Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

*Legion* wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

wait your aio should be pulling in fresh air from outside the case, not pushing air inside the case out.

Not necessarily. A top mounted AIO pushing case air through the rad and out of the case is common.

Especially if you have strong intake from the front of the case, making the top mount AIO intake as well is just going to result in excessive positive air pressure, and will constrain airflow.

Granted, if you're running the case with the side panel off, then there isn't going to be any pressure buildup as the air can move freely.

So this was the final piece of the puzzle. With the side panel off no more jet engines under the desk.

I finished my build but I'm having a bizarre issue with my Xbox controller constantly disconnecting. It will regularly connect and then disconnect for a few seconds. It also seems to be very game and setting dependent. Spec Ops works fine, Doom Eternal not so much. Anyone else seen this? I did a Google search and unfortunately it seems somewhat common but no real resolutions.

Got all my parts ordered after the early CPU surprise last weekend. Looks like it may be next week.

1, I didn't want to pay extra for expedited shipping on PSU from newegg.

2, Amazon is weird. They dropped Samsung 970 Evo $30 in price this week so I got it instead of the plus. So it was sold out on Mon or Tues but it will let you order for when it was in stock so I went ahead. It says it will show up between Mon-Wed next week. But if I look at the product page today it says "ships in 1-2 days" and order now and guaranteed by Sunday. So what the hell is up with my original order? Should I cancel it and reorder to get it sooner? Or is my original actually shipping tomorrow and will be here Sunday anyway?

I guess it doesn't matter because PSU will be like Tues. But it's still a bit annoying with the shipping status.

BTW hopefully malor will approve... I went with the Antec gold gamer 750w. The reviews said it's a seasonic psu that antec paid them to build or something. Seems to be well reviewed and hopefully just as reliable but a bit cheaper.

Now just to sit here and stare at my CPU box while I wait for all the other parts to arrive.

Stele wrote:

The reviews said it's a seasonic psu that antec paid them to build or something. Seems to be well reviewed and hopefully just as reliable but a bit cheaper.

Yeah, Seasonic manufactures a lot of power supplies for other vendors to rebrand.

The one thing with rebrand PSUs is that there's no guarantee a rebrand model will always use the same original PSU that they've been previously sourcing. It's not uncommon for a vendor to change the white label PSU being used for a given model, without changing the model name/number. The fresher the information identifying the white label PSU, the better.

Stele wrote:

2, Amazon is weird. They dropped Samsung 970 Evo $30 in price this week so I got it instead of the plus. So it was sold out on Mon or Tues but it will let you order for when it was in stock so I went ahead. It says it will show up between Mon-Wed next week. But if I look at the product page today it says "ships in 1-2 days" and order now and guaranteed by Sunday. So what the hell is up with my original order? Should I cancel it and reorder to get it sooner? Or is my original actually shipping tomorrow and will be here Sunday anyway?

Yours will probably be shipped before any newer orders. It's quite common for Amazon orders with lead times to show up early, sometimes by weeks if the lead time is long.

BTW hopefully malor will approve... I went with the Antec gold gamer 750w. The reviews said it's a seasonic psu that antec paid them to build or something. Seems to be well reviewed and hopefully just as reliable but a bit cheaper.

If it actually is Seasonic, then it should be pretty good. I imagine they probably don't put as much care into off-brand manufacture, but it should still be fine. And 750W should be enough to handle any current CPU with a 300-watt GPU, even sneaky Intel chips with their massively underestimated TDPs.

Now just to sit here and stare at my CPU box while I wait for all the other parts to arrive.

If it's any consolation, there's a ton of people staring at their parts, wishing for a CPU.

My stuff arrived. Build was simple, then I realized I couldn't find my Windows boot flash drive. Oops.

Used an old laptop to make one and now up and running. Ran memtest last night and got zero errors. Woot!

Fresh Windows install on an ssd with a modern, if not amazing, cpu is blazing fast.

Re windows boot flash drive. Does it have to be FAT32? That's what most of the instructions say but then there's a 4+ GB file on the Windows install. So there are instructions for this file split console command to use... seems like a pain in the ass. Can I not just use my already formatted NTFS stick that I have?

