Present Day, Present Time (Part III)

So last night was, enlightening..? Is that the word? It'll do.. in both good and bad ways.

First the bad - I always like to get the bad out of the way. I've already had to install the OS twice. Why? Mainly because OCD, but the issue was one which was never going to go away properly if I didn't, and there's absolutely no way I will tolerate a bad install from the outset - who would!?. The crux of that issue was not the OS (for a change?) but was in fact the Asus AURA software, and Asus.. I'm talking to you now.. I love your mainboards but you truly deserve to get thrown under a bus.. no, several buses for the lacklustre, piece of s**t RGB control program you've handed to the world.

Fortunately for me I was never that bothered about having a plethora of RGB devices all glowing in a distracting and gaudy fashion, preferrring the more relaxing subtlety of maybe a little glow from the mainboard, supported by solid ambient lighting from the case fans. Indeed that is what I find myself with! Nevertheless I did entertain the notion of having their software on board to exercise some control over the minimal lighting present. Sadly the most recent version, whilst capable of actually running, could neither see the mainboard, successfully reflect upon its transgression by way of any forum solutions nor actually uninstall after a later, second attempt, reporting a "catastrophic error" instead. Not wishing to give up easily I also tried the various available incarnations - the remainder threw up all over the screen listing an X99 error of some form in a hastily opened web browser, and did little else except report another vague problem which wouldn't even let the software run in its greyed out incompetence. How did something this bad get out in the wild, much less sit at the heart of their marketing campaign? Judging by the 24-plus pages on the ROG forum detailing many and varied ill-fated efforts to use this crappy code, I would heartily suggest to Asus that they pull all the marketing for this, get back to the drawing board, return with good software and a handful of apologies in at least 150 differing languages prepared well in advance, and in the interim celebrate what they do well. The boards are great, Asus AURA less so.. With that in mind I shall remain my usual stoic self and enjoy the rainbow glance intertwined about my graphics card, considering it to be as representative of Lain's glowing heart as much as it might be a reminder to me that I need to tear a strip off any Asus representative I might encounter.

Now for the good.

In spite of the usual abomination that is known as the installation process for Windows 10 (it can't help itself) I can report nothing less than what I would call blisteringly fast install times from a USB 3.0 boot stick to NVMe. We are talking legendary by comparison to that which I've known in the past. Having done this twice already I can confirm that from "go" to "working desktop" takes around 8 mins, give or take a little buggering about with options on the fly. Booting up in as little as 12 seconds even without any BIOS tweaks, this is by far the niftiest I've ever seen Windows move and massively faster than anything ever witnessed in this home.

NVMe SSD performance is undoubtedly a worthy champion with its credentials intact, and for a change it's nice to say an actual congratulations to Samsung for delivering what it says on the tin. Clicking through the OS from pillar to post happens without the system batting an eyelid. Wonderful! It also explains how I was able to install, bugger about with, learn from and reinstall in about three hours, without any harm to self or society at large.

With a few things learned about what is worthy and what is best left to rot in the digital sunshine, I'm confident that I'm going to have a very wholesome computing experience in the near future. For tonight it's left to me to dodge Asus AURA and move swiftly on to reinstalling the chipset and system drivers, uninstall the ropey Windows video driver variant in favour of the REAL nVidia 1070 driver, and perform all those little tweaks and pokes in order to get for myself a first, basic, almost vanilla image down to external HDD (with a little Chrome inserted into the mix - I would never consider Edge or IE to be worthy browsers to have out of the box, should a quick restore be required.). From thereon it should just be a matter of pruning the software I haven't been using over the months and get the ones I do use into proper order. A swift tidy up of the external HDD will also be in order once the survivors of the pruning, software and documents alike, have been ascertained.

Present Day, Present Time (Part II)

So the first night saw me perform that most fundamental yet dread-inducing of tasks - BIOS flashing. Armed with a whole Jayztwocents worth of widsom about ensuring your GAP file is at the absolute naked root of your USB stick and to let your computer do its thing, whilst taking pains to ensure as best as you can that the system DOES NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES LOSE POWER for the duration, I unleashed the routine (simultaneously proving the worthiness of that previously mentioned dubious front USB 3.0 mainboard connection). I avoided the direct internet update, which is I suppose another option but seems quite a reckless way to do a BIOS flash if I'm honest, and all was set!

