Build Advice Advice on new build, starting with motherboard manufacturer, for touchscreens, floppy disks, which Windows version ?

[Richard1234]

Hi,

I have built a few PCs over the years, I built this one around 2010, and because its becoming a bit obsolete, time to build a new one with a complete overhaul, in the past I would recycle components, but this time I think I need to upgrade most things. I will only recycle the loudspeakers, mouse and keyboard.

the motherboard is the startpoint for building a PC, and this one's is by Gigabyte and is ATX.

I would firstly like advice as to which motherboard manufacturer, eg ones with more or better early startup facilities, eg ability to boot from USB drives. I also want ancient floppy disk support, because I have dabbled with writing software on floppy disks which boot directly without operating system. I dont know if all ATX's support the ancient floppy drives. Also a manufacturer whose motherboards are reliable.

this Gigabyte one has been good but after 13 years of use, the USB seems to sometimes malfunction for the wireless USB dongle, I think the USB support on the motherboard is somehow worn out. And eg hard drives attached to the USB hub attached to the machine will vanish.

I would also like legacy support for PS/2 mouse and keyboard, ie PS/2 sockets at the back for mouse and keyboard. Basically I want as much legacy hardware support as possible, as I have programmed PS2 mouse and keyboard directly for my floppy booting software. I know USB can emulate legacy, but I would like the legacy hardware directly.

Some months ago I bought a laptop with touchscreen and windows 11. I dont know if one can buy touchscreen monitors for PCs? Also can windows 10 support such, or does it have to be windows 11. As I would need to buy Windows also. I have some spare licensed copies of Windows 10 not yet installed, bought so they can be used when windows 10 is no longer supported.

Then advice on tower cases for the system, I would like a transparent one where I can see everything inside the machine without having to open up. But I would like one also which uses old school slotting, my existing one has nonstandard plastic things, which I find very confusing, and some have broken. I would like as many bays as possible, eg I have lots of SATA drives.

any advice on specific such tower cases, and specific UK vendors who sell these, I dont know if I am allowed to ask such advice on this forum. I found PC World no use for tower cases, and had problems finding anything any good on ebay.

with my existing machine, I found the expansion slots a bit cramped, where the graphics card is too near the slot I use for the USB3 adapter, I dont know if this is a limit of the ATX specification, or if it is a manufacturer design limitation. it would be nice if there were more space between the sockets.

This existing system, has various bare wire USB sockets on the motherboard, which I found a bit confusing to connect up, I would prefer proper USB sockets on the motherboard accessible at the back. But maybe all have this problem?

I think I would like DV-I and hdmi support, with my existing machine, its hdmi doesnt do audio, I dont know if newer machines have integrated audio into the hdmi, and what to look for to get hdmi with audio. that way I could record a session on the machine for say Youtube. I dont know if this is a graphics card question rather than a motherboard question, and if a graphics card question, advice on which graphics cards.


it is lots of questions, and the central question is which motherboard manufacturer, and the constraints of both ancient hardware eg floppies and ps/2 but also modern hardware eg touchscreens, which might constrain which version of windows or the graphics card etc.

with my touchscreen laptop, I found the early startup controls a bit limited, and it doesnt allow enough time for the external USB bluray drive to get ready to boot say Linux mint, I had to configure the hubs a certain way before I could get that to boot, which is a limitation of the early startup.

anyway, many thanks for any advice
Richard

 

[USAFRet]

with the TBW limit, is a specific write address just relocated when it is worn out?

ie until the example 1200 TBW limit is reached, you can write to any sector of the disk? where the disk hardware just relocates a used up sector to a not yet used up sector?

The TBW you see given from the manufacturer is simply for the warranty.
Much like 3 or 5 years.

The will not simply fall down and die at that moment.

And that TBW number is VERY large, in relation to normal consumer use. Unlikely you would ever get to 1/4 that number,

Like a car, having a 5 year, 1 million mile warranty.
It will age out long before you reach that mileage.

Further, endurance tests have shown (non-crappy) SSD's to last far far beyond that TBW number...even up to 10x that.

It is not really something to worry about.

 

[Aeacus]

an example where a new technology has emerged and eventually become obsolete before I decided to upgrade!

mSATA isn't actually that big of a flop, since it saw limited usage case for few years.

But what is complete flop, is SATA Express,
wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA_Express

Now, my Z170 chipset MoBo has two SATA Express ports and when SATA Express launched, it's idea was to be successor of SATA. But since at the same time M.2 also launched, while being far better, M.2 stood around while SATA Express failed spectacularly. Heck, there aren't even any SATA Express drives around, for one to utilize SATA Express ports they have on their MoBo.

with the TBW limit, is a specific write address just relocated when it is worn out?

No.

SSD has some "brains" whereby it spreads the writes along all NAND cells, rather than writing into one cell until cell is toast and the moving to the next one.

ie until the example 1200 TBW limit is reached, you can write to any sector of the disk? where the disk hardware just relocates a used up sector to a not yet used up sector?

HDDs use physical round platter and this round shape is divided into sectors for data storage. SSDs, in the other hand, doesn't have sectors, instead they have NAND cells.

And as far as i know, you can't specify certain cells where to write onto. Instead, SSD spreads the workload evenly among all cells. Though, with HDDs, you can define which sector to write onto, but again, SSDs doesn't have sectors.

NAS=?

NAS = Network Attached Storage

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

can you show an MSI screenshot of the settings system for this underclocking?

MSI Afterburner used to OC/underclock GPUs? If so, then do note some things:

* MSI Afterburner isn't updated/developed any further. The sole programmer who made MSI Afterburner, lives in Russia and MSI, due to Russo-Ukraine conflict, hasn't been able to send payments for that developer. So, all developent has stalled.
* Underclocking values are individual for each GPU.
* Even if you want to underclock GPU, GPU can say: "Nope, doesn't happen!" and will revert all underclock changes you did. So, even if you want to underclock a GPU, you may not be able. This depends on GPU though, some GPUs won't let them to be underclocked.

But if you want to go ahead with underclock, you have to look up the guide for the very same GPU (or CPU) you have. There is no cookie cutter guide for underclocking that applies to all GPUs/CPUs equally.

how do you measure the CPU and GPU frequencies eg that the GPU is 400Mhz currently?

HWinfo64 in "sensors mode",
link: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

For CPU, either: Core clocks value or Core Effective Clocks value.
For GPU: GPU clock value.

E.g HWinfo64 screenshot of my Skylake build at current moment:
My CPU clocks are around 500-700 Mhz per core and GPU clocks stay at 300 Mhz while me typing this.

how accessible is this button? why not at the front?

Well, are you going to push that button several times a day, for it to be located on the front panel of PC case?

Accessability wise, it is located next to the PSU switch, at the back of the PSU.
Rear end of Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 ATX 3.0:

Rear end of Seasonic PRIME 650 80+ Titanium [SSR-650TD]. My PSU:

to install the upper one in the photo looks a bit precarious! do you have to remove the GPU below it?

Yes, i had to. Since space between my CPU cooler and GPU is ~5cm and not enough to get my hand into there comfortably.

Taken during drive installation:

compare that with my 2010 PC:

http://www.directemails.info/tom/PC.jpg

where the blue arrow points to the hole in the wall for the cables to the monitor + speakers + mouse + keyboard in the next room. in fact now I use a handshake mouse by Logi, which uses something like bluetooth.

can you see why I leave the side panel off?

A fire hazard waiting to happen.


I see that you use power cord with multiple sockets, with many sockets also filled with power plugs. Now, if that power strip produces a spark, what do you think will happen?

Also, one of the worst neglected PCs i've ever seen. Sure, i've seen far dustier ones, but the massive ratsnest of cables you PC lives in, with open side panel + power strip casually next to it, sitting ontop of several cables, IS a fire hazard.

one danger is where you spend a lot, and then 2 years later the low end stuff is much better!

This is the nature of PC hardware. We get new hardware releases on yearly basis (more-or-less) and it usually takes 2-3 generations, where new generation easily surpasses few generation old hardware.

With this, you can do it in 2 ways:
* Upgrade/buy new system every year or every 2 years, to keep up with latest/best performance.
* Buy high-end (or even top-end) hardware and keep it around for ~10 years, before hardware becomes so slow, that you have to buy a new system.

