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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   17 Jan 2020 00:15 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)       12 of 89 
42538.12 In reply to 42538.1 
Yeah, it's funny the way that Intel was great and a few companies like Cyrix and AMD produced budget copies then AMD was the best for ages then Intel for even longer and now AMD seem to have taken the lead with their Ryzens and Threadrippers and 7 nano-metre  technology and 64 core CPUs.

I think if I was building a new computer now, I'd follow Chris and go down the AMD path.

For drives, certainly the system drive, you definitely want an M.2 NVME drive rather than SATA SSD. They're up to 7 times faster and getting faster and cheaper all the time. Most modern boards support this anyway. 

Personally, I would include an optical drive but that's mainly because I do a lot of ripping for my Plex and music libraries. 

Also, what Peter said about Ebuyer and Scan and Quiet PC. I've also bought stuff from them without a problem. 
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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 From:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)    17 Jan 2020 11:10 
 To:  ALL 13 of 89 
42538.13 
Thanks all, lots to start looking at now. I'll definitely take a look at the NVME SSD drives - putting a SATA SSD in my current system was one of the best things I ever did. I'll be taking the approach of having a moderately sizeable SSD for the OS and whatever games I'm currently playing, and a traditional drive for media storage - possibly my existing one (think it's 2Tb and where near full) for starters, using the money I save for MOAR MEMORY.

Sounds like it's easier to get a case without an optical drive slot and go USB there.

Cooling and stuff - is that still a big deal? Fans still, yeah? Water cooling never quite managed to hit the mainstream, right?
Kenny
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   17 Jan 2020 12:19 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)       14 of 89 
42538.14 In reply to 42538.13 
I recently put a 512GB NVME drive in my laptop (ADATA SX8200PNP) which was under £60. It wasn't the big change that swapping a SATA HDD for an SSD was a while back, but it is generally snappier and seeing as that price is comparable to a 512GB SATA SSD of similar quality...

As for water cooling: I have this in two separate PCs. Easy to fit and very effective. I put one in my main Plex and backup PC which runs 24x7. It uses an elderly i7 860 in a relatively small case along with 6 drives. There isn't room for a big air cooler and it was idling around 50C and regularly getting up to 80C. That's within spec but I wasn't comfortable having that in an unattended PC. With the water cooling, it idles around 28C and seldom goes above 40C. 

My main desktop was worse. I put a great big Gelid heatsink/fan thing onto its i5 4690K and didn't really think about temperatures which was scary, because I just happened to check when I was doing some video transcoding and found that all the cores were getting within a couple of degrees of 100C. With the Corsair thingy, temperatures now get to about 55C maximum.

The pump and case fan aren't silent, but they're pretty good.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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 From:  milko   17 Jan 2020 17:48 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)       15 of 89 
42538.15 In reply to 42538.13 
All In One (AIO) water coolers are pretty good. I've got the Corsair H80 I think, which is like WilliamA's except a little bit more, I guess. Very straightforward to fit (well, about the same as normal ones) and not as gigantic and heavy as the air cooling ones, which I feel is good for these tower cases even if I intellectually know they must be fine.
milko
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   17 Jan 2020 22:31 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)       16 of 89 
42538.16 In reply to 42538.15 
If you're interested in water cooling I'd recommend spending a little more than I did on the Corsair H55. The cooling performance is excellent, it's well made and easy to fit, but it has a couple of issues. It was designed to be small and quiet, but to a price. This means, for instance, that the supplied fan is not PWM controlled out of the box and runs at one speed. On my Backup PC this is fine and the whole thing runs very quiet indeed. On the other PC, the fan could only be fitted at one point which seemed to be the sweet spot for case resonance and noise. After about 3 months of irritation I fixed it by replacing the fan with a better one from Corsair. 

One thing that did interest me. I saw that Chris built his PC on a full ATX board. Did you have any thoughts about this? Having just built a full-fat Windows PC on a tiny mini-stx board and leaving aside all the obvious jokes about size mattering, are you going for anything in particular?
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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 From:  Dave!!   18 Jan 2020 12:35 
 To:  milko      17 of 89 
42538.17 In reply to 42538.15 
Agreed, I went with a Corsair AIO water cooler when I built my Ryzen rig a couple of years back, it's been solid ever since and is nice and quiet. Mine is the H110i, it is PWM and can be controlled very easily from an app within Windows.

Personally, I'd also go the Ryzen route. AMD's current CPUs are very competitive in terms of performance, and usually much cheaper than Intel's chips as well. I have the Ryzen 7 1700X (8 core, 16 thread) and it's been great so far. Reliable and handles everything I throw at it with ease.

Another thing to consider is www.quietpc.com - decent site and plenty of bits that are designed/chosen to be nice and quiet. I bought my case, fans and CPU cooler from them, then eBuyered the other bits.

Only part I had a problem with was my original motherboard - I went for an MSI one and it had an intermittent fault with the SATA controller that caused some of my mechanical data drives to randomly disappear and re-appear. In the end I managed to RMA it and replaced it with a Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard which has been rock solid - I do also like that it has an LED character display on the board, so if it fails to boot at all, it is easy to look up the code in the manual and see where the issue is.
---

 
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 From:  Chris (CHRISSS)   18 Jan 2020 14:51 
 To:  Dave!!      18 of 89 
42538.18 In reply to 42538.17 
A lot of coolers now are huge. I was looking at Be Quiet and Noctua coolers and most are so tall they wouldn't fit in my tower case.

I did end up buying a smaller Noctua that's much quieter than the stock AMD but the bigger ones would have kept it a bit cooler.
Me
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   18 Jan 2020 20:41 
 To:  ALL 19 of 89 
42538.19 
On a account of Win 7 going unsupported last week & MrsD. needing online banking, we decided to do her a Win 10 + 'new' [refurb] pc twofer:

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=7_158&item_id=123156


(& I get a server upgrade out of it)
“A drunk puppet declares she's a virgin, and teens learn a sex-ed lesson”
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   18 Jan 2020 23:36 
 To:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)      20 of 89 
42538.20 In reply to 42538.19 
Looks pretty decent and very good value at that price.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   18 Jan 2020 23:39 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      21 of 89 
42538.21 In reply to 42538.20 
This'll be the 3rd refurb hp SFF we've bought for MrsD. in the past ~15-years. Usually better value than a home build for sub-gaming stuff, considering the OS is 'free'.
“A drunk puppet declares she's a virgin, and teens learn a sex-ed lesson”
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 From:  CyrixDes (CYRIXDES_)   21 Jan 2020 08:23 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      22 of 89 
42538.22 In reply to 42538.12 
'budget copy'? u na fneek ect 

APPROVED: 21 Jan 2020 09:21 by WINGNUTKJ
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 From:  milko   21 Jan 2020 11:00 
 To:  CyrixDes (CYRIXDES_)      23 of 89 
42538.23 In reply to 42538.22 
lol, I do enjoy a gag that takes that much effort to get in.
milko
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 From:  CyrixDes (CYRIXDES_)   21 Jan 2020 11:03 
 To:  milko      24 of 89 
42538.24 In reply to 42538.23 
I wonder whatever happened to WeeDave. 

APPROVED: 21 Jan 2020 12:54 by MILKO
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   21 Jan 2020 11:34 
 To:  milko      25 of 89 
42538.25 In reply to 42538.23 
Trouble is, it's so old (as am I ) that I can't remember what it means anymore.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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 From:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)    21 Jan 2020 14:41 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      26 of 89 
42538.26 In reply to 42538.16 
quote: william (WILLIAMA)
One thing that did interest me. I saw that Chris built his PC on a full ATX board. Did you have any thoughts about this? Having just built a full-fat Windows PC on a tiny mini-stx board and leaving aside all the obvious jokes about size mattering, are you going for anything in particular?

I was thinking Micro-ATX, possibly even re-using my existing case (although I'm likely to get a new one, although I'll be aiming for no sodding LEDs and side-windows if I can possibly avoid them.

Presumably with a mini-stx board, the size of the graphics card is a consideration?

Trying to think about what else I'll need - Keyboard, mouse, SATA DVD drive, storage HDD and monitors are all being kept from the existing system. Might try to move my Windows key across to the new system, although I can't remember what level of legit it is (it's quite legit, but might be OEM).

I've got a wi-fi card which plugs into a PCI Express slot on my motherboard, which I presume will still work, and an ageing Lexicon Lambda Studio USB Audio Interface I used for recording with, which I fully expect to mess about with for a few minutes trying to sort out ASIO issues and a high-pitched whine which won't go away, before punting it in favour of something more contemporary.

Things currently semi-permanently connected to my pc: Printer, keyboard, mouse, audio interface, external drive, joystick, SD card reader. I'll want USB ports. Lots of USB ports.

Kenny
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 From:  william (WILLIAMA)   21 Jan 2020 15:13 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)       27 of 89 
42538.27 In reply to 42538.26 
I was only curious because if I was building a PC now I'd probably aim to make it smaller than my current one. The case I have is an elderly Antec case but it dates back to when IDE cables were the norm so it has loads of space, but poor cable-management opportunities. I think the big empty panel areas make it noisy as well. The ultra cheap case I rebuilt my backup PC into is much smaller but all the cables can be threaded out of the way. 

And no, the miniature boards (stx and itx) are limited with either no graphics card provision or one PCI-e slot right on the edge. My stx board has no PCI-e slots apart from M.2 for an SSD and a wifi card.

I'm sure micro-ATX will be your best bet.
never trust a man in a blue trench coat, never drive a car when you're dead
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 From:  CHYRON (DSMITHHFX)   21 Jan 2020 15:30 
 To:  william (WILLIAMA)      28 of 89 
42538.28 In reply to 42538.27 
I hate how discreet GPUs take up two pci slots.
“A drunk puppet declares she's a virgin, and teens learn a sex-ed lesson”
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 From:  Matt   21 Jan 2020 17:31 
 To:  Kenny J (WINGNUTKJ)       29 of 89 
42538.29 In reply to 42538.26 
I don't think you'll be fitting a DVD drive in a Mini-STX case (at least not in any I've seen). If you really need the DVD drive, you'll probably need to put it in a separate case/caddy and connect it via eSATA or something.

doohicky
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 From:  Dave!!   21 Jan 2020 20:46 
 To:  Chris (CHRISSS)      30 of 89 
42538.30 In reply to 42538.18 
Yeah, that's mainly why I went down the watercooling route in the end. The bit that clips onto the CPU for mine is quite small, then the radiator bolts to the roof of the case and vents directly outside. Of course, less use in a small case, but then I have to admit that mine is a normal ATX case (got 5 hard drives - so needed the space anyway!)
---

 
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 From:  Manthorp   22 Jan 2020 08:26 
 To:  Matt      31 of 89 
42538.31 In reply to 42538.29 
There are plenty of handsome and efficient external DVD drives (sometimes with DVD players built in) about. Once you've got one, you'll never need to weigh up whether you need an internal one again.

<edit> And I suspect one will last until DVDs are are definitively redundant.
"We all have flaws, and mine is being wicked."
James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks 1951
 
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