The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Wow, Kevin, you did it!!!

Congrats!!!! So UPS is using a lot of overtime - oh, yeah, with isolation everybody is staying home instead of shopping at brick and mortar stores. Take advantage of that Kevin, and make big bucks while the pickin's are ripe.

Sam says you'll have no problem with a good air cooler. I put my Thermaltake Silver Arrow cooler on the i7-4930k, and it's running prime in the 30s core temps. I have two 140mm fans on it - it will take 3 fans total, but then you need shorter memory - so I pulled out 16 gb from the 32 gb that I got from the animator, dropped myself to 16 gb, and I have two fans in push/pull. It came with 2 fans. I bought it 5 years ago, but never pulled it out of the box until beginning of this year, for cooling the sabertooth X79 + i7-4930k combo (6-core 12 thread) that I picked up on eBay for about $300.

(I haven't tried any overclocking, but I see that Jeff is OC'ing his 4770 at 4.2ghz, so I think I should also be able to do that - I'm running stock right now at 3.4, turbo to 3.9 - but the gtx 1070 is the bottleneck on my games which only run in low 30s fps - which is fine for me - I can see that the 1070 is running at 99% - so the cpu is definitely not the bottleneck.)​

Well, I don't blame you Sam - if you already own Far Cry 3 and 4 - yes you might as well play them - however I don't know if they come with the high 4k-ish texture packs - check it out maybe they added a patch.

However, I am pretty sure that Far Cry 5 and New Dawn do come with 4k textures. When I bought the mobo/cpu combo at the beginning of this year, and I had to re-install W7, I wiped my hard drive, then re-installed Far Cry 3. I played a little bit of it to shake out my system - but I couldn't get into it at all, even though I had been "in love" with it back in the day. Compared to FC5 and New Dawn it felt clunky. (Of course, the fact that I had hundreds of hours into FC3 also might have had something to do with it.) I will say, however, that no game has comparable water reflections.

It was interesting, however, in that FC3 used all 6 cores, and almost all 12 threads as I recall - I think I read that they had tried to take full advantage of higher-thread-count processors. By comparison, I don't think FC5 or After Dawn use all those extra threads, but they run great anyway.
Rich

 

Just pulled the trigger on an 8GB kit of RAM for my main PC.

I'm currently running 16GB(2 x 8GB) Team Xtreem LV DDR3-2400 CL10-12-12-31. Just ordered an 8GB(2 x 4GB) kit of G.Skill Trident X DDR3-2400 CL10-12-12-31. Half the capacity, exact same speed, timings, and sub timings.

Was somewhat difficult to find such a high performance kit. I DID find an identical kit to my Team memory on Ebay shipping from Hong Kong, but it sold as I was entering my credit card info, lol. High performance DDR3 in general is getting hard to find nowadays. Especially 8GB sticks.

So I'll have 2 x 8GB + 2 x 4GB for 24GB of RAM total. I figure that's about as much as I need. This platform is getting long in the tooth. A little boost is nice, but I don't care to order an expensive matching kit for 32GB. My cushion has gotten thin with 16GB. I've never filled it yet though I've gotten soooo close. It's getting to where I have to be conscious of my memory footprint sometimes when doing heavy multitasking and working at the same time. A little breathing room will be very nice.

If everything works the way I HOPE, I can just set XMP and both pairs of sticks will play nicely together at 2400Mhz. The board is rated up 3200MHz for four sticks at the same time so fingers crossed. If I have to do it the hard way with manual settings, the biggest issue will probably be that one pair wants slightly more relaxed sub-timings, and I'll just have to set all four sticks to the more conservative settings. Not a huge deal but something to be aware of.

 

Congrats Kevin!!!!! Nice buy. You're super long overdue for it!

 

Yeah, I think a lot of those people skimped on their PC case. This HAF 932 has turned out being the best thing I ever bought for my PC cooling needs. I still see no need to update.

Thanks, Jeff! WAYYY overdue lol

 

Wow, Jeff, nice ram upgrade. Good luck on getting those non-matching pairs to "play nice" with each other - I'm sure you'll work it out.

