Update: I poked around online looking at all the various cpu cooling options and ended up sending it with a EVGA CLC 280mm AIO. Budget wise, this means an nvme drive will have to be a future upgrade. A 280mm AIO is overkill for my current 65 watt TDP Ryzen 7 1700 that I’ll be swapping into the new build, but I’ll certainly be able to determine just what that chip can do (It does a 3.4ghz all core overclock with a crappy oem Dell cooler, but the vrm on the crappy dell board turns molten even at stock clock speeds under load). This should be ample cooling capacity for a future 2700x/ryzen 3rd gen upgrade down the road.
After putting in my new GPU (with my old RX580 getting a second life with an Oppo!), it turns out I’ve gone on an Amazon spree the last few days that is going to result in a mostly new build. This is basically going to be building the PC I wanted to build last year, but ended up going with a Dell pre-built gaming machine because of insanity on the GPU market at the height of the crypto craze.
Fractal Design Define R6, with the front USB-C and a tempered glass window so I can enjoy staring at my toy. I’m done with Dell’s 5675 case and 92mm fan mounts.
An MSI X470 Gaming 7 AC board, because I’m also done dealing with Dell’s crappy X370 board and locked down BIOS that allows basically nothing beyond setting boot drive order. Screw that board.
A pair of 16GB Corsair LPX ram sticks at 3200mhz. 32 GB at 3200 ought to work for as long I’m going to run DDR4. I’ve never run properly fast RAM before, so I’m curious to try it out and see what I might gain. It looks like I should be able to recoup a decent part of the cost selling my current RAM sticks.
These parts will go along with the RX590 I picked this past week. The plan for now is to swap my Ryzen 7 1700 into the new board with an eye to upgrading it down the road. X-plane 11 in particular would benefit from more clock speed. However, my 1700 has worked well. It’ll run at an 3.4ghz all core overclock even with a crappy cooler and a case that doesn’t exhaust hot air from the CPU area well.
I’ve got some decisions to make on CPU cooling. I’d like to run something like a Corsair H115i AIO for lots of future 2700x or Ryzen 3rd gen cooling and not lots of noise, but I may initially run the new build on the OEM heat sink and fan I’ve currently got.
I also have to decide on my storage options. Currently I’m running a Crucial MX500 SSD, 500GB, as a boot drive and steam library, with the Toshiba 1TB 7200RPM drive the machine came with as a media/document library. I’d love to pickup something like a Samsung 970 Evo Plus NVME in 250GB or 500GB as a boot drive, but I’m not sure I can justify the cost. I don’t think I really have an nvme use case, other that it would be neat. My understanding is that nvme doesn’t gain much, if anything, over any good modern SSD as an OS drive.
Most likely is that I’ll just pickup another MX500 SSD and use one as the boot drive and steam library, and the other as the media/document library. I’d like to make my 1TB drive into a cold storage backup drive that I only hookup for occasional refreshing of the backup.
I’ll have to pickup a windows key, since my current windows 10 home license is an OEM one tied to the Dell board. Fortunately, I can get a Windows 10 education license for personal use via the university for $15, so I’ll gain most of the enterprise features of windows 10. Bitlocker is probably the only one I’ll use for the most part.
The PSU will be easy in swapping over the Seasonic Focus Plus Gold 750w that I grafted into the current machine.