New box 2015

General Computing Hardware & Networking
21

[QUOTE=mackerel;467311]confused

I’m talking about AMD Fury X GPU. In a bit of a search, are you talking about Kingston Fury HyperX ram?[/QUOTE]

…and the moral of that story is “Don’t post late at night when you’re tired!!” :slight_smile: Yes I was talking about the Hyper X RAM, hence the confusing reply. Annoying about the GPU. My Gigabyte card has a single 120mm fan on it and it’s really quiet. Most of the noise I get from my system is sympathetic vibration from the Pro212 cooler fan causing the case to resonate. I’m going to stick a lump of metal to the inside of the case to act as a damper.

22

Bleh, reading the small print on returns is really making me paranoid. How faulty is faulty? What happens if they decide it isn’t faulty enough? Air cooled products might not be silent, but the noise they make is kinda smooth and not annoying. The Fury X is a high pitch whine and I can’t tune that out. Even if I send it back it is 5 working day turn around so nothing is going to happen until late next week.

23

Pain in the a$$ is that, but there’s nothing you can do about it which I think is wrong. But them’s the rules as they say :frowning:

24

In searching around this is a “known issue” with early cards but supposed to be fixed in production. I got the RMA number now so just gotta pack it up and arrange collection.

Also found another issue with my new setup. I got an Element Beryllium gaming keyboard, as I wanted one that was backlit. Since using it, my typo rate has gone through the sky. Now, it has a much longer throw than most other keyboards I’ve used recently so put it down to that. But in some testing tonight I found the problem. It seems like if you press a key from the top row and then very shortly press a key from the middle row, the letters get reversed. A common combination is “th” and since using that keyboard I kept getting “ht” out. I have now switched back to my old cheapo logitech, and the issue to totally gone. Great. So I got an expensive keyboard you can’t type fast on.

25

I’ve just RMA’ed a 5 month old XFX PSU that started playing up on me. When I get the replacement it’ll be going on fleabay… replaced it with a 80+Gold Corsair CS450M…

As for keyboards… I use a Belkin OmniCube KVM i need a PS2 keybord… Just purchased a £11 el cheapo Cherry and what an improvement on my previous old Logitech!!! :smiley:

26

My keyboard issue has been resolved. I found the instructions that came with it and was randomly playing with the settings. Most of them are to do with lighting modes, but one of interest was NKRO. In short, set to 6 the problem I had didn’t happen. I can type as quick as I like. Only when set to full, did the problem happen. Yay! Now any typos are my own fault again. Also it saves me from more spending, as I was half tempted to get one of the Corsair RGB series… total overkill, but look at the pretty colours!

The Fury X has been packed and is due to be collected tomorrow. I’ve included an extra statement pointing to the known issues, and also saying if they want to replace it, they better check the replacement doesn’t suffer from the problem also.

At this rate I might get some serious gaming time on the weekend yet. That reminds me, how long will it take to transfer 600GB of Steam data over gigabit? Might be an overnight job… before anyone asks, it’s that or redownload it all. I’m sure it’ll take a lot longer over 50Mbit than local gigabit!

27

Scan tested the dodgy XFX PSU and sure enough found it would power down under load and also found it suffering from coil whine… Phoned them up to see if there was any chance they would credit me for it but they’ve already sent out the replacement. :frowning:

28

In other RMA news, my Fury X has been collected today, so they should get it Tuesday. Then up to 5 working days before I hear back…

Playing with a pair of GTX960s SLI until then. Definitely 2GB is ram limiting.

Elsewhere, I started my Steam game file move. Done about 40% this evening so hopefully the rest will finish overnight. Only 650GB, why take so long? :slight_smile: To recap, I went for a faster 512GB SSD as my OS/important program install drive, and 1TB standard SSD for bulk installs like games. I haven’t decided what to do with bulk data yet. In a quick look around I see 6 to 8GB drives are available now. Why are they interesting? My new desktop only has two 3.5" drive bays. Guess they expect everyone to move to SSDs, as there’s room for 4x 2.5" drives, and 2x 5.25 drives. My old desktop has 2x2 + 2x3TB drives which simply aren’t going to fit if moved over. Two 6TB drives would more than cover what was on the old drives, with room for more junk. I could reuse the old drives as backups for the new ones if I ever get some decent NAS software sorted. WHS doesn’t cut it.

