I’m bored

"Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing." (granfury)
05/28/2020 at 22:35 • Filed to: None

And when I get bored things get expensive. Not new car expensive, but more than I should probably be spending. All of these items were markdows/returns or on sale at Micro Center, so therefore relatively affordable, plus there was an additional $20 discount for buying a MB and CPU together, even with returns.

After years of i7s (870, 2600, 3770 and 3770K) I somewhat reluctantly stepped down to an i5. The performance difference between the 9600K and the i7 9700 were minimal, didn’t justify a price nearly twice that of the 9600K, and can probably be made up with a little overclocking.

I was thinking Ryzen for this build but the competition with Intel plus the recent release of the 10th generation chips made this CPU a bargain. I could have saved a little more by going with a 9400F, but I prefer unlocked chips. The 10600K was considerably more expensive but the performance was only marginally better. I think I hit the sweet spot with this chip, and can always upgrade later.

I’m sticking with 32GB of RAM, this time in just two DIMMs. I’ll have a couple of RAM slots left over in case I decide to add more later. You think you have enough, but it’s never enough. 23 years ago some know-it-all bypassed the IT department I worked in and put a massive 80MB in his company computer. It seemed like overkill - our servers didn’t even have that much - but now that amount is laughable. Hell, it would be a laughable amount in a damn watch these days (my older Apple Watch has 512MB).

The old Cooler Master Sniper case, piles of SSDs and GTX 1080 will carry over to the new build. Like my car, when you find something that you like and that works well for you, you see no need to change it out. I have no need for RGB and glass in my builds, so this old stuph will be fine.

My folding performance probably won’t change much since I’ll be using the same GPUs. I disabled folding on the CPU, but maybe with this new chip it might be worth re-enabling it.

DISCUSSION (11)

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
05/28/2020 at 23:10

I need to get some more RAM for my machine...8GB only atm, but I’ll prob upgrade it to 16GB. 8GB is honestly still fine for me, but there are times when I do require a little more.

I’ve used the same SSD and hard drive through several builds now in my desktop, same with my video card. It’s getting long in the tooth (Sapphire Radeon HD7870 2GB) but it still plays the games I enjoy fine.

Grindintosecond > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
05/28/2020 at 23:19

it is not worth reenabling on CPU. folding on my 8 core ryzen runs 100 watts. it makes 220ppd doing that. a 1070 card does 800k on 170 watts.......cpu is still grossly inefficient, or, the program it runs is inefficient....either way, not worth it.

TheRealBicycleBuck > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
05/29/2020 at 00:11

My new SSD should arrive tomorrow along with a new battery. Both are going into an Inspiron convertible laptop/tablet. The next upgrade will be more RAM, but t hat’ s another paycheck away.

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
05/29/2020 at 00:12

Aw man this makes me want to do some bad things.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
05/29/2020 at 00:30

If you’ve got a Micro Center near you check out the open box items as shown on their website. It can be very dangerous to one’s financial health, but a fun way to go down in flames. I’m still happily using the $3.96 Jabra bluetooth headset I grabbed last month.

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
05/29/2020 at 08:10

Oh yeah, the 7870 was a great card, but it’s a little past it expiration date. I replaced mine four years ago (it is actually sitting in a machine right behind me, but that whole machine is probably getting scrapped when I move this summer). One thing I especially liked about it was that it was efficient enough that I could slap a big passive cooler on it and have no fan noise from the graphics card. Seems that modern cards at the same market position draw a bit too much power for that.

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw
05/29/2020 at 08:18

Yeah. When I retire it from my machine I’ll prob put it in the Media Center PC. That’s my old Core 2 Duo @ 3.0Ghz/Radeon HD3850 system.....works perfectly fine as a Media Center PC for 1080p! :)

facw > RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars
05/29/2020 at 08:28

Ha, I just replaced the (also passively cooled) 4670 in my HTPC earlier this year because I wanted to be able to output 4k and I was getting annoyed that Windows 10 kept replacing the working (but unsupported) Windows 7 driver with AMD’s official legacy driver (which maxes out at 1024x768). Bought a passive 1030, but they shipped me the wrong part (it was weird, part number on the box was right, but didn’t match the card, but both the box and the card had matching serial numbers). In any event, I was annoyed enough that I just bought a 5500xt instead. Sadly not passively cooled, but it’s a pretty quiet card (and the fans stay off until it gets hot).

RallyDarkstrike - Fan of 2-cyl FIATs, Eastern Bloc & Kei cars > facw
05/29/2020 at 09:12

I run Linux Mint on my HTPC, so n o issues like yours there!

Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
05/29/2020 at 09:43

Oh they sell open box on their website? I thought that was in store only.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > Daily Drives a Dragon - One Last Lap
05/29/2020 at 10:02

I don’t know if they do mail order. When I find a good deal I place a hold on it and then pick it up in person.