Thinking of building a new rig...

[Grall]

Running Folding@Home on 18 CPU threads, + both GPUs, I have CPU turboing up to 3990MHz on all cores at 82C, GPU0 is at 80C and GPU1 is at 92C (!). I'm thinking that's maybe in part because one of the fan bearings is "sticky", and it is turning more slowly than the other fan on that card.

The whole PC is also sucking down 670-680W, with a peak up to 689W...! Pretty glad I picked a 1000W PSU, to be quite honest.

Thing also makes huge racket with all case fans going 100%. Not that I really expected much of anything else; that's what you get with air cooling air cooled components... Still, water is a huge hassle to me. I'll just tune the speed down for less noise when it starts getting to me.

 

[Mize]

Water is a huge hassle if you make frequent changes. Pretty maintenance free otherwise after initial build.

 

[Grall]

Pretty maintenance free otherwise after initial build.

Yeah, if you stick a few years with the same components - which I tend to do anyway... But it's the initial hurdle, plus the added expense of course. This thing cost enough money as it is, and I saved SKR700 by being able to re-use the CPU cooler I bought four years ago and couldn't fit in my then-new rig. It would have been ludicrously oversized for haswell, but I didn't care; I wanted a big, beautiful cooler... Well, it's cooling now; running just the CPU client for Folding@Home, PSU 12V output peaks at 350W, and that's with 2 CPU threads idling (because the 2 remaining are reserved for GPU babysitting.)

Ran folding overnight, when I woke up this morning GPU1 was at 94C (having peaked at 95) and throttling to not heat up further. Ugh! GPU0 was at a toasty, yet more comfortable 85C. 12V power had also peaked at nearly 760W at some point. Holy shit. Might just have been a quick peak while Windows was spinning up my Raptor drives tho, I'm not sure. I've set them to power save, and there's no valid partitions on them as far as windows is concerned since it's a spanned disk volume (which I've not properly set up yet on this PC.) Still, windows spins up drives for no discernible reason all the fucking time, so who knows?

Gonna configure them using intel hardware RAID0, which this chipset supports, but not gotten that far yet.

 

[entity279]

What gpus you have now? Not the Vegas yet, I suppose.. AMD gpus don't need threads available for GPU babysitting (and also provide lower performance, unfortunatelly )

 

[Grall]

What gpus you have now?

2x R9 390X. (Lots of X:es. Mobo model name has another two X in it...The more the merrier I suppose.)

gpus don't need threads available for GPU babysitting (and also provide lower performance, unfortunatelly )

From what I read at foldingforum, AMD does need babysitting, just not as much as NV. And the lower performance cannot be helped, sadly. Maybe one day, red team can reach parity on compute stuff...

 

[Cyan]

If money is no question then 7900X is a great combination of high core count and decent clock speed. You can get more cores for the $$ with a Threadripper but you're going to lose out on clock speed/IPC for gaming.

yup, either that or he can wait for Ryzen 2.

Dude get dual 1080Tis. Most models are <$100 more than Vega64 and they are quite a bit faster and cooler, not to mention you won't need a MiniFusion™ to power them.

A true boss would go with a couple of these.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814137126&ignorebbr=1
View attachment 2214

if he has a FreeSync monitor or he is planning to buy a 4k Freesync monitor I'd wholeheartedly recommend him to get an AMD card. That technology alone is free on AMD size but GSync is around 200$ plus to the price of a TV or so. Sure they can't compete with NVidia on the GPU side but the RX series are good overall.

 

[Cyan]

2x R9 390X. (Lots of X:es. Mobo model name has another two X in it...The more the merrier I suppose.)


From what I read at foldingforum, AMD does need babysitting, just not as much as NV. And the lower performance cannot be helped, sadly. Maybe one day, red team can reach parity on compute stuff...

do they have FreeSync? What are the final specs of the PC compared to the ones you posted when you started the thread?

 

[Grall]

do they have FreeSync?

The 390 series? Yeah, it should support freesync. It doesn't support that "smart vsync" thing though that AMD introduced this summer. Not for any technical reason I'm pretty sure; after all, DOOM can do it in software. Just another reason to screw owners of older hardware so they'll buy new instead...

What are the final specs of the PC compared to the ones you posted when you started the thread?

It's the same specs, pretty much. Samsung 960 Evo instead of Pro SSD, because it seemed pointless spending the extra money when I'll pretty much never ever notice any difference.

Oh, btw... Noctua finally launches those black fans they've been showing off for years. A WEEK after I buy six goddamn hog-pink and shit-brown fans... Oh well... At least they're amongst the best fans one can buy. I've had two spinning basically 100% day and night for over 4 years, still as dead silent as when I bought them. Not sure they'll ever wear out, really.

 

[entity279]

@Grall https://www.gamersnexus.net/news-pc/3110-asus-faces-competition-from-xfx-in-partner-vega-cards

My Liquid RxVega was just installed (in the old Vishera desktop I still have, for now) so you'll be alone on your pursuits of custom Vegas

 

[Grall]

@entity279
Yeah, I saw that XFX card; not really my style (and besides I'm an ASUS man myself, although next time I'll build another PC I might go for MSI, because they actually seem to be making better stuff overall.)

 

[entity279]

Oh.. I'm sorry to hear that this card is still not what you want.

 

[Grall]

Ordered my black Noctuas today... "Had"* to buy from fucking Amazon even though I hate Jeff Bezos, because none of my local vendors carry the new black.swap series of Noctua fans.

*Of course I didn't have to. Consumerism...

So now I have a set of pink/brown noctua fans I've no genuine use for, once their replacements finally arrive in 5-7 business days. Thinking of what to do with them. I could put them back in their original packaging (except for the heatsink fan which didn't have any) and sell them off as used fans. Maybe they're worth something.

