Help me build my PC: 2024 Catch-All

That did sound a little strange to me but I am not on the cutting edge right now and who knows what shenanigans mobo manufacturers are up to these days...

Wait, are you sure there is no chip attached to it? You don’t put a heat sink in a slot. It’s not the slot that’s going to heat up, it’s a chip. And that wifi chip might be very small…?

Edit - Looked it up and it’s an M.2 thermal guard. It’s intended to fit on top of an installed M.2 NVMe SSD; you install the SSD and then attach this guard. I would strongly recommend that you use this with your new NVMe card… The mobo manufacturer has pre-positioned this for a reason…

Right, good point.

I'll use it. It sits under where the GPU will go so as to protect from the heat of the many CUDAs flopping their teras.

That makes total sense now. I learned something new! Thank you.

the heat of the many CUDAs flopping their teras

That needs to be a meme and pronto!

Boy am I super glad I came here and asked questions, because now I realized I ordered a Gen 3 M2 SSD, when I could order a Gen 4 with a heatsink attached instead.

My plan will be to use the Gen 4 one in the "A" slot under the GPU (with it's own heatsink attached) and then use my older one in the "B" slot with the included gigabyte branded thermal guard.

People everywhere are sifting through the scraps of hardware availability, and man's up there in Canada just casually building a beast system.

It is a BEAST now

This is the FINAL FORM

*AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 3.7 GHz 12-Core Processor
Fractal Design Celsius S24 87.6 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
*Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE WIFI ATX AM4 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory
Corsair MP600 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
*Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8 GB Vision OC Video Card
Fractal Design Define 7 Compact ATX Mid Tower Case
*Corsair RMx (2021) 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

* these were the bundled components
** adding a second 512 GB NVME SSD and a few Hard Drives from my old system

Came across this today as I was researching how to orient my PSU

https://knowledge.seasonic.com/article/32-how-to-position-your-power-supply

My case is bottom mount for the PSU, logic would say put the fan facing down so that it draws air from the bottom and through the dust filter. But this article makes a case for fan up, IF your PSU is hybrid and will often run fanless at lower wattages, as mine will do at under 400 W.

The pcpartpicker wattage estimate puts the max at 519 but the minimum at under 150W so maybe it's worth having the fan face up to let heat rise?

The disadvantage to me seems that when it does run the fan it will be drawing warm air into it and making it even hotter, since everything else will be hotter under heavy load.

This also raises the question of whether to put my CPU water cooler radiator at the top of the case or at the front of the case... decisions decisions

gamerparent wrote:

The disadvantage to me seems that when it does run the fan it will be drawing warm air into it and making it even hotter, since everything else will be hotter under heavy load.

This assumption is incorrect.

The air that the PSU needs to expel will be warmer than case ambient. What's going to make your PSU hotter isn't airflow with air that's a few degrees warmer than ambient, it's having no airflow and being unable to dissipate the heat being generated by the component.

This also raises the question of whether to put my CPU water cooler radiator at the top of the case or at the front of the case... decisions decisions

Either will work. In most configurations, the difference will be a couple degrees in either direction, for both the CPU and GPU.

I generally prefer to front mount, pull configuration. I prefer having "cool" air pass over the radiator. It does mean you're radiating the dissipated CPU heat into the case, but there's a couple things to keep in mind:

- your GPU is going to have a higher TDP than your CPU. A CPU is more likely to be overwhelmed by warm air from a GPU than vice versa.
- when high-end gaming, your GPU will likely be at 100%, but your CPU usually won't.

Usually, it doesn't matter much either way, but given the choice, I prefer having the CPU slightly warm the case ambient temperature, rather than having air warmed by the GPU (plus the rest of the system) passing through the radiator.

I would just say also to plan for worst-case cooling (all-day MMO or FPS sessions). You don’t want to fall short and slowly cook your system during gaming binges.

Never saw the need to mount the PSU in any scenario when bottom mounted with the fan in any other direction but facing the dust filter. Even when mounted sideways I still have it face the filter.

But then again I run gigantic cases with massive amounts of space and very little inside.

TheGameguru wrote:

Never saw the need to mount the PSU in any scenario when bottom mounted with the fan in any other direction but facing the dust filter. Even when mounted sideways I still have it face the filter.

But then again I run gigantic cases with massive amounts of space and very little inside.

To me, the only reason to mount the fan in the opposite direction is if you wouldn't have enough clearance to get airflow in through that bottom vent (ie. if you were putting the case down on some carpet that effectively blocked off the vent - which, don't do that.)

I guess one other reason is if you didn't have sufficient exhaust in the case, so the power supply fan would effectively act as another exhaust, taking its own heat along with it.

But... yeah. The vast majority of the time, intake through the bottom vent makes the most sense. That's why every modern case has that vent right there.

I think the rationale is if the fan of the PSU doesn't spin (eg. mine won't spin if the load is under 400 W), then the heat doesn't go anywhere if it's mounted downward.

Best Buy stock drop is happening now. The fun twist this time is that they've gated all of their videocards behind a $200 yearly membership.

So, now they want us to pay $200 to get in line for an uncertain opportunity to buy a thing.

polq37 wrote:

Best Buy stock drop is happening now. The fun twist this time is that they've gated all of their videocards behind a $200 yearly membership.

So, now they want us to pay $200 to get in line for an uncertain opportunity to buy a thing.