It was after the above progress bar had done its thing that prospects diverged from the script. The screen just sat there with a primitive logo and a barebones screen asking for me to press F1 to enter setup. After leaving it for a while (Jay's words still echoing through my head "leave it alone to do its thing.."), I finally had little choice but to relent and press F1.

Nothing.. no response.. nothing.

I pressed F1 again.

Nothing.

A little piece of me fell over inside. That didn't happen on the tutorial I'd watched. What could've gone wrong? Nothing had popped up, nothing seemed untoward.. it even stated the new BIOS version above the insistent F1 request, yet simply refused to respond. Given that it was showing the new BIOS version I decided to bite the bullet and risk something which I felt was going massively against Jay's mantra, something I couldn't even have physically done if I'd followed my original plan of not connecting it up (it's rather too close to the case lighting controls for my tastes).. I poked the reset button.

and waited..

black screen..

and waited..

more black screen..

..the ROG logo appeared, and moments later a startlingly similar screen to the one above, with one notable exception - the newer BIOS version.

I've decided I don't like doing BIOS updates on my own personal stuff.

Next came the forging of a Windows USB boot stick. This took rather longer than I expected (the better part of the remainder of the evening), between conversations with Twitter co-conspirator Adrian about the importance of backups and patience. Deciding that it was better to sleep and undertake this on a fresh evening, I allowed my elder PC time to finish downloading and verifying the USB tool build. I also noted with some curiosity that by default the new PC continues to display it's chipset RGB lighting even after powering down the system. Without any Aura software to control it at this point you're stuck with the rainbow scroll in all its infancy, but it is lovely and adds to the feeling that Lain is somehow more alive than the primitive, lifeless black box predecessor sat next to her.

Present Day, Present Time (Part I)

With barely a moment to catch my breath (aside from a hastily concocted breakfast omelette and an extra strong mug of really hot coffee) the day of reckoning had finally arrived. All was gathered, and this Sunday gone I embarked upon the task in hand.. and a change of blog title.

Of course something this monumental wouldn't slip by the guys at Facebook's "Kawaii Life", so to that end please welcome Alphonso, Ziggy and Eric, proudly modelling the hardware line-up, complete with the promised case reveal! Yes, it was always going to be a tempered glass affair, but which was a mystery even to me for the longest time. It came down to a three horse race - the NZXT S340 Elite, the Fractal Design Meshify C and the Corsair 460X RGB. On paper the Corsair was set to be more expensive than the other two, except that I had settled on Corsair SP120 fans as my preferred flavour for cooling. With those in the bag it then equalised the deal, given that the former two cases would require the triple pack factoring into the cost. The Corsair comes with a set of three SP120's pre-fitted, but did require a rear fan - an odd omission for a case of this price and yet so typical of the idiosyncrasies which plague computer projects. In fairness the other two cases do each come with exhaust fans, but as this build does have some aesthetic quality to its consideration then a replacement SP120 fan would likely have been an adaptation somewhere down the line anyway. Since this is an air cooled PC the comparatively restricted air flow of the NZXT eventually pushed it out of the running, leaving the Fractal Design vs the Corsair. Included fans aside I really did have a soft spot for the Fractal Design case but the biggest problem actually became availability. For reasons unknown at time of purchasing I could not land one under a £30 premium on its RRP, which tipped the balance. Also was the (admittedly) fickle but undeniable matter of convenient lighting control, which the Corsair is set to handle up front with the provided top panel controls. When implemented in the Fractal Design case the controller would sit inconveniently behind a panel - not a dealbreaker, but certainly something else which didn't help its corner. So after more time, a forced purchase in the form of the bargain CPU (which set the clock ticking on buying all the parts for reasons of RMA) and an uncertain future for the fractal Design entry, the Corsair eventually took the win.

Of course every PC has to have a sense of character to it, and I settled with the name which has haunted the project since its inception some four years ago - Lain Dark, a fitting description for the sought after monochromatic case and motherboard look, unified with Lain Iwakura, the protagonist of one of the more provocative and haunting anime series ever to cross my collection.

So how did building Lain go? To be honest even though it was my first build, all came together surprisingly well. This is of course only the physical build - the BIOS, drivers, OS.. all that is yet to come, but the actual nuts and bolts happened without incident and to the best of my knowledge she's fine. Out of the box we had a successful POST test, which didn't even take as nail-bitingly long to complete as I expected (it seems that you can expect a few tense silent reboots when you first kick a Ryzen system into life). With that milestone out of the way (and I really am eternally grateful that I have no RMA issues at time of writing) it was on to full assembly.