 

[Grall]

#€@?$*£&¤!!!!!

SATA connectors are the works of the Devil. For realz. So tiny, yet so troublesome! It's like that proverbial straw that broke the camel's back; I fricken can't get one of them in, because the mobo connector is maybe perhaps verging at the very bottom of the tight end of the tolerance spectrum, and the cable connector is maybe on the top of the largish end. It just wiggles back and forth in place without actually popping in... (And no, I'm not speaking metaphorically for something else either! Davros, you can go away. )

So I can't put my graphics cards, fans and all that other shit back in either because the GPUs cover all of the SATA connectors. Rrrogntudjuuuu....!

(I also decided in a delirium to replace my thermal paste with thermalgrizzly kryonaut to see if maybe that might bring some semblance of control to my spiralling core temps. Ugh. Fecking bother cleaning off old paste with cotton q-tips and isopropanol...)

 

[digitalwanderer]

I had one like that! Are the sata ports perpendicular to the board or parallel? For the parallel ones I just plug in SATA cables to all of 'em and just leave 'em in the case for future use, for the perpendicular one I used the 90 degree bendy ones and had each row facing out in a different direction making it just able to fit my card on top of.

I feel your pain, I've had too many "surprises" like that about systems I had thought I thought out to death but didn't find out about until I put all the actual bits together. Best of luck in finding a solution!

 

[Grall]

@digitalwanderer
It's the parallel, double-stacked variety. On their own, each cable fit just fine in that one specific top connector jack, but for some reason when I put in a cable in the bottom connector jack the top connector became very difficult to insert. I suspect it's because of the metal locking tabs, they might put a bit of pressure on the top jack, slightly decreasing the clearance.

Anyway, I solved the problem by switching cables around until I found one connector that would go into the most bothersome jack. Gah. Made mush of my fingertips, squeezing on sharp-cornered tiny connectors that wouldn't budge.

And yeah, I'm pre-inserting SATA cables for two drives that I haven't even bought yet. No money for such things right now...

Would also love to add an Intel Optane 900P drive. That's a stretch goal for this system, migrate windows and my most important stuff to this drive, leaving my M.2 drive purely for games. Any SATA SSDs could then host the remainder of my Steam library, and my Raptor HDDs could... *shrug* Maybe host video files? If I start buying movies in download format instead of blu-ray. Not that 2TB lasts all that long for such purposes... Also, no idea if an Apple TV for example can stream from a PC HDD. Knowing Apple, it probably bloody well can't! Because let's pretend PCs don't exist, and even if they did why would anyone want to put their itunes store-bought videos there.

Yes, why indeed, because itunes fucking sucks several cartloads' worth of donkey schlongs, but I'm just thinking out loud here.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Glad to hear you sorted it all out. I've found that in building/upgrading it's always a case of, "It's not what you're sure of, it's what you don't know", is that always gets ya.

Don't know if Apple streams to PC, don't care. I feel the same way about Apple that Apple just doesn't exist. They want their own little ecosystem, they're welcome to it...the rest of us will enjoy android, windows, linux, etc.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

I miss the days when all of the SATA connectors were vertical and not horizontal. So much easier to change, replace, or add a cable after the MB has been installed when they are all vertical.

Regards,
SB

 

[Grall]

@Silent_Buddha
Today's super long graphics cards pretty much annihilates that idea. There's simply not enough board space or clearance above for 6, 8 or sometimes even more vertical SATA connectors and cables sticking straight out.

Btw, now a full week of not being able to use my PC due to those fucking fans I'm wanting to replace - constantly one step forwards, half or a full step backwards. Latest snag is the new, black rubber fasteners being too long, making it impossible to fit the top fans. I have to go back to the standard Noctua-brown rubber fasteners to regain the necessary clearance... *sigh*

Hopefully no more of them will rip when re-attaching them. I've annihilated one of them already and I don't have too many to spare. Actually, it's 3 now, to be exact...

 

[Grall]

Uggghhhh... God dammit, godfuck dammit... God... Fuck. Ugh. Yech.

I never EVER want to build another PC EVER again. God, fuck, no.

Got the black fans in place, finally. Had to take off the fans from my CPU cooler once more, after just getting them ON the cooler yesterday evening (and there's so little room around that big cooler too especially the topmost side making getting fans off in particular a real bitch), so I could scavenge the brown rubber fasteners from them, smushing my fingertips even more because those rubber things have to share the same hole as the metal wire latches that hold the fan onto the CPU cooler, and getting them both through that hole was a real bother, to put it lightly. And it's four latches and eight holes total. Times two, since I did it twice over in two days...

UGHHHHGHJFJHFGHJKJJJGHKHHHhhh...

And then pull the black rubber fasteners out of the top fans, install the brown ones, screw around with all the cables at the top end of the mobo including two fat power cables, put in the top rearmost fan (which really means jiggle it back and forth inside tiny margins of error for like a minute until it's in place and swear some) and make sure it fit, pull it back out again because I forgot to plug in the CPU fan power connectors which are located right underneath it and basically can't be plugged in with the fan there taking up valuable space, put fan back again, put in the other fan (which is easier but not cakewalk either), pull both fans out once more because the power cable for the rear fan (which cannot be removed once the top front fan is installed) would be better routed through the other rubber grommeted hole, put them both back in again a final time (touch fucking wood)... UUGGGHHHHHHH.

And on and on like that it went. I am totally not a handy, practical-minded person!

Still need to remove an extraneous extension cable from one of the front fans which really didn't need it, but what the hey. That can wait until I get my new GPUs because the connector is blocked by the graphics cards anyway...

And still need to check CPU temp and see how that looks with Kryonaut paste in place instead of the Noctua stuff.

 

[entity279]

Oh, so the GPUs still didn't arrive?