I like fractal design buy the cases are too boring imo

@VenomZ_ Well yeah, "the very, very simple and clean aesthetic" - aka minimalist style - is kinda their thing. They're not flashy cases by any means. This specific rig just sits on a shelf so it doesn't need to have bling. Their Define S2/Define R6/Meshify series have a bit more flash while staying pretty clean and simple with plenty of compatibility with water and air cooling. 

If you want flashier stuff, Phanteks has very similar build quality and more pizazz. Corsair stuff is nice (but my Air 540 is similarly simple), haven't built with much else. Had an S340 Elite and that's an amazing case, also built in an H200 but the build quality on that didn't impress me at all. Cable management was an unsatisfactory effort to match that of the S340 as well. Mostly just looked nice once finished (I built an R5 1600/980 Ti rig in it for a friend), didn't have much else going for it other than being better for airflow than the Evolv ITX. 

On the carpet...living dangerously I see.

@Jon Jon Oh don't worry I often wear wool socks on said carpet as well. I've never had an issue with a single rig that I've built like this though 

And I've built uh... a fuck ton of 'em because I've usually rebuilt my main rig every few months, and had up to 3 or 4 alt rigs I was messing with as well. 

How long ago did you get in to this zando Bob because I wish I still had that fire and passion inside me

Maybe I am showing my age (30), but I remember a time when I was a teenager and static electricity frying things was an actual problem.

Just force of habit at this point!

@VenomZ_ I think around when I was 17? Am 20 now, so 3 or so years ago. I've gone through a shitload of hardware and an ungodly (and unwise) amount of money . Have lost a good bit of the passion though lol, I only have so much patience for stuff not working. That's why I'm planning to nail down my main and folding/secondary rig and then I can just tinker with the other stuff at my leisure. As an example, I've had an SR-2 for almost a year now, maybe more, and yesterday was the first time since initial boot test on receipt that I tried messing around with it. Still having issues with it but I can't be arsed to deal with it so it'll likely sit for a good while before I pick it up again. 

Also have to rebuild my main rig again anyways. My 5960X arrives today and I need to re-do my custom loop with better routing. Also need to look into BIOS modding so I can mod mine to enable bifurcation, so I can use my Hyper M.2 card and go all SSD. Or else I'll move the front rad to the top to free up the HDD bays in my Evolv. If I can get bifurcation working, then yoink a 4K monitor, 4K capture card, and another SSD or two, my main rig should be 100% done for the foreseeable future. Unless I absolutely must have an RTX card for Cyberpunk 2077, shall see how that game turns out. 

I do have a few other rigs planned but same as with the upgrades for my main rig, I need to actually save for them lol. Need to do some stuff on my truck soon-ish as well . 

Ah you are young!

Makes me think of my buddy's kid brother (He and I have been close since kindergaren, so I've known his brother his whole life, he is 21 now) and he just got into this stuff. Stuff today is just so bullet proof. He is constantly investing in his PC, his Rift, audio mixing equipment, etc.

It wasn't uncommon back then to get product that was DOA. The only stuff that was bullet proof were CPUs. Not uncommon to have to boot into memtest via CD and see memory failed fresh from packaging. Same for hard drives. Same for motherboards. Power Supplies were pretty bullet proof back then IF you bought from a reputable manufacturer, but even then, not like today.

I think your 4K idea is a great one. I actually own an Elgato HD60 Pro and love it, the 4K one is apparently amazing.

Honestly, I think an RTX card would save you on compute since the Turing NVENC is so good that you can leverage that to give your 5960X a break. I am finding that with my OC Ryzen 7 1700 that I am starting to see FPS impact when streaming exclusively with CPU when playing modern AAA titles. This wasn't the case two years ago. You can easily clone a display to the HDMI out into a 4K capture card, or just daisy chain out to the same monitor, at the cost of adaptive sync.

@Jon Jon Nice!

And yeah I'm mostly going 4K because I really want to take even nicer screenshots and my 1080p display (it is 144Hz tho so that's nice) holds me back. I can run the game at 4K 200% render scaling (at like 15fps) but the screenshot itself is still taken in 1080p. That's why I wanna skip 1440p and go to full 4K, pretty sure I can make do with 60Hz for the better capture options. 

For the capture card I want the AverMedia one, it records much, much better colors than the Elgato 4K60 from demos I've seen (they're more full/vibrant). IIRC they can encode streams as well, capturing through PCIe and not needing to use pass-through. Mostly want the 4K one so I can record anything up to that, even though my current stuff outputs 1080p or lower. I'd use it to record the BIOS screen and such on rigs if I decide to try and make walk-through videos for X58. I get asked a lot about that and all the guides on YT are either for specific CPUs or really damn low production quality, pretty sure I could do better and at least get them up in full 1080p. 

And yeah if I decide to stream the NVENC encoder on 2000 series Turing is a hella attractive option. AMD's one is basically hot garbage, and I mainly play D2 which will take all the threads I can throw at it (up to 20 IIRC). Am kinda torn, I really don't want to give up my RVII, since it's on par with a 2080 when OCed but should be faster at 4K due to the better VRAM bandwidth (1TB/s stock, around 1.2-1.3TB/s OCed IIRC). The 2080 Ti would be a good upgrade but that's a really dang expensive card. 

That and I got my Radeon VII at launch, direct from AMD, with overnight so I had it in hand the day after they released. It's kinda special to me, and I already went through a massive conundrum deciding whether or not to waterblock it (I really like the look of the stock cooler, same with the Vega FE I had and the LE Vega 64s I've drooled over). Ended up doing the yoink and slapping on a waterblock because as gorgeous as the card is, stock temps are horrible and it's pretty loud when spun up (at least the Vega FE only had one fan, this has 3 and they have a nastier sound profile). 

@Zando Bob, test the settings for yourself when it comes to streaming with the Radeon VII.

I honestly thought my RX 580 put out decent enough quality. When you pump out higher bitrate, it becomes good enough. I don't think a side grade is worth it JUST for that. Though I really like the Turing NVENC, for the price, you could just build a second rig for streaming and get far better performance. I am actually tempted, to do that. My current rig will probably become a dedicated streaming/plex server when I am ready for a new build. At that point, I'd be getting a Quadro.

I think it is a great idea for you to do some walkthroughs / guides. Really, 1080P is plenty for stuff like that.

@Jon Jon Yeah the desire for a 4K card is more so I'm covered if I ever need to record something at the native res of my screen. And I could defo do a second streaming rig, I eventually want to do some sort of compute box with dual 1080 Tis (they're darn cheap used for the rendering perf and do well in games too) and a high core count Xeon (may be trading an ASUS X99 WS/IPMI board off Damascus soonish), would mostly just run folding till I had something else to throw at it (like streaming). Though again monies... adds to ever growing list of stuff I eventually need to buy.

Vega cards would do darn well for rendering too but if I run across anything that needs CUDA then RIP. 

My main thing now is trying to plan out what sort of setup I want to go for rig-wise without going over a reasonable amount of computers (I can't be tripping a breaker in my apartment lol), or having to dump hardware I really like. I'm loathe to get rid of my X58 motherboards, even though I technically only need to keep one. My main one is the EVGA X58 Classified SLI 4-Way, massive record setting XL-ATX badass motherboard that's overkill for anything I've ever done already, lol. I have the same board but EATX (the 3-Way) and a server board as well. Then my SR-2s but I wouldn't get rid of those, they're more of a long term tinkering project. I just don't like getting rid of hardware 

@Zando Bob, I get you, I am the same.

I still have my $1800 2005 beast gaming rig that is dead at my uncle's house, as well as a shuttle I built as well that was a good HTPC for the time.

I also have my Core i5-3570 build from 2012 still hanging around because I have my ASUS Xonar Essence ST in there, so that is my primary music listening rig.

Now I have my current rig, which will ultimately become a Plex/Streaming box when the time comes that I want to build a new rig that is exclusively for gaming.

It's why I mention getting a Quadro when the time comes. That thing will chew threw both Plex and Streaming tasks without breaking a sweat, and my Ryzen 7 will be able to pick up anything additional without any issues. I have a Be Quiet Silent Case that this is all in and my Noctua D15, really the only thing you can ever hear in the case remotely is my graphics card, but the STRIX 5700XT is way quieter than my Red Dragon RX 580 ever was.

I could just save and put the two RX 580s I own into it, but I am also pretty tempted to eventually migrate them into my i5-3570 build and turn that box into a premiere Windows 7 gaming PC, for the titles that actually supported Crossfire. Eventually, those games won't run well on modern OS, similar to what I've seen with many XP games (which I plan to resurrect my high school machine for).

@Jon Jon Lol, I still have all the components from my original rig except for the GPU. CX450M, i5 2400, Intel H55 mobo, M9i cooler. Need to do something with it at some point, right now it just sits. I've been on an HEDT thing since my 2nd upgrade where I went to X58 (i5 wasn't keeping up with my 1080 Ti). Did take a departure for a bit with a 2700X and B450-F, then Crosshair VII (to test out SLI, but it ran much better with my 8600K, still didn't scale well in most games though), had a rig with an 8600K at the same time as that. Eventually downgraded back to X58 because OCing on that platform was much more satisfying than the 2700X ever was, and the X5670 still ran my games well enough. Even Assassin's Creed Odyssey kept 30-40fps or so with solid frametimes so it was perfectly playable, and I ran that poor X58 CPU with a 1080 Ti . 

I forget how or why I came to X99, but that's where I am now. I think it's because I got a deal on the mobo and then tracked down a CPU to match? I can't remember why I skipped X79 in my upgrade path, lol. Deal on the mobo was $99 for a B-Stock straight from EVGA btw, combo'd with a 5820K (actually massively overpaid, mine was $160 and they're much cheaper than that now), actually better value than 2000 series Ryzen at that price,  given all the features you get with X99. 

My buddy is still running an X99 platform rig. I believe is he running a 5820K at 4.5ghz and just upgraded his 980ti to an RTX 2080ti because he bought a 4K TV.

Funny enough, he tells me that even with that card, it still struggles with handling Minecraft with shaders.

@Jon Jon Oh yeah, if you go full eye candy, Minecraft with shaders will curbstomp any rig out there. My RVII manages a shaky 30fps or so if I max out everything with Sildur's shaders + volumetric lighting. Looks amazing but there is a mind-boggling performance hit. 

And right now I have a 5820K in my rig that I run at 4.6Ghz, solid little CPU. My 5960X just arrived though, so I'll be swapping that in soon, hoping for a similar OC since it's a j-bin (on average they're damn good overclockers compared to other bins), but on the full 8c/16t. Even more importantly, I get my full 40 PCIe lanes vs the 24 with the 5820K. 

@Zando Bob I am excited to see the results!