The PC thread

[faizoff]

That is a great deal for that time. I bought the i5 2500k during release week in Jan 2011. It came bundled with a board and  I think it was $300 without the RAM. Looking back I think I built my entire system around $600 a decade ago, it was quite a desktop performance beast. Certainly not the topmost but very close to it. The combinations also were a lot simpler, now ... the combos are infinite and the sky is the limit. The workflows and target market have also gotten so varied that you're going to get vast segmentation.

With BF right around the corner, you're going to get a ton of great deals. I already see some excellent NVMe SSD sales. Those seem to be the only components that are dropping in price along with the CPUs. The other components prices (GPU apart) come and go.

[El Barto]

Doing a bit of research last night I figured out why people hate the 11th gen Intels. Without a monster cooler you're probably not going to get full potential out of those things, as temp will limit your turbo boost. And for the price of an adequate cooler you're better off going with water cooling. AIO water coolers are quite reasonable right now, so that's not a problem, but it is an added expenditure. I actually came pretty close to grabbing a factory water-cooled 2080 Super off of eBay, but then I'm presented with the problem of needing a case that'll accommodate two 240mm radiators. Shit just snowballs. 

[faizoff]

For real things definitely snowball, it started with a GPU purchase with me as well last year. Had used the 6870 for eons and when that couldn't play GTA V with the most basic settings on 1080p I got the RX 580 and then the rest snowballed when a great deal for 64 GB RAM came along. I still haven't found such a deal yet. $185 for G.Skill 64 GB 3200 DDR4 RAM is still an elusive deal.

It is interesting how CPU performance boost is now tied to things like heat dissipation, lower voltage, creating more thermal headroom. The better the cooling the better the performance push. I mean it was always there, but the default stock behavior is now dictated by the cooling solution you have. Most CPUs don't even come with a fan nowadays. So getting a good AIO or aircooler is part of the build expense.

[ReaPsTA]

Serious question - Why would anyone buy an Intel at this point? AMD is cheaper and even for gaming they are competitive.

[faizoff]

I think at this point it's a wash which CPU you get. There are"quirks" that people get familiar with. The cost really is comparable because it's not just the CPU you get, you have to get a compatible board and the costs pretty much line up similarly.

I think AMD have an edge on power efficiency these days but day to day workflows the performances should really not be noticable.

[El Barto]

Serious question - Why would anyone buy an Intel at this point? AMD is cheaper and even for gaming they are competitive.

In the current market they're not really cheaper. With one exception I'm seeing better prices for Intel on comparable chips. And while AMD is actually slightly faster in gaming, Intel is slightly faster in applications. Aside from the power draw it's mostly a wash, at this point. Furthermore, while the Intel chips are surprisingly hard to cool, the same is true of the 5800x, which is the AMD chip I'd be looking at. You're spending a wad of cash on a cooler either way.

As for quirks, I really dislike AMD rather strongly, despite having been an early adopter back with the first Athlons. Years of suffering through their miserable driver support has left a bad taste in my mouth. And while that's specifically VGA related, it didn't really inspire me as to their customer support. Plus, a MoBo has a lot more drivers than a mere graphics card. Lastly, the Intel CPU I'm still using, as Faizoff can attest, has really impressed me. I've never had an AMD chip I can say that about. The only reason I'm even bothering to upgrade is because the architecture around it has left me behind.

[ReaperKK]

Now that I've gotten my 3080 I'm going to sell my older 2080 and put that money towards a VR headset. I'm really out of the loop as VR is concerned but do you guys have any thoughts or recommendations?

[v_clortho]

As far as games go, Beat Saber is really fun.

[faizoff]

As for quirks, I really dislike AMD rather strongly, despite having been an early adopter back with the first Athlons. Years of suffering through their miserable driver support has left a bad taste in my mouth. And while that's specifically VGA related, it didn't really inspire me as to their customer support. Plus, a MoBo has a lot more drivers than a mere graphics card. Lastly, the Intel CPU I'm still using, as Faizoff can attest, has really impressed me. I've never had an AMD chip I can say that about. The only reason I'm even bothering to upgrade is because the architecture around it has left me behind.

I understand the distrust against AMD after your experience but after almost going bankrupt with the Bulldozer line of CPUs, they put Dr. Lisa Su in charge and  I think they've made a turnaround very few companies are able to. Their Ryzen lineup has truly risen from the dead and brought top-tier performance and reliability. The 3000 and 5000 series are probably the Sandy/Ivy Bridge of the current AMD CPU generation. Time will tell how long they last but so far it's quite impressive and this Ryzen architecture has further spun off to the workstation Threadripper series and EPYC servers. They've actually made a big dent in the server market, something that's always been Intel's stronghold and unheard of.


I really wouldn't worry too much about drivers so much especially for motherboards. With this turnaround, all board manufacturers have been paying a ton of attention and building trust with AMD by providing constant updates, improvements and multiple versions of motherboards and chipsets. Heck EVGA who have traditionally been only exclusive to Intel and Nvidia have now started making AMD boards and video cards. So yeah things are different now and I'm really glad this competition is fierce allowing for some fantastic line of CPUs and technology to advance by both brands.


The 5800x is kinda in a weird spot with its increased temperatures, somehow its silicon lottery luck seems to be limited. All other 5000 and 3000 series don't really have a problem with high temperatures even if it's within spec. I say this not really to try and change your mind but to give more perspective really. It's odd in a way a decade ago I was almost ready to pull the trigger on the Phenom series and was told to wait for the Sandy Bridge CPU which I did. This time round I was almost about to commit to the 10th gen Comet Lake CPUs and decided to wait for the Ryzen 5000 series which I did.




