• You may find search is unavailable for a little while. Trying to fix a problem.

PC Parts Whaaaat?

TragicMonkey

Poisoned Waffles
TragicMonkey
Joined
Jun 28, 2004
Messages
71,352
Location
Monkey
Daaaaaamn. Needing to assemble a new PC before Windows 10 dies from unsupport next October, and fearing consequences of possible tariffs on stuff, I went ahead and ordered the parts I need to build a new PC. An Xmas present to myself!

However, I was shocked (SHOCKED!!!) to learn that since the last time I messed with computers (2016) apparently an entirely new form of SSD has been invented? This "NVMe" thing?! Can it be REAL?!!? I guess I'm going to find out since I just ordered one. Have any of you got one of these? Do they really work as fast as claimed? Can I actually put the O/S on the thing? I still have a pair of serviceable SSDs in my current computer I plan to bring over.

Also noted with interest that even though most components are more advanced than they were 8 years ago, they're mostly cheaper now. (For now, anyway). I didn't get top-of-the-line everything, mostly stuck with next-best. Also the motherboards I looked at were quite reasonable if you don't want them all "WiFi". I don't. I don't like WiFi, and I don't trust WiFi.

Weird thing though is the parts that apparently have had no technological improvement in 8 years. Same heatsink I currently have, except the fan will light up with pretty colors now.

Anybody else messing about with computer builds lately?
 
Also when the time comes to do the thermal paste I will freak out and cry. It's nervewracking!
 
I built a machine this year - and yes, it was easier than the last time I did it (about 10 years ago, not counting minor upgrades).
Yep, NVMes are awesome. No problem to install. Depends on what kind of cooling your Motherboard offers for them, but you probably don't need any heat conducting paste. Install Windows on this, and use your SSDs for mass storage.

Much more important and tricky and potentially expensive is putting the CPU on the motherboard - very easy to bent some pins, and that might be that for the board.
 
Just got back from the nerd store. Holy crap, it was busy. Even for a Saturday. I wonder if other people are anticipating tariffs affecting the price of tech and getting in early? I'm was reassured that I picked good combination of parts for my build when the guy next to me at the pick-up counter was getting pretty much the same parts I picked, same case, same motherboard, and same processor. Although he went with a fancier graphics card and a cheaper power supply. Electricity makes me nervous so I'm willing to pay extra for quality there. Also he got the case in black which I feel is always a mistake: it shows dust so much more.
 
Note that fancier graphics cards require larger power supplies.

I'm chuckling now because I probably have a couple of 150W power supplies in the shed, and am comparing this with the 500W Cooler Master, that I've just replaced with an EVGA GD 700W (Gold).

This is amusing as comparing current hard drives to the original 100Mb drive in my first PC...
 
I worked application development and support for many years, and would never even think about constructing my own computer. I applaud (and am mystified by) you who choose to do it. TM you said Windows 10 dies but I'm sure you just mean that support will end for it at that time. It will still function fine. I have a Windows 7 laptop I use solely for a media server and it keeps asking for updates that fail so I turned that part off. Otherwise it does what I want it do. Also rips CDs and DVDs which I can't even do on my newer more highfalutin' thingies.
 
alfaniner said:
I worked application development and support for many years, and would never even think about constructing my own computer. I applaud (and am mystified by) you who choose to do it. TM you said Windows 10 dies but I'm sure you just mean that support will end for it at that time. It will still function fine. I have a Windows 7 laptop I use solely for a media server and it keeps asking for updates that fail so I turned that part off. Otherwise it does what I want it do. Also rips CDs and DVDs which I can't even do on my newer more highfalutin' thingies.
Click to expand...
Yeah, support ends for Win 10. Which means no more patches and updates...including security. I just don't feel comfortable using it past then. Also software has gotten more demanding in the last 8 years, it's time to update anyway.

As for "building", really it's just buying compatible parts and putting them together. There are online tools which you can use that match compatibility so you don't have to figure it all out yourself and end up with a video card too big for your case, as used to happen. It's fun! (except for the thermal paste) and when you do it yourself you can omit most of the bloatware that manufacturers install when they do it all for you. And you can omit the stuff you don't want, and include the stuff you do. I don't care for WiFi, for instance, but I do insist on extra fans. And I like extra-big, roomy cases for maximum airflow-- none of this silly "oooh I want my computer to be as slim as possible" stuff.

