Shai Hulud

Anyone?

Hi I'm pretty lost what to do to replace these ugly cables before building my custom loop (top/bottom rads, front pump/distroplate, petg hard tubing, lian li unifans x 10, monoblock and gpu block) Have a Lian Li 011dxl silver case, asus rog zenith 2 extreme alpha MB which takes 3 different psu cables, evga rtx 3090 gpu which takes 3 8 pin pcie cables, and some sata and front panel cables im considering replacing like the USB cables. The default cables are way too long and the front of the system doesn't look great and the back is just a mess. Extension cables won't work w/o replacing main cables as there just isn't room. See pictures below and imagine additionally putting in 10 lian li sl120 fans and a couple radiators and front distro plate. My PSUs are Phanteks Revolt Pro 850 chained to Corsair RMX 750W in master/slave mode so I need Phanteks compatible cables. I *think* Seasonic cables would work but am unsure? Anyway I was looking at cable mod custom cables and it was like 550 dollars just for the PSU cables. Which seems super high but idk whats standard. I mainly just want shorter cables, 20 to 30mm, the ability to customize each strand of the cable I can take it or leave it. Are there other reliable companies that can do this cheaper? Or should I just get short PSU cables and 20mm extensions? Still expensive but probably half as much. Some pics of what I'm working with. Can I replace these I/O cables? I'm assuming I can but the USB one was very hard to remove so I just left it alone. Pics: Front / rear with shield / without shield In the last pic some cables are unplugged, it's even worse when they're all plugged in. The top cage is the hot swappable drive bay which I'm currently using but I could remove that and put the drives there elsewhere probably. Having trouble picturing good color combination for the cables. My fittings are all silver and the case is black/silver so I was thinking maybe a silver theme. Pretty sure I'll just use distilled water for coolant. Haven't decided what to do with the rgb, everything still on default settings. Probably do something relatively simple with 1 color (blue maybe?) Appreciate any/all advice. I dont mind spending if I must, 550 just seems nuts and I've already spent over 10k on the system.

That was my guess, so my card is fine with those both empty? Any idea how to change the fan curve? The main thing I'm noticing is my CPU idle temps seem about 5 degrees higher since installing the new GPU

Here is a better picture, above one set of pins it says 5V D G(?) and the other says Aux fan. Maybe one is for RGB controller and one is for external PWM case fans? Otherwise I dont really see the point of two of them

I finally installed my air cooled EVGA RTX 3090, and I noticed today at idle the fans do not spin at all. They do spin when I'm gaming. I assume this is how it is supposed to work but the card gets pretty hot even at idle, and being right next to my CPU I think this makes my CPU fans work harder,, which worries me a bit. So there are these two connectors that look like they take a 4 pin female fan cable, but the GPU didn't come with any fan cable and the installation manual mentioned nothing about it. I *think* the purpose is to attach PWM case fans to those and have their speed controlled by the GPU temp. Maybe I'm stupid (probably), but how would one control the fan speed on this? I dont see any setting in Nvidia control panel, nor do I see a way to control the RGB. I didn't put much thought into this initially as I'm going to watercool the card and the fans/rgb are going bye bye, but the block is from Optimus and was supposed to ship in mid November but being Optimus they probably meant November 2021 and I'll be air cooling a while... Do I need a third party software? Am I actually supposed to plug something into these 4 pin slots? Am I worrying over nothing? Thanks

Sabrent has 5 year warranties if you registered within 90 days I think. 1 year otherwise. That drive has been on the market about 18 months, I guess you didn't register it?

I currently have 6TB of M.2 drives, 1TB older SSD, 500GB very old HDD, and three different external USB drives ranging from 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB. So total 14.5TB but not all drives are full and I can coalesce the external drive data to get < 14 TB I'd like to back up the drives on internal SATA HDDS. I was thinking two 14TB+ drives in RAID 1 to use for backups. Problem is all the large drives I've looked at seem to be very loud. E.g. Seagate Exos reviews frequently mention them being very noisy. That's a deal breaker for me as the drives would go in my PC. What are some of the quieter options? Ideally not spending more than 3 cents / GB If cheap high capacity drives are always noisy what are some alternatives? Use NAS drives in different room maybe? Not sure how reliable that would be when backing up large drives, never tried it.

