The computer and electronics super geek thread

[Nazareno2012]

Hmmm... Mobo doesn't have any remaining 3-pin headers either. The one it does have is being used by the rear exhaust fan. I want to avoid getting a splitter or other extra hardware, but maybe that's the only option left? Would a local Best Buy/electronics store have something for that, or will I have to shop for something online?

CD-R King sells fan controllers (availability will depend on the stock in their stores though), but they are only available with 3-pin connectors, so you will need an adapter.

Edited November 18, 2016 by Nazareno2012

[kajnrig]

Thanks for the advice, everyone. Alas, it seems all that worrying I did was for nought... as was the fan. What was supposed to be a simple $200 GPU upgrade (with the 140mm fan tagging along for some better cooling) turned into a ~$800 more or less full upgrade. What happened was this:

I built my previous PC 3-4 years ago running an AMD Athlon X4 750K on a MSI A88XM-E45 motherboard. It was my first time overclocking, and I ended up doing some damage to my computer in the process, even after I returned everything to stock settings. I wasn't sure whether the CPU, motherboard, or both was damaged, but everything was running fine now, so I didn't pay it any mind. Until... About a year ago, my computer started randomly shutting off; after I made the aforementioned $200 upgrade, things only got worse. My nephew playing Overwatch began experiencing major frame drops indicative of heavy CPU throttling, and sure enough, when I checked the CPU stats, I was seeing temperatures of <80 degrees C and, more alarmingly, a CPU clock speed of 3.7 GHz (it's supposed to be 3.4) and voltage of 1.5v (it's supposed to be 1.25-1.35).

I don't have the knowledge nor skill to test which of the two components (CPU/mobo) is faulty, so I decided to pretty much just start new. Although I wanted to wait for the new AMD Zen chips coming out next year, I needed a replacement now, and the current lineup of CPUs heavily advantages Intel. That meant a new Intel chip and matching motherboard, which demanded new DDR4 RAM (from DDR3). And while all that would still have worked inside my then-current case, I decided what the heck, let's change that out for something with a bit better airflow, too. The only things that would carry over from my damaged PC would be the CPU heatsink - a Hyper 212 Evo - the PCI-E wireless card, the storage media, and the 750W PSU.

So as it stands, my current build is:

- Intel Core i5 6600K (may or may not overclock, but definitely with better care this time around)

- MSI Z170-A Pro motherboard

- 16GB (4x4GB) DDR4 @ 2400 MHz

- XFX RX 480 8GB

- 120GB SSD

- 2x 1TB HDD (one for general storage, one for backup, both to be replaced eventually with SSDs)

- Corsair Carbide Air 540 high-airflow case

The Corsair case came with three 140mm fans preinstalled, which rendered my fan purchase earlier pretty much moot. I suppose I could mount it to the top of the chassis (there's space there for 2x 140mm or 3x 120mm fans, and/or radiators), but so far, there's plenty of airflow and cooling, and I'm once again out of 3-pin system fan headers to boot. I have a free 4-pin PWM header now, so I COULD connect it to that and attach it to the heatsink, but eh, I feel like the computer's fine as is.

Speaking of, the computer runs ridiculously quiet. I didn't even notice the lack of sound until my nephew brought it up shortly after booting for the first time. Has fan tech really advanced so far in 3-4 years? Or did I just go from using really bad fans to really good ones?

Once I get a new copy of Windows installed, I'll do some more thorough testing on CPU speeds and cooling and the like, but for now, I'm just happy everything is working.

[azrael]

Speaking of, the computer runs ridiculously quiet. I didn't even notice the lack of sound until my nephew brought it up shortly after booting for the first time. Has fan tech really advanced so far in 3-4 years? Or did I just go from using really bad fans to really good ones?

No. Not really. CPU efficiency has improved. The days of needing to blast the fans at full speed is not necessary. If you're not doing something as intensive as gaming or content creating, then you don't really need to make it sound like you're sitting next to a jet engine and can throttle back those fans. That's one of the advantages of PWM. PWM is computer-controlled fan control so people don't need a fancy manual fan controller.