After soaking up Dmitry's review of this case on Hardware Canucks, I decided to expect a moderate challenge. Whilst I can understand his concerns, and it's true that I did encounter some quirks, I needn't have felt any concerns. The grommets holding the tempered glass seem to have been refined since his review, appearing now to be much better - perhaps Corsair listened to his words? It'd be nice to think so. The quirkiest part was probably the PSU shroud, which is an overlapping, combined bolt and slot-sliding affair - a little cumbersome to be honest, and I'm still not convinced it's completely back together as it should be, but it feels settled.. Perhaps the worst I encountered was the lack of cable pass through between the back of the PSU shroud and the underside of the fitted mainboard, for all those fiddly connections. I think if I'd passed any such cabling through before installing the mainboard then it would've worked out. As it was with the mainboard already fitted there was no way the audio and fan splitter cables were going to make it, and so I elected to send all cables through the pass through in the PSU shroud.

All the main components were a breeze to deal with. The CPU cooler screws took a bit of fettling to get to bite into the mounting bracket, but I suspect that was me being a tad more delicate than I needed to be, such is the light touch of a noob - I can live with that thought better than finding myself the owner of broken components. Even cable management seems to have been relatively easy, although I think I was spoiled by this to be honest, having only four cables to tidy (the ubiquitous 24 pin connector, the CPU cable, the GPU cable and one SATA cable feeding both the 2Tb HDD and the pre-fitted fan LED connector). Still for a first build I feel quite happy with the job done.

So, how did she look after that first, tentative power-up?

All in all I think she's a real beauty. Be not concerned by the absence of a mouse. It was totally my fault that I don't have a single USB mouse about my person but this will obviously be remedied! You can certainly get around in the BIOS without one but it'll be easier with one, especially if you're going to be spoiled with a real UEFI, so no worries for now.. Anything else? I was slightly disturbed by the front panel USB 3.0 cable connector into the mainboard, which felt a tad flimsy - are they all like that? Maybe so. Still it's in and one would presume working at this point - all of this and more will be tested properly over the coming couple of evenings. I have plenty more fettling to do before we're finished (is such a point in time ever reached?), but for a first boot I found it a glorious thing to behold - CPU, memory, spinning fans, Nvme SSD and hard drive.. all recognised.

Finally after all this time I would seem to have a PC which will do some justice for a good while and there's plenty of life left in the blog yet as I follow up with said tweaks, on a build up to her full time installation. To that end I would like to say thank you for following the project thus far, and here's to the first step!

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase VII)

In one last avalanche we have the final pieces of the puzzle.. Case and GPU, the latter of which I wasn't actually expecting to buy at this point, have both arrived.

After mulling over the possibilities and being ever mindful of the cryptocurrency situation, I was quite content to stick with recycling my impossibly basic but functional graphics card from my old system - it's good enough to get me a POST test result and sit quietly.. In the end it wasn't even a black Friday offer which tempted me, but rather that I really ought to just relax a little, do what had to be done and trust in my financial forecast to carry the weight of a little debt. After mulling over price, availability, size and performance (ladies..), it boiled down to two options; Zotac and EVGA. I could say I was steered by peer bias but I don't like the intent which that communicates, and so I prefer to think of it as heeding the wisdom and experience of those who have already walked the path. Nothing is wrong with Zotac as far as I am aware, but for a long time I've plotted this build out with an EVGA gpu at its heart, and combined with the sage advice from Jayztwocents and Twitter friend Adrian I brought the debate to a close.

As to the specifics, a 1070 fits the bill quite nicely between value and performance. Driving a dual monitor with 1080p and 1440p resolutions set up a level of demand more than a GTX1060 was ever going to let me truly get away with. Even as I tried to keep the budget down (and yes the cryptocraze applied still more unwanted pressure) the demands and requirements were there to be met, and if anything about this build can be called a compromise then I was only willing to allow such matters to go so far.

As for the case, that particular reveal will have to wait for the assembly.. all good fun you understand.

The Building Of A New Beast (The Barn Edition)

Assuming the latest email to be accurate and full of nothing but truths, my PC case is now on its way from CCL Computers. This still isn't likely to be an event without incidental damage since the issue with Amazon, as noted in the previous blog, dissolved into one last formal round of madness.

