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  • I think it was if you were out of warranty. Likewise, you couldn't use more than 5 HDDs (despite there being sufficient sata ports) without a tweaked BIOS.

  • Went for this in the end, which looks like it should absolutely fly (and just over £400, which future father-in-law offered to put through his business, score!)
    650W EVGA SuperNOVA 650 G1, Full Modular, 80PLUS Gold, 135mm Fan, ATX Power Supply
    Intel Core i5 6500, S 1151, Skylake, Quad Core, 3.2GHz, 3.6GHz Turbo, 6MB Cache, 1050MHz GPU, 32x Ratio, 65W, CPU
    Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3P, Intel Z170, S 1151, DDR4, SATAe/SATA3 6Gb/s, PCIe 3.0, DVI/HDMI, ATX Motherboard
    16GB (2x8GB) Corsair DDR4 Vengeance LPX Red, PC4-24000 (3000), Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 15-17-17-35, XMP 2.0, 1.35V RAM

  • Sounds decent. I need to upgrade my PSU and like the look of that one. I need cables for my HDD's that have 90 degree heads, they exist?

  • It's on sale at scan.co.uk - still £65 but modular with a big fan and very efficient.

    90 degrees in which direction? I have a SATA power cable oriented like a ribbon cable (round wrap though) or do you mean they have to be in line with the cable?

  • Indeed they do.

    Edit: just realised you might mean SATA power. Most modular cables are designed to be flexible enough for a sharp right angle (including EVGA's). Cooler Master's SATA power cables are moulded at a right angle for all modular cables.

  • Yes, just search for SATA power right angle. They save a little space, not a huge amount.

  • They look like they will be more flexible than my current ones, cheers. Is it an error on Amazon or is that PSU MASSIVE? I currently have a Corsair 430w or something non modular and it's a tight fit in my case. I could do with saving a cm but thought all PSU's were the same size?

    Product Dimensions 33 x 27.9 x 12.7 cm REALLY?!?

  • Yeah that's definitely wrong, maybe the box size? Unit size is 85mm (H) x 150mm (W) x 180mm (L) http://www.evga.com/Products/Product.aspx?pn=120-G1-0650-XR

  • Ahh cheers. Still a little bit bigger... le sigh....

  • Pulled the trigger. Excite!

    Had to spend an hour figuring out what was going on with all the different varieties of M.2 drives, confusing as fuck. Originally had a Samsung 850 in the basket but discovered that was sata rather than pci-e so wouldn't be any quicker than a regular SSD. Then there's the 951 series which have weird throttling issues but aren't supported by Samsung because they were only intended to be OEM parts (so why are retailers selling them?) Finally settled on a 950 PRO which was almost double the price of the 951 but should (hopefully) work without issues, once I've fiddled with the BIOS to make it bootable.

    Figured spending £3.58 on the standard intel heatsink and cooler made a lot of sense so I can make sure it's working ok before plumbing in all the ridiculous water cooling.

    Weekend should be all sorts of fun :)

  • Well that shits on mine haha! I considered an m2 drive but after reading that am glad I didn't, as I didn't know half of it!

  • Oh shit, knew I'd forgot something.

    This upgrade's only cos of the dead 1155 board (albeit possibly only temporarily, see a couple of pages back). The pair of 6GB 780s will have to do for the time being, replacing them with anything worthwhile would cost a grand.

  • I had Windows 10 (upgraded from OEM 7) before the bad BIOS incident last weekend. What happens when I try to activate it on the new hardware from this USB installer I've just created?

    Would be a pain in the tits to go through installing 7 and upgrading again. Guess I could try booting from the SSD with the previous install on it, although with a new motherboard and CPU that might not go too well, and I obviously want the OS on the M.2.

  • You can install W10 from scratch with a W7 key now. No need to install 7 and upgrade. Might need a recent ISO but you can get that easy with the media creation tool

  • if you have it linked to an MS account you can just sign in and it will auto-activate etc...

    At least that's what happened with my MSDN copy

  • I'd read that Win 7 keys wouldn't work, is that something they changed their minds about? Have an MS account as well so will hopefully be covered one way or the other.

  • http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-10/activation-in-windows-10

    Starting with the November update, Windows 10 (Version 1511) can be activated using some Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 product keys.

