A couple more little touches to my precious. Don't say that out loud in public :D

>>35712 Nice! It's the little touches that make all the difference :D

Thanks! Up and running again.

Nice! Looks neat and tidy :)

Leak test with air done. Filled with the coolant. And currently doing cable management.

>>35690 It looks like some sort of mini chemistry lab in that picture :D

I'm pleased you've set a realistic finish date ;P

Doing some well deserved maintenance and also going to redesign the loop. The front 240 radiator is going to go and it will be replaced by a side mounted 360 rad.

Currently redoing the hard tubing, it will also have soft tubing for ease of access. Will also need a M20 washer. Hopefully it will be done before Cyberpunk 2077 comes out ;)

>>34785 Well that sucks :/

RIP CaseLabs :(

http://www.caselabs-store.com/

Thunderstorm wasn't as impressive as in Rotterdam a couple of days ago but it thankfully cooled down a lot! Room temp is now at 27C. And I did the thing I said I was gonna do.

>>34735 Just had a nice thunderstorm thankfully power stayed up :D

Thank you. I think tomorrow..I mean today (Saturday) I'll try to do the rest as severe thunderstorms are incoming. :D

>>34723 Nice :D

After cable management.

Still a work in progress though.

Before cable management

>>34718 Yes I do XD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgqEIp2YmtE

Oh, do you also have a dial-up modem? Cause I'd like to let the neighbors know when I'm going on-line.

>>34713 I have a 105mb IDE HDD if you need one, and you may as well have my 5 1/4" floppy drive so you can install my copy of windows 3.11 XD

One M.2 sata ssd of 1TB (Cruxial MX500) and one M.2 nvme ssd of 500Gb (Samsung 970 EVO). I already stored bigger files (games, series & movies) on the server and on the, now external, 2TB hard drives. I never had more than 300GB on the 2TB WD and as it was a Green model it was awfully slow. So now it serves as another backup disk.

Man, IDE that's a looooong time ago..I would need an SATA to IDE adapter, and an IDE disk too. How long would it take to install W10 on it, hours or days?

>>34709 So you've gone back to IDE cables ;D
So you have multiple NVME drives in it now or just one big one?

As of today my pc is SATA cable free!

>>34670 I'd have burned them too. I never did like Norton, the picture of him that was always on the box of his products made him look like such a smug bastard :D

Cool guy indeed. I would've burned Norton but they do that pretty good themselves ;)

Most of the data I store is already backed-up to my server. If any of my drives fail it isn't a problem. Luckily destroying an ssd is easier than a hard drive disk.

He has clarified this statement recently and said that using spinrite as a maintenance tool is pointless on SSDs, but as a recovery tool is as useful as ever. He even mentioned that someone had been in touch with him to mention that they had used it to recover and SD card that had failed and USB sticks.

It's without doubt the most powerful drive recovery tool. He spoke recently of how Norton tried to buy it from him many years ago but didn't offer a good price. Steve turned them down so then Norton made a copy of the software buy seeing what spinrite did to a drive and copying the behaviour. Norton hit problems when people would call them for help with a drive and they didn't really understand the software and why it did what it did. In the end norton just referred customers to Steve for help. He was very happy to help them once they purchased a copy of spinrite :D
Steve could have sued norton but didn't want the hassle as he was happy that spinrite was still selling well. That's the kind of nice guy he is :)

>>34651 SpinRite isn't as useful for SSD's. Gibson said that he could "see absolutely no possible benefit to running SpinRite on a solid-state drive" and later "SpinRite is all about mechanics and magnetics, neither of which exist, by design, in an SSD".

Considering I'm going full ssd in the near future I'll pass on this software.

cheers!

Heat spreaders don't have fins they just even out the temperature unlike a heatsink that, as you say, should have fins to remove heat. But I think you're right that the MSI thing is just a piece of crap. I think it's just something to sell to the MSI fan-boys.

