Note before I begin. Nothing particularly exciting to be had here boys, sorry. It is just a no hassle regular old build but with some super nice gear that I got for bugger all. I will explain pricing as I go. So last year when I upgraded my 2080Ti kingpin to a 6800XT I decided to replace my aging Xbox 1x with a PC. I cobbled it together using all of my leftover crap, and a NZXT case. First problem was the Threadripper was extremely bad for gaming. It was a gen 1 1920x, and yeah, crap clock and rubbish for modern games. I thought about upgrading the CPU, but left it. It would mean a new board AND CPU. Any way, sold the TR, stripped it down again. Then a good while back I decided to build it up again. I first bought this board. For £199. It had an RRP of over £550. I then bought my current budget weapon of choice, an 11400F for £120. I bought 32gb DDR4 3600 for £90. This was a good while ago now. And then a PSU for £150. I got this from OCUK B grade section, but it was fully sealed and never used. And then 9 of these Lian Li fans at half price. IIRC that was about £20 per pack of 3. It then became a bit of an exercise to basically build a ridiculously expensive PC at a budget sort of level price. A Lian Li Odyssey X came up for £220. So I got that also. Sprinkle in some half price Phanteks neons, a cheap ass AIO and a 6950XT for £620 on Amazon.. And you pretty much have how it is right now. I have been gaming on it a lot, and it has been superb. One issue though is that sometimes I drop the render res to 1440p, and notice it could do with a little more CPU grunt. So, I bought an 11700KF for £140 to replace the 11400F. Two more cores and a lot more MHZ. I then found this on Amazon for £55. So that is going in also. I will update as I get more done.
Very good. They are by no means offensive. TBH? it doesn't matter any way, given I am surrounded by many watts of speaker noise. Or, 99% of the time I am wearing a headset gaming with my buddy in the USA, so I can't hear sod all. OK. This was not supposed to happen until today but you know how new and shiny go..... I got home around 1pm yesterday and set to work. It took many hours to reach this stage. At which point I realised the pump was upside down. Oops. Removed it and put it up the correct way, then spent many more hours sodding around. Eventually I got there. And I am very happy. Sorta kinda. The good. It looks ace (IMO). The horror stories about it guzzling power whilst just sitting there are untrue. Well, unless of course they have optimised it since. It uses no more power than a regular AIO at idle, and even with the 11700KF now in there it is the same as it was before. So that's good. It works. Tremendously well. I saw idles of 17c last night (trust me, it was extremely hot in here) and when overclocking I got it to 5ghz very easily on all cores. Like, very easily. Max temp was 72c. Which is pretty amazing, given these are known to hit 95 very fast. The cooler can obviously dissipate a lot of heat. The CPU was drawing well over 200w and it still remained at a very sensible temp level. £55. Superb value. The bad. Yup, the CPU likes power. A lot of power. Can't blame the cooler for that, though. The cooler also likes power when the CPU does. I don't mind this, though. It uses around 140w by the look of it capped out. Power prices are dropping on Oct 1, so I am not worried about it in any way. The pump noise is absolutely horrendous. It wires straight into a SATA power connector and I know it is running 12v. I can tell because you can literally hear it whipping the coolant into a froth in there. This is a pain, due to the SATA connector. The Lian Li Strimer is a bit crap. I mean, it works, but yeah it's a bit crap. Glad it was only £19, and it does add some light so whatev. The fix. That will allow me to try it at 12v, 7v and even 5v. I just hope the cryo suite does not sniff for pump speed. I don't think it does, because obviously you can put it on any header (the sensor wire) on the board. I think the quick test will be remove the tacho PWM wire and see if it complains.
Well I had somewhat of a brain fart there and realised I only had half of it. I suppose I could have depinned the SATA cable on the PSU but there were two things worrying me. Firstly they are all black, and one mistake means bang. Secondly the PSU is a ROG Thor, so yeah did not want to hack it around any. Will sort it week after next when I get back.