Either way with the technology and architecture out now, you can't go wrong with any of it really.

Now that I've gotten my 3080 I'm going to sell my older 2080 and put that money towards a VR headset. I'm really out of the loop as VR is concerned but do you guys have any thoughts or recommendations?

I briefly considered getting the Valve Index but it's a little too much to spend for what I don't think I'll be getting much use out of. There is also the Oculus but somehow their facebook integration is just not sitting right with me. If I can grab a cheap used VR kit I'd have to go for the Valve Index. I haven't tried any of these personally so really hard to give recommendations but that was my line of thinking when I last thought about it.

[faizoff]

I decided to take the plunge to the Small Form Factor (SFF) world and got one of the more popular cases. It's called the 'Meshlicious' cause it's all Mesh and delicious I guess.

Made by an offshoot of Lian Li, called SSUPD - (Sunny Side UP Design) the names they come up lo. They make it up with the case though, it's really well made and the panels are full mesh and easy to take out. It's very well designed and quite popular in the SFFPC arena. I was going to choose between this and the Cooler Master NR200P, but I'd have to buy a new SFX PSU for that. With this case all I had to get was a new board and after much debating and research again I decided to get the MSI B550 ITX Gaming Edge Wifi Max. All other components are the same from my other ATX build.

Still doing some testing and adjustments, once I finalize the settings and configuration will zip tie these wires and close the case. So far I'm having a major problem ironically installing the Nvidia drivers. I get constant crashes after installing it. So right now am using the generic display drivers provided by Microsoft.

I believe it could be due to the PCIe 3.0 Riser cable that the case comes with. I will have to see if switching to a different cable resolves the crashes. Other than that I'm really liking the small footprint.


My decade-old case on the left compared to the Mesh on the right. It's even more impressive in person.













The case comes with a right-angled HDMI cable. I bought an additional right-angled Display port cable and was troubleshooting with different cables to figure out the issue. The white one here is the DP cable that came with the LG 4k monitor. Everything worked great when plugging the GPU directly which is why I've narrowed it down to the riser cable as being the issue. Will probably test more tonight or maybe in the weekend.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

Most of those cables that come with cases and other components (namely HDMI and Displayport) are absolute junk. Right-angle ones tend to be even worse.

[faizoff]

I took a chance and updated the Nvidia drivers through Windows Update, surprisingly that worked. This thing is finally stable and I'm cautiously observing. I'll put the angled cables back to see if there's any difference.

[El Barto]

I've compiled all of the parts (save for the graphics card) and I'll be building it all over the weekend. Black Friday turned out to be rather pointless. Better to just buy it all early and not fuck with it. Nothing's been opened, and save for the case it's all local, so it's possible that I go and beat down Microcenter or Best Buy down on Friday, but I'm not expecting any price changes to make that worth while.

Wound up going with the 11700k, as I really don't see it to be much different than the comparable AMD CPU, other than $50 cheaper. They're competitive in performance, and since I'd wind up water cooling the 5800x anyway, the power draw doesn't matter to me. Also went into it looking to over-engineer the thing. High quality MoBo and PSU, and greater than necessary cooling.

PICe 4 really does seem to be pointless. While the new NVME drives post blistering performance numbers, they mean absolutely dick in the real world. Going from SATA to M2 can cut a load time from 60 seconds to 15. Going from M2 3x4 to 4x4 cuts it down to 14. In theory GPU Directstorage will better implement that, but who really knows. All of the BF deals on SSDs were for the super fast WD Black an Samsung drives, which were still twice as much as a "slower" Intel drive (with shorter MTTFs).

Doesn't look like I'll be upgrading the GPU anytime soon. Prices continue to rise, though they might taper off a bit after TG. In the meantime, various online calculators suggest that by upgrading the platform around it, I could see upwards of 100% improvement on my current card. Still won't have RT or Tensor cores (the latter is what I'm actually interested in), but I should still see an improvement to make it all worth while.

[cramx3]

I wouldn't have stuck an NVMe PCI card into my PC if I didn't have some extras floating around work that no one needed.... I use it just for video game installs and if there's one thing I notice... my games all load faster than any of my friends  not that it's terribly important as games usually wait until the entire party loads in to begin so I'm not exactly gaining anything here. 

[El Barto]

I wouldn't have stuck an NVMe PCI card into my PC if I didn't have some extras floating around work that no one needed.... I use it just for video game installs and if there's one thing I notice... my games all load faster than any of my friends  not that it's terribly important as games usually wait until the entire party loads in to begin so I'm not exactly gaining anything here.

I've had to upgrade a few computers around work to W10, and what I've noticed is since they all have old school HDDs, the Windows load time is insufferable. I keep thinking there's something wrong, but it's just that I'm used to a SSD at home. That said, I'm suing SATA SSD's at home, and moving to a PCIe SSD should actually make a significant difference. And, like I said, there's still GPU Directstorage on the horizon, and that may actually matter.

Another thing I did with this build was to make sure that I'm replacing everything across the board, so my old computer will remain largely intact (save for the graphics card). I'll initially set up the new build with the onboard graphics, so I'll have all the time in the world to work on this thing with zero down time. That'll be a pleasant change. From spending an entire Saturday with no computer, and then Sunday with a marginally functional computer while I install and set everything up.

[faizoff]

I've compiled all of the parts (save for the graphics card) and I'll be building it all over the weekend. Black Friday turned out to be rather pointless. Better to just buy it all early and not fuck with it. Nothing's been opened, and save for the case it's all local, so it's possible that I go and beat down Microcenter or Best Buy down on Friday, but I'm not expecting any price changes to make that worth while.

