WMGroomAK

According to Noctua's specs, you'll want at least 165 mm of height to mount over the CPU. The U12S requires 158 mm.

Honestly, with most of the benchmark and OC results that I've seen, I would rather go for a R7 1700 and get a decent AIO to OC it to around 3.9 GHz.

Fairly much anything Noctua should be better than a 212 EVO. I would just double check your case clearances for your cooler height. I've got a NH-U12S in a MATX system and the clearance is a tight fit.

I'll believe it when it happens... Wondering if it might be people thinking they can spook Apple by saying they are going to use one of the security flaws published via Wikileaks. If it's true, maybe I should dig out my old 3GS, boot it up and let them do a factory reset for me instead of doing it myself.

You can either get by with a stock cooler if you have a compatible one sitting around or get a cheap one like a Hyper 212 Evo or something similar. Of course, you could also just future proof yourself and get a better cooler like a DH-15 or an AIO so getting a high overclock in the future is a bit easier...

That same Foxconn that builds all the Apple devices... One good bit of news is that there are other companies looking at forming an alliance to purchase this side of the Toshiba business. Probably one of the more promising ones is a deal between Western Digital and Micron. Per the article below, WD is pursuing this because: http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Toshiba-Memory-suitors-eye-alliances-as-deadline-nears

Honestly, while this news will probably help Toshiba with some of their financial woes, I'm thinking that there is some serious blood in the water trouble for them this year... Going back through some of the news from December/January until now, they suffered a major loss from the acquisition of Westinghouse Nuclear (something around $6.3 Billion US) and to make up for it were planning to sell off a major stake in their NAND unit. Now they are trying to get Westinghouse off of their books. As for the NAND side of the deal, TSMC and Foxconn are currently looking into bidding. Will be kinda curious to see what is left of Toshiba by next year or if they can rebuild themselves. http://fortune.com/2017/02/20/toshiba-nand-flash-unit-sale/ www.macrumors.com/2017/03/07/foxconn-tsmc-to-bid-on-toshiba-memory-unit/

Agreed, problem with SSDs now is that there is getting to be such a demand that production can't keep up... Hopefully, this will free up some of Toshiba's resources to focus more on NAND production, but I have a feeling that they have too many other financial issues... Honestly for my mass storage device, I went with the 5400 RPM HDDs to keep the long term operating temps down.

In an article on Guru3d, it has been published that Toshiba sees no reason to continue production of the 15k RPM HDDs. From the article (http://www.guru3d.com/news-story/toshiba-will-not-release-new-15k-rpm-hdds.html): Given the price per GB for these drives, I can't see them moving too many of them, but if you have a 15k RPM device in your array or were hoping to build a 15k RPM HDD array, it looks like your options are closing... Edit: So just to add my speculation from some of the additional information I know about, this is probably a business decision on their part to help out with the financial woes they are suffering from the completed purchase of Westinghouse Electric (the nuclear side especially, where they announced a loss of $6.3 Billion US in December/January). This has also led for them to begin a sale of their NAND unit with some big businesses in the process of bidding for it and expected to be completed by April 1st. One interesting bit from the Nikkei is that there are several companies actually forming alliances in this bid process. I'll be really interested in seeing what Toshiba looks like as a company by next year. http://fortune.com/2017/02/20/toshiba-nand-flash-unit-sale/ www.macrumors.com/2017/03/07/foxconn-tsmc-to-bid-on-toshiba-memory-unit/ http://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Deals/Toshiba-Memory-suitors-eye-alliances-as-deadline-nears

I would probably expect a new BIOS update from ASUS in the near future... AMD is supposedly releasing a new AGESA microcode to help with the memory timings & compatibility. https://www.overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/amd_has_reportedly_released_new_agesa_microcode_for_ryzen/1

If I remember correctly, my custom fan curve has the fans turned off until they hit around 45 or 50 C, then begins to ramp them up gradually. I think I set it to hit max fan speed around 80 C or so...

Best to build on a solid non-conductive surface. If you don't have a table, grab a wooden plank or small sheet of plywood.

Best performance wise Air Cooler brand IMO is going to have to be Noctua. Aesthetics, I kinda like some of the Cryorig air coolers. As for the AIO performance/aesthetics, I prefer the NZXT AIOs over the Corsairs.

