Post Your Computer Build

Its a nice little case. I seriously considered the Fractal Torrent Compact, but its design is just too out there for me

 

Yeah I really don’t like the protruding top cover…

Have a NR200 right now. I wish Fractal made a mITX version of the Meshify.

I built a big workstation in a Meshify 2XL with Threadripper Pro and 3x RTX A5000 for work, it was so nice to have so much space to work in!

 

classy case, have mine as a mini with a green front panel. really helps it blend into the room

 

Bought a new desk, an Omnidesk Pro 2020, has a cable management attachment which came free with the desk, helped me organize all those wires and cables that were hanging (as seen in my previous pic). It looks much neater now. Bothers me that I have a decent rig, but bad cable management was getting to me. Pic below was when I was still using my old mousepad.

Big fan of mechanical keyboards, I was hip deep into mechanical keyboards a few years back and had built a nice collection of such keyboards ranging from some Cherry MX to a few Topre keyboards. I'd recently gotten a few sets of PBY shine through black pudding keycaps, here's a set I'm using now, on my Ducky Shine 2 78 Edition. Also got a new colorful oversized mousepad to go with the new keycaps, they really allow my keyboard to get pretty well-lit/bright....

 

That's sooooo expensive even for our audiophile standards

But then again, this GFX will keep you going for a while for sure!

 

I blame @SoupRKnowva for this. I'm going to have words with your mother, you enabling little scamp, you.

I haven't built a desktop computer since the P4 Northwood (some 20 years ago!), on account of moving a few times for science and switching to laptops. But now that I'm settled the desktop itch came back, yet being completely out of the game I had no idea where to start. Well, my enabling friend mentioned the Torrent Compact, I looked it up, and I was immediately smitten. That is the case I dreamed of 20 years ago, and I *had* to have it.

Parts are...
Motherboard: MSI Z690 Edge WiFi
CPU: Intel i5-12600k
RAM: XPG Lancer 32 Gb DDR5-6000 CL40
SSD: Samsung 2 Tb 980 Pro
PSU: Fractal Ion+ 2 Platinum 860 W
Case: Fractal Torrent Compact
Cooler: Noctua NH-D15S Chromax Black

All things considered, it is a very similar build to @SoupRKnowva - the MSI Edge is the perfect balance of features/price/performance, but I went for the DDR5 variant, step down in CPU, faster storage, and cheaper PSU. No video card yet, going to wait until the RTX 4xxx series drops.

I think it's glorious. I love the look, massive airflow even at very low fan speeds, super-performant versus my laptop.

 

Nice build!

I would maybe caution against waiting "...until the RTX 4xxx series drops" though. considering GPU pricing now, and what the rumors are saying, unless you're looking for a top of the line card, aka spending somewhere north of 1k usd, new cards may not be out for you at all this year. if you want something in the like 3-500 usd range, it might be the middle or end of next year before its out. Specially with the uncertainty around oil prices right now, gpu prices may start going back up.

 

Yeah, it's definitely a small risk as to how the market plays out, but I'm optimistic. Current trends are for slowly reducing prices and increasing availability, and 'The Merge' is coming to the Ethereum network that will make GPU mining a bit less attractive. Release of the 4xxx should hopefully edge prices down a little, and who knows, even Intel's discrete GPU might help meet a bit of the pent up demand and help push prices down.

It's not even like I'm after a budget card either, I'd pick up a 3080 non-Ti at RRP right now if they were available! Best Buy has occasional drops at RRP up here in Canada, but competition is still fierce.

 

Geez guys, I think the last time I built a computer completely from scratch it still had a turbo button on the front.

 

HA!

I have to admit, I remember it being a lot more difficult, and simultaneously more and less satisfying. Setting master/slave on IDE devices, switching IRQ and DMA settings, playing round with autoexec.bat to get all-green boxes in Wolfenstein's memory display. And the mass of cables, good lord, the insanity of the cables. Whiny little fans that drove me bonkers (I'm pretty sure the Delta 4k RPM CPU fan on my Duron 600 gave me permanent hearing damage). But man, once you got it done it was an achievement.

Now we have modular power supplies, cable management nooks, M2 drives, massive low RPM fans. It's all so clean. It's all so pretty. It works pretty much first time every time. It's almost boring.

 

Delta fans are supposed to be for noisy ass server rooms not for your desktop cpu, that must have sounded like a jet engine.

Hopefully the 4000 series will come out of the gate with jacked up mining performance so you won't have to fight off as many scalpers (+etherium merge) but who knows. That said, sometimes I like to mine because it's cheaper to heat my room that way than to crank up the heat and slightly less wasteful than leaving some amps on... well and I don't have any class a amps in my room.

Also, I have to use a tube of chapstick under my 3090 as a support otherwise it wants to droop like 20 degrees from the pci-e slot because it's so heavy, though that is with a waterblock on both sides. I feel like I must be the only person who builds their PC to get rid of all the RGB...

Also cases are SO much easier to work with now. I remember having to take my motherboard out when the psu would die because it couldn't be removed otherwise, was pretty normal back in the day and that was awful.

 

I'm trying to find the exact model, but it looked something like this. It came with two fan options, low-speed or high-speed. I bought the high speed model and persisted with it for a while, but ultimately switched it out for the slower one. Jet engine is absolutely appropriate. This was back before PWM control as well, so it was constantly full noise.

The Fractal cases have a bracket you can install to support the weight. Very clever!

I went with the RGB case and RAM, because it's a way to get the little one interested in the box daddy does all his work on. It's worked quite nicely in this respect.

 

Yeah my case is modular so you can move the motherboard up and down, but what this means is the pci e slots/screw mounting is not actually a very good place to attach one of those brackets (or the video card itself) because it just isn't as rigid as in your case where the pcie slots can't completely come apart from each other.

 

Don't forget modifying config.sys while you're at it. Kids today can't appreciate that we had to make special boot disks optimized for each game.

 

And my contribution to all that is... Having to enter the hard disk specs: heads, cylinders, etc, etc, manually in the bios.

 

f**k you're old

 

True.

Although I didn't get started with computers at all until late 80*s. The first hard disks I handled (although not on PCs) were as thick as bricks. But not as tough. It said on the box: dropping this disk as much as one inch may destroy it.



*1980s... I'm not that old! Hmmm... fast approaching 70.

 

hard disks? How about 5.25" floppies as the only disk available.... the move to 3.5 was groundbreaking. And my mind was blown when removable zip disks came out... the capacity was amazing...
---edit---
and of course the young'uns in the office still can't believe we ran AutoCAD 2.x on 9" monochrome monitors...

 

Ha ha... 8-inch disks!

i don't think I ever used those on a computer, but the first piece of computerised equipment I encountered was a photo-typesetting machine. Its only storage was 8-inchers. The model to which we upgraded used 5.25ers, and the fonts were digitised, rather being on filmstrips.

It was my experience researching, buying and using these machines that established me as a bit of techie in the company, and gave me the opportunity to look after the new accounts computer, which ran Unix. And that changed my life and career!

 

I used to have an ADAM computer that hooked up to my Coleco... the storage media was cassette disks

edit: Nostalgia!