I'll probably go for 64Gig total, either 4 x 16G or if any mobo has 8 sockets, for 8 x 8G.

if it has 16 sockets then 16 x 4G!

Consumer MoBos either have 2x or 4x RAM slots. But server MoBos usually have 8x RAM slots. Even 16x RAM slots if MoBo is dual-CPU MoBo.

So, if you go with R9 7950X3D, best you can have is MoBo with 4x RAM slots.

I want the system I build to last 10 years, and to be competitive for 5 years!

IF kept well, PC can easily last 10 years. Even 15-20 years.

As of it being competitive, it depends on what metric you use to compare it against.

could be worth also buying 4 x 4G, rather than 2 x 8G.

R9 7950X3D uses only DDR5 RAM, and there are no 4GB DDR5 RAM sticks out there. Smallest sticks are 8GB in size.

what I meant is for air to get into the PC from the base of the tower, the base needs to be elevated above the floor.

Current day PC cases have feet under them and doesn't sit on their belly. So, those feet are enough to elevate entire PC up enough, for bottom intake. Still, for dust management, it is better if you elevate your PC from the floor at least 12cm. Since that can reduce dust intake up to 80%.

yes, but what I want is the least noise that fully cools whatever I may try!

ie I want both points, with "cool the components" the priority point.

I dont want a fully cooled system which is noiser than a jumbo jet, also I dont want a silent system which doesnt cool the system.

Your best bet would be to do what i did with my PCs; populate all and every fan mount with 140mm high-performance fans, which also have wide RPM range.

This way, and if you wire up the fans for individual control, you can fine tune each and every fan to your likening, while still keeping reasonable airflow since you have that many fans inside the PC case.

The less fans you have in a PC case - the harder each fan has to work to maintain the overall airflow inside the PC case. And in turn, the louder the fans also are.

for me the leds are irrelevant, as I keep the tower in a different room, see photo, where I cant see the computer when I use it!

lighting is only relevant if it illuminated the mobo for inserting gizmos.

also an led is one further thing to go wrong, if the led eventually wears out, will the unit now fail?

There is non-LED version of the Corsair ML Pro fans as well, but i see that those aren't available anymore.

In this case, great choice is going with Noctua, namely: NF-A14 industrialPPC-2000 PWM,
specs: https://noctua.at/en/nf-a14-industrialppc-2000-pwm/specification
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NF-A14-iPPC-2000-Cooling-2000RPM/dp/B00KESSUDW/

Those Noctua 140mm fans are actually better than the Corsair fans i have;
Airflow: 107.42 CFM @ 2000 RPM (compared to 97 CFM @ 2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
Static pressure: 4.18 mmH2O @ 2000 RPM (compared to 3.0 mmH2O @ 2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
RPM range a bit lower: 500-2000 RPM (compared to 400-2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
Quieter as well: 31.5 sB(A) @ 2000 RPM (compared to 37 dB(A) @ 2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
Same control method: 4-pin PWM
A bit different bearing: SSO2, which is hybrid between mag-lev and fluid dynamic (compared to mag-lev bearing for Corsair ML140 Pro)
No LEDs in Noctua fans.

Oh, my Corsair ML Pro LED fans are ~7 years old and none of the LEDs have died in any of them. (There are 4 LEDs per 1 fan.)

but how do you give a standalone forwarding router this SSID? is it via the PC via wireless like with the main modem?

SSID is wi-fi network identification number. Now, if what you have is just plain router, without modem part in it (that creates the wi-fi network), then there is no SSID, since plain forwarding router won't output wi-fi network. It just has ports for cable connection.

But if you have modern router (e.g like i have), which besides having cable ports for wired connection, also outputs wi-fi networks, then you can log-in to your router and look up the SSID + give the SSID unique name and password. As of how to access the router, that is written in router manual.
Modern routers have default IP address (usually written at the label of router), that you need to connect to. Either via PC with cable connection, or via wireless device within same network.

could you give a config based around this, with 64G memory?

I'll reply to this and following quesitons at later time + composing build suggestions. Right now, i'm out of time.

 

[Aeacus]

Now, the 2nd part of my reply (when i again have time).

it may be worth it to have those extra M.2 sockets, I have to scrutinise what I get for the money,

Rather than paying ~£1400 for a MoBo that has 6x M.2 slots, it would be far cost effective to buy a MoBo that costs ~£500 with 4x M.2 slots and for additional slots, buying PCI-E to M.2 adapter card.

E.g this 4x M.2 slot one, for ~£31,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/4-Port-Controller-Expansion-Adapter-Converter-4-Port-PH44/dp/B09CTZ8QJM/
Now, that specific adapter card doesn't support M.2 PCI-E 5.0 speeds, only M.2 PCI-E 3.0 and 4.0. Then again, M.2 PCI-E 5.0 is newest tech and adapter cards for M.2 PCI-E 5.0 haven't been made. Still, M.2 PCI-E 5.0 drive works in there, but at PCI-E 4.0 speeds.

With Asus ProArt Mobo, you can't use that PCI-E to M.2 adapter card, since that MoBo doesn't support PCI-E lane splitting into x4 mode, which that adapter card requires.

But with MSI Pro X670-P MoBo, you can use that adapter card. But only in one of the PCI-E x16 slots. So, MoBo has 4x M.2 slots on it + when using adapter card with another 4x M.2 slots, total amount would be 8x M.2 slots, with a fraction of a cost compared to MSI Godlike MoBo.

Now, with MSI Godlike MoBo, you can have even more M.2 slots if you use that adapter card. MoBo has 4x M.2 slots on it + included is adapter card for 2x additional M.2 slots. And if you were to buy that adapter card with 4x M.2 slots as well, you can bring the total amount to 10x M.2 slots.
OR when you replace the included 2x slot M.2 adapter with 4x slot M.2 adapter (running two 4x slot M.2 adapters), you can bring the total M.2 slots amount to 12x. (4x on MoBo, 4x on one adapter card, 4x on 2nd adapter card.)

Of course, another caveat with MSI Pro X670-P MoBo is, that it's PCI-E slots are 4.0. MSI Godlike MoBo, in the other hand, has PCI-E 5.0 slots all around.

Comparison between MSI Pro X670-P and MSI Godlike,
link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...TUVHLVg2NzBFLUdPRExJS0U=,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

So, it is really tough to suggest ~£1400 MoBo over ~£500 MoBo, just to have 2-4 more M.2 slots. Of course, MSI Godlike MoBo has other features what MSI Pro X670-P does not have. Still, a tough sale.

I, personally, would buy a cheaper MoBo and would use PCI-E to M.2 adapter card. Sure, i may end up with few M.2 slots less, but i'd save a LOT of money.

also is on board wifi cost effective, is a mobo supplied with wifi card cheaper than buying the 2 separately?

On Asus MoBos, wi-fi is built-in. On MSI MoBos, wi-fi card slots into M.2 E-key slot and can be replaced.

The M.2 E-key wi-fi card is included with MoBo price, so, it essentially costs nothing. It comes with MoBo. And what i was able to gather, it isn't worth it to replace the M.2 E-key wi-fi card with PCI-E based wi-fi card.

For one, M.2 E-key wi-fi card has it's dedicated PCI-E lane, which it operates with. But if you use PCI-E based wi-fi card, you have to use up one of the PCI-E slots, which in your case, would be better suited to use as additional M.2 adapter card.
Also, PCI-E based wi-fi cards aren't any faster than M.2 E-key wi-fi cards. But they can be slower.

E-ATX presumably has more sockets, and better spacing between sockets?

or are the PCI sockets same distance apart in order to align with the back of the tower case?

E-ATX is bigger and in turn, can have more "stuff" on it than standard ATX MoBo. But PCI-E slots spacing is standard across all MoBos, since it has to align with PCI-E slots PC cases have.

what I meant is, I cannot tell just by looking and using a machine whether it is top end or high end!

eg a low end laptop today is probably faster than our university's mainframe in the 1990s!

someone emailed me specs for a Dell laptop costing some £300 and the hardware looked quite impressive!

To understand the difference, you'd need to compare same era hardware. If you were to compare it against older hardware, even today's low-performing hardware is impressive compared to the hardware that was high-performing 5 years ago.

could you do an upper end and lower end system with the GODLIKE AMD mobo?