But are you telling me that my 16 gb might actually not be as much memory as I think it is. Wait - you did say you were multi-tasking. I do not do that. I play a game, and nothing else in the background.

So in that case, do you think I'm okay with 16 gb?

Oh, and I second that thought Kevin - you're in the full tower HAF, right? I've got the full tower spedo. Nothing like full tower to allow you to really crank up some great air cooling with plenty of fans and a nice big hsf Noctua or Silver Arrow. (The air cooler is so big, I had to move my two 140mm door intakes from the inside of the door to the outside of the door - they look kind of cool sitting outside! - gives the case a bit of "extra authority" lol.)
-Rich

 

With the failure of most of the channels on my Scythe fan controllers (and one of the VFDs) and the failure of some of the fans themselves, there are now six fans in the machine that don't work versus when it had the full complement of 9 at its peak. With lower wattage gear like a stock 50W 7600 rather than a 200W overclocked 750, and a single 180W ish GTX1080 rather than almost 700W of HD4870X2s, it isn't really necessary to have more cooling, the case is way overkill for what I currently need. When I next upgrade it'll be to a slightly beefier CPU as I am starting to feel the confines of this one after 3, but effectively 5 1/2 years since it's basically identical to the 6600 it replaced. Therefore, a bigger cooler and some better case cooling will definitely be on the agenda.

For now, my intention is simply to get another Corsair Commander and see how many of the existing fans still work, replacing as necessary. Still not really sure what cooler I will go with for the CPU, I'd prefer not to have to fork out for the full size dual fan 140mm offering but to avoid throttling in long video transcode runs, which this PC will certainly be doing more of when it becomes the fastest again, that may well be what's needed. The last thing I'd want is to put a smaller solo 120 or 92mm cooler on it and discover it wasn't enough and have to get another, after having gone through the palaver of fitting backplates etc.

What may potentially determine the HAF's continued use is if I can deal with the rattle it now has. The singular 7200rpm drive still running in the machine is causing an infuriating rattle which I can only stop by pressing against the side panel, since it's no longer as tight as possible - I will refit the side panel, but I'm pretty sure I've already done that once and it was only a temporary fix. Unfortunately without spending a substantial sum, it will not be practical to do away with mechanical storage in this machine just yet and with both the 2TB 7200rpm games disk and the 4TB 5400rpm basic disk 99%+ full already and the 1TB SSD not far behind, the machine really needs more storage, not less...

 

No problems with my Scythe controller here. Rarely do I have the fans at their max, and only using 3 of 4 channels. Single fan on each.
I suspect the noise in my house would drive you mad lol As the Air conditioner is easily 45 - 50 Decibels. I intend on "Split heat" next year, I just didn't wanna drop 1200+ dollars right now. And really, I'm just not sure how much the unit would increase the home value. I need to talk with an expert first.
I got my 140mm Noctua tower for $55. But I used a $25 gift card earned on a site starting with 'Swag' and ending with 'Bucks'. It took a fair bit of time overall, but mere minutes a day off and on. I may add a cooler master fan to it, depending on the temps I see. But since it's mounted directly next to the exhaust fan, We'll see lol

I can't wait for the day when I have affordable large capacity SSD drives replacing my mechanical drives. If only for the snappier response. Never mind the noise.

 

My drive for silent PCs has had no real attention in the past few years as in early 2017 I had a fibre-optic leased line installed. Due to various screwups with the install process the installation ended up being scheduled quicker than anticipated so I had no time to arrange for power and networking to be installed in a cupboard, so the NTU with its high speed 40mm fans has been sitting on my bedroom floor ever since. It's not exactly super loud, I sleep in the same room as it just fine, but it does make quietening my PCs any further a pointless exercise.

The leased line was supposed to be terminated in February - since you can't migrate them like regular broadband I thought I'd take a bit of a payment holiday before livening one up with another supplier. Here we are in late June and it's still live, despite us no longer paying for it. I guess supplier incompetence also has its upsides...

