Evolution of my rig ~2016-today

Vegetable · September 10, 2018

Hi all. Finally got the last piece to finish my PC. (for now at least) Thought I may as well share the tale of how she came to be. I've yet to come up with a good name for it, so if you have any suggestions pls halp, am not that creative or original lmao. Anyways, here goes:

Summer 2016: Got an FX 8350/990FX Sabertooth for $150 from a close friend, bought a PNY GTX 580 from @Bubblewhale and another off Ebay for a total of $90 for TWO 580's (already had case/PSU/HDD/RAM.) Between that and the FX 8350 at 4.9Ghz, I have NO IDEA how that poor TX850W didn't explode. Long story short it was the old 80plus model from 2009 that was brand new in box I got for $20. She kept me warm in the winter, that much is for sure. All of this was housed in my NZXT S210, complete with 7 fans. I actually had to do the same thing @Ryan Leech did for his 3-way SLI GTX 465 build, and mounted the radiator fans OUTSIDE the case because there was no clearance for them inside the case because of the motherboard. It was ghetto asf and worked great too. To summarize that, a $45 case with a $15 fan controller, and literally $100 worth of Corsair AF120/AF140 + 2 Noctua Redux fans for the Kraken.

Here's pictures:

Here's the 580s in all their glory. The one from Bubblewhale is pristine (top card), and of course the Ebay 580 has ALL the stickers peeled off complete with irremovable adhesive residue!

And this was my whole setup back then. I just loved the sleeper aesthetic, and knowing I had 2 old as dirt GPUs in SLI for no other reason that it was cheap performance when it scaled.

Then I hit a wall. An oddly-specific-but-I-should-have-seen-it-coming wall. VRAM. I tried to tweak settings. I thought I could do 1080p with low textures and medium-high settings otherwise and be alright. That just wasn't the case. There was just too much stutter because it would choke out on it's measly 1.5GB of GDDR5. So I came up with another idea. Having built this entire PC with airflow for dual GPU's in mind, I wanted to keep that going strong. So I did. I traded some old Dell Vostro prebuilt I had for an EVGA GTX 570 2.5Gb edition via craigslist. They were sort of rare, but not to the point where the price was ridiculous. I got a matching card off ebay for $70. So yes, I went from SLI 580's to SLI 570's, BUT they both overclocked VERY well (I'm talking 900mhz and that was classified territory) and with the entire extra gig of VRAM, they performed great. Not to mention power consumption was down, heat output into the room was down, although noise remained about the same. I could turn the settings up now. High textures with medium settings (that's a very BROAD example with no game in specific mentioned, so obviously it depends on the game at the end of the day) was about where she could hold a steady 60fps in most titles. I was in love. I even got a HB SLI bridge off my local CL for a $5 bill just for luls. And no, it didn't change the performance. I tested it.

This was her from late 2016 thru march 2017:

Then something clicked. I found some brain cells or something idk man. I love all these pictures above a lot, but I can't believe I myself used them in retrospect. They were SO LOUD. Nothing else can be said. It was basically a hair dryer after 5-10 minutes under load. I can't stand even hearing my PC now lol. So I got tired of it. I wanted a quiet fast modern thing, not riding the 7 year old once was new and nice wave. I got my beloved R9 Fury NITRO (another card from @Bubblewhale for a great price of $210 back then) to replace the 570's in April 2017. She went into the S210 and I actually don't have a picture of that. I do have the Fury halfway unboxed from the day I got it, seen here:

I then got my i7 4790k+Z97 board from the same guy I got the FX platform from, for the low price of the FX chip/board+$150. I as well don't have any pictures of this but that's how she was until about 2 months ago. I got sick of looking at the turd, the sleeper aesthetic had worn off and she just looked like crap to me. I ordered a Phanteks P350X with the black/white interior and another AF140 for the radiator to match the one I already had for a complete push/pull. I pulled 2 of the AF120's out of the S210 for exhaust fans. It was time for a nice improvement in the looks department.

Here's pics:

Another one:

But there was 2 problems still. Number one, storage. I had a WD Black 1TB, and it was/is fine, just slow. Buddy of mine got an SSD, and as soon as I experienced it myself, there was no going back. I ordered a 1TB Adata SU800 SSD. I again don't have any pictures of this, but its just an SSD. I replaced my HDD altogether, it sits in a box as a trusty backup. Made a world of difference 10/10 would recommend an SSD for ANY computer. As for the other problem. It wasn't a big problem, just a minor inconvenience really. I was used to my pretty high airflow S210 tricked out like no other $40 case was meant to be, so when I got this case my GPU temps really did go up quite a bit. I used to run <70*C on the Fury in the old case, but in the P350X I was more around 76-77*C under load. That killed me, even though it's 100% safe. So I had to do something that the case wasn't intended to do, and bought another fan. But where do you put it? In the empty PCI slot covers of course. I pulled out the 4 slot covers and did some measuring, then ordered an 80mm red LED fan complete with a dust filter as well (all held in tightly with zip-ties.) Made load temps go from 76-77*C, to about 74*C peak after many hours of gaming or stress testing. It's really ghetto but it almost looks alright and it works wonders surprisingly. I also got an actual stick from outside, cut it to size, and painted that shit red to hold up the GPU. Compare the GPU sag now vs before and also peep the lil red fan:

And there ya have it folks. My baby. I'm sure this was lame but I wanted to do something so I spent 45 minutes writing this crap. Help me name her and leave your thoughts below if you feel so inclined.

Ryan Leech · September 14, 2018

All you need to do now is get a second Fury to maximize that heat output! (I was secretly hoping you would have gotten three GTX 580 3GB in 3-way SLI and put them underwater)

P.S. Where's your SSD at?

P.S.2 My R9 290s melt my room

Vegetable · September 14, 2018

13 minutes ago, Ryan Leech said:

All you need to do now is get a second Fury to maximize that heat output! (I was secretly hoping you would have gotten three GTX 580 3GB in 3-way SLI and put them underwater)

P.S. Where's your SSD at?

P.S.2 My R9 290s melt my room

Love those fat 290s man. Very distinct look for sure. My SSD is mounted on a little sled thing on the back side of the case, for nobody to see sadly.

Edit - If I could find a Fury for a good price (and it'd have to be the nitro 1050mhz one as well), I would consider it. But I definitely don't need it as of now lol, Medium settings I can pull 80-100fps all day in really any game and I love it. Couldn't be bothered to CF right now. Maybe in the future tho...

Ryan Leech · September 14, 2018

3 minutes ago, Vegetable said:

Love those fat 290s man. Very distinct look for sure. My SSD is mounted on a little sled thing on the back side of the case, for nobody to see sadly.

I just have to have my SSDs out in the open, all four to be exact. I love having the Intel logo out in front, with my rig being AMD based and all. What I really want to know is when will you buy a DSLR?