Sure;

Lower-end:
PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core Processor (£495.97 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler (£44.20 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI MEG X670E GODLIKE EATX AM5 Motherboard (£1431.84 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£69.00 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro Tempered Glass ATX Full Tower Case (£131.97 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS GX-750 ATX 3.0 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£137.94 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £2562.14

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-01-10 07:56 GMT+0000

Compared to the latest build suggestion, where i use MSI Pro X670-P MoBo, there are only 2 changes;
MoBo - From MSI Pro X670-P to MSI Godlike
RAM - From Corsair (4x 16GB) to two sets of Kingston 2x 16GB (total of 64GB).

Now, while Kingston RAM does come in two separate sets, rather than one set of 4 sticks, MSI has tested this very specific RAM and it will work when all 4x RAM slots are populated. That much is also seen from MoBo memory compatibility list.

Upper-end:
PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core Processor (£495.97 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 CPU Cooler (£104.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI MEG X670E GODLIKE EATX AM5 Motherboard (£1431.84 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 990 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£94.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro Tempered Glass ATX Full Tower Case (£131.97 @ Amazon UK)
PSU: Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 ATX 3.0 (£674.00 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £3387.63

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-01-10 07:57 GMT+0000

Compared to the lower-end;
CPU cooler - Replaced to the Be Quiet! one which is quieter than Thermalright but costs quite a bit more.
SSD - From 970 Evo Plus 1TB (PCI-E 3.0) to 990 Pro 1TB (PCI-E 4.0). There are PCI-E 5.0 drives as well, but they all cost premium and need cooling, either passive or active.
PSU - From Seasonic Focus GX-750 ATX 3.0 to Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 ATX 3.0 for best efficiency there is + ample power connections. Also, all Seasonic PRIME PSUs have 12 years of warranty (highest there is).
Case fans - Also included 7x 140mm Noctua fans, where the idea is that you install all of them and run them at ~1000 RPM, to get good enough cooling inside the PC case, with little, if any, audible noise. This way, you need to uninstall two Phanteks fans the PC case comes with.

I think having many connectors is important, that way whatever I buy will work directly, versus before I got the Corsair PSU, where I was splitting repeatedly various power cables.

Most people buy beefier PSU since they need the wattage capacity, but buying beefier PSU for connectors alone is also a valid option. Since splitting/extending power cables isn't a good idea. You can end up overloading the cable and melt it.

the main risk is buying a lot of technology which I then never use!

That is up to you. I can only suggest hardware based on your current needs. I can not foresee IF you are going to utilize the bought hardware at it's fullest or not. Or if you lack certain hardware features in the future.

 

[Richard1234]

No.

SSD has some "brains" whereby it spreads the writes along all NAND cells, rather than writing into one cell until cell is toast and the moving to the next one.

some form of error correcting code? ie where if less info is corrupted, the corrupted info can be mathematically "repaired" and the data is intact. eg with a square table of data, if you include row and column checksum to zero, including a checksum of the checksums, then if just 1 entry is corrupted, you know which entry from the corrupted row and column checksums, and can repair that number! eg for a small example:

1 5 -6*
3 2 -5*
-4! -7! 11*!

where the *'s are the row checksums to zero, and the !'s are the column checksums to 0.


if you corrupt just one number, I can repair the error! eg say corrupt the 2 to a 4, you now have:

1 5 -6
3 4 -5*
-4 -7! 11

where the * is the corrupted row checksum, the ! is the corrupted column checksum, so it has to be the middle square, and this will need to be the checksum to zero of the others in that row -(3 + -5) = 2

but with technological applications they will use much more difficult to understand MO. eg the above will only withstand corruption of 1 entry, but you could have MO which will withstand more corruption.

QR codes probably use such, I remember my project supervisor in the 1990s talking of work where you can express data as a 2D array of dots, where if you say tore out some, all the data is still there.

HDDs use physical round platter and this round shape is divided into sectors for data storage. SSDs, in the other hand, doesn't have sectors, instead they have NAND cells.

And as far as i know, you can't specify certain cells where to write onto. Instead, SSD spreads the workload evenly among all cells. Though, with HDDs, you can define which sector to write onto, but again, SSDs doesn't have sectors.

but it must pretend to have sectors? eg where I have cloned a magnetic sata drive to an SSD one, the machine boots identically to before, where the magnetic one will arrange the data in sectors, the SSD must be pretending to have sectors?

the SATA connector presumably doesnt know whether the attached device is magnetic or SSD?

NAS = Network Attached Storage

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-attached_storage

ok, looks similar to or the same as the concept of file server that we were taught. where you have a network of computers, but the filesystem is at a dedicated machine on the network. where each user would just access some files, could be something like /some_path/my_user_id/my_directory1/my_directory2/my_file as if it were on this machine, but in fact its on a file server. eg /usr/Richard1234/emails/email1.eml

similarly a printer server which is a machine managing a printer, and you print across the network to this, enabling say 100 people to use one top end printer as if it was their own. our department ones would print a cover page with userid on it, then say 10 pages for me, then cover page for someone else, 10 pages for them, ... eventually another 10 for me. Might not be 10, but some other number, its long ago! depends how much demand, eg if you used the system at 3am, you would have the printer server to yourself. but at lunchtime, the ethernet could grind to a halt as ethernet cant handle too many people. its good for low demand but it jams up if too many people use it at the same time. token ring handles overloading much better, where it only slows down, doesnt jam up. I have never used token ring, but we were taught the theory and I went for a job interview to a firm which specialised in token ring, I didnt get the job and then did the computing degree! probably good that I didnt get the job as the degree was much better for me!

we could actually select which mainframe to use from the DECstation terminal, and all would access the same account from the same file server. I could walk up to any terminal, select mainframe, login, and continue working on the same files, print a document and then go in the lift to the lower floor to the printer and wait for the print out! everything Unix and Ethernet based.

MSI Afterburner used to OC/underclock GPUs? If so, then do note some things:

* MSI Afterburner isn't updated/developed any further. The sole programmer who made MSI Afterburner, lives in Russia and MSI, due to Russo-Ukraine conflict, hasn't been able to send payments for that developer. So, all developent has stalled.

can they pay him with bitcoin?
I heard the transactions are anonymous! maybe via VPN if he pretends to be in the US

* Underclocking values are individual for each GPU.
* Even if you want to underclock GPU, GPU can say: "Nope, doesn't happen!" and will revert all underclock changes you did. So, even if you want to underclock a GPU, you may not be able. This depends on GPU though, some GPUs won't let them to be underclocked.

But if you want to go ahead with underclock, you have to look up the guide for the very same GPU (or CPU) you have. There is no cookie cutter guide for underclocking that applies to all GPUs/CPUs equally.


HWinfo64 in "sensors mode",
link: https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

I have now downloaded and installed it, it looks very interesting.
https://www.hwinfo.com/download/

Well, are you going to push that button several times a day, for it to be located on the front panel of PC case?

Accessability wise, it is located next to the PSU switch, at the back of the PSU.
Rear end of Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 ATX 3.0:

ok, I misunderstood! you meant the back of the tower, I think of that as the front of the PSU! ie I thought you meant it was on the opposite face of the PSU!

Rear end of Seasonic PRIME 650 80+ Titanium [SSR-650TD]. My PSU:

a picture is worth a 1000 words!

A fire hazard waiting to happen.


I see that you use power cord with multiple sockets, with many sockets also filled with power plugs. Now, if that power strip produces a spark, what do you think will happen?

its not as bad as it looks! virtually all the switches are off. Most of my drives are only powered up when I need a specific project relating to that drive. eg some drives are for compressed sector by sector backups of other drives. where the drive is only powered up when backing up, OR for reinstating a drive from the backup. Those red "ON" switches need to be depressed for that socket to be on.

I have a set of approx 5 drives, which I only switch on when I backup projects which involve a lot of work, where I use a script to save a copy to each which is connected. if any isnt connected, it continues to the next ones.


most of the jungle of cables is transformer and USB cables, these need to be long but this then also causes a jungle to develop. eventually I will disentangle it all, but I need to keep track of which transformer goes to which device, as many look so similar but might not be compatible. I try to put a label at both ends.

