neurotix

On 17/12/2022 at 15:13, Fluxmaven said:

 

Yes, that's the best part 

 

NovelKeys is where I would go for BOX switches. They sell them in boxes of 36 so two boxes is enough to cover the board and have a couple spares. The keyset I got doesn't really fit well since it uses nonstandard shift sizes 2.25u/1u as well as 1u keys for everything right of the spacebar. I'd just look around on Amazon to find something that's geared towards 65% boards. 

 

EPOMAKER (the ones who make the Mini Cat board, have several different keysets that would all have the correct sizes for that board. 

Thank you Flux!

Thanks for the input guys.

Using a 2014 era Cooler Master V1000, @Sir Beregond

Alright thanks everyone. Now I finally understand the dongle/adapter situation. I think length should be no problem, see pics of my rig.

What may be an issue is that my psu has the mentioned daisy chained 8-pin connectors; 2x 8 pin on one cable. However, its a Seasonic unit and run multiple GPU setups using those with no issues, even with 2x 290 and an FX-8350 pulling 950w+. So I'll chance it and I think both cables are on seperate rails as well.

Will be sure to plug stuff in all the way as well- no gaps.

That's assuming I can get my hands on one; Microcenter is close but like 1 1/2-2 hrs on the Chicago freeways. I don't know if I'll have to reserve one or be able to, or just drive there and hope they don't sell out by the time we arrive.

3 minutes ago, J7SC_Orion said:

  

 

...as @Sir Beregond mentioned, I have the Gigabyte-Gaming-OC (since mid-October), and so far, it is great...it came with a 4 year warranty. My card is water-cooled, so @ENTERPRISE's comment on fans won't be an issue. FYI, all told in my home-office / work and play, I have a Gigabyte mobo, and six GPUs of theirs and never had to do an RMA, so I don't really know how that would be like...my previous and only RMA experiences with Asus and MSI (one claim each) were excellent. 

 

...the best PCB (IMO) for the 4090 is the MSI SuprimX / & AIO version...there's also the extremely expensive Asu Strix and the unobtanium Galax Hof, but if you want to go for Asus, I would get the TUF / OC and flash another vbios on it (ie Strix, Galax Hof)....all told, avoid cards that don't have 2x vbios and less than 20+4 VRM.

Alright thanks for your input, I might go with Gigabyte then ,(if these things are ever even available getting pissed off waiting for no stock,), 4 year warranty is pretty great too.

Still need Sir Beregond to straighten me out on exactly what the 12V8HWR1337 hemi connector actually is though

4 minutes ago, The Pook said:

I'm avoiding Gigabyte from now on due to horrible RMA experiences with them. I haven't owned anything MSI since 775 and I haven't owned anything Zotac since the GTX 500 series so idk for them. 

 

Zotac has a marginally higher power limit (+15W) than the MSI. If you're going run them on HWBOT it might be worth an extra $50 but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The Zotac also has a larger, 3 slot cooler though the mounting bracket is only 2 slot.

Thanks for the warning about Gigabyte and thanks for the power limit heads up since yes, card will be benched for the bot.

14 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

I believe the MSI card does only 3 (lol) 8-pins to 16-pin 12VHPWR while the others are 4. So from an enthusiast perspective probably better with the Gigabyte or Zotac if you are planning to overclock and play with power. @J7SC_Orion has that Gigabyte I believe.

 

As far as warranty, not sure, I've not owned any of these brand GPUs before for an extended period of time. I've heard hit and miss things with each of them over the years, but I couldn't really tell you anything definitively. 

Thanks for your input too @ENTERPRISE

I'm totally confused about the connector and adapter issue now. I thought you clarified for me in another topic that the connector on the card is 12 pin and you plug 1x 8 pin PCI-E into it, with an extra 4 pins on the adapter being unused.

Is the "12VHPWR" actually 16 pin and I plug two 8 pin PCI-E into the adapter then in to the card? Good god I don't see the effing point of this new connector, I love my current PSU and don't want to have to put in a new one. This is the wiring on the backside of my rig and we'd have to rip it all apart:

So if Microcenter ever has these in stock, what is the best card out of these three:

Gigabyte Gaming OC

Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming Overclocked Triple Fan 24 GB GDDR6X PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card - Micro Center

WWW.MICROCENTER.COM

---

Get it now! The WINDFORCE cooling system features three 110mm unique blade fans, alternate spinning, 10...

