Snakecharmed

I'll see what I can do with tidying up the cable sprawl on the case floor. I did forget to tie together the two bundles of USB 2.0 header cables like I originally meant to do. I played around with the PBO Curve Optimizer today and I'm currently at -20 all core with some slight reduction to idle CPU package power and cooler temperatures across the board. The office room temp has stayed in a range of 3-5°F above ambient floor temp all day. That's a significant improvement over the 8-10°F I was noticing before with the i7-2600K. I did get a break today though because it was overcast. However, I'm now optimistic that tinting the west-facing window should keep the afternoon temps in this room under control without any other significant measures. I'm trying to optimize idle power right now because it turns out that sleep might not be a great option after all. I need to do more testing, but in two instances when the PC went to sleep, my monitor didn't want to recover after wake. Apparently, LG decided that having DisplayPort deep sleep recovery option settings on their monitors wasn't important. I've yet to find out the exact cause since everyone in the forum threads I researched was focused on how Windows 10 rearranges the app windows on wake. I should have tried pulling the DP cable and plugging it back in when I encountered the no-wake issue this morning, but I forgot. Meanwhile, the 55" Samsung has behaved well in Windows 10 so far coming out of screen-off, non-sleep idle. Even that was constantly an issue in Windows 7. With enough trial and error, I found that selecting the Switch User option in the Windows 7 Ctrl-Alt-Del menu would wake it up. However, there was also a small but statistically significant chance that the screen resolution would revert to 1024x768 instead of keeping the 4K setting and screen layout position in Nvidia Control Panel. Thus far in Windows 10, I've had no issues with the TV forgetting its resolution or screen layout position, although it did act up the one time I tried to enable VRR on it by dropping the video signal in Game Mode. Monitors and TVs these days seem to be a nightmare to configure properly with a PC now.

Early tests with QD-OLED have not been promising on the burn-in front. If this matters to you, stick with LG. Longevity Burn-In Investigative Paths After 3 Months: QD-OLED vs. WOLED, LG vs. Sony, And More - RTINGS.com WWW.RTINGS.COM Our accelerated longevity test has been running for over three months, and we've already encountered some very interesting results. We've... I'm waiting it out for microLED. It'll probably be another 5-10 years, but what I do with my monitors would amount to abuse for OLED because I have them in work mode for most of the day. It's worse than letting a CNN news ticker scroll persist all day. I've been wanting a 65" LG C-series OLED for my family room for years now, but I've put it off indefinitely knowing that I almost never just "watch TV" anymore.

Cable management isn't really going to be possible beyond what I can move out of the way to help airflow as best as I can. There's nowhere to stuff all the extra cable slack and it'd be worse if I tied them together into a thicker bundle. Considering this case has no side window, leaving it a little messy is fine, but it does bother me slightly. I used to not care about these things, but I do now. I'm not even sure what I'm photographing, but everything that's supposed to be inside the case is in there now. Despite how it looks in this picture, the path from the front intake to the CPU fan is unobstructed aside from the USB 3.0 header cable which disrupts the airflow a little. The last thing I needed was a pair of USB 2.0 header extension cables so I could put the PCI slot cover ports above the GPU. That allowed me to put all those SilverStone Aeroslots Gen 2 vented PCI slot covers below the 3080 Ti to reduce dead air zones at the back of the case. Here's a bonus pic of the packaging of the USB 2.0 header extension cables. I can put aside a lot of things when it comes to generic Chinese products that don't have a lot of design complexity or criticality, but I can't get over the futility of their alphabet soup brand names on Amazon. I can confirm those are letters from the alphabet. I know we all just accept this now and never really talk about it despite being covered as feature articles in New York Times and Slate, but it annoys me. This would be like an American product called Zzyzx. Actually, it's worse, because at least Zzyzx is the name of an actual town.