[kajnrig]

There's that, definitely, which makes my 750-watt PSU purchase back in the day seem like a silly decision now. But also, those three case fans are 3-pin, non-PWM fans, and they're still almost silent.

I remember contemplating whether to switch to all-PWM fans running off a splitter. If they weren't tied only to the CPU, I think I'd have bitten. It could have potentially saved my aforementioned overclocking disaster to have a fan dedicated to keeping the motherboard's chipset heatsink cool.

[mikeszekely]

Well, I got my hands on an old NES, and I ordered a Core i3-6100T, a Silverstone NT07-115X slim profile CPU cooler, 4GB of Crucial Ballistix DDR4, an MSI B150I Gaming Pro AC mini-ITX motherboard, a picoPSU-150-XT and 150w AC Adapter, a spare power switch (just in case), and a cable that's female USB 3.0 headers on one head and a pair of female USB 3.0 ports on the other so I can either put USB ports in the old controller ports or on the side where the composite AV jacks are. I've got a 2.5" Kingston 120GB SSD lying on my desk, plus a 240GB Samsung EVO M.2 SSD in an enclosure, and Lakka on a flash drive ready to install.

While waiting for parts to come in I'm going to see if I can whip up a batch of Retr0bright to de-yellow the NES. I might even take that NES to Lowes or Home Depot, see if they can get a Pantone match for the top case, make a paint, and put it in a spray can so I can paint a non-Dualshock Sixaxis I'm giving to this project before I add some NES-style decals I got from DecalGirl.

[kajnrig]

So about a month ago, I bought a repair service for my old YLOD'd PS3 (original CECHA model with the PS2 EE) from an eBay seller named rebaling_genius. A bit ostentatious a name, but eh, the reviews were good. The guy, an Ibrahim Khaled, operates out of Cucamonga, CA, which is where I shipped my PS3 for repair. Leading up to me buying the service, his communication was great - prompt, polite, and informative. It's easy to guess what happened next.

I buy the service along with an IHS thermal compound re-application, totaling some $110 + $25 return shipping. I then ship it off, costing me an additional $40 (priority 2-day mail, I wanted to play my PS3 ASAP at the time). As soon as the item leaves, I don't hear from him again. I send him several emails between then and now, several more messages through eBay, and all is quiet on the western front.

EBay won't allow me to open a dispute until the end of the month, since that's when the estimated arrival date will end. I'm not exactly impatient for the date to arrive, because I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to get a refund, but I'm upset (for many reasons, but among them:) because I might not be able to get my PS3 back (preferred) or reimbursed for its value. If I don't get either of those options through eBay arbitration, I wonder what if any legal options are open to me.

Ugh. I never thought I'd have to deal with this kind of eBay seller nonsense, but I suppose there's a first for everything.

[technoblue]

Hm. In your initial communication, did he give you an idea of his schedule and when you should expect your PS3 back in working condition? The best case is that you might have caught him during his busy season, and he is simply taking more time to do right by you. Fixing hardware, especially at this level (repairing CPU sockets), is not like upgrading a video card in a PC or even scanning a computer for a virus infection. It takes time.

But I agree that the lack of extra communication is a concern, and I would continue to reach out to avoid a worst case situation. Be the squeaky wheel and try to get as many details about progress on the repair and/or where things stand right now. Remember to be polite, and even though you may be upset don't threaten the guy. Use eBay as a last resort if he doesn't get back to you at all.

I can speculate, especially once the hardware repairs are complete, that he would run some kind of diagnostic to test the PS3 and ensure that the Yellow blinking light is fixed somehow. Diagnostics can also take a while, if he is the type who wants to be exact. But these are things that I would want to have explicit details on if I was in your shoes. At the very least, it will give you more data if you do need to go to eBay for arbitration.

[kajnrig]

He never stated any time frame in his communication, but his eBay listing explicitly stated no more than 48 hours work time from when he receives the console. I agree that it MIGHT be his busy season, and I'm trying to remain optimistic/empathetic about his possible situation, but the sudden communication blackout is... alarming.

I sent him another message last night. Like I said, I'm fairly confident I'll be able to get a refund through eBay, so I've been cordial in all my messaging; no threats. (They wouldn't do much good anyhow, only give me a brief jolt of satisfaction and him a reason to not make good on his sale.)