Thermaltake also has a knob fan controller: https://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-COMMANDER-Channel-Controller-AC-024-BN1NAN-A1/dp/B01B9618C2/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1490117323&sr=1-1&keywords=Thermaltake+Commander+F6 The one thing I've yet to find on any of these are ones with an Automatic mode...

I was just wondering if there might be an easy way to spoof Windows into thinking you're operating on a different Mobo and CPU. If so, that is probably the easiest solution. Would also be interesting on the stability of the spoofed system. From some of what I've seen Wendell post concerning the Ryzen IOMMU though, the AMD side might not be as easy.

It is an interesting question and I would also like to see someone try it out... Just guessing, since I don't have any of the hardware, is that it probably wouldn't work since I would assume that the Win 7 VM would be detecting that it is running on a Ryzen or Kaby Lake Processor when it tried to perform an update.

I think the interesting point on these are whether they are actually going to be 32-Core processors or not since Intel has not officially announced that they are building one. Supposedly they were only going to do up to a 28-Core processor. Question is, how long have they had this in the background. Second question, which is going to have to wait awhile, will be how does Intel's 32-Core Server Platform and AMDs 32-Core Server Platform (Naples) stack up to each other in different workloads.

@aisle9, @Pidgey, @Lord Anubis Just figure I would toss this in, although it is a couple of years old... Basically in their testing on an Air Cooling setup, the difference between Kryonaut and MX-4 was 1.1 C. The difference between Kryonaut and the worst performing thermal paste was 8.5 C. http://overclocking.guide/thermal-paste-roundup-2015-47-products-tested-with-air-cooling-and-liquid-nitrogen-ln2/6/

I'm not sure what you're Intake/Exhaust Config is going to look like, but with the H440, you will probably max out the case Fan space with 7 120mm fans. Below is a rough potential fan config in which you would have two splitters running in the case (with the potential of dropping one). Essentially, you would have 2 full time front intake fans and one extra fan running intake when the GPU is getting hot. There would be one full time exhaust fan in the back. Your top mounted fans are kinda tricky cause I wouldn't want to create too much turbulence with airflow. You could potentially place these as exhaust or intake (or maybe mix a little bit), but that would be something to test with. I tend to prefer a little bit of positive case pressure myself...

With aftermarket coolers, I've never really had a problem with the thermal paste supplied. Not sure if it is worth the extra cash to buy some slightly better thermal paste for a minimal improvement in temps. If you really need it though, I think the Noctua NT-H1 is fairly good performance per value. Of course, once you get to the aftermarket cooler, I would definitely read the reviews on the coolers and double check their performance.

If you can wait about a month for the R5 processors to be released, there will probably be some real world game benches to show FPS in 1080 at stock and OCed. The R5s biggest benefit will be the more cores and the biggest weakness will be that it will not stock clock to the same levels as the 7600.

The R5 stack is going to range from $169 to $249, although I would probably look at the R5 1600 in the Ryzen R5 lineup at $219 with an X370 board and an AIO cooler to OC it to the max stable. That would provide 6 cores with SMT for 12 threads.

I'm gong to have to go with a good Sourdough pancake with butter and maybe a berry based syrup on top. Will eat stacks of those at a time.

Unless I'm missing something about the 1070, the Strix fan headers should be giving you a total of 6 fan headers in the whole case (4 on Mobo and 2 on GPU). The main difference is that the two fans you can plug into the GPU are controlled by the GPU temp profile and not the CPU Temp profile. This is supposed to be so that you can increase the airflow to the GPU in situations where the GPU is being more stressed than the CPU.

Just as a generalization, most games tend to prefer higher clock speeds to go with the IPC. This is part of the reason that an OC 7700k is currently the best gaming CPU on the market. Newer game titles are also beginning to utilize more cores/threads for better performance as well. For a pure gaming machine, you can go with a 7600 (non-K) but you will be limiting the clock speeds available and have half the threads as a 7700k. Longer term, it is hard to tell where the tipping point between clock speeds and core availability is going to be. Question would be what your budget is and whether you can afford a k-sku Intel for the higher clock speed availability or maybe wait for an AMD R5 to give you a similar OC clock speed to the non-k 7600 with more core/threads.