In spite of assurances from their helpdesk that there had been no payment and the cancellation was a done thing, I found out the following morning that they'd still managed to take the money out of my account that same afternoon, leaving me very short on funds for the new order I'd just placed with CCL in lieu of Amazon's "assurances". The accompanying email to that transaction stated quite benevolently that the money would be refunded in lieu of the cancellation, and that it would happen 2 to 3 business days after they'd received the refunded item. Since neither I nor Amazon could accurately ascertain where that refunded item actually was it was going to be a cold day in hell before I'd allow them such a luxury, and one vociferous but polite phone call later resulted in an on-the-spot refund and another accompanying email to assure me that the money would be back with me asap, subject to the limitations of the banking process. Unless I get lucky with the crossover point between now and payday (the day after tomorrow) this will still likely leave me with a little overdrawn bruise on the chin from my bank. Given that CCL have now dispatched said case I'd say they're likely to have taken the funds out today..

I suppose it's my fault for not having the forethought to use the credit card in the first instance and pay that off with the debit card instead of making direct payments. The plan was always to just save up and buy it outright but on reflection I didn't meditate enough upon all that could still go wrong. To be fair I'd almost got away with it since all other orders, from Amazon or otherwise, have unfolded flawlessly. Now I'm too tired to be bothered. There's something of a break even facet to this since I've ostensibly ended up with a £10 saving, and I estimate that'll likely be the size of the bruise.

Remember, buying online is still not without its pitfalls..

**UPDATE** I managed by sleight of hand, and methodology too prolonged to explain here, to mitigate the £10 bruise down to a £3 bruise.. A hint - if you go over your debit card overdraw buffer with any payment(s), pay yourself with your own credit card.

The Building Of A New Beast - All Horse, No Barn

At any given moment something can trip you up, so goes the latest plot twist. At this point I will say that I don't really think I can point the finger at anything but the "machine" in this case. Every Amazon employee I spoke with (that amounts to two guys) were extremely helpful in their own ways. Yesterday it was Amhara's turn (frame of reference rules apply again) with thanks for his courteous poke of the anthill to get my PC case going in the right direction, and secondly this morning to David for helping me clean up the detritus and move forwards, even with a little sweetener thrown into the mix.

So giddy as I was to be finally receiving my case today that I happened upon one last use of their parcel tracking service (the same one from the advert which keeps interrupting my anime viewing on Cunchyroll) only to discover that in spite of all the effort that Amhara had made to get my parcel moving, it once more read with an apology for the delay and a notice relegating delivery to anywhere between now and next Friday (again). Fuming I elected to cut the head off the dragon and cancel the order. In order to better clarify the new status I contacted Amazon again and David, my new ally, was most helpful. The fact that payment had still not been taken for this item even as it was "winging its way to me" left me deeply suspicious of any truths their tracker app swore by, and indeed according to David both he and I had conflicting information about where my parcel actually was. Mine said that it had travelled overnight from Manchester and was sat at Sheffield depot, ready for delivery. If this were true then why would it take them up to a week to drive it up the hill? I mean I know the post can be slow, but even that strained reality a bit for my tastes. David couldn't even see the existence of the parcel anywhere near these fair shores, so only certain faceless individuals might know the actual fate of my order. Add to that the fact that he'd received, as part of my cancellation, a note from the "couriers" saying they'd tried to deliver it this morning but no one was in to receive it.. frankly I think it was a relief to both of us that we each agreed to draw a line in the sand and call bullshit on the whole affair. David confirmed that payment hadn't been taken, and off his own bat (meaning that this wasn't sanctioned by Amazon protocols - the finger points at the machine again) credited my account with £5 against my next purchase from them for the hassles. A quality ally indeed! He did note that I had a free trial of Amazon Prime still to use (something I thought I HAD used up), but I opted not to at this time as we joked that even Prime probably couldn't get my case to me by tomorrow on this occasion.

So what becomes of all this? The order has gone to (another drum roll..) CCL Computers! A big shout out to those guys and gals again for managing to deliver my 3 way PWM splitter cable to me in record time (see previous blog v1.5 in the series) and congratulations for the reward coming on the tails of that record breaking service. Also bonus points for selling the case I want for £5 less than I was paying with Amazon (another colleague called David noticed the price reduction shortly after I placed my order with Amazon, so it's nice to be able to action this to be honest).