In good news newegg shipped yesterday and UPS tracking says Friday. And Amazon on the hard drive now says Fri-Sun. It still hasn't shipped yet but I've seen them pull overnight shipping out of nowhere before. So I might actually have all the parts end of day tomorrow.

Re windows boot flash drive. Does it have to be FAT32?

No, not at all. The easy way to handle the problem is to download an ISO and the Rufus USB tool. Load your USB stick, run Rufus and make sure it's pointed there, select the ISO, and click Start. A minute or two later, wham, nice clean Windows install image.

Rufus also understands Linux very well, and can successfully create an image from almost any ISO you give it. It knows multiple ways to boot, and is superb at choosing one that's compatible with your chosen distro.

BOOM. Best Buy stock drop. Secured and purchased an Asus TUF 3070 at non-scalper price. Will be truly excited when it's in hand. But very happy nonetheless.

*Edit - with GPU in hand, here is planned build. Already have the 5600X in hand. The budget is a bit higher that I anticipated but am not sure where to trim the fat as it were. Any insight is appreciated.

AMD build

Malor wrote:
Re windows boot flash drive. Does it have to be FAT32?

No, not at all. The easy way to handle the problem is to download an ISO and the Rufus USB tool. Load your USB stick, run Rufus and make sure it's pointed there, select the ISO, and click Start. A minute or two later, wham, nice clean Windows install image.

Rufus also understands Linux very well, and can successfully create an image from almost any ISO you give it. It knows multiple ways to boot, and is superb at choosing one that's compatible with your chosen distro.

Can confirm the ease of Rufus.

And ntfs worked just fine.

When I have to re-install windows I just use their media creation tool and it does all the formatting and setup for the thumb drive.

That works too, but it's much slower, and only does the version of Windows that it can download at the exact time you run it. However, it's a one-and-done, you don't have to track down an ISO file. If you only do this once every five years, it's a good tool.

Rufus, on the other hand, is much faster, understands pretty much everything, and can image pretty much anything. With a Windows image, it formats the USB stick as NTFS, puts a boot sector on it, and then copies the individual files from the ISO image to the stick. It can easily handle old/obsolete versions of Windows that way, you just have to source the ISO.

In the Linux world, some brilliant person, ten or fifteen years ago, realized that if you generated a deliberately damaged/incorrect ISO header, it could simultaneously serve as a partition table. The same lead-in sequence of bytes could work either burned to a CD/DVD or to a USB stick. It's a gloriously ugly hack, and almost all distros have taken up the idea, in different forms. Rufus, AFAIK, understands all the different variants.... I think there are least three flavors.

Thanks. Looked at Rufus, read FAQ, makes sense. Even has some NTFS UEFI explanation in the FAQ.

And Amazon just shipped the hard drive. So yeah, everything supposed to be here tomorrow. Maybe late Fri night build if the kids go to bed early enough.

Heretk wrote:

BOOM. Best Buy stock drop. Secured and purchased an Asus TUF 3070 at non-scalper price. Will be truly excited when it's in hand. But very happy nonetheless.

*Edit - with GPU in hand, here is planned build. Already have the 5600X in hand. The budget is a bit higher that I anticipated but am not sure where to trim the fat as it were. Any insight is appreciated.

AMD build

Congrats. I saw some dropped on Amazon last night at 1am on Twitter. But I'm trying to wait until things are reasonable.

There's some crucial 3600 c16 ram for $10-2 less than your g skill? 2 hard drives of the same type? Did you want a cheaper secondary drive? That could be a place to save money for just more backup storage with less speed.

Otherwise parts seem solid.

Windows... Depending on your job or school, you might have options for a cheaper or free option even? I have visual studio account from work and get 5 free win 10 licenses. Also office 365 lets us install multiple copies of that for home use too.

Gaald wrote:

When I have to re-install windows I just use their media creation tool and it does all the formatting and setup for the thumb drive.

I kept getting an error with that tool, which is why I loaded up Rufus as I had an iso downloaded. Tried doing the tool three times and it failed every time. I'm fairly certain that was a problem with the laptop I was using and less so the tool, but eventually I got tired of waiting on it to re-download the same iso over and over again to then have the tool fail again.

I snagged an iso from Microsoft (using the Edge emulator trick), used Rufus and was up and had the flash drive ready to go right quick. Live and learn.

