I spent over 4 HOURS at my local Fry's Electronics on Thursday

[RobFRaschke]

Because they didn't have exactly what I wanted, and by the time I re-arranged my build, they sold out of 3 separate sets of RAM I wanted and the CPU I had originally intended to get...

 

So I went there with the intention of getting an i3-8100 with a Gigabyte H370M D3H with a clearance set of Corsair ddr4-2400. Out the door for under $300 on those three items with a little price-matching and tax. Well they didn't have the board in stock, but they had the processor and ram. But I hated all 4 reasonably priced boards they had in stock for 8th gen Intel. So I went through four iterations of builds as things sold out and I made my decisions. So the Final build is as follows:

 

Ryzen 5 2400G(Yup, went from 8th gen Intel to AMD(2200g), back to intel 7th(i5-7400) gen and then back to AMD(2200g) again, then on to AMD(2400g).

MSI x470 Gaming Plus

Patriot ddr4-3200 2x4gb(second kit to come)

Corsair RM650I

Corsair Carbide 270R(will get it's own thread on mods in the not to distant future, really not as thrilled with this selection, but they sold out of BOTH other cases I wanted while I was there.)

Some Red LED fans, some black fans for the front and some red sleeved extensions.

 

Carrying over from a previous system that didn't get ganked: A Thermaltake Contact Silent 12, which is a much better cooler than I anticipated when I picked it up for an ancient system that needed a little help. A Samsung 3TB 3.5" disk drive, with the possibility of adding 4 1TB WD Green drives if I need the space, which I may because the 3TB drive is almost 3/4 full. And last but not least, an SSD so old, most of you have probably never heard of it, an OCZ Agility 3 60GB drive

 

I'll yet be adding a Samsung 970Evo 250gb to replace the aged 60GB SSD, a video card TBD, more lighting, more sleeved cable extensions. I bought a 24 pin and an 8 pin, then proceeded to lose the 8 pin on the way home, so I need to replace it, and get one or two for the video card as needed.

 

My impressions so far of everything:

 

Ryzen 5 2400 - Fantastic Value. I wish I could have gotten the 2200G as the price is so much lower for what you get. I just can't see the SMT making that much difference in most real world use. The added Vega cores sure don't hurt until I get a video card in it. The only thing I've run on it so far is Elite Dangerous. 1080p high settings ran more than well enough, even at stock settings, but running 3.975ghz on the CPU and 1400mhz on the GPU did alleviate some rendering delays on planet textures and barely noticeable micro-stuttering on moving in a nd out of hyperdrive. I ran this on a 50" 1080P TV sitting way too close, to help make sure I didn't just not notice any issues it had. I was also running a second 23" 1080p monitor in portrait mode for ryzen master and some other info on ED while playing. I'm also pretty glad I didn't end up with the i3-8100 that I intended to get, despite this actually being MORE expensive, I got SMT, which won't hurt, I can overclock, which is really fun, and the integrated graphics are so far ahead of intel, they use them in their own systems when they want actual graphics performance. I.E. Hades Canyon.

 

MSI x470 Plus Gaming - I've spent WAY too much time looking at motherboards and going back and forth trying to save money here and there, but in the end, I'm really glad I got an upper-midrange board on the x470. First and foremost, the 2400G just worked out of the box, which I just couldn't be assured of on the B350 boards I was looking at. It also has DRASTICALLY better VRM than any of the lower end boards, and I absolutely believe that contributed to my overclocks. They're not spectacular by any means, but temps are well within happy ranges, no throttling, but Ryzen Master is reporting I'm well over socket voltage, probably just for the 65W TDP chip.

 

Patriot DDR4 - Runs at rated speeds at default voltage, which surprised the hell out of me since it was rated at 3200 16-18-18-36 at 1.35v, and it's doing that speed and latencies at 1.2V.

 

Corsair RM650I - Yup, works. Haven't installed the Corsair link, but voltages are solid and stable.

 