Oh well. Two more days, and then this situation can begin to be resolved for good.

[mikeszekely]

Well, I did it.

First, I took an old NES and I removed everything inside except for the power and reset switches, the LED, and the associated circuit board and wiring.  I also left the plastic parts in the controller ports, but I removed all the wiring.  I also Dremeled all of the raised screw holes except five of the ones that hold the top case on (the middle rear had to go, it was in the way).  While I was Dremeling, I made my first mistake and marked off where I thought the IO plate would go without taking into account the standoffs.  Oops.

Speaking of standoffs, I felt the need to use them.  Now, viewed from the bottom the NES has perpendicular channels that, from the inside, look like a raised cross.  My first thought was to run the standoffs through it, but a mini-ITX motherboard only has four screw holes, and none of them lined up with the raised area.  My solution was to screw a piece of balsa wood to the raised areas, from the back of the NES to up to the power/reset/LED circuit board.  Except the mobo was still longer than that, so I ripped out the reset switch, glued a little strip of balsa wood to the top of the circuit board, and stuck a piece of a dowel rod in the front corner.  With all that done, I could screw the standoffs into the wood, being careful not to go all the way through the wood I glued to the circuit board.  Speaking of glue, I tossed the mechanical parts of the reset switch but glued the button back into the case for aesthetics.

Standoffs in place, I could then install the hardware.  I used an MSI B150i mini-ITX motherboard, and I picked it because it's a relatively affordable Intel mini-ITX motherboard with integrated Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which comes in handy when you get to the software part.  The CPU is a Core i3-6100T, which is almost certainly more powerful than I needed but draws just 35w, which is just over half of any cheaper Intel CPU with that socket, and rather than the stock cooler I used a Silverstone NT07-115X low-profile cooler.  I finished it off with 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4 RAM and a spare Kingston 128GB SSD.  I'd wanted to use a larger M.2 drive, but the drive is M.2 SATA and the M.2 slot on the mobo is PCIe only.  I also bought a cable that fits the mobo's USB 3.0 header on one end and splits into a pair of female USB 3.0 ports.  I have those tucked behind the NES's cartridge door so they're hidden most of the time but easily accessible if I need them.  The system is powered with a picoPSU0150-XT, which is really just a little circuit board that plugs into the mobo's main ATX connection and has wiring coming off of it for your CPU, one SATA device, and one IDE device.  I drilled a hole in the back of the NES and set it up so the picoPSU plugs into a 150w AC adapter, like a laptop.

Initially I had an ATX power switch I used to turn it on for testing, but I really wanted to use the NES's power switch.  That wasn't too hard; first I did a little reading and figured out that the Power switch used the red and brown wires, and (important for later) the LED used one wire and shared the brown with the power switch. I cut off the harness that connected the 5 wires coming from the power/reset/LED circuit board off, then removed all the wires except the red and brown (I also made a small cut into the circuit board that was necessary to sever a circuit; not clear on why it was necessary, but that's what my reading told me).  To keep things easy, I got a Dupont crimper, crimped the red and brown wires, and jammed them into a housing so I could plug them right onto the motherboard.  I also had to remove a tiny strip of metal and a little staple from behind the power switch; that's what made is so the power switch stayed clicked in.

Getting the LED to work was slightly more involved.  I took two of the wires, an orange and white, that I'd removed originally, and decided that the orange was positive and the white negative, then crimped and housed them like I did with the power switch.  I cut the 5th wire in half, stripped both ends of each piece, and taped one end of each to one side of a button cell battery.  I used the other ends to figure out which lead was positive and which lead was negative on the LED, then soldered the orange and white wires accordingly.  Long story short, pushing the NES's original power button turns the box on, and when it's on the NES's original power LED comes on.

Oh, and my mistake?  I had too much cut out of the back of the NES.  It looks messy as heck, but I just patched it up with Sugru.  No one's going to be looking at the back anyway.

