Mystichrome 2023 Build Log

[Snakecharmed]

Cable management isn't really going to be possible beyond what I can move out of the way to help airflow as best as I can. There's nowhere to stuff all the extra cable slack and it'd be worse if I tied them together into a thicker bundle. Considering this case has no side window, leaving it a little messy is fine, but it does bother me slightly. I used to not care about these things, but I do now.

 

I'm not even sure what I'm photographing, but everything that's supposed to be inside the case is in there now.

 

 

Despite how it looks in this picture, the path from the front intake to the CPU fan is unobstructed aside from the USB 3.0 header cable which disrupts the airflow a little.

 

 

The last thing I needed was a pair of USB 2.0 header extension cables so I could put the PCI slot cover ports above the GPU. That allowed me to put all those SilverStone Aeroslots Gen 2 vented PCI slot covers below the 3080 Ti to reduce dead air zones at the back of the case.

 

Here's a bonus pic of the packaging of the USB 2.0 header extension cables. I can put aside a lot of things when it comes to generic Chinese products that don't have a lot of design complexity or criticality, but I can't get over the futility of their alphabet soup brand names on Amazon.

 

 

I can confirm those are letters from the alphabet.

 

I know we all just accept this now and never really talk about it despite being covered as feature articles in New York Times and Slate, but it annoys me. This would be like an American product called Zzyzx. Actually, it's worse, because at least Zzyzx is the name of an actual town.

[pio]

You can get really close with cable management anyway in that case, same as my Chieftec Dragons from the looks of it....or very similar.  Lots and lots of zip ties.  Might be useful to get those little 1" sticky squares with a loop in em to attach zip tie mounting points to the mobo tray or something too.  At least that way you'd have a tie down point along the mobo tray you could use too.

Either way, build's coming along nicely!  Looking forward to finalized 110% done pics.

[Snakecharmed]

I'll see what I can do with tidying up the cable sprawl on the case floor. I did forget to tie together the two bundles of USB 2.0 header cables like I originally meant to do.

 

I played around with the PBO Curve Optimizer today and I'm currently at -20 all core with some slight reduction to idle CPU package power and cooler temperatures across the board. The office room temp has stayed in a range of 3-5°F above ambient floor temp all day. That's a significant improvement over the 8-10°F I was noticing before with the i7-2600K. I did get a break today though because it was overcast. However, I'm now optimistic that tinting the west-facing window should keep the afternoon temps in this room under control without any other significant measures.

 

I'm trying to optimize idle power right now because it turns out that sleep might not be a great option after all. I need to do more testing, but in two instances when the PC went to sleep, my monitor didn't want to recover after wake. Apparently, LG decided that having DisplayPort deep sleep recovery option settings on their monitors wasn't important. I've yet to find out the exact cause since everyone in the forum threads I researched was focused on how Windows 10 rearranges the app windows on wake. I should have tried pulling the DP cable and plugging it back in when I encountered the no-wake issue this morning, but I forgot.

 

Meanwhile, the 55" Samsung has behaved well in Windows 10 so far coming out of screen-off, non-sleep idle. Even that was constantly an issue in Windows 7. With enough trial and error, I found that selecting the Switch User option in the Windows 7 Ctrl-Alt-Del menu would wake it up. However, there was also a small but statistically significant chance that the screen resolution would revert to 1024x768 instead of keeping the 4K setting and screen layout position in Nvidia Control Panel.

 

Thus far in Windows 10, I've had no issues with the TV forgetting its resolution or screen layout position, although it did act up the one time I tried to enable VRR on it by dropping the video signal in Game Mode.

 

Monitors and TVs these days seem to be a nightmare to configure properly with a PC now.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Snakecharmed

[Snakecharmed]

I finally put on a case badge. My original plan was to have this done on a vinyl decal, but I realized partway through putting together the inquiry to the vinyl shop that it wasn't going to work. The actual Cobra emblem has too many fine details for a double layered, 1.2" square vinyl cutout with a metallic silver or chrome bottom layer. Even a black inverse print on metallic silver or chrome vinyl using a vector image of the emblem would have resulted in a loss of detail because vector renderings aren't as finely detailed as the actual metal emblem. All the vector images I've found also don't seem to get the belly of the cobra exactly right either.

 

I ended up printing this myself with my color laser printer on adhesive-backed heavy glossy paper stock that was meant for CD/DVD labels and then cut it to size with a straight edge and utility knife. It turned out pretty good, but lacks the wow factor that I originally wanted. It's not reflective like it would be if it were inverse printed on vinyl.

 

Well, at least it's not blank anymore, and it's something other than the P5-166 XL that was there before the paint job.

 

 

[Snakecharmed]

I looked up the old model number for this computer and found this ad in a Google Books scan of the Jan 22, 1996 edition of InfoWorld. I got this PC in May of that year.

 

 

I'm not really sure why they opted to depict the P5-150 instead of the 166 XL other than perhaps avoiding a copy layout issue trying to wrap text around the much taller XL model tower case. Anyway, beyond the specs, I'm a little surprised that 4+ months after the Windows 95 launch, they were still offering 3.11 by default instead of 95. That obviously changed by May when I got it.

