[GTALUG] Build critique request and the story behind it.

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2017 at 07:24:41PM -0500, Russell via talk wrote:
> A quick check gets me this combo.
> 
> https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards/PRIME-Z370-P/

Looks quite good, although for me personally I find the lack of
displayport concerning.  Displayport trivially converts to DVI or HDMI,
while the other way around isn't the case.  Displayport support daisy
chaining and high resolution, while DVI is essentially useless for
modern displays.  Just something that might matter.  The HDMI port is
also 1.4b, not 2.0, so it is limited to 30Hz at 4k resolution.

The -A version of the board adds displayport and has a max of
4096x2304 at 60Hz and keeps the other two ports.  Also has intel rather
than realtek for the network port.  I guess that probably means it costs
more too.  Yeah $219 vs $175.  Well that's annoying for the budget.

> and
> 
> https://ark.intel.com/products/126685/Intel-Core-i5-8600K-Processor-9M-Cache-up-to-4_30-GHz
> 
> If I keep the same water cooling and take a slight hit on the ram clockwise, this costs out at $27 more than my original. Not too bad for the two extra cores. This bios has all the overclocking geegaws and gimcracks any tweaker would love to have in fron of them. I think I basically gave up optical audio out and the disco flashing led features, I hope. 

If quiet is the goal, make sure to check the reviews on the water cooler
since I found a number were quite noisy a couple of years ago when I
built a machine for a friend that had water cooling.  At the time,
the intel brand one was apparently quite noisy.  This may well have
changed by now.  I remember being surprised that so many water coolers
were rather noisy.

-- 
Len Sorensen