Wound up going with the 11700k, as I really don't see it to be much different than the comparable AMD CPU, other than $50 cheaper. They're competitive in performance, and since I'd wind up water cooling the 5800x anyway, the power draw doesn't matter to me. Also went into it looking to over-engineer the thing. High quality MoBo and PSU, and greater than necessary cooling.

PICe 4 really does seem to be pointless. While the new NVME drives post blistering performance numbers, they mean absolutely dick in the real world. Going from SATA to M2 can cut a load time from 60 seconds to 15. Going from M2 3x4 to 4x4 cuts it down to 14. In theory GPU Directstorage will better implement that, but who really knows. All of the BF deals on SSDs were for the super fast WD Black an Samsung drives, which were still twice as much as a "slower" Intel drive (with shorter MTTFs).

Doesn't look like I'll be upgrading the GPU anytime soon. Prices continue to rise, though they might taper off a bit after TG. In the meantime, various online calculators suggest that by upgrading the platform around it, I could see upwards of 100% improvement on my current card. Still won't have RT or Tensor cores (the latter is what I'm actually interested in), but I should still see an improvement to make it all worth while.

That's awesome! Agree with the gen3 to gen4 being pointless. I did exactly that and outside of a few scenarios that I specifically benchmarked and noted down, you don't notice much between them. The game loading was a tad faster I'll give it that but not by a huge margin. You definitely notice when going from SATA SSD to NVMe SSD. I'm hoping DirectStorage and Nvidia's RTX IO makes gen 4 worthwhile though I'm guessing we're still a few years from it hitting mainstream.

 What board did you go with btw? And what SSD?

[El Barto]

I've compiled all of the parts (save for the graphics card) and I'll be building it all over the weekend. Black Friday turned out to be rather pointless. Better to just buy it all early and not fuck with it. Nothing's been opened, and save for the case it's all local, so it's possible that I go and beat down Microcenter or Best Buy down on Friday, but I'm not expecting any price changes to make that worth while.

Wound up going with the 11700k, as I really don't see it to be much different than the comparable AMD CPU, other than $50 cheaper. They're competitive in performance, and since I'd wind up water cooling the 5800x anyway, the power draw doesn't matter to me. Also went into it looking to over-engineer the thing. High quality MoBo and PSU, and greater than necessary cooling.

PICe 4 really does seem to be pointless. While the new NVME drives post blistering performance numbers, they mean absolutely dick in the real world. Going from SATA to M2 can cut a load time from 60 seconds to 15. Going from M2 3x4 to 4x4 cuts it down to 14. In theory GPU Directstorage will better implement that, but who really knows. All of the BF deals on SSDs were for the super fast WD Black an Samsung drives, which were still twice as much as a "slower" Intel drive (with shorter MTTFs).

Doesn't look like I'll be upgrading the GPU anytime soon. Prices continue to rise, though they might taper off a bit after TG. In the meantime, various online calculators suggest that by upgrading the platform around it, I could see upwards of 100% improvement on my current card. Still won't have RT or Tensor cores (the latter is what I'm actually interested in), but I should still see an improvement to make it all worth while.

That's awesome! Agree with the gen3 to gen4 being pointless. I did exactly that and outside of a few scenarios that I specifically benchmarked and noted down, you don't notice much between them. The game loading was a tad faster I'll give it that but not by a huge margin. You definitely notice when going from SATA SSD to NVMe SSD. I'm hoping DirectStorage and Nvidia's RTX IO makes gen 4 worthwhile though I'm guessing we're still a few years from it hitting mainstream.

 What board did you go with btw? And what SSD?

MSI Z590-A Pro. It's no frills, in that it's lacking a bunch of onboard stuff that I don't need, but it's very well constructed insofar as the power supply side is concerned. Good caps, good VRMs, runs cool, and is designed to handle far greater voltage and temps than I'll ever throw at it. That's part of what I meant by over-engineering it. I also bought an AIO water cooler that actually has a fan on the water block that blows laterally across the VRMs, which is unusual (and surprisingly affordable, relative to the others). As for the SSD it's just an Intel 3x4. It cost half of what the vaunted SN850 is going for, and in a year, if it makes any difference, I can buy the SN850 for half what I spent on the Intel.

All told I'm out $817. That's from the ground up, leaving my current PC intact and running, and it should be quite robust and future proof. Like you, I was building with an eye towards getting a decade out of it.

[faizoff]

Is your AIO the Arctic Liquid Freezer II? That's what it sounds like with the VRM fan, I have the 240 version of it.


Also wanted to mention that I'm jealous of anyone have a Microcenter close by. They have great sales all the time.

[El Barto]

Is your AIO the Arctic Liquid Freezer II? That's what it sounds like with the VRM fan, I have the 240 version of it.


Also wanted to mention that I'm jealous of anyone have a Microcenter close by. They have great sales all the time.

Yep. Same one. The cooling is on par, or better than much more expensive ones, and the VRM fan seems to be unique. $90 for the non-LED version (my case has more than enough LEDs that I'll never turn on).

And since you own one I'll ask you: Does the MoBo control both the fan and the pump? That seems to be uncommon. Also seems like I'd want the pump running wide open all the time.

Microcenter is a blessing and a curse. They do often have the best prices, but despite being all of five minutes away, they're a nightmare to deal with. Especially once Frys started to implode. You invariably wait 10-15 minutes for an associate to get what you want, and then the same amount of time waiting in line to check out. And returns have to go through the same line. Hell, I had to park next door yesterday because their parking lot was full.  My strategy is to just go to Best Buy and haven them price match. So much more convenient.