With all the videos and guides online it's getting easier and easier to put together a PC.
 
novaphile said:
Note that fancier graphics cards require larger power supplies.

I'm chuckling now because I probably have a couple of 150W power supplies in the shed, and am comparing this with the 500W Cooler Master, that I've just replaced with an EVGA GD 700W (Gold).

This is amusing as comparing current hard drives to the original 100Mb drive in my first PC...
Click to expand...
Bah. I have a 10MB one.
 
NVME can be great BUT you have to watch out for the ones that slow down when worked hard.

I discovered to my cost that a cheap 4TB one was fine until I tried to copy some large files. It sped along at a good pace until it suddenly decided it was too hot and slowed down to a crawl.

So. Make sure the one you order is not one of the budget tier items.

A good NVME will be able to run cool.

All digital technology uses transistors of various sorts. Using less transistors saves money.

The cheap NVME drives will use technology that crams four bits of information into the one storage cell. It's called QLC. That means when it writes data is not a simple binary on off and of it goes to the next bit of data. It has to fiddle around and set a state that's multi level. So it has to see what's in that cell already, then rewrite it. Each cell can only be written to a certain number of times before it wears out and starts getting errors.

The manufacturers also pile up layers of cells. How well they do that also impacts performance and heat generated in use.

If this all sounds very complex it is. It takes a lot of energy to do so that work so it heats up. Smart controllers, onboard cache memory and a small amount of fast write memory help to make it faster.

That makes the job of working out, before you buy it, of you have bought something that is fast and reliable or cheap and slow.

What part did you buy? I ended up the a WD Black SN850X. It works well and doesn't seem to grind to a halt.
 
Last edited:
TragicMonkey said:
Also when the time comes to do the thermal paste I will freak out and cry. It's nervewracking!
Click to expand...
The thermal paste is built in. Makes it so much easier. However, the stock fan that came with my Intel CPU had an annoying whine as it sped up to cope with the CPU under load. I bought an after market fan which is much bigger but also much quieter. I don't overclock so the extra cooling capacity isn't needed but it's so much quieter.
 
catsmate said:
Bah. I have a 10MB one.
Click to expand...
In my youth when I worked in a computer shop, we made good trade on "Winchester Drive" add-on cards for the cheap Amstrad PC clones. As long as they got a low-level formatting every other week they were fine products! Came if memory serves me right in 10MB and 20Mb variants.
 
Darat said:
In my youth when I worked in a computer shop, we made good trade on "Winchester Drive" add-on cards for the cheap Amstrad PC clones. As long as they got a low-level formatting every other week they were fine products! Came if memory serves me right in 10MB and 20Mb variants.
Click to expand...
You bastard. I want to kill you for reminding me of those awful things.

We have a working, re-cased, XT complete with twin floppies and 10MB hard disk.
 
catsmate said:
You bastard. I want to kill you for reminding me of those awful things.

We have a working, re-cased, XT complete with twin floppies and 10MB hard disk.
Click to expand...
I became quite the expert of fdisk and its relations.

I think the oldest box I've got up in the attic has a 486SX 25MHz processor in it with a 40 - yes a whole 40MB hard disk. I doubt it would work, probably should get around to chucking it out. But it's the only device I have with the SCSI port for my SCSI scanner and you never know when you might need it!

Now the SCSI connectors were real connectors - none of this under powered, lily-livered USB-C nonsense that you can barely see - you could use a SCSI cable and connector as a lethal weapon.
 
Back in around 1989, when I got my first PC, a slightly used 286, it had a 40 mb hard drive, and the vendor told me I'd never manage to fill it up.

My camera is already over ten years old, and that hard drive would comfortably hold one image from it but not a second.
 
I'm going through a de-cluttering process on my entire house, and as I'm also about to build a PC I fear it is time to pull out the Big Cardboard Box of Ancient Tech. You know the one. Cords for long-lost devices. Floppy disks for installing Windows ME. Flash drives that hold 20 KB because that was a lot back then.

It shouldn't be so bad because I did go through it about four years ago....but it's still going to be awful. Last time I needed a SATA cable I knew I probably had one in there but it was just less horrible to go to the store and buy a new one.
 
Darat said:
I became quite the expert of fdisk and its relations.

I think the oldest box I've got up in the attic has a 486SX 25MHz processor in it with a 40 - yes a whole 40MB hard disk. I doubt it would work, probably should get around to chucking it out. But it's the only device I have with the SCSI port for my SCSI scanner and you never know when you might need it!

