PC Tech Thread

Acer's lack of detailed specs on its site is maddening.

Currently looking at an Aspire 5 A514-54 that I can get for ~£600. 8GB RAM (can upgrade to 20GB myself at a later date). 512GB SSD. 14" screen (don't want bigger). i5-1135G7 CPU.

Can drive a 4K monitor over HDMI 2.0 and probably not USB-C (which would have been preferred) but finding any accurate specs is nigh on impossible.

Cheapest Dell that meets my requirements is £1000, even with various sales/outlets.

This one is 650 and is same spec as the Acer
https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/laptops/new-inspiron-14-5000/spd/inspiron-14-5405-laptop/cn54506

AMD rather than Intel, but comparable according to benchmarks.

Acer looks fine though. The Dell XPS stuff will obv be nicer but you'll probably need to find a student discount and some good luck to get it towards 650. Otherwise Inspiron, Acer etc will all be decent.

Alright, I'm conceding that bootcamp isn't for games. I want a really small, quiet, attractive PC - probably between £1-2k to start with excluding monitor/keyboard etc.

Chris of bmx/this parish fame has suggested a louqe ghost s1 as a case to start with, which, while to my taste, doesn't seem to be available anywhere. Anyone for anything else?

Will purely be for gaming as I have other machines for work.

Wishlist:

• Very quiet (don't want sporadically be toggling audio with a loud fan if I leave 'open mic' on instead of push to talk - as the frequent recipient of this I know how irritating it is - not looking at anyone CG).
  
• Attractive (simple/clean, nice build quality, no flashing lights and gases floating around)
  
• Big enough for a powerful GPU (open to what this is but main game will be PUBG)
  
• Want to be able to play PUBG very responsively on high settings or above at high frame rate (monitor: 3840 x 2160 / 144hz - incidentally not sure what to display the game at for best balance of visual/performance based on resolution of monitor / scaling etc).
  
• Decent IO - ethernet (10gb?), lots of USB C/A, hdmi, decent bluetooth, wifi 6?
  
  

What guts does it need? The last PC I built was a Pentium 4.

Note - am aware that 'small' and 'quiet' aren't usual bedfellows.

There are lots of micro itx cases that fit full sized GPUs for gaming, ranging from cheap to ££s and nice. Your budget should get you something very capable. It will always be noisier than the equivalent larger case, as airflow will by nature be more restricted, ergo fans will spin up more. It's really hard to accurately predict this, obviously the more powerful processor/card you get, the more headroom to undervolt stuff if you really want fans to spin up less.

r/sffpc might not be a bad jumping off point for inspo/build lists, particularly to visualise other peoples builds so you can think about how airflow might work for what you want. In terms of build, it's exactly the same as any other form factor, just more fiddly. pcpartpicker is another great tool for quick comparisons of features/compatibility

The biggest obstacle will be the GPU - for PUBG at 4k 144hz you're going to be looking at something beefy and beefy general means hot (2080/3070/6900).

For me I'd recommend something like a Meshify C Mini or a Define Nano S. Space for rads and lots of fans if you want it, and if you go for a 5th Gen Ryzen you won't really need a huge CPU fan so you can concentrate the firepower on a hybrid GPU.

Also, with that kind of budget I'd definitely spring for Noctua fans or Corsair ML series. Even if your case comes with fans, swap 'em all out. Make sure your MOBO supports enough PWM fan headers (or get a separate fan controller) - it's probably kind of rare they don't nowadays but best to check.

I don't have much experience with SFF but if you want something smaller I use this as a Plex media server and it's unobtrusive. The big 200mm fan in the front helps keep noise down too; you can even have a rad on the top and sides if you're game about separately cooling your GPU with an AIO.

.

Water cooled GPU. AIO water cooler for cpu. M2 SSDs instead of spinning hard disks. High quality PSU. tidy internals for smooth airflow

My intel skull canyon is small but hideously noisy. The watercooled eGPU by comparison is massive but near silent.

The thermal design of the Mac mini that the skull canyon replaced was excellent, perhaps because everything was soldered on. i would switch back in a heartbeat if I could.

.

.

Is water cooling the norm then these days? Can it be not hideous? My assumption is a big multi coloured lava lamp.

You're not wrong, 30 series GPUs are hens teeth at the moment and you'd struggle to find an AMD one too! Would you be interested in 2nd hand? You could probably find a 2080ti second hand if you wanted, but for the amount they go for you're 2/3 of the way to a 3070!

As for water cooling it can be as gentle as you like - I also hate RGB and spinning fan crap. I had a Corsair AIO (a previous model to this) that I turned the LED colour to white and it was acceptable.

I don't really understand these water cooling setups. Surely the whole point of having a circulation system is to allow you to move the radiators away from the sources of heat, i.e. outside the case. In a building, you have the AC system outside, on the roof. Including the pumps and fans, which also produce heat.

But in watercooled PCs, all this seems to be inside the case, which seems stupid.

I’ve been looking at a Coolermaster NR200 recently.

https://www.coolermaster.com/catalog/cases/mini-itx/masterbox-nr200/

I’ll also have a 3070 to return to Amazon soon as a 3080 I preordered should finally arrive. Could sell that at cost, but it wasn’t cheap (£600)

.

HNY etc

For the same reason that, unless you drive a Beetle, 2CV or pre-996 Porsche, your car (if you have one) probably uses water as a coolant and has a water to air heat exchanger or radiator. Fluids are far more efficient at absorbing and dumping heat than air. Same reason the radiators in your house are full of water, not air. Hopefully.

What I'm specifically saying is that the radiator should be on the outside. Like it is on a fridge, or building's AC system. There are good reasons not to do this on a car.

I mean, the radiator goes at the edge of the case so the heat can be directly exhausted.

If you use a normal air cooler, it still has a radiator (and heat pipes) but it's right in the middle, on top of the CPU, and generally relies on the case fan to get the hot air outside.

Probably because Nvidia and AMD want to focus on producing the chipsets and let someone else do the coolers, the assembly and the retail distribution.

Generally the only things that matter much are the clock speeds and amount of memory.

Similar story for motherboards, which are mostly an assembly of a stock Intel or AMD chipset and a bunch of standard sockets. Once you know the size and features you want, all that really matters is whether it's well made.

The full setups will have the radiator at the front pulling cold air in and some fans at the back to expel the warm air. Its no worse than having the radiator outside the case entirely, in fact maybe better because you benefit from the air pressure inside the case helping to expel the warm air. The main benefit of water cooling is it can be much more efficient than fans, much quieter and you can add things like the GPU without relying on the stock fans. Saying that you can achieve just as good results with the right fan based setup but it takes more finessing.

AIO water coolers, IMO, are a good upgrade to a standard CPU fan. I know some fans can get decent results but I always struggled until adding an AIO cooler and they also free up space in the case to help airflow for the GPU.

Watercooling still relies on fans & rad - it's just that you can have more / bigger fans & bigger rads to cool the same chip surface area.

Which then means you can have it quieter etc...

I put in an order for a new work PC last week.

Having a 3080 is totally legit for spreadsheet work, right?

Yeah when I say "radiator" I mean the rad with fans attached.

If you can get your hands on one yeah

the radiator at the front pulling cold air in and some fans at the back to expel the warm air.

This is just poor thermal design. You'd actually be using the radiator to warm the cold air as it comes in.

Its no worse than having the radiator outside the case entirely, in fact maybe better because you benefit from the air pressure inside the case helping to expel the warm air.

But if you had the radiator outside the case, you remove its heat output from the problem of cooling the case entirely.

I accept that having the radiator on the edge of the case, with fans pushing or pulling its heat outwards is OK.