Fluxmaven

I'm no stranger to "winning" the opportunity to overpay for a GPU paired with a PSU I didn't want/need lol As for Navi, I have a reference 6950XT with a Bitspower block. It lives an easy life in my bedroom PC that I don't use all that often. It's undervolted and it also connects to an external MO-RA3 radiator so it runs cool and pretty much silent. 7800X3D isn't adding much heat load so fans are typically only spinning 400rpm to maintain a 2-3 degree water to air delta. Prior to that, I used it in a Silverstone 4u case review and it was the only modern GPU I had that would fit with the top panel on... Thanks Nvidia for the fragile 12VHPWR connector.

Do you have a decent power supply? I only see a case and peripherals mentioned. As for used hardware recommendations: Intel: I'd look for a 12600KF or 12700KF. The "F" means no iGPU which tends to lower the price a bit. I wouldn't go any older than this unless you got a crazy deal. On the AMD side I'd look into Ryzen 5600 or better. A couple months ago, I'd say order a 5700X3D off Aliexpress, but those shot way up in price unfortunately. For GPUs, Pascal is holding up amazingly well for how old it is, but I wouldn't go that route unless it was dirt cheap. Quick scan of my local listings and it's all over the place. GTX 1070s range from $40-150. For $40, sure why not... $150 put the crack pipe down lol. Basically any RTX card would be a good option depending on pricing. I see 4060's for around $200 pretty often which are basically 2080 performance at half the power consumption. The price floor doesn't dip much below that though and a 2060 isn't worth $150. The price ceiling for Nvidia cards is basically the moon. Radeon RX 6600-6750XT would be decent team red options. Another option with Microcenter is going with a CPU/Motherboard/RAM combo instead of a full prebuilt. If I were I were in the same boat, I'd probably spend the majority of the budget on a new CPU combo and toss a cheap used GPU in for now. If he sticks with it, swapping in a new GPU is the simplest upgrade down the road.

Lol it was fun staying up till 3am to see the midweek madness price drops on B-stock. Very sad to see EVGA out of the game. I always had the least amount of issues with their products and the very few instances I needed to deal with customer support, it was the best of any of the manufactures I've dealt with. Obviously, we'll welcome anybody from the EVGA forums with open arms. Things are a little slow over here currently, but we're trying to keep the forum experience alive.

I keep these tired old RO Search boots under my desk for when I need to go get into trouble. These things are old enough to vote

I like quirky hardware. Finally picked a 12490f. China exclusive model that's basically a 12400f with a higher base clock and 2MB more l3 cache. Got it on AliExpress so I was excited that it came in the black retail box. The 5700X3D I bought a while ago just came in a plastic tray. Also grabbed a Barrow direct die block for it. Totally unnecessary but they were having a sale and I needed to spend more to use the coupon. Also got some new boots.

Thanks guys. I also have a pair of 7970s with waterblocks but those are a lot less cool than a 7990. Back in 2012 I was still running an i7 870 with an EVGA 560 TI Classified. That year I helped my best friend build his first custom PC which was actually the 2700K and motherboard that I'm using for the team blue build. He gave them to me when I helped him build his next PC which was a Ryzen 2700X with dual 1080 Ti's. It's hilariously tiny, but I also have a Fury X with a waterblock that I need to bench and do something with. Back when it was relevant, I did what every smart person did and bought a 980 Ti instead Had it paired with a 4790K since AMD was still a joke on the CPU front at that time. Not exactly era appropriate, but maybe I'll pair the Fury X with a first gen Ryzen. Or better yet a first gen Threadripper. Granted something like a Vega Frontier would be a more appropriate pairing for a Threadripper... That involves me buying even more old crap though lol. Now that you guys can get a bit of a glimpse into my thought process, it's easier to understand how I end up with an entire room full of hardware that I haven't done anything with.

The AMD rig is up and running. This case is not nearly as easy to work with as the gigantic Lian Li so it took some silly solutions to get everything together. Biggest hurdle was connecting the two radiators together. The ports on the top rad are below the ports on the front rad. I tried several different combos of offset fittings and adapters... Ended up just using a couple 90 degree 10/13mm Alphacool fittings with a little loop of EPDM to go into the back chamber of the case, around the front panel and into the front radiator. The fill port on the distro is also too close to the radiator to slip even a low profile 90 degree adapter into so filling the system is a bit tricky. Ran just the rads with a filter for a few days which is why there is moisture in the distro. Got all the lines ran and pressure tested before filling her up with red Aquacomputer DP Ultra. Old ass hardware in a new case means, a few extra front panel cables that aren't used. Case came with the fan/rgb hub built in which is convenient. Didn't go nuts perfecting the cable management, just wanted it good enough to not need to stand on the back panel to get it closed The first flash drive I grabbed from the pile ended up being a stripped down copy of windows 11... which oddly installed perfectly fine. I'll need to find my win7 boot drive at some point, but the system works for now. Damn thing idles over 200w stock and a quick timespy run was low 600w draw. Once I get a decent overclock dialed in on the CPU and GPU, this thing is gonna be a real space heater... Which I expected lol

Holy crap that is a steal. I'd be excited to get the watercooling stuff for $100. The fact that it came in a Caselabs for that is an insane deal.

It's a shame a lot of traditional forums are dying. I like the structure and ease of finding info on forums. Things like Reddit and Facebook groups just always seem like an endless string of people asking the same things every day and expecting immediate replies. Obviously anyone is welcome to move over here. The forum just went through a bit of a rough patch but are slowly bouncing back. A lot of the members here are more chatty on the Discord server, but we're working on getting more content and activity on the site.

Made some progress on this.The system will likely dual boot windows 10 and either 7 or XP for legacy benches so I wanted it to be easy to swap GPUs. So those got soft tubing with QD3s. The basement rad and pump will be soft tubing but the rest of the runs in the main chamber will be hard tubing. Some old school stuff hiding down low. The thermochill rad with an Aquastream Eheim pump on a shoggy sandwich.

This isn't an airport, no need to announce departures.

The dual CCD chips actually benefit from increased bandwidth. For single CCD, just tightening up a decent kit makes more sense than spending a bunch on a kit that will do 8000+. When it comes closer to your upgrade, I'd see what the recommendations are at the time. The PCIe lane layouts are infuriating and the manufactures don't bother to clearly show how that works. For my main system I wanted 3x M.2 without stealing lanes from the GPU. I was actually interested in an Asrock X870E Nova but it was always out of stock. Ended up with an MSI X870 Tomahawk which can do what I want for the most part. Populate all 4 M.2 would still not drop main PCIe from 16x. You do have to sacrifice the USB4 ports and/or the other PCIe slot though depending on what slots you use. Using M.2_1 and M.2_4 affect nothing else. I don't need the other PCIe slot so I'm using my 3rd M.2 in M.2_3 so I keep the USB4 ports (which share lanes with M.2_2). Like Mr Fox, I also recently purchased an Iceman direct touch RAM waterblock set after seeing several people seemed to have good luck with them. The flimsy heat spreaders on my G.Skill A-die were already starting to fall off.

I know a guy that can get you into a big boi external on the cheap On my main rig I have it on the floor around the corner from my desk blowing the heat out of the room. QD fittings on the external plus datavac equals cooling system cleaned in minutes vs dying trying to carry the full tower outside.

Fresh block installed on the 2nd Titan Black. Some old glamor shots of my other Titan Black from the last build it was in. Gold backplate isn't ideal for the blue and white theme, but I'm getting tired of spending money on this build I'm going to use for a couple hours then likely ignore in the corner for years lol. That said... If someone has a couple matching Titan backplates laying around...