I had started a post several days ago but ended up never posting it. It was about exhaust temps. The i7-2600K in the Montech X1 case had an exhaust temp of 105°F at idle. The 7900X in my modified case had an exhaust temp of 86°F at idle before I set it up in my desk. This weekend, I put the case in the desk and brought in the 12 TB HDD and 3080 Ti. In the middle of extracting 40 GB of data, the exhaust temp was 96°F under load. Ambient room temp was 79°F for this measurement. The day the idle temps were measured, the ambient room temp was 81°F. I used to have some theories as to what was making this room so hot and figured it couldn't have been just the PC, but the room this PC was in previously was also much bigger. At this point, it seems that the only must-do in this room is to have the west-facing window tinted so the afternoon sun doesn't heat up the room so much. The significantly cooler 105W Eco-limited 7900X should allow the room temp to stay within 10°F—or hopefully even within 5°F—of the rest of the floor now. There were days last week where the room temp got up to 86°F with both PCs running, which was as much as 14°F higher than the rest of the floor. After overclocking everything I've built for myself since 1999, it's an unfamiliar feeling to not be doing that anymore. However, the overclocking hobby in the form of getting free performance so your affordable CPU could punch significantly above its weight class has been dead to the average DIYer for quite some time now.

If you're looking at CAD prices, that Asus GS-AX3000 seems to be a decent price compared to what it goes for in USD. However, I don't see Asuswrt-Merlin support for it. Like ENTERPRISE, the availability of that firmware is also my primary criteria for choosing an Asus router.

There are some mixed visual cues happening here. The unread items indicator is being interpreted by users as a notification indicator because it's a large red circle with a number inside, which corresponds to the visual cue of a red chip with a number inside for notifications in many other web portals, chat apps, mobile OSes, and macOS. In these forums, the notification bell next to the unread items also shows a dot at its top right when you've received an actual notification, but it's nowhere near as prominent visually. Since I don't have any active notifications, I can't even remember if the dot is red. However, this is what a user really wants to know or see when they've received a notification. I've learned to ignore the unread items indicator completely. You can clear it if you want by clicking through and marking all forums as read, but that doesn't really serve a functional purpose. They aren't actual notifications.

Not enough brown for that.

Those are all Newegg Marketplace sellers. Just like Amazon Marketplace sellers who sell new old stock, they all price gouge. If you want older hardware at a reasonable price, you pretty much have to look on forums or go for used on eBay.

Helm's Deep Reborn was a creative use of game assets to make the game function in a way that wasn't intended by Valve, to great effect. It gave a narrative purpose to survival mode. I never played any other survival map because the entire mode felt pointless to me otherwise. That map is so difficult that it worked well with the servers I played on, which supported up to 12 players. We also had increased difficulty mods including double tank spawns, increased horde sizes, and one-hit kill witches, but we also gained firepower with infinite minigun ammo and repositionable turrets. Since this is a survival map played on a survival game server, I don't think we had a CS-like buy menu system available for this map. Anyway, the mod potential of L4D2 is so vast unlike other games of the genre that the replayability factor for the game is nearly limitless as long as you can embrace the game's core mechanics.

L4D2 holds up exceptionally well and it's largely because the game isn't micromanaged. I stopped playing a few months before the Last Stand update, but the custom map community still appears to be going very strong. HS Top on YouTube still puts out videos regularly that continue to surprise me about trick plays that you can perform in the game, and Andre Ng does a good job of showcasing custom campaign map secrets and gameplay facts. I stopped playing partly because online play is a massive timesink, but that's where most of the game's replay value is. I wore out the official campaigns long ago, the pure game experience feels lacking after you've played on modded servers, and the team play dynamic and randomness isn't there in single player because the bots are stupid.

I feel like these types of leaks have persisted ever since HL3 became a meme. L4D3 has existed as comments left behind in source code for years. It's been worked on and subsequently abandoned. Tech demo screenshots exist, although they have no context. Nobody on the outside knows its current status. L4D2 on modded servers is my favorite gameplay experience of all-time. There is a case to be made for L4D3 because Turtle Rock's Back for Blood seems to have missed the mark in many ways.

Yeah, it's definitely a keeper. The paint job alone is a reminder of what I can do when I make the effort to do things the right way, because that was my first and only attempt at an automotive-quality paint project. I said earlier in the thread that I might have went with a vinyl wrap on the whole case if I started a few years later after wraps became more popular. That still wouldn't have addressed the complexity of the front bezel which has enough nooks and crannies to make a vinyl wrap very difficult to adhere nicely. In any feasible scenario that involved keeping the case, I think painting it was likely inevitable. I was never a retro purist for beige. As for the Lian Li cases, I would go as far as saying Lian Li didn't think far enough outside the box back in the mid-2000s. They still tried to make those cases retain the dimensions of a normal ATX tower and I think that limited their imagination and led to those monstrosities. I do like the shape of the Burj Al Arab hotel as a design concept, but as an ATX case, the illusion of over a dozen stepped front panel drive bays doesn't work for me. I think the Lian Li PC-Y6 yacht from a few years ago is an amazing limited edition case, and part of that is because it didn't try to satisfy the dimensional requirements of an ATX case.

