PC Building

[sterkrazzy]

My water kit showed up today so I tossed it in my case and played around with the hoses. It'll probably be something similar to this. I'm thinking of moving the 90* on the cpu block to the pump and then swap the 2 hoses on the radiator block. I'll probably run a fluid that's similar to the color of the letters on the radiator, grabber blue basically.

I need the big expensive things now, gpu/cpu, and then just a mobo, and I'll be able to finish the build.

 

[torga]

Man, the kit looks good! Gonna use any colorings at all?

I just bought an Adata XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 SSD. I was planning on the Samsung 970 Evo+, but the Adata has rave reviews with identical R/W speeds and performance.
The 500GB Samsung drive won't budge from ~$130 and I copped the 512GB Adata drive new for $85.

 

[sterkrazzy]

Man, the kit looks good! Gonna use any colorings at all?

I just bought an Adata XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 SSD. I was planning on the Samsung 970 Evo+, but the Adata has rave reviews with identical R/W speeds and performance.
The 500GB Samsung drive won't budge from ~$130 and I copped the 512GB Adata drive new for $85.

Probably something like the text on the radiator, I like that blue.

I ordered a 970 evo+ the other night, the 500gb too lol

 

[torga]

I told myself I'd take this build slowly, but I bought a GPU at the end of February and so far I've bought 32GB of RAM, a 550W Corsair RMx PSU (paid $50 new, with the 10y warranty still) and now this M.2 SSD within the span of a week.
These deals gotta stop!

 

[sterkrazzy]

Know what you mean...and as I get closer to finishing it I want to just order stuff to complete it. I need a gpu/cpu/mobo, but I've got everything else pretty much. Then I looked at price history and the best deal on the mobo I want would only save me $10, same with the gpu, and the cheapest the cpu has been is $20 less. I need to space out some of my orders though.

March 2 I ordered my case when I saw it was $40 off. I wasn't really planning on starting my build yet, but when I saw the deal I took it. Then everything else I've ordered has had some kind of sale, but now I'm just missing the cpu/gpu/mobo.

 

[torga]

Same... looking at the price histories for everything, I think the last thing I stand to save a significant amount of money on might be the case I want. Everything else doesn't really fluctuate - maybe a few percent.
So hopefully I'll be able to start spacing things out as well.

But on all the parts I've bought, I've saved an average of 45% off retail and everything is new. So I don't feel THAT bad.

 

[sterkrazzy]

That's really good. I haven't saved quite as much. My biggest deals have been about 30%.

 

[torga]

I'm fully expecting to not get any sort of deal on the CPU. Those things aren't budging and I don't feel like waiting until Black Friday/Cyber Monday for a hopeful drop.

Sometimes I think about going AMD because I'd save ~$300 for similar CPU specs.

 

[sterkrazzy]

I'm fully expecting to not get any sort of deal on the CPU. Those things aren't budging and I don't feel like waiting until Black Friday/Cyber Monday for a hopeful drop.

Sometimes I think about going AMD because I'd save ~$300 for similar CPU specs.

If my plan works out I just got a pretty good deal on an i7-9700k. Rakuten had a rtx2070 with $60 off and $48 in cashback that I just ordered, so I'll wait for Rakuten to have another 15% off site wide sale and use it towards the cpu with my $48. Should put it under $350.

 

[torga]

If my plan works out I just got a pretty good deal on an i7-9700k. Rakuten had a rtx2070 with $60 off and $48 in cashback that I just ordered, so I'll wait for Rakuten to have another 15% off site wide sale and use it towards the cpu with my $48. Should put it under $350.

Not a bad idea. How does Rakuten cashback work?

 

[sterkrazzy]

Not a bad idea. How does Rakuten cashback work?

No idea really, that's why I said if my plan works lol

It looks like most items you buy give you cashback. It looks like you get 1 point back for every dollar spent and every 100 points is $1 in cash for their store. The GPU had a deal with a large amount of cashback. https://www.rakuten.com/shop/dell/product/AA404901/

The cpu isn't the cheapest on rakuten though. It's like $459 when most places have it for $418, but if I can use my $48 with a 15% off sale it'll put me in a pretty good spot. Someone said it takes a couple days for the points to go through, so I might miss the current 15% sale.

 

[torga]

I see Rakuten having those 15% off sales all the time - I don't think you'll have to wait long at all.

 

[sterkrazzy]

Got the last of my parts so I put it together last night. Booted up fine after I realized I forgot to install some RAM. Now I just to need to personalize it a bunch. RGB is all over this thing so I need to play around with the settings and get it where I like it, but I'm missing a wire so the RGB on my fans aren't working yet.

Only thing that's got me kinda confused right now is the water pump. When I've got the PWM wire plugged into the mobo I can barely tell the thing is running, but unplug it from the mobo and it's obvious it's running. While plugged into the mobo my cpu temps are only about 30 degrees with just chrome running, so it seems like it's working. I'll have to run some benchmark tests I think and see if the pump speed gets higher when the cpu is being stressed a bit more.

It's my first time using windows 10 too, so that's gonna take a bit of getting familiar with.

Thing is fast though, and amazingly quiet for having 7 fans in it. You honestly don't hear anything at all and it's kinda trippy.

 

[torga]

I haven't bought anything for my PC in a couple of weeks, since I have to deal with my alternator. Tried to find a cheap, used one, but that didn't work out - so I bought a re-man Bosch unit for $280. And I recently picked up a Neuspeed charge pipe (already have the discharge pipe, so I'll probably install those next weekend). It's annoying having more than one expensive hobby!

I used to use only OSX, but I've had to adopt Win10 because of the work I do. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it's a great OS. I still stand by the fact that no one makes better quality laptops than Apple (ignoring the recent keyboard dilemmas). Every single Windows touchpad feels like absolute garbage next to any MacBook touchpad.

Maybe the mobo helps to optimize the water pump's function, which is why you can barely tell. Try doing something intensive and see if it picks up (like opening 3 or 4 Chrome tabs :laugh: ). By not having it plugged into the mobo, maybe it just runs near capacity all the time, with no optimization.

 

[sterkrazzy]

It's annoying having more than one expensive hobby!

No kidding...I Put a Golf R bumper on my car and then a week or 2 later I was ordering pc parts lol

Maybe the mobo helps to optimize the water pump's function, which is why you can barely tell. Try doing something intensive and see if it picks up (like opening 3 or 4 Chrome tabs :laugh: ). By not having it plugged into the mobo, maybe it just runs near capacity all the time, with no optimization.

That's what I'm thinking too. I'll have to play around with it and see what I can figure out. I looked at the bios briefly and it wasn't obvious if I had control over the pump speed.

Now I need a 32-34" ultrawide 1440p 144hz monitor...and those aren't cheap.