Perfectly valid, just wanted to point it out in case you hadn’t given it any thought.
I wish I had advice to give on GPU’s, but outside of signing up for the Newegg Shuffle everytime you see something that interests you, it’s slim pickings.
For tower coolers, Scythe has some good stuff, but don’t overlook the Noctua U12S. It might be just a bit more expensive, but for the 6-8 core CPUs it’s plenty of cooling and should run quieter than Scythe’s offerings. BeQuiet also has some decently priced coolers that perform well.
For AIO’s, it’s hard to beat the Liquid Freezer II line. They chart top, and are close to being the least expensive AIOs on the market. Thankfully they seem to have finally sorted their supply issues out for the time being. Because there were months that they were really hard to come by. I would say grab the 280 if you decide to go for the 5800X though.
My typical rec’s for B550 boards are the Strix-E/F, MSI Unify, or the Gigabyte Aurous Elite or Master depending on how much board you want. I’m not very fond of ASRock’s BIOS, and I’ve heard more than a few reports that they are feeding too much voltage into CPUs when left to auto.
He just did an updated buyer’s guide video last month.
Great cases, along with the Phanteks P400A, Fractal Meshify C (you’ll have supply fans for this one), or anything else GN Steve recommends.
The only area where you’d see this matter between the X and G series is memory speed. Because of how they are designed, the G series will allow you to run faster RAM speeds without the penalty of decoupling the fabric clock.
Yeah… Right now, if I happen to have the spare change and happen to find one in stock at a Best Buy without it being overly ridiculous prices, I may look at maybe a 3060 ti or something.
I’ve nothing against be quiet! (cause you know… all lower case and an the random EXCLEMATION MARK totally makes sense, but I digress) or… Scrap that, I do have something against Noctua… That damn brown color. Weirdly, if I go air, I almost feel like what I’d be willing to spend less on the top end then water. Like $70 tops for air, where as for the Liquid Freezer II, the 280 is $109 and 240 is $87.
So in the relm of more reasonable: Aurous Elite (AX V2 - $190) and Strix-F (WiFi6 - $202). Where as in the potentially “Why didn’t you go X570?”: MSI Unify (don’t ask me how Walmart has the best price right now $260), Gigabyte Aorus Master ($270), and Asus Strix-E ($280)…
Yeah… I just watched it… Takes a bit to get through some of his videos, unfortunately. I’m the kinda person that doesn’t mind tweeking the speed and timings to squeeze out some extra performance for the sake of optimization… not to “how fast can I go?”. That’s where I kinda hit a… i don’t exactly just wanna slap on XMP and call it a day, but I also don’t care about the take a whole day off work to overclock my RAM.
I’d consider the Phanteks, but the geometric “pattern” on the Meshify genuinely was never my cup of tea.
Is it new? I hadn’t ever seen it either. Looks nice though.
I don’t tell people to go X570 unless they are going to need the PCIe4.0 lanes on all off of the slots. B550 is just the better chipset. There are a few good X570 boards, like the new EVGA Dark, ASUS Dark Hero, etc. but you are paying premium for them. And you can find decent B550 boards at the ~$150 mark, but at that point you start losing features or VRM that makes them hard for me to recommend if you aren’t hard constrained by price.
Same here. That’s part of the reason why I spent entirely too much on my 2 2x8 kits of Trident Z 4000 c15, lol.
In the end air vs water cooling all comes down to how bursty your workloads are. If it is a long enough sustained load that you surpass the extra thermal soak capacity of the water in the loop then all you really have is an air cooler in a different location. If it is a workload that spikes and goes back down then water can absorb those spikes better (more thermal mass) and smooth out the temp.
Also you can get chromax editions of some of noctua’s air coolers so no brown and beige… which I agree is amazingly awful.
So far as I know it is, and it is a looker indeed.
Out of the ones listed… The Strix-F WiFi and the Unify honestly would probably be my choices. I don’t know what it is about Gigabyte, but something doesn’t quite feel right about them.
Mostly long gaming sessions and however long it would end up taking to render out a video. Some live streaming here and there, but all the same.
I am well aware of these… However, when the only one in that theoretical $70 hard limit… is the 95mm tower cooler, and the low profile coolers. Once you step up to NH-U12S Chromax edition… You’re in Dark Rock Pro 4 and NH-U14S territory.
Gaming is very bursty and a liquid cooler is very useful in smoothing out the spikes in CPU temps, streaming is dependent on what you are using to do the encoding of the stream (CPU vs GPU encoding) and can heat soak in the right/wrong circumstances. Video encoding is probably the most likely to heat soak a 240 or 280 liquid AIO, but again it does depend on the software used, the length of the render and how GPU accelerated it is.
I know they reach that price cap quite quickly. I tend to look at coolers a bit differently and put more value in a good air cooler then a good liquid cooler for the extras like reliability (less things that can fail). I do use AIOs from time to time when building computers, but that is mainly due to restrictions from building SFF computers and sometimes I do just need to move a heat source somewhere else or get more cooling then a low profile will allow. But in a full size tower that is not going to be moved around a lot a large air cooler is my preferred method.
Kinda depends… OBS doesn’t always like behaving, AMD’s GPU encoder is pretty… ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Nvidia’s Shadow Play is more tolerable, but has to be the biggest pain of all when it decides it doesn’t wanna work.
DaVinci Resolve
If I could believe that I could afford a custom loop, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Right now? Out of the question. I’m also very well aware that you can get a pretty decent fucking cooler for less then these “put it on a pedestal” towers that everyone needs to use as the baseline apparently. On the other hand, I also know with an AIO, there are more things to keep in mind and you usually have to spend more. Let’s face it, you can get some decent air coolers for ~$50, but that is not even remotely close to the case with an AIO.
Mainly I was talking about if you are using the Nvenc encoder since it can take a lot off of the CPU when used with streaming or video encoding in general. And yes AMDs version is kinda meh, workable but meh.
The main things I put air coolers above others is total cooling potential and noise… noise is probably even more important to me then total cooling potential if it was at a “good enough” level. So yes you can get decent to great air coolers for $50 or so, but none of them are quiet enough for me without fan swapping, which just puts the cost right back at the others level. also factor in small benefits like SecuFirm (noctua’s brilliant mounting system that everyone should just copy, also only a small benefit since it only matters a few times) and I I don’t mind a reasonable premium for some air coolers. Now if I had a hard budget and the choice was a better air cooler or a better main component then the air cooler is going to be the first thing where I find something that is good enough.
I really wish we could reach a point where open source hardware becomes a thing. Power supplies aren’t an area where you should skimp, but how can you tell the manufacturer isn’t?
The front panel is certainly different. But if it had had top exhaust for a 360 then I would have picked one up to replace my Define R6. Would have given me a good reason to clean up my cable runs. I think I’d like to see a revision where they make it wider, move the PSU to the side, and extend the current PSU mount to allow for top mounting rads with a mesh screen at the opening at the back. That way they can keep the top completely closed off. And also make the case feet another ~0.5" taller to allow for more air to be pulled in from the bottom.
I ordered a used NUC10i5FNHJA getting delivered this weekend. My plan is to put Proxmox on it and run Home Assistant and a PiHole. I have two rPi’s currently setup for these and would be merging over to the NUC. I’ve ordered a 16gb RAM kit to upgrade the 8gb. This will be my first VM but found some good guides online that show the setup processes and I feel comfortable with T/Sing through them to get setup.
What other VMs do you guys use that I should consider loading on the NUC as well? A buddy of mine has a plex server he gets me access to so I don’t have much need to host my own videos.
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