Fluxmaven

I have seen that before as well, but this one fan is actually just faulty. The other Noctua that's right next to it is rock solid. When I first installed it I thought it might just be some resonance and dropped the RPM a bit lower on that fan. Didn't think anything of it until the fans ramped up a bit more than usual. (ambient temp in the office with multiple rigs running gets into the mid 80s during the summer). In my case, this one fan is just out of balance. You can see the whole blade assembly wobbling on the hub. Noise wise, it's only annoying at higher RPM which this system rarely sees anyway. It will wreck the bearing and only get worse being out of balance. If it were a $5 fan I'd just toss it, but being a Noctua, it's worth taking a couple minutes to fill out the RMA form.

As a counter point, I have 9 Arctic P12s on an external rad that I bought when I was on a tighter budget. Expected that I'd have to replace them in a couple years... It's been about 5 and they are still running great. Meanwhile the last Noctua A12x25 I bought needs to be RMA'd. I should have just returned it to Microcenter when I first got it since it seemed louder than the others I have, and now it's gotten worse.

Actually a lot of mech people love linears which is why there are so many different ones on the market. I just personally cant stand them. Your noise ceiling for switches eliminates a lot of options. If I locked you in a room with Box Navies, I think your head might explode . The Panda's are probably the quietest switch I use lol. that said, the keyboard itself makes a difference also. The Pandas in my Rama are quieter than the ones in the cheapo board I have on the desk right meow. There are various factors like if the switches are lubed or not, case material, plate material, if there's any dampening in the case etc. There are more boutique options that are designed do be silent like Zilents or Boba U4, but they tend to be more expensive and harder to find in stock. The Akko penguin is something I just came across that looks like a decent option to consider. You still trying to give away them Gateron yellows? Have you ever typed on a tactile other than Browns? Plenty of tactiles have a more pronounced bump than average clicky switches like blues. Poking at one key in a switch tester isn't a great way to actually get a feel for switches. Unfortunately, the only way to properly demo switches is in a board and most stores only have basic switch options in prebuilts. The nerd option is to attend keyboard meetups and try other people's boards. Outside of that you just have to buy lots of different switches to try out. Of course that leads to having all the switches you don't like piling up lol.

Off to a bit of a late start, but I just fired up some stuff.

Nice choice on the BC1. As for PSU Corsair SF line has been the cream of the crop for SFX for years. I own/have owned 3 of them and they are rock solid. They actually just released their updated lineup of the true SFX units recently to ATX 3.1 and go up to 1000w. There are some other options in SFX-L (which is just the longer version of SFX). Some of which are higher wattage, others are just a bit cheaper than SFX units. I actually reviewed the Cooler Master V1100 SFX for the site a while back. Wasn't particularly impressed and went back to an SF600 for my actual PC.

In your mom

It just downloads fresh air through the invisible side vents.

Just bench more and beat him this season as well

Team cup is often a display of who has the most old crap. Having all the subs filled in every category is worth more points than just having really good subs in a few categories. Even if we did have coverage of that category with better CPUs, still nothing wrong with running the Athlon. If a better sub gets taken down for some reason, its good to have backups.

"3 core scores only. Core unlocking allowed, no core disabling." So, you can't use it unfortunately.

Picked up some bling for the older platforms that I'll hopefully bench someday

I really don't need more games in my backlog that I'll never play. I did get a couple DLC for Assetto to guilt myself into actually using my racing sim

Went a similar route as Damric but with a white aesthetic. If we could have done microcenter in store deals, it would have a been a 5800X3D combo with a 4080 super lol PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/fWfKjH CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 4.2 GHz 8-Core Processor ($384.99 @ Amazon) CPU Cooler: Thermalright Assassin X Refined SE ARGB 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler ($17.91 @ Newegg Sellers) Motherboard: Gigabyte B650 AORUS ELITE AX ICE ATX AM5 Motherboard ($199.99 @ Amazon) Memory: Silicon Power XPOWER Zenith Gaming 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory ($92.97 @ B&H) Storage: Kingston NV2 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($114.99 @ Amazon) Video Card: Sapphire PURE Radeon RX 7900 GRE 16 GB Video Card ($544.99 @ Newegg) Case: MagniumGear Neo Air 2 ATX Mid Tower Case ($59.99 @ Newegg) Power Supply: MSI MPG A750GF 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($79.99 @ Newegg) Total: $1495.82

I did tweak all the timings and upped voltage. No idea what they were off the top of my head. I probably still have that profile saved in the motherboard though. I can't check right now since I'm in South Carolina for work. This was on 10th/11th gen. 10850K, 11600K, 11900K. Like I said I don't have kaby lake, just was saying that Intel seems to clock well with those B-die sticks.

