HM-2

Imagine how short those tiny M series screws are going to have to be to anchor in all of a few mm IHS material.

Managed to put a bulge in one of my rear sidewalls so new rear tyres. Annoying as I'm planning on replacing the wheels pretty soon, but I should at least be able to run the current rear 255/35 R19s on the front with 275/30 out back. Likely going for Japan Racing SL01 flow-formed in 8.5x19 ET33 front and 9.5x19 ET42 rear. 9kg and 9.6kg a corner respectively instead of 16 for the OEM wheels. So far its stock other than: M Performance slotted and grooved disks M Performance pads M Performance LSD xHP Stage 2 gearbox map "Hot climate" intake mod OEM M3 shift paddles Koni Active Red shocks on OE springs I've got a painted M Performance style spoiler in the garage to go on but not fitted it yet. Will probably go Stage 2 (map + high flow cat) at some point for ~460bhp. Would also quite like the M Performance splitter, diffuser and side skirts in carbon fibre.

Honestly, hard tubing is pretty easy IME. You need to be reasonably accurate with your marking up (within about 3-5mm, there's usually a bit of wiggle room in the fittings), be careful to deburr the tubing inside and out, and I found you have to build a lot of your runs including fittings out of the case which makes tightening them down a bit of a pain...but it's more time consuming than anything else really. Bends are a bit nerve wracking the first time you do them but there's only 2 in this whole system and they're simple 90s. Jigs are cheap and even as a newbie it's reasonably easy to just feel when Acrylic is ready. You could always get pre-bent tubing too. I actually found dealing with the insanely stiff EK-ZMT black soft tubing much harder than the Acrylic hardlines

The main suggestion I'd then look at above and beyond something like a PMA60 / 3020i pairing would be a decent subwoofer. The PMA has a dedicated sub out, and pairing it with something like a BK Double Gem or Gemini II would net you a superbly balanced 2.1 setup for everyday listening across both music and film/media. Here in the UK you would probably be looking at ~£600 all in for such a setup at current prices as long as you don't have an aversion to buying at least the speakers second hand. Buying new, it's closer to a £1000 set up, but frankly all of my higher any audio gear is second hand. If you have more space to play with, then you might want to look at something like a decent 5.1 system and AV grade amplifier. Again in that $500-600 range, you could pair something like a Wharfdale DX-3 5.1 system with a second hand Yamaha RX-V379 for a very good quality setup- though you'd probably have to add extra budget for speaker stands. Assuming your listening environment is accommodating, that will definitely get you a better (and significantly more adjustable) soundstage.

The A2+ are great small desktop actives but the S8 is a flabby boy unfortunately. Not a great sub. For $500 I'd be inclined towards a decent desktop amplifier, something like a Denon PMA60, and some passives from the likes of Q Acoustic 3020i on some decent stands. Should be easily doable if you don't mind going second hand on the passives.

Hmm, I could possibly look at replacing my under-desk drawers with something lower that would give me space to fit a receiver on the pedestal below my desk. That would potentially let me run something wider without worrying about desk real estate.

I currently run a 2.1 audio setup for my PC consisting of: A pair of Q Acoustic 2010 I bookshelf passive speakers A Q Acoustic 3070S 150W active subwoofer A Sabaj A4 DAC/Amplifier connected straight to my motherboard via Optical/Toslink I've recently picked up another two 2010is and a 2000C centre speaker with the aim of sorting a true 5.1 setup. My existing 2010is (soon to be fronts) are on 400mm isolating desktop stands, and the rears will be on floor stands. Centre speaker TBD. Sub is on the floor on spikes and isolation pads. Room is a 3m² cube basically so not a massive space to fill. I'm looking to see if anyone can advise on a 5.1 AV receiver/home cinema amp that'll happily drive these without being absolutely freakin' massive. These 5.1 systems are usually paired with things like the Denon 1610/1700/1910 or various Yamaha receivers, which are far bigger and heavier than I want on a 2000mm x 720mm sit/stand desk and totally overkill for my needs (7.1 at 140W per channel lol). So I'm wondering if anyone can advise on a possible solution meeting these criteria: Ideally no bigger than 300mm x 300mm footprint and no taller than 200mm 5.1 at 80W per channel or less, anything else is unnecessary overkill and realistically 40W per channel would be absolutely fine Optical in A decent integrated DAC ideally Headphone amplification would be a "nice to have" but I have other options to satisfy this requirement so hardly a deal breaker. Budget... I'd like to keep it under £500.

Finally got round to blocking up my 4080.

Spent some time properly cable managing the rear: Still need to sort the rear covers for above and below the PSU plus something to cover up the space behind the light box. Other than that and a few other cosmetic tweaks I'm not in a massive rush with, all done.

Mostly finished my teardown and rebuild. Managed to damage one of my fan control cables so won't be able to finish off until tomorrow. Strip down and light clean. Surprisingly very little muck. Rear cover from ColdZero. Pain in the arse to fit. Reran some of my cables Inc 12vHPWR Nothing like pulling apart a £1200 GPU. And holy shit is is the 4080 Strix a pain in the arse to disassemble. My EVGA 2080 was a piece of piss but this was a nightmare, including three screws driven in so hard they tried to strip on removal. Not happy, ASUS. ASUS also seem to use a really nasty thermal goop in place of pads on the memory modules. Cleaned off okay with a bit of isopropyl to leave a pretty tidy board. The Phanteks G40 block is also a right pain in the arse. The instructions are terrible and quite obviously wrong in some places, the thermal pads are not especially well cut which means they gum together. They also put them in loose with other bits so they get a bit mullered. Maybe I was spoiled by the Watercool block I had on my 2080 but for £250 I really expect better quality. Anyway, looks nice enough. In and wiring tidied And tubing done. I don't like the aesthetics as much as I did with the 2080, the 4080 feels a bit unbalanced as the ports are so far back. But equally the other blocks are tiny and this has a decent industrial look to it that compliments the fittings. Will have to see how I get on, if I'm not happy I'll pick up the Watercool block instead.