So when that's shut down I'll see how I feel about spending any more quietening my PC. Considering there are three machines running in here on a daily basis, one of which is my server with 19 mechanical disks in it, I think I've still done pretty well. The only bugbears are as I say, that rattle in the HAF, the dreadful BIOS fan control profile on my file server's 2200G that puts the CPU fan at 100% at only 50C, and of course the noise when any of the machines are at full load. Most of my cooling concerns with a bigger CPU upgrade stem from avoiding throttling rather than silence at idle, but that too may be a concern. Both the RM1000i PSU and the GTX1080 in my main PC were purchased with no regard for noise at all yet are both effectively silent under all conditions. The 1080 of course has some fan noise, but it's really not that noticeable, it has no tonal quality whatsoever, just a little of the white noise you'd expect from a radial cooler.

I had a £150 portable A/C unit for about 7 years but also in 2017 had a proper £2200 split A/C unit fitted (£600 for the unit, £1600 for the 2 man days labour installing it) which is fairly quiet and being in the UK, only needs to work hard during heatwaves, like the one we're just experiencing now.

 

Ahaha both my HAFs, 932 and Advanced, had drive vibration issues. Carried through the floor all the way up to my desk. Got worse the more drives I added. My NZXT H440 has it as well but so far only seems to be a single drive bay. I just put one of my less active HDDs there and it hasn't been an issue since. It's an exceptionally quiet case. I'll never stop bragging about its superiority. It's just the best chassis I've ever used, haha. It's really that good. It's so perfect, excepting its lack of optical bays. Considering I have my I/O maxed I'm forced to a USB3 external drive for media burning anyway.

Cooling isn't as major an issue for me since I moved away from Phenom II X6. However, everything in my PC is in some state of overvolt, and my chipset especially is prone to getting warm without SOME cooling. This high pressure NZXT case isn't perfect but it does the job well. My PC is very well behaved in that regard.

My living room PC in the Corsair Carbide 200R is even less picky. I did new paste and thermal pads on the motherboard a few years ago, and everything runs at stock speeds. So even with just two of the 1700RPM Noctua fans for intake and exhaust, it runs just fine. It's a fair bit quieter than my main PC in the office. The 970 gets a bit hotter under load, but still sits passively in the 30s and 40s just like my 1070. Have considered a mild overclock on the Q9650. 3.6 or 3.8GHz wouldn't be very hard on anything and I can still use SpeedStep's downclocking. In fact I run SpeedStep on my main PC as well. It needs voltage forced to one setting, but can downclock just fine. The 4770K is bouncing between 800 and 1200MHz right now happy as can be. I could probably run it passive most of the time. Bad IHS thermal paste and all.

The coolers on both my GTX970 G1 and GTX1070 G1 are very similar and both run passive under most conditions. I have them set to turn their fans off under 50*C. The bearing noise from the main CPU fans ramping up is more noticeable than the cards under most conditions. No real bearing noise to speak of from the video cards. Just really unobtrusive white noise. Both cards are really quiet and well behaved. I have a friend who is somewhat of an expert on video hardware who tells me both cards are silly overbuilt vs reference cards as well. Apparently Gigabyte went nuts with the G1 Editions. Overbuilt VRMs and overall power delivery.

Portable window AC here. Back at my dad's house central AC. Could get central air here but the window unit works and my power bill isn't anything crazy. Natural gas heat in the winter. Pretty cheap.

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BTW Xbox 360 sold and gone. Storm Gray Xbox One S ordered like new condition. I got scalped because of COVID-19. $309 with shipping included from Ebay. lol like dang. 6 months ago I could have bought one for $180. But it replaces the 360 totally, and plays all the 360 games I have. Plus it has better Xbox original backwards compatibility, and plays a decent list of those older games with some mild enhancements.

I didn't bother with an Xbox One X because there's really nothing it offers that I want. I still play the majority of my games on PC, and the few Xbox One games I might want will run fine on the Xbox One S. Since all Xbox One titles are targeted at the original Xbox One as a baseline, the S does a great job with most titles. It's the same machine hardware-wise with a mild video card overclock and HDR support. Also plays 4K HDR Blurays which none of Sony's consoles this generation do.

