ITX PC upgrades and stuff.

AlienALX · October 12, 2021

Hola. Been quite a long time since I built a PC now. Well, on forum any way.

Last April 2020 I built a dream PC after a windfall of cash. Has a 3950x, Lian Li PC12 case, 2080Ti Kingpin etc. It's a beautiful rig. I also have a Alienware threadripper PC (not the triangle one, the older one I modded) as my file server. However, I live at two addresses. I'm not rich or anything (far from it) but I have an elderly mother who I need to help a lot, so I have a room at her house for when I stay here, which as she has gotten older means I am here half of the time. I had a Threadripper water cooled rig here (1920x, same as my one at home) but it developed a leak and I was missing out a lot of game time messing with it. Plus it was huge, and room here is at a premium (the room is 2.2 meters x 3 meters so pretty tiny). As such I sold off the TR gear and water cooling gear to my buddy (sans the broken rad) and built this.

At the time I built it funds were limited heavily and parts were scarce. So I bought the case (Jonsbo V10 with the riser) for £80, the PSU was on sale (bronze wired) for £45 and the cooler was £46. I also bought a B450 Aorus ITX for £100 (was new) and a R3600 for £170 (which was super cheap as the prices had all ramped up and they were hard to get). The Aorus 2080Ti Xtreme I bought when Ampere was announced for £480 lol. It even has a water block I removed.

So yeah, concessions were made. Most notably on the PSU and the cooler. I didn't realise those AIOs are known for leaking around the pump housing. It hasn't, but I don't like the idea of that one bit. The PSU leaves a lot to be desired too. It runs very warm being only Bronze, and has the fan on 100% of the time. The fully wired thing is a real bummer in ITX too.

I went on vacation last week for the first time in 2.5 years (cheers, Covid) and I got Covid whilst away. So I have been sick and could not go out when I got there. That meant I didn't spend any money, so now I am back home isolating (three days to go, thank god I am double vaxxed) and I have excess money and I am bored shitless. Not a good combo LOL.

So yeah, like I said last year I built my dream rig. However, I was considering getting this case.

And the CH 570 Impact. In the end I realised that spending double on a ITX board was kinda silly as if I got a normal ATX board I could have the Kingpin, so I went that route. However, I now have the gear so I bought that case earlier.

I bought this PSU on sale.

Fully modular gold rated, and this cooler refurb (Corsair sell them like that here) for half price.

I will be keeping the board, RAM, SSDs and GPU etc and swapping out the case, cooler and PSU. What I like is that the case I have now like I said is a hot box, and the Antec allows you to do this.

AlienALX · October 13, 2021

Late night Amazon purchase....

I'd love to ditch the SATA, but the ingress of cheaper 2tb+ NVME has not happened as I thought it may. So for now I will have to use the 2tb 2.5" Firecuda and 1tb SATA SSD I have. I think I may be able to hide those in the central chamber, but we'll see.

AlienALX · October 15, 2021

AlienALX · October 27, 2021

Quick update. The 2.5" Firecuda decided to die. So I modded the case in the centre to take a 3.5" drive as that was all I had to hand. I really didn't want to spend any more money right now. I managed to read everything from the dying drive, so that was cool.

I've been tossing around ideas for what to do to guard the GPU. I would imagine it will look something like this.

I am also considering giving it a custom paint job. For about ten years now I have been into the BMX hobby. Collecting and restoring old bikes etc. Here is some of what I've done lately. I call this murder purple. It's Blackberry with red flake over it.