Time for my regular six weekly update, which is mostly to say "nothing has happened". Well, that's not entirely true. I did paint my ColdZero rear case cover. Not perfect, but pretty decent and the tiny bits of overspray I can clear up with a razorblade and acetone if I need to. I also had one of my top rad NF-P12 redux shit it's bearing, so I've got a replacement for when I tear it down. Which will probably be just after new year.

The RTX 2060 was priced closer to the 1070 at launch, though. Which it beats, but not by that big of a margin.

Pricing. On release, the 2080 was $719 RRP which made it marginally more expensive than the 1080ti (~$699) and miles more expensive than the 1080 ($599). The rasterization performance was broadly similar to the 1080ti, and exactly three games made use of the Tensor cores, so ray tracing was basically pointless in the early years of RTX cards.

Been tweaking my GPU overclock a bit, Port Royal run (as generates by far the highest workload) RTX 4080 (on air) at 2970MHz Ryzen 5900X (water cooled, 2x360 currently) PBO2 OC'd with all-cores floating around 4.8GHz and 8/12 cores boosting above 5GHz.

Pretty similar to when previously posted. 4080 replacing 2080, still need to water block it though. New Kanto speaker stands for the Q Acoustics make a huge difference.

Progress(ish)! I've done absolutely nothing on Mellifera for a few months now as real life has been getting in the way. However I managed to grab an hour this afternoon to work on modifying the 5v RGB cable that comes with the G40 waterblocks. They supply an ugly grey and black daisy -chainable micro-3-pin to 3POL cable with their blocks to key into their RGB ecosystem (thankfully using the standard pinout though). If you want a standard 3 pin 5v RGB connector, you have to use supplied adapters. See what I mean? Now this just don't do; not only is it ugly it's also clutter I could do without. So I decided to sleeve the cable and replace the connector with a more traditional 5v RGB one. The process is pretty straightforward but very fiddly. First, pop off the nasty 3POL daisy chain. I then threw the sleeve on; I used some leftover MDPC-X from doing my PSU and pump cables as it was the longest piece I had. At the micro 3 pin end I've heatshrunk it, it's not the greatest job but it's alright. 3/4 pin RGB connector body over the cable, 3-pin ready for soldering. Getting stuff lined up for soldering. I don't solder very often (this is the first time in about 2 years) but I really should invest in some helper gear as EVERYTHING I solder is incredibly tiny and finicky. I certainly didn't mis my calling as a career brain surgeon. Top (Grey) = 5v Middle (Black) = Data Bottom (Black) = Ground I took one practice run with the spares before soldering and boy am I glad I did. None are going to win any awards and frankly the data cable is a horror show but they're well adhered and nothing has bridged. I threw some tiny strips of electrical tape around the 5v and ground as extra insurance, slapped the connector housing on and we're done (and looking pretty fine too). Now we wait until I can tear my system down again to see if it works....

More Parts! Gave up waiting for Overclockers at ~45-odd days of waiting for stock, and ordered the Phanteks G40 block from Newegg in the US instead. This was INCREDIBLY smooth- so smooth. in fact, that I can see myself buying PC parts direct from them a lot more in the future. Ordered on the 8th. Arrived on the 12th. Basically the same price as from Overclockers (item inc tax and duty slightly more expensive, but free postage) and was faster delivery than OC advertised despite coming all the way from California. I've not had chance to spin up Fusion 360 yet, let alone get down to actually designing any of the other lightboxes.

Pretty happy with this: 5900X and RTX 4080. Probably a fair bit left in the tank on the RTX, but this'll do just fine until it's under water. No idea why my CPU score is higher than the 5950X a few posts up...

REDUX! Some initial progress on a continuation of this casemod. Going to be slowish going due to part availability and lack of free time. RTX 4080 2080 is out, now replaced with an ASUS 4080 TUF. It's currently on air whilst I try and source a Phanteks G40- overclockers are the sole UK distributors but their order which was due in late August has been delayed with no ETA. Custom 12vHPWR cable This was supplied by ModDIY with 2x 12 pin AX750 Gold pinout. Yes it's an old PSU but it's plenty powerful enough to keep things tiding over for now; I will eventually upsize to something 1000w ATX3.0 and retire it. ColdZero rear panel cover Picked up a rear cover that obscures the horrid der8auer sticker and GPU vertical mount. I'm going to spray some sort of hexagon pattern on it before fitting. I'm also planning on a few more laser cut / CNC panels, one top and one bottom, in the same hexagonal style as the lightbox. These will partly obscure the upper and lower radiators and I might also fit them with diffused LED strips At the rear I'll also be doing some shroud and cover panels for the cabling.

Given your symptoms I'd be looking at voltage and CPU temps, in that order.

Well just to round this one off...TUF 4080 ordered. I'll need to look at interim options for GPU cables for my AX750 whilst I source a new power supply. Will likely run it on air at first until I can get the GPU block I want.

They also have a ROG Strix for £1100 which would enable me to use the Phanteks G40 block I want to. But, then again, that's only marginally more expensive than buying a new TUF.

Plus, I have a matching pair of them, so I'd need to buy two...

2017 era ROG Swift PG279Q, so pretty early in the history of GSync monitors. Fairly sure it hasn't got Freesync compatibility.

Okay, one factor I haven't considered which I think will probably sway me towards NVidia... My 1440p monitors are GSync (ROG Swift PG279Q). That means, if I'm correct in my thinking, that I won't be able to use adaptive frame rates without buying replacement monitors. Hmm.