MSI Gaming Trio:

MSI NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Gaming Trio Triple Fan 24 GB GDDR6X PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card - Micro Center

WWW.MICROCENTER.COM

---

Get it now! Play with style! GAMING is upgraded with TRI FROZR 3 to sustain intense performance during gaming...

Zotac AMP

Zotac NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 AMP Extreme AIRO Triple-Fan 24GB GDDR6X PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card - Micro Center

WWW.MICROCENTER.COM

---

Get it now! "Love Gaming with the all-new ZOTAC GAMING GeForce graphics cards based on the NVIDIA Ada...

Galax is not available nor do I think my power supply would be able to power the two 12VNP whatever stupid new connectors on the card. I will have to use one of the included 8-pin to 12-pin blah blah blah to even power these cards and hope it works.

Thoughts? I'm leaning towards Gigabyte myself. Also, how long is the warranty and how is the RMA process/quality for each of these brands. I've only used Evga and Sapphire in the past.

16 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Hadn't heard of this one. Thanks for the tip!

 

Results with 4.8GHz / 4.675GHz @ 1.44v:

 

 

Was this with L1 and L2 prefetcher off? I hadn't heard of that tweak either.

Also, in Extreme Tweaker there's a drop-down box near the Per CCX entry that says something like Performance bias and it has entries for Cinebench R15 Gentle, Cinebench R15 Aggressive, etc. I wonder if those would help.

44 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Thank you very much for the advice/tips @neurotix and @The Pook. I was able to do 4.8GHz/4.65GHz on the 5900X at 1.44v and crossed 24k multi-core score for the first time.

 

 

Congrats, good work

18 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Very nice! I'm about 250 behind then. Were you also trying Dynamic OC mode?

A protip: you get slightly to a decent amount higher Cinebench scores if you set the process priority for Cinebench to Realtime. The system will essentially lock up and show just a black screen for Cinebench and not show the render, but if you wait it will finish and show the whole render and your score will be slightly higher. I tested both with Realtime and without at 4800MHz and in R23 it increased my score by around 300 pts. On other setups/my old 4790k/older versions of Cinebench, it would actually give you like 500pts more or higher when running the process in Realtime.

I think you can set process priority to Realtime using benchmate, but I personally use a program called Prio Process Priority setter. https://www.prnwatch.com/prio/

That program will allow you to control process priority through Task Manager under the Details tab by right clicking on the Cinebench process.

And no, I did not use and have no idea about Dynamic OC mode. I just went in the Extreme Tweaker PBO menu and set both PBO and PBO Fmax enhancer to off, left voltage on auto, and set clocks and VID in the per CCX menu.

4800/4500

This turned out great! And I'm not just saying that cuz I'm on it.

Thanks Enterprise!

On 17/12/2022 at 13:26, Fluxmaven said:

I don't know the activation force of pinks off the top of my head but it's less than Jades and Navies. I like Navies the best of those three. 

 

I buy keyboard stuff from all over. Amazon with prime is typically the fastest. The keyboard sites are usually pretty quick. Novelkeys, 1up, thekey.company, cannonkeys, kono, etc. Drop (used to be massdrop) in stock stuff is quick but most stuff on there are group buys that wont ship for a long time. Sites in China can be surprisingly fast or take months. KBDfans is nice to navigate. Aliexpress is kind of a clusterfuck but you can get good deals if you don't mind waiting.

I used to browse /r/mechmarket all the time, but its hard to find good deals there. Most posts are people flipping limited group buy stuff for a ton of money.  

Box Navies eh? Don't you really have to pound on those? I was actually the most interested in those before I did my custom builds, but went with the Jades because of the lower actuation force and positive reviews, as well as a few videos of how they sound etc.

What site do you tend to use for switches that would have Box Pinks with fast shipping? Also, can you recommend some keycap brands or post a link to the caps on your Mini Cat? Or even some PBT white caps. I'm thinking of replicating it for my wife, just with Box Pink switches. We share keyboards so I would be able to use it as well lol. How many switches would I need for it?

Not sure I can get the wife to give me say $150 to put it together for her for Xmas when we get back from LA though...

@Fluxmavenn

15 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

The Mini Cat before switches or keycaps was $79.49 after tax from Amazon.

 

I'm not a fan of the speed silvers. They are a light weigh linear with a short activation distance. I think I got a bunch of them through a price mistake. They have been sitting on my shelf for a while and I'm glad to be rid of them.

