New gaming rig build

[FlyingPenguin]

Because I am a magnanimous, charitable and humble person, and I have so many extra frames, I award each and every one of you on the forum, ONE of my extra frames. Ownership for said frame will be assigned via a Non-Fungible Token.

[FlyingPenguin]

One more change. Since enabling the frame cap, Valheim and Flight Simulator are the only games that allow the GPU to hit 100% because neither of those will get anywhere near 100 FPS. Temps get mighty mighty high sometimes, so after doing some reading, I installed the 3rd fan in the front.

I used to think those cases with a wall of fans in the front were just for show, but it seems like modern cases are actually designed for it, in order to create a massive amount of positive pressure in the case. It does work. My GPU temperature dropped 7 degrees, and that's nothing to sneeze at. Also dropped the CPU temp a couple of degrees.

Also, a 2 TB SATA HDD (spinning rust) drive arrived in the mail today, which I installed in the CD-Rom bay up top, and I'm using as a backup drive for image files, drivers, game backups, etc. It replaces a portable external 1TB drive I was using for that purpose.

[Losbot]

My GPU temperature dropped 7 degrees, and that's nothing to sneeze at.

Take that!!!

[Err]

If your CPU is still not as cool as you like it, you may want to consider a Noctua NH-D15. This sucker is giant though and it may be too tall for your case.

https://www.amazon.com/Noctua-NH-D15-heatpipe-NF-A15-140mm/dp/B00L7UZMAK

[FlyingPenguin]

Same height as mine, but that's a beast. Thx, I'll keep that as an option. So far temps seem to be staying reasonable now with the 3rd front fan. I'm just going to start monitoring clock speeds to see if the thermal limiters are kicking in during heavy gaming.

[Pugsley]

That looks similar to the coolermaster V8 that I have been running forever... except with an extra fan for some reason.

[FlyingPenguin]

I am annoyed that the fad in newer case designs is to eliminate the HDD LED, and this case is one of those.

I really like having a HDD indicator for basic diagnostics: If it's not booting into Windows, or the desktop is unresponsive, but the light is flashing, that tells me something. If the machine locks up and needs to be restarted, I'd like to know if the drive is being accessed and try not interrupt any writes to avoid registry corruption.

So I ended up running my own drive light. I've got a few spare harnesses on the shelf and I cannibalized one. I mounted the light behind the front panel's air intake so I can see it flickering through the filter. Does the job.





Also the headphone adapter came in. I ordered this one which doesn't look as cheap as some of the others. There are some reviews that say it breaks easy, but I suspect it's someone who walked away with their headset on and yanked it. Looks rugged enough, but yeah it's more likely to break than the plastic-ey looking moulded ones. I put a strain releif on it to prevent it from getting yanked. For 7 bucks, if it breaks it breaks.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01I3A47I4/