General PC Help Thread 2

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KjGarly
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by KjGarly » Tue Feb 04, 2020 10:49 am

Jenuall wrote:State of that cable management. :dread:

What case have you got? You should just be able to google the specs for the case and it will tell you what motherboard sizes it supports. It certainly looks big enough for a standard ATX but it will depend on things like the mounting points etc.


The case is a Kolink Aviator (White) should be fine, asked on Reddit too and others said an ATX should fit fine. Bought an MSI Z270 for just under £60 which will do and is compatible with my 7th Gen CPU and bought another 2 x 8GB sticks of ram (Crucial Ballistix Sport LT 3200 MHz, DDR4) which were delivered last night. They only go as far as 2400 with my current board so will do nicely with the Z270 when I can actually overclock them. The cables were nice and tidy until I swapped out my PSU :slol: :fp:

Just need to flog the ram I bought last week from Amazon on eBay which should recoup the cost of last nights ram purchase (2x8GB G.Skill 2400s Gaming)

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Jenuall
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Jenuall » Tue Feb 04, 2020 4:50 pm

Nice.

I'm so looking forward to doing an upgrade soon. I'm still on relatively meagre speed DDR3 RAM at this point so jumping to a new CPU with some super fast DDR4 is going to be great! :D

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KjGarly
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by KjGarly » Tue Feb 04, 2020 6:40 pm

Jenuall wrote:Nice.

I'm so looking forward to doing an upgrade soon. I'm still on relatively meagre speed DDR3 RAM at this point so jumping to a new CPU with some super fast DDR4 is going to be great! :D


The 16GB 3200 Crucial sticks were £50 off Amazon, keep an eye on HotUKdeals as soon as I saw them on them jumped straight on them.

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Albert
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Albert » Tue Feb 04, 2020 6:56 pm

What's wrong with the cable management? I thought it looked pretty tidy.

It's a lot better than my setup with its loose hanging hd and non screwed face plates etc. :lol: :toot:

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Jenuall
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Jenuall » Tue Feb 04, 2020 7:33 pm

Albear wrote:What's wrong with the cable management? I thought it looked pretty tidy.

It's a lot better than my setup with its loose hanging hd and non screwed face plates etc. :lol: :toot:

The cable comment was more of a joke than anything. ;)

I've definitely seen worse!

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Dowbocop
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Dowbocop » Wed Feb 05, 2020 8:04 am

I don't know if I'm the only person that does this, but I have a spare hard drive in one of the bays of my PC that I haven't set up to use because I was tidying and trying to find space for stuff, and I thought that it may as well go in one of the spare holes in my case to get it out of the way. I'm not sure if this is genius tidying or insane case management :shifty:

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That's not a growth
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by That's not a growth » Wed Feb 05, 2020 8:30 am

Cable management is 90% hiding the cables, rather than making them pretty. It's why the back of the bit of the case you attach the motherboard to has so many places for cable times - and even comes with preinstalled velcro straps fairly often.

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Jenuall
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Jenuall » Wed Feb 05, 2020 9:10 am

I always have grand plans about ensuring my builds have insanely tidy cabling ... but then I end up with getting it good enough and thinking "strawberry float it, that'll do!" :lol:

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Sat Feb 08, 2020 8:04 pm

Early draft of a potential build with rough prices

Case - Raijintek Metis Evo - £119
PSU - Corsair SF Series SF600 SFX 600 W Fully Modular 80 Plus Gold - £98
Mobo - ASRock Intel Z390M ITX/ac MiniITX Motherboard - £152
CPU - Intel Core i7 9700F 9th Gen Desktop Processor/CPU Retail - No iGPU - £311
CPU Cooler - Noctua Low Profile NH-L9i Intel CPU Cooler - £36
RAM - Corsair 16GB DDR4 Vengeance LPX 3200MHz Memory Kit - £70
GPU - Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2060 MINI ITX OC 6G - £280


Need to figure out the case fans but I'm thinking a big intake fan at the front (200mm Noctua) with a couple of smaller ones as output fans, kind of like this



I've never built my own PC before (my brother will be doing the grunt work) so any advice and suggestions would be most welcome.

Edit: would it be worth getting the slightly more expensive CPU with an onboard GPU ?

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Xeno
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Xeno » Sat Feb 08, 2020 8:53 pm

First thing is set it up outside the case (build it on the mobo box) to make sure all the parts work as that case looks like it would be a pain to take it all out and stick it all back in again. It does look like a nice case as well.

Regarding the cpu I wouldn't worry as long as everything starts up with the GPU.

Oh and read the mobo manual.

