Woo, haha, you're getting a 3600 :D It was your fault I got mine.

Hello!

Is Welsh cake real? I bet it's great.

And I got broadband :|

So real. And Welsh.

Don't you miss the noise of of a dialup modem?

They do look great. Welsh things are always great.

I miss the noise of dialup and also the noise of degaussing a monitor.

"Boyoyoyoyoiinnggg"

Totally forgot about that. Very satisfying.

They are good! Gotta love a Welsh cake.

Oh man, degaussing a monitor. I miss doing that :'(

I have a new PC!

List of things in it is here:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/NgVrRk

It went together quite easily - main problem I had was that I put the CPU cooler on the motherboard before mounting the mobo in the case, which meant it was a tight squeeze to plug in the power cable for the cpu.

Other than that, and some fun trying to set up a new install of Windows to my liking, it all seems to be good. It laughs at Just Cause 3, which my previous rig was weeping about, so I've mostly been explodeding things today.

Nice. That gpu is badass. In the spirit of things I went to order another 16GB ram stick, thinking I could dual channel it, but it seems to be same product name, slightly different part number (HX424C15FB3/16, vs. HX424C15FB/16 bought two years ago) with almost all the same specs, at least the ones that count, and different appearance (heat spreader and, I guess, pcb), and @ half the cost. Fingers crossed they will work together, slated to arrive Weds. I've got my eye on a Ryzen 5 1600 part, allegedly a rebadged 2600, and supposed to be good value.

Very nice too. Did you carry forward the T Rex from your previous PC?

Edit: that should be, T Rex with ambitious Koala combo.

The T-Rex has been perched atop several past PCs - I won it in a Godzilla roaring competition at an art exhibition opening party in Bradford; the artist Kenneth Hung, curated by Teh Forum's very own Steve Manthorp, some time in, oooh, 2003, maybe?

That's excellent and a very good reason to carry it forward. 

Next thing: I'm up and running, and everything *seems* to be working very nicely. Compared to the olden days, it's all so much easier. It took about 5 minutes to install Windows, and it recognised all the bits straight off, and there was no faffing around trying to download drivers from various places or right-clicking .inf files, or any of the other nonsense that setting up a PC used to involve.

Which leads me to my questions - I've been getting a nag box telling me that Nvidia control panel is not installed, and I just figured out how to stop the nag box (by disabling the " NVIDIA Display Container LS" service), and while I was tidying away the boxes the bits came in, I found a disk of motherboard drivers and utilities.

Is it worth installing any of this? I seem to remember that the additional "control panel" software for my previous graphics cards and motherboards gave access to some arcane features via gratuitously ugly interfaces designed by people who believed that rolling your own interface elements resulted in a far superior button than anything Micro$oft [sic] could produce.

I suppose it'd be useful to know about fan speeds and temperatures and frequencies and that kind of thing.

Most people recommend against installing software that comes with the motherboard, unless there's any useful stuff you want like fan control, etc. without needing to go into the BIOS.

But they do recommend installing the AMD chipset drivers which you can get the latest from AMD's website. It also gives you some extra AMD specific power profiles.

Did you install Nvidia drivers from their website or just let Windows install them for you?

Whenever I built myself a new PC in the past, I ended up doing a kind of "Oh no, I wish I'd seen that," thing like when I saw the special offers on a slightly faster memory or the next CPU up. Any of that? Just mention it because I was poking around some of the products on your list and...

Comes with the territory.

Yeah, but that's always the case. Spent ages deliberating on whether to spend just a little bit more on, just about everything. Only thing I caved on was the Samsung drive - originally I went for something else, but when it turned out to be out of stock, I went for the full terrabyte of Samsung goodness.

If you've seen some amazing deal on something I could have got instead of one of the components, I don't want to know!

That's what I thought. Who wants the Ryzen 7 2700X 8 Core 4.3GHz anyway?

Yeah, but it's got LEDs in the cooler fan. Don't want that.

But you wouldn't...oh, hang on, clear acrylic side panel. Ah right. Looks like one of the stock AMD coolers. Also, the Gigabyte mobo might not be quite in the same class as the MSI. Nothing to choose between the Corsair or Crucial RAM, I wouldn't have thought. If it was me, I might be tempted by the bundle, but I would reuse my Corsair water cooler.