So, a fair amount of hassle in return for a £5 saving and £5 of credit to spend with Amazon when the machine is feeling more like a delivery service and less like a total dick. In their favour though is the fact that they did succeed in completing the other orders.. I have to wonder what went so wrong?

The Building Of A New Beast (Update)

I thought I'd pick up the thread on the delayed PC case a little, if only because it may be helpful insight for others, which was always a part of the reason for this blog.

 

I contacted Amazon (0800 279 7234 - a real number for everyone out there!) and a very helpful guy informed me that for packages requiring a little extra TLC, they take extra time to check and reinforce any of said packaging where necessary (knowing couriers so well..), and that in such instances it could seem to be stuck in "ready for dispatch" hell on the website right up to the wire. He assured me it would still be delivered on the stated date, which to me still flies in the face of all reason given that the delivery date is tomorrow (that could of course be any date when you're reading this, but the clever thing is that doesn't matter.. you have a frame of reference). Still he must do this more than me, so I will keep faith in place now that I've discovered it is possible to talk to them after all.

Fingers crossed.

*UPDATE 90 mins later* Poke the anthill and ye shall receive - suddenly it's on its way! Remember kids, communication is good, communication is a wise thing.

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase VI.9999%)

I agree this is getting silly.. but it's also what's happening so it's nothing if not truthful. The only outstanding part, and one which even at this time has seemingly not yet been dispatched (in spite of it being both currently in stock, available on overnight order and, in my circumstances, ordered at the same time as this item below) is the PC case. All in all even I have to admit that it's been a pretty good run so far delivery-wise, so I suppose it wouldn't be the same unless I eventually ended up with the complete horse before the barn would it.. so please welcome the back end of the horse.. a very necessary but seemingly lonely Corsair SP120 RGB fan.

Really, just don't ask.. When the barn gets here it'll all make sense.

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase VI.5)

Some might accuse me of overblogging with this one, but there's a purpose..

Not only is it a celebration of the simplistic and beautiful glory that is an EK Water Blocks 3 fan PWM splitter (better looking than most let me tell you..), not only was it delivered to me with lightning turnaround of about twenty eight hours via free delivery by those lovely people at CCL Computers, but it was also by the machinations of the same Amazon that has totally failed to meet its responsibilities in delivering my supplementary case fan today as stated, and hasn't even got my PC case out of the front door, both ordered on Saturday. Ironic since the memory arrived a full three weeks before that was due to even be in stock again. There's obviously more to this delivery lark than first meets the eye.. Keep going guys.. I have faith in you!

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase VI)

Next parcel.. the final quarter of the brain.. a dual stick 16Gb's worth of Corsair Vengeance LPX 2666Mhz memory. As with the hard drive you can't in all seriousness make this sexy either, nor say much about it except reasons..

I'd considered going with the faster memory until it came to addressing Asus and Corsair QVL's. With a few specific sets to choose from the pricing looked even more awful than it had before I'd consulted their safety nets, a condition which all PC enthusiasts have been suffering with for over a year now - along with GPU increases memory pricing has pretty much doubled which is something of a bitter pill to swallow, but the system isn't going anywhere without any so what do you do? Ryzen is often said to be happier when you throw it the fastest memory it can handle (which is about 3200Mhz at time of writing) and in the quest to decide what to get I had to balance how much I felt I reasonably needed to get the project off the ground (which kept pulling me to the cheaper initial investment of 8Gb) vs the notion of 16Gb, where the industry is leaning and looking. Ultimately I opted to bite the quantity bullet and a (hopefully) hassle-free bet from both Asus and Corsair's lists. To be honest XMP'ing to 2666Mhz isn't anything to be sniffed at, and is certainly a part of a system which will be infinitely faster than the poor bugger I'm typing this blog on.

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase V)

There are precious few ways you can make a hard drive sexy, but you can still try for a nice photo..

In spite of the glorious nature of SSD's, the price per gigabyte still rests with ye olde mechanical platters, and since the need for mass storage remains I've elected to grab one of these little bundles of joy.

