Kalm_Traveler

Hey guys, I got this idea from Linus talking on the WAN Show last month recalling his personal CPU history and thought it would be fun to compare with LTT forum members. I'll start it off with my own personal CPU timeline and maybe a short comment (not counting family machines that were not my personal computers). 1st (~ 1993) - Intel 486 DX 33 MHz (no heatsink) - Windows 3.1 workstation dad got for me from work (Novell in its heyday) 2nd (2000) - Intel Celeron 566 MHz - Windows 98SE baby (my first self-purchased rig) 3rd (~ 2003) - Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.2 GHz - Windows Xp 4th (~ 2006) - Intel Pentium 4 HT 3.0 GHz (PSU failure fried the previous rig) - Windows Xp 5th (2008) - Intel Core 2 Duo E8600 3.33 GHz - dual booted Windows Xp and 7 6th (2011) - Intel Core i7 2600k OC 5 GHz - Windows 7 7th (2015) - Intel Core i7 5820k OC (I think 4.3 GHz) - Windows 7 8th (2016) - Intel Core i7 6900k OC 4.5 GHz - Windows 7 -> 10 9th (2018) - Intel Core i9 7960x OC 4.7 GHz - Windows 10 10th (2020) - Intel Core i9 10980XE OC 4.9 GHz - Windows 10 Honorable mentions that were not in my main personal rig: 2018 Intel Celeron G3930 (2 of these in mining rigs), 2019 AMD Ryzen 7 2700x (powered my home server last year), 2018 Intel Core i7 7700 (HTPC), 2018 Intel Core i9 9900k (2018 Christmas gaming rig), 2019 Intel Core i9 9900ks (2019 Christmas gaming rig) and lastly 2020 Intel Core i5 9400 (pfSense box). Admittedly in my younger years I was anti-AMD, but with age has come a pinch of wisdom - which is why I used the Ryzen 2700x for my home server. Other than its heart-attack-inducing voltage fluctuations that shocked me coming from Intel, i was extremely impressed with it and if they keep advancing like Zen 2 has shown us I will be switching to AMD for my next full platform update. What does your personal rig CPU history look like?

Don't forget that having ultimate external drive performance won't help the source drive be any faster than whatever its interface is limited to. That all being said, I've been using this one for almost a year - specifically for backup/transfer duties at home and have found its speed acceptable (minding that it is just USB 3.whatever gen 2, not Thunderbolt 3): https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07MZQF1H6/ At work we just use SATA SSDs in external USB 3.0/3.1 enclosures, which are also sufficient as long as your entire job is not only to be nonstop backing up one Samsung pro nvme drive (or the new PCI-E gen 4 nvme drives) after another for 8 hours straight.

definitely, lots of very nice displays around and under that price - again coming down to what features you value most. I think the most popular sizes of screens are 24" and 27", and again if you mostly play shooters it seems people generally just want 1080p and really fast refresh so 240Hz or higher. For general gaming, I would instead look at more of a 1440p range but keep in mind all-else being equal your fps will drop significantly with each bump up in resolution so don't expect any newish AAA title to hold (or probably even reach at all) 240 fps with max graphical settings at 1440p even with a 2080 Ti. If you haven't used an ultra-wide, my personal recommendation is to at least try to check them out in person as they've become my staple. I haven't been able to acquire one at work yet so still using 2 normal ratio screens there but at home I have the 38" LG on the HEDT rig and moved my old 34" Asus 3440 x 1440 100Hz Gsync display to the new gaming PC. Never going back to 16:9 for my personal setups.

There isn't a universal "best" as it will come down to all the usual factors that matter to you. If you primarily competitively play shooters, you probably want lower resolution and max high refresh rate over all else. My personal choice is an LG 38" 3840 x 1600 that can do 175Hz but I run it at 144Hz to keep some HDR functionality (if you drop it to 120Hz it will do full 10-bit color as well). If you are on a limited budget that will also affect your "best". Details man, details.

Rockitcool makes a delid tool specifically for the 9th gen cpus. I've used it on a 9900k and 9900ks just fine. To make your life easier you'll want to also pick up some Quicksilver solder remover so you don't have to try to scrape it off manually with a blade after removing the IHS.