The only question left would be… what drives do I go for? I wont buy Seagate even though their 8TBs are similar in cost to WD’s 6’s. On the WD side, there’s 3 possibilities, red, green, purple. Red is their NAS drives designed for 24/7 use. Green is the lower power one, and will likely sleep a lot. Minor concern here is older ones had been known to die early due to excessive stop-start cycles. That leaves purple, which are again rated for 24/7 but optimised for surveillance use. In my role I’d like them available 24/7 I suppose, even if in practice they wont be used very often. Fast for a rotating disk would be nice. I have to assume the firmware in purple would be optimised for continuous writes, and NAS operation is typically short TLER which I’m not so sure is good for general purpose desktop use. Oh nearly forgot Black, but they’re not rated 24/7 but are intended for performance use.

29

Somebody else who doesn’t like Seagate… LOL.The last Seagate I bought bricked it so I RMA’ed it… and within 2 years the replacement also bricked it. For a while I was buying Samsung Spinpoints but sadly Samsung HDD division was acquired by Seagate in 2011… WD is now my HDD of choice.

Large capacity SSD’s are still too expensive but it does look like it’s where the technology is heading and and both Seagate and WD are getting left behind.

30

Seagates tend to be cheaper, and probably for a reason. They’re often bundled with things I buy, and on the occasion I dare to use them, I found their death mode to be worse than others. When a WD dies, you might start to notice some bad sectors and give you a last chance to top up any backups. When a Seagate dies, it is all or nothing. Working one day, unusable the next. I do suspect that Seagates have a lower heat tolerance than WD (elevated but within spec temps makes them die much faster), but of course don’t have any data to back it up other than impressions.

Anyway, after much reading around, it sounds like Reds are like Greens but with the benefit of 24/7 rated operation. Also my fear about TLER seems to be unfounded, in that Reds have a setting so you could still leave it long like a regular desktop drive.

The Steam copy completed fine overnight so that’s about 2/3 of a 1TB SSD full of games! Wonder how long the rest will last…

31

Oh, I’ve only ever owned one Samsung, and didn’t like it. Vibrated too much. I did use 4x3TB Toshiba desktop drives in my cold storage box. That is, it only gets turned on infrequently to make manual backups. No idea if they are owned by or cooperate with another manufacturer.

Old fashioned spinning disks still have a significant value role if you need big storage and care less about performance. Just had a poke around ebuyer quickly, and worked out the best price/capacity of a few segments.

For pure storage, there are some value points. The Seagate 3TB, 8TB and Toshiba 3TB drives work out about £23/TB. The WD 6TB models start from £30/TB. SSD wise, you just have to pay. The Sandisk 480GB SSD is cheapest per capacity at £219/TB, so we’re looking at about 9x price difference here. So Seagate, WD and anyone else left in the rotating storage industry still have a role to play. I wonder if anyone has done a “Moore’s law” equivalent for rotating drives? Is their capacity growth tracking that of silicon? That would determine if they will keep a niche or will they be obsoleted?

Of course it is more complicated than that… I picked up a couple of Kingston 240GB SSDs for around £60 each at the time and that is more than enough for light use. Bulk storage may not be needed for a lot of casual users.

32

Toshiba acquired the Fujitsu HDD division and also acquired OCZ Storage Solutions. My only experience with them is a Fujitsu drive I had in an old laptop.

My main system runs 2 1TB Samsung’s, but apart from one other system which has a WD 1TB Green the rest are just running on 40 or 60GB SSDs.

33

I’ve got SSDs in all laptops, and main desktops. However crunchers still use spinning disks to save cost, mostly recycled WD Green 1TB left over from a very long time ago.

34

Slowly getting the system up and running at full speed. Finally moved my e-mail over (along with external spam filter software) and installing graphic editing stuff now. Where are my CDs?..