Oh, I totally get you and agree with you. The original Gateway case is pretty meh. Its only remotely interesting claim to (questionable) fame is that it was one of the first ATX tower cases ever, but that doesn't make it good or valuable. It survived due to my financial circumstances at the time, and then I got inspiration at precisely the right time in history. I believe my roommate back in the mid-2000s had a Chieftec Dragon in blue. If not, it was a Thermaltake knockoff. I thought I had an old pic of it, but I can't find it. I really liked that case in stock form, so I get why you'd like it even more if you took time to mod it. That Lian Li case is model PC-777A. There were some others that got my attention back in those days, like the Lian Li Burj Al Arab PC-888. I'm glad their $400+ price tags back then stopped me, because I'd be full of regret if I owned them now.

My rig is really a blend of old and new, and I think that has something to do with how every upgrade I make is a deliberate and big one at the time of the upgrade. Then I'll just stick with something until I can't anymore. As a result, I tend to be really ignorant on things until it's time for me to do research, and then afterward I feel like a subject matter expert until the next technology innovation comes along. I've had three Logitech MX500 series mice (MX510, MX518, G MX518 Legendary) since I'm guessing 2005, and for whatever reason, I never seriously looked into upgrading them when there was reason to get a new mouse. I've gotten better mice for other purposes (Logitech Performance MX for my laptop, Logitech MX Master 2S in switchable Bluetooth/RF mode between the work laptop and my main rig as a backup), but I held onto old adages when it came to gaming mice such as wired being better than wireless, and just being content with the form factor and relative affordability of the MX500 series to not really consider other options. I got the G MX518 Legendary just under two years ago because my MX518 had a DPI down button that was getting increasingly stiff to actuate. About a month ago, I started to notice the same thing happening with the G MX518 Legendary's DPI down button too. Also, the cord was getting on my nerves because the cable management solution I put together for my desk limits the amount of extra slack I can pull back towards me, but the natural behavior of the mouse cord during enough use is to retract back into the cable bundle away from me. Well, "enough use" happens multiple times a day. If I was going to upgrade for real this time, I wanted a mouse that had side-scroll and freewheel capabilities that was still good for gaming. Also, it needed to have at least as many buttons as the MX500 series, because I actually use all of them even for productivity. That really left me with just two options: Logitech G502 X Plus and Razer Basilisk Ultimate. I've known for some time that high-end wireless gaming mice could match the latency of wired mice. What I wasn't aware of was this (from Rtings): They're faster wireless than the modernized version of the MX518 is wired. So, Logitech or Razer? I've had Logitech going back to the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 days, but it wasn't necessarily brand loyalty so much as knowing what I would get with Logitech. What it boiled down to was the least bloated and buggy software. Based on reading what users have complained about, Razer Synapse seemed like a bigger disaster to me than Logitech G Hub, and Synapse is also cloud-based for some reason I have a hard time accepting. So I decided to camp out on eBay and also spring for the G502 X Plus Lightspeed version for the ARGB. I mean, if I'm not going to pay full retail anyway, why not? Paid $128 for a brand new unopened $160 mouse. The trouble I go to just so I no longer have to yank the cord towards me every few hours. The crazy thing is that I have no idea how long I'd subconsciously gotten used to doing that.

Thanks! The crazy thing is, timing was everything to me keeping the case. Back in the mid-2000s around the time of my AMD Athlon XP-M build, I was considering other case options. I had a few requirements back then though, and the most stringent one was that I wanted a case at least as tall as mine. That's a hard requirement to meet considering it's 23" tall. In hindsight, was that a practical requirement? No, because much shorter cases these days are much easier to work with, have more interior space, and/or have better airflow. Nobody except Lian Li made a quality full-tower that I liked. However, Lian Li at the time was known for ultra premium cases with a few wacky special edition models, so none of them were affordable to me back then. Also, in hindsight, I don't think those cases would have aged very well either. I mean, there was a time when I wanted this thing: I'm very much not a fan of that case looking at it 18 years later. Also, since I'm not strictly a retro enthusiast, my case wouldn't mean as much to me if it weren't for the hours I spent painting, buffing, and correcting it. However, I also wouldn't have gotten the idea to paint it if an affordable iridescent paint that bore an extremely strong resemblance to DuPont's $500/pint Mystichrome formulation didn't come onto the consumer market a few years after that 2004 Mystichrome Cobra.