 

AFAIK Kailh Rose are linear switches. Kailh BOX Pink are clicky switches. I have some of those. I actually used one for the ESC key on the Mini Cat. My sister lives in Florida so I'll be enjoying the warm weather there when I give her the board. 

Yeah I was thinking of Kailh Box pink. Do you know the actuation force (usually in grams) of them? Have you used Box Jades, Navy or White and how do the Box Pink compare?

I am not surprised at the Speed Silvers.. the only linear switches I've used are MX Reds but those have a longer throw distance. I have a Corsair K70 Lux with Cherry MX Reds and a Ducky One 2 with MX Reds, both of which I got when I was new to the hobby. Getting a very well worn OCN Ducky with MX Blues is what convinced me I like clicky switches.

I'd love to build my wife a mini cat and a seperate numpad but doing both with the cost of switches and keycaps would probably be too expensive and she's fine with what she has. (GMMK v2 fullsize, Box Whites, pbt pudding keycaps)

Also, where do you buy your switches and keycaps? I got my Jades through Amazon and they took over a month to come from China...if you know of somewhere to get Box switches faster, and keycaps, maybe I could do a Mini Cat for my wife for Xmas.

20 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

Portico75 showed up today. The board itself is awesome for the money. Without extras it was actually cheaper than the Mini Cat board. I picked it up with a bag of SP Star Magic Girl tactile switches, Equals V3 tangerine stabilizers, and a purple coiled cable for just over $100 shipped. Granted that was during their 12 days of Christmas sale.

 

It's marketed towards beginners as being something ready to just drop switches into and go. Mine did have a couple screws that were loose in the bag and others that were about to fall out. I just tightened everything up and moved on. 

 

I started popping in the Magical girl switches but decided to try out a linear switch for the first time in a long while. I really like heavy tactile and/or clicky switches and have been pretty anti-linear for years. There are lots of options that weren't around years ago so I picked up some Glorious Lynx to try out and filled out the rest of the board with those. 

Thankfully it's a hot swappable board so I can take them off easily if I hate them 

 

It's easy to program with VIA and I adjusted the keymap a bit to my taste. Not sure which keyset I'll run on it yet. I do have an Aliexpress DSA Astrolokeys knockoff set on the way or I might dig out my EnjoyPBT Sushi keyset. 

It turned out great! And that cheap too?

How much is the Mini Cat 64? Also what do you think of the Kailh Speed Silver switches in it? Do they have a very short throw or something?

Both your boards turned out awesome. Making me want to build a similar board with Kailh Rose switches (clicky). However trying to be frugal lately except for my wanting an RTX 4090, lol. Spent a lot on Xmas gifts for people and I'm also going to visit my fiancee's family in LA for Christmas, those plane companies really nickel and dime you. But I'll take 70F weather for a few days and its supposed to be 5F out here one of the days I'm going to be gone. Lol.

21 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

Someday I'd like to create a full inventory of all my PC and watercooling stuff. As well as some more in depth flow charts just to be able to easily visualize what all I have going on. 

 

The 2080 has been doing alright. I preordered a new monitor and it won't be able to run the new refresh rate. Still 1440p but 280hz instead of the 165hz it's pushing now. I already have a waterblock for a reference 6900xt so that's why I'm going for that.

When I first setup my sim rig, I was using a 5600x and crossfire 7970 GHz cards. Since Assetto Corsa supports Crossfire, it actually ran great. Forza was unplayable though. The 2080 will be a big step up for the sim rig. Also the 11900K and B-die at 4200cl16 should help too lol. 

 

Some people might dog on your moms setup for being FX, but I picked up a 9590 and Crosshair V Formula Z for the last HWBOT team cup and I was impressed with how well the system ran. It's actually the first FX setup I've owned but it's one of my favorite combos now. 

 

Yeah the FX-8350 in her rig is lapped and I used to run it at 5GHz 1.55v. It was unstable and would phail intelburntest but was 100% game stable.

I switched when I got 2x 290 Tri-X and got a 4770k instead.. Valley at 1080p got 90fps with the 8350 and 135 fps with the 4770k at 4.5GHz. 500MHz lower and 45 more fps..

However yes, even now and at stock (I don't think moms RAM kit is even OCed correctly its just at the boards default) the system is snappy. It boots fast and opens programs fast off a SATA 850 Evo. Its fine for her simple games and occasionally web browsing/paying bills online. I'm really happy the R5 230 didn't take the board with it when it failed (that gpu was literally burned all over). 

