I've spent last week continuing to tinker and have blasted the dust off all the old components excepting the GPUs, which I'll be taking apart at some point. Here's the mobo all cleaned up: That CPU seems a lot happier now. I also found that Young Pete had not quite been as stupid as previously thought and the RAM had actually been a 4x4GB single set. However, in today's Brave New World, that won't do, so deciding to commit to 128GB, I thought "sod it, let's go RGB" and purchased this: Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO DDR4 128 GB 4x32GB 3200MHz CL16 Unfortunately, a few hours later, I was looking through my mobo's manual for the umpteenth time, and only then noticed the following statement: "You may install 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB, 8 GB and 16 GB unbuffered and non-ECC DDR4 DIMMS into the DIMM sockets. LOL." Balls. Annoyingly, I had missed the cancellation window, so will be travelling to the Post Office to return them at some point, hopefully not having to contend with Horizon. In the meantime, I ordered this: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 128GB 8x16GB 2666MHz CL16 At least my OCD of filling ALL ZE MEMORY SLOTS will be satisfied, and I'm hoping that by upping the voltage from the default 1.2 to 1.4V, I'll be able to run it at 3000MHz. I want to point out that I have absolutely no need for this amount of RAM; it is all for the epeen. I was also a little surprised to find that I had not, in fact, bought an M.2 SSD drive all those years ago, probably owing to the weird way the mobo has its single M.2. slot orientated such that the drive sticks out perpendicularly and therefore wouldn't have fit. I started looking into 2230 form drives, then found that if I did install an M.2 drive, the 3rd 16xPCIe lane would go from 16x to 8x, robbing the second GPU of vital bandwidth that I absolutely would not notice. So Instead, I'll be RAID 0ing two 850 EVO SSDs for the boot drive (epeen) and purchasing a nice, new 870 EVO for £35 off evilBay to fulfil my esoteric and outdated need to have a scratch drive. I also found out that for some utterly inconceivable reason, Young Pete had connected the USB3 header to ports 3 and 4, therefore robbing the GPUs of even more barely noticeable bandwidth. Anyway, I got to actually putting things in the case: GTX Titan X (Pascal) for scale. I also decided to upgrade the CPU cooler's fan: Noctua NF-A15 HS-PWM chromax.black.swap Unfortunately, DeepCool made the 140mm fan in the cooler a proprietary affair, so I've had to get a little busy with the Notitia replacement . Not finished yet, but at least the requirement of injuring myself each build has been met: Next week, it's time to start putting in cabling and to bite the bullet and take a GPU apart to understand cleaning it and applying new thermal pads.
Got everything in, excepting the GPUs and CPU cooler (for which I'm still modifying the Noctua fan): I came in with the best of intentions for cable management, but after building my new rig that had next to no cables whatsoever, I gave up and squidged them in as best I could. Be glad we live in an age of the M.2 slot, folks. I've also attached a spare SATA cable in case I want to temporarily attach a SATA drive for some reason (plus it means all the SATA slots are filled on the mobo). At least on the windowed side, everything looks nice. Now, time to do that task I've been dreading: taking apart the GPUs. Obviously I'm starting with one and seeing how that goes. If I fudge it up, I'll concede and buy a new GPU, using the other older GPU as the world's most extravagant dedicated PPU. Here's the underside (well, technically the top, I suppose): Let's see what happens if I take those four big screws out... Interesting, springs on the screws rather than inside. Nothing comes apart. Let's take the backplate off: The little screws were supringly torqued quite highly and I had to really press down on the little toolmaker screwdriver I have to ensure I didn't strip the screw heads. Somewhat disappointed by the large lack of thermal pads, excepting that little one. I didn't notice it until I accidentally nudged it, and in the process of removing it, ended up smearing it on the soldered pins next to it. Frustrating from an aesthetics viewpoint, but it's not going to be visible once everything's back together! Thermal pad was about 0.5mm thick (EDIT: measured it and yes it was, but I plan to utterly fill the thing with thermal paddery anyway. Flipped the card over and removed more screws: Nothing came loose, so looks like the next stage is to buy a mini spanner set (delivered today) and see about loosening off those hex heads - 4mm in width they are. But seeing this build is at my folks' house and I'm back at my own for the weekend, looks like that'll be an adventure for next week. Stay tuned...
Found a couple of handy Youtube videos (Gamers Nexus Cheesecake) for aiding me in my GPU disassembly antics:
My small spanner kit turned up, so let's pop that rear plate off: Check out that sexy DVI-D port, younglings That's what real men used back in the day. I finally did the thing I'd been dreading: There we have it, folks. My first ever GPU disassembly. No turning back now... Thermal paste is dried right out. And there's the complete disassembly. Not going to lie, always doubting if I should've bothered. But it'll be worth it. I hope. Since then I've air blasted the components, but a decade of dust means some is REALLY stuck on. Ordered a litre of isopropyl alcohol to aid getting rid of that. I've ordered lots of thermal pad material of varying thicknesses. Next week, I hope to at least get the replacement thermal pads back in place. Stay tuned...
