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Computer specs
Aug. 2nd, 2021 10:08 pmThe first part of the long-overdue computer rebuild posts!
Back in May, I finally brought my desktop kicking and screaming into the current decade. Nyx was originally built (as Khaos) in 2007 and the core of it has changed very little over the years - there's been a few incremental upgrades here and there, but it still ran the same Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor that it started out with. It's held up surprisingly well over the years and still had enough grunt for daily use and light gaming, but the time has finally come to replace it... (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pleaseremove has noted that I keep old hardware going for much longer than anyone should)
For reference, the original core of Khaos was:
Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WiFi (Intel P35 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping)
RAM: 2x Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX kits (4GB overall across 4 sticks)
GPU: Inno3D GeForce 8800 GT
HDDs: 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA-II
There's a story behind the set of parts: I picked the Q6600 because it was the CPU to get at the time and managed to get the lower-power stepping, the motherboard because it had three PCI slots and I had three cards I wanted to use (TV card, SCSI card (for a film scanner), IDE card (the motherboard only had a single IDE channel and I had older drives I wanted to include)), and the GPU solely because it was the only single-slot two-output one on the market. It was only much later that I realised I'd unexpectedly picked a top-tier GPU - when the 8800 GT was released, it outperformed everything bar nVidia's crazy expensive flagship and did so for under £200 in a mere 125W TDP. Looking back at reviews, the general consensus was it instantly obsoleted everything else on the market.
Anyway, by the time Nyx (renamed after upgrading from Windows XP to 7) was decommissioned the major components were:
Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WiFi (Intel P35 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping)
RAM: 1x Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX kit, plus 2x generic 2GB DDR2 (6GB overall across 4 sticks)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW
SSD: Plextor PX-256 M5S 256GB SATA-III
HDDs: 3x Toshiba PC P300 3TB SATA-III
The GPU upgrade came about because the 8800 GT finally failed, and by this point I'd removed the IDE HDDs and corresponding IDE card and could fit a two-slot card. Not that I had much choice - the GPU market had entirely settled on twin-slot coolers for anything halfway decent even if they weren't always necessary - and after a bit of research I picked a GeForce GTX 950 as sitting in the sweet spot for performance. It does look rather silly with an enormous twin-fan heatsink on it as it's only rated for 90W TDP. The SSD was bought after the speed wars of early SATA drives had died down and was one of the first that could saturate a SATA-III bus all day long without cheating with compression. And the HDDs... well, the original drives had been upgraded to a pair of 2TB drives, and then one of those failed so I replaced all the myriad HDDs in the system with a ridiculous 9TB of storage.
Finally, it's time for the new system! The core of the build consists of:
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Pro
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 3600 CL16 2x16GB (32GB overall across 2 sticks)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW
Primary SSD: WD Black SN850 1TB
Secondary SSDs: 2x WD Blue 1TB
Unlike the original build I had fewer criteria when building it: AMD Zen 3 architecture (because by pretty much any metric they stomp current Intel CPUs), X570 chipset, and onboard 802.11ax 2x2 WiFi. The TUF Gaming seemed like a sensible choice - higher end boards seemed to me to result in diminishing returns and one trick of the TUF Gaming is there's few constraints on which combination of slots can be used. RAM was picked at the highest clock speed that Ryzen CPUs can reliably run 1:1 with and this particular set is lower latency than most. For storage, I had originally planned on getting a Samsung NVMe drive but by the time I finally went for the upgrade the new WD Black had appeared to flatten everything in benchmarks. GPU aside (reused from Nyx), this is not a slow computer.
And while I was putting the final specification together, I decided to treat myself. You might have noticed there's no HDDs in the list - yup, I went pure SSD for this build as my network is fast enough to use the NAS for bulk storage. I also picked a Noctua NH-C14S CPU heatsink (which easily handles the 140W power draw of a fully loaded Ryzen 9) and as the final treat I swapped out all the case fans for a set of Noctua NF-A8's. The result is when idle, the new computer is silent, and even under full load it's quieter than Nyx ever was.
