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

[Russell]

On November 16, 2017 11:32:09 AM EST, lsorense at csclub.uwaterloo.ca wrote:
>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.

Thanks, I'm sold. I hadn't fully considered forward compatibility in respect of the display. The improved features justify the new price point. Although I'm a little  wary of the Realtek S1220A codec. There is kernel support for it in 4.11 and people have made it work. It does have an integrated preamp and pop filter, that works for me  

>
>> 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.

I said noise, but its a bit more than that. A home users computers biggest enemy is hosehold dust and microscopic particles of cooking oil. I hate trying to clean monster heat sinks. With radiator cooling I can do ordinary cleaning of the fan from the outside and the actual cooling unit is all smooth surfaces, much easier to clean the sticky dross. 

I took delivery of the case today. Just in time, I lost the boot sector of the remaing drive on my desktop. I had shutdown and pulled my active data and archive disks, no joy on reboot. No significant data gone, just have to boot from a live usb distro to see if I can recover a couple of docs.
 
Many thanks Lennart and Hugh. I revamped my cost calculations and pushed the ram clock back up to DDR 4000, but with half the the amount. I can upgrade that later, if it is even necessary.

The new config +A MB and RAM, added about $80 on my build, but the added features make it very worthwhile. The only thing left for to consider is the SSD for system files.

Cheers.

-- 
Russell
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