[faizoff]

I believe the VRM fan/pump runs all the time when it's on. It's the radiator fans that can be controlled as it's just one connector to the board. Since you have MSI as do I, you should see an option in BIOS called Hardware Monitor or something similar that on the right side of the BIOS load menu. It has a ton of options to control fan curve, speed etc.. I left it at the default values as that worked the best I felt. I think it was called Smart PWM.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

Is your AIO the Arctic Liquid Freezer II? That's what it sounds like with the VRM fan, I have the 240 version of it.


Also wanted to mention that I'm jealous of anyone have a Microcenter close by. They have great sales all the time.

Yep. Same one. The cooling is on par, or better than much more expensive ones, and the VRM fan seems to be unique. $90 for the non-LED version (my case has more than enough LEDs that I'll never turn on).

And since you own one I'll ask you: Does the MoBo control both the fan and the pump? That seems to be uncommon. Also seems like I'd want the pump running wide open all the time.

Microcenter is a blessing and a curse. They do often have the best prices, but despite being all of five minutes away, they're a nightmare to deal with. Especially once Frys started to implode. You invariably wait 10-15 minutes for an associate to get what you want, and then the same amount of time waiting in line to check out. And returns have to go through the same line. Hell, I had to park next door yesterday because their parking lot was full.  My strategy is to just go to Best Buy and haven them price match. So much more convenient.

Yeah the Arctic Liquid Freezer II's are the absolute best bang for buck AIO's out there right now. I mean, there are better ones out there (sort of), but you will pay a lot more for them.

Having said all that, the best AIO I have is a Fractal Design Celsius S36 that I bought 4-ish years ago. No matter what CPU I've thrown at it I can't get the temps above about 55C no matter what I do and it will idle at close to ambient temperature. I have yet to find another that has performed as well (even another S36 that I purchased later).

I just purchased the new Fractal Design Lumen AIO to try out. We'll see how that performs.

[faizoff]

Hadn't heard of those Fractal AIOs. I think the 360s tend to cool better than the 240s. From what I remember it's the amount of heat they can take away from the CPU that matters the most and larger radiators and their fans tend to do better.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

Hadn't heard of those Fractal AIOs. I think the 360s tend to cool better than the 240s. From what I remember it's the amount of heat they can take away from the CPU that matters the most and larger radiators and their fans tend to do better.

Actually in my experience, the 280's will cool slightly better than the 360s and quite a bit better than the 240s. Wish I could fit a 420 in my case, but I don't have room and I don't want a case that large.

At any rate, that one 360 AIO I have just seems to perform way better than anything else I've used prior or since.

[El Barto]

So I built my new PC over TG weekend, and got it setup and running the following weekend. Having my existing PC up and running made the whole thing far more leisurely. A few interesting things. For one, building it took quite a bit longer than I'd expected. Mostly due to learning curves along the way, and the occasional setback. Figuring out RGB headers, and mounting brackets for the AIO water cooler took a while. Moreover, it initially wouldn't boot due to a RAM error. After quite a bit of fiddling with it the suggestion that worked was to simply remove and re-seat the CPU. Problem solved, and no problems ever since.

The tales of 11th gen Intels running hot are not exaggerated. Doing actual work it runs in the low to mid 80s in my relatively cool condo. If I really cook the thing with Prime95 it'll hit 100 pretty fast with the AVX512 instruction set running. According to Intel that test represents an unrealistic 130% CPU load and shouldn't be considered. A more realistic P95 test hits the same low to mid 80s. In the Summer that's likely to hit closer to 90. At the same time, the comparable 5800x seems to run just as hot. It uses a bit less power, but it concentrates it more into a smaller location. Eventually I may replace the fans in the LFII just for my own peace of mind, but it's really not a problem.

Interestingly, I rarely notice where it seems to be a whole lot faster. I can unzip an 8gb file in about 8 seconds, which is pretty cool, but how often do you need to do that? Apps open faster, but that owes more to moving away from SATA. Data stored right in the PIC lane makes all the difference. Mostly it seems a testament to how good my old PC was. I still marvel at that thing. I also found that my old PC hadn't bottlenecked my graphics card much at all. GPU benchmarks stayed mostly the same. And insofar as the power intensive things I may regularly do, they're typically GPU based. Trying to upscale video at the CPU level takes days instead of hours, for example. One thing I didn't try is re-encoding video, my hunch is that'll be faster, but since that normally happens after the upscaling, it just hasn't come up.

This has been running with my existing GTX-1060. I just managed to buy a factory water-cooled 2080 Super for actually less than it retailed for, so that'll be happening this coming up weekend. I suspect that will make a pretty big difference. It was more than I wanted to spend, but in this market it's was a bargain. This card is generally good for 4k on ultra, if I ever decide to bother with that, and tensor cores plus hardware encoding should make short work of video editing. Over all I'm optimistic that this will still be well performing in 2031, which was my goal.

[cramx3]

Nice, and that 2080 will be a nice upgade over the 1060.  RTX on.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

So I built my new PC over TG weekend, and got it setup and running the following weekend. Having my existing PC up and running made the whole thing far more leisurely. A few interesting things. For one, building it took quite a bit longer than I'd expected. Mostly due to learning curves along the way, and the occasional setback. Figuring out RGB headers, and mounting brackets for the AIO water cooler took a while. Moreover, it initially wouldn't boot due to a RAM error. After quite a bit of fiddling with it the suggestion that worked was to simply remove and re-seat the CPU. Problem solved, and no problems ever since.