Thanks! I do have a small collection of DVDs and also have probably another 100 CDs to rip and digitally store for family, but even then, my optical disc needs are also few and far between. I actually thought about getting an external USB burner when putting together this rig, but ultimately decided I didn't want to bother with it for the time being. I'm not sure what the future holds for SATA since consumer hard drives are still going to need an interface and frustratingly, there are no actual installation pics of Seagate's alleged demo of an NVMe HDD in 2022, but I'm projecting my next motherboard will be at least five years away, so I can deal with the problem then.

I guess I should post an update. The rig is up and running except for the 3080 Ti and the hard drive which will be brought over at the very end once I have all the software I need installed and am ready to retire the Sandy Bridge build as my daily rig. Aside from the wallpaper which I've yet to bother with because my main monitor is a different resolution, I've got my Windows 10 desktop set up to my liking with a new suite of UI customizations including ExplorerBlurMica and TranslucentFlyouts adding to what I've already used for some time with other PCs in Rainmeter, RocketDock, and Open Shell. With an ambient room temp of 83°F which is more like what I'm used to seeing in this room during the summer, the max temp I'm seeing on CCD1 is 87.1°C and the hottest core is #6 at 86.3°C after about 20 minutes of stress testing and the temps staying stable for more than the last half of that duration. I don't think I'll have many real-world workloads maxing out the CPU for this long. Idle temps are in the low-to-mid-30s Celsius, which I'm just not used to seeing after over a decade with an i5-2500K and i7-2600K. I think the lowest I remember seeing my i7-2600K in the Montech X1 is 45°C (and currently 50°C with the higher ambient temps today). For accent lighting, I tried three different ARGB solutions for the front panel vents and I ended up putting together a custom solution (of course) with the help of steel stock and magnets. One of the things I learned from my experience with fitting white LED strips behind the front panel previously was that I need the LEDs to be side-firing to output any noticeable amount of light out the front. These are 12x0.5x0.5" steel square bars with adhesive magnetic strips holding them to the chassis, then the magnets on the ARGB LED strips hold them to the steel bars. I only enabled 16 of the 21 LEDs on each strip so I don't get light bleed in places where the light doesn't need to be. I was hoping that it would be brighter than the other solution I successfully fit in there, and it was, so I'm pleased with how it turned out. There is a little light bleed into the disk activity LED, but since the activity LED is brighter, I don't really care too much about that. I still need to have a 30mm square custom decal made, but all in all, not bad for making a 27-year-old case that was never designed to accommodate any of the mods I've done look maybe 10-15 years younger. Prior to this implementation, I tried two styles of magnetic ARGB light bars and was disappointed with the results. The first one was too thick to fit between the front bezel and the steel chassis, and the other was too dim to be seen in a fully lit room. On a side note, I'm glad I have a plan for the top external drive bay for one day when internal optical drives become fully obsolete via the obsolescence of SATA.

I remember considering the VS4121 for a work build. This would have been in 2007 when I worked for a very small startup and we were basically building our own computers. I just needed something cheap but not completely scraping the bottom of the PC audio barrel. I ultimately got a used Altec Lansing VS2221 set (which was two generations older) on eBay instead and expensed it. I don't really remember much about how they sounded (other than forgettable, obviously) but like every Altec set I've ever had, the volume control knob aged poorly and gradually produced noticeable static with one channel sometimes cutting out along various positions on the potentiometer. It's kind of wild thinking about the hoops we had to jump through to get marginally acceptable audio for low-volume music listening on PCs back then versus now.

With regard to air cooling, it feels like Cooler Master isn't doing much other than getting by on name recognition. The Hyper 212 series was a good, cheap cooler that fared well against much weaker competition 10+ years ago. It was primarily a good value and a noticeable upgrade over stock Intel/AMD coolers, but it was never an S-tier air cooler. I can't believe we're still even talking about it in 2023, regardless of the variant. Cooler Master needs to start fresh with a new design because they can't make the Hyper 212 a good value proposition anymore, especially not with these black anodized and ARGB add-ons. Not when the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 series, which is an S-tier air cooler, occupies the same price point and steals the Hyper 212's lunch money daily then bullies it relentlessly afterward during recess. Cooler Master has dual-tower coolers, but they're more expensive than comparable Noctua models. Those ain't it either. At this point, I think the Hyper 212 series only makes sense for SFF builds that can't cope with the extra depth of a dual-tower cooler, and even then, I wouldn't be so sure that there aren't better options for the price.

