Let's make a gaming PC - The Bear and Badger

LivDiv

Everything to purple.
Purple to ham colour.

SpaceGazelle

Frosty wrote:

I'm now fully converted to that high refresh rate life. Tried out some Apex and Jedi Fallen Order and it's blown me away how crisp and smooth it feels. It's big, dumb and has pointless LEDs on the back and I love it.

I have a big dumb telly with LEDs at the back and it's ace. Btw you can get smart bulbs for the entire house that will mirror the colurs on your monitor.

GurtTractor

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

Do your build in a room without carpets, don’t wear your furriest clothes and don’t rub balloons on your hair whilst you build and then I was under the impression you’d be fine with the static issue (that isn’t a real world issue at all apparently).

Yeah you shouldn't worry about it too much, actually straight up breaking something with static is pretty tricky to do. Saying that it certainly can be a real issue so it's worth taking a few basic precautions just for the peace of mind. If you wear a good sensitive pair of headphones and touch the jack repeatedly you can hear little pops, which kind of shows that your body is constantly generating a little bit of charge. Something I've heard is that you might not kill something immediately with static, but the charge going through it might lead to a component dying prematurely, or earlier than it would through normal use. I think things like your climate and how dry it is can have an effect too.

Dunno it's all very anecdotal and a bit based on hearsay, but given how expensive these amazing complex bits of kit are I tend to take it seriously to an extent and play it safe. When I handle boards and similar stuff here's what I do: Hold components by the edges of the PCB as much as I can, never place parts on carpet or other fabric, before I touch something I'll touch a big bit of exposed metal on a radiator or tap for a couple of seconds to maybe discharge a bit and I'll do that every so often whilst fettling, and if I'm doing a lot of handling of a GPU or something I'm working on I'll wear my little antistatic strap and clip the end to a screw on my PSU that's plugged into the wall so I'm definitely grounded.

GurtTractor

SpaceGazelle wrote:

I have a big dumb telly with LEDs at the back and it's ace. Btw you can get smart bulbs for the entire house that will mirror the colurs on your monitor.

Bias lighting is a very good idea to minimise eye strain, I use a couple of USB LED strips on the back of my monitors, one RGB strip set to red, the other a neutral white, together they make a nice warmish white that really helps reduce the contrast between a bright screen and the darker wall behind. Matching LED backlights seem like a great idea too, would be nice to see that tech built into PC monitors.

GurtTractor

acemuzzy wrote:

And how hard are these to actually build?!? So I need antistatic shizzle? No soldering right?!!

No soldering, it's all standardised fairly foolproof connectors.

One thing to be watch out for other than static when building is the pins on CPUs or motherboard sockets. On Ryzen CPUs there are little pins on the bottom, if you drop the chip there's a good chance you might bend or even break off a pin or two, which would not be ideal. All you need to do is keep the chip in its plastic container thing until it's time to pop it into the socket on the motherboard, and if you are really worried you might get all butterfingers then put the plastic container with the CPU inside onto the motherboard, and transplant it into the socket from there so that if you did drop it it would only be an inch which would be unlikely to bend a pin.

Also if you need to pull a cooler off of a CPU that has pins such as the Ryzen chips then you should be careful to wiggle it a bit to loosen the paste a bit, and pull gently up so that it comes away cleanly. With the mounting system used in AM4 sockets it's possible to pull a CPU out without unlocking the socket, it's not common but people have done that, and if you pull a cooler up that still has the cpu stuck to the bottom it would be easy to put it down again and bend pins accidentally.

SpaceGazelle

acemuzzy wrote:

2070 is like £200 more, and 2080 another £400 on top of that. So uh unlikely to get the green light, alas. Unless I obfuscate...

2070 is £100 more, and this is the thing that will play nicely with the VR headset you'll no doubt buy in the next 6 months.

TheBoyRoberts

I have to stop visiting this thread!

Over the past weeks i have lost count of the number of times I have had a basket full of parts only to bottle at the last moment.

My brain is telling me to wait until Ryzen 4.....my heart is screaming just do it!!!

acemuzzy

SpaceGazelle wrote:

acemuzzy wrote:

2070 is like £200 more, and 2080 another £400 on top of that. So uh unlikely to get the green light, alas. Unless I obfuscate...

