So, with the new PC online, here comes some thought on my build.
But first: it's 2019 and still there's no decent way of connecting motherboard to case I/O panels. Is that hard to come up with a standard like internal USB headers? Really. My previous build (Asus mobo) had a raiser board where you would connect the I/O cables and then plug that little piece of plastic onto the motherboard. Gigabyte provided a full cable in the X570 Xtreme, which made things a little easier, but when I closed the case after checking everything was in place (and turned the PC on a couple of times for BIOS update and config), the I/O power switch cable came loose and forced me to reopen the case. Really, do something about those frigging I/O cables mobo and case manufacturers.
Here's the build:
Ryzen 3900X
Noctua NH-D15
Gigabyte X570 Xtreme
Seasonic 750w
32GB DDR4 cantrememberthespeeditshouldbemorethan3000MHZ
MSI RTX 2080
Samsung 970 500GB NVME
WD 6TB Black
Samsung 860 4TB
Samsung 860 1TB
5" frontal bay with card reader and 4x USB3
beQuiet! Dark Base Pro 900 (black trims)
Starting with the case, that was the most difficult decision. I like fulltower cases, and those are rare. A quick tour of available midtowers highlighted that many manufacturers now ignore frontal bays, and for the desktop I don't want an USB card reader on the desk. The Dark Base was pretty much the only case which game me what I wanted, which included provision for many internal HDDs. If it had a version with no tempered glass sidepanel it would have been perfect, but nowadays everyone is about RGB LEDs so that you can light up the room with just the PC. Whatever.
Anyway, the Dark Base is a pretty nice case. You can strip it down to the frame and rearrange its internal in several ways, and the hinged door (padded with sound absorbers and covering the intake fans, their dust filter, and the 5" bays) can be rearranged to open on the other side. It even includes a Qi charger on top, which I didn't connect because I don't have anything that would make use of it. The case has 2 USB 3 in A flavour and 1 USB 3 type-C on the front, sorrounding a large power button and activity LEDs. No reset button. There's a fourth USB-A plug but it doesn't carry data, it's meant for fast charging only. 3 beQuiet 120mm fans are included, but I replaced them with an assortment of 120mm and 140mm Noctua fans, then proceeded to add 5 more, for a total of eight fans spread throughout the case (front and bottom pushing, rear and top pulling); I went for Noctua fans because they are slightly quieter and the number of fans will compensate for the lower airflow. I've forced those fans to maximum RPM (normally they're PWM controlled) and they become audible in a quiet room, but it's a low-pitched whisper than doesn't get annoying and is drown by any other kind of noise.
Working on the case was OK, but the motherboard partially covers the cable passthroughs, making routing a bit difficult. I had to rearrange the HDD cages because the GPU was too long, and had to route some cables through one space meant for HDDs as otherwise they wouldn't have fit. Disassembling the case was again OK, but removing the PSU shroud is a bit of a pain, with two screws on the right side and one on the left side. But the dust filters can be accessed from the front of the case without disassembling anything, a definite plus. Now let's see how long it takes for those to get dusty.
I've lost a screw inside the case, as usual, but it was when everything was 90% completed so the screw will stay in there. Have fun, buddy.
The additional HDD case are a pain. To attach them you need to open the left sidepanel to first unplgu a series of plastic covers than can only be retrieved from the right side, than install the HDD, slip the cage in the opening, and fix it with three thumbscrews. Each cage can fit two 2.5" HDDs or one 3.5". However the thumbscrews are arranged in a way that one is right below the SATA connector, precluding the use of angled cables.
Overall I liked the case, my gripes are probably mostly due to oversized mobos.
I've chosen the Gigabyte X570 Xtreme because it's the only mobo in the initial wave featuring an on-board 10GB network card. A MSI mobo had that as an additional PCIE card, and many others have only a 2.5GB or 5GB card on-board. It's also the only mobo with passive cooling for the chipset. It doesn't have internal USB2 headers, but 2 USB3, and 1 USB-C internal headers, which neatly fit the ports on the case and the frontal bay. The mobo even has two CPU power connectors, probably to ensure compatibility with future, more power hungry CPUs...but with a 3900 one plug is all you need. There are three M2 slots, all of them covered by a metal heat spreader. The first slot can be accessed even with a GPU installed. I installed the GPU before the CPU HSF, and to secure the fans I had to unplug the GPU...and that's where I wished for larger PCIE retention clips, it was pretty hard pushing them down to free the card.