I have everything required to start up the PC now, but I have no operating system, no dedicated game SSD, and my storage HDD and 3080 Ti are still in my current machine. I ordered a 2 TB WD_BLACK SN770 from B&H after Amazon decided to delay my shipment by 10 days because they don't actually have any stock. Reusing an old case like this for a modern build has both charm and significant technical limitations. Even though I had an AIO cooler on my wish list earlier in planning, there was nowhere to put a radiator and the case is only vented on two sides instead of four on more modern cases, so that left me with only one real viable airflow path: front to back. Meanwhile, the lateral support and former 3.5" drive cage mounting brace basically left me with only one premium air cooler option in the Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 and its variants. Without the help of its vertical offset heatpipe design, any other 120mm+ tower cooler would hit the brace. I was prepared to cut a notch in the brace if I had no other options, but the PA 120 SE made life a lot easier. Rather than my initial plan of getting a cheap used 750W SeaSonic Focus as a spare PSU for about $60 to power this up before swapping in my Corsair AX850 later, I got an open box unused Corsair RM850x (2018) to be the new PSU for this build for $80. It's still the best low noise PSU for the money. The 5.25" drive cage serves as a nice PSU cable slack cubby. Putting aside the fact that the space in my desk to put a case makes a side window nearly useless, not having to worry about side windows at all on a 27-year-old case does reduce the emphasis on having a meticulously arranged interior. At this point, it's only mostly organized aside from the PSU cables because I want it to be. Unfortunately, there are still PCI-E connectors to be run for the 3080 Ti and I also have two SATA connections to make, so this is about the cleanest it'll look in bootable form. In-Case Initial Build Specs AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE heatsink with Be Quiet Silent Wings 4 120mm PWM fans Asus ROG Strix B650E-F ATX Motherboard G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo RGB Series 64 GB (2x32 GB) DDR5-6000 30-40-40-96 RAM F5-6000J3040G32GX2-TZ5N EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti FTW3 Ultra Gaming Western Digital WD_BLACK SN850X 1 TB PCI-Express 4.0x4 SSD WDS100T2XHE Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770 2 TB PCI-Express 4.0x4 SSD WDS200T3X0E Seagate BarraCuda Pro 12 TB 7200 RPM HDD ST12000DM0007 Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS Black SATA 24X DVD Burner Corsair RM850X (2018) 850W 80+ Gold PSU CP-9020180-NA Be Quiet Silent Wings 4 120mm PWM intake fans Noctua NF-A8 PWM 80mm PWM exhaust fan Notes I got the RGB memory because it was the same price as the non-RGB version at the time of purchase. The DVD burner will stick around as long as I need to help family rip and digitally file CDs before I eventually consider replacing it with a custom LCD monitoring panel that I saw on Etsy or something else that would be similarly useful. I'm in no rush though. The almost useless 80mm exhaust fan at the top of the case is currently an old 3-pin Nexus silent fan, but I'm replacing it with a Noctua NF-A8 PWM because I can. I'm still trying to find a suitable ARGB backglow lighting solution for the front intake panel. That's been difficult so far because I only have a 10" opening up front that has no room for wraparound or excess light strip placement, and most off-the-shelf solutions are way longer. Once I get all this up and running and have Windows installed, I'll have to introduce all the other peripherals and gear outside of the case, then the work/gaming space, and eventually finish it off with a case photoshoot because I never did finish polishing the wraparound side panel or apply the one decal I need on the front bezel all those years ago.

Wow, I should have used welded wire mesh from the start. It's a lot sturdier as I predicted. It's straight in all three dimensions and there is minimal flex when pushing on it. I'm extremely impressed with the result. It looks so much cleaner and more professional. This is what the two pieces look like side-by-side—woven on the left, welded on the right. The funny thing is, I knew welded wire mesh existed all along because I have a pair of wire baking racks that were made with it. It didn't cross my mind to find this stuff in a thinner wire gauge, nor was I searching with the right terms because the vast majority of wire mesh you find for sale is the woven type.