Now the SCSI connectors were real connectors - none of this under powered, lily-livered USB-C nonsense that you can barely see - you could use a SCSI cable and connector as a lethal weapon.
Click to expand...
Ah, the good days of diode clamped termination. And a box of adaptors and connectors.
 
Darat said:
I became quite the expert of fdisk and its relations.

I think the oldest box I've got up in the attic has a 486SX 25MHz processor in it with a 40 - yes a whole 40MB hard disk. I doubt it would work, probably should get around to chucking it out. But it's the only device I have with the SCSI port for my SCSI scanner and you never know when you might need it!

Now the SCSI connectors were real connectors - none of this under powered, lily-livered USB-C nonsense that you can barely see - you could use a SCSI cable and connector as a lethal weapon.
Click to expand...
Some people pronounced it “scuzzy”. Others pronounced it “sexy” 😍
 
A decent motherboard ought to have a heatsink for the M.2 drive. If not, third-party ones are available; I prefer the ones which screw both sides, rather than just stick on.
 
There's also a small chance the NVMe drive might not be recognized OotB by the Win11 install. You might need to download a specific storage driver for that motherboard and copy to the installation media. It's not likely, but I've needed it a couple times even with Win11.
 
TragicMonkey said:
It's called "FireCuda 530R", by Seagate. It wasn't very expensive so if it turns out to suck I can try a different one, or an old-fashioned wooden SSD like the pilgrims used!
Click to expand...
You just knew this was coming.

Beware of the Seagate FireCuda 530R SSD, which is on sale right now.​


Info


I saw the following article today on IGN where they mention that the Seagate FireCuda 530R 2TB SSD is on sale for $139.99 when it normally costs $229.99 and I thought to myself, "that's a good deal. I might pick one up." And I started doing some research on it.

I Googled "Seagate FireCuda 530R SSD reddit" and found this reddit post and this reddit post where people talk about these drives failing after specific Windows updates.

I looked at their Amazon reviews and searched for "failed" and found several PS5 owners saying that the drive died after just a few months.

So this Amazon sale is highly suspect and basically feels like they're trying to offload this drive on unsuspecting customers. I know every drive manufacturer has fail rates, but this particular model is too high. I would just avoid it.
Click to expand...

The specs on that are good, so performance should be fine. Digging down the links it looks like updating the firmware is advised, but I do that on all my SSDs anyway.

All the new motherboards have two nvme slots these days. I would get something like a redudant SSD on the board or get some other backup strategy in place. I keep my computer backed up to an external SAN.

In reality, the modern SSDs in general are probably just a bit more fragile than the old days of real HDDs. Also, now that you can get so much storage on the one drive, the possibility of a fault probably goes up as well. They have inbuilt fault tolerance but that can only go so far. Unlike a CPU which in theory could keep going indefinitely, SSDs have a definite lifetime due to the technology they use to store data. They can only be used so much before they will slow down and they will get data errors. There is a limit to how long they can keep their data without power.
 
novaphile said:
This is amusing as comparing current hard drives to the original 100Mb drive in my first PC...
Click to expand...

LOL- my first computer with a HDD (as opposed to Kansa City tape drives or floppies- back when they WERE floppy lol) was an XT with a whole 10Mb of hard drive...and a single full height 'floppy' 360k floppy...

The one with the lift up lid... (and an amber screen monitor with a Hercules video card- no way could I afford an CGA, let alone an EGA!!!! that effectively almost doubled the price!!!)

And it came with a ridiculous 512Kb of RAM- considering the first new computer I bought came with a whole 3.5Kb of RAM- I didn't know how anyone could ever use it all...

(looks at the current laptop (quite elderly from 2018) with 24Gb of ram, a 150Mb SSD for the O/S (Bionic Beaver lol), a secondary mechanical 1Tb internal drive, and just over 13Tb of external storage on the NAS- how far we have come...)

(my house is very dark... it has NO windows lol)
 
TragicMonkey said:
I'm going through a de-cluttering process on my entire house, and as I'm also about to build a PC I fear it is time to pull out the Big Cardboard Box of Ancient Tech. You know the one. Cords for long-lost devices. Floppy disks for installing Windows ME. Flash drives that hold 20 KB because that was a lot back then.