By design it will be responsible for carrying day to day media, work documents and games (which are surprisingly sizeable), all backed up to a second disconnected external drive of the portable variety. I suspect at some point there may very well be some involvement with NAS, but that is definitely for another day. Originally I looked to a 1Tb model to get the ship sailing, but when it became clear that there was likely to be some manner of gaming involved space requirement went up a little. To be fair it didn't exactly break the bank - £38ish for 1Tb, £55ish for 2Tb.. foregone conclusion really. This may still prove to be light in the long run, but for now it should suffice. As I said in a previous blog, I've been running full tilt on a 320Gb drive up to now, so it'll be a cosy convenience for the foreseeable future.

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase IV)

So now we have the next quarter of the brain. Welcome (drum roll..) the CPU of the moment.. the Ryzen 5 1600.

So that irony that I was talking about before.. The first PC I ever owned that wasn't a rescue from the stone age was the Acer Aspire T160, a pre-built sporting an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ 2.4Ghz. It was a capable box but that was over ten years ago, and time has not been kind to it. So having walked through the Intel sweet shop since I started this search, it's funny to find myself full circle.

Anyway I digress.

Why AMD, and with nine (soon to be fifteen) CPU's in the family to choose from, why this particular one?

With Ryzen (and the higher tier Threadripper range, which sits well beyond my needs and budget) AMD managed to effectively sideswipe Intel, who with little competition to inspire them have incrementally tick-tocked the development of consumer processors at a rate which seems to have been insultingly conservative. AMD re-crafted the architecture and brought a range of CPU's to the consumer market with core counts and multithreaded performance previously only found in the enthusiast domain. Whilst Intel can still technically claim to have the faster single core clock speed at the price, what we have with Ryzen is a range of CPU's which can still stand shoulder to shoulder with Intel's offerings AND compete mercilessly on price/performance. The flagship Ryzen 7 1800x with its 8 cores and 16 threads entered the market at a very sweet £499 compared to Intel's closest offering at the time, the Core i7 6900K, which retailed typically for around £1000. Multithreaded performance tests confirmed its ability to take on those tasks with a real zest, further refinements are smoothing out low level quirks endemic to newer platform releases and overall the Ryzen range seems to have carved a respectable place for itself. I feel I have to clarify that I'm not talking as any kind of AMD fanboy here. I would be happy with either an Intel or AMD CPU in the driving seat, and for the majority of this project time Intel did in fact hold pole position, with both X99 and Z170 platforms.

Why this particular CPU? Interestingly the Ryzen family seems to mirror Intel's nomenclature with series 3, 5 and 7, and generally speaking they carry four, six and eight core models across those categories. Balancing price against overall expected personal requirements six core, twelve thread felt about right. The leap from the nominal price of this chip (£175) to the eight core, sixteen thread 1700 (£260) was one I kept returning to - you find when assembling a PC project that the temptation is always there to go for more, but ultimately I couldn't justify it - even less so when I managed to bag my 1600 for £136. Still a reasonable upgrade path does exist, and with AMD's commitment to the platform for the next three years in concert with my consumer restraint, there's probably more than enough life in this. Another undeniable benefit is the included CPU cooler - not all models have them, but it is a welcome thing from a budgetary perspective, particularly when they turn out to be as half decent as reviewers seem to claim. It's probably not going to be in there for the whole nine yards. I don't know whether I'll stick with air cooling or move to an AIO water cooling solution down the line. I don't find myself being that interested in chasing an aggressive overclock, something about having water in a PC strikes me as a discomforting thing and to include a pump is to introduce another point of failure. Given that I'm changing up from a Yugo to a Ferrari it's not something that overly concerns me at this point. It will just be nice to be able to work better.

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase III)

Well the delivery services are certainly keeping me on my toes with this project blog! Here I was expecting parts to be scattered to all four corners of the world and yet one after the other they seem to be dropping through with relative ease, a couple even in advance of their original ETA! The latest to appear is one quarter of the brain department, one half of the storage. Say hello to the result of more passive/aggressive costing and swearing.. the Samsung 960 EVO 250Gb 2280 form factor M.2 Nvme SSD (rolls off the tongue so easily doesn't it..).