 

One thing I will say about those old days is that once again, timing was everything. Dell and HP had yet to gain the level of market dominance where they introduced proprietary case-specific hardware in their prebuilt systems. In 1995, this system would have been Baby AT and I would have tossed it following my 1999 or 2001 custom builds because I was way too young to care about case modding back then. If it was a couple years later, Gateway went away from these tanky case designs and I certainly wouldn't have kept one of their later and flimsier cases for 20+ years.

Edited April 8, 2023 by Snakecharmed

[Snakecharmed]

Well, here's something annoying. Lately, my CWT-built 2018 Corsair RM850x has been making stupid sounds similar to a hard drive seeking, and it's distinct enough to be different and also more annoying than my actual hard drive. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does happen, at its worst, it can be pretty rhythmic and consistent like a hard drive defrag operation.

 

I can't pinpoint the conditions when it occurs though other than I think it starts at a mid-level power load, but of course it's a known problem after finding out there were some other users with similar complaints over the years who ended up RMAing their units. Of course, I also only find out about this via Google long after buying the product and thinking all the professional reviews covered all the bases on what a great PSU it was.

 

I'll be bringing my Seasonic-built Corsair AX850 Gold from my previous rig into this one over the weekend. I paid $81 on eBay for this unused RM850x which really isn't much more than the $60 or so I would have paid for a used Seasonic Focus 750 as a backup. I guess that makes this fine for a backup power supply that I won't really care about, although I was seriously considering getting a Seasonic Prime 850 Titanium last night because the RM850x's rhythmic "drive seek" noise was pissing me off. Seasonic is probably the closest thing I have to brand loyalty in the DIY PC space. In the meantime, I guess I'll just have to keep the music on more frequently.

 

I also spent $75 on two cans of new old stock spray paint last week as extra supply because the paint I used for my case has been discontinued for probably a few years now. After dusting off the work that I last did in 2015, the "bad" spray job I did on the top of the wraparound panel wasn't as bad as I remembered. The main repair I need to do is respray the top of the case with clearcoat to fill in the pit marks that originally resulted from spraying a can that sputtered from being dangerously low on paint, then sand it all down evenly and polish. The pitting was deep enough that I couldn't reliably buff the top even flatter because it was already glass smooth otherwise.

 

Not much in the way of other updates at the moment, but I did increase my PBO Curve Optimizer negative offset from -20 to -25. There may still be more headroom, but I haven't tested it out yet. I hit 28146 in Cinebench R23 multi-core, which is exceptional for a 7900X at a cTDP of 105W considering most reviews put an uncapped 7900X at 28500-29500 and there are users out there who have manually tweaked their 7900X far more extensively than I have at the 105W power limit and are topping out in the upper-27000s. In fact, my previous best from three weeks ago was 27744.

 

Edited May 3, 2023 by Snakecharmed

[Snakecharmed]

So that damn noise is coming from the motherboard. I realize now that it only started happening after I upgraded the BIOS to 1414 and made the manual adjustments to the CPU SOC voltage and memory voltage. My previous -25 PBO Curve Optimizer and 105W Eco Mode settings from before the BIOS upgrade didn't result in this noise.

 

Here's what I've found to not work so far:

 

• Disconnecting the hard drive
• Swapping PSUs
• Running Auto SOC and RAM voltages with EXPO enabled
• Downgrading to 1222 BIOS (won't boot—this would have revealed a lot if it worked)
• Upgrading to 1602 BIOS
• Disabling EXPO (and consequently lowering voltages on the SOC and RAM to 1.0-1.1 V)
• Reducing PBO Curve Optimizer offset back to -20

 

At idle after leaving the rig alone for an extended period of time, the noise is gone. It reintroduces itself while it's in use without a clear pattern. It can happen now when I'm just typing in this form and have very little else running, or it can be during a heavy workload, or neither, or both.

 

It sounds like a hard drive seek that lasts for a second. Sometimes it stops there, but if it's in a repetitive state, it will be quiet for at least 3 seconds before making that seeking noise again. There are times when the noise only happens once, and there are times when it happens dozens of times consecutively with that 3+ second break between each instance. The sound never occurs while in the BIOS, and I think that matters because that's when the voltages stay consistent and aren't fluctuating from actual use.

 

I've never experienced coil whine in the traditional or closer-to-literal sense, but this has the makings of what I've found to be another form of a coil whine sound that people have described as a hard drive seeking. I've read that it's been observed with PSUs and in one instance, the ASRock X670E PG Lightning. Since it's been over a decade since I last built a rig for myself and had to deal with the consequences of electronic interference in modern rigs, I'm sure are few of you are thinking this:

 

 

Apart from further messing around with the voltages, I do want to test the GPU as a potential culprit as well, because that's really the only remaining thing I can test, but that thing was heavily used before I bought it and I also briefly had it in my previous rig with no issues. I am very confident that it's not a problem with any of the fans in the case because it's just not a sound that a fan would make, and a fan wouldn't know it's in the BIOS or not because its speed can be adjusted whenever. If I've exhausted testing for all possible culprits and/or variables and the noise is still there, I'll plan to RMA this motherboard if the loudness and frequency of occurrence remain excessive.