To keep things simple, I used Lakka for an OS.  Lakka is a fork of OpenELEC, a version of Linux stripped down to just enough of an OS to run Kodi.  Lakka is similarly stripped down, but instead of running Kodi it runs RetroArch.  Once it's set up, Lakka is a great OS for a console-like device.  In fact, it's very similar to the PSP/PS3's XMB, with horizontal entries for each "playlist" (that is, a list of ROMs for a given console, like the NES), and vertical entries for the playlist entries (the ROMs themselves), and entirely navigable with a controller.  However, setting Lakka up can be pretty involved.  To put ROMS on the Lakka box, you have to move them over your home network.  Once they're in the right folder, you can have Lakka scan the folder and generate the playlists.  However, if Lakka isn't sure what a given ROM is, it'll simply not include it on the playlist, so I had to go through and figure out which ROMs weren't included for each playlist, find the playlist file, and manually write the entries (six lines per ROM) in a text editor that's cool with the Linux format (I used Notepad++).

Now, remember when I said that bluetooth would be useful?  Lakka supports a number of bluetooth controllers, including the PS3 and the PS4's.  However, I couldn't get the PS4's working.  For that matter, I wasn't getting any sound.  Lakka's simple settings options in the OS weren't cutting it, so I had to use Putty to create a remote terminal session with the Lakka box, edit some config files, mess with the bluetoothctl command and... well, I set the clock to my time zone and fixed the audio.  I got the PS4 controller to pair, but I couldn't get it to stay paired between reboots.  Well, a PS3 or PS4 controller, even one with NES-ish decals, didn't really feel appropriate enough.  I decided to get something more suiting but still with enough buttons for all my emulated systems, and I settled on 8bitdo's NES30 Pro controller.  It still required me to set it up via remote terminal, but unlike the PS4 controller it stays paired.  (For the record, a PS3 controller paired exactly the same way as it does on a PS3 console; plug it in with a USB cable, hit the button, and it's paired... if even that's too much trouble it'll also work with a bunch of other controllers over a wired connection).

So now my box is up and running, with playlists for TurboGrafx-16, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NES, SNES, N64, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, Sega Game Gear, PlayStation, and PSP, and I'll ballpark it at  500+ games (including all 30 on the NES Classic).  I've tested each core, and everything seems to be running at full speed, at fullscreen (with black bands to maintain the correct aspect ratios).  I played through Super Mario Bros 3 entirely (without warp whistles!), and everything felt just as I remembered.  Video is over HDMI to a 42" 1080p HDTV, so not everything looks so hot, but the various emulator cores support things like graphics filters as well as cheats and save states.  The playlists I made are just from the ROMs that I served to it, but Lakka/RetroArch has cores for many more including various arcade hardware, the Nintendo DS (although I'm not sure how well that'd work without a touchscreen or at least a mouse), and the Dreamcast.

"Now Mike," you're probably saying, "couldn't you have done this WAY cheaper if you'd gone with Raspberry Pi with Lakka or Retropie?  And the answer to that is a resounding yes, probably like a quarter of what I spent, and I'd probably been able to make fewer, smaller cuts to the NES's case.  So why'd I do it with PC hardware?  Three reasons; first, I'd been saying for probably 10 years that I was going to build a PC in an NES... it just took the release of the NES classic to actually motivate me to do it.  Second, somewhat related to the first, is that I've been building PCs a long time and I'm comfortable working with PC hardware.  While I'm sure that Raspberry Pi is probably easy enough to work with, I felt like going with what I already know.  And the third, most important reason, is power.  From what I've read, Raspberry Pi has some trouble with Saturn, Dreamcast, and PSP emulation, and while I could live without Saturn and Dreamcast I want to be able to play stuff like Gundam Battle Universe and Macross Triangle Frontier.  Also, while the RetroArch team has hit some roadblocks, there's hope they'll eventually get a Dolphin core for Gamecube emulation, which seems unlikely to run on any current Raspberry Pi hardware.

[JB0]

Very nice!

[Black Valkyrie]

 

Awesome, nice. 

 

[azrael]

Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?
The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion

Hmmm...Well, this opens a few options for my upgrade plans if Kaby Lake-CPUs are only marginally better than Sky Lake-CPUs.