This also means that my living room PC can see less usage. Currently it sees the most use as a streaming box for movies from my main PC as well as Netflix, Hulu, etc. I'd like to relegate it to just another server, and use the Xbox One S as the dedicated streaming box for everything. That way the PC doesn't need to be running if it doesn't need to be. My PlayStation 3 used to do that job, but is just on the cusp of being old enough to be problematic. It still does Netflix at 1080p impressively smoothly and the app runs great. However, it doesn't do network streaming very well with high bitrate files. My streaming server has to automatically cut the bitrate of most films in half when streaming to it. And the living room PC has a hard time keeping up with the transcoding sometimes because of its limited CPU power. An Xbox One S can play all of my files without any transcoding on the video. Just throw the sound in a Dolby Digital container and go. It has enough hardware grunt and automatically uses video acceleration on everything so runs my 30GB MKVs raw. And when I want to watch an online streaming service, the PC can be off and I can use the more efficient Xbox with a more convenient wireless controller. A wireless mouse and keyboard works but it's not the same experience as just having a purpose built controller in your hand.

 

Jeff, did you say 30 gig mkvs? Dang! The only thing I downloaded at near that size was the 4k version of Strange Creatures 2, just to test it out vs a 6gig 720p version of the same video. The test told me - don't bother with 4k. But maybe it's just me.

So Sam, that AC you've had all these years - it was a portable? I had pictured a window unit the whole time. So you're rooming with 3 PCs, and a fibre-optic NTU that they haven't gotten around to turning off. Sounds a bit noisy - but actually I run a noisy fan when I go to sleep - I find the white noise helpful for sleeping. Are you still with the same computer company, or have you hopped around a bit?

-Rich

 

30 gig is on the smaller side for 4K, there are some 1080p rips that were around that size for long films like The Godfather etc. - I'm not sure what the biggest I have is, but 66GB for Blade Runner 2049 has got to be up there. For me, there's definitely a noticeable difference between 720p, 1080p and 4k as long as the encode itself is good. If it's a hastily or over-compressed file then you'll never spot the difference. Of course, whether it's necessary or not is another matter. In all honesty, 1080p is perfectly adequate for many types of film, plus of course many "4K" studio released blurays and the likes are actually just studio upscales, or films with special effects still rendered at 1080p, so largely pointless. It's a bit of a minefield working out what content is true 4K beforehand and of course, much of the true 4K content out there is HDR and thus not really appropriate for PC displays. Before I upgraded to a 4K HDR PC monitor I'd also want it to be 120 or 144Hz I think. There's just no reason to replace the UP3214Q or UP3216Q with anything else yet, the gain simply isn't there.

Window A/C units here are a bit less common, more expensive and when i first picked up the unit I was living in student rented accommodation on the ground floor so didn't really want anything that required an open window or any modification. After a few years, particularly after being transported to/from home a few times the exhaust hose on the portable unit split, and while I picked up a replacement off ebay, it wasn't as good as the original being much thinner and leaking far more heat. The unit still works and is occasionally used in my parents' bedroom when it gets excessively hot, but the split unit has redundantised it for my purposes, does the same or better job for a fraction of the noise (and power consumption).
Only one of the PCs, the file server, runs 24/7 - the two desktops are switched off when I'm asleep or away. Honestly the 19 disks, being mostly 5400rpm, make minimal noise. It's only the CPU fan profile that really makes any substantial noise that can be heard over the NTU. Unfortunately the speed of the fans in the NTU does change, completely arbitrarily, every few hours, and in addition to that there are two fans in it that run at almost the same speed, so the superposition effect can sometimes be annoying. I'll be glad to be rid of that and will try and do things properly next time around, but of course originally speaking my room was intended to become just a server/work room by now and my parents' bedroom was meant to have become my bedroom. With the economy and now Covid, they haven't got round to retiring down to their place in Cornwall yet, so I'm still stuck with all the equipment in my bedroom

Not sure when I last updated you - I've been working for my current employer since April 2018 - the third IT company I've worked for now, but one I've known for far longer. The transfers I've made have all been within companies I know so for three jobs I've only ever had one interview. Where I work now used to be a supplier of my first employer, and a partner of my second. They're not remotely local, pre-covid I worked from home 4 days a week (right now of course it's all 5) unless I had to visit a client, and only visited the office once a week as it's a 70 mile drive. Ordinarily I'd never have applied for a company so far away but since it's one I knew well, they were the first people I reached out to when things started going wrong with my previous employer.

