PC build thread

[fastbilly1]

New case came in - Rosewill R4000:

Rosewill put it on ebay shipped for $30 cheaper than Newegg. It is a tank and really is a standard pc case on its side with a lot of harddrive bays.

The the 8600k was in stock at Newegg for $40 more than retail, so still waiting on the rest of hte build...

[Ziggy]

How many rack spaces is that?

Are you using it as a server? I was thinking about parting together a PC specially for audio recording, so something like this might be handle for me since I have a rack or audio gear anyway.

[fastbilly1]

4u. I am using it for my gaming computer. I have a 42u cabinet my wife found on the side of the road, but I am downsizing to a 10u one I am building. I had 30u of servers at one point, but paired them down. I had ten (10) Dell 1950s that I had setup as a render farm but they were donated to a Children's Cyber Defense class. They were way too loud for me.

My main two servers are Dell R710s I use for server stuff:
Hyper-V R710:
Dual Xeon X5672
24gb of ram
6 1tb SATA drives

ESX-i R710:
Dual Xeon X5650
128gbs of ram
6 1tb SAS drives

I dont do any real work on them but I have gotten pretty good with some OS's I did not have access to before because of them.

My other computer project is replacing the psu fan in my Juniper ex4200. If that works, I am getting a former army rugged 3u case, and mounting it and a IBM x3650 server into it for LAN parties to use as the backbone and to run game servers.

[fastbilly1]

Everything is finally aligning so new build is going to be:
8600k
Noctua Nh-d9l
MSI z370 Pro
Samsung Evo 960 M2 NVMe 250gb
Ballistix 16gb 3000 DDR4
2tb Seagate data drive

Planning to use Artic Silver 5 and swap out the whitebox fans with Noctua NF-R8s

Edit:
Opted to get the two Noctua NF-F12 aswell. The base 120mm fans were a good bit louder than I thought they were.

Ill be quasi cutting edge soon!

[casterofdreams]

Hi everyone.

About eight or so years ago I built my very first gaming rig - a 1.0 so to speak. Fast forward to the end of last year/beginning of this year where i completed a new rig - dubbed 2.0, and with that the 1.0 was stored. But since there isn’t anything wrong with the system other than being a bit slower and having the inability to play modern games, I can have it as a mule of sorts; playing games released for the time period (Xbox 360 era).

It looks like the GPU, an AMD Radeon 5780, is on its way out. Heat issues seem to throttle it. I opened it once about three years ago to clean it out and apply a fresh thing of thermal paste.

So to give the old rig some new life, I decided to buy a few things:
- an EVGA 1050 ti FTW edition: this will, or should, handle anything I throw at it from the time period I am aiming for.
- a new 1TB HDD as my main OS boot drive: this is simply replacing the one I have currently which is eight years old.
- a new 2TB SSHD as my gaming drive: I’ve liked the concept of SSHDs for awhile and use three in the 2.0 rig. Much cheaper than SSDs.

So that’s it. This will be coupled with the current stuff in there: a first generation i7 -950 @ 3.04GHz I think, with an ungraded air cooler, and 6GB of DDR3 RAM. All tied to a 144Hz 1080p monitor. While I am aiming for 1080p @ 60FPS, the modern card will allow for 144Hz during regular OS use, something the old card cannot do.

[Tanooki]

Ok need some help, never shopped one of these before both for type and well size (laptop here.)

My piece o crap HGST is yet again dying, 3rd one and my warrant is over from like 8mo back now. I'm finished with that terrible maker of drives. I'm also done with these click trap stupid plate drives too.

I only need a 1TB drive as it has breathing room for me as I'm using around 1/2 of what I have now on this junk drive.

It started having some SMART notes, and a week ago a scan showed nothing using HD Tune 2.55, and now I'm maybe 15% through the drive scan and just 1 solitary isolated block for whatever each of those spaces are worth came back as RED(damaged.)

I have a good quality Sager DIY laptop I had xoticpc slap together and it uses a Clevo P170sma motherboard. HDD is easily accessible on this too as I can pop it out with little effort.

What kind of SSD would be ideal here, 1TB in size. I don't need something slow, but also not screamingly fast either, B-tier speed is fine. Don't want some generic PNY level garbage though too. PCMag for 2018 recommended a Crucial MX300 drive -- https://www.pcmag.com/review/358892/crucial-mx300-1tb Would this be agreeably ideal? Who would be good to avoid (aside from HGST I won't touch again ever.) I saw that SanDisk was into making SSDs, and I've never had an issue with them over the years with SD or stick drives. Samsung look like they cost the most, maybe paying for name? Are Western Digital or Seagate any good for these types of drives or not, hit and miss? I know you still pay up some on a SSD, but they're not as bad as they were 4 years ago when I chose not to. I can swing a couple hundred out of my paypal or elsewhere somehow but not really north of it.