[MacrossJunkie]

1 hour ago, azrael said:

Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?
The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion

Hmmm...Well, this opens a few options for my upgrade plans if Kaby Lake-CPUs are only marginally better than Sky Lake-CPUs.

I'm waiting for 3rd party benchmarks of the official release of AMD's Ryzen CPU to decide which way to go. So far, it looks promising with the IPC seemingly exceeding that of Intel's i7-5960x.

Once the actual thing is out on the market with optimized platform drivers, I want to see how productivity and gaming performance compares. Having an 8 core 16 thread CPU with i7 comparable performance at half the price of Intel's 8 core 5960x (SR7 black edition supposed to be $500) would be amazing, not to mention it would push Intel to stop being so lazy with these low effort incremental refreshes. The 6 core SR5 at $250 or normal 8 core SR7 at $350 are outstanding price points if the performance holds up.

If rumors are true, then AMD's Vega GPU with HBM2 memory should also rival nVidia's upcoming 1080 TI. If the performance is good, I may go Red for the GPU also since Freesync monitors are much cheaper than G-sync monitors and nVidia's driver antics have been pissing me off for a long while.

Good times ahead for people looking to upgrade or build a new PC and wanting options/actual good alternatives.

Edited January 4, 2017 by MacrossJunkie

[mikeszekely]

2 hours ago, azrael said:

Intel Core i7-7700K Kaby Lake review: Is the desktop CPU dead?
The Intel Core i7-7700K (91W) Review: The New Out-of-the-box Performance Champion

Hmmm...Well, this opens a few options for my upgrade plans if Kaby Lake-CPUs are only marginally better than Sky Lake-CPUs.

I'm still rocking Ivy Bridge and DDR3 in my gaming rig, but with an SSD for a boot drive, a blu-ray burner, and a GTX 970 GPU I'm still not exactly dying to upgrade, y'know?  I'll probably wait for Cannonlake and the GTX 11 series, so maybe late 2017 or early 2018 (and my current rig becomes unequivocally the longest-run gaming PC I've built for myself).

[azrael]

3 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

I'm still rocking Ivy Bridge and DDR3 in my gaming rig, but with an SSD for a boot drive, a blu-ray burner, and a GTX 970 GPU I'm still not exactly dying to upgrade, y'know?  I'll probably wait for Cannonlake and the GTX 11 series, so maybe late 2017 or early 2018 (and my current rig becomes unequivocally the longest-run gaming PC I've built for myself).

My current rig is a Haswell system. With those Kaby Lake benchmarks, I'm also thinking of stretching that upgrade from mid-2017 to late 2017 myself. Likely upgrade other aging components until all I need are a new CPU/motherboard/RAM combo.

[MacrossJunkie]

47 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

I'm still rocking Ivy Bridge and DDR3 in my gaming rig, but with an SSD for a boot drive, a blu-ray burner, and a GTX 970 GPU I'm still not exactly dying to upgrade, y'know?  I'll probably wait for Cannonlake and the GTX 11 series, so maybe late 2017 or early 2018 (and my current rig becomes unequivocally the longest-run gaming PC I've built for myself).

 

I've been puttering along with an Ivy Bridge as well. Been holding off on building a completely new PC and just upgrading parts as I needed over the past years. It's served me pretty well so far. I usually wait for big jumps in performance before upgrading. Had SLI GTX 670's before and wasn't until Mid-September that I went to a 1080 and doubled my framerates with a single card.

I'm also waiting to see if Intel's Opteron drives will be as fast as Intel claims because that could be a game changer as well.

[jenius]

I'm on a Sandy Bridge E computer still... it has served me wonderfully but I think my next rig will get built after the next black Friday. With any luck that will be the point where my website goes to 4K video and pictures. It looks like it will be Skylake E for now...

What's an Intel Opteron drive?

[MacrossJunkie]

33 minutes ago, jenius said:

I'm on a Sandy Bridge E computer still... it has served me wonderfully but I think my next rig will get built after the next black Friday. With any luck that will be the point where my website goes to 4K video and pictures. It looks like it will be Skylake E for now...

What's an Intel Opteron drive?