The FX chips clock really high and can even tolerate out of spec voltages on something like custom watercooling, ocs of 5.2GHz were not unheard of on OCN.

19 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

 

The 2080 will be pushing 2560x1440 while it's in my room, then 3840x1080 when it moves to my racing sim. I do have the Forza games, but I mostly play Assetto Corsa on the sim which runs fine on lesser hardware. 

 

Got several waterblocks in the mail today. The new 2080 block, a Heatkiller IV CPU block, and a vintage XSPC Delta CPU block that I found BNIB on ebay. Also not pictured a Thermochill TA120.4 radiator. 

 

I also whipped up a bit of an outline for the current state of my builds and my intended plans for them 

Nice kit you got there, a 2080 is pretty good at 1440p. Nice chart too, you really put a lot of thought into all of it.

I too built a PC for my mom. It has an FX-8350, Crosshair V Formula and G.skill TridentX 2400MHz ddr3. GPU is just a $50 GT710 or whatever that we got at Best Buy when her AMD R5 230 fried. She's got a pretty nice Rosewill K85 RGB keyboard with Kailh Blue (clone MX Blue) switches and she loves it for the games she plays. Its in a Silverstone pizza box style case with a Asus V239H IPS 1080p Monitor. She uses it mostly for gaming... Bejeweled 3, Tetris in a 68k Mac emulator, and Kyodai Mahjongg.

22 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

Well you will get to see the system watercooled with the side panel on. However, I doubt the 6900xt will ever live in this case.

 

I'm going to move the 2080 over and watercool the system with that. When I get a 6900xt, I'll also get another motherboard and move it all back into the D-Frame Mini. Even though that's an ITX case it supports full ATX power supplies. 

 

Since it's been a couple years since the 2080 has been apart, I picked up a new Heatkiller block to replace the Barrow block that's on it now. Should be here tomorrow. 

 

 

What display and resolution are you going to be running on this build?

A 2080 is around the same performance as one of my 1080tis and I'm finding mine long in the tooth, I really like the Forza Horizon series and have 4 and 5, and since they are DX12 they only use one card. My res is 3440x1440 144hz and in both games my 1080ti only hits around 80 fps max on Ultra in the ingame benchmark. Most of the time its closer to 65/70 in gameplay.

So I'm after a 4090 but I wonder if a 2080 is enough for your res and what you play.

That kb looks great. Kinda jealous. I'd do something like that for my wife and she'd love it but she's an accountant and works 100% remote so she has to have a numpad.

Interesting and I love the case. Its a shame you can't get the side panel on currently. Will be following this since you said you are going to do full watercooling once you get a 6900xt.

Good work

28 minutes ago, Avacado said:

If you ever DO decide to go custom, ask around first. I have enough parts to do quite a few full loops in the dungeon. 

Awesome. Yeah I'll keep that in mind. You can actually fit two 360mm radiators in my case including fans but I have no clue where I'd put the pump and res.

This is my case, by a manufacturer that is small and has a lot more presence in Europe. (Pronounced ah-nee-days)

Website is a bit wonky but if you scroll down to the pictures it should give you a little bit of an idea on how cramped it is. If I had one card I could probably put the pump on the right on top of the "basement" but I think with a 360mm rad in the front it kind of limits where you can put the res.

Love the case btw, 8mm thick tempered glass, rgb fan controller (though unfortunately the fans use a proprietary connector and HAVE to be plugged into the fan controller to work), sparkly powder coated paint, though I'm not sure if the chassis is steel or aluminum. Take a look around their website, they make some interesting cases. They also make Raspberry Pi cases and I should probably build a RaspPi 4 assuming it has a better GPU and decode functionality since a lot of anime is encoded in x265 or hi10p that my Pi 3b+ can't play in Kodi.

28 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Thank you so much.

 

It was my first attempt at hard tubing and definitely shows in some areas. I think I'd redo it again in the future with fewer 90-bends especially in that pump to CPU block run. In fact I might plumb it completely the other way with the return going up through the top of the res. I'm not sure. I kinda like how @Avacado plumbed his recent O11-D XL.

 

I totally get it. This is indeed very heavy when moving and I find it a much bigger pain to drain fully vs my soft tubing builds of the past. If you ever did get into wanting to do even a simple CPU loop, happy to help provide tips, and I would definitely stick with a soft tubing EPDM/norprene (think Tygon A-60-G industrial) tubing for ease of use and maintenance.