I didn't realize it at first but it didn't fit because some of the housing pins were bent. I attempted to straighten them and they broke off. The drive then fit into the slot and it actually works perfectly. Only problem is it runs pretty hot. Idle is around 42C which is not bad but stress testing with Crystal Disk Mark saw peak temps of 83C, though most tests peaked in the low to mid 70s. Not really sure how to cool the drive. There is not enough space for the Sabrent heatsink I have. I could possibly make a simple DIY heatsink with thermal pad + ? Ideally a strip of copper, but I don't have one. I know aluminum is used sometimes, this is probably stupid but would aluminum foil do anything? Just want to cool it down like 5C. Maybe one of those laptop heatsinks would work. I don't know if it's better to have the drive in contact with the motherboard tray or not, though, so thickness of the heatsink is very unknown. The space I have to work with is slightly more than the length of those standoffs, maybe 6 - 10mm. Hard to tell for sure as I can't measure the space while the board is installed. I'm not sure how to direct air to beneath the motherboard, but I'll also be liquid cooling once I get my GPU block and all my fan slots are used on radiators, so a passive cooling solution would be preferred.

So it actually works in this slot, I'm using the drive as a boot drive for the moment but planning to clone to the faster Rocket 4 Plus. Only problem I'm having, and I'm not sure it's a problem as I've heard differing things on cooling NVME drives, is the bottom slot has no cooling and there isn't space for the heatsink I have. In Crystal Disk Mark default test, when it gets to the random write section I saw peak temps around 83 degrees C. Idle is around 42 C. I've heard throttling doesn't happen until 90, but IDK. Sequential reads/writes were actually slightly faster than before, which is odd. Not sure how to actually cool this drive. I have a few strips of Laird thermal pads, but I don't think they would reach the motherboard tray even if I put them together. But there is not enough space for the Sabrent heatsink. Maybe a simple thermal pad + thin copper strip? Would that do much? I don't really care about super cool temps on SDDs but 83c is a bit worrisome, if I could lower peak temps by 5 to 10 degrees I'd be satisfied.

Yeah the metal pins underneath are fine it was just the housing I guess (sorry, they looked like "pins" to me but plastic). Guess I'll give it a shot. If it works it should work indefinitely as I have no need to be looking at the bottom of the motherboard except for the initial install

As far as I can tell the pins that broke don't actually have contacts on them so I'm actually not sure why it wouldn't still work. The pins appear to be plastic on both sides

The top plastic pins broke. Bottom pins are fine. I don't know if the plastic pins had important contacts underneath, I'm guessing from comments that they did. I could just try to boot it up and see what happens...any chance this damages the drive or it just wouldn't work? Still a PITA to attempt as I have to plug/unplug everything and remove the motherboard each time to mess with that slot.

Okay thanks for the bad news. Not going to buy a new motherboard as I spent 900 on this one and can work around this. I really can't think of a moment where I'd have crushed the pins...this is the first time I even looked at the bottom of the motherboard. But I doubt Asus warranties this kind of thing since I'm not sure I didn't do it, and even if I were I can't prove it. Luckily there's a Dimm.2 expansion module I can use for 4 total M.2 drives vs 5. I currently have 3, so, it should be fine. I was staring at the slot for a good 15 minutes trying to figure out why it wouldn't work before I saw the crushed pins. It shouldn't really affect anything but it still bums me out to have a 10k+ system I've been using a couple months already having things break, even if I broke it (or especially if I broke it). It's ridiculous for a board this expensive to have unprotected pins on the bottom if they break this easily...a simple cover like the top M.2 drives have would have protected them.

So I recently figured out in this thread that the M.2 slot on the bottom of my Asus Rog Zenith II Extreme Alpha had broken pins that were preventing the drive going in. I don't think I broke them but can't rule it out as that's a sketchy place for unprotected pins. Anyway, I tried to bend them back and they snapped. The drive goes in now but I don't know if those pins had any functional purpose or were just there to hold the drive in contact with the bottom pins. So....will this work? Or is this slot hopeless?

It was really hard to see but after getting a good enough photo it looks like those are actually crushed pins. I am assuming it came this way as I have been very careful when building. I'm not even sure how I would have crushed these pins. Maybe accidentally pressed against a standoff? Only possibility but still I have been pretty careful. What a bummer...this is why you shouldn't put important connectors on the bottom of the motherboard. I have no way of knowing for sure whether I did this. Maybe I could RMA it but I'd be out a computer until I got a new one. F*** I'm assuming this is not fixable, the pins are so tiny