 

I spent a lot of time in communication with my favorite release group, Grym, trying to replicate their encoding scheme, and it paid off. Scene release groups(ripped content uploaders) like to really squeeze the films down and even reputable groups come up with some really anemic encodes. Grym(alongside a few others) is the exception and I have modeled my encoding scheme off theirs directly. I re-encode the majority of my 1080p films at ~14Mbps with some custom quality tweaks. In contrast most "large/high quality" 1080p encodes you'll find floating around the internet are around ~10Mbps or even less.

It's been very reliable for me, and I would almost go so far as to call the video quality lossless. I can A/B with an un-touched Remux with my face right in the display, and the picture is flawless. I won't accept even the slightest of micro-artifacts in the most challenging scenes. For average length films, anywhere from 10-20GB is common using this method. For very long films, ~35GB isn't unheard of. Lord of the Rings and The Godfather indeed run around this size. It works out very well in most cases, and is more about saving space WITHOUT sacrificing video quality(rather than saving as much space as possible). I find my method to be a good middle ground. Much smaller than raw remuxes, but nowhere near the usual butchered upload of a film you'll find floating around the internet.

For any films whose native bitrate falls under ~14Mbps, I leave the video raw and just use MakeMKV to mux together a playable MKV file. Lots of old MPEG2 Blurays are low bitrate. The Matrix trilogy for example are earlier Blurays and with just the raw video and the lossless audio tracks each film is around 10-11GB a piece. No downcoding needed or desired in that case. I always leave the native audio tracks intact for every Bluray.

It took a long time to dial in my treatment of different Blurays. I consider my digital archive of films 1:1 quality for the purposes of viewing. I've had a couple serious videophiles not able to tell them from a retail disc already. Between my own encodes and those sourced from elsewhere, I try to maintain a very consistent level of quality. This is a serious collection.

No need for 4K files yet, and have yet to come up with a reliable scheme for playing them. Software support for 4K video is just fine and running regular DXVA or CUVID both PCs run 4K just fine. However it's very demanding to run using MadVR's custom renderer. Too demanding to do well. However, being a 4K HDR capable device I'll have to do some experimenting with the Xbox One S. It might give me the motivation I need to start replacing some of my collection with 4K HDR instead. I would really like to start collecting 4K Blurays and that was a major reason I got the Xbox One S. Maybe a 4K TV with next year's tax return. I've been holding off.

 

Jeff I should have known with your attention to graphics detail, that you'd have a serious video collection virtually equal to the quality of the bluray! I can't imagine the size of the 4k files you'll start collecting once you get that great set.

Sam, so your folks have a place down in Cornwall - is that near the coast? Is that where they have the boat? I guess I shouldn't pry and ask what "started to go wrong" with your prior employer, but that is pretty cool that you hopped right into your present job - even if the company is a fair distance away. But they are a partner of the company that you just left - that didn't create any problems? (Hey what are you guys doing being my partner, but stealing one of my valuable people?)

- Rich

 

Hah, it's a long story. Not one I mind telling, but it'd take a while. 'Hopped right in' is right, I stopped working for one company on the Thursday of the Easter holiday weekend, had a 4-day holiday at a LAN party, then started fresh on the Tuesday morning at the new company.