Corsair Carbide 270R - was my third choice and only because it was a decent price, but I kind of hate it now that I've built in it. I wish I didn't, it looks nice, but I hate it. Hate it. The power supply basement isn't full length, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to plug things in to the power supply once it's in. It also does not have a rear PSU mounting plate that's removable, so you have to insert it from the front, with all the cables you need installed. It also absolutely will not take three 140mm fans front or side. It absolutely wouldn't take 420mm rads on either, I expected that, but I'm going to have to do significant modification to get the triple fans I wanted front and top. I'm needy, but the physical space is there, they just aren't using the space at all optimally. I'm a little disappointed they didn't manage to put a 140mm in the rear for being such a wide case, but I did know at least that much about it before buying, but it's still a bit surprising. Space behind the motherboard tray is good, not anything insane, but the case panel doesn't bow at all with the 24pin cable bundle and plug with latch going to the individual sleeved extension. There's plenty of loops for wire routing on the rear of the motherboard tray. There are no gromets on any of the cable routing holes, which is pretty shoddy, even for a $50 case, but they'll be getting covered with a plate to hide everything better anyway. The drive brackets for mounting up to 2x2.5" and 2x3.5" drives to the rear of the motherboard tray and divider absolutely do not permit 90° cables, so depending on your motherboard arrangement, you will likely need SATA cables with all straight ends. That bit me in the ass mid build, so you've been warned. Finally, the power supply cover/basement is heavily ventilated, so if your power supply has any stickers on the top, you'll wan to remove them post haste, unless like me, you're going to make a sheet to cover all those holes and hide the wires below. Lastly, there is just one hole between the basement and the motherboard area, near the far right of the board, so my front audio cable was forced to run along the top of the basement area to get to it's header at the lower left corner of the motherboard, which is hideous.

 

If you've actually made it this far, you probably deserve some pictures, but I don't have any. Not right away at least. I'm going to do some before and after pictures of the case modifications to not suck quite so hard, so I'll take a picture of the system assembled before tearing it back apart to start on those mods.

[JuztBe]

Aaaaaaand that's why you order online. 

[RobFRaschke]

1 hour ago, JuztBe said:

Aaaaaaand that's why you order online. 

This was actually exactly the point of doing this build, this way. You can buy things locally, and they'll pricematch online, and you'll have it in your hands right now, instead of in a day or two or more, but these are the sacrifices you have to make. And frankly, I was really surprised, the only real "sacrifice" I had to make was on the case. The rest was just going with an alternative option. I still got the same price I would have at amazon or newegg. And didn't have to order from multiple places and hope it all gets here in one piece. So I have one more case. I've already got almost a dozen, dating back to an AT tower case that could fit a pair of most other standard tower cases in it that's been EXTENSIVELY modified and still can't keep up with what you can get for less than $100 now. But I've got two Antecs, two I don't remember brands on, a Thermaltake, the AT huge tower, a HP, one lian-li, one phantecks, one bequiet, and now two corsairs. I recently gave away a system in a Thermaltake and gave away one lian-li(xbox360) case. 

 

This was an intentional experience as part of the build. I actually rather enjoyed it. It was like buying computer parts 10 years ago, except I could pricematch the online guys, from my phone.

[JuztBe]

14 minutes ago, RobFRaschke said:

This was actually exactly the point of doing this build, this way. You can buy things locally, and they'll pricematch online, and you'll have it in your hands right now, instead of in a day or two or more, but these are the sacrifices you have to make. And frankly, I was really surprised, the only real "sacrifice" I had to make was on the case. The rest was just going with an alternative option. I still got the same price I would have at amazon or newegg. And didn't have to order from multiple places and hope it all gets here in one piece. So I have one more case. I've already got almost a dozen, dating back to an AT tower case that could fit a pair of most other standard tower cases in it that's been EXTENSIVELY modified and still can't keep up with what you can get for less than $100 now. But I've got two Antecs, two I don't remember brands on, a Thermaltake, the AT huge tower, a HP, one lian-li, one phantecks, one bequiet, and now two corsairs. I recently gave away a system in a Thermaltake and gave away one lian-li(xbox360) case. 

 

This was an intentional experience as part of the build. I actually rather enjoyed it. It was like buying computer parts 10 years ago, except I could pricematch the online guys, from my phone.

Oh, cool then. Turned out pretty good in the end. 

A techie can definitely make changes on the spot. I can only image what disaster would occur, if a guy who's not good at tech, would go to shop like that with a list of parts, without actually knowing much about them.

[RobFRaschke]

12 hours ago, JuztBe said:

Oh, cool then. Turned out pretty good in the end. 

A techie can definitely make changes on the spot. I can only image what disaster would occur, if a guy who's not good at tech, would go to shop like that with a list of parts, without actually knowing much about them.

Yeah, there were a few of those, I tried to help, but the sales guys really don't like that. Especially when you're saying things like "Oh, you only really check emails, shop and watch youtube on this, please don't spend $500 on that  1TB NVME SSD. Get this 250GB SATA SSD for $60. You would never know the difference."

[RobFRaschke]

On an unrelated note, I went through and shut off each fan to try and figure out where a hum was coming from. It was the HDD. I guess those noise isolation mounts just don't do much to steel platter spinning at 7200rpm. Go figure, lol. I may finally have an excuse to spend money on BIG ssd drives since it's very much the loudest part of this system.