Doh! I meant Optane. Also known as 3D Xpoint. It's a technology jointly developed by Micron and Intel. Supposedly 1000x faster than Nand and 1000x higher lifetime. They said it is relatively cheap to produce and there will be both DIMMs and SSD products made using this tech. Very early engineering sample SSD's of Intel's Optane drives were only about 10x faster than current SSD's which is a far cry from the claims, but they said they were still working out the drive controllers.

[JB0]

Man, all yall with sand under your bridges and ivy overgrowths. I just recently upgraded from a friggin' YORKFIELD. Finally put the socket 775 board out to pasture. In fairness, I DID grab a cheap Q9300 at some point, so I was in the upper end of what it could do. But even the lowest of the low outruns that 9300 now. 

...

Actually, that isn't true. The lowest of the low is the EQUAL of that 9300.

[technoblue]

I'm in no rush to upgrade to Kaby Lake, but I do like the out-of-the-box numbers from these initial reviews (especially the power numbers). I have to agree that those software benchmarks tell a completely different story, though, and Intel appears to be giving AMD an opportunity to play catch up. Man, it would be nice to build a solid AMD system again. I haven't had one in house since I put together a SFF Athlon64 system years ago.

At the moment, I'm getting ready to upgrade my GPU so that I have better support for my ultra widescreen monitor and I'm finally going to test Windows 10 Pro (stubborn holdout, I am).

[MacrossJunkie]

This pretty much sums up people's thoughts on Kaby Lake.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/5lu4lr/it_was_skylake_all_along/

[kajnrig]

I really wished my computer would have lasted until the Ryzen release, but alas, I had to go with a Skylake CPU from a dying (1.4+ volts!) Athlon X4 750K a month or two ago. I'm still debating whether to sell the computer and go with a Ryzen setup or just stick with what I have, which is serving me just fine right now.

I don't think anyone was expecting to see much of anything going from Skylake to Kaby Lake; it's not using any new manufacturing technology as far as I'm aware. I think they made them a bit less power hungry, though, which is always good.

[kajnrig]

So mi madre maxed out the 32 (EDIT: 16) GB on her iPad and was adamant that absolutely none of the 1200 photos be deleted. I look at it thinking, "Okay, no problem. I've done this before. Shouldn't be more than 15 minutes moving some of this stuff somewhere else."

Two hours later, the iPad is still full and I nearly give up. I can't attach a flash drive/portable HDD because it has its dumb proprietary Lightning connector. I can't slot in a MicroSD card because it doesn't support them. I can't upload the pics to Apple's own cloud servers because 1) iCloud integration is nonexistent unless you install the iCloud app, and 2) the iCloud app isn't preinstalled. I can't use the only option available to me - the Backup feature - because the only option is to bulk upload all 12GB or so to iCloud's 5GB of available storage, which preemptively disables your upload attempt (without even the option to do a partial upload). I can't email even a single picture to myself because the Mail app needs storage space to function at all.

Jesus Christ on a stick, frakk this machine and frakk Apple. I'm reminded once again of just how smart I was to have never ever EVER adopted a single Apple device.

Finally I plug it into my computer via the charging cable and it takes AN HOUR I SWEAR TO GOD to copy the available 8-9 GB over. (For whatever reason, i can't get to the other 3-4 GB, but whatever, I'm taking what I can get at this point.) There's nothing wrong with the computer, nothing wrong with the USB 3.0 port, and nothing wrong with the cord or iPad save for their being Apple products.

Just... UGGGGHHHHHHH.

Edited January 11, 2017 by kajnrig

[technoblue]

^Mm. I think the only IOS device that supports USB 3.0 connections is the iPad Pro. Apple's pace for hardware upgrades is glacier slow, and then they make the oddest choices with what features they leave out when it is time to release something new. I would love it if Apple built a more open system, and included nifty add-ons like microSD, but these bits and bobs seem so very much against their business philosophy. The Apple today is not the Apple of the 1980s, or even 2007 when the first iPhone was released.

IOS products have evolved to become less about usability and more about profit, IMO. LoL, and I give the criticism with an iPhone 6 in hand. Oh well, I'll learn eventually.