2070 is £100 more, and this is the thing that will play nicely with the VR headset you'll no doubt buy in the next 6 months.

Told my mate I was considering an upgrade. He said "You could also borrow / have my first gen HTC Vive headset with wireless adapter." This is not helping me be sensible.

SpaceGazelle

acemuzzy wrote:

SpaceGazelle wrote:

acemuzzy wrote:

2070 is like £200 more, and 2080 another £400 on top of that. So uh unlikely to get the green light, alas. Unless I obfuscate...

2070 is £100 more, and this is the thing that will play nicely with the VR headset you'll no doubt buy in the next 6 months.

Told my mate I was considering an upgrade. He said "You could also borrow / have my first gen HTC Vive headset with wireless adapter." This is not helping me be sensible.

You'd be mad to skimp on the GPU. This is the most important bit. Elite Dangerous in VR is god tier.

Speedhaak

Frosty wrote:

I'm now fully converted to that high refresh rate life. Tried out some Apex and Jedi Fallen Order and it's blown me away how crisp and smooth it feels. It's big, dumb and has pointless LEDs on the back and I love it.

Nice Arctis 7's

Also yeah, 144hz is a eye opener.

Loving my recent build.

SpaceGazelle

Speedhaak wrote:

Also yeah, 144hz is a eye opener.

You should see it in VR.

Speedhaak

Been considering that alright with the imminent arrival of Half Life: Alyx.

SonicBoomBoy

Anyone able to recommend a decent twin monitor stand? After something with a clamp base that can hold two 25"

SpaceGazelle

Speedhaak wrote:

Been considering that alright with the imminent arrival of Half Life: Alyx.

It's getting hold of one that's the problem. Virus is hitting an already stretched production.

acemuzzy

acemuzzy wrote:

OK, build updated - thanks again! More questions though ;p
- the "one PCIe" thing - do the NVME and GPU not both need one, or is there other stuff involved there?
- the power supply says "ATX" not "MicroATX" - but is that all good?? Then I need to mull it over and decide whether to actually pounce!!

GurtTractor wrote:

The NVME drive will have it's own little slot, and m.2 connector, you can see the 970 in Speedhaak's build. It uses 4x PCIE lanes, and I think that shouldn't interfere with GPU at all. If you wanted to use more than one NVME then that would be a situation for getting an X470 or X570 board, I don't have time to double check just now but there will be some good articles and posts around that explains it better. Looking up block diagrams for the different chipset platforms can be handy too. Different manufacturers handle things differently with PCIE, often if you populate or add a number of something to the slots other slots will be either disabled or lowered in bandwidth, check the board's specification on their website for more detail. I'm pretty sure that the 1x GPU and 1x NVME setup will be absolutely fine though.

So @Speedhaak was this all good?? Can't quite work out what's what inside your chassis...

Speedhaak

Yup, the 970 EVO sits in nicely on the mb - see below for a better understanding of the relationship between the components from a spacial perspective. MB is MSI b450 Mortar Max by the way.

M.2 slot marked with arrow. CPU above and GPU below with RAM to the right.

acemuzzy

Great, thanks! Think that's all the same as I've got lined up in https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/acemuzzy/saved/#view=vC7Czy, so sounds good.

Meanwhile, I've got as far as "let's discuss properly later", having raised the importance of e-learning during a coronaquarantine. Pray for muzz.

Speedhaak

Yeah just looked at the part link, fairly similar to mine - I would have been the same as yourself by the way, noobish but willing to learn. All I'll say is give yourself a nice 3-5 hour window for assembly. I had to watch a good few YouTube videos on certain items such as connecting all the case specific cables to the MB (sound, power switches, fans ect) and found the time just vanished.

But apart from not fully connecting the appropriate power pins to the GPU everything went well. Was thrilled with myself for days afterwords

Also, I didn't tell the wife anything about the cost

- I just ninja purchased on a whim, although my old Laptop was on the way out and I work from home so I needed a new rig.