Stele wrote:
Heretk wrote:

BOOM. Best Buy stock drop. Secured and purchased an Asus TUF 3070 at non-scalper price. Will be truly excited when it's in hand. But very happy nonetheless.

*Edit - with GPU in hand, here is planned build. Already have the 5600X in hand. The budget is a bit higher that I anticipated but am not sure where to trim the fat as it were. Any insight is appreciated.

AMD build

Congrats. I saw some dropped on Amazon last night at 1am on Twitter. But I'm trying to wait until things are reasonable.

There's some crucial 3600 c16 ram for $10-2 less than your g skill? 2 hard drives of the same type? Did you want a cheaper secondary drive? That could be a place to save money for just more backup storage with less speed.

Otherwise parts seem solid.

Windows... Depending on your job or school, you might have options for a cheaper or free option even? I have visual studio account from work and get 5 free win 10 licenses. Also office 365 lets us install multiple copies of that for home use too.

Thanks Stele. One drive for boot and one for games. Is a 500GB boot drive big enough to future proof Win 10? I use NAS for slow storage. Unfortunately I don't have any work/school perks for discounted OS.

Dang yeah I don't know if they still do it cause it was like 12 years ago but my wife was in grad school and I bought win 7 for $8 at the university IT store with her, haha.

I'm still using a 120gb drive for win 10 right now. Have 25gb free or so. All programs are installed on C but games all on other old drives. I think 250gb would be enough for primary OS but do they even do m2 drives that small?

I'm going with 1TB and hoping to rotate games on and off C drive as needed. I think it's easier to move steam games now at least. Of course if the load times are really awesome and I don't want to keep deleting things, I might end up getting a second m2 drive later this year myself.

1TB is pretty comfortable for a system/programs/games drive, although that new Call of Duty is 250 gigs all by itself. Most games are much, much smaller, and you can fit quite a library and still have plenty of unused space.

Note that you'll get best performance from SSDs if you avoid filling them over about 80%. In effect, a 1TB drive will work best if you treat it as about an 800-gigger. This has worked out fine for me, I've got lots of games installed, and I'm still only at about 600 gigs total.

Well, I finally pulled the trigger and made a decision for my new build after seeing an awesome case for what I needed!

IMAGE(https://i.ibb.co/R7C1XGv/C8-E801-C8-36-D3-45-CC-B6-CA-16-B4-E8747-AA1.jpg)

The Lian Li TU150
That handle just sold me on the portability of what I need.

Also finally decided on the 11400 and a Gigabyte Z590i board after deliberating and researching and wanting to get it all by next week. Everything should arrive tomorrow (Friday) except for the Noctua NH-U9S cooler which should be here middle of next week! All of the recent discussion about new builds *really* helped me out!

Stele wrote:

Thanks. Looked at Rufus, read FAQ, makes sense. Even has some NTFS UEFI explanation in the FAQ.

And Amazon just shipped the hard drive. So yeah, everything supposed to be here tomorrow. Maybe late Fri night build if the kids go to bed early enough.

Aw man tracking update this morning says the RAM is coming tomorrow but everything else today. Oh well. Still way ahead of the original May date when I bought the CPU.

I used Rufus last night with the win 10 image I had from Microsoft, and that was amazingly easy.

Watched a CPU installation and fan mounting video for what I have, and an m2 drive installation video for the motherboard. Read the mobo manual from their site. Just waiting for stuff now...

It's been about six years since I did a fresh install of Windows, so now I need to turn off all the crap I don't need. Where (or who) is a good source for up-to-date info on that stuff? Is Black Viper still the guy?

garion333 wrote:

It's been about six years since I did a fresh install of Windows, so now I need to turn off all the crap I don't need. Where (or who) is a good source for up-to-date info on that stuff? Is Black Viper still the guy?

I use the LTSC version to avoid most of that, and then wpd.app to set privacy defaults to more reasonable values. Note that you have to keep running that tool after Patch Tuesday, as many Windows updates will reset your settings.

WPD works on any version of Windows, but can only shut down telemetry completely on enterprise-focused versions. Home versions will send telemetry no matter what you do.

Dunno nothin' about Black Viper, but I imagine that if he was a good resource before, he still would be.