Believe it or not, my current CPU cooler is pretty much competitive with a custom CPU loop cooling wise. I've seen charts years ago that I wouldn't be able to dig up now...

It's the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360mm and its not made by Asetek. It has a strong pump and the radiator, while still being aluminum, is 38mm thick compared to like 23mm on something like a Corsair H100. A nice feature of the cooler is it has a small inaudible fan on the block blowing directly down on the socket/VRMs/MOSFETs and RAM. AIO coolers have leveled up quite a bit in the last 3 years or so.

I appreciate the offer and will keep it in mind though. I'm just unsure where I'd put something like the res with a three fan long GPU as my case is a midtower, which I pretty much insisted on. We really packed a lot in to the case, two 3 fan gpus and 3 hdds.

Your bends look fine to me. That's yet another turn off for me is needing to buy an acetane torch or w/e and practice melting plastic and bending it without making holes in it. If suddenly my hip, neck, and back pain vanished and I were stronger I'd consider it but I'm pretty satisfied with my current cooling (though I did have a interest in doing full watercooling on my current setup since EK makes a full cover block for the 1080ti FTW3 but they are due to be retired now).

7 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Fairly recent shots, though my SW3's are reinstalled at the top and those RGB fans re-purposed to another rig.

 

 

That looks fantastic. Mad respect for the hard tubing watercooling and loop.

With my pain issues there's just no way for me to be able to do a build like this, mostly because of the maintenance and I probably couldn't carry it with the loop full. Never done custom watercooling. I have some idea how and the theory and could probably do it with soft tubing to start, but pc parts are expensive enough nowadays let alone custom loop components. I'll just be happy if I can get my hands on a RTX 4090. And of course the wife and savings factor into this and why I can't as well She's the one who works, I spend her money so yeah..

Any pictures of your finished build in this thread? What page?

2 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Yep, you are correct on the PBO. I think that's why my R23 multi-core scores have always been highest with all-core OC's. I am definitely going to try the per CCX OC and see if I can squeeze more out of it.

 

Sadly ended up working last night so didn't get a chance to. Frankly busy all week, so this might be punted down to next week when I am off from work. Will have to see.

Yes, if you tune your chip for all-core OCs versus boosting single cores higher, you'll get a better score.

In my case, with PBO it will only all core boost to 4750 and my CB23 was only around 21k. However, playing games it boosts cores to 5150 quite often (and I've heard without using curve optimizer, PBO2 has a strong bias towards single thread max boost) so I'm happy.

I did watch that 30 min video finally on Curve Optimizer and how to use it and test it and it seems extremely tedious, I also personally don't care to run either OCCT, Prime95 or Linpack to test my OCs as they generate heat and put a demand on the processor that I will never see in real world use (my rig is primarily for gaming and I use Linux the rest of the time as my main os/file server/media server... I also don't use Plex so I never need to encode any streams anymore.)

Perhaps I will eventually get around to trying and tuning CO and use Handbrake as the test and see if I can get my all core oc boosting higher but overall I am extremely satisfied with my purchase, other than the low infinity fabric clock and slightly slower memory because of it.

17 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

Nice job! Looking forward to trying mine out like this.

For some weird reason it gives better Cinebench scores at lower clocks when OCing this way. I'm unsure why other than I know that with PBO, what you see in HWINFO isn't entirely accurate. It'll show all cores at 4850MHz for example but AMD has said themselves that starting with Ryzen 3000, monitoring tools just don't refresh or work accurately to what the clocks actually are, it is just showing an average whereas the processor is actually changing frequencies hundreds of times in a second. Doing a per-CCX oc locks the chip at those clocks all the time no matter what so they aren't running lower (which we can't see) to stay within thermal margins. That's my theory anyway.

I started at 1.33v and 4700/4400 if that helps. Temps in Cinebench were around 70-72c with a 360mm aio. I'd suggest starting there, possibly with less voltage. Also, do note that I passed Cinebench fine but y-cruncher pi-1b caused an instant black screen and system reboot so I was definitely either not stable or exceeded temperatures to the point the chip shut off to prevent damage. Also a tip for Cinebench: run it with Realtime process priority to get a few hundred more points. While its running your system will appear to lock up but just wait and you'll get a better score.

Hope this helps