It's all above board - my first employer (I'll abbreviate to CB), me and my manager worked under a larger 30-member organisation which, while a good place to gain experience, was a pretty horrible place to be an employee. Me and said manager resigned together after an incident in 2013 and essentially formed our own company (TT) - I had no stake in it, but was integral to getting it off the ground. The third company (II) who I work for now were a contractor of CB who we used to outsource work to until they fell out with CB due to unpaid bills. Since we knew II and had a good relationship with them, we used them for financial backing and the credibility of 20+ years in business to get TT off the ground. It was intended that eventually the companies would merge. Ultimately, however, the two company bosses (my old manager and my current manager) didn't get on commercially and the two companies became almost entirely independent of each other, but for a small number of services being provided to each other. During that time I was on both companies' payroll as I worked for them both. Eventually I became so busy with the work TT gave me, it wasn't possible to contract for II effectively so I became full-time at TT. This lasted until early 2018 when the pressures of two people running an IT company for 200+ users led to a falling out between me and my boss, so after 6 1/2 years working for him under the two companies I reluctantly decided to resign, losing a fair amount of perks in the process, but such was necessary for sake of my sanity and health.

II was the logical company to reach out to as I knew them very well by that stage, initially just for advice but since it turned out they were hiring, I ended up being taken onboard with barely a second thought. I'm slightly less well off now than before, but fairly content. Rather than working a 40-50 hour week and having to commute to and from London every day I (before covid) mostly work from home, but got out and about just often enough to keep me from getting too bored. It's also facilitated a move to management which I wouldn't ordinarily have wanted but in hindsight is probably better for me as I can tackle the technical problems I'm good at and delegate the ones I'm not, rather than be stuck with everything whether or not it was something I could handle!

The part of Cornwall my parents have a place in is indeed a coastal town, their place doesn't have a sea view but it's only a few minutes walk down to the harbour. The boat is still here in Essex at the moment and isn't being used very much lately! Kudos for remembering as I don't recall mentioning it for quite some time!

 

Well cheap 50" 4K HDR TV scored on sale from WalMart. I was down there today and just decided to take a look. Lo and behold they're having a really nice sale. lol I usually end up pretty happy with impulse buys.

https://www.tclusa.com/products/hom...lass-4-series-4k-uhd-led-roku-smart-tv-50s421

Certainly not amazing but for the price I paid it can't be beat $250 on sale. I paid $300 for my 43" a while ago and thought that was a great deal. It has been really fantastic over the past few years. Great picture quality and excellent color accuracy. It's not the best but it's a great budget TV. The 50" 4K version is just as satisfying. It's not an ultra high quality 4:4:4 display for crisp PC desktop usage but it's easily enough for movie viewing(no 4K content yet but I'll try some soon). The SDR colors are definitely correct, and it matches the 43" in color accuracy and vibrance. Just tweak contrast and brightness a hair and it's ready to go out of the box with great color.

The HDR is indeed real on this one though it doesn't have enough nits of brightness to meet true Dolby Vision or HDR10 standards(though it's technically HDR10). That said, it's a night and day difference from my 1080p SDR model, literally. It definitely works using Red Dead Redemption 2 as my metric. Everything detects as HDR compatible on the Xbox One S and the display quality is brilliant. Or at least blacks seem proper and not washed out which I've seen on worse displays. It's nowhere near as good as my friend's ~$2000 Sony flagship TV but it's a really nice upgrade over what I had and a nice addition to my home cinema.

It also has fake 120Hz CMI which is okay I guess. It can't do real 120Hz but it does motion interpolation. For movies it kinda sucks but for watching Youtube and cartoons and stuff it's actually pretty nice. Will probably end up ignoring it as the real draw here is the working HDR in such a cheap TV.

50" is as large as I could fit in the space I had and it's nice to finally have a display with size worthy of my sound system. I will say Lord of the Rings and Star Wars look fan-freaking-tastic on it streaming via the Xbox One S. The original Xbox also displays nicely on it and it has the appropriate scaling to show the games properly. It's no show stopper, but it's a quite decent display for the money. It will be seeing a lot of use in the near future. Also, no more PS3 for streaming means no more Sony Cinavia DRM, hehe.

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As far as work goes I'm still at the plant, haha. I've been promoted to packaging leadworker which essentially means I take attendance for my section and get used as a gopher on slow days. It's far from a bad job. Benefits are okay and my wage is very reasonable for the area I'm in.