35

Ok, I wasn’t expecting that. I recently had a birthday, and was told my great-nephew wanted to send me something. Didn’t think much more of it until I saw a Hello Kitty wrapped box at work. Ok. Do I want to open this at work? Curiosity got the better of me… inside was… another layer of Hello Kitty. Ok, open that too… a cardboard box. Saw the Asus logo, but it could just be recycled packaging. It wasn’t. There’s a 980Ti in there! I guess that puts the Fury X problem out of the window and I’ll see if I can get them to do me a refund rather than replacement on the outstanding RMA.

In other news, my next day delivery on the WD Red 6TB is due tomorrow, which isn’t next day. It is ebuyer and free, so can’t complain too much.

36

Got the call the RMA has been processed and I requested a refund. Separately, the HD has arrived so in terms or hardware, I’m “complete” on this build. I just need to fit the disk and copy the data from the old HDs, using the old HDs as backup for the new one once I look at NAS options. I also got some lighting to fit in on the weekend.

Almost everything about this system is new, as in purchased this year. The exception is the mouse, which a label on the bottom says “manufactured in 2005”. Problem is I’m fussy with my mice so I’m hesitant to replace it unless it does start failing.

37

[QUOTE=mackerel;467352]Got the call the RMA has been processed and I requested a refund. Separately, the HD has arrived so in terms or hardware, I’m “complete” on this build. I just need to fit the disk and copy the data from the old HDs, using the old HDs as backup for the new one once I look at NAS options. I also got some lighting to fit in on the weekend.

Almost everything about this system is new, as in purchased this year. The exception is the mouse, which a label on the bottom says “manufactured in 2005”. Problem is I’m fussy with my mice so I’m hesitant to replace it unless it does start failing.[/QUOTE]

You were lucky with your RMA, phoned Scan up about mine and they were only willing to replace the PSU, which arrived yesterday… I could either keep it as a spare or fleabay it… at the moment I’m undecided.

KNow what you mean about mice… I’ve got an old logitech where the paint has worn off most of it but it’s still going strong!!!

38

When shopping for parts I was debating who to use, and although Scan had some bits in at a reasonable price, I had bad experiences with trying to order from them in the distant past. I am impressed with how Novatech handled the return so they’re up a notch in my book. They offered to collect at no cost to me, and offered a refund.

39

Never really had any problems with Scan and with the PSU RMA they sent me shipping details for UPS to collect at no cost to me, all I had to do was drop it off at a UPS collection point. I tend to use a mixture of Scan, ebuyer, Amazon and CCL depending on price, with Amazon being the most problematic.

40

I’m not much of a modder so this isn’t a particularly special build. Mostly put things in case, and job done. Almost, as I’m not quite finished yet. The images in this thread were taken a short while ago and I’m still playing with the build.

Since the above image I’ve tidied up the power cables to the GPU. I really wish cables were available with a single connector on them as I’d never want to use the 2nd one in a high power multi-GPU application, and there are plenty spare in lower power scenarios.

Anyway, onto the less common images. I borrowed the IR imaging camera from work to see what was going on. The CPU was under sustained load at the time. Unfortunately these are low resolution so might be a bit of an eye test for those with higher resolution monitors.

This is an overview of the internals. The two hard disks are clearly visible in the bottom of the case. There seems to be a large hot area between the CPU and GPU.

A closer look at the hard disks. The one further from the fan is, not surprisingly warmer than the one closer to the fan. This may be a consideration if you only put in one hard disk, to put it nearer the fan. The HD nearer the fan was indicating 33.5C, or roughly 5C cooler, but do note they’re different models. Both are WD Reds, the hotter one is 6TB, the cooler one 3TB.

There is a hot spot next to the ram. Presumably this is power related circuitry perhaps for the ram. The ram itself was indicating 36.7C.

The H110i GTX radiator is nice and cool compared to most other things. You can see on the end one side is warmer than the other, presumably as that is where the warmer water goes in.

The back of the CPU waterblock isn’t much warmer.

And finally, the hot spots around the CPU socket. I believe the parts to the left are for CPU power delivery, and the bits closer the GPU may be for the PCIe slot. This is one of the concerns I have with watercooling CPUs. Normally I think the surrounding components will be extra cooled by air spillage from the CPU cooler, which isn’t there with watercooled systems unless you make consideration for it e.g. through higher case airflow.