The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

The main reason for buying the dock, is that it supported drives larger than 2TB.
Says it supports up to 4TB, but I can't imagine why a 6TB would be a problem. Unless they intentionally put a limit on it
I understand how the wraparound would occur on a dock that doesn't support it. In any case, I had already exceeded 4.5TB, and had no issues. It was when I put it internally, that things went down hill.

Now you're probably wondering about write cache. Not sure how it's currently set, but I always restart windows. And I also always make sure the tower is discharged, before connecting/disconnecting drives.

Aw well. Live and learn. This will take weeks to replace the data. At least it wasn't my precious data drive lol Which currently has a redundant drive

 

If a device can handle SDXC, you'd think it can handle more than just a mere 64GB card, right? That is where my logic is coming from. If 4TB is the absolute maximum for this dock, they did it intentionally. Or through sheer ignorance.
Yes, USB 3.0. USB 2.0 would be painfully slow lol

 

I would wager it does predate 6TB. However, I would doubt that each new hard drive revision(Size), needs unique code. Now, problems PERHAPS could arise down the road as drives get super large. Problems that were not anticipated. For example a petabyte drive, might require updated coding. Though the theoretical limit for GPT is 16 exabytes.

 

I just remembered that After Dawn existed... lol. I was on the site back in 2006 and practically lived here. Sam was my master and I think I learned more here about computers than anywhere else.

Just wanted to say thanks to everyone and it's honestly amazing that we have somewhat managed to keep threads about PC building alive for over 12 years. Pretty insane honestly and great to look back on.

I remember when graphics cards were rated against one statement: "Can it run Crysis?"

Good times.

 

It seems to me, He_Man, that if you're going to talk about Crysis, you should be posting on the Official Graphics Card and PC Gaming Thread that Abuzar started in 2008. LOL
https://forums.afterdawn.com/threads/the-official-graphics-card-and-pc-gaming-thread.647383/page-497

I'll probably post there soon, as I just came upon a gaming issue with my overclocked crossfire 7950s on Dishonored 2. The main game, Dishonored 2 - a brilliant game in many respects, does support crossfire, after I upgraded to the latest drivers, and w7 service pack 1. It was an outstanding game - almost as good as the original, which, I should mention, also had two DLCs that were just as excellent.

But imagine my surprise last week when I started to run the Dishonored 2 DLC, "Death of the Outsider" and after wasting a good day on upgrading drivers again, and trying to get crossfire working, I finally came to the realization - as confirmed on at least one thread - that they did not enable crossfire for the DLC.

That's right - crossfire support is featured on the main game, but NOT on the DLC.

Wuuuut? It's a standalone DLC - meaning sort of more than a DLC, but less than a full Dishonored 3 - but still why would they drop off crossfire support???

The reviews are great.

I haven't yet gotten into it yet, beyond the first 30 seconds. Of course now I realize I'll be limping along on one card.

But I should mentione - THIS IS THE CARD THAT DID SUPPORT CRYSIS.

In fact, He_Man, I had purchased but put away all the crysis titles until I got that card, then I happily stormed through all of them during my card testing.

I bought one 3-gig HIS 7950, overclocked it to match 7970, and used the crysis titles to test the card - it has a huge turbine that actually takes 2 1/2 slots, and yes, I could put two of them on my evga 9450 motherboard, except that the turbine on the bottom card extended about a quarter-inch beyond the bottom of the beautiful black Sonata mid-tower case.

So during the 30-day Newegg RMA return time-limit, I tested two other models of 7950 that did not have that exact same bulky turbine, but none of them seemed to match the HIS in terms of performance and lack of on-screen "glittering." I paid a re-stocking fee one one, and the other I was able to RMA back.

Finally I decided to just purchase a second HIS.

Rather than cut a hole in the bottom of the Sonata, which I seriously considered doing, I finally remembered that 4 years earlier I had bought a $180 spedo thermaltake full-tower case that had been sitting in the garage all this time. I have a total of about 10 fans in that case, most of them 140mm, one 200mm ceiling exhaust fan, 6 intake fans including bottom intake, 2 side and 3 front intakes - fans all over the place. So that was my case upgrade, probably equivalent to the HAF cases that everybody else has - and I do have two top-front USB ports in addition to an esata port which has come in handy.