Also, one of the worst neglected PCs i've ever seen. Sure, i've seen far dustier ones, but the massive ratsnest of cables you PC lives in, with open side panel + power strip casually next to it, sitting ontop of several cables, IS a fire hazard.

I have no other option! if I want to copy backups to 5 powered drives, there are only 2 wall sockets, and I need a power socket for the PSU, and for the powered USB2 hub,

but most of the time, most of that is off.

I have an A3 scanner where if I use that, I then power it up, which is one of the 6 transformers on the multiplug on top of the tower. the others are mostly for WD Blue 2T magnetic hard drives encased in USB2 as I have run out of SATA sockets. I think I have 7 WD Blue 2T drives PLUS a few spare factory sealed unused ones. 2T because XP couldnt handle the 4T's but did handle a 4T by another firm.

I have to have the case open as the 2 SSDs and the panasonic 3D bluray writer is on top of the tower, all via sata cables.

its why I want a huge mobo with a ton of sockets and a tower case with a ton of bays,

the A3 scanner is superb but is USB2 cable only, no wireless. I bought an A3 Epson Ecotank and just assumed it would have a scanner, only after installing found it didnt! so now had to buy an A3 scanner. A4 scanners are no use as I often scan items which are significantly bigger than A4. I'd get an A2 scanner if they exist and arent too expensive!

in fact the only sparks I have seen are at the wall sockets, not on the multiplugs!

at one point I had a TPLink kind of ethernet by BT, which took another mains plug! ie internet via the mains electricity, I dont know if there is jargon for this concept? but I call it TPlink like calling a vacuum cleaner a hoover. I quit that TPLink ethernet because it caused continual interference with my loudspeakers.

This is the nature of PC hardware. We get new hardware releases on yearly basis (more-or-less) and it usually takes 2-3 generations, where new generation easily surpasses few generation old hardware.

With this, you can do it in 2 ways:
* Upgrade/buy new system every year or every 2 years, to keep up with latest/best performance.
* Buy high-end (or even top-end) hardware and keep it around for ~10 years, before hardware becomes so slow, that you have to buy a new system.

10 years sounds right for my 2010 machine, in 2020 it was still fine, but in 2021 I could no longer use various websites, so had to upgrade from XP to win10, but then also USB2 problems. Also I bought a monitor with higher than HD res, but couldnt use the higher resolutions, probably upgrading the GPU would deal with that, but that is "throwing good money after bad", better to replace the entire system, and get a GPU for that.

Consumer MoBos either have 2x or 4x RAM slots. But server MoBos usually have 8x RAM slots. Even 16x RAM slots if MoBo is dual-CPU MoBo.

So, if you go with R9 7950X3D, best you can have is MoBo with 4x RAM slots.

useful to know such limits, that way I dont have to waste time trying to find something which doesnt exist!

IF kept well, PC can easily last 10 years. Even 15-20 years.

As of it being competitive, it depends on what metric you use to compare it against.

by competitive, I mean better than the new low end Dells and HPs eg the ones for sale in supermarkets.

eg where you could viably sell it second hand where its not yet obsolete, but maybe you have to upgrade the windows version.

advantage of ATX and E-ATX is you could modernise the hardware to sell via cards, eg my 2010 machine didnt have USB3 but I installed a USB3 card: one problem is Ubuntu 8 doesnt recognise items on the USB3 card, but the current Linux Mint does.

R9 7950X3D uses only DDR5 RAM, and there are no 4GB DDR5 RAM sticks out there. Smallest sticks are 8GB in size.

8GB means 33 bit addresses, ie you are now beyond 32 bit. it might be some optimisation based on the digits of the upper 32 bits. or maybe 2 x 2GB DDR4 might be better than 1 x 4GB DDR5, where there is no point having 4GB DDR5. or there might be no meaningful cost advantage of 8GB versus 4GB for DDR5. I dont know the specifics of DDR5 vs DDR4.

can you use 1 DDR5 stick?

Current day PC cases have feet under them and doesn't sit on their belly. So, those feet are enough to elevate entire PC up enough, for bottom intake. Still, for dust management, it is better if you elevate your PC from the floor at least 12cm. Since that can reduce dust intake up to 80%.

I elevated my previous PC to protect from flooding also! if a pipe burst, and the floor got flooded. this one isnt elevated I think because when I replaced the earlier one I forgot to reinstate the elevation!

Your best bet would be to do what i did with my PCs; populate all and every fan mount with 140mm high-performance fans, which also have wide RPM range.

ok, I'll go for this idea with the ones you suggested, are those the best in terms of silence and coolability?

This way, and if you wire up the fans for individual control, you can fine tune each and every fan to your likening, while still keeping reasonable airflow since you have that many fans inside the PC case.

The less fans you have in a PC case - the harder each fan has to work to maintain the overall airflow inside the PC case. And in turn, the louder the fans also are.


There is non-LED version of the Corsair ML Pro fans as well, but i see that those aren't available anymore.

In this case, great choice is going with Noctua, namely: NF-A14 industrialPPC-2000 PWM,
specs: https://noctua.at/en/nf-a14-industrialppc-2000-pwm/specification
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NF-A14-iPPC-2000-Cooling-2000RPM/dp/B00KESSUDW/

Those Noctua 140mm fans are actually better than the Corsair fans i have;
Airflow: 107.42 CFM @ 2000 RPM (compared to 97 CFM @ 2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
Static pressure: 4.18 mmH2O @ 2000 RPM (compared to 3.0 mmH2O @ 2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
RPM range a bit lower: 500-2000 RPM (compared to 400-2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)
Quieter as well: 31.5 sB(A) @ 2000 RPM (compared to 37 dB(A) @ 2000 RPM for Corsair ML140 Pro)

but with your 3 fans 2000rpm at 37dB versus 6 fans 1000rpm at 20dB idea,
I think its the 1000rpm decibels that matter, are these also better for the Noctua?

Same control method: 4-pin PWM
A bit different bearing: SSO2, which is hybrid between mag-lev and fluid dynamic (compared to mag-lev bearing for Corsair ML140 Pro)
No LEDs in Noctua fans.

Oh, my Corsair ML Pro LED fans are ~7 years old and none of the LEDs have died in any of them. (There are 4 LEDs per 1 fan.)

I think LEDs are very robust, if its engineered properly the led failing shouldnt cause the system to fail, but not everything is meticulously engineered! eg some USB hubs, have the sockets so close, that you cant always use 2 consecutive ones. this is a problem also with the ATX design, where GPUs can take up too much space, they need to modernise the specification where there is more space between the cards!

I dont know which year ATX is from, but things have become bigger since then.

the original tower design must be from approx 1980?

I'll reply to this and following quesitons at later time + composing build suggestions. Right now, i'm out of time.

I'll reply to your later reply later also, as it has been some work replying to this! I have read your later reply, but will need some work to reply to!

on a different matter, where I said:
Richard1234 said:
current problems:

USB sometimes fails, eg wireless dongle vanishes, disk drives vanish whilst in use

and you replied:

Issue #1: Could be due to aging MoBo. Sometimes, old MoBos for whatever reason, have issues maintaining USB connection.

I think it could be because the continual inserting and removal of the old USB devices causes the contacts to wear out from friction. eg I ran into this problem with SD cards for a dashcam, where I kept removing the card to insert in a card reader, and eventually the contacts wore out. Also before the appearance of contactless credit cards in 2012, my credit card chip and pin would eventually wear out from overuse.

I scrutinised a USB2 male and female socket, and both have within them those flat bronze-like contacts. this is a problem, these will wear out from continual insertion and removal. maybe they should add titanium to the alloy?

to mitigate this with the new PC, I am thinking of attaching permanent short USB3 or USB4 extenders both to the hub and inbuilt PC sockets, and also permanent extenders to devices. that way only the extenders wear out, where I can just replace the extender:

PC : short_extender : USB_cable : hub : short_extender: USB_cable : short_extender : device

that way connecting and disconnecting dont occur at the PC's and hub's and device's sockets, but just on the extenders.

when the extenders wear out, replace these, where only at replacement time is there frictional wear and tear at the PC or hub or device.

the amount of hubs that have worn out for me!

some of these gizmos you have to keep attaching and disconnecting, eg flash drives, wireless dongles, camera cables, etc.

the dashcam SD card could easily have been inserted and removed 500x.


they really ought to redesign the connectors to something more robust. wireless would be one option, as no friction.
or use magnetic or electrical induction from a distance, eg I have an exercise bike which uses magnetic braking, and I think magnetic hard drives are via magnetism at a distance. hard disks allow a smaller gap than floppy disks, which then enables a higher res of data.

friction based contacts are a highly dubious idea! I think with memory modules graphics cards etc also, if you kept inserting and removing, the contacts would probably wear out. luckily these are rarely removed or inserted.

