Proper hard core M1 mod then! My 3rd hand M1 came with a lot of original accessories missing, like the ATX mount and the rubber mounted screws for drives. I'd got as far as considering one of those 'not' mATX boards that's 3 slots long and 190mm wide or so. I think the Asrock H310 was good as it had a 1x slot above the 16x one that's in position 2. Got it, Asrock H31M-HDV/M2 Well, if it had 4 ram slots and 2 M.2 it may be OK, but it's a step backwards from what I have other than if I needed a 1x PCIe slot
I have two "main" computers. The first is in my home office and is one of the 300 Valve Steam Machines they made a few years ago. I've upgraded it about as far as it can be pushed without modding the GPU bracket or case, so it has a GTX Titan Black and an i7-4790. The whole setup hangs from a mount under my desk and it's pretty tight, so I'd like to get an angle grinder and chop the mount up a little bit for better air intake. My second "main" PC is a more modern i5-9600k with a 2080 ti. It's also in a small case, the Silverstone FTZ01, which sits on a rack-mount shelf in my modified mid-century credenza in my Living Room. This is my VR rig. Air circulation has been an issue there, so I'm going to upgrade the cabinet with some circulating fans (which I received last week), and the CPU will get a cooler upgrade to the Corsair Hydro H5 cooler, which I received this week. Other than that, the only upgrade I'd make would be to replace my 2Tb spinning drive with a 2Tb SSD for faster game loading in Steam. I'll probably make that upgrade just before Half-life:Alyx comes out. If money were no object, I'd probably get a G-sync TV for my living room and maybe retire the Steam Machine, even though I love it, for a modern streaming rig.
Yep, only recently (re) built my machine with the watercooled 7980XE / 2070 Super all housed with a Lian Li O11 Air. Already have the itch for either a ITX 3950X / Impact VIII build or a utterly pointless 3970X Threadripper build. I say pointless as my usage right now doesn't exactly stress a 4.3Ghz all core 7980XE..
Just upgraded to a mini itx Ryzen 3600 build from a Ryzen 1600 ATX build. I'm only running a Radeon 390 right so have an itch for a 2060 or 5600XT but mainly play CSGO at 1080p so don't 'need' anything more. But the itch to tinker more calls. Sometimes I think I enjoy tinkering with my system more than I do using it.
Mod is coming along nicely and best case scenario is finished tonight but It's not as balls to the walls as I'd like for a home system. Great for LAN but I feel like it's going to be too loud for home.
Just attempting to scratch the itch in a less expensive way: It should work - using the 2nd m.2 slot and running the ribbon under the bottom edge of the mobo. It should just be a matter of plugging a 10gbe nic into it and mounting the lot underneath the graphics card. It's a wee bit of a hail mary, but £37 shipped is a sight better than £250-£300 for that Asus flex-atx mobo. Props to @edzieba for planting the seed. Speaking of that Flex-ATX mobo, I pulled my rig apart today and dug out the ATX PSU adapter just to size things up. One thing led to another and I ended up in the garage with the Dremel to make the bracket fit as far forward in the M1 as possible*. It just needs a little plate making to secure the PSU, which will have it's intake fan facing inwards. Bear with me though because I have a 120x15 Noctua fan as an intake on the side bracket. My 1080ti is an FE, which exhausts at the rear and the NH-U9S on my 9700k exhausts upwards through the top panel. I haven't made the little mount plate yet, because all I had to hand was the spare SSD tandem mount plates for the M1 and I decided to wait and make a proper mount plate for the PSU rather than butcher on of the SSD mounts, when I find that little bit of alu sheet I put in a safe place... The downside is that I'll lose one of my m.2 SSDs to accommodate the m.2 -> PCIE adapter. Only just bought the bloody thing too. *For the sake of clarity - I Dremelled the PSU bracket, not my M1.
Modding skills to the fore then David! Does this mean you're making room for a "maximum overkill, stuff as much in" build? I'm still watching the Dancase C4 on SFFN, which has surfaced again after a quiet few months. Same guy that made the 7 odd litre A4 case with the GPU and mobo parallel sandwich design. It's just under 11 litres and can fit a GPU the usual way a la M1 or a vertical mount on riser ti make room for a 240 AIO at the bottom. Looks nice, M1 money and probably a year away. It's been going for a couple of years so far What size M.2 are you losing? I was tempted by Shirty's 1TB 970 M.2 over the weekend, but luckily someone has nabbed it. They're £165 on Scan, so no huge loss. I had a £100 budget in mind, but the thread I started led me to being recommended the Corsair MP510 for its extended endurance. When I looked on Amazon at the time, it was £137, the darn thing is now £159 . I'd prefer the 970 Evo given the choice and having the funds.... Currently I'm conflicted, as a 1TB M.2 is the sensible thing to save for, but am tempted by a used Ryze Tello to fly indoors as the Mavic Pro is sat at home sulking with all the gales.I'm desperate to film the Christchurch water meadows, which are 100% lake at the moment, haven't seen them quite like that for a bit. Just an hour when it's not windy.....pleeeeeeeease
I like the layout of the C4 but I've kicked the Liquid Cooling/AIO habit (for now), and it doesn't offer enough over the M1 to tempt me away. The m.2 is that 1TB WD Blue SATA drive I bought for the secondary slot a little while back. It's not the end of the world - I have a spare 1tb 2.5" 850 EVO that I can press back into service. I'm feeling your pain with the pissy weather - I've had the last three days off, so we get sideways rain and 50mph winds! Colour me totally pigged off. What screws are you missing for the M1?