(I did not need crossfire for any of the earlier Crysis titles. I DID however use crossfire on that last Crysis title - the one with the crossbow that worked in cloaked mode. Crysis 3 received a lot of negative press, but I liked it quite a bit - the water reflections were amazing - I posted lots of screenshots over on the graphics thread.)

So on this Dishonored 2 DLC, Death of the Outsider, I'll probably be working with fps in the low 20s, or maybe even down to the high teens - I'll see how that works on my 2560x1600 Dell 30" native resolution. The game started me out on a lower resolution, but experience shows that I will get the best graphics in native resolution, even if I have to ease off some of the advanced settings.

As I say, I started the game and I'm alone on the whaling ship, with beautiful graphics and frames in the low 20s - which is fine for me - but by the time I get into serious combat with multiple assailants, I may have to make some extreme compromises to run on just the one card.

====================================

I went back a page on this thread, and I read ddp's crappy comments - lol - and Kevin's brilliant retort. And I read about Kevin's monster hdd - 10 terrabytes! Kevin - out there on the bleeding edge where Sam used to like to be!

And I read Sam and Jeff's analysis of Intel's cpu progress, or lack thereof. What I gleaned is that Haswell might be my best near-term cpu upgrade - but I have no plans to do anything anytime soon - I still have 100 user-created missions of Arma3 to play - and I still keep Steam from upgrading me past the last 2015 upgrade when I lost all my save-game settings and most of the user-developed scenarios I had already downloaded by then.

Periodically I go into the Arma3 downloading folder and delete everything, and in steam download manager I try to keep two COD titles, which each need about 30 gigs of updates, in front of Arma3 to protect my 2015 Arma3.

While steam won't launch the game directly - I have to use a game shortcut - luckily steam hasn't decided that the game is unplayable without those upgrades or I don't know what my workaround would have to be. There are other games where the shortcut method won't work. And I keep steam in off-line mode, and for further safety I physically disconnect my ethernet internet connection.

=============================================

What do you guys think of the new issue with Intel vulnerability regarding potentially exposing hackers to knowledge of the information contained in the kernel - the object of furious software patching by Microsoft and everybody else - except maybe AMD where it seems like it is less of an issue.

I was reading The Register yesterday - and I enjoyed the photos of the perfect landing of the two Falcon orbiters, and of Musk's cherry-red car complete with driver which is now orbiting the planet.

Well, I'm off and back to the official graphics card thread where it is lonely indeed, but I know that one day one of you guys will post again. hahaha

Rich

 

I really need threadripper and the platform to come down in price. I wonder how ~Aprils offerings will impact pricing. Supposedly, that's when new revisions will release.
1090t is starting to show it's age lol
I recently ran a test file 4k HEVC mkv, and my guess is since the GTX 570 has no native support, the CPU took on the whole decoding process. Suffice to say, it nearly maxed out. Lite stuttering in my opinion makes it unwatchable.

If I'm to enjoy 4K on my PC, a new monitor, GPU, Board, Memory etc... etc...
Unreal that what I currently own didn't cost me nearly as much when they were nearly state of the art. Gotta love inflation...

 

Omega, my 1070 runs HEVC/X265 flawlessly for the record. My Phenom II setup never had an issue with it with the GTX970 either. Just saying, the CPU should be adequate if the video card supports it.

 

Ouch...
Both 970 and 1070 are expensive lol
The 570 ran me less than $350 when I bought it.
I guess I'm growing impatient. Saving for a house, sitting on substantial funds, and have an upgrade itch from hell
Most of my components are ~2010.
While those new cards may be compatible with my board, I get the feeling they'd be bottlenecked by an old PCI revision.
790XTA-UD4 AM3
Damn... older than 8yrs

 

Any 9 series has software rendering support for HEVC and any 10 series has full hardware CUVID support. The GeForce 1050Ti is reasonably priced and stomps your 570 easily. GeForce 9 was a gigantic leap in efficiency so 9 and 10 are a huge performance jump over previous series'. The 1050Ti is capable of maxing most games at 1080p and will do 4K video with ease.