I also bought a nice 32" QHD 165hz monitor which has changed my life

SpaceGazelle

acemuzzy wrote:

Great, thanks! Think that's all the same as I've got lined up in https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/acemuzzy/saved/#view=vC7Czy, so sounds good.

Pull the trigger on that bad boy!

SpaceGazelle

Also, take yer pals hand off if he's offering a Vive. The basestations alone will save you a fortune - it'll only cost you £460 for the Index hmd and you can upgrade the controllers later.

acemuzzy

Heh. My room is pretty box-sized tho...

GurtTractor

acemuzzy wrote:

OK, build updated - thanks again! More questions though ;p - the "one PCIe" thing - do the NVME and GPU not both need one, or is there other stuff involved there? - the power supply says "ATX" not "MicroATX" - but is that all good?? Then I need to mull it over and decide whether to actually pounce!!

The NVME drive will have it's own little slot, and m.2 connector, you can see the 970 in Speedhaak's build. It uses 4x PCIE lanes, and I think that shouldn't interfere with GPU at all. If you wanted to use more than one NVME then that would be a situation for getting an X470 or X570 board, I don't have time to double check just now but there will be some good articles and posts around that explains it better. Looking up block diagrams for the different chipset platforms can be handy too. Different manufacturers handle things differently with PCIE, often if you populate or add a number of something to the slots other slots will be either disabled or lowered in bandwidth, check the board's specification on their website for more detail. I'm pretty sure that the 1x GPU and 1x NVME setup will be absolutely fine though.

So @Speedhaak was this all good?? Can't quite work out what's what inside your chassis...

I'll attempt to better explain the PCIE situation -

This is a block diagram of the MSI Mortar board, it shows how everything is connected to the Central Processing Unit. You can see that both the GPU in the first slot and the m.2 slot have a dedicated connection straight to the CPU, some of the other slots have to go through the chipset, which then has a (x4 IIRC) connection through to the CPU.

The more budget end chipsets with both Intel and AMD typically have some limitations on how many devices can be connected at once, the manufacturers get to choose how to divide and organise the available connections. Nicked from the Anandtech forum -

X470 Chipset Features

    USB – 6 (2.0), 6 (3.1. Gen1), 2 (3.1. Gen2)
    SATA 3.0 – 4
    PCIe lanes – 2 (Gen3), 8 (Gen2)
    PCIe slot speeds – 1×16 / 2×8
    OC enabled – Yes
    XFR2 – Yes
    Precision Boost Overdrive – Yes
    StoreMI – Yes

B450 Chipset Features

    USB – 6 (2.0), 2 (3.1. Gen1), 2 (3.1. Gen2)
    SATA 3.0 – 2
    PCIe lanes – 1 (Gen3), 6 (Gen2)
    PCIe slot speeds – 1×16
    OC enabled – Yes
    XFR2 – Yes
    Precision Boost Overdrive – Yes
    StoreMI – Yes

And X570 is a little different again, in particular it has PCIE4 support.

On pretty much every specification page for a motherboard you will find details like this -

And if you combine that with the motherboard layout diagram in the manual -

You can see which physical slots the specifications are referring to. You can see that there are two m.2 slots, and that if you populate the second lower one that the lower large PCIE slot will be disabled, so a choice between two graphics cards or two NVME storage devices (most will want more storage..). Also notice that the second slot is limited to PCIE 2.0, whereas the top one is PCIE 3.0, this means that an SSD will run slower in the lower slot. This kind of thing is very normal for consumer focused motherboards, mine has similar things going on that I need to pay attention to. If you really wanted to be unlimited in what you plug into the thing you would want to go for a higher end workstation type platform such a Threadripper, which has a higher PCIE cap.

SpaceGazelle

acemuzzy wrote:

Heh. My room is pretty box-sized tho...

You'll be sitting down gawping at Elite Dangerous.

acemuzzy

Cheers chaps. Only one real thing between me and pressing buy...

cockbeard

wife??

acemuzzy

Yup

Dark Soldier

My PC from Scan has gone down in price if you fancy it

acemuzzy

Twice the price of mine?

Dark Soldier

Just get your missus insanely drink and say you need to soend 2k

cockbeard

But darling it's a 4k monitor, it's like doubling our money

Howdy, Stranger!

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