There are four USB2 ports on the back of the mobo, currently populated by mouse, keyboard, and graphic table. Upon first powerup the board was equipped with BIOS version F2, which for some reason stopped recognizing the mouse after 10 or so seconds, forcing to use the keyboard. Yes, it's a snazzy UEFI-type BIOS. Updating to version F3i solved all problems. A few parameters changed later (like turning off LEDs and enabling virtualization), the mobo was configured and ready.
One note on LEDS: they are more subdued than I thought. But still useless, so off they are turned.
About LEDs...the GPU. By default it has a rainbow-coloured LED strip lighting up the MSI logo and the whole lenght of the mobo, and the only way to turn it off is to install a piece of software. I don't want another thing clogging up the startup sequence, the case is below the table, I don't know if the settings will be saved if I unistall the program, so I'm living with those LEDs.
The GPU itself is a beast, longer than the motherboard. It has three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. MSI were corteous enough to include dustplug for all these ports, and a metal stiffener to support the card. Which is totally useless, I've tried for 10 or so minutes to fix this stiffener for it to actually support the card with no success, it was either pitching down or too angled to make any difference. The PCIE slots on the mobo have a metal frame around them and the card itself takes two slots (so two screws on the backplate), so it should be enough. It's not like I'm moving the case anyway.
The PSU is from Seasonic, which produce their own internals, and I've been using them for quite some time and never let down. Cables are fully modular, braided, and come in an elegant bag. I went for a 750w PSU although 600 should have been enough mostly to be sure not to be underpowered due to the GPU...and should I change that I wouldn't have to worry about removing the PSU and all the cabling associated with it.
The RAM is from G-Skill, and I picked it from Gigabyte's compatibility list. I would have went for 64GB, but there were no 2x32GB kits available for sale when I ordered and I saved some money to upgrade the CPU from the planned 3800 to a 3900.
I didn't go for watercooling because I'm still not fully convinced by it and its maintenance requirements, even for all-in-ones. Not to mention that the Noctua HSF is cooled by the same fans I use in the case, so they are practically silent even at max RPM. Mounting the HSF required the removal of the standard AM4 mounting brackets, but installing that and the CPU was a breeze compared to the LGA2011. The thermal past is Arctic MX-4, which I bought new and remembered more liquid and easier to spread. Oh well.
Installing Win10 from a USB3 stick took around 5 minutes, although not even version 1903 comes with drivers for the 10GB card (from Aquantia), so I had to install the OS, then the network card drivers, reboot, and then Windows proceeded to install all needed drivers. Do you remember when you either had to slipstream updates in a Win7 installer or download all updates once a vanilla OS was installed? Now everything's simple. To hell with those fondly reminiscing the days of config.sys and autoexec.bat.
The only thing that wasn't correctly installed was the Cintiq tablet: the tablet worked but the pointing area spread across three screens, so I had to manually install the Wacom drivers to force the pointer on just the Cintiq itself. The Adobe CC was a minor bump, beforehand I disabled and unistalled it from the previous PC, but upon login it was adamant the CC had been already activated on two computers...nothing major, I just logged in again and reset the activation on the machine.
After installing every other utlity, I then proceeded to install Steam and GOG Galaxy. I wanted to test the PC and thought of 3D Mark, discovering that now you have to get it from Steam and the whole suite is €25. Then speedlolita told me the demo has some benchmarking tool. I got a respectable score of 11000, placing me above the sample "4K gaming PC" in the test (9300), but still way below the record holders (35k). Still, it's nice to see BattleTech run in 4K with all details and FSAA turned to max at 60fps even in city missions. And...other than that I don't have any other modern PC game to test the PC with.
But here are some impressions with BattleTech.
The major source of noise is the GPU. Upon turning on the PC its three fans spin at max, creating quite the ruckus. They then stop completely, only to resume spinning when required. The fans do produce an audible "hum" that constantly goes up and down, but even after an hour they were quite silent and never overpowered the game's music even during quiet moments. I tried the CUDA-enhaced rendering for one video (nothing major, just a bit of colour and perspective correction), and in that case it never stirred more noise than standard/Youtube use. Quite pleased with this design from MSI.
I turn off the displays if I leave the PC on and go, for example, to eat dinner, and the card is also faster in reconnecting them, which is a pleasant change. Not that the FirePro W7100 I had before took minutes, but it's those one/two seconds that make you happy. A couple of days ago nVidia also released drivers in which you can decide scaling type (bilinear or nearest neighbour) which should eliminate blur on old/pixelart games, but I still have to install them.
