Hi Guys. I'm back to build my "dream machine"

Catalonia · April 13, 2016

Hi guys! This is my first post here, even if I've been watching so many videos of Linus in Youtube, so... Here I am!

I am Mac user, a really convinced Mac user for many years. I had MacBooks Pros, I had a couple of iMacs, and now I have the top of the range iMac 5K which I mostly use for work and some random play time in boot camp (i7 6700K 16GB R9 M395X 3TB Fusion Drive)

Last year, (just before buying the iMac 5K) I decided to go back to the PC world. I love building systems (in fact I have a computer company and I spend all days building/fixing computers for my customers) and I was angry with Apple's limitations to upgrade the GPU in order to play demanding games...

So, I've got all this from Amazon:

Asus Rampage V Extreme USB 3.1
Intel 5930K
Samsung NV951 SSD 512GB nvme PCIe
32GB DDR4 Kingston HyperX 3.000MHz 4x8GB
Corsair h110i GTX
Corsair 780T
Corsair AX1500i PSU
All Individually sleeved red cables
ASUS Strix nVidia GeForce 980 Ti 6GB
ASUS PG278Q
Corsair Keyboard K95 RGB

I carefully build my system, it was so nice and fun. The strix have the fan off when not using 3D, so is the Corsair AX1500i... Is amazing, even in games the PSU fan was off. I was honestly blown away by the stability and power of this PSU. Of course the power of that machine was also amazing when playing games.

But, I finally decided to return it all and get the iMac 5K, here the reasons:

1) I was totally unable to get the RAM to work at 3.000MHz. And I mean totally unable. I know how to build computers I've been doing that for years. I had the latest BIOS, I followed every single tutorial in internet, I asked for help in all forums, ROG, 3DO. Tried to mess up everything... After more than a week trying I just gave up. Standard speed 2166MHz for 3.000Mhz certified Kinston modules in a motherboard that supports 3000Mhz and XMP 2.0 (so the modules) no luck.

2) Strangest thing ever. The SSD NV951 PCIe, was very fast, yes, but I noticed that when booting a system with that PCI I lost some FPS, and in fact when running 3DMark I had a noticeably lower socre than when booting the system using a traditional HDD using SATA. Which brings me a simple question... Do PCIe SSD take some bandwith from the GPU or the system? Anyone had this issue before?

I honestly don't know, but I saw myself spending almost 10 days in a system that I couldn't make it work at standard speeds, I spent a lot of money, more than 4k Euros, so I returned it all and bought the iMac 5K which ran perfectly smooth out of the box.

Now, 6 months later I am thinking that my lack of knowledge of the gaming world was probably the issue. So, here I am starting again with the hope of building my dream machine, and get it at least work at "supposed" speeds in less than a week

For starters, I should totally check the motherboard compatibility memory list, and make sure I buy a part number which is specifically supported.

Sorry for the long story!

Dr_Pleeper · April 13, 2016

I personally don't like kingston ram. The only thing i can think of relative to your score dropping while booting from the SSD is that it was so fast it was using a percentage of your cpu to load things? Not entirely sure.