The tales of 11th gen Intels running hot are not exaggerated. Doing actual work it runs in the low to mid 80s in my relatively cool condo. If I really cook the thing with Prime95 it'll hit 100 pretty fast with the AVX512 instruction set running. According to Intel that test represents an unrealistic 130% CPU load and shouldn't be considered. A more realistic P95 test hits the same low to mid 80s. In the Summer that's likely to hit closer to 90. At the same time, the comparable 5800x seems to run just as hot. It uses a bit less power, but it concentrates it more into a smaller location. Eventually I may replace the fans in the LFII just for my own peace of mind, but it's really not a problem.

Interestingly, I rarely notice where it seems to be a whole lot faster. I can unzip an 8gb file in about 8 seconds, which is pretty cool, but how often do you need to do that? Apps open faster, but that owes more to moving away from SATA. Data stored right in the PIC lane makes all the difference. Mostly it seems a testament to how good my old PC was. I still marvel at that thing. I also found that my old PC hadn't bottlenecked my graphics card much at all. GPU benchmarks stayed mostly the same. And insofar as the power intensive things I may regularly do, they're typically GPU based. Trying to upscale video at the CPU level takes days instead of hours, for example. One thing I didn't try is re-encoding video, my hunch is that'll be faster, but since that normally happens after the upscaling, it just hasn't come up.

This has been running with my existing GTX-1060. I just managed to buy a factory water-cooled 2080 Super for actually less than it retailed for, so that'll be happening this coming up weekend. I suspect that will make a pretty big difference. It was more than I wanted to spend, but in this market it's was a bargain. This card is generally good for 4k on ultra, if I ever decide to bother with that, and tensor cores plus hardware encoding should make short work of video editing. Over all I'm optimistic that this will still be well performing in 2031, which was my goal.

Those temps sound like a thermal paste issue. Perhaps the thermal paste isn't making good contact all the way across the IHS. I run a 5900x with a 280mm AIO and in Prime95 I can't get it to go over 70c. Same with AIDA64 or any other stress test.

I'd also make sure the radiator fans are ramping correctly with CPU temps in the BIOS.

[El Barto]

So I built my new PC over TG weekend, and got it setup and running the following weekend. Having my existing PC up and running made the whole thing far more leisurely. A few interesting things. For one, building it took quite a bit longer than I'd expected. Mostly due to learning curves along the way, and the occasional setback. Figuring out RGB headers, and mounting brackets for the AIO water cooler took a while. Moreover, it initially wouldn't boot due to a RAM error. After quite a bit of fiddling with it the suggestion that worked was to simply remove and re-seat the CPU. Problem solved, and no problems ever since.

The tales of 11th gen Intels running hot are not exaggerated. Doing actual work it runs in the low to mid 80s in my relatively cool condo. If I really cook the thing with Prime95 it'll hit 100 pretty fast with the AVX512 instruction set running. According to Intel that test represents an unrealistic 130% CPU load and shouldn't be considered. A more realistic P95 test hits the same low to mid 80s. In the Summer that's likely to hit closer to 90. At the same time, the comparable 5800x seems to run just as hot. It uses a bit less power, but it concentrates it more into a smaller location. Eventually I may replace the fans in the LFII just for my own peace of mind, but it's really not a problem.

Interestingly, I rarely notice where it seems to be a whole lot faster. I can unzip an 8gb file in about 8 seconds, which is pretty cool, but how often do you need to do that? Apps open faster, but that owes more to moving away from SATA. Data stored right in the PIC lane makes all the difference. Mostly it seems a testament to how good my old PC was. I still marvel at that thing. I also found that my old PC hadn't bottlenecked my graphics card much at all. GPU benchmarks stayed mostly the same. And insofar as the power intensive things I may regularly do, they're typically GPU based. Trying to upscale video at the CPU level takes days instead of hours, for example. One thing I didn't try is re-encoding video, my hunch is that'll be faster, but since that normally happens after the upscaling, it just hasn't come up.

This has been running with my existing GTX-1060. I just managed to buy a factory water-cooled 2080 Super for actually less than it retailed for, so that'll be happening this coming up weekend. I suspect that will make a pretty big difference. It was more than I wanted to spend, but in this market it's was a bargain. This card is generally good for 4k on ultra, if I ever decide to bother with that, and tensor cores plus hardware encoding should make short work of video editing. Over all I'm optimistic that this will still be well performing in 2031, which was my goal.

Those temps sound like a thermal paste issue. Perhaps the thermal paste isn't making good contact all the way across the IHS. I run a 5900x with a 280mm AIO and in Prime95 I can't get it to go over 70c. Same with AIDA64 or any other stress test.

I'd also make sure the radiator fans are ramping correctly with CPU temps in the BIOS.

That actually sounds about right. Your 5900x runs cooler than the 5800x, much like the 11900k runs cooler than my 11700k. Also, AVX is an Intel thing. It performs some sort of mathematics much faster than anything else, but really cooks a processor. Like I said, Intel considers P95's application of AVX to be about ~130 of a normal max load. As I understand it AMD has no such thing, so the benchmarks probably won't be comparable. Also, The difference between a 280mm and a 240mm radiator is pretty significant.  That's quite a bit more surface area and will be reflected in the cooling. Everything about your setup is going to run cooler than mine, and it seems we're both running about where we should be.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

So I built my new PC over TG weekend, and got it setup and running the following weekend. Having my existing PC up and running made the whole thing far more leisurely. A few interesting things. For one, building it took quite a bit longer than I'd expected. Mostly due to learning curves along the way, and the occasional setback. Figuring out RGB headers, and mounting brackets for the AIO water cooler took a while. Moreover, it initially wouldn't boot due to a RAM error. After quite a bit of fiddling with it the suggestion that worked was to simply remove and re-seat the CPU. Problem solved, and no problems ever since.