Should you have drive problems in the future check out SpinRite, it's amazingly powerful for fixing drive errors. It's made by Steve Gibson, the same guy who made the Spectre checking software.

I once had a Corsair Force 3 ssd that had a faulty temp sensor, still works till this day. And I use to have an OCZ ssd that failed on the first boot. These were all early ssd's from back in da day. Nowadays I don't have issues with ssd's.

67C for a sata ssd is toasty but acceptable in a laptop.

The MSI 'heatsink/spreader' isn't that. It can't dissipate heat cause it doesn't have heat fins, it's just a thin flat piece of metal.

My current ssd, 500GB Crucial MX200 M.2, averages 46C and the maximum temp it's hit is 67C. The 1TB hdd I have averages 33C and the max is 43C.

Sometimes companies will use 'heat spreaders' to even out the temperature across the entire surface of a device to avoid spots of very high temperature. Perhaps that is what MSI intended!?!

I'm honestly not worried about SSD or HDD temps. I've been using PC's for 25+ years and never had any issues with drive temps :D

>>34639 "..restricted like in a laptop. Although as the shell of my alien is made of aluminium I guess a heatsink that touched between the m.2 and the shell would be quite effective."

As I noticed with the 960 and 970 M.2 plus the standard MSI heatshield (single side), it was barely more effective as without a shield. The EK is double sided, sandwiched to say.

So I guess you can test it without, single sided and lastly doubled sided for best result. Bare (& bear) in mind that M.2 ssd are hotter than sata ssd's so temps of around 50-70C are normal.

The reason why I changed it was this video from Gamers Nexus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIkWnnDjhkk

>>34639 Does your m.2 get toasty too?

In the first test >>34635 I didn't use any heatsink but it did have airflow. In the second test I covered it with the EK-M.2 NVMe Heatsink and it also had airflow.

https://www.highflow.nl/aircooling/hdd-coolers/ek-m.2-nvme-heatsink-black.html?sl=en

>>34638 Doh! Of course it's M.2 if it's an NVME Drive :S

So what kind of heat sink did you use? I guess you have more space in a desktop to dissipate heat so you're not restricted like in a laptop. Although as the shell of my alien is made of aluminium I guess a heatsink that touched between the m.2 and the shell would be quite effective.

Yeah, m.2 2280. As far as I know is that the 970 is only available as the m.2 form factor.

Wow! That's pretty toasty. Is it an M.2 or a 2.5" drive?

Ran a few tests and it gets toasty. Now for normal use it won't get that hot but I've added a heatsink to it anyways.

Got myself another M.2 ssd, this time a 500GB 970 cause why not, right?

>>34576 Yeah, that's pretty sweet :)

ugh no, that's an asus X.X

If I had too much money I would go for a different desk, this wobbly crapea one is driving me nuts. I've already picked one -->

I've just found your next build...

Latency Monitor test on an Asrock H81M-VG4

>>34447 Good. To be honest Spectre isn't currently a big threat anyway so don't worry too much about that :)

Well, the beta was the latest Spectre proof bios. Luckily most modern mobo's you can flash back to a previous bios. And having experienced borked pc's in the past I also had the current stable bios on the usb stick.

>>34445 I wouldn't ever use a beta bios unless it was the only way to make the mobo work. Bugs in the bios that cause big problems can only be fixed by the manufacturer, although usually these days bios's use a side by side method that allows the old bios to remain on the chip in case the update fails. There always remains a chance that system can fail too.

I remember the first mobo I bought was for an Intel P166-MMX it was specifically made for the P166-MMX and P200-MMX. I installed it and the system wouldn't boot. After talking to the manufacturer it turned out the board would need a bios update to be able to work with those chips even though they were the only two chips that could be used with that board!?! I had to return it for one that already had the updated bios. As it was my first build by myself I was sure I'd fucked it along with the £1800 that computer cost to build, but thankfully not :D

I should have just been happy with 486-SX25 it had all the power I could ever need XD

So far the newest mobo (MSI Z370) has the latest and greatest bios.
The older Z87 (Asus) & Z97 (Asus & MSI) mobo's don't. Although the Z97 Asus did had a beta bios, which borked my pc :I

>>34443 It mostly comes down to what chipset the board has these days and therefore what features it has. The biggest concern is always to go with a company with good bios update support. So probably none of them! XD

>>34442 There isn't much choice for AM4 M-ITX mobo's though.