WD Blue? How did that work out. Someone warned me off them, but gave no reason. WD prejudice or experience? I don't know. I'm not interested in liquid cooling either, as I take the M1 to LAN night most weeks. The U9S with 2 fans blowing out through the rear works fine on my i5 8400. The only interest in the C4 really is to have something a bit different, and to support Dan. It's money spent on 'show not go' so not that advisable. For that money, I could change my 970 for a 1070, which would actually achieve something. What a weekend! So sorry for the folk in Yorkshire and SW Wales. My son said it was hairy in Cardiff on Saturday night, he was working late. I'm waiting to see what damage has been done at work, as I was not able to get on site today. We lost a few slates last weekend, but no respite to do a drone survey to see where they came from. Maybe launch it tethered like a healim balloon and have a quick gander.
I bailed. Ain't gonna lie, last weekend was a nightmare. Such is the price for living in a timber building 100ft from the sea. The noise was unbearable, even with ear plugs in. I didn't sleep at all. When I awoke on the Monday morning I noticed my Radiohead signed CD was at 45' on the wall. Came over mum's on Friday. Switching meds and the withdrawal from the last ones began so I wasn't going to be a martyr. Have slept mostly. Itches. For some reason I really want to turn my Fallout Anthology Nuke into a PC. For no other reason than some other git has done it and now I feel I am obliged. I must really try and forget that, as that will be a £600 scratch.
Hang in there V-T, bumpy rides all round. Looked up the nuke you mentioned, a small PC build ain't gonna please you . All the more reason to go for the challenge. I will go Ryzen next time, so long as you can get a stable dual M.2 ITX board by then. My i5 8400 even though it's not a K chip will need a fairly hefty spec Ryzen CPU to better it. That's especially as I bought it and the board for not much over £200.
I feel fantastic, just very tired with a very upset stomach. The withdrawal seems purely physical. I'd only want it for playing Fallout on, so 3 4 NV. Yeah, I know totally pointless... I need my holiday to hurry up, as boredom is expensive lol.
This has been great - it's an m.2 SATA drive so not the same blazing speeds as nvme (not that I can tell the difference), but I have no complaints - I had a couple of the 500GB WD Blue NVME drives in my DS918+ for ssd caching, which were fugging awful. The cache kept crashing every couple of weeks - WD support admitted it was a specific incompatibility/false error state issue with Synology NAS systems. I have one in my laptop and it's just fine as an OS drive. The U9S is a great cooler - I really can't find fault with it.
That's good to know. I am booting from a 500GB NVME with a 500GB 2.5" SSD for Steam and games. A 1TB would save some wires as the top M.2 slot is empty.
Cosigned. I have a U9S with two fans, both with LNAs, in my M1 and it's more than adequate to cool my 6700K whilst being pretty much silent. Great bit of kit.
I priced up a CPU, Mobo, Ram, PSU, Case and custom CPU waterloop the other day and it came to just under £3K, but as much as I would like to do an upgrade if I had the money I wouldn't really see any benefit for gaming, maybe 5% over what I have now so it's not worth it even if I decided to not do the case and custom loop.
I've still never done a custom loop in my 20+ years of building and I now doubt that I ever will. My first foray into watercooling was with a Zalman Reserator. I can't remember which model it was but it was about a metre tall, anodised blue cylindrical radiator with fins on the outside. After that, I've only ever dabbled with AIOs. My issue with it is that it's become so 'designer', the WC components now often cost more than a top end gaming CPU and all to save a bit of heat and noise, the cost of tube fittings is a prime example. For me personally (and this isn't a criticism of those who enjoy watercooling), I'd rather spend the extra money elsewhere either in or on the PC or in the office/studio setup in general. When they finally release an open or semi-open air case that ticks all my boxes, I'll be ditching the AIO and going back to high end air cooling. I can live with 25-50MHz less GPU core clock and a few degrees on both chunks of silicon in a trade off for more reliability and less maintenance. That's my next itch.
You don't have to do your balls on fittings dude. Or pumps. I wouldn't use cheap alu rads but I got my Bitspower 11/8 fittings for 99p each on clearance for white and £1.99 for red. I also know that going up to 19mm made no difference to cooling. The SC 600 pumps I used were fantastic and cost around £9 each. They even had ceramic shafts and bearings and a hefty motor. One ran as a server for over 18 months without any problems. You can get Chinese barb fittings for like £1 for two on eBay and so on and so forth. Aesthetics are easy with good planning and some nice hose. But yeah you don't need to do your knackers on gear.
A recent developing itch is to overhaul my home network, add a proper firewall, VPN server, DNS. I've been considering, setting up an single machine with VMs to host each function, or go with discrete hardware. Does any one have any experience and care to share their experience?
I haven't built a brand new decent spec PC...ever, always 2nd hand and older generation parts, just still not sure I need to spend the money on one. I'm budgeting to build a decent garage this year so would love to build a dedicated area for network kit and servers and to play with tech. No rush though