The tales of 11th gen Intels running hot are not exaggerated. Doing actual work it runs in the low to mid 80s in my relatively cool condo. If I really cook the thing with Prime95 it'll hit 100 pretty fast with the AVX512 instruction set running. According to Intel that test represents an unrealistic 130% CPU load and shouldn't be considered. A more realistic P95 test hits the same low to mid 80s. In the Summer that's likely to hit closer to 90. At the same time, the comparable 5800x seems to run just as hot. It uses a bit less power, but it concentrates it more into a smaller location. Eventually I may replace the fans in the LFII just for my own peace of mind, but it's really not a problem.

Interestingly, I rarely notice where it seems to be a whole lot faster. I can unzip an 8gb file in about 8 seconds, which is pretty cool, but how often do you need to do that? Apps open faster, but that owes more to moving away from SATA. Data stored right in the PIC lane makes all the difference. Mostly it seems a testament to how good my old PC was. I still marvel at that thing. I also found that my old PC hadn't bottlenecked my graphics card much at all. GPU benchmarks stayed mostly the same. And insofar as the power intensive things I may regularly do, they're typically GPU based. Trying to upscale video at the CPU level takes days instead of hours, for example. One thing I didn't try is re-encoding video, my hunch is that'll be faster, but since that normally happens after the upscaling, it just hasn't come up.

This has been running with my existing GTX-1060. I just managed to buy a factory water-cooled 2080 Super for actually less than it retailed for, so that'll be happening this coming up weekend. I suspect that will make a pretty big difference. It was more than I wanted to spend, but in this market it's was a bargain. This card is generally good for 4k on ultra, if I ever decide to bother with that, and tensor cores plus hardware encoding should make short work of video editing. Over all I'm optimistic that this will still be well performing in 2031, which was my goal.

Those temps sound like a thermal paste issue. Perhaps the thermal paste isn't making good contact all the way across the IHS. I run a 5900x with a 280mm AIO and in Prime95 I can't get it to go over 70c. Same with AIDA64 or any other stress test.

I'd also make sure the radiator fans are ramping correctly with CPU temps in the BIOS.

That actually sounds about right. Your 5900x runs cooler than the 5800x, much like the 11900k runs cooler than my 11700k. Also, AVX is an Intel thing. It performs some sort of mathematics much faster than anything else, but really cooks a processor. Like I said, Intel considers P95's application of AVX to be about ~130 of a normal max load. As I understand it AMD has no such thing, so the benchmarks probably won't be comparable. Also, The difference between a 280mm and a 240mm radiator is pretty significant.  That's quite a bit more surface area and will be reflected in the cooling. Everything about your setup is going to run cooler than mine, and it seems we're both running about where we should be.

Oh, somehow I read earlier in the thread that you got a 360mm radiator  Apparently my reading comprehension was terrible that day.

[faizoff]

So I built my new PC over TG weekend, and got it setup and running the following weekend. Having my existing PC up and running made the whole thing far more leisurely. A few interesting things. For one, building it took quite a bit longer than I'd expected. Mostly due to learning curves along the way, and the occasional setback. Figuring out RGB headers, and mounting brackets for the AIO water cooler took a while. Moreover, it initially wouldn't boot due to a RAM error. After quite a bit of fiddling with it the suggestion that worked was to simply remove and re-seat the CPU. Problem solved, and no problems ever since.

The tales of 11th gen Intels running hot are not exaggerated. Doing actual work it runs in the low to mid 80s in my relatively cool condo. If I really cook the thing with Prime95 it'll hit 100 pretty fast with the AVX512 instruction set running. According to Intel that test represents an unrealistic 130% CPU load and shouldn't be considered. A more realistic P95 test hits the same low to mid 80s. In the Summer that's likely to hit closer to 90. At the same time, the comparable 5800x seems to run just as hot. It uses a bit less power, but it concentrates it more into a smaller location. Eventually I may replace the fans in the LFII just for my own peace of mind, but it's really not a problem.

Interestingly, I rarely notice where it seems to be a whole lot faster. I can unzip an 8gb file in about 8 seconds, which is pretty cool, but how often do you need to do that? Apps open faster, but that owes more to moving away from SATA. Data stored right in the PIC lane makes all the difference. Mostly it seems a testament to how good my old PC was. I still marvel at that thing. I also found that my old PC hadn't bottlenecked my graphics card much at all. GPU benchmarks stayed mostly the same. And insofar as the power intensive things I may regularly do, they're typically GPU based. Trying to upscale video at the CPU level takes days instead of hours, for example. One thing I didn't try is re-encoding video, my hunch is that'll be faster, but since that normally happens after the upscaling, it just hasn't come up.

This has been running with my existing GTX-1060. I just managed to buy a factory water-cooled 2080 Super for actually less than it retailed for, so that'll be happening this coming up weekend. I suspect that will make a pretty big difference. It was more than I wanted to spend, but in this market it's was a bargain. This card is generally good for 4k on ultra, if I ever decide to bother with that, and tensor cores plus hardware encoding should make short work of video editing. Over all I'm optimistic that this will still be well performing in 2031, which was my goal.

I was wondering how your build went, good to know you got it up and running. I too had some learning curve regarding the AIO bracket assembly, took me a while to figure out that not all parts in that bag are needed. In the end it was a lot simpler than thought. The manual on Arctic's site is very helpful and I was made aware that for the Ryzen 5000 series there is an offset position for mounting. In my move to the SFF build I had the mount at the incorrect position and had to redo it.