USB looks like solid metal, but that is a facade, internally it looks like dubious friction + pressure contacts on both sides.

can you recommend any high quality short USB3 extenders, also I dont know if USB4 has these available yet?

I'll then buy 10 to attach to the 10-hub USB3 item, and probably a further one to distance it from the PC's socket,

 

[Richard1234]

this is my reply to the 2nd posting, with a reply to the 1st posting done earlier,

Now, the 2nd part of my reply (when i again have time).


Rather than paying ~£1400 for a MoBo that has 6x M.2 slots, it would be far cost effective to buy a MoBo that costs ~£500 with 4x M.2 slots and for additional slots, buying PCI-E to M.2 adapter card.

you may be right, this is where a careful scrutiny is needed for the mobo, as its the trickiest to change as you'd have to reinstall Windows and all other software, and then also other cards might not be compatible.

Warren Buffett has a saying "its easier to keep out of trouble than get out of trouble"! choosing the right mobo is keeping out of trouble, once you have bought it, changing the mobo is getting out of trouble!


the hard drive can be changed without reinstalling Windows by cloning the earlier one to the new one, have done this successfully on at least 3 different computers.

E.g this 4x M.2 slot one, for ~£31,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/4-Port-Controller-Expansion-Adapter-Converter-4-Port-PH44/dp/B09CTZ8QJM/

I would in any case just begin with the inbuilt ones, and only buy expansions out of necessity.

similarly, I will probably buy the initial system without add on GPU, to see how that fares, if its good and deals with the new higher resolutions etc, then I would delay buying an add on GPU until I have to,

with mobos I think one needs to clarify what M.2 sockets are available not pre-populated with eg wifi.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/4-Port-Controller-Expansion-Adapter-Converter-4-Port-PH44/dp/B09CTZ8QJM/

Now, that specific adapter card doesn't support M.2 PCI-E 5.0 speeds, only M.2 PCI-E 3.0 and 4.0. Then again, M.2 PCI-E 5.0 is newest tech and adapter cards for M.2 PCI-E 5.0 haven't been made. Still, M.2 PCI-E 5.0 drive works in there, but at PCI-E 4.0 speeds.

With Asus ProArt Mobo, you can't use that PCI-E to M.2 adapter card, since that MoBo doesn't support PCI-E lane splitting into x4 mode, which that adapter card requires.

But with MSI Pro X670-P MoBo, you can use that adapter card. But only in one of the PCI-E x16 slots. So, MoBo has 4x M.2 slots on it + when using adapter card with another 4x M.2 slots, total amount would be 8x M.2 slots, with a fraction of a cost compared to MSI Godlike MoBo.

Now, with MSI Godlike MoBo, you can have even more M.2 slots if you use that adapter card. MoBo has 4x M.2 slots on it + included is adapter card for 2x additional M.2 slots. And if you were to buy that adapter card with 4x M.2 slots as well, you can bring the total amount to 10x M.2 slots.

as regards disks, I like in any case to have most of my disks switched off to reduce wear and tear,

where I only connect them and power on IF I need them, eg for backups, or for shunting to storage things when the always on drives are getting too full. eg I usually backup hardware installation CDs and DVDs to iso files, and sometimes these backups need to be shunted out to other storage.

thus even with M.2, I'd probably have a lot of USB3 disks, as these are easier to disconnect, SATA and M.2 would seem to be on continually. which is great for the system drive, and eg one main work data drive,

but eg if I do a long journey in the car to a new place, I may save the entire dashcam journey, and I have a specific drive for this kind of thing, only connected up when I save a journey. I do this eg if some of the navigation is tricky, so I can study it later eg as regards which lanes to be in. some junctions being in the right lane is all important, where its major effort to return to try again.

as mentioned in the other message, I think all these connectors wear out if you insert and remove too often, so I want to keep the M.2 drives permanently installed until they malfunction or I upgrade the mobo or need a larger drive.

sockets based on pressure ought to be better than ones based on friction. USB sockets are friction sockets.


putting extra USB3 extenders seems a way to localise the wear and tear away from the more expensive equipment, namely mobo, hub, device.

I am not sure I can do this with SATA or other sockets?

anyway, I am thinking in terms of 2 M.2 drives, but with at least one further unused M.2 in case I might need a 3rd one, I like to always have some leeway with all things. And then any further M.2 for non disk drive future uses. which could be 4 x M.2 M-key

OR when you replace the included 2x slot M.2 adapter with 4x slot M.2 adapter (running two 4x slot M.2 adapters), you can bring the total M.2 slots amount to 12x. (4x on MoBo, 4x on one adapter card, 4x on 2nd adapter card.)

Of course, another caveat with MSI Pro X670-P MoBo is, that it's PCI-E slots are 4.0. MSI Godlike MoBo, in the other hand, has PCI-E 5.0 slots all around.

Comparison between MSI Pro X670-P and MSI Godlike,
link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...TUVHLVg2NzBFLUdPRExJS0U=,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

Now I have been scrutinising the comparison, which then raises various questions:

although the Pro board just has PCI-E 4.0,

that comparison for Godlike vs Pro, says:

M.2_1 (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) PCIe 5.0 x4 vs PCIe 5.0 x 4,

ie the Pro's M.2_1 (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) PCIe is 5.0! but I am not sure what all that info means, is the Pro PCIe 5.0 via a different kind of socket? potentially could that in the future be converted to a PCI-E 5.0 slot?

it also says
PCI_E2 gen: 5.0 vs 3.0,

is that 3.0 a problem for being too low?

PCI_E2 bandwidth: x8 vs x1

is this a problem for the Pro as regards speeds

AMD MULTI-GPU Support: yes vs no comment,

does this mean the Pro just supports one GPU?
why would someone want 2 GPUs?

SATA 6G: 8 vs 6

also a bit confusing:

USB 3.2 Gen1 Type A (Rear) 0 vs 4,
USB 3.2 Gen2 Type A (Rear) 7 vs 2
USB 3.2 Gen2 Type C (rear) 0 vs 1
USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type C (Rear) 2 vs 1
USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type C (Front) 1 vs 0

the Pro has Gen1 Type A: 4, Gen2: 2, if Gen2 is more recent, why havent they just done 6 of Gen2?

also I am not sure what it means by Gen2x2,

why not just make everything USB 4.0 and rely on backwards compatibility? or is this to enable more speeds for the higher version of USB and lower for the others, because the total speed limit is bounded.

that way maybe each socket can function at its max speed, rather than slowing as you connect more devices.
https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...TUVHLVg2NzBFLUdPRExJS0U=,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

So, it is really tough to suggest ~£1400 MoBo over ~£500 MoBo, just to have 2-4 more M.2 slots. Of course, MSI Godlike MoBo has other features what MSI Pro X670-P does not have. Still, a tough sale.

could go for fewer M.2 but to keep other advantages, what I would like is max buswidths on all things available at least for future use,

the E-ATX idea does sound compelling as it would have more stuff on the board, eg rather than Godlike maybe some other E-ATX option.

that comparison does say the Pro board has PCIe 5.0 in some format, namely
M.2_1 (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) PCIe, and furthermore 4x, but where no idea what M.2_1 and (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) mean. I assume the 4x means 4 sockets of whatever this is!

I, personally, would buy a cheaper MoBo and would use PCI-E to M.2 adapter card. Sure, i may end up with few M.2 slots less, but i'd save a LOT of money.

