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Building my childhood dream PC

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Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#61

Post by rkomorn »

danparsonson wrote: post #48
rkomorn wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you use it as a gaming PC (or for other high GPU load activities)? And if so, what's your take on noise under load? Edit: I guess this is a senseless question if the case really only uses passive cooling. I was assuming there would still be fans somewhere. I despise my current PC's fan noise and I'm always on the lookout for a quieter solution.

Did you have no success upgrading your fans (Noctua etc)? Still too loud? How about water cooling?

It's an HP OEM (because I moved countries during the pandemic and getting parts where I settled was ridiculously more expensive).

The CPU is AIO (and the radiator fans are loud). The GPU has very loud fans too, but is not AIO.

It's four years old at this point and I might just build something else rather than try to retrofit this one to sanity (which I doubt is possible without dumping the GPU anyway).

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#62

Post by jll29 »

This post is a meticulous documentation, it's attention to detail is remarkable, and it all looks so clean. How much did your project cost in total, though, out of curiosity (tools and failed attempts included)?

Reading through the post, sadly nothing worked the first time round (bravo to the poster for his perseverance), and while things got slightly better, IT "stuff" is still surprisingly fiddly and fragile.

The quality of the build and the technical detail of the handbooks are areas where things got remarkably worse - how could we let that happen? How can children learn how stuff works without schematics of the devices they own and love?

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#63

Post by jll29 »

simgt wrote: post #58
tekne wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of my PhD thesis was/is done traveling in places with poor, poor Internet. Currently on my laptop in rural Calabria, where I pull a blazing fast 60 kbps, sometimes. Would be very irritating waiting for the compiler/theorem prover to go brr, remotely… I can hardly edit a Google doc out here! This doesn’t contradict your minority point, but it really does make me appreciate local-first.

CS thesis that requires traveling, tell us more! What's the topic? :)

Perhaps the Italian girlfriend was not where the mainframe on which the theorem prover ran? ;)

If I had been in Italy, perhaps my Ph.D. would never have been finished...

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#64

Post by intrasight »

whatever1 wrote: post #26
dingnuts wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no, you tell us why you think the next ten years are going to be different than the last thirty

The only market for desktops is gaming. Hence nvidia will just slap a cpu on their board and use the unified memory model to sell you an all in one solution. Essentially a desktop console. Maybe some modularization will survive for slow storage. But other than that demand for modular desktops is dead. Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs.

>The only market for desktops is gaming.

I disagree. My premise isn't that desktops are going away. It's that DIY custom-build desktops are destined for the trash heap of history since you'll no longer be able to buy CPUs and memory. We will be buying desktops like the HP Z2 Mini Workstation - or the 10 years from now equivalent.

>Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs

But only as a retro theme thing? Would enthusiasts just put a Z2 Mini, for example, inside the case, wire up the lights, and call it a day?

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#65

Post by intrasight »

barrkel wrote: post #33
whatever1 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only market for desktops is gaming. Hence nvidia will just slap a cpu on their board and use the unified memory model to sell you an all in one solution. Essentially a desktop console. Maybe some modularization will survive for slow storage. But other than that demand for modular desktops is dead. Cases will probably survive since gamers love flashy rigs.

There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation that are hard to beat with a laptop. If you're compiling code, you generally want as much concurrency as you can get, as well as great single core speed when the task parallelism runs out. There aren't really any laptops with high core counts, and even when you have something with horsepower, you run into thermal limits. You can try and make do with remoting…

> There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation

I've historically built my own workstations. My premise is that my most recent build may be my last or second to last. In ten years, I will still have a workstation - but not one that I build from parts.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#66

Post by charcircuit »

fourthark wrote: post #21
charcircuit wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, as that's already the case with phones. There is more to a phone than the SOC.

Who builds phones?

It's mostly factory workers. But hobbyists could do so too if they wanted. Most people want to just buy something that works out of the box so it's not a popular option.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#67

Post by vel0city »

rkomorn wrote: post #61
danparsonson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you have no success upgrading your fans (Noctua etc)? Still too loud? How about water cooling?

It's an HP OEM (because I moved countries during the pandemic and getting parts where I settled was ridiculously more expensive). The CPU is AIO (and the radiator fans are loud). The GPU has very loud fans too, but is not AIO. It's four years old at this point and I might just build something else rather than try to retrofit this one to sanity (which I doubt is possible without dumping the GPU anyway).

I bought my current gaming desktop off a friend as he didn't need it anymore when I was looking for an upgrade. It had an AIO cooler. The pump made so much noise and it seemed like I had to fiddle with fan profiles forever to get it to have sane cooling. I swapped it for a $30 CoolerMaster Hyper 212 and a Noctua case fan. It cools well enough for the CPU to stay above stock speeds pretty much all the time and is much quieter than the AIO cooler was. I'm not suggesting this CPU cooler is the best one out there, but just pointing out its not like one needs to spend $100+ on a cooler to get pretty good performance.

The GPU still gets kind of loud during intense graphics gaming sessions but when I'm not gaming the GPU fans often aren't even spinning.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#68

Post by rkomorn »

vel0city wrote: post #67
rkomorn wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an HP OEM (because I moved countries during the pandemic and getting parts where I settled was ridiculously more expensive). The CPU is AIO (and the radiator fans are loud). The GPU has very loud fans too, but is not AIO. It's four years old at this point and I might just build something else rather than try to retrofit this one to sanity (which I doubt is possible without dumping the GPU anyway).

I bought my current gaming desktop off a friend as he didn't need it anymore when I was looking for an upgrade. It had an AIO cooler. The pump made so much noise and it seemed like I had to fiddle with fan profiles forever to get it to have sane cooling. I swapped it for a $30 CoolerMaster Hyper 212 and a Noctua case fan. It cools well enough for the CPU to stay above stock speeds pretty much all the time and is much…

Honestly at this point it's not so much about money as it is about whether or not this particular case/setup/components combo is salvageable with minimal effort.

The CPU fan is rarely an issue (it mostly just goes bananas when IntelliJ gets its business on with gradle on a new project XD).

The GPU is the main culprit and I'm not sure there's any solution there that doesn't involve just replacing it.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#69

Post by intrasight »

theodric wrote: post #55
danparsonson wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RAM? Are we expecting on-chip RAM any time soon?

Apple's done it since 2020. Intel was planning to, but walked it back. It dramatically increases performance, and allows vendors to sell you RAM at 8x the market price, and requires you to replace your entire computer to upgrade it, thereby inducing you to overspend on RAM from the outset so that you don't have to spend even more to replace the entire system later. There's literally no reason for shareholders not to…

Exactly. Better performance and higher profits. Seems inevitable to me.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#70

Post by vel0city »

rkomorn wrote: post #68
vel0city wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought my current gaming desktop off a friend as he didn't need it anymore when I was looking for an upgrade. It had an AIO cooler. The pump made so much noise and it seemed like I had to fiddle with fan profiles forever to get it to have sane cooling. I swapped it for a $30 CoolerMaster Hyper 212 and a Noctua case fan. It cools well enough for the CPU to stay above stock speeds pretty much all the time and is much…

Honestly at this point it's not so much about money as it is about whether or not this particular case/setup/components combo is salvageable with minimal effort. The CPU fan is rarely an issue (it mostly just goes bananas when IntelliJ gets its business on with gradle on a new project XD). The GPU is the main culprit and I'm not sure there's any solution there that doesn't involve just replacing it.

Depending on the fans it may be possible to re-oil the bearings.
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