The Wasted Efforts build

[maxtch]

Budget (including currency): US$0. It is one RMA and some shifting parts around builds only

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Spare computer. No specific tasks.

System configuration:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-10700K
• Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z490-G Gaming Wi-Fi
• RAM: T-Force Vulcan Z DDR4-3200 16GB x2
• CPU Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML120L v2 RGB version
• Graphics: Sapphire Nitro RX 580 8GB
• SSD: Samsung PM981 M.2 22110 NVMe 960GB
• NIC: nVidia ConnectX-3 MCX311A 10GbE NIC + Brocade 10GBASE-SR transceiver
• PSU: Corsair CX750M
• Case: Corsair 220T RGB

I went in to further investigate the reason why things are giving me problems and generated an unholy amount of rejects, turned out to be two problems:

• I mounted my CPU cooler with insufficient mounting pressure in my 4U cases and thermal paste, and
• The set of T-Force RAM I bought was faulty at 3200MHz speed.

For the first problem I fixed it when moving that MSI platform back. And the second one is up to an RMA process. The RMA came back, and I moved the MSI board back to the rack case I initially had it in, and it has worked fine ever since. This means now I have a pile of no longer needed troubleshooting pieces, hence the title Wasted Efforts. This is still a pretty capable gaming and workstation build, but I just have no task assigned to it.

 

Some things of note here:

• The BIOS of this Asus board has trouble booting Ubuntu through UEFI, and its onboard peripherals are not supported in macOS (Hackintosh.) This limited the usefulness of this machine for me, as I use a lot of UNIX.
• The front fans of the case is a good emulation of server cases if I spin the fans up. Too bad this motherboard lacked the PCIe slots for my spare Tesla K20x.