Back in May, I finally brought my desktop kicking and screaming into the current decade. Nyx was originally built (as Khaos) in 2007 and the core of it has changed very little over the years - there's been a few incremental upgrades here and there, but it still ran the same Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor that it started out with. It's held up surprisingly well over the years and still had enough grunt for daily use and light gaming, but the time has finally come to replace it... (
pleaseremove has noted that I keep old hardware going for much longer than anyone should)For reference, the original core of Khaos was:
Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WiFi (Intel P35 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping)
RAM: 2x Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX kits (4GB overall across 4 sticks)
GPU: Inno3D GeForce 8800 GT
HDDs: 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB SATA-II
There's a story behind the set of parts: I picked the Q6600 because it was the CPU to get at the time and managed to get the lower-power stepping, the motherboard because it had three PCI slots and I had three cards I wanted to use (TV card, SCSI card (for a film scanner), IDE card (the motherboard only had a single IDE channel and I had older drives I wanted to include)), and the GPU solely because it was the only single-slot two-output one on the market. It was only much later that I realised I'd unexpectedly picked a top-tier GPU - when the 8800 GT was released, it outperformed everything bar nVidia's crazy expensive flagship and did so for under £200 in a mere 125W TDP. Looking back at reviews, the general consensus was it instantly obsoleted everything else on the market.
Anyway, by the time Nyx (renamed after upgrading from Windows XP to 7) was decommissioned the major components were:
Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E WiFi (Intel P35 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 (G0 stepping)
RAM: 1x Corsair 2GB DDR2 XMS2-6400C4 TwinX kit, plus 2x generic 2GB DDR2 (6GB overall across 4 sticks)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW
SSD: Plextor PX-256 M5S 256GB SATA-III
HDDs: 3x Toshiba PC P300 3TB SATA-III
The GPU upgrade came about because the 8800 GT finally failed, and by this point I'd removed the IDE HDDs and corresponding IDE card and could fit a two-slot card. Not that I had much choice - the GPU market had entirely settled on twin-slot coolers for anything halfway decent even if they weren't always necessary - and after a bit of research I picked a GeForce GTX 950 as sitting in the sweet spot for performance. It does look rather silly with an enormous twin-fan heatsink on it as it's only rated for 90W TDP. The SSD was bought after the speed wars of early SATA drives had died down and was one of the first that could saturate a SATA-III bus all day long without cheating with compression. And the HDDs... well, the original drives had been upgraded to a pair of 2TB drives, and then one of those failed so I replaced all the myriad HDDs in the system with a ridiculous 9TB of storage.
Finally, it's time for the new system! The core of the build consists of:
Motherboard: ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Pro
CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
RAM: Crucial Ballistix 3600 CL16 2x16GB (32GB overall across 2 sticks)
GPU: EVGA GeForce GTX 950 FTW
Primary SSD: WD Black SN850 1TB
Secondary SSDs: 2x WD Blue 1TB
Unlike the original build I had fewer criteria when building it: AMD Zen 3 architecture (because by pretty much any metric they stomp current Intel CPUs), X570 chipset, and onboard 802.11ax 2x2 WiFi. The TUF Gaming seemed like a sensible choice - higher end boards seemed to me to result in diminishing returns and one trick of the TUF Gaming is there's few constraints on which combination of slots can be used. RAM was picked at the highest clock speed that Ryzen CPUs can reliably run 1:1 with and this particular set is lower latency than most. For storage, I had originally planned on getting a Samsung NVMe drive but by the time I finally went for the upgrade the new WD Black had appeared to flatten everything in benchmarks. GPU aside (reused from Nyx), this is not a slow computer.
And while I was putting the final specification together, I decided to treat myself. You might have noticed there's no HDDs in the list - yup, I went pure SSD for this build as my network is fast enough to use the NAS for bulk storage. I also picked a Noctua NH-C14S CPU heatsink (which easily handles the 140W power draw of a fully loaded Ryzen 9) and as the final treat I swapped out all the case fans for a set of Noctua NF-A8's. The result is when idle, the new computer is silent, and even under full load it's quieter than Nyx ever was.
