"Rate my Rig" thread

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well after waiting until the Black Friday sales on Ebuyer started I made my choice and bought the more sensibly-priced XG27AQM. It was a toss-up between that and the slightly cheaper, slightly bigger offering from MSI, however because the card and motherboard were also Asus ROG-STRIX I wanted to be consistent I've had problems with MSI's motherboards in the past. And though of course I wouldn't be looking at that part of the monitor, the back of the MSI is ugly as fuck! Monitors that are both 4K and G-Sync capable are surprisingly rare, this one came in a huge box that I'm definitely going to enjoy opening!

I also bought a couple of air duster sprays with the other parts because the space under the desk where the PC sits gets VERY dusty, so I'll clean out the machine and its enclosure before installing the new parts. Said parts are filling the hitherto empty slots on the motherboard, new Corsair RAM to complement what's there to double its memory, and an NVMe SSD for the M.2 slot which if I'm able to copy my C drive to it should allow me to fulfil the "secure boot" requirement of Windows 11. Despite the fast data transfer speeds afforded by SSD a terabyte is still a terabyte after all

[Agent Fisher]

I done did a thing! I finally built my own PC, since I've now got a big person job that pays big person money.

ASUS Rog Strix X299 E Gaming II
Intel i9-7640
Gigabyte RTX 4080
64 gb of RAM
2 1tb SATA SSDs.

[The Infidel]

I done did a thing! I finally built my own PC, since I've now got a big person job that pays big person money.

ASUS Rog Strix X299 E Gaming II
Intel i9-7640
Gigabyte RTX 4080
64 gb of RAM
2 1tb SATA SSDs.

Nice!
Are you sure you don't mean i9-7940x? The 7640 belongs to an i5, methinks.

[The Infidel]

Most sites/youtubers review power consumption at peak performance. I've been looking for a review for power consumption at idling and light work, since my computer is idling/playing Spotify/light surfing at least 95% of the time. Finally, I found one, and I share it with you guys as you might've been looking for the same:



I've suspected that Intel's E-cores makes a huge difference here, and it looks like they do.

[Agent Fisher]

Nice!
Are you sure you don't mean i9-7940x? The 7640 belongs to an i5, methinks.

*checks my notes*

Yes, 7940X.

It's a big jump going from a 1060, 8 gigs of ram and an i5.

[The Infidel]

Nice!
Are you sure you don't mean i9-7940x? The 7640 belongs to an i5, methinks.

*checks my notes*

Yes, 7940X.

It's a big jump going from a 1060, 8 gigs of ram and an i5.

Oh yeah, you're gonna feel that one.
Myself, I have an 8 year old i7-4790K with a somewhat newer RTX3060ti and 32GB DDR3. The nerd in me wants to upgrade, but honestly, I really don't need to yet. The only thing I do that wants some juice, is playing Elite Dangerous on my 3x32" dirt cheap monitors @7680x1440 @60Hz, and it just works well. Other stuff I do is mostly browsing and playing music. I'm amazed at how long this system has just kept on going.

[Agent Fisher]

If it wasn't for wanting to play DCS and Star Citizen, I would've been mostly fine with what I had. But I also wanted to future proof for a bit. And like I said, well paying city job, no kids, no spouse, means I have more money to spend on toys.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

I managed to get quite a few years out of my own system with incremental upgrades, and a few unforeseen expenses and problems. Turns out, one of the browser games that I play is NOT compatible with HDR unless fullscreen is enabled, something I only noticed with my new monitor. A workaround I fortunately discovered is to turn HDR off, start the program, then turn it back on and it works normally. A relatively minor inconvenience but it's still annoying.

I did manage to transition to Windows 11 eventually, I had to buy a £10 TPM chip since the motherboard is TPM compatible and had the port but the chip itself (the size of a average coin) is sold separately, and I had to mess around with the partitions since converting from MBR to GPT fails if there are too many of them. I had to determine which of the three recovery partitions I needed to keep and got rid of the other two at which point the conversion succeeded. So I managed to get a working W11 installation on the WD M.2 SSD, and the Sandisk which the OS was on before is relegated to storage, but being an SSD startup times were already fast.

Next thing I need to replace is the intake fan on one of the drive bays. Since the drive bay is empty it's not a big deal however I might be able to remove the worn-out fan or I might not, the fan on the other still works fine. Because its speed is manually controlled by a small dial on the front it might be difficult, considering I've had this case since 2009 it's certainly gone the distance. Those two fans are powered by two wires on a molex connector, the other two have individual ports on the motherboard controlled by the BIOS.

One of the fans on the back I had to replace twice, the first was a cheap Corsair one that started making an "rrrr" noise after a few months so I replaced it with a better Corsair one that so far is working fine. I've been putting this off for weeks because I'm looking to get a set of 120mm fans, my case has four of them including the one that is broken, and a huge 200mm one at the top that I'm pretty sure can't be replaced if it breaks.

I have to research to see what kind of fan controllers my 4-year-old Asus ROG motherboard came with or whether I have to buy a set of fans that come with their own controller that I plug in, somehow.