Fluxmaven

It's finally getting too hot to fold around here and now we go and have a good ole hootenanny. I'm obviously in

Actually played a game on the team red build the other day. Crossfire worked and the system was pulling 600-675w from the wall all stock. Decided I should probably make some progress on the team blue build since it's raining so I can't play outside lol. Plumbed the lower rad and pump into the distro. Decided to just loop the rads together with a filter to run the system a while to catch any loose bullshit since the top rad is new. Also ditched the front rad and flipped the intake fans to the inside of the bracket. Figured dual 480mm was plenty. Even after all the years doing this stuff I still screw up sometimes. Filled with just the DDC until I saw liquid make it all the way around. Then kicked on the aquastream... Which ended up overflowing the reservoir right as I went to snap a picture. Everything is fine I just felt dumb.

Thanks. I also have an A770 that I got at launch. After a few months of driver updates it became a great card. Currently loaned out to a friend thats saving up for a new card. Runs surprisingly well even pushing an ultra wide display. Looking forward to seeing what you can accomplish with that Apex. I have a Gene which is already more board than my lack of skill requires lol.

Picked up an open box Arc B580 to play around with. Went ahead and just built a rig from spare parts for now. Too hot in the office to benchmark currently. Tossed it on the living room TV and it runs Rocket League great in 4K. I don't really play anything else on controller but I'll try a few more demanding games just to see how it holds up.

I don't get why everyone thinks they are going to be a photo or video editor these days and thinks they need a crazy workstation to do so. When you learn to drive, most people don't go out and buy an F350 dually as a first vehicle just in case they might need to tow something someday. Get a 7800X3D or 9800X3D. If your PC doesn't make you money, there is no reason to bother with anything else. For gaming either of those CPUs will be amazing. For photo/video editing they will also be plenty fast. Especially for someone that's just dabbling in it. Get the cheaper motherboard. You won't notice a difference in performance and the money would be better spent elsewhere. If that "maybe" turns into a reality and they start editing regularly and it becomes a priority that would benefit from a CPU upgrade, the X3D chips will always be in high demand. So you could easily sell it and grab a Zen 6 chip when those come out.

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.