Wrong offset position





Adjusted offset



Amazing how big of a difference those few mm make, bringing down the temps by 10-15C and avgs to high 30s C on idle. I may actually redo the pasting again as the temps are still slightly higher (used to idle around low 30s C) than what I had before but still way better than the 5800x or 11700k. I don't know if there is a similar setup for Intel CPUs and its bracket.


The power usage and clock boost technology has changed so much, it's fun to dig into tweaking settings to maximize your CPU performance. It's a lot of tinkering that used to be reserved for the old school overclocking. Now you adjust power levels and various other power settings to give your CPU the thermal and power headroom to squeeze what you can out of it.


The 11th gen is kinda an engineering marvel of sorts by the Intel engineers as they had to backport the initial 10nm design and reconfigure it to the existing outdated 14nm design process. The fact that it could at least match 10th gen CPUs is a miracle. Reviewers mostly blasted the 11th gen release because at the time of release it was super expensive and barely offered any performance gain over the 10th gen and also used a ton more power. The only advantage it seemed to be offering was PCIe 4.0 support. But for those upgrading after a decade like yourself and waiting for the price to drop those things should be a wash.




With regards to performance the shift to NVMe does make a ton of difference, but the CPU still makes a big difference I thought. It isn't just the application load time, they work a lot faster due to the huge multithreaded gains. While the single core performance is there, you'll definitely notice it more when anything utilizes multiple cores, like compression and transcoding etc.. The 2nd gen Sandy Bridge CPUs are still a beast, I have my old 2500k still in use for misc little things and it still works great.


An interesting bit about AVX512 is that the new Zen 4 series will be supporting it while the latest 12th gen Intel CPUs are disabling it out of the box. Motherboard makers have been clever enough to dig through and enable it in BIOS to those who really need it but it's a curious move by Intel to publicly declare that Alder Lake will not be supporting AVX512. I think they want to segment it towards their Xeon line of server CPUs.


Even though I don't game much moving to 4k adds a lot of visual eye candy and IMO makes for a fun experience esp on a 32" 4k monitor.

[El Barto]

Amazing how big of a difference those few mm make, bringing down the temps by 10-15C and avgs to high 30s C on idle. I may actually redo the pasting again as the temps are still slightly higher (used to idle around low 30s C) than what I had before but still way better than the 5800x or 11700k. I don't know if there is a similar setup for Intel CPUs and its bracket.

Now you got me wanting to double check mine.    I'm working from memory here, but I don't think mine uses that top bracket with the offset. In fact, I can't even tell what it does. Spacers, maybe? Insofar as coolers go I tend to just think of them as binary. If they work they're making good contact. If they're not you don't even get past POST before it shuts down.

AVX has caught a lot of flack. MOBO manufactures had to include an offset to throttle it back because it's guaranteed to hit max T almost immediately. This kind of made the whole thing a wash. I'm not surprised that they're discontinuing it on consumer chips. AMD might be able to get away with it because they're already using less power to begin with. That said, properly coded applications use it sparingly enough that it shouldn't be a problem. P95 obviously ramps it up to 100, and by most accounts that's totally unrealistic.

Also, you mentioned AVX512. That's just one of three varieties of AVX, so I wonder if they've disabled the others. In my case the two lesser versions also caused it to run pretty damned hot, so 512 isn't the only culprit.

I experimented with a 4k monitor for a couple of weeks and decided it was far too much trouble. The issue is that I've got a dual monitor setup, plus my TV. Windows has never, ever been able to handle differing resolutions all that well, so anytime I launched a game or something in 4k it screwed my desktop all to hell. You'd think after all of these years they'd be able to sort that out, but in typical fashion, Windows blames graphics card manufacturers and graphics card manufacturers blame Windows. A lot of problems work that way. In the end I just bought identical monitors for the desktop and everything runs at the same HD resolution now. If I do ever go to 4k it'll only be when I can buy two new monitors and a new TV.

[faizoff]

Amazing how big of a difference those few mm make, bringing down the temps by 10-15C and avgs to high 30s C on idle. I may actually redo the pasting again as the temps are still slightly higher (used to idle around low 30s C) than what I had before but still way better than the 5800x or 11700k. I don't know if there is a similar setup for Intel CPUs and its bracket.

Now you got me wanting to double check mine.    I'm working from memory here, but I don't think mine uses that top bracket with the offset. In fact, I can't even tell what it does. Spacers, maybe? Insofar as coolers go I tend to just think of them as binary. If they work they're making good contact. If they're not you don't even get past POST before it shuts down.

Yeah just double-check the manual against the version of the cooler you have, each version looks to have some slight difference between the brackets and offsets that should make a difference in heat distribution. I've read stories about people forgetting to peel the plastic sticker off the pump and being able to use the computer albeit at very high CPU temps. So coolers have pretty high thresholds to operate, it doesn't appear that black and white.

Also, you mentioned AVX512. That's just one of three varieties of AVX, so I wonder if they've disabled the others. In my case the two lesser versions also caused it to run pretty damned hot, so 512 isn't the only culprit.

In this case it's just the AVX512 that's being disabled on Alder Lake, something to do with it not being optimized or compatible with the hybrid P and E core architecture. That hasn't stopped people from using it though.
Anandtech had a good write-up on it, though this was before the release

Intel’s journey with AVX-512 has been long and fragmented. Some workloads can be vectorised – multiple bits of consecutive data all require the same operation, so you can pack them into a single register and perform it all at once with a single instruction. Designed as its third generation of vector instructions (AVX is 128-bit, AVX2 is 256-bit, AVX512 is 512-bit), AVX-512 was initially found on server processors, then mobile, and we found it in the previous version of desktop processors. At the time, Intel stated that by enabling AVX-512 on its processor line from top to bottom, it would encourage greater adoption, and they were leaning hard into this missive.