I don't have any Kaby lake systems so IDK specifics of what you should try, but I have several B-die kits and they do pretty good on intel. I am not a RAM OC guy at all and easily took 32GB 3200c14 dual rank kits up to 4200c16. I need to see what my 16GB Royal kit will really do. Just running XMP 4800C17 currently.

I'm continuing my trend of budget boards with nice keycaps lol RAMA KAT Explosion artisan. Was supposedly "in stock" but I ordered May 7th and it showed up today. The rest of the keycaps are Infinikey Cabernet. I'll take some nice pictures of the whole board at some point but it's just a cheap beater. Epomaker EK68 VIA Kit that I got for practically nothing open box. Wired and Bluetooth work but the 2.4g wireless adapter seems bad. I use it wired so it doesn't bother me. Tossed a mix of switches I had laying around. Redragon pandas for the Alphas and Cherry MX Clear modifiers.

I'll get all the other teams as drunk as me so you can easily beat them

Good news is that my 4070 ti seems fine. I went ahead and fired all the 4000 series cards up last night. The 4060s have much more limited tuning. One is in linux so it's just doing its thing. The other in windows I can get down to 89w at just over 3mil... VS the 4070 ti I'm able to run at 128w and still do over 10mil. Now that the sun is really beating on the side of the house the temp in the office is already climbing. So I'll likely end up pausing everything and only running in the dark of the night.

We are just splitting hairs at this point, but Kaby lake desktop CPUs launched in 2017 which would have been B250 which were still locked down. They didn't stop until B560 which was Rocket Lake (11th gen).

It was Skylake (6th gen) and it was 2133 on B150. B250 moved the needle to 2400. B360 was 2666. B460 gave us 2666 for i5 and below and 2933 for i7 and above. During that entire time, Ryzen was here with higher core counts and support for faster memory. Early Ryzen's had a hard time running RAM higher than 3000, but at least it wasn't locked away.

Aside from all the rack mounted stuff, I do have windowed side panels on all my rigs and I keep them up on the desk. Partially because I like looking at them, and also because we have pets so I don't want them on the floor. So a decent looking board is a consideration for sure. I also want plenty of USB ports, M.2 slots, and a post code display so that immediately bumps you into a higher end board these days unfortunately. On simpler builds I will go with a cheaper board. Although it wasn't that long ago that you really got swindled on the lower end chipsets for basic features. It wasn't until H570 and B560 that you could enable XMP on Intel. Was always funny to see people a couple years back buying fancy RAM kits that were stuck running at 2133 because they didn't get a Z board. Or vice versa, people buying Z board with a locked CPU.

If you hang around on forums like OCN and ExtremeHW and wonder why people spend money on higher end components you might be hanging around the wrong forums lol. A e s t h e t i c s is a big reason I see people splurge a bit more than they probably should on components. The "white tax" and "pink tax" are very real things. I've helped plenty of gamer girls build PCs and you will absolutely pay a premium to make a cute PC to avoid the "gamer aesthetic". Even if you aren't trying to do a cute build, if you want something with IO port covers, beefy heatsinks, integrated RGB etc so it doesn't look like some poverty spec board, you'll pay a premium. There's obviously a point of diminishing returns. If you buy an MSI Godlike or an Asus ROG Maximus Extreme, you are 100% doing it to flex your massive epeen. That said, your biggest counter argument seems to be, money saved on the board is better spent on other components. Do you really see people out there buying top end boards and pairing them with budget components? Most of the people on here with higher end boards already have best in socket CPUs and high end GPUs. I'd agree that for your average joe that just ascended from consoles to PC, they probably don't need a nice board since they just want plug and play. They also don't need a bunch of IO because they are used to having none coming from a console. 10g networking is very relevant to anyone that has a NAS or any type of server they work off of. Higher end chipsets X670E like offer more PCIe lanes, PCI 5 support etc. One other factor is availability. When new a new platform launches, they start with the high end stuff and you don't see value options pop up until later. If you do SFF builds you especially get hit hard. AFAIK on AM5 every ITX board under $270 hit the market less than a year ago.

Many people tend to go way overboard on PSUs. I have a reference 6950 XT under a custom waterblock that I run on an AX760. I haven't had any issues with it. It's paired with a 7800X3D. I also briefly ran it on an SF600 with a 7900X and had a couple shutdowns until I put CPU in eco and did a mild undervolt and capped FPS on the GPU. The reason people recommend 1000w PSU for these cards is the transient power spikes. Higher quality PSUs do a better job of handling spikes without tripping OCP. The 650 BP will be a little iffy but you can try it and if you have issues try and shoehorn your 1000w into that system.