That's cool that they did a traveling road show. I wonder if they got significant traffic at their on-location events. It's hard to gauge how many people are still into this hobby anymore considering PC usage feels like it's been declining with the rise of mobile computing. I'm also reminded of a local store and warehouse that used to do component and pre-built sales back in the early-2000s. I remember buying an 80 GB WD Caviar hard drive and an ViewSonic 19" CRT from them among other things. They also hosted manufacturer showcase events a time or two where I got swag bags from Gigabyte, VIA, Maxtor, Microsoft, and others. Unfortunately, they fell off hard toward the end of 2006. They started failing to fulfill pre-built orders, didn't have components and peripherals in stock anymore, and eventually shuttered in early-2007.

For sure, I remember going into CompUSA and Fry's years ago and spending so much time in there browsing and seeing parts up close. I'm fortunate enough to live near Micro Center, but it would be a really barren computer tech retail landscape without them. Beyond them, Best Buy doesn't come remotely close to having as much product diversity as we'd like to see at B&M retailers. Anyway, I ordered the welded mesh earlier today, so I'm going to take another crack at that back panel grille. I did straighten out the woven mesh a bit more compared to what I posted yesterday, but I want to see if I can do better. The welded mesh is four openings per linear inch instead of the five on the woven that I used. I didn't look up the wire gauge, but being welded should increase the rigidity a good amount anyway, and I won't have to leave off the nearest wire strands parallel to the cut edges. They tend to fall out on woven mesh because nothing really holds them in place on the side that was cut.

Well, it's a year later and I've gone through two DACs in the last month. After trying to pick between the Schiit Modius and SMSL Sanskrit 10th MKII, I ended up deciding on something else entirely. I wanted the SMSL M300 MKII to match my SA300 amp. However, the M300 MKII was apparently discontinued late last year. Hifi-express still had it in stock though, but on the night I was ready to buy it, I added it to my cart, then went to eat dinner, and came back to see it was out of stock. I clearly had practice for my Micro Center CPU/MB/RAM bundle out-of-stock experience last week. That led me to scramble and opt for the SMSL Sanskrit 10th MKII, which I learned was also recently discontinued and succeeded by the slightly pricier MKIII. I still got a new 10th MKII without any hassle though and had been using it for a month. It's been a great DAC and the price was exceptional at a discounted $100. I randomly looked up the M300 MKII on Hifi-express again a couple of weeks ago and this time, it was back in stock. Well, since that was my original target DAC for matching my SA300 as much as for using the AKM4497 DAC chip, I went ahead and bought it. Its price-performance ratio is much worse than the Sanskrit 10th MKII which has the AKM4493 like the original Schiit Modius, but a new M300 MKII on clearance cost nearly the same as a used AKM4493 Modius on eBay, so I guess it worked out. As of today, Hifi-express returns a 404 page instead of out of stock when looking up the M300 MKII, so now it's gone gone. I can't hear the difference between the M300 MKII and the Sanskrit 10th MKII, which was itself not as dramatic of an upgrade as going from the SMSL Q5 Pro amp to the SA300. It is nice to get a noticeably cleaner and stronger signal to my speakers though. No more internal PC sound hardware for speaker output. Also, I have audio output switching in Windows working for me for the first time ever with functional switching between the M300 MKII and my ancient Chaintech AV-710 sound card. At this point, I'm only using the AV-710 for basic front panel headphone output, and I'll be doing the same with the onboard sound on my new ROG Strix motherboard. Anyway, when I was running speaker output through the Wolfson DAC on the AV-710, switching to front panel audio required me to quit and restart every open audio stream, and Adobe Audition and Premiere would throw stream output errors when the Wolfson DAC was active. Glad I won't have to deal with those annoyances anymore.

I'm not over the moon with the result, but it also fit about as well as I could have hoped. It gets the job done and It's rigid enough to not deflect much when I press my fingers against it, not that anyone's going to be doing that anyway. In hindsight, welded mesh would have fit in a lot neater without warping and been much easier to work with than this standard fare woven mesh. To be fair, I didn't know welded mesh was an option until I found it on McMaster-Carr the other evening. I may still buy some because I'm far from having everything I need to put together the build right now. Another option is expanded steel, although I believe that would be significantly harder to bend with only hand tools, since I don't have a sheet metal brake or even any spare metal stock to create a makeshift one on a workbench.