>>34441 Well just don't buy an ASRock mobo, they're even worse :D

>>34440 Oh nice I'll listen to that.

Those patches didn't solve everything as I tested it before I did the bios update. I still had one in the red but I don't remember which one (forgot to snap a pic).

As for my little HTPC, it's a(sus) fucker anyway. I successfully flashed the latest bios BUT it fucked with the os as it couldn't find the OS disk anymore. Luckily I could flash it back to the previous one. But damn..dodge that bullet.

As it turns out Asus has a lot of issues with high latency but and however within 3 months I'll buy an AMD Ryzen 3 2200G cpu, a non-asus mobo, and some memory and be done with it.
You want an M-ITX mobo? ;D

>>34437 I see you're using Steve Gibson's software, great guy, does a really good podcast on internet security every week, security now on twit.tv.

Microsoft are making microcode updates available to patch CPU's so you don't need to worry about BIOS updates...
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4078407/update-to-enable-mitigation-against-spectre-variant-2
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4090007/intel-microcode-updates

>>34436 Poor little HTPC. Mine is an i3 too, not fast but they get the job done :D

And one more with XMP on, HEPT off, and High performance energy settings.

And because of >>34437 I redid a Cinebench R15 benchmark with the default bios settings.

Did a bios update, so at least it's somewhat better protected.

And lastly I checked my htpc O_O

An Asus MVII Impact (1150) with an i3.

I also tested the latency of my VR-rig, which is of the older socket 1150 and has with the i7-4790k processor.

Looks good.

This was after I turned HEPT off. Before it was a bit higher but still in the green.

http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon

I tried something like that when I was young. The next best thing would be using liquid nitrogen..also handy for killing and cooking (yes, in that order).

5Ghz!?! Good luck. This might help... ;D

So since it's blazing hot outside and I have nothing better to do, I decided to slowly over clock the 8600K.
Currently got it stable at 4.5Ghz, goal is 5GHz!

SWEET!!! :D

NVME only really shows a huge improvement over SATA when working with very large files, but is still faster for just about every thing. However I'm still tempted to have an NVME OS drive too. :)

My next drive purchase will probably be a 1TB 860 Evo, £245, but the 970 Evo is only another £105 so it's very tempting :D

I also changed the OS drive from a sata ssd to a nvme M.2 ssd. Although it doesn't make windows start much faster due to whatever reason(s), most programs do start-up fasttt.

Cinebench R15 OpenGL & CPU test, left the 4790k, right the 8600k.

Note: oddly the 8600k minimum core speed is 1,31Ghz while the 4790k does 800MHz.

ps: ignore the cpu clock, both ran at max turbo

Fully up and running!

Still to do:
keep the leds on or off?
Find the sweet spot for the pumps to run. Currently at 20% @ 37C then 50% @ 55C and lastly 75% @ 62C. I really don't like the pumps running too loud.
Getting Photoshop 7 to install (old I know, but it worked on the previous W10)
Do some benchmarks; Cinebench R15, AS SSD

I actually wanted to do the swap in the weekend but it only took 3 hours (yay, watercooling).

So overnight I did the air leak test (0.5 bar). This afternoon I'll fill her up and make her scream :)

Windows 10 plus the drivers installed.
Next up swap the mobo's

Bought myself a small toy, can you spot it?

Sweet! Pretty sure this will be using pulse width modulation (PWM) to precisely control the fans speeds. So much better than the cheap controllers that just use a variable resistor and therefore burn off the unwanted voltage as heat :/

Remember, never underestimate the importance of controlling your wind! ;D