But that all changes with Alder Lake. Both desktop processors and mobile processors will now have AVX-512 disabled in all scenarios. But the silicon will still be physically present in the core, only because Intel uses the same core in its next generation server processors called Sapphire Rapids. One could argue that if the AVX-512 unit was removed from the desktop cores that they would be a lot smaller, however Intel has disagreed on this point in previous launches. What it means is that for the consumer parts we have some extra dark silicon in the design, which ultimately might help thermals, or absorb defects.

But it does mean that AVX-512 is probably dead for consumers.

Intel isn’t even supporting AVX-512 with a dual-issue AVX2 mode over multiple operations - it simply won’t work on Alder Lake. If AMD’s Zen 4 processors plan to support some form of AVX-512 as has been theorized, even as dual-issue AVX2 operations, we might be in some dystopian processor environment where AMD is the only consumer processor on the market to support AVX-512.

I experimented with a 4k monitor for a couple of weeks and decided it was far too much trouble. The issue is that I've got a dual monitor setup, plus my TV. Windows has never, ever been able to handle differing resolutions all that well, so anytime I launched a game or something in 4k it screwed my desktop all to hell. You'd think after all of these years they'd be able to sort that out, but in typical fashion, Windows blames graphics card manufacturers and graphics card manufacturers blame Windows. A lot of problems work that way. In the end I just bought identical monitors for the desktop and everything runs at the same HD resolution now. If I do ever go to 4k it'll only be when I can buy two new monitors and a new TV.

In my experience, this has happened when the game insists on starting on 1080p on the main 4k monitor and then adjusts back to 4k and then proceeds to mess up the 2nd monitor setup. I have a 32" 4k along with a 28" 1080p and on games that don't do that switch, things remain just fine. But yeah it's super annoying when it happens.


Edit: I should add that apparently Windows 11 somewhat fixed this and remembers the position of the desktop on any change.

[El Barto]

Amazing how big of a difference those few mm make, bringing down the temps by 10-15C and avgs to high 30s C on idle. I may actually redo the pasting again as the temps are still slightly higher (used to idle around low 30s C) than what I had before but still way better than the 5800x or 11700k. I don't know if there is a similar setup for Intel CPUs and its bracket.

Now you got me wanting to double check mine.    I'm working from memory here, but I don't think mine uses that top bracket with the offset. In fact, I can't even tell what it does. Spacers, maybe? Insofar as coolers go I tend to just think of them as binary. If they work they're making good contact. If they're not you don't even get past POST before it shuts down.

Yeah just double-check the manual against the version of the cooler you have, each version looks to have some slight difference between the brackets and offsets that should make a difference in heat distribution. I've read stories about people forgetting to peel the plastic sticker off the pump and being able to use the computer albeit at very high CPU temps. So coolers have pretty high thresholds to operate, it doesn't appear that black and white.

Yeah, that looks about right. And since it was idling around 26 over the weekend, I suspect it's setup right. That said, I'm gonna have to dig into that thing pretty hard over the weekend to shoehorn a new 120mm radiator into my relatively small case, and I'll definitely take a look-see at the offset holes for the thumbscrews.

In truth, wrangling that new radiator in there is likely to be quite challenging. With the LFII in its stock position I couldn't fit a 120mm fan in the exhaust space, so a fan+radiator isn't likely to be any better. Seems kind of likely that I'll have to "adjust" the stock position of the 240mm rad. It'll be worth it, though. What I've kind of realized is that liquid cooled graphics cards are running cheaper right now because nobody uses them for mining, and not everybody trusts them. For somebody that just wants a graphics card for their own use right now they're kind of the way to go. And in my case it was really the only reason I bit.

In this case it's just the AVX512 that's being disabled on Alder Lake, something to do with it not being optimized or compatible with the hybrid P and E core architecture. That hasn't stopped people from using it though.

Interesting that they're not citing any issue with energy consumption and thermal properties. From what I've read that's really the reason why it's not yet practical. Under a very heavy AVX workload you essentially slow down half your processor so you can speed up the other half.

[faizoff]

What case do you have? I had to get a bit creative to shove the components (ATX PSU, 240mm radiator with the large ass pump, large ass 3080 FTW3 GPU and some long ass custom cables) in my small SSUPD case. I have some room to put a 90mm fan that I want to add as an intake.

[El Barto]

What case do you have? I had to get a bit creative to shove the components (ATX PSU, 240mm radiator with the large ass pump, large ass 3080 FTW3 GPU and some long ass custom cables) in my small SSUPD case. I have some room to put a 90mm fan that I want to add as an intake.

https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16811353186

Overall I'm very happy with it. It was dirt cheap, easy to assemble, hides all the cables nicely, great airflow from the front, and the RGB controller is expandable. Most importantly, it had room for 3 3¼" drives (+2 2.5), which was a key criterion. The downside is that it's one inch too short. With a radiator mounted topside there's not quite enough clearance for the exhaust fan. It's not even a quarter inch short, but that still matters. Ideally I'll just move the 240 forward a bit. Don't know if there will be enough room though, and whether or not I'll have to drill new holes. The other alternative is move the 240 to the front, but I kind of hate that idea.

[faizoff]

Moving the rad to the front isn't so bad, that's how mine is now set up. Cases having space for numerous drives is getting less support nowadays. I sorta compromised when going to a small case by having everything set up externally.

I have to admit I do like the small footprint while enjoying access to all my 5 HDDs and a 4k Bluray drive plus external DAC, even with the extra units it takes up way less space than the chunky giant behemoth case I had before.