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KjGarly
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by KjGarly » Tue Feb 11, 2020 8:10 pm

Managed to switch over the motherboard and have it turn on first time (after a nose around the bios settings and overclocking my ram) did have to borrow my dads diamond cutter to slice a bigger square out of the case due to the switch from a micro atx to atx and the cpu cooler plate not fitting properly with the chance of warping the MB. That gooseberry fool took hours :evil: Ordered some more fans for the empty slots at the top.

Better monitor next, preferably G Sync compat.

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Wed Feb 12, 2020 4:13 pm

Trying to choose case fans atm and I don't really know what I'm doing.

I was thinking of getting something like:

1x Noctua NF-A14 PWM PC 140mm Case Fan - front intake (was looking at bigger but hear they're a bit loud)
1x Noctua NF-S12A PWM 120 mm Fan - side/base intake directed toward cpu cooler
2x Noctua NF-A9x14 PWM 92mm Case Fan- rear exhaust

Could I just connect these to the motherboard or do I need a fan controller?

Full system build:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/d8wQcq

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Mon Feb 17, 2020 4:23 pm

Anyone had any problems with cheap OEM copies of Win10?

Looking at this on Amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Home-Bit-DVD-OEM/dp/B07Z2ZXCB6/ref=sr_1_17?crid=11KUP5CAIPM59&keywords=windows+10+pro+license+key&qid=1581956170&sprefix=windows+10%2Caps%2C174&sr=8-17

Looks suspicious but reviews suggest its a legit OEM version.

Thoughts

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Mon Feb 17, 2020 8:21 pm

I wrote:Trying to choose case fans atm and I don't really know what I'm doing.

I was thinking of getting something like:

1x Noctua NF-A14 PWM PC 140mm Case Fan - front intake (was looking at bigger but hear they're a bit loud)
1x Noctua NF-S12A PWM 120 mm Fan - side/base intake directed toward cpu cooler
2x Noctua NF-A9x14 PWM 92mm Case Fan- rear exhaust

Could I just connect these to the motherboard or do I need a fan controller?

Full system build:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/d8wQcq


Replaced the 140mm fan for a 200mm one after reading up on PWM fans deciding to not worry about the noise levels.

Also went with a Be Quiet 120mm instead of the Noctua one as it was out of stock (different colour but it won't be visible) and had to get a splitter cable for the two 92mm ones as the mobo only has 3 fan headers.

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Sun Feb 23, 2020 8:56 pm

The new build has not gone well and my current PC is now also not happy .

The build itself was relatively okay, aside from a couple of quality issues with the case (poorly aligned screw holes) but after 10 hours of troubleshooting it seems that the motherboard is essentially knackered on arrival it won't detect any HDDs connected to any SATA port, the front USB connectors aren't recognised and fails to boot up after being powered down for a few minutes (Error says something like CMOS Date / Time Not Set).

Sending the mobo back for a replacement but it won't be until next weekend when my brother can assist me with the build again so I'm back on the current PC which hasn't taken kindly to having bits borrowed (a SATA cable and a couple of HDDs) for the new one and is now intermittently failing to boot despite nothing drastic happening to it.

So, yeah great weekend :fp:

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Sat Feb 29, 2020 3:56 pm

ITS ALLLLIIIIIIIIIIIIVVVVVE!

Replacement motherboard is installed and everything running smoothly.

Really impressed by the Noctua case fans, they're almost silent at 100% speed, even the huge 200mm one is whisper quiet.

Not too impressed with the build quality of the Raijintek case though, a lot of screw holes aren't properly aligned and the front USB ports seem rather poor quality.

Just need to buy another SSD as the two HDDs from the old PC I was intending to reuse are totally knackered, so might as well go for an SSD.

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Jenuall
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Jenuall » Sat Feb 29, 2020 7:37 pm

I scrimped on case and fan quality in a build many years back and have never repeated the mistake. Having a solid case makes the build process so much easier and whisper quiet performance just feels so good!

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Ironhide
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Ironhide » Sun Mar 01, 2020 9:09 pm

The annoying thing is that the case wasn't cheap (£119) so I was expecting the bloody screw holes to line up properly. plus they're not the quick release 'thumb' screws.

My previous case (Fractal Node) was really well built so I would have probably been better off reusing that.

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Jenuall
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Jenuall » Mon Mar 02, 2020 12:25 pm

Ah that's annoying, for that money you would have been right to expensive a nice, well built case!

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Meep
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PostRe: General PC Help Thread 2
by Meep » Fri Mar 13, 2020 4:09 pm

Anyone encounter any problems since the last Windows update?

My system refused to boot after the last shutdown until I had reset CMOS.


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