Fluxmaven

Took the day off work. Decided to finish this while I had some free time. Added an Aquacomputer Octo so I can control fans based on liquid temp. The Arctic P12 Max can get pretty loud but move a ton of air. After I get all the air bubbles worked out and fan curve dialed in, it will be ready to go for the upcoming foldathon.

I have way to many systems. I also have multiple racks, so it makes sense to start doing rackmount builds lol. I'm planning on using this as my main rig for a couple weeks while I tear down my main rig for some long overdue maintenance and a couple upgrades. After that, It will just go into the rack as a folding rig unless I end up needing it for something else down the line. RackChoice 3U case Temporarily its running a Ryzen 5700X3D in a B550 board. That's going to go into my travel rig and the Z790i + Delidded 12600KF will go into this rig. RTX 5060 Ti 16GB watercooled with a Koolance GPU-210 block on the core and an Alphacool MCX One kit to cool the memory. Corsair SF600 360mm XSPC rad D5 Vario in Bitspower top FrozenQ 2016 limited edition reservoir that I've been meaning to do something with for a long time PCB on the Gigabyte 5060 Ti is hilariously tiny. Beer for scale. Having memory on the front and back makes things interesting. Using large loops of tubing to keep from applying a lot of force on the blocks to hopefully keep them from popping off. Added a bunch of zip ties to help hold things in place. After a few heat cycles if they seem to stay on solidly, I might cut those all off. Trying something new. Didn't want to use nuts and bolts to mount the pump since it would stick down further and make it harder to slide into a populated rack. So I riveted it in. Seems to work great. For some dumb reason, I want to do a few runs of hardline tubing. (mostly since I have a bunch laying around). We'll see how that goes but I got some progress done before it got hot this morning so I'm content with putting that off for another day.

So I guess I never did a build log for this... Around 2020 I gave my sister a build I did for fun just so she had a desktop computer... It was an i7 6700 with an OG GTX Titan when I built it, but I swapped the watercooled Titan for a 980 Ti since I knew she wouldn't maintain a custom loop. No pics of what I sent her off with, but here's what it looked like with the Titan. It was in a windowless black Fractal Define Nano S. A solid little system at the time, but it was never cute enough for her even after covering it with stickers. A while ago Cooler Master wanted us to review an SFX PSU. I said I'd do it if they sent along a Pink NR200 to review along with it... They had just discontinued the pink and so I was sent a white version instead. For anybody interested Here's the review of the PSU/Case. After the review, I built her a bit of an upgrade. i5 12500 GTX 1070 32GB Trident Z Royal Crucial P3 Plus 2TB Thermalright SI-100 CM NR200P wrapped with sparkle blue vinyl That has served her well the last couple years. She still doesn't game much but was interested in trying Hogwarts Legacy. Figured that might be a little too much for the ole 1070. As well as Nvidia starting to phase out support for Pascal. Figured it was time for a bit of an upgrade. I just happened to be in Tampa for work last week, so I stopped by her new place and swapped in an RTX 3060 Ti.

81.3 degrees in the office currently and that's with the AC running and not folding on the 3090s. Wish I had the spare electrical capacity to install a mini split. I'm working on a silly project with a 50 series card. I'll post a build log in a bit but hopefully will have it done before the event starts.

Yes, I'm just shy

^ It's a shame Asus seems to keep churning out overpriced products that don't live up to expectations. Wish we still had EVGA in the enthusiast motherboard space. As for my most recent purchases.... Just snagged a Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 Mobo with an i7-4930K CPU + 32GB RAM for an upcoming HWBot comp Grabbed an open box RTX 5060 Ti 16GB from Microcenter for Folding@home. The PCB is hilariously tiny. I'm going to watercool it for fun and will post some pics when I do. Also picked up an Optane 905P to replace the tired boot drive in my sim rig. I have some EXTREMELY special updates for that rig in the works.

50 series is a big letdown to me. The performance uplift of every card in the stack is pretty much in line with the increased power consumption for each card. The only additional benefit is the software trickery. Add in all the issues they are having and crazy prices then they aren't looking very attractive. I was hoping for a 24GB 5080 that matched or was slightly faster than the 4090 for $1000. I don't need 32GB and don't want to spend over $2k on a GPU. I'll wait and see if we get a 5080 Super/Ti/whatever that is a closer fit for my needs. If that doesn't come around or is a flop, I'll just wait for the 6090 and just accept that it's going to cost a fortune.

Since we have a couple new faces around here, I'll throw out an ExtremeHW sticker or two. I've had a few batches of these made over the years to give away during foldathons and most of the regulars have one by now. If it's your first time folding with us, and you live in the USA, slide in my DMs. I'll drop one in the mail.

Thanks to everyone that participated! I was hoping to get some more competition to make me dying of heatstroke with all my stuff folding more worth it. I understand that it may take a while to build back up to where we were previously. A lot of users jumped ship when the site was about to go down and don't want to jump back and forth from team to team. I am in that position myself. I went to [H]ardforum to fold when I thought EHW was going under. I feel a bit of commitment to both and as such have been splitting my resources between the two teams. As for the prizes, we didn't hit either of the set milestones so I'd save them for the next big event.

Just got back from being out of town all week. Normally I'd be firing up every modern card in the house but I'd rather not be sweating like a whore on nickel night. So I'm just going to relax this evening with just the couple cards I run all the time. Tomorrow I'll start firing up as much as I can without tripping breakers. Download.mp4

I have a 7400f as well. It's basically the same thing but it has paste under the IHS instead of solder and a bit lower clocks. I bought one to delid but haven't had time to mess with it yet. I'll do an comparison between them when I get a chance.

PCIe lane distribution is very stupid on almost all the current crop of boards and it is annoying. I agree that we should have more 2 DIMM options. Most people buying consumer gear are never populating 4 slots anyway. It's a shame we'll never get an EVGA X870E Dark Kingpin. That Aorus Master looks like a nice board and if it fits your needs for $300 less, seems like a no brainer. As for my recent purchases... I picked up a Ryzen 7500f, i5 13490f, and a DDR5 6000 CL28 kit on Aliexpress today. I have a friend that's wanting to try PC gaming. So I'll build them a rig with one of those CPUs along with the Arc B580 I just bought after I do some HWBOT runs on everything.

Their audio setup "Klipsch The Sevens" are just stereo speakers not a full AVR. So no surround formats to consider. It's just 2.0 (or 2.1 since it does have a sub output). With that in mind, I'd just do HDMI from PC to TV, then HDMI from TV to speakers since ARC will turn the speakers on/off with the TV. Unless you have interference issues from other nearby equipment, there isn't really any quality difference using Optical.

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.