I bought a trailer home so I could live on the cheap. It's been an adventure, haha. Took a lot of work to make it a nice place to live, but I think it's finally becoming a home. I own the building, and lot rent and utilities are ludicrously cheap. Did a lot of work repairing and weatherizing but I think it paid off. It's not a very large home but I can live in it pretty comfortably. The living room is just the right size for my home theater as well Also, new ISP with no copyright letters, haha. My media collection is expanding. Downgraded from 200Mbps to 150Mbps but $20 a month cheaper and still more than enough for my needs.

 

Jeez Jeff, you were just talking about 4k - and POW - you went out and did it! Sounds like fun! So did you say you are playing Red Dead Redemption 2? You're playing the console version, right? I ask because I did download the PC version, and I did play it for one hour to make sure it worked. It took my new 6-core 12-thread down to a bit under 30 fps - but that was in the snow - and I still successfully shot-gunned the wolves and perceived no lag. I haven't toyed with overclocking the i7-4930k - the bottleneck is the gtx 1070 - but 30 fps works for me. I did play with the settings, and dialed back a couple, but it's still pretty much ultra.

That's cool that you're in a trailer, which you own free and clear. But it's VERY cold where you live - so were you able to shoot insulation into the walls somehow? Is it a one bedroom? Can I guess that it's not really a 7-foot wide camping trailer, like the office I'm sitting in right now, but more like a house trailer with perhaps 10-foot width. What is it, about 10 x 30? I actually did live in a trailer like that one time, for about 6 months - in Petersburg, Virginia - in the snow. The heater worked okay - I wasn't cold.

Sam - that prior work arrangement was almost as complicated as Rubik's cube. But for taking a very slight hit on income, it's nice to drop a whole lot of stress - plus being able to delegate out the few things that you don't want to do. Yes I remember the boat because I think boats are very cool. Unlike Jeff who's land-locked for hundreds (thousands?) of miles, I am fairly near the coast myself! Though Jeff, you probably have some big lakes around - which counts.

Rich

 

Rich, it's a 14' x 60' manufactured home. 2 bedroom. Full size bathroom. Full plumbing and HVAC. Laundry hookups. Not big by any stretch but far from tiny. Really not bad at all. I get more square footage and PRIVACY for far cheaper than a local apartment. All I pay is lot rent and mobile home tax which is just stupendously cheap, and then utilities. It wasn't very well insulated when I bought it but I've since touched upon all the windows, insulated some of the floors and walls, carpeted the hallway, and repaired some roof issues and it's much better. Natural gas furnace so should be cheap enough in winter.

Interior and exterior both in pretty decent shape to begin with. Just poorly maintained. It had been remodeled nicely at one point, and then tenanted by a family that didn't take care of it. Brand new carpets before I bought it. Newly ceramic tiled and refinished bathroom(really surprised me at the showing). Decent kitchen cabinetry. I walked into quite a mess and bought the building for basically pocket change. In the end, it essentially worked out that I got the home for free. They just didn't want the vacant home, and were willing to let me pay scrap price in order to occupy it. The appliances in it are worth more than I paid if they were to be sold used, if you want an idea. A week or so of prep later and dang it's actually a decent house. A little paint and it was ready to move in. Anyone from a middle class background would be comfortable enough in it. I like to keep a fairly nice home.

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Red Dead 2 yes I borrowed a friend's Xbox One copy of the game to try it out. Not really a comparison to the PC or even the Xbox One X version but more than adequate to test the HDR function of my display. Works great!

 

Well, at 14 x 60, that's way bigger than my 10 x 30 estimate, Jeff.

It doesn't really matter, but is it actually on wheels - or when you called it a trailer, were you sort of using that term to refer to it, as a manufactured home? It probably did come with wheels initally - but perhaps not necessarily - they move them to the permanent location, and possibly in some cases they remove the wheels.

Anyway, that doesn't matter.

Yeah, it sounds like you really scored a great purchase. Congratulations!!

So, Red Dead Redemption 2 - there was so much talk about the first game which definitely was NEVER ported over to PC, I have been waiting for this one, and in the 1 hour run-through it seemed kind of interesting. I gather that I am in for an unusually-engrossing game experience once I dive in and spend some serious time with it.

