p and many other laptops from that time period had MBs with a connector that could connect to a 1080p display...

The only issue the laptop has right now is a sound card that doesn't work due to driver support, thank you Conexant. I was able to find a driver which would install on win10 but the speakers still crackle when over 40% and the sound dies for a short time because the sound card overheats. There is a "solution" where you can install a copper plate over it which stops it from overheating, but I didn't bother with that as laptop speakers suck anyways. I have a good bluetooth speaker and headphone can easily be connected.

For now that is pretty much it, still looking (not really) for a plastic base to replace my cracked one (which is really not that cracked) and will maybe get a 4gb ram stick to replace the 2gb that is in there for a total of 8gb. Oh yeah and **** MS, their latest Cumulative update fails to install for some reason so I will more then likely have to reinstall windows unless the next months update fixes it.

edit: oh yeah and it has an SSD, but that was done before I got it.

edit2: word of caution on the wifi card upgrade, Lenovo and HP (only for a certain time period for HP) laptops have a whitelist in bios that will only let their own cards work. So you would need to install a modified version of the bios to get around that. This goes for LTE modems too and in this case the whitelist exists on newer HP laptops too.

 

Edited May 21, 2021 by Sarex

[Bartimaeus]

That seems like a heck of a DIY project - is it for yourself or someone else?

[Sarex]

20 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

That seems like a heck of a DIY project - is it for yourself or someone else?

For my family, currently my sister is using it. But what I haven't mentioned is that it's a heavy ass thing (especially with that battery), so not much for mobility. I suspect it will soon be left to my parents as she gets a sleek aluminum Macbook wannabe.

[Sarex]

Ended up running the Windows 10 upgrade tool as the update that was failing was trying to install every other restart... Seriously MS...

[majestic]

Every now and then I stumble into this thread only to be reminded of why I decided 15 years ago that I will never ever again build a computer myself, after trashing my P4 D840* (great idea Intel, by the way, putting two of these heat monsters onto a single chip) in attempt to get the core temp down to a workable range. I'll just pick the parts I'd like to have and let someon else assemble it, luckily there are plenty of shops these days that do just that.

*Might have been broken right from the start, I changed the heatsink because the idle core temperature went up to 70°C, and the CPU overheating protection fired the moment I started a game or two. However, I well and truly trashed the CPU trying to mount the other heatsink, which of course meant that I voided any warranty.

[Bartimaeus]

It can definitely be a struggle, but I like having hands-on familiarity with my PCs, especially since I like to get everything just so, be able to do physical maintenance and know what I'm doing and where everything is, swap out drives, etc. The neck-breaking pain, not so much, but

[ComradeYellow]

Just bought a 500 watt electric dust blower to periodically clean out the innards, wont arrive for a month though.  I hope it works as I'm imagining it working.

Also, my 1440p/144hz monitor looks like it's starting to **** the bed, as it keeps flickering on and off.  I guess it's time to upgrade to 4k?

[Sarex]

Word of caution on the wifi card upgrade, Lenovo and HP (only for a certain time period for HP) laptops have a whitelist in bios that will only let their own cards work. So you would need to install a modified version of the bios to get around that. This goes for LTE modems too and in this case the whitelist exists on newer HP laptops too.

[Keyrock]

The upcoming Linux kernel (5.14) is killing support for IDE (ATA) connections.

I still remember connecting a DVD ROM, a floppy drive, and 2 7200 RPM WD hard drives with those unwieldy ribbon cables...

Edited July 12, 2021 by Keyrock

[Bartimaeus]

I still have a bunch of IDE cables in a box somewhere that I'm keeping for who knows what reason...I guess I ought to go through some stuff.

[Keyrock]

I think I got rid of my box of IDE cables some years back, but I'm sure I still have a ton of useless stuff, like way too many cat 5 ethernet cables, USB A to mini USB cables, coax cables, and AV cables.

[Azdeus]

Oh yeah, I've got some 50 metres of coax cables around my house that we used to have for networking, not to mention tonnes of old IDE drives and whatnot, I know I've got an ISA riser aswell

[LadyCrimson]

On 7/12/2021 at 11:50 AM, Keyrock said:

is killing support for IDE (ATA) connections.

I thought that had already happened. 

I haven't seen those things in ages, feels like. Although I'm sure hubby also has some in a dusty box somewhere.

[Keyrock]

58 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

I thought that had already happened. 

I wouldn't be surprised if Windows had killed IDE support years ago. In fact, I'd be surprised if they hadn't.

Edited July 13, 2021 by Keyrock