I am considering this idea,
there is then the earlier:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product...-wifi-atx-lga1700-motherboard-pro-z790-p-wifi

which appears to have 4x M.2 with M-key, and is about £190 from ebuyer, which is some £300 even cheaper than the Pro?

what do I lose out on with this Pro Z790 instead of the earlier Pro?

and then of course the original Asus mobo suggestion,
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product...atx-am5-motherboard-proart-x670e-creator-wifi

On Asus MoBos, wi-fi is built-in. On MSI MoBos, wi-fi card slots into M.2 E-key slot and can be replaced.

The M.2 E-key wi-fi card is included with MoBo price, so, it essentially costs nothing. It comes with MoBo. And what i was able to gather, it isn't worth it to replace the M.2 E-key wi-fi card with PCI-E based wi-fi card.

For one, M.2 E-key wi-fi card has it's dedicated PCI-E lane, which it operates with. But if you use PCI-E based wi-fi card, you have to use up one of the PCI-E slots, which in your case, would be better suited to use as additional M.2 adapter card.
Also, PCI-E based wi-fi cards aren't any faster than M.2 E-key wi-fi cards. But they can be slower.


E-ATX is bigger and in turn, can have more "stuff" on it than standard ATX MoBo. But PCI-E slots spacing is standard across all MoBos, since it has to align with PCI-E slots PC cases have.

they need to create a new PC case standard with more realistic spacing between the slots! or leave that zone open, where the mobo can supply its own spacing panel. ie a standardised panel size, but the slots within the panel decided by the mobo manufacturer. where the slot panel is part of the mobo kit and not part of the tower case kit. bandwidth is potentially being wasted creating sockets which will never be used to compensate for the size of the GPUs

To understand the difference, you'd need to compare same era hardware. If you were to compare it against older hardware, even today's low-performing hardware is impressive compared to the hardware that was high-performing 5 years ago.


Sure;

Lower-end:
PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core Processor (£495.97 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler (£44.20 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI MEG X670E GODLIKE EATX AM5 Motherboard (£1431.84 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£69.00 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro Tempered Glass ATX Full Tower Case (£131.97 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS GX-750 ATX 3.0 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£137.94 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £2562.14

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-01-10 07:56 GMT+0000

Compared to the latest build suggestion, where i use MSI Pro X670-P MoBo, there are only 2 changes;
MoBo - From MSI Pro X670-P to MSI Godlike
RAM - From Corsair (4x 16GB) to two sets of Kingston 2x 16GB (total of 64GB).

Now, while Kingston RAM does come in two separate sets, rather than one set of 4 sticks, MSI has tested this very specific RAM and it will work when all 4x RAM slots are populated. That much is also seen from MoBo memory compatibility list.

Upper-end:
PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core Processor (£495.97 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 5 CPU Cooler (£104.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI MEG X670E GODLIKE EATX AM5 Motherboard (£1431.84 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL40 Memory (£125.61 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 990 Pro 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£94.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro Tempered Glass ATX Full Tower Case (£131.97 @ Amazon UK)
PSU: Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 ATX 3.0 (£674.00 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Case Fan: Noctua A14 industrialPPC-2000 107.42 CFM 140 mm Fan (£28.95 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £3387.63

whistles again because of the price!

but the fans do add to the price.

Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-01-10 07:57 GMT+0000

Compared to the lower-end;
CPU cooler - Replaced to the Be Quiet! one which is quieter than Thermalright but costs quite a bit more.
SSD - From 970 Evo Plus 1TB (PCI-E 3.0) to 990 Pro 1TB (PCI-E 4.0). There are PCI-E 5.0 drives as well, but they all cost premium and need cooling, either passive or active.
PSU - From Seasonic Focus GX-750 ATX 3.0 to Seasonic PRIME TX-1600 ATX 3.0 for best efficiency there is + ample power connections. Also, all Seasonic PRIME PSUs have 12 years of warranty (highest there is).
Case fans - Also included 7x 140mm Noctua fans, where the idea is that you install all of them and run them at ~1000 RPM, to get good enough cooling inside the PC case, with little, if any, audible noise. This way, you need to uninstall two Phanteks fans the PC case comes with.

they dont sell the Phantek fanless for people who want to supply their own fans?

Most people buy beefier PSU since they need the wattage capacity, but buying beefier PSU for connectors alone is also a valid option. Since splitting/extending power cables isn't a good idea. You can end up overloading the cable and melt it.


That is up to you. I can only suggest hardware based on your current needs. I can not foresee IF you are going to utilize the bought hardware at it's fullest or not. Or if you lack certain hardware features in the future.

I think at the moment to focus on a decision for the mobo, eg 4 x M.2 is maybe enough, and the ASUS seems to have 4x M.2, not sure what version of PCIe it is,

the MSI Pro Z790 seems to have 4x M.2 M-key also and a 5th with E-key,

paying half the price and upgrading twice as fast may well be a better path, as you would track the latest technology better. Also I can then limit more the unforeseeable facilities, and unlimit them more accurately with a later upgrade of the mobo.

I would like the max speeds for the different things more than having more sockets, but not the really expensive top speeds eg that 10000 mobo!

is there an E-ATX like the godlike, but with fewer M.2 sockets, but otherwise quite similar?

I think ATX boards are maybe too small for me,

with the E-ATX what am I getting for the steep extra price?

more M.2 sockets, more and better USB sockets, more SATA sockets, faster and better PCI sockets, any other advantages?

all these mobos would have the same CPU I requested, from the user perspective the boosts are with the graphics on the monitor, disk speeds and sizes, internet speeds, any other improvements the user would notice for the extra price?

 

[Aeacus]

some form of error correcting code? ie where if less info is corrupted, the corrupted info can be mathematically "repaired" and the data is intact.

No.

Unlike HDDs which use a rotating magnetic disk, SSDs use NAND flash memory to store information.

Each NAND flash memory chip contains cells, which can only be written to or erased a limited number of times before they wear out. Once these cells reach their limit, they can no longer hold data reliably, in a process known as write endurance.

SSD wear leveling is a technique used to prolong the lifespan of SSDs by ensuring all memory cells are used evenly. Without wear leveling, some cells are written to more than others, wearing out more quickly, while others are used less. By spreading the write and erase cycles across all memory cells, wear leveling prevents any individual cell from reaching its end of life prematurely.

How Does SSD Wear Leveling Work?
Wear leveling is managed by the SSD controller, a small processor dedicated to handling the drive's operations. There are primarily two types of wear leveling: static and dynamic.

* Dynamic wear leveling redistributes data across the SSD's memory cells by keeping track of how many times each block has been written. When data is written to the drive, it is written to the least used blocks first. However, dynamic wear leveling only considers blocks that are currently in use. This means that if certain data blocks are static and rarely change, they are not moved around, leading to uneven wear.
* Static wear leveling keeps track of used and unused blocks and moves data from frequently written blocks to lesser-used areas, even if that involves relocating static data that hasn't recently changed. Distributing data in this manner typically results in a more even distribution of writes across the SSD cells but can also lead to slightly more write operations than dynamic wear leveling. However, the overall increase in lifespan more than makes up for the slight increase in write operations.

But it's not either-or when it comes to SSD wear leveling. Most SSDs will use a combination of both wear leveling types to manage data and ensure even distribution, prolonging the drive's lifespan.

Source + further reading: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-ssd-wear-leveling/

but it must pretend to have sectors? eg where I have cloned a magnetic sata drive to an SSD one, the machine boots identically to before, where the magnetic one will arrange the data in sectors, the SSD must be pretending to have sectors?

SSD does not have "sectors". What it has, are "pages" which form "blocks".

SSDs serve the same purpose as HDDs: they store data and files for long-term use. The difference is that SSDs use a type of memory called "flash memory," which is similar to RAM. But, unlike RAM, which clears its data whenever the computer powers down, the data on an SSD persists even when it loses power.

If you took apart a typical HDD, you'd see a stack of magnetic plates with a reading needle—kind of like a vinyl record player. Before the needle can read or write data, the plates have to spin around to the right location.

Whereas SSDs use a grid of electrical cells to send and receive data quickly. These grids are separated into sections called "pages," and these pages are where data is stored. Pages are clumped together to form "blocks." Furthermore, SSDs are called "solid-state" because they have no moving parts.

Why is this necessary to know? Because SSDs can only write to empty pages in a block. In HDDs, data can be written to any location on the plate at any time, and that means that data can be easily overwritten. SSDs can't directly overwrite data in individual pages. They can only write data to empty pages in a block.