Pretty typical speeds for mid-work-day from home. During peak hours after work the download speed can drop to around 800, but upload always seems to stay between 930-950 ($50 USD /mo for unlimited 1gbps symmetrical)

especially if it's only for gaming, you'd do much better for yourself to part it out and build a modern gaming PC. Prices on very decent parts are extremely buyer-friendly right now - price to performance is arguably the best right now that it's been in over a decade. The sad truth is that every dollar spent on trying to upgrade this old beast is basically just a dollar wasted. You're already into it near enough to have built a brand new machine that would destroy it for gaming. That being said, if you value fun tinkering with old hardware more than money, there's nothing wrong with spending your money on something that makes you happy. My only point was to try and help save you from wasting money on a dead platform, since you could be having a much better gaming experience now and that situation only gets worse the more you put into this thing. It's like spending money on a new paint job for your boat that is already mostly sunk, instead of just buying a new boat.

That's the real problem with trying to beef up these old workstations... You end up wasting money where you could have built a brand new much faster rig that uses less power for the same or just slightly more money.

Nuc type would be best. I'm using a Nuc sort of base for my pfsense box and I put a 6 core i5 with 16gb RAM and a sata SSD in it. Could use an nvme drive and use the SATA port for a Blu ray drive

I was going to make a joke about whatever the keyboard on Mac laptops is these days... I have a late 2018 MBP for work and can hardly type on it due to basically no key travel (my favorite switches are Kailh box whites, Razer purple laser, and Cherry MX blue).

I was looking for DisplayPort KVMs a little while ago to see what the likelihood of being able to share my new LG 38" ultrawide between the HEDT and gaming rig but even single port DP KVMs are few and far between. Dual port, it sounds like you've already done research and found that TrendNet device. Not sure why we don't have more options given how long DP has been a thing, but it seems like the market for KVMs must still somehow favor good ol' VGA - even DVI or HDMI KVMs are not super plentiful.

I see what you're saying but different pastes do indeed have varying thermal conductivity properties, so you will see degree variance moving between the higher end compounds and the cheaper compounds. That being said, I have no idea what EVGA uses for their pre-installed goop so no way to guestimate accurately how much lower max temps would be swapping from that goop to Kryonaut. I'm fairly sure it would be several degrees given my own testing between Kryonaut, Gelid Extreme, and Arctic MX-1 pastes but without actually slapping them on and testing it's all just speculation to me.

I'm not sure what you're asking exactly... These are USB 1/2 and 3.x motherboard headers. the Type C connector is for USB 3.1 Gen 2, USB 3.0 and 3.1 Gen 1 are the same connector, the larger 20 pin connector in the right of that picture.

as far as I'm understanding it depends on the DIMM rank being single or double, but also the topology of the motherboard (how it connects the DIMM slots to the CPU's memory controller). the OCN guys are telling me that on my x299 boards they use T-topology for connecting the DIMMs to the CPU's IMC so I should use all 8 DIMM slots instead of just 4. I haven't actually noticed any difference in anything after swapping from 16gb x 4 @ 3200mz CL14 to 8gb x 8 @ 3600mhz CL16 though.

USB motherboard headers before the type C connector have 2 ports per header. If your case has only 2 front USB 3.x type A ports, it should only need one USB 3.x motherboard header.

That is almost always a switch issue. I would RMA it. Had the same mouse since launch a few years ago and it has never given me any issues at all, but other mice exhibiting the double-clicking thing always ended up being a dying/faulty button switch.

For sure... on my own stuff I only use Kryonaut. Just saying don't expect a massive difference if you decide to use it over that pre-installed stuff

Kryonaut is a little bit better but from testing I've seen and done myself the difference isn't going to be more than maybe 5 degrees at max.

definitely will help - I would never try to use a 120mm AIO on an 8700k - a single tower air cooler with only 120mm fan wouldn't be enough even with 2 fans on each. Note that the very best giant air coolers outperform 120mm AIOs and usually are about the same ballpark of cooling capacity with 240mm AIOs because what you're really looking at is overall cooling surface area + air flow through those fins; whether that surface area is two towers of heat pipes + fins as an air cooler or one rectangular shape of radiator fins, the physics behind them are the same - with water cooling the key difference is just that you're relocating that heat exchange to a radiator mounted somewhere else rather than doing the heat exchange right on top of the CPU. Where water cooling can become better is when you have radiator surface area that exceeds what you could have with an air cooler, and 280mm is about where that starts to happen.