It shouldn't be so bad because I did go through it about four years ago....but it's still going to be awful. Last time I needed a SATA cable I knew I probably had one in there but it was just less horrible to go to the store and buy a new one.
Click to expand...
I've still got a set of 5 1/4 floppies for windows version 1 here somewhere- I doubt they still work but I am reluctant to throw them out just because they were the very first O/S I ever bought that wasn't already built in to the system itself lol
 
a_unique_person said:
You just knew this was coming.



The specs on that are good, so performance should be fine. Digging down the links it looks like updating the firmware is advised, but I do that on all my SSDs anyway.

All the new motherboards have two nvme slots these days. I would get something like a redudant SSD on the board or get some other backup strategy in place. I keep my computer backed up to an external SAN.

In reality, the modern SSDs in general are probably just a bit more fragile than the old days of real HDDs. Also, now that you can get so much storage on the one drive, the possibility of a fault probably goes up as well. They have inbuilt fault tolerance but that can only go so far. Unlike a CPU which in theory could keep going indefinitely, SSDs have a definite lifetime due to the technology they use to store data. They can only be used so much before they will slow down and they will get data errors. There is a limit to how long they can keep their data without power.
Click to expand...
A bit OT but I did this for my earbuds recently, new options and improvements in quality m


malbui said:
Clearly you never heard me, late at night in my basement, daisy-chaining drives together.

This is probably a good thing.
Click to expand...
Look, what you get up to in basement at night, especially if it involves "sexy" is your business. Just remember RACK.
 
a_unique_person said:
You just knew this was coming.



The specs on that are good, so performance should be fine. Digging down the links it looks like updating the firmware is advised, but I do that on all my SSDs anyway.

All the new motherboards have two nvme slots these days. I would get something like a redudant SSD on the board or get some other backup strategy in place. I keep my computer backed up to an external SAN.

In reality, the modern SSDs in general are probably just a bit more fragile than the old days of real HDDs. Also, now that you can get so much storage on the one drive, the possibility of a fault probably goes up as well. They have inbuilt fault tolerance but that can only go so far. Unlike a CPU which in theory could keep going indefinitely, SSDs have a definite lifetime due to the technology they use to store data. They can only be used so much before they will slow down and they will get data errors. There is a limit to how long they can keep their data without power.
Click to expand...
Heh. I think I'll get a traditional SSD for the O/S after all. That's what I have now and I've had no complaints about speed, my current computer goes from completely off to up-and-running in about thirty seconds on Windows 10. I'll still put the FireCuda in there just to see how it does, but I won't store anything precious on it.
 
Dabop said:
I've still got a set of 5 1/4 floppies for windows version 1 here somewhere- I doubt they still work but I am reluctant to throw them out just because they were the very first O/S I ever bought that wasn't already built in to the system itself lol
Click to expand...
I am sure you could recoup your original investment well by selling them on eBay. I know, it's kind of fun to keep that vintage stuff around, though.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Heh. I think I'll get a traditional SSD for the O/S after all. That's what I have now and I've had no complaints about speed, my current computer goes from completely off to up-and-running in about thirty seconds on Windows 10. I'll still put the FireCuda in there just to see how it does, but I won't store anything precious on it.
Click to expand...
I opened up an old style SSD once just to see what was in it. They are now 99% empty space and just have the same chips the NVME chips have in them.
 
Okay, so what are you telling me? Don't use the NVMe I got, but don't use an old style SSD either? Do you have a recommendation or are you just trying to psych me out?
 
It's all a bit of a game


People complaining about sn850x and recommending a Firecuda. ;)

Intel is going through hell and losing billions with its latest CPUs. It turns out they had bugs in the CPU voltage/temperature/clock speed code that literally burnt out components. They've finally fixed it but too late for a lot of customers.

I assume the Firecuda is now more mature and latest firmware fixes will be ok. I just back stuff up now. Use a second drive for mirroring or backups.

I have a friend who bought a SanDisk ssd drive that has been in the click bait. Reputable brand but sure enough, it went into a failsafe read only mode after only a couple of months.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Okay, so what are you telling me? Don't use the NVMe I got, but don't use an old style SSD either? Do you have a recommendation or are you just trying to psych me out?
Click to expand...
Just use the NVMe, unless it's a no-name brand even the 'slow' ones will be at least as fast as your old SSD.
Follow the instructions in the manual for fitting and if there's a thermal pad included don't forget to peel the plastic
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom