CoalitionGaming

Decided to take a stab at using an HP Z440 as a basis for a custom PC build like I've done in the past with the Z420 and Z400 and I originally thought that wouldn't be doable...but it was! Specs: -Xeon E5-1650v4 6-core/12thread CPU $35 from ebay (basically equivalent to i7-6800k) -32gb DDR4-2400 ECC RAM (4x 8gb) $30 on ebay (RGB ram heatsinks applied after) -XFX Radeon RX 580 8gb XXX GTS Edition $90 on ebay -HP Z440 Motherboard ($50 on ebay, even came with a Xeon E5-1620v3 that was useful to test and then update the bios for V4 compatibility) -Zalman i3 neo black case w/ included RGB fans $69 online new -Zalman CNPS10X Optima II RGB cooler $25 online new -Zalman Gigamax 600w 80+ bronze PSU $50 online new -512gb SATA SSD $25 online new -1tb HDD BAM! If Linus & team decide to keep their $69 (now $420) budget gaming PC from this thread/vid going for another video, next logical step would be transplanting it to a new case to get it out of the stock HP Z420 case. A few tricks are needed when that is done and i'd be happy to assist with that!

Found it on google in about 10 seconds. Good luck with the buildout! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cloverefiboot/

Hyped! Extremely excited to finally return.

If the motherboard part number in your Z420 starts with a 6, then you have to use the Sandy Bridge based Xeons. The E5-2690 should work. If your motherboard part number starts with a 7, you can use ivy bridge Xeons like the E5-2690v2.

They have 8 RAM slots so if you wanted 32gb you can do 4x 8gb sticks or 8x 4gb sticks. Has to be ECC server memory (registered dimms). Tons of it all over ebay for good prices. DDR3 1600. Searching PC3-12800E (make sure to put the E at the end there) should bring up some ram results for you.

I would check the BIOS for any PCI-E slot gen options and see if you can bump that slot to Gen 3. That aside, it may be that only the top slot's PCI-E lanes are wired to the CPU and maybe Clover somehow only recognizes things like that instead of NVME thru Chipset. There appears to be some info here that might be helpful too. https://www.dell.com/community/Optiplex-Desktops/Is-the-dell-Optiplex-9020-compatible-with-an-NVMe-ssd/td-p/8088136/page/2 , https://www.dell.com/community/Optiplex-Desktops/Optiplex-Model-Overview-regarding-UEFI-PCIe-NVME-M-2-Boot/td-p/7621123 It almost looks like the gen 2 on that 2nd slot might be the issue. Shouldn't be, but is what it is. You may want to look for a Clover alternative that can support that, or check with the Clover support/discord/post on the github issues page to see if there is a workaround for PCIE gen 2 slot booting.

Did you change everything boot related to EFI instead of legacy in the BIOS? Under advanced -> device options -> PXE option roms, Mass Storage option roms, video option roms

In terms of boot time and general usage, it would minimal difference (if at all). For simplicity, i'd say just use a good SATA SSD (make sure it has a DRAM cache). The workaround boot thing to get a PCI-E adapted NVME SSD to be an OS boot drive is just an extra thing, if you felt like tinkering.

Yesssssssssssssss! Hyped, excited, stoked, all the things. Can't wait to hear more and can't wait go! LTX19 was such an awesome experience (and my first time visiting Canada). Roomed with Danny Le (Nerd on a Budget) and Ozi (OzTalksHw) and was super cool meeting those dudes for the first time too. @nicklmgthx for saving our butts by getting us into that room to finish shooting our content when our original plan elsewhere fell through!

Is Tanner McCoolman on Twitter or reachable somehow?

Z workstation gaming builds and transplants are my jam! Funny timing as just a few days before this video dropped, I covered the idea of a sub-$300 6 or 8 core haswell workstation gaming build based off the newer version of this platform, the HP Z440. I've done a few full transplants of HP Z420s as well. Linus and team made some mistakes, or rather overcomplicated some fixes (cooler too tall, front fan header hackery, cpu fan header hackery because of less than idea CPU choice, etc), but its all a learning process. Just happy to see it. Another point that would have been nice to see covered is that there are two variants of the Z420s from HP because HP segemented the Sandy Bridge ones from the Ivy Bridge ones, so if they either already ran a v2 xeon or has a bootblock newer than a certain date (in 2012 I think, i can't remember off the top of my head) then it will support v2 xeons and not be locked to Sandy bridges. The V2 Ivy bridge Xeons have some advantages over the Sandy Bridge ones, with the E5-2667v2 8-core 3.3ghz/4ghz turbo being my favorite (around $25 on ebay). On Sandy Bridge, this same Xeon is only a 6 core. This build IS transplantable into any regular ATX case with no "F1 to boot" errors and a off-the-shelf PSU with the right tweaks and stuff. If the LTT team plans on a part 3 of the video where they transplant their Z420 into a traditional ATX build, I'd love to contribute! @Sveeno@LinusTechI have more of a writeup on what I did on this page for the RGBeast 2.0 Build below: https://builds.gg/builds/the-rgbeast-2-0-epic-xeon-build-19141

Ah the trusty ole' Xeon X5687. I loved those Xeons for budget HP Z400 rigs I was doing for a while. Valheim server maybe? NAS is a good suggestion.

I am also partial to Gorilla Double Sided Mounting tape (the grey kind). Also super good and SUPER heat resistant. One use I had with it, I mounted a magnetic cell phone holder to my car's dashboard using this stuff. Summers here get over 100f regularly and using what was supposed to be good 3M double sided tape, the heat in my vehicle would make it come unstuck. The Gorilla Double Sided Mounting tape hasn't had that issue for me.

Hey thats me! I'm hyped for LTX 2023, can't wait!

So my brother has been having an issue with his laptop that has gotten progressively worse. He finally had the last straw the other day so I sat down to go through testing rounds to figure it out and identified what appeared to be a GPU throttling issue. It will, seemingly at random, drop frequency of the GPU which goes down to around 960mhz and the wattage of the 2060 will drop as well, down to around 40 watts. Obviously this tanks performance, but have tried many things to no avail. Verified it does this in both COD Warzone (2019, Black Ops Cold War, Cold War Zombies, and Vanguard), and Apex Legends so far. My brother also streams from his laptop and I had him install MSI afterburner and get the overlay configured so we could see whats happening when it behaves like this and we caught it live. Also id like to point out for OBS Studio that its been set in windows graphics settings to run in High Performance (so running on the 2060), and the preview window is disabled. Here's a clip of after it was running like normal, then throttled, then went back to normal and you can see the behavior i've described. https://clips.twitch.tv/ObedientVainPlumageOSfrog-ahLMOppvm4kebI0U Have tried: Clean reinstall of drivers, DDU and clean reinstall of drivers, windows 10 full reinstall, specifying any/all games and OBS Studio in the windows graphics settings to run in High Performance mode (so it runs on the 2060 instead of iGPU), setting GPU to "prefer maximum performance" in nvidia settings, setting Asus Armory Crate to max performance for the laptop, trying different game graphics settings, Hardware accelerated graphics scheduling on and off, set windows power plan to high performance, created custom max performance windows power plan. Figured okay maybe there's thermal throttling, lets just repaste it. Had my brother come over and we cleaned out the fans and heatsinks and redid the thermal paste. I was unfamiliar with the thicker goop used on the VRAM and VRMs though (come to find out its K5 Pro). We put some Kingpin KPx I happened to have (spread manually) on the CPU and GPU and I had extra Arctic MX-4 that I put a thick dollop on the VRAMs and small dollop on the VRMs and everywhere else that had the thicker goop. I'm seeing that many people online used 1mm thermal pads instead for anything that wasn't the CPU or GPU, so I may have to revisit this. He ran through a short amount of testing and the original issue described above seems to have cleared up. No more GPU throttling dropouts. But GPU temps can still reach mid-80s and CPU mid-90s. Watching him test this live on his stream with the MSI afterburner overlay going, I saw the CPU going from around 4ghz down to 2.6ghz and bouncing around like that. Here is a clip. https://www.twitch.tv/tzalman/clip/BlightedRelentlessMagpieYee-ESBJswGV0_TK-WGI No framerate drops like from the first clip though. So it feels like 2 steps forward 1 step backwards. Thinking of ordering thermal pads for the VRM and VRAM chips and redoing this again. Any feedback on KPx on the CPU and GPU or should I try something else? Thanks in advance.