  • Magic, thanks. Created the install media last night so should be good to go.

  • That's a beast of a machine... I missed it, but what are you going to do with this thing?

    My desktop machine is actually starting to feel out of date. This is the HP z800 I purchased back in 2010. 6 years old and it is still doing fine, I've upgraded the GPU but that's about it.

    Still has dual 2.8Ghz Xeon x5560 and I downgraded the RAM from 192GB to 24GB (to get back some of the cash I'd invested now I no longer needed to run 100 virtual machines concurrently).

    The thing I still love about mine is the system board. The thing is insane, something about workstation class motherboards and the ridiculous bandwidth on the bus, combined with dual Xeons and the ECC RAM is just nuts when it comes to high bandwidth, high CPU intensive operations... such as encoding a Blu-Ray in about 3 minutes.

    It's just a shame it sits there mostly idle and running Plex for 99.99% of the time. What a waste, oh the humanity.

  • Mostly games and 3D modelling/rendeirng plus a bit of photoshop.

    The 6700k is probably overkill for games at the moment, since even with dual 780s I'm usually GPU limited at 7560x1440. Having said that the upgrade from Sandybridge to Skylake does apparently improve SLI performance, particularly in terms of minimum frame rates or 'stutter'. Am also hoping that since the 2600k lasted over five years it'll be about as future-proof as technology gets.

    For the 3D stuff, rendering would definitely benefit from more than four cores (or more than one CPU) but practically everything else is still single threaded so overall clock speed is more beneficial. The likes of Xeons and Quadros are so expensive compared to the regular consumer stuff they've never appealed for my uses.

  • The interesting thing is that your CPU is a tenth of the cost of one of my CPUs, and yet in terms of performance it's not far from what one of mine delivers.

    The only real differences emerge in the bandwidth available to each CPU from RAM, and the ECC RAM support. But unless you're doing some incredible throughput and maxing it out, it's not going to make a difference. For the vast majority of workloads, because 3D rendering and even Photoshop would outsource some work to the GPU... you're actually going to see performance on par with my insane system.

    This is why... when I finally do need to replace my machine, I'm unlikely to go back to a workstation class machine. I love my machine, but outside of the first 6 months of running a lot of VMs concurrently, it's just overkill and doesn't represent bang-for-buck.

  • You could get a few more of your CPUs for $14-$60 now!

  • @Velocio

    Or a couple of 8 core Xeons for cheap. On the off chance you model weather patterns in your spare time. Expect that machine could be ludicrously fast for another 5 years.

    http://www.etb-tech.com/intel-xeon-e5-2670-2-6ghz-eight-core-cpu-sr0kx.html#.VtlvfPmLSUk

  • They won't fit the weird slots on my motherboard.

    But I am pondering how to cheaply upgrade my NAS, so that's an option.

    My NAS is only RAID6 12TB and I'm fast running out of space. Would like to move to 18TB with dual parity but I have nothing I can backup the existing NAS to and with older hardware for my existing NAS and a move towards larger drives I'm thinking it's time to move towards ZFS and FreeNAS.

    The problem there is how to build a relatively cheap NAS enclosure for 18TB of disks and still have low power usage, high-bandwidth and super-quiet.

    The other problem is that ZFS is super RAM hungry. I mean really hungry... at least 1GB RAM for every 1TB of disk... so I really need 24GB here, and if I want to put in bigger disks in future then I'd need the room for either 32GB or ideally 64GB of RAM. That all needs to be ECC RAM too, otherwise you'd get bitrot on write as it buffers through RAM and you know... cosmic rays really do flip bits over a long enough uptime.

    Oh, and an enclosure it needs to take 8 drives, and a motherboard that can take all that RAM, and a power system that can segregate each of the drive power feeds.

    Current research points towards one of these solutions (all kinda similar):
    http://www.mcmayer.net/build-freenas-based-nas-server/
    http://blog.brianmoses.net/2015/01/diy-nas-2015-edition.html
    http://blog.brianmoses.net/2016/02/diy-nas-2016-edition.html

    FreeNAS has been selected based on this:
    http://www.mondaiji.com/blog/other/it/10210-the-hunt-for-the-ultimate-free-open-source-nas-distro

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PC Tech Thread

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