Malor wrote:
garion333 wrote:

It's been about six years since I did a fresh install of Windows, so now I need to turn off all the crap I don't need. Where (or who) is a good source for up-to-date info on that stuff? Is Black Viper still the guy?

I use the LTSC version to avoid most of that, and then wpd.app to set privacy defaults to more reasonable values. Note that you have to keep running that tool after Patch Tuesday, as many Windows updates will reset your settings.

WPD works on any version of Windows, but can only shut down telemetry completely on enterprise-focused versions. Home versions will send telemetry no matter what you do.

Dunno nothin' about Black Viper, but I imagine that if he was a good resource before, he still would be.

My concern was less privacy, cause I've given up on that, and more so turning stuff off you don't need to speed things up.

Likely not really an issue with 32 GB of ram... That's the one splurge I did in this build since i usually do the "common" amount for the time. That 8 GB in my old build lasted me the whole time!

There's a number of scripts out there for disabling Windows telemetry.

Things are a bit more complicated than the days of just disabling unneeded services from Black Viper's list.

Windows 10 Debloater is popular.

I've used Chris Titus's win10 debloat script as well. I liked this one as it leaves the Xbox and WSL stuff alone, whereas some others are hell-bent on making Win10 as virgin as humanly possible.

Ah yes, that's what I'm talking about. I got rid of some of that stuff on my own during installation but getting rid of even more via script is lovely.

I just checked my current graphics card, a RX580 8GB, on the Belgian e-bay. The card I got for 300EUR in October 2018 now goes for 400EUR. I'm seriously considering selling mine and putting my ancient 5700 card back in again. I can play recent PC games on my gaming laptop with a 1650Ti, or play on my Switch/PS4 for now.

Only issue is that I would not have a backup graphics card anymore, and I use my desktop PC regularly for work. And of course having no clue when I would be able to buy a new graphics card again, and finally play Control as it's meant to be played That might as well be in 2023 at this rate.

Yeah it's pretty nuts. Seems a lot of it is crypto, but some just people wanting to play games. But the crypto folks are willing to spend more I think.

Hell I just want an old 2060 or something, but those are impossible to find too. Will chug along with my 1060 for a bit and hope it eventually settles out.

PC assembled and booted the first time last night.

Toggled XMP in bios and RAM ram at 3600.

Installed windows off the Rufus USB. That went pretty quick.

Since was cannibalising some parts, and just in case it didn't work, at that point I had only moved the video card over. So I say down to take the old hard drives out of my case and spent an annoying hour at 2am getting that fixed. Phanteks has these hdd trays that go on the lower section with the PSU. But I couldn't get everything in comfortably. The sata power cable was too short to reach the drives side by side. But stacking them made the mobo and GPU power cables real tight running in that same area. So finally I just plugged in another sata power cable. But the whole thing was a pain with the PSU already installed and barely able to fit my hands down there. Poor planning on my part and I paid for it with lack of sleep.

But anyway all the drives were recognized. I had planned to install Steam and move a few games to C drive to test, but that was not happening at 3am. So hopefully today I'll get around to that.

I was going to move the one large case fan I have over to match. Seems like 2 intake 1 out is a good enough setup with this case. But when I looked at the exhaust fan on my old case it had a 3 pin power cable. Both the ones on the new case are 4. Of course just now as I type this, I think to Google and you can use a 3pin fan on a 4pin header. So I guess I should have just moved it. One more thing to do today.

But so far so good.

Grats!

Alright put that other fan on the front. Did some reading about fan curves because I've never in my life worried about that. Also most people on MSI reddit seem to hate the windows Dragon software, so I got rid of that, and installed HWInfo to watch my temps.

So anyway my AMD 3600 is now idling between 35-40C, at least 5 degrees cooler then last night or this morning.

Ran some AC Odyssey benchmark which I think may have hit 75 or 80 this morning but it was 65 now. Feeling better about temps. Was afraid I was going to have to get a CPU cooler instead of using the stock and messing with all that. But it seems ok for now.

I can't swear to my old numbers but I believe I got a 15 FPS improvement in AC Odyssey too. I need to move a few more games over to the M2 and start enjoying faster load times.

Last night I copied 6GB of files from my old SATA ssd and it took about 10 seconds. So that was nice. Windows starts up instantly. It's like that fresh install snappiness but more than ever before. Good stuff.