So then, how do SSDs handle data deletion? When enough pages in a block are marked as unused, the SSD commits the entire block's worth of data to memory, erases the entire block, then re-commits the data from memory back to the block while leaving the unused pages blank. Note that erasing a block doesn't necessarily mean the data is fully gone, but you can still securely delete data on an SSD.

However, the consequence of how SSDs operate means that your SSD will become slower over time.

When you have a fresh SSD, it's loaded entirely with blocks full of blank pages. When you write new data to the SSD, it can immediately write to those blank pages with blazing speeds. However, as more and more data gets written, the blank pages run out, and you're left with random unused pages scattered throughout the blocks.

Since an SSD can't directly overwrite an individual page, every time you want to write new data from that point on, the SSD needs to:

1. Find a block with enough pages marked "unused"
2. Record which pages in that block are still necessary
3. Reset every page in that block to blank
4. Rewrite the necessary pages into the freshly reset block
5. Fill the remaining pages with the new data

So, in essence, once you've gone through all of the blank pages from a new SSD purchase, your drive will have to go through this process whenever it wants to write new data. This is how most flash memory works.

That said, it's still much faster than a traditional HDD, and the speed gains are absolutely worth the purchase of an SSD over an HDD.

Source + further reading: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/solidstate-drives-work-makeuseof-explains/

As of why your OS is bootable once you clone the drive over, is because you made 1:1 clone of OS drive. For OS, it doesn't matter if it lives on HDD or SSD, nor does it matter which blocks the boot manager is located on SSD. But it does matter when it comes to HDD. Boot manager is usually written into 1st sectors since those have the fastest access to.

the SATA connector presumably doesnt know whether the attached device is magnetic or SSD?

Connector itself has 0 clue. Who knows which drive you plugged in, is MoBo (BIOS/UEFI to be exact).

can they pay him with bitcoin?
I heard the transactions are anonymous! maybe via VPN if he pretends to be in the US

Official payments (e.g paycheck) can't be done via cryptocurrency due to the anonymity of it. Also, cryptocurrency is very volatile and there are even fewer exchange places, to exchange cryptocurrency into normal currency.

I have no other option! if I want to copy backups to 5 powered drives, there are only 2 wall sockets, and I need a power socket for the PSU, and for the powered USB2 hub,

There is always an option.

For your case, haven't you thought about HDD docking station?
E.g this thing that supports both SATA and IDE drives,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/External-Docking-Station-Reader-Offline-Black/dp/B07XGLKWQ3/

It would free up cable clutter a lot. Just plug the drive in when you need to use it. Afterwards, store the drive in cupboard or any other convenient place.

by competitive, I mean better than the new low end Dells and HPs eg the ones for sale in supermarkets.

eg where you could viably sell it second hand where its not yet obsolete, but maybe you have to upgrade the windows version.

We do not know what kind of hardware future brings, thus, it would be impossible to predict how long your new build is able to hold it's own, until low-end prebuilt PCs catch up.

As of selling it 2nd hand, it depends on usage case. E.g old Xeon CPUs, with multiple cores, are still somewhat viable as gaming PCs. But if it's for office use, then it doesn't matter at all how beefy CPU it has in it. Nor it matters what OS it runs. Since while Win can restrict older hardware (e.g Win11 won't work on my PC, "officially"), one just needs to install GNU/Linux disto on the old machine and machine lives again.

can you use 1 DDR5 stick?

Yes, you can.

With DDR5, even when using single stick, you get dual-channel RAM. This wasn't possible with DDR4 and older versions. You had to have 2 sticks in proper slots for dual-channel.
E.g in DDR4, one stick has single 64-bit channel. So, if you wanted to have dual-channel RAM, you needed to have two sticks. But in DDR5 stick, it has two 32-bit channels, making dual-channel RAM possible even when using single stick of DDR5.

are those the best in terms of silence and coolability?

These 140mm Noctua fans are one of the best in terms of airflow and static pressure. So, cooling wise, they are great.
Of course, there are even better fans out there, like Delta industrial fans (essentially king when it comes to fans). Also, very robust. But since Delta Electronics makes industrial fans, they aren't that well suited for PC case fans. So, 2nd best option to Delta, is Noctua.

E.g Delta Electronics industrial 92mm, 11000 RPM fan;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAFB9w2Rh0Y


Or Delta Electronics industrial 200mm, 7400 RPM fan;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blU_2wIMT4U


Noise wise, it's a balancing act. Reduce fan RPM too much, to get minimal noise, whereby fan hardly moves any air. Increase fan RPM to get more airflow but also more noise. So, only trick that works, is using as much fans as PC case supports, so that each fan has to work a bit, to maintain overall good airflow with minimal noise.

but with your 3 fans 2000rpm at 37dB versus 6 fans 1000rpm at 20dB idea,
I think its the 1000rpm decibels that matter, are these also better for the Noctua?

Given that my Corsair ML Pro fans at 2000 RPM produce 37 dB(A) and Noctua fans at 2000 RPM produce 31.5 dB(A), then yes, at ~1000 RPM, Noctua fans are quieter than my Corsair ML Pro fans.

the original tower design must be from approx 1980?

Hard to tell.

My IBM and Intel 286/386/486 PCs were all in "factory" form, meaning laying on their side. Same with Pentium I 133 and Pentium i 166. Once i got Pentium II 266, it came in "tower" form, standing upright. So, around that time i guess. Btw, my Pentium II 266 was brand new in 1998.

can you recommend any high quality short USB3 extenders, also I dont know if USB4 has these available yet?

CableCreation products have reviewed well, as being durable and long lasting,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/page/C41CD2B9-4085-4AD3-8BE1-2C0FE023C150

I am not sure I can do this with SATA or other sockets?

With SATA, you can, since there are SATA extension cables as well, both the power and data cables.

As of M.2, well, that's direct connect port and only way would be using PCI-E to M.2 adapter.

that comparison for Godlike vs Pro, says:

M.2_1 (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) PCIe 5.0 x4 vs PCIe 5.0 x 4,

ie the Pro's M.2_1 (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) PCIe is 5.0! but I am not sure what all that info means, is the Pro PCIe 5.0 via a different kind of socket? potentially could that in the future be converted to a PCI-E 5.0 slot?

MSI Pro MoBo 1st M.2 slot is PCI-E 5.0 (aka Gen5), same as it is on MSI Godlike MoBo. Both M.2 ports are identical.

it also says
PCI_E2 gen: 5.0 vs 3.0,

is that 3.0 a problem for being too low?

This refers to 2nd PCI-E slot on the MoBo (when you read from top to bottom).
On MSI Pro MoBo, 2nd PCI-E slot is physically x4 slot, which only has PCI-E 3.0 and it is x1, meaning that it is one lane slot..... It's getting to complex to write it down, so take a look of this image instead, that i made, for clarification;

Color legend;
Red - PCI-E slots
Blue - M.2 slots
Cyan/light blue - actual space where M.2 drive goes

does this mean the Pro just supports one GPU?
why would someone want 2 GPUs?

Workstation use, by using two GPUs side-by-side for 3D render. Won't help for gaming, since SLI/Crossfire is long dead when it comes to gaming.

also a bit confusing:

USB 3.2 Gen1 Type A (Rear) 0 vs 4,
USB 3.2 Gen2 Type A (Rear) 7 vs 2
USB 3.2 Gen2 Type C (rear) 0 vs 1
USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type C (Rear) 2 vs 1
USB 3.2 Gen2x2 Type C (Front) 1 vs 0

the Pro has Gen1 Type A: 4, Gen2: 2, if Gen2 is more recent, why havent they just done 6 of Gen2?

also I am not sure what it means by Gen2x2,

why not just make everything USB 4.0 and rely on backwards compatibility? or is this to enable more speeds for the higher version of USB and lower for the others, because the total speed limit is bounded.

"A bit" is severe understatement.

Those guys in USB, they really went haywire with the naming scheme.