PCI-E bandwidth shouldn't be a major issue. You have PCI-E 2.0 which is plenty for most PCI-E 3.0 cards as long as you can use a dedicated 16x slot. Only having 8x or PCI-E 1.0 on the other hand would be a notable limit. As long as everything works, your CPU is enough to push a much better video card. My 970 was fine on Phenom II and is fine with my Q9650, so just about anything anywhere near that card would be reasonable. A 1050Ti or similar easily. Or something a little older like a GTX960. Even neater, the GTX950 is actually the first GeForce 10 GPU and has HEVC hardware support.

 

Thanks for your input! Definitely keep it in mind. Much appreciated!
You're right, the 1050ti is reasonably priced. And has nearly 4 times the Ram, which I could use in GTA 5

 

I may have discovered a bug, or the problem I initially had with the 6TB (Above posts). Because, it just happened again. Where it was connected to an external dock before, and then reconnected internally causing some kind of addressing issue, now I installed windows 10 to my main SSD (All other drives disconnected). And after running a job that required writing to the 6TB, some of the files disappeared. Windows reported using the exact same space, just the 1.87TB of files disappeared.

SMART is quite clean, a mere 12.7K hrs. Ran a full erasure to see if it could discover bad sectors. Clearly not.
Upon checking Disk Management in windows tools, it reported the drive being in MBR format. I find that very unusual, since I know that drives larger than 2TB should be GPT. Even my 3's and 4TB drives are GPT. Either it changed itself somehow, or its being MBR incurred some kind of bug that neither microsoft, nor western digital anticipated. I'm pretty sure when I started using it again, I did a mere quick format. Chalked it up to a bad dock (Which I still use by the way). I have a new one on the way (which also gives me a USB 3.0 hub).

My 10TB, nor any other drive has ever done this. I'm left wondering whether the above discovery is to blame, or a bad sata cable, or controller on the hard drive. But given it only happens when during windows re-associations, is very curious.

Since the drive reports being fine, I'm gonna sell it, and be done with it. Probably sell multiple others as well. Really left a bad taste in my mouth lol

 

People don't build computers anymore? lol
I intend on a rebuild very soon. Within 3 - 4 months. I'd like to see what Ryzen 4000 brings to the table. Or, take advantage of the potential price drops of 3000 series. I've been drooling over 3900 and 3950. 3900 being the likely choice. Lest 3950 really drops. I'd really like the x570 boards to drop a little, and come back in stock!!! But maybe x670 will be the choice later.
But, until then I've been tinkering with another toy.
This is a 10TB my book from Western Digital. The price was quite agreeable, so I bought it for a redundant backup drive. But I don't like the 48C temps I seen after a few hours of running. So, as you can see I'm working on an enclosure for both the my book, and my dock. I can see I'm gonna have to go a bit larger to accommodate both. In the end, it will likely be Aluminum. I collect a great deal of scrap metal, but I may opt to buy eighth inch sheets depending on price, and what I have at the time.

What do you guys do for a hot running external drive? I prefer drives no hotter than 42C. With this enclosure, it seems to now be leveling off around 35 - 38C after over 30 minutes . Granted, I recently installed a new AC unit, and it's in the wall opposite this image. I have it set for 73F, and it feels almost cold at times lol

 

Kevin,

Yes I have a bunch of Seagate usb drives - and they are VERY poorly ventilated and get up to 55 degrees if I don't have a fan blowing on them. I put them on top of my movie storage tower, in the cabinet in the kitchen. The largest is a seagate 8 TB. It appears to have a bunch of holes, but they are all decorative. There are only a few holes that actually go all the way into the case. I think it is awful how they "bake" non-enterprise hard drives, which are rated at 40 degrees - and I agree with you, I like them to not run over 42. But they will run a lot hotter than that, except that I keep fans up there blowing on them - computer case fans.

Using a 110 to 12 volt converter, I put a couple of 120mm 800 rpm silent scythe fdb fans up there on each side of the tower top, blowing in toward the usb drives. The fans themselves have fan screens, without the screen material, just in case if I grab one - I don't get hit by the blades.

So if that box above, eventually to turn into aluminum, has a fan built into the back, blowing on the 10 TB drive - that will work. I just had a scythe fan go bad in less than one year in my sunroom tower. I pulled it out - I had not been careful enough in buying it, and I saw that I had bought a straight sleeve bearing instead of the really great fdb bearings - fluid dynamic bearing. So I highly recommend the fdb - designed by Sony - and marketed by Scythe. With those the life is in the 80,000 - 120,000 hour range or longer, and with 8760 hours per year, that's upwards of 10 years.

By the way, I'm now running on a 22nm 6 core 12 thread ivy bridge i7-4930k, on a fabulous sabertooth X79 motherboard with two tiny cooling fans on heat sinks for parts of the motherboard assembly. Since Intel is still stuck at 14nm, I'm not much off being at 22nm. I haven't been overclocking at all - the graphics card is the same as Jeff's - the 8 gig vram gtx-1070.

Jeff had told me all about ryzen, and I was on the verge of getting new tech, but I decided I loved that sabertooth motherboard from the animator relative. But a power supply failure had caused the motherboard to get stuck at "bad cpu" light - so I finally paid $300 on ebay to get another motherboard plus cpu combo, and it is perfect. I was Really surprised to see that the power supply failure had also ruined the graphics board. Good thing I didn't have my new graphics board in it while I was doing the initial workbench cardboard top testing.

Back to usb drives, I have an old ancient seagate 1.5TB which I'm going to phase out, from which I stripped most of the plastic to try to keep it cool, then also a 4 TB flat, a 6 TB upright, and now a 5 TB upright, and an 8 TB upright - I haven't yet tested the 5 and the 8. I use HDTune pro for all my testing and full error scan, and HDSentinel to keep temps, even usb temps, in the system tray display, as well as run hdd diagnostics from time to time. I had the fans on a switch, but occasionally forgot to turn it on, and saw 46 degree hdd temps, so now I just leave the fans on 24/7 even while the tower is in sleep mode with the usb drives turned off.

-Rich

 

Personally never owned an intel CPU/Mobo. Not yet anyway. Timing and pricing hasn't been right yet.

This is a 140mm fan, and the opening isn't even as wide s it could be. So cooling might be slightly better in the final build. Plus I'm considering a push pull intake/outtake design. The final build will be for a dock and external drive after all.

I'm such a tight wad lol I've been watching the Asus Tuf x570 plus board. Newegg finally gets it back in stock, and I change my mind. Granted, they were asking $30 more than I recall seeing it for initially.

Ten four on the sleeve bearings lol Seems like I had a problematic one in the past. Appreciate your input

 

People are definitely still building PCs, but I think this forum may be becoming a bit quiet - probably not helped by me no longer replying to all the threads - What can I say, when you did it for a living for a few years it has slightly less appeal during your spare time!

The Ryzen 3000 series was a real game changer. I find it hard to predict exactly what a difference the upcoming 4000 series will make - it was transformative in the laptop sector, but for desktops I can't be sure. As far as a good balance of productivity, general use and gaming is concerned, the 3600 (standard, non-X) is the chip to have right now. For very reasonable money you get a CPU that bests all but the high-end Intels, in a reasonable power & heat footprint to boot. It's the CPU I'd be looking to upgrade to if I was upgrading my machine now.
Given the current uncertain state of the economy, I can afford to wait a little longer, so hopefully by that time both the 4000 series and the next graphics generation will have arrived. As it stands, even if my i5 7600 is thoroughly outclassed by newer CPUs, the 4 year old GTX1080 is still better than anything you can get for a fairly substantial sum nowadays. I'd like to get at least double the performance before I replace it and as yet, that doesn't come for less than £1000 (i.e. an RTX2080Ti).

For hard disk temperatures, anything in the 40s is fine by me - I only seek to improve ventilation if drive temps reach 50C. Hard disks are typically rated at 60C or higher for max operating temperature and I had a drive run in the 60s for a while (old 7200rpm Seagates ran hot, it shared a caddy with WDs running in the high 40s) that still lasted over 9 years before failing.

 

Appreciate your input.
I got concerned about the temps, as we're entering the very hot season. And given I want to transfer over 9TB, I wanted to ensure they wouldn't overheat whilst out and about. I do tend to worry a bit. Probably too much. Certainly where my data is concerned lol
I have thought about the cheaper/reasonable Ryzen cpu's. I guess I just see better resale value in the 3900 or better. Not to mention am4 motherboard stock being difficult to find(or price gouging). Never mind my being a tightwad lol

 

X570 boards are expensive, but B450 is perfectly good enough nowadays that BIOS updates have usually been applied at the factory to support 3000 series CPUs.

 

Yeah, and active cooling on the x570's is a bit disconcerting lol