This behemoth undoubtedly exists in my project thanks to the three year project span. Originally I was quite content to settle for a couple of Western Digital or Seagate hard drives, even as SSD's began to creep into the market place to challenge their speed limitation. Various models from various companies reared their heads, most notably Samsung's 2.5" 850 EVO SATA SSD range, with a recognised competitive edge in performance and reliability. Whilst I think it can be argued nowadays that manufacturing has improved to the point that the market doesn't feel quite as desperately distinct as it once did, Samsung have held their own and on paper the 850 EVO continues to prove to be a stubbornly relevant contender. What I didn't anticipate was both the emergence and significant drop in price for Nvme SSD's, to the point that the long cherished 850 EVO with its £85 price tag became overshadowed very recently by the 960 EVO's £114 price/performance backhand. This cousin to their own industry leading 960 PRO stick certainly isn't lacking in performance. In fact I might question the value of the PRO range beyond bragging rights, or a demand for absolute performance irrespective of cost.

So why Nvme? For all its speed SATA has a fundamental 600Mb/s transfer speed limit, perfectly adequate for the typical 100-150Mb/s performance of regular hard drives. SATA SSD's, whilst blisteringly fast with their typical 500Mb/s speed upwards, do still hit that limit. Nvme on the other hand uses the PCI lanes on the motherboard for conversation, the result being that this little bugger sports write/read speeds of up to 1.5Gb/s and 3Gb/s respectively! These figures are no idle "peak music power" marketing boast either - for a change, tests seem to show that they do indeed reasonably meet the criteria.

So often decisions about PC hardware fall into categories of "need" or "want" - you "need" a CPU or motherboard, versus say the "want" of that three-way SLI stack of Titan Xp's or that £10,000 custom PC set up. In this case it seems to be a no-brainer, with a leap and a half in performance for an extra measly £28. Of course the cost per gigabyte of Nvme SSD technology vs conventional hard drives is still in its infancy, but it's getting better. It's for certain that 250Gb is enough for my current needs, with adequate room for the operating system and a few programs. I'm currently running on a 320Gb mechanical drive for everything - operating system, programs, documents, the lot! To help out with storage of larger files and general media I've sensibly elected to retain a mechanical drive in the design (the second half of the storage department).. but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase II)

With barely a breath drawn, here we are again! In Phase I we took a look at the heart of the build - today we have the arterial system of our soon to be newborn.. the motherboard. After lots of scrambling, doodling, comparing, sizing, worn-out pencils, scrapping, tantrums and swearing I present to you the Asus Strix B350-F.

So why this one? I can't deny that it's probably one of the better looking boards out there, especially at this price bracket (£107), even if it sits in the mid-high range on the B350 spread. It's still a very reasonable price for a mainboard imho, especially when you look into it as much as I have. There have been plenty of opportunities to spurn choices of board as one might say spurn a rabid dog, but on paper this is not one which succumbed to such distain.

LINK: The Asus Strix B350F Spec Sheet

What else did you look at? Hmm.. To answer this one has to consider the project as a whole. As you may have guessed, given that I've been pouring over specs for the last three years or so it's a pretty sound bet that I'm not one for chopping and changing on a frequent basis. Both the cooker and fridge I own are an equal sixteen years old and still kicking, with no reason to change them. It's just how I roll.. So the same goes for my reasoning with this build - it's not something which is going to sprout change on a regular basis. With reasoning like that I can pretty much justify any form factor size, and it's true that I have come within a hairs breadth of landing in m-itx territory more than once, simply because whilst not necessary (and frequently more expensive in spite of less actual "product"!?) the itx form is cute, desk friendly and it's fun to have a lot of power packed into something which doesn't look capable. Having said that there's a lot to be said for managing case temperatures, and consideration for case purchases which could accommodate future motherboards has repeatedly crossed my mind, even if it isn't something I expect to consider frequently (an atx board will not fit in an itx case without the application of something like a saw). So in spite of all the above I found myself looking with more pragmatic eyes, which whittled it down to atx and m-atx, of which there were still many choices out there. In that respect the battle was won on reputation, and whilst none of the main competitors really fail by that measure ("except maybe Biostar" the fanboys cry), it came down to which company I ultimately felt I could trust, backed up by the sage advice and experience of the main tech You Tuber's whom I follow. Whilst they themselves are quite unbiased when it comes to throwing systems together, whether it be Jason (JayzTwoCents), Paul (Paul's Hardware) or Kyle/Wifeysauce (Bitwit), they do all seem to return to Asus a lot. That can't help but offer a helpful float when floundering amidst the choppy, salty depths of possibility.