But first: it's 2019 and still there's no decent way of connecting motherboard to case I/O panels. Is that hard to come up with a standard like internal USB headers? Really. My previous build (Asus mobo) had a raiser board where you would connect the I/O cables and then plug that little piece of plastic onto the motherboard. Gigabyte provided a full cable in the X570 Xtreme, which made things a little easier, but when I closed the case after checking everything was in place (and turned the PC on a couple of times for BIOS update and config), the I/O power switch cable came loose and forced me to reopen the case. Really, do something about those frigging I/O cables mobo and case manufacturers.
Here's the build:
Ryzen 3900X
Noctua NH-D15
Gigabyte X570 Xtreme
Seasonic 750w
32GB DDR4 cantrememberthespeeditshouldbemorethan3000MHZ
MSI RTX 2080
Samsung 970 500GB NVME
WD 6TB Black
Samsung 860 4TB
Samsung 860 1TB
5" frontal bay with card reader and 4x USB3
beQuiet! Dark Base Pro 900 (black trims)
Starting with the case, that was the most difficult decision. I like fulltower cases, and those are rare. A quick tour of available midtowers highlighted that many manufacturers now ignore frontal bays, and for the desktop I don't want an USB card reader on the desk. The Dark Base was pretty much the only case which game me what I wanted, which included provision for many internal HDDs. If it had a version with no tempered glass sidepanel it would have been perfect, but nowadays everyone is about RGB LEDs so that you can light up the room with just the PC. Whatever.
Anyway, the Dark Base is a pretty nice case. You can strip it down to the frame and rearrange its internal in several ways, and the hinged door (padded with sound absorbers and covering the intake fans, their dust filter, and the 5" bays) can be rearranged to open on the other side. It even includes a Qi charger on top, which I didn't connect because I don't have anything that would make use of it. The case has 2 USB 3 in A flavour and 1 USB 3 type-C on the front, sorrounding a large power button and activity LEDs. No reset button. There's a fourth USB-A plug but it doesn't carry data, it's meant for fast charging only. 3 beQuiet 120mm fans are included, but I replaced them with an assortment of 120mm and 140mm Noctua fans, then proceeded to add 5 more, for a total of eight fans spread throughout the case (front and bottom pushing, rear and top pulling); I went for Noctua fans because they are slightly quieter and the number of fans will compensate for the lower airflow. I've forced those fans to maximum RPM (normally they're PWM controlled) and they become audible in a quiet room, but it's a low-pitched whisper than doesn't get annoying and is drown by any other kind of noise.
Working on the case was OK, but the motherboard partially covers the cable passthroughs, making routing a bit difficult. I had to rearrange the HDD cages because the GPU was too long, and had to route some cables through one space meant for HDDs as otherwise they wouldn't have fit. Disassembling the case was again OK, but removing the PSU shroud is a bit of a pain, with two screws on the right side and one on the left side. But the dust filters can be accessed from the front of the case without disassembling anything, a definite plus. Now let's see how long it takes for those to get dusty.
I've lost a screw inside the case, as usual, but it was when everything was 90% completed so the screw will stay in there. Have fun, buddy.
The additional HDD case are a pain. To attach them you need to open the left sidepanel to first unplgu a series of plastic covers than can only be retrieved from the right side, than install the HDD, slip the cage in the opening, and fix it with three thumbscrews. Each cage can fit two 2.5" HDDs or one 3.5". However the thumbscrews are arranged in a way that one is right below the SATA connector, precluding the use of angled cables.
Overall I liked the case, my gripes are probably mostly due to oversized mobos.
I've chosen the Gigabyte X570 Xtreme because it's the only mobo in the initial wave featuring an on-board 10GB network card. A MSI mobo had that as an additional PCIE card, and many others have only a 2.5GB or 5GB card on-board. It's also the only mobo with passive cooling for the chipset. It doesn't have internal USB2 headers, but 2 USB3, and 1 USB-C internal headers, which neatly fit the ports on the case and the frontal bay. The mobo even has two CPU power connectors, probably to ensure compatibility with future, more power hungry CPUs...but with a 3900 one plug is all you need. There are three M2 slots, all of them covered by a metal heat spreader. The first slot can be accessed even with a GPU installed. I installed the GPU before the CPU HSF, and to secure the fans I had to unplug the GPU...and that's where I wished for larger PCIE retention clips, it was pretty hard pushing them down to free the card.