Would you agree with that?
Rich

 

The wheels are removed but the axles remain as that's what makes it a "Mobile Home" and allows me to pay almost nothing on it for tax and insurance. An extremely common scheme at least where I live. It's set on cinder blocks on a leveled concrete pad, with aluminium side skirting. It's a trailer, it's just a lot more substantial than some might be familiar with. They're common around here, as a cheap way to own a decent home. It's definitely still just a "Mobile Home" or "Trailer Home" and the lot is in a "Mobile Home Community". So as far as my knowledge goes, it's about the most common type of Trailer Home in this area. My landlord says after the work I put into fixing it up, he'd easily ask $20,000+ for it. Which for a 70's mobile home is not a small amount. The worth of the home is disproportionately small for what they actually are. They depreciate very quickly, and it takes a lot of work to maintain their value. So that's a nice compliment for this particular unit.

That said, I did get a fantastic price on it, and my monthly costs are very minimal. Very comparable to low income housing in the area. Which is to say, very cheap. With my wages I have no problem living comfortably and am happy to have a nice little home of my own Easy to maintain, small, and manageable. But big enough for a little family expansion someday maybe... Nothing in particular in mind.

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Red Dead Redemption 2 is a bombastic game and totally worth your time. Definitely play it all the way through and enjoy all the little details. It's easily equivalent quality to GTA5, though probably a little more serious in tone. It's a celebration of old John Wayne and Clint Eastwood films.

I really like the first game and it's definitely a shame that it never got a PC release. That said, the closest you can get is playing the game on an Xbox One X. It introduces some small enhancements to the graphics as well as displaying the game in 4K. That said, it runs just fine on my little old Xbox One S at 720p, and the graphics, sound, and production quality are all top-notch. Alongside Red Dead Redemption 2 with HDR both games are an awesome showcase for what these cheap little game boxes can manage. I don't have a very large collection of modern console games but the ones I do have, have all been worth my time. I still have a pretty massive PS3 collection though, haha. All the good stuff and some hard to find favorites that are only available on that generation of console.

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RAM upgrade underway. Currently the board does NOT like booting with all four sticks, haha. To be expected. We'll see what it takes to get it to accept all four. Both kits work wonderfully in both banks of slots at XMP settings, but when put together do not like it at all. The board is throwing out some funny auto settings for the G.Skill kit with XMP disabled so my guess is the incompatibility is there. Just have to find some universal settings that both banks will run and work from there. I can't believe that they just won't work together at all. There's always a common ground.

EDIT: Got it working, haha. Sitting at 1600MHz CL9 all four sticks right now. It'll be some trial and error to see what the board wants to do. The XMP profiles for the sticks ARE different. Same timings but the G.Skill kit is at a 1T command rate. That would prevent the other sticks from booting on its own. Hopefully that means they'll all do 2400MHz with a little tweaking.

 

Just put through an order for this lot - I needed some more space in my main PC and the LAN PC to keep my games library up to date. If I started filling an M.2 with game installs and then later upgraded the CPU etc. I'd want to start with a fresh windows install as I usually try and do when major hardware changes happen. I therefore figured, I may as well do both at the same time. Also threw in a 14TB mechanical disk for my on-site server, not because it needs anywhere near that much extra space but because having another large single disk will make reorganising the file system around bigger disks so much easier.

AMD Ryzen 3700X
Gigabyte B550 AORUS Elite
32GB (2x16) Corsair LPX Black 3200
Crucial MP510 1.92TB NVME SSD
Noctua NH-D15
Corsair Commander Pro Fan Controller

Crucial MX500 2TB

Toshiba MG07ACA14TE

Since the i5 7600 setup in this machine sort of works (just needing separate PCIe network and sound cards), I'll redo the paste on its cooler at some point after the upgrade and get it working in one of my spare boxes.

I considered a 3900X but the only application I use that needs that much CPU power is Handbrake and the results on how much better it is than the 3700X are very mixed. Half the benchmarks I see show a 20% improvement which isn't really worth the 60% higher price. The other half show a 50% improvement, which would be. That uncertainty plus the extra power, heat and noise I'm not sure is worth the gamble. The 3700X is already quite a transformative upgrade over the i5 7600, so should do fine for the foreseeable.