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The PC (non-gaming) thread - What else do yours do? No RGB pics please!

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Riquende:
A thread for technical questions, building help or just general comments about computing on PCs, far from the prying eyes of those Mac-using deviants! People tend to post all the PC chat in the gaming thread, but they can do so much more!

Anyway, I mentioned a few weeks ago in the PC gaming thread that I was rebuilding a new small PC to use for work or possible as an HTPC and said I'd post an update when I got round to it... and for some strange reason I woke up incredibly hungover this morning and decided not to bother with actual office work but get my build finished instead. Turns out it's not quite finished but I'll explain at the end...



So this is a top down look inside the case. It's generally old kit pulled from other builds. I7-3770S (the lower powered variant with reduced clock speed) on an H77 ITX motherboard, 16GB DDR3 and hidden in the drive bays is a 500GB SSD. I've removed the plastic shroud and its 40mm fan from the GTX 1050 as it sits so close to the twin 80mm fans (one of the few newly bought bits for the system). I also bought a Corsair 450W SFX modular power supply, it's worth spending money on a good PSU as it will usually outlast a more than one system it's used in!

Cable management is something of an issue, the modular PSU's cables are all individually braided so it looks like black spaghetti in there! Cheap SFF cases don't have clever cable routing systems so all I'll be able to do is cable tie it up.



I had to use my Dremel to modify one of the new case fans as it just intefered with the inside of the GPU's DVI port. It's not the cleanest of cuts but it's done the job!



A final shot for scale next to my old HD5870. It's a pretty minimalist case designed to sit under a TV pretending to be a console or media player, and doesn't have anything in the way of front ventilation.

So why is it not finished? Well, I'm not entirely happy with the idle temperature of the CPU sitting at 40° (although there is a heatwave currently in the south so I need to wait a few days for a more typical reading). The CPU cooler is a mid-tier AR06 which has performed well previously in a case with proper airflow but is struggling here. I've ordered a chunkier Noctua fan to mount on the heatsink to see if that helps any, if not then I'm not sure where to go really! I've already spent way too much money on what is essentially a 4th-choice ancillary PC so bigger, serious coolers and the necessary low profile RAM, or buying an even lower TDP processor aren't routes I want to head down...

Maybe I'll just only turn it on in the winter.

candys:
great job btw! I'm building my own pc too right now

candys:
It turned out not so easy tast. Yet, for some reason, I felt more excited spending time researching parts and putting the build together with my own two hands than being able to run almost everything so smoothly, which was kind of the point of buying a PC. I'm waiting for some parts right now. I ordered them from supplier here https://eltra-trade.com/catalog/baumer-encoders. It is fast developing company that supplying electronic components and complex systems in Europe and throughout the world.

Riquende:

--- Quote from: candys on December 28, 2020, 02:43:21 pm ---It turned out not so easy tast. Yet, for some reason, I felt more excited spending time researching parts and putting the build together with my own two hands than being able to run almost everything so smoothly, which was kind of the point of buying a PC.

--- End quote ---

That's very common! What have you built and what problems did you run into?

Despite being excited about building the PC in my first post, about 6 weeks later I disassembled it as the airflow direction wasn't compatible with its location and even with a better cooler it was sitting at a crazy 60 degrees at idle. I was going to move some stuff about but ended up breaking something on the mobo so abandoned the whole thing. It was a fun project to plan and build though, and stuff like cases and power supplies can always be used for something new down the line (which is why it's a good idea to buy good and not cheap ones).

We've actually been decommissioning a few bits at work recently so my list of computers to tinker with grows ever longer, despite the non-completion of this box and throwing out a 10 year old HP prebuilt earlier in the year:

Custom gaming PC: i7-7700K, GTX 1070. Really showing its age now, I think I'll be building a new gaming rig towards the end of 2021 but I've got a house move/relocation to plan first.
2 x Custom HTPC: both i7-7700, 1 with a GTX 1050ti, the other with GTX 970 (bits from previous gaming PCs that got paired with lower powered CPUs and ITX cases to make capable little boxes).
HP Microserver: AMD X3421, GTX 1050 (upped the RAM to 16GB, put in the GPU and fitted a server-grade SSD into the DVD slot to keep the drive bays clear for storage)
Apple 2010 Mac Pro: Xeon X5675, GTX 1050 (the low profile 1050 from the first post! It's a big improvement over the Radeon HD5770 that came as standard but looks absolutely comical inside the cavernous interior of the Mac Pro. It's a decommissioned server so despite only having the single CPU tray it is packing 32GB of registered DIMMs. I don't really know what to do with this as it's worse than all my other desktops but an absolute power hog)
Apple 2012 iMac 21": i7-3770S, GT 640M (adopted work project to invesigate whether drive could be swapped to SSD. Also increased RAM and switched CPU whilst inside. Got it just before the lockdown and proved to be vital as it was my only machine with a webcam for all the sudden Zooms etc)
Apple 2012 Macbook Pro 15": i7-3715QM, GTX 650M (I can't say that I'd bother snapping up an 8 year old plastic Dell laptop but this this is solid as a rock and remains a decent performer. Switched to a good SSD and will bring the RAM up from 4GB to 16 once the festive spending is over)
Stone N120: Celeron 1037U (the runt of the collection with an 11" screen, this cheap bit of junk is my travel laptop that I can afford to lose. I've switched to an SSD and filled its single SODIMM slot with an 8GB stick but that's all I can do. I don't really like laptops due to their lack of tinkerability)

OperationIvy:
Can someone help me with a technical issue please!

I recently upgraded the Mobo, RAM and CPU. I bought a Aorus x570 Elite, 16B Corsair Vengance 3200Mhz and a Ryzen 5 2600x. I have an old GPU (Radeon R9 270x).

Before the upgrade I had no issues. But now when I start my PC for the first time there is never any video output and GPU fans go berserk. But if I reset my pc then then it works fine. I literally have to do this everytime I want to use the PC.

After trying loads of different things in the bios, I finally managed to get it work normally on the first boot by just pluging the GPU in the secondary PCI-E slot (the x4 one) instead of the primary (x16) one.

So I'm wondering if the problem is more a compatability issue between the mobo and my outdated GPU. I want to buy a new GPU but literally every shop is sold out and I have until the end of the month to return my mobo if there is a problem with that.

So was just wondering if anyone else knows of this kind of issue and what the problem may be. Thanks.

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