I'd consider it, if they reimbursed even half of the membership cost, towards a purchase and if they increased your odds with each drop or guaranteed the ability to purchase within a fixed time period (6 months, maybe even 9.)

gamerparent wrote:

I think the rationale is if the fan of the PSU doesn't spin (eg. mine won't spin if the load is under 400 W), then the heat doesn't go anywhere if it's mounted downward.

Heat rises no?

TheGameguru wrote:
gamerparent wrote:

I think the rationale is if the fan of the PSU doesn't spin (eg. mine won't spin if the load is under 400 W), then the heat doesn't go anywhere if it's mounted downward.

Heat rises no?

I think mostly heat just radiates. Heat only rises because of convection, which is a secondary effect arising from the interaction of heat, gravity, and the density effects of varying heat on gases and fluids. In a passive cooling situation, If the fan is mounted downwards, you're not going to get quite as much convection based cooling as with fan mounted upward. Possibly these effects are going to be overwhelmed by the radiative cooling coming from the case acting as a large heatsink. Material composition matters too. I'm not sure why there isn't more use of aluminum and copper in computer cases. It makes a huge difference in cookware. The five ply copper / aluminum / steel cookware works amazingly better than even three ply steel/aluminum cookware.

My new PSU is mounted with the fan pointed downward, because that's what the directions called for. If I had read this earlier and considered that it is nearly always running in passive mode, I might have chosen a different configuration. On the other hand, in my NZXT case, there's a perforated metal grate above the PSU, which will partially occlude the convection flow. On the third or fourth hand, you really need the most heat dissipation when the fan is running (which will overwhelm convection cooling effects), not in low power passive cooling situations.

Probably the upward facing fan mounting is best for people who are trying to get ultraquiet systems with overbuilt components.

Building copper into a case is likely to turn it into a Faraday cage of sorts, potentially blocking wifi signals from the chip on the motherboard. Also copper would add to the price and it turns green as it oxidizes, which could affect the color of components. Just seems like a bad idea to me. But I Am Not A Materials Engineer.

Robear wrote:

Building copper into a case is likely to turn it into a Faraday cage of sorts, potentially blocking wifi signals from the chip on the motherboard. Also copper would add to the price and it turns green as it oxidizes, which could affect the color of components. Just seems like a bad idea to me. But I Am Not A Materials Engineer.

Verdigris design accents would be awesome, and even moreso if they were actually functional.

Accents, sure. But building in a copper heat transfer layer, say as a sandwich, would be costly and probably unnecessary. Aluminum and steel deliver a lot of heat transfer capability.

Still, convection is main form of cooling I think. No one wants to worry about warping a case during an intense gaming session because a heat pipe intended to dissipate to a case plate caused it to expand.

It occurs to me that otherwise, we’d just see heat pipes extending to the case walls and few or no fans…

Some cooling fans are exceptionally sensitive to mounting orientation.

I installed a large (1.5 KW) inverter (24VDC - 110 VAC) for some electronics I was running and mounted to inverter onto a wall. The directions allowed for mounting it vertically with the long side running horizontal. I, because of space restrictions, mounted it vertically with the long side running vertically. After about a year the magic smoke escaped. When I opened up the case to find out why I discovered that the cooling fan had fallen off the bearing. The fan wasn't designed to be hung off its bearing.

Some next level thinking here for sure. I put the PSU facing down because that’s where the dust filter is.

Heat exhausts because you put fans in such a way so you draw cool air in from one direction and exhaust heat the other.

Also water is wet and the sky is blue…Eagles fans rule and the rest drool.

TheGameguru wrote:

Eagles fans rule and the rest drool.

hope that covid fog clears soon

That deserves multiple likes lol

So we've talked in these threads about how NewEgg has become a crappy company, far beneath what they used to be.

That has become the talk of the PC enthusiast world for the past week, since GamersNexus revealed that bought an open box motherboard from NewEgg, returned it unopened, and then NewEgg rejected the return because the CPU socket had damage - damage which obviously was present in the item as it left NewEgg because GN never even opened the box.

Upon further investigation, they've discovered NewEgg knew the product was damaged and sold it as open box anyway:

GN stops short of making this accusation, preferring instead to call it "incompetence", but this situation clearly implies the possibility that NewEgg is knowingly selling their damaged items as Open Box, then rejecting the returns so that the customer is stuck with the broken product.

UFD Tech has apparently been struggling with NewEgg for some time, over unpaid video sponsorships and a charity stream prize that they failed to deliver, which he kept quiet about until the GN debacle:

Here's a fun ebay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/25537810710...

Open box, new condition with no wear!

The Newegg thing is pretty disheartening because, for obvious reasons, I'd rather by from a reputable vendor with good return and replacement policies.

I saw a social media post from Newegg doing damage control and accepting responsibility but claiming it was accidental.

Who knows. I’m pretty happy at this point buying from Amazon when I can and from Newegg if I have to.

But in general the whole process I’m fairly soured on. I’m recommending more and more to buy prebuilts.

polq37 wrote:

Here's a fun ebay listing: https://www.ebay.com/itm/25537810710...

Open box, new condition with no wear!

I reported it. I doubt it does anything but claiming "like new" on used stuff is a big pet peeve of mine.

It's been quite the journey but here I am installing Windows now! Yay!

I changed the case to a Define 7 instead of the 7 Compact, more room. Went with a 280 cooler front mounted, and 2 140s at the top with an open mesh airflow setup.

UPDATE: I got Windows installed and the system running. Did some benchmarking https://www.passmark.com/baselines/V10/display.php?id=151737660043

not too shabby OMG