Sir Beregond

I thought about waiting this out till Zen 4 or whatever next platform supposedly has DDR5 support. But I am struggling running newer games at 1440p on my current 4790k / 980 platform so I think I'll just bite the bullet with Zen 3 and RDNA2/Ampere. Besides it will be expensive when it first releases, so I am ok not being on that bleeding edge.

On 8/27/2019 at 6:23 PM, Alex said:

Personally I haven't been able to go back to AIOs or air since building my first loop in 2011 or 2012. The open loop bug bit me.

Same. I first got into water-cooling as a necessity in 2012. Where I lived at the time, we had no AC and the PC got far too hot and loud in the summer for me to be comfortable with.

Since then, I've become addicted to silent computing where I make the PC as silent as possible with water-cooling. New build next year will be dual 360 rads and will get rid of these noisy HDD's since SSD storage is cheap enough now. This D5 pump does a good job moving water even at low speeds where you can't hear it, so am happy about that.

I honestly don't see me ever going back to air.

So I had to get out of my Corsair Air 540 case as it was becoming a noisy vibrating mess and if there is one thing I am when it comes to my computers, is a silence freak. For now I just migrated everything from it to the O-11 Dynamic. I have space to expand to 360 radiators of course, but don't plan on doing so until I build a new Zen 3 / Ampere or RDNA2 build next year. For that I am wondering what people have found to be the optimal radiator/fan intake and exhaust placement?

For now I set up one of my 240 rads up top with 2 fans as exhaust in push. The other 240 radiator is side with fans intake also in push. Will probably put a fan as intake at the bottom as well as temps are a bit higher than my 540 was.

When I upgrade (including new 360 rads to replace these 6 year old 240's) I am wondering if it would be better to have 3 fans intake from the side with top and bottom radiators both exhausting? Or maybe side and bottom intake with top exhausting? Not sure. This case is definitely different so not sure what is optimal.

Curious what others think?

Thank you for this guide. I've really been out of the loop on storage these days and I plan to ditch having HDD's in my upgrade build next year. This will help finding the right SSD's.

I'm a silence freak with my PC and the hard drive noises are bothering me. 

Didn't even know about this site until someone (I think it was UltraMega) mentioned it on OCN. Really liking this site!

It's been said, but like others here, I just feel like OCN is a shadow of what it used to be as a community and platform. The site runs like garbage to this day with some of the navigation ever since the migration back in what 2015/2016? And I've otherwise felt little reason to engage outside of the HW News section, but even then just seems like a lot of fanboying. Like others, I felt my activity drop drastically over there in the last 4 years.

Anyway, this site looks great, and I look forward to more!

12 minutes ago, Darkpriest667 said:

Corsair peripherals quality has already gone down since they sold a few years back.  I'm looking for another high quality professional vendor. A 70 dollar mouse should last more than 24 months. 

Wow, that's bad. My Razer Naga is way older than that and it's a Razer. 

Excited to retire my 4790k and GTX 980 build with Zen 3 and either a 6900XT or 3070/3080.

Liking the rumor mill for Zen 3. Looking forward to the announcement tomorrow.

Very interesting to see a console that big, but I guess they really are just SFF computers.

I'm not that well versed on Liquid Metal. What are the long-term effects of its use?

On 9/22/2020 at 8:16 AM, axipher said:

Source

 

Corsair is really going hard on hitting all the parts of the PC market which is great from a brand perspective.  My only fear is that they start using lots of generic products from ODM's and just putting the Corsair logo on them and then only getting a year or two of actual proper tech support.

Yeah, they've really done a good job making their name known in this space for everything under the sun. But they already do sort of rebrand and slap a logo and a price hike on things like their radiators I believe are HWLabs bottom end with a Corsair logo and a price hike for example.

5 hours ago, Mistio said:

It is in our advantage to have both companies innovating. Nobody has anything to gain if one suffers or goes away. There have been cycles of stagnation in this industry. The EE days when FX was king and the Conroe up to Zen days where INTEL was king pretty much everywhere. 

 

 

 

Yep yep! With performance competition comes innovation and pricing competition. Who wins? The consumer.

Hey hey!

7 hours ago, ENTERPRISE said:

 

Have to say the gold fittings against the white looks great

I wasn't sure going in, but gotta say I like how it ended up looking with the white tubing.

Had to migrate my Corsair Air 540 build into a new case as the case was falling apart and very noticeable vibration noises were becoming worse and worse in the front panel. So went with a Lian Li O-11 Dynamic.

My old EK Supremacy Evo block is trashed as the plating completely failed and the fins were clogged with gunk of some sort. So I picked up a cheap Corsair block at Micro Center as a stop gap until I build a new rig next year and replaced all the tubing. Micro Center only had white tubing in my size, but I think it works. Cleaned out my EK TX 980 Strix block as well. Plating also failed there, but not as bad as the CPU block. Fins were still clear. Completely flushed the radiator and grabbed a new reservoir/pump. All that plating that failed was floating around in the loop. All better now.

Old PC (sorry blurry pic), and then the transfer. Will obviously get some bigger rads when I do the new build.

I definitely plan to pick this up when I build a new rig. I did enjoy Quantum Break (more the sci-fi elements than the gameplay though). Control looks great.

On 9/30/2020 at 11:27 AM, ENTERPRISE said:

Is it bad that I do not really get excited about new blocks unless they offer a tangible advantage/benefit over another ?

No, that's a perfectly reasonable feeling and attitude in my opinion. At a certain point it's just down to build quality and aesthetics as the performance is comparable.

Never heard of TechN. Are they well known?

On 10/4/2020 at 11:06 AM, Diffident said:

Its not end of line.

https://www.techspot.com/news/86968-no-amd-isnt-discontinuing-radeon-rx-5700-series.html

 

I don't know why AMD doesn't use an arch in all GPU's top to bottom.  The higher end and low end are always on a different arch.

Yeah feels weird. That said, Nvidia has done that too in the past. Fermi made up some of the low-end cards in the Kepler 600 and 700 series. Since then though, they have had same arch across the stack.

Not sure what they are doing for low-end, but looks like RDNA2 should at least cover mid-high end.

After the Faildozer era, nice to see them being rewarded with marketshare increase with their Ryzen comeback. Looking forward to Zen 3 and 4.