There are four USB2 ports on the back of the mobo, currently populated by mouse, keyboard, and graphic table. Upon first powerup the board was equipped with BIOS version F2, which for some reason stopped recognizing the mouse after 10 or so seconds, forcing to use the keyboard. Yes, it's a snazzy UEFI-type BIOS. Updating to version F3i solved all problems. A few parameters changed later (like turning off LEDs and enabling virtualization), the mobo was configured and ready.
One note on LEDS: they are more subdued than I thought. But still useless, so off they are turned.
About LEDs...the GPU. By default it has a rainbow-coloured LED strip lighting up the MSI logo and the whole lenght of the mobo, and the only way to turn it off is to install a piece of software. I don't want another thing clogging up the startup sequence, the case is below the table, I don't know if the settings will be saved if I unistall the program, so I'm living with those LEDs.
The GPU itself is a beast, longer than the motherboard. It has three DisplayPorts and one HDMI. MSI were corteous enough to include dustplug for all these ports, and a metal stiffener to support the card. Which is totally useless, I've tried for 10 or so minutes to fix this stiffener for it to actually support the card with no success, it was either pitching down or too angled to make any difference. The PCIE slots on the mobo have a metal frame around them and the card itself takes two slots (so two screws on the backplate), so it should be enough. It's not like I'm moving the case anyway.
The PSU is from Seasonic, which produce their own internals, and I've been using them for quite some time and never let down. Cables are fully modular, braided, and come in an elegant bag. I went for a 750w PSU although 600 should have been enough mostly to be sure not to be underpowered due to the GPU...and should I change that I wouldn't have to worry about removing the PSU and all the cabling associated with it.
The RAM is from G-Skill, and I picked it from Gigabyte's compatibility list. I would have went for 64GB, but there were no 2x32GB kits available for sale when I ordered and I saved some money to upgrade the CPU from the planned 3800 to a 3900.
I didn't go for watercooling because I'm still not fully convinced by it and its maintenance requirements, even for all-in-ones. Not to mention that the Noctua HSF is cooled by the same fans I use in the case, so they are practically silent even at max RPM. Mounting the HSF required the removal of the standard AM4 mounting brackets, but installing that and the CPU was a breeze compared to the LGA2011. The thermal past is Arctic MX-4, which I bought new and remembered more liquid and easier to spread. Oh well.
Installing Win10 from a USB3 stick took around 5 minutes, although not even version 1903 comes with drivers for the 10GB card (from Aquantia), so I had to install the OS, then the network card drivers, reboot, and then Windows proceeded to install all needed drivers. Do you remember when you either had to slipstream updates in a Win7 installer or download all updates once a vanilla OS was installed? Now everything's simple. To hell with those fondly reminiscing the days of config.sys and autoexec.bat.
The only thing that wasn't correctly installed was the Cintiq tablet: the tablet worked but the pointing area spread across three screens, so I had to manually install the Wacom drivers to force the pointer on just the Cintiq itself. The Adobe CC was a minor bump, beforehand I disabled and unistalled it from the previous PC, but upon login it was adamant the CC had been already activated on two computers...nothing major, I just logged in again and reset the activation on the machine.
After installing every other utlity, I then proceeded to install Steam and GOG Galaxy. I wanted to test the PC and thought of 3D Mark, discovering that now you have to get it from Steam and the whole suite is €25. Then speedlolita told me the demo has some benchmarking tool. I got a respectable score of 11000, placing me above the sample "4K gaming PC" in the test (9300), but still way below the record holders (35k). Still, it's nice to see BattleTech run in 4K with all details and FSAA turned to max at 60fps even in city missions. And...other than that I don't have any other modern PC game to test the PC with.
But here are some impressions with BattleTech.
The major source of noise is the GPU. Upon turning on the PC its three fans spin at max, creating quite the ruckus. They then stop completely, only to resume spinning when required. The fans do produce an audible "hum" that constantly goes up and down, but even after an hour they were quite silent and never overpowered the game's music even during quiet moments. I tried the CUDA-enhaced rendering for one video (nothing major, just a bit of colour and perspective correction), and in that case it never stirred more noise than standard/Youtube use. Quite pleased with this design from MSI.
I turn off the displays if I leave the PC on and go, for example, to eat dinner, and the card is also faster in reconnecting them, which is a pleasant change. Not that the FirePro W7100 I had before took minutes, but it's those one/two seconds that make you happy. A couple of days ago nVidia also released drivers in which you can decide scaling type (bilinear or nearest neighbour) which should eliminate blur on old/pixelart games, but I still have to install them.
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