[Tanooki]

I'm reading more on the Crucial site it looks like if I had to do it I may need to buy a kit that allows a SSD in a SATA HDD space?? I may have to call clevo or xoticpc before i jump to it. For all I know the drive could last or crap out in weeks. Argh.

[isiolia]

If you have a standard 2.5" drive in there, then the Crucial should fit just fine. Those are basically the same size as a thin HDD, though they tend to include a plastic shim to make it a "standard" thickness if it fits better that way. Were you trying to install it in a mounting location that fits a 3.5" drive, then you'd probably want an adapter - though to be fair, with no moving parts, mounting an SSD cleanly isn't necessary. So it's only really a big deal if you have a backplane or something you need to align it with (older Mac Pros for example).

IMO, Crucial SSDs are a solid mainstream type pick. Samsung are typically some of the best too, but like you mentioned, usually a little pricier. Personally, those are the two brands I tend to buy, and have had no real problems with them (in fact, I bought the 500GB version of that drive for myself a few weeks ago). We've had some Sandisk and Kingston ones at work as well, which were largely good, but did have a failure or two. Western Digital is a fairly recent entry into the market, and is decent from what I have read.

With that many failures in your laptop, I would wonder some about environment or usage. SSDs are a bit more resilient in general though.

[Tanooki]

I have a standard HGST 2.5" traditional HDD 1TB in size.

While I was out I let it run a scan, came back with more red blocks since. 0.6% of the drive I see appears to be shot according to HD Tune 2.55.

Below is what I'm looking at now, basically it's going slowly.


Some of this junk that Crucial has in their guide confused me. Can I just stuff this SSD in the same plug/space as the HDD was, or do I have to pry off the plate under where the HDD has been and inject the SSD into that space? They're making it sound like I need to do some kind of a jumper deal so it can use that area.

I like the idea they have a free ghosting tool though with Crucial, can just salvage this entire system without having to reload weeks/months of configurations and setups.


Well right now the Clevo motherboard guide has me a bit confused. I know what's in there now is a SATAII style 1TB drive that fits that kind of jack. The book likes to talk about removing but not adding drives and how to get into those spaces for additional SSDs (I can raid out like +2 or 3 more in this thing.) I don't know if it's as easy as prying out the one HDD and it will just jump to the next (first) SSD it sees and boots off that. If that's the case cool, leave it bare. But if I have to rig it because of the thing, then I'd need that cage and conversion cable to go from SSD port to SATA I suppose. The more I read the more it isn't helping, so I may just have to call Sager or XoticPC and see who is more helpful about that.


I would wonder about environment too as you said, but after that 2nd HDD went I convinced them it could have been the motherboard and got an entire new one put into the device about a year ago or so. So unless I got 2 lemony in the same space motherboards I don't know. As far as heat goes 42C on the GPU, the HD sits currently at 50C, general temp is 53C, and the 4 cores are ranging 49-54C currently according to speedfan 4.52. I do have it raised up sitting on a cooler master with 2 fans going below and with this room lacking in better temp control it does run slightly hotter in summer than other times. I recently pulled the bottom off and dusted off the board and cleared the dust off the 2 fans and the copper piping inside is nice and clean too.


I'm looking right at this Crucial drive, I think this would work according to their site it says it should saying it's SATA and 7mm but comes with a bracket for 9mm standard: http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/p170sm/CT11485086

[isiolia]

Some of this junk that Crucial has in their guide confused me. Can I just stuff this SSD in the same plug/space as the HDD was, or do I have to pry off the plate under where the HDD has been and inject the SSD into that space? They're making it sound like I need to do some kind of a jumper deal so it can use that area.

Yes, you can do a direct swap from the existing HDD to that SSD, as it's a standard SATA model. It'll fit in exactly how the existing HDD does.

Where I think Crucial is throwing you for a loop is that - far as I see - your laptop has an mSATA slot underneath where the primary HDD is. So, if you wanted, you could buy one in that form factor (IE like this ) and install it there instead. Far as I know, unlike NVMe, there's no performance benefit. mSATA is more just for form factor, which in your case would mean being able to still have a HDD where you have one now.

Either way, because you have that as an option, Crucial is linking the instructions for that, despite that they don't actually seem to offer mSATA drives for it.

If you go with the 2.5" instructions, they're a lot more in line with what you'd do to simply clone your drive and swap it entirely.