For sure - for starters here's the old case (he sent this to me after I made him promise to get it out of my sight forever)

Technically it depends on the heat output of the CPU. You have diminishing returns as the AIO size increases so effectively there's a point with any given heat load where it doesn't really make sense to go any larger from a performance standpoint. Noise extends that size because in general a larger surface area for heat dissipation will allow you to run more fans at slower speeds for the same amount of heat dissipated. That all being said, if you had a very low TDP chip and a 120mm AIO was keeping it cool with low fan RPM, effectively there wouldn't be any benefit to jumping up to a 280mm since you're already achieving both low temps and low fan noise. However, since I'm guessing you're talking about a modern desktop PC, I would definitely go for the largest AIO you can fit - keeping in mind that larger fans will move more volume of air with less noise than smaller fans but the larger fans will have less static pressure than smaller fans so a high fin density radiator design would probably benefit more from smaller higher pressure fans.

Yeah it seems like most of that is kind of in the grey area where it's too old to be much use right now, but not old enough to be vintage yet. I'd just hold on to it if I were you.

why not just buy a 32gb kit with 4 of them that were already tested together?

just my 2 cents on the topic... Off the top of my head I can recall PC speaker configs as follows: ~ 1999 - swiped-from-family HP Pavillion crap Polk Audio stereo speakers (seemed fine to me at the time) ~ 2005 - upgraded to Logitech 5.1, looked exactly like the X-530 set so probably those, modded to relocate the power/volume bits into their own separate plastic box (seemed amazing at the time, big upgrade to the HP/Polk stereo speakers) ~ 2008 - ditched the Logitech speakers in favor of using an AVR with a hodge-podged 5.1 home theater system of mis-matched Yamaha speakers and some no-name powered 10" subwoofer (giant monitors with 12" woofers for front LR, some old early 90's large center speaker with 5.25" woofers, and their cheap bookshelves with 8" woofers as rear LR. I thought this sounded amazing) ~ 2014 - built a legit home theater in my new place, put the PC desk mid way in a long room and just TOSLinked it to the HT system. This was using 5 Yamaha NS-777 towers for FL FL C SL SR and two of their small bookshelves for RL RR the NS-333, with a giant and way overkill HSU VTF-15H MK2 15" powered sub (still sounds amazing) ~ 2019 pt1 - in prep to move I rearranged the room and picked up a pair of Klipsch stereo self-powered R-41PM speakers on some stands to bring them up to ear level, and sharing the existing 15" subwoofer (this sounds great but in retrospect I should have bought the R-51PM because they're larger but still fit on the stands. I do somewhat miss surround sound) ~ 2019 pt2 - whilst going down the rabbit hole of retro PC building I ended up finding an old-but-working set of Klipsch Promedia 5.1's from mid 2000's and have them set up on the new gaming PC since I didn't have anything better laying around. They definitely are the best-sounding set of 5.1 'PC speakers' that I've ever heard despite being really old but when listening to stereo content the R-41PM pair I have on the HTPC sound much clearer, more full sound not counting the obvious bass discrepancy. Actually the dual woofer sub in this old discontinued kit still sounds fantastic, the only negative for me is that the satellites can sometimes sound a little bit tinny -------------------- I also have some old late 90's sets of 2.1 and 4.1 Altec Lansing PC speakers (using the 2.1 on my Razer Blade Pro setup and the 4.1 on the retro PC) and while they too sound pretty good for being so old, those in particular are obviously missing high-frequency clarity on the top end. As far as 5.1 vs 2.0 or 2.1 on a PC to me there's a bit of a toss up / consideration to be decided. I'd probably rather have a really good 2.0 or 2.1 setup than a "just ok" 5.1 setup, all things considered. While the surround effects are great for immersion, I'm so used to really decent clear full sound now from the higher-end speakers I've been using for years that hearing not-as-good sound from 5 surrounds is a little distracting to the point of not fully appreciating the surround effects. TBH I've actually been debating moving the Klipsch R-41PMs over to the laptop and replacing them with R-51PMs on the HEDT rig, as well as seeing if there are any higher-end 5.1 kits I could use on the gaming PC that wont' have that tinny sound that the Promedia 5.1 satellites have.

ahh yeah I see your point. I guess what is going through my mind is that this kid (man... guy is married with a child and turning 30 this year...just always think of him as my little step brother) will probably never be able to afford to buy himself a brand new decent PC. Thought has been that if I got him something a little higher end on the CPU/memory side it would last him another 10 years since he's been getting by with my old Core 2 Duo -> upgraded to that quad core Xeon I think 2 or 3 years ago. You're probably right though - keeping roughly around that $1200 mark, dropping to a 3600 to fit a big screen in makes more sense.