Since the board is there for all to see then it's the worst kept secret that this is indeed a Ryzen build (the full circle irony I alluded to in Phase I), a choice which is better saved for discussion when the part itself drops through the letterbox. Given the dearth of itx boards (yes I did see the upcoming Strix itx, and behind its beauty I witnessed its expected price tag..) another choice which helped to narrow this was the subtext - X370, B350 and A320. To cut to the chase the X370 boards have the most features but not ones I'm likely to use, and the A320 shouldn't in my opinion exist at all since it's essentially a B350 with all the joy sucked out of it. So B350 it was to be! Justifiably cheaper than the X370 range and yet cheekily capable (which I think parallels the Intel/AMD competition as it presently stands). You get the usual plethora of paraphernalia; backplate (of the nice black, padded variety that isn't cheap enough to eat your fingers), SATA cables in straight and right angled flavours, M.2 screws, sticky labels (interestingly some of which are designed to be applied to your cables, to help trace which to where after installation. Very considerate Asus - have some brownie points), a nice but pretty much always redundant DVD and coaster (it's easy to get those mixed up, but the DVD will probably last longer). There was a much closer battle fought betwixt m-atx and atx form factors after that decision, even some skirmishes with dark vs white motherboards for reasons mostly no more complex than aesthetic, but ultimately on price, looks, reputation and technical merit (in no particular order) this bad boy couldn't help but float to the top. Also one cannot underestimate the sheer power of a product which comes with something called Overwolf.. Not just a wolf, and even beyond wolf plus.. I mean how can that fail!?

I wonder which part will be next?

The Building Of A New Beast (Phase I)

Wow.. it's been a while since I've done a blog in here.. 2014 by the looks of it! How the time flies. So what now? Well it's high time I got a new computer, and it's been a long time in the making - for those who are mindful of such matters this has been in the pipeline since the X99 platform was brand new.. coincidentally as long as the time since the last blog.. funny that. Anyway I imagined that if I were ever to do another blog it would be a little something to share the exploits and pitfalls of this long besieged project - my first PC build. I've owned a couple of pre-built computers, each quite sufficiently capable for the tasks at the time. Still even for those readers whose own interests in computers are merely cursory, it is well known that things move on quickly and user skills and demands broaden, so unless I was destined to renounce computing altogether then this was pretty much inevitable. I have to say though it feels as if it's taken forever to get to this day.

There have been a number of interventions and setbacks between that original dream and the present. As I struggled on with my old AMD PC, which knocked the socks off Intel when it was new - yes it's that old (ten years for the uninitiated), dedicated to music production and precious little else, the plan began with the dream of the aforementioned X99 platform and the intended Intel processor of the time - the 5820K. Then the project stalled, time passed and it evolved into the Z170 platform and the reasonably priced Intel 6600K processor, before stalling yet again and finally coming to land in the present, with irony to spare. Tech has moved on quite a bit over the intervening time. Now thanks to a twist of pricing fate which pushed me into action (the CPU of choice appeared from it's £219 RRP, and more nominal £175 selling price, down to an undeniably outrageous £136 for one weekend only as the saying goes) the system is now forced into the light, and the first of my internet parcels arrived today. Somewhat lacking in obvious glamour but nevertheless quite important and underappreciated - the power supply.

Yes I know it's not all that exciting on the face of it, but to be honest there is something really inspiring and cool (aka geeky) about receiving something even as simple as a PSU in the flesh as it were. When you finally get your mitts on something you've only ever known as photos and spec sheets, it all becomes more tangible and interesting. Still after spending so much time pouring over the possibilities and promise of innumerable incarnations and permutations, something which at least a couple of my friends can easily testify to, all is now coming into focus - no bad thing for a project which has been ongoing in earnest and sufferance for a little over three years.

So with a foot now planted firmly on the path this concludes the first of several reveals, which will build upon the choices, progress and assembly as we go. As I stand right at this moment roughly 80% of it is settled, bought and en route though the various couriers, somewhat sooner than I'd intended due to said CPU bargain. The two concessions which I have to make at this point are knowing neither which graphics card nor which case I'm finally going to settle upon. The card will almost definitely be a GTX1070 variant to meet the demands of the 1440p resolution I'm running (not to mention driving two screens), though which model remains a mystery even to me at this point thanks to the inflated costs incurred as a result of the scourge of cryptocurrency mining. Nor am I at this point going to divulge the remaining components. Like a fine wine or pleasant meal it's not to be consumed or revealed in a rush, and makes the blog a bit more fun. So we'll be back with phase II just as soon as the next part(s) assemble.