 

As an aside, the new 1602 BIOS with AGESA 1.0.0.7 and 48/24 GB DIMM support does seem to bring quicker cold boots and reboots. Also, after a few hours of trial and error, I will say that the noise is less frequent and less loud with 1602, although still not to the point where I'm satisfied.

 

I did change one thing compared to before which was drastically lowering the SOC voltage by accident while using a negative offset rather than a fixed value. Now it's at 1.20 V instead of the 1.28 V it read at previously with my manual adjustments to properly get it under 1.30 V. The Asus BIOS cap was really putting it at 1.32 instead of 1.30. I don't know if any of that plays a factor in reducing the loudness or how much I hear it.

 

After all this, at least I failed to pull the trigger on a new hard drive and didn't pull the trigger on a new PSU because both of those would have been a waste of money. That's the story of anything I troubleshoot: it's never the easy nor the obvious, and at least the first 2-3 things I check are guaranteed to not be the smoking gun.

Edited May 7, 2023 by Snakecharmed

[Snakecharmed]

Some assorted updates:

 

Be Quiet Screaming Banshee 4 120mm PWM fan

One of the Be Quiet Slient Wings 4 120mm PWM fans on my heatsink started making some noise a few weeks ago. It took me a moment to track down where the noise was coming from, and then which CPU fan was making the noise. I swapped my CPU fans with my intake fans and then confirmed the specific fan that was howling like the bearing was shot.

 

Be Quiet's RMA advance replacement process was nice and straightforward, but I had to live with an intake fan that could vary from a low-level ticking noise to a screaming banshee for nearly two weeks. It wasn't quite as bad as I'm making it seem, and I could have disconnected it if it was always in banshee mode, but the potential was always there.

 

I hate creating e-waste per Be Quiet's RMA instructions, but I also hate this fan in particular for the aural torture it created for the last couple of weeks.

 

 

Room temperature

I underestimated the heat situation. The room consistently gets up to 86 °F after a session of gaming with the upstairs thermostat set to 76-78 °F, but the thermostat is in my bedroom on the opposite end of the floor, and I don't need the rest of the floor to be any cooler. The old rig didn't dump this much heat into the room, partly due to the airflow within the case being worse.

 

Since I had this in mind from the early days of buying my house, I'm revisiting the idea of zoning the upstairs HVAC for each bedroom and now I'm planning to go forward with it. While a mini split system would have a lot of benefits, I just don't like the tacked-on aesthetics of them, so I'm going the expensive route. (That said, a mini split would be my only consideration for a garage HVAC project, but that's what I call a pure luxury home upgrade.)

 

The only real consideration I need to make is how to order the different attic projects I have in mind between the zoned HVAC, whole-house Ethernet wiring, and enhanced attic insulation with extra blown insulation and radiant barrier installation on the rafters. I'm hiring contractors for all of these, by the way. I've long been done with trying to do major projects like these myself.

 

Motherboard VRM noise

For the first time since my previous post, the VRM chirping/grinding noise picked up at a significant volume last night. The only correlation I can make at the moment is that the noise really picks up if the motherboard probe listed in HWiNFO is close to 40 °C and trying to step down to a lower power state. Usually, it stays below 35 °C if I haven't been gaming.

 

This appears to be a known issue now with numerous Asus motherboards with the AMD 600 series of chipsets. During my reading, I came across this moderator's reply on the ROG Forum, and it is the most idiotic, tone-deaf suggestion I've ever seen on a manufacturer forum.

 

Re: ROG STRIX B650E-I: Coil whine? - Page 4 - Republic of Gamers Forum - 895136

ROG-FORUM.ASUS.COM

---

Hello  karakartal3, Once you get the motherboard installed in the case, you likely won't hear it with the case fans going and the side panel on...

 

Yeah, let me go ahead and buy a PSU that costs more than the motherboard and maybe that will, but most likely won't fix the issue. FOH.

 

Since motherboard swaps aren't as much of a pain in the ass with Windows 10 as it was with 7 or earlier, I may just accelerate my upgrade cycle if the issue persists and I can't find the golden BIOS settings that will silence it without compromising performance or low power idle capabilities. To be honest though, it's practically been a nonissue aside from last night ever since I used a manual offset to lower the vSOC voltage to 1.20V last month.

 

My next motherboard is almost certainly going to be an ASRock or an MSI or anything but Asus or Gigabyte. It's funny that Gigabyte seems to be the least competent of the major motherboard manufacturers, and yet they still employ rootkit-style BIOS-injected malware software suite installs a la Asus and Armoury Crate. What the hell Gigabyte, you don't even have the legions of blind loyalists like Asus does to get away with that kind of BS. Go blow up some more power supplies and get lost.

 

Case painting

I'll finally respray the top of the case later this month before buffing the top and the one side I didn't finish buffing years ago to the glossy smooth finish I want. I've been wanting to take pictures of the finished product forever and it frustrates me to keep putting progress of this project on hold, but other priorities are getting in the way of both this and the home improvement projects.

Edited June 14, 2023 by Snakecharmed