New rig, one week on
I am procrastinating on a meatier post, so here's a 1 week in report on the new gaming build. So far, it is great!
I am working on a longer form piece on the dysfunction of the “Never Trump” pundits, and their hypocrisy, but I need a break, so I am going to write about the first week post build.
Last Friday, I took a half day off of work to assemble my new PC. An amalgam of AMD processors, Gigabyte mother board, Nvidia graphics card, a colorful set of LED’s and a boatload of SSD and RAM memory.
It was my first build in almost 14 years, and the first modern build with a motherboard that includes m.2 drives, onboard wifi and Bluetooth, and integrated LED controllers.
This isn’t your Mother’s PC anymore.
It is also the first computer I have ever had that used a liquid cooling of the CPU, built with a Corsair AIO1 radiator and cooling block. That led to my first potentially cringe action. The cooler came with pre-applied thermal paste, and I will admit that I was concerned that it might not be sufficient to keep the (relatively) expensive CPU cool under pressure.
Some thoughts:
My prior experience was that just installing and using the BIOS defaults is a good path to a stable, if sub-optimal, deployment. That is a mistake. After the first couple of days, I realized that only 8G of the 64G ram I bought was being recognized. Rebooting into the BIOS and doing a little setup on the RAM fixed that, and I learned something.
With DDR5 RAM, at a hard boot (that is power off, not a reboot) there is an auto-tuning that happens at boot (this is related to the issue above) and for 64G RAM it takes like a minute and a half. That can freak you out as it sits there with nothing to tell you that all is well. But it has always booted.
I did some early benchmarks, and the CPU delivers its full performance. It is not the highest performance, but I chose it because it was a lower TDP part (~ 108W at max power use, the comparable other choices were 125 - 150 Watts) and that it had ample juice. I am pleased with my choice.
After 6 days of stable running, I fired up a known benchmark to really exercise the CPU and GPU to test the efficacy of the cooling. Cinebench 2024. 15 minutes at all 8 cores running flat out, and the temp at the CPU was rock solid at 79-81C. The cooler fans on the radiator increased in speed, keeping the coolant at a steady 30C wicking away the heat. Yes, the pre-applied thermal paste was doing its job splendidly.
Gameplay is amazing. Forza Horizon is rock steady at 60Hz (that is limited in the application) with all the visual goodies on “High” and resolution maxed out on my 2K monitor. I installed the Ray Tracing source port for the original Quake (an app that completely pegs the GPU), and it runs glass smooth at 144-145 Hz at 2K resolution. Slick.
It is a bit louder than the old NUC. That is to be expected. There is more heat generated, and the liquid cooling requires fans to run. It is not unbearable, but it is there.
I do have my Line 6 Helix attached to the system, and that behaves like a USB audio interface, allowing me to use my killer Yamaha studio monitors as a sound system. A nice touch!
I do have some comments on the LED system. It is a little garish, but I am growing accustomed to it. As the case had two LED fans, and the memory/CPU cooler, and my Keyboard/Mouse are Corsair units, they have one tool, iCue, to control the LED’s, and it works well. The two case fans on the other hand are just simple I2C2 devices, connected to a controller on the motherboard (that I will note was a total bitch to get connected cleanly when it was all mounted in the case), so I have two applications to control the visual effects. Not ideal.
Look, I have fiddled with I2C control via Arduino, so it is not exactly intuitive, but the applications that help you configure light/animation are a help, but they are still rather cryptic.
Now, I am 4 days until the new Forza Motorsport is released, and I am 100% ready for it.
AIO is All In One, a completely assembled ready to use system.
I2C is a standard serial controller for microcontroller systems. They are used to address and activate the elements in the LED string.