Edited January 11, 2017 by technoblue

[kajnrig]

It was a USB 2.0 cable (and I think this iPad model's Lightning is also based on USB 2.0), so I wasn't expecting 3.0 speeds, but even then, and accounting for the whole lot of small files, sane devices would take between 10 and 30 minutes (5-15 MB/sec) to transfer 9 gigs of data. This took an hour? Really?

Egh grumble grumble grumble. It's finally taken care of now, so fine's fine, I suppose.

[azrael]

Did you try this?

https://discussions.apple.com/message/17174292#17174292#17174292

[technoblue]

The results are coming in, and it looks like Kaby Lake has ho hum overclocking performance at retail. Oh well... 

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/01/16/retail_7700k_up_to_5ghz_3600mhz#.WH0oBFMrJlY

 

[azrael]

20 hours ago, technoblue said:

The results are coming in, and it looks like Kaby Lake has ho hum overclocking performance at retail. Oh well... 

http://www.hardocp.com/news/2017/01/16/retail_7700k_up_to_5ghz_3600mhz#.WH0oBFMrJlY

Assuming Hyperthreading is turned off. Either way, anyone planning upgrades could probably stick with a cheaper Sky Lake-CPU. Kaby Lake-CPUs should only be a "if you want to spend the money"-deal.

[Smiley424]

So is anyone water cooling here?  I'm thinking about getting a new PC Case and thinking of changing out my Noctua NH-D15 cpu cooler and going with either an AIO water cooler or maybe even a custom loop.  More for aesthetics as I am looking at cases with a tempered glass side panel and possibly moving into a slight smaller case that won't fit my current CPU cooler.  My CPU is a Haswell I5-4690K that I have overclocked to 4.5 GHz from the stock 3.5 GHz.  Just looking for thoughts and opinions.

[JB0]

I keep telling myself this is the year I throw in a pump and a radiator, and it keeps not being the year.

So I am not, but am definitely interested.

[mikeszekely]

I don't know. I read about water coolers from time to time, and they seem like they're great for overclocking. I've never overclocked any of my systems, though. In fact, aside from the low profile cooler I bought for my NES build, I've always just used the stock cooler that comes with the CPU.

[azrael]

*raises hand*

I currently use AIO coolers in my desktops. I use a Corsair H60 in an ITX case and a H80 in my main box. The H60 has kept my little ITX quiet enough to sleep through and barely distinguishable from everyday background noise. I would definitely recommend that one. I'm less impressed with the H80 in my main box. In both instances, the cooler has kept my CPUs fairly cool under load. I'm not terribly impressed with the H80 since it only brought down the temp marginally compared to my Hyper 212 Evo. I do overclock a little. I will likely get better results if I switch to a larger radiator but that's an upgrade down the road.The Noctua cooler is one of the best air-coolers on the market so I don't think you will see much difference unless you get a 240 or 280mm radiator setup. As for a custom loop setup, I can't answer that.

[JB0]

9 hours ago, azrael said:

I'm not terribly impressed with the H80 since it only brought down the temp marginally compared to my Hyper 212 Evo.

That is one of the problems that radiator setups have faced the last several years. The acceptable size of traditional coolers has gone up enough that they are punching in the same weight class.

And mounting a waterblock on a video card is still a pain in the rectum, though it is where water shines best in a modern system(very limited cooler space at the card, more heat than the CPU).

[azrael]

21 minutes ago, JB0 said:

That is one of the problems that radiator setups have faced the last several years. The acceptable size of traditional coolers has gone up enough that they are punching in the same weight class.

For the price of the H80 (or the H80i now), the Noctua NH-D15 will likely give you the better bang for the buck. I found the H60 to be a better cooler at the price point. A H80, being a double-thick radiator, doesn't really provide any greater advantage than a normal-size radiator or a decent air-cooler. A 240 or 280mm radiator would be a better buy than a thicker radiator cooler.

[Smiley424]

Thank you everyone.  I have looked more into watercooling and custom loops are definitely more maintenance then I am willing to undertake.  My Noctua is working very well with my overclock, 40C at idle and max 68C under load.  I will stick with it in the new case and see how it works out.  I am currently set on the Phanteks Enthoo Pro M with tempered glass case.