Explanation of it goes like so;
USB 3.2 Gen 1 = 5 Gbit/s (or 0.45 GB/s)
USB 3.2 Gen 2 = 10 Gbit/s (or 1.1 GB/s)
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 = 20 Gbit/s (or 2.2 GB/s)

As of why MSI Pro MoBo has only 2x USB 10 Gbit/s connectors and 4x USB 5 Gbit/s connectors, while MSI could've just added 6x USB 10 Gbit/s connectors - cost.
MSI Pro MoBo is mid-tier and to keep the price low, it also won't come with as many fast USB connectors as e.g MSI Godlike MoBo comes with.

that comparison does say the Pro board has PCIe 5.0 in some format, namely
M.2_1 (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) PCIe, and furthermore 4x, but where no idea what M.2_1 and (Gen3/Gen4/Gen5) mean. I assume the 4x means 4 sockets of whatever this is!

As is written on MSI comparison, the headline essentially means;
M.2 slot, either Gen3 (PCI-E 3.0), Gen4 (PCI-E 4.0) or Gen5 (PCI-E 5.0).
Whereby next line actually tells which gen (version of PCI-E) the M.2 slot is.
E.g PCI-E 5.0.

"x4" for M.2 slot means that the M.2 slot utilizes 4 PCI-E lanes.

the E-ATX idea does sound compelling as it would have more stuff on the board, eg rather than Godlike maybe some other E-ATX option.

is there an E-ATX like the godlike, but with fewer M.2 sockets, but otherwise quite similar?

For other E-ATX options, other than MSI Godlike, you have:
* MSI MEG X670E ACE, specs: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-ACE
* Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME, specs: https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-crosshair-x670e-extreme-model/

And some more options from other brands as well, like AsRock (4x MoBos) and Gigabyte (2x MoBos).

E.g comparison between MSI Godlike, MSI Ace and MSI Pro;
link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...0U=,TUVHLVg2NzBFLUFDRQ==,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

And 2-way comparison between MSI Godlike and MSI Ace;
link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...TUVHLVg2NzBFLUdPRExJS0U=,TUVHLVg2NzBFLUFDRQ==

MSI Ace MoBo essentially costs half of what MSI Godlike MoBo costs, despite both being E-ATX and almost same features.

I am considering this idea,
there is then the earlier:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product...-wifi-atx-lga1700-motherboard-pro-z790-p-wifi

which appears to have 4x M.2 with M-key, and is about £190 from ebuyer, which is some £300 even cheaper than the Pro?

what do I lose out on with this Pro Z790 instead of the earlier Pro?

What you loose out, is CPU.

Z790 chipset is Intel and supports only Intel CPUs.

bandwidth is potentially being wasted creating sockets which will never be used to compensate for the size of the GPUs

This is true to an extent.

Most MoBos have the additional PCI-E slots to utilize chipset PCI-E lanes, rather than CPU PCI-E lanes. And on some MoBos, you can "turn off" other PCI-E slots. Well, those actually come as "turned off", whereby when you want to "turn them on", you have to divide the available PCI-E lanes between 1st PCI-E slot and other PCI-E slots.

whistles again because of the price!

they dont sell the Phantek fanless for people who want to supply their own fans?

That depends on PC case manufacturer, but the consensus is, that most people who buy PC cases, are such penny-pinchers, that they won't buy additional case fans and are happily using the few fans PC case comes with. So, not to let those people to overheat their PC, case manufacturers add few fans with their PC cases, that would suffice for bare minimal airflow.

For enthusiasts, these extra fans are essentially dead-weight, since stock fans usually are poor performing ones and are replaced regardless. E.g i have a stack of 140mm Corsair AF140L fans that my PC cases came with. Those are airflow fans and poor ones at that. So, i have no use for those fans.

with the E-ATX what am I getting for the steep extra price?

more M.2 sockets, more and better USB sockets, more SATA sockets, faster and better PCI sockets, any other advantages?

all these mobos would have the same CPU I requested, from the user perspective the boosts are with the graphics on the monitor, disk speeds and sizes, internet speeds, any other improvements the user would notice for the extra price?

I'll compare MSI Pro against MSI Ace (E-ATX),
MSI comparison: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...are=TUVHLVg2NzBFLUFDRQ==,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

Besides the more connectors for M.2 and also faster USB ports MSI Ace has, it also offers more extra stuff with MoBo;
Accessories with MSI Pro:

Accessories with MSI Ace (E-ATX):

Another big difference, especially in terms of performance, namely system stability, is the amount of power phases MoBo has. This (power phases), is something commoners don't know 0 about, but experts know very well the importance of it.

For example;
MSI Pro has 14+2+1 power phases
MSI Ace has 22+2+1 power phases
In comparison, my MSI Z170A Gaming M5 (from 2015) has 12 power phases

What's the diff? Well;

A motherboard power phase refers to the number of voltage regulator modules (VRMs) on a motherboard that regulates the voltage supplied to the CPU and other components. The power phase is essential to any motherboard, ensuring stable and reliable power delivery to the CPU and other vital components. The more power phases a motherboard has, its power delivery will be more stable and efficient.

This is because each VRM is responsible for regulating a specific portion of the power supply, and the more VRMs there are, the more evenly distributed the load will be. The power phases on a motherboard can vary depending on the model and intended use. For example, a high-end gaming motherboard might have 12 or more power phases, while a bare office motherboard might only have 4 or 6.

All of these factors work together to ensure stable and reliable power delivery to the CPU and other vital components, which is essential for the optimal performance and longevity of the system.

As of to know more about MoBos, i suggest that you read/watch their reviews.

MSI Ace review: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/msi-x670e-ace-review

MSI Pro review:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scux4n5neVg

 

[Richard1234]

I wrote a detailed reply, but the system isnt allowing me to post the reply and I have run out of time.

I have saved a draft and cut and paste also to a file, to maybe try and post in fragments later.

 

[Richard1234]

sending in fragments, my earlier reply which I couldnt post.

No.


Source + further reading: https://www.makeuseof.com/what-is-ssd-wear-leveling/


SSD does not have "sectors". What it has, are "pages" which form "blocks".


Source + further reading: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/solidstate-drives-work-makeuseof-explains/

very interesting problem, really its a software problem. its a more difficult version of the related problem of arranging a filesystem with the ability to delete files on a "write once read many" (WORM) medium such as CD-R, DVD-R, BD-R. with this SSD problem I see difficult to reconcile demands! eg evening the spread leads to using up the total lifetime faster AND a timecost because of the redundant rewriting of already written data.

perhaps I have misunderstood, but I personally think this problem is best dealt with by the OS and not by the hardware, because the hardware wont know when a sector is "deleted".

I think evening the spread is a bad MO. user disks tend to fill up with files which are written once and never deleted or modified, eg downloaded software, downloaded documents, saved webpages etc. if you keep rewriting written stuff, you'll be shunting an increasingly huge load of stuff that will never change.

instead best MO is if the OS puts writes consecutively on the SSD. where you can think of a write "cursor" progressing from left to write consecutively.

deletes are just marked as deleted, but the data remains and new data is written from where the cursor is. a bit like WORM media eg a CD-R. when the cursor reaches the end of the disk,
the cursor now goes to the start of the disk, and now writes to zones marked as deleted, and skips over zones marked as written, with the cursor progressing rightwards only. again marking further deletes as deleted but only writing from the next deleted or unused zone that the cursor reaches.

this way the write cursor scans through the disk left to right repeatedly, skipping over written zones, where a file written in the first scan and never deleted is only written to once.

the OS thus just keeps track of how many scans of the disk have been done and once this reaches the limit, the disk now is read only, even though various zones have been written to much less.

if you write and delete a 1MB disk 1024 times, that becomes a 1G zone just written once. whereas ordinarily a 1MB zone might be written to 1024x.

but if the hardware manages writes internally, the problem is it doesnt know which zones are deleted as deletion is a metalevel thing.

 

[Richard1234]

by splitting the reply in fragments, I have found what the system is rejecting, but I cant mention it or this post will be rejected! hint: mention of alternative payment systems!

There is always an option.

For your case, haven't you thought about HDD docking station?
E.g this thing that supports both SATA and IDE drives,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/External-Docking-Station-Reader-Offline-Black/dp/B07XGLKWQ3/

It would free up cable clutter a lot. Just plug the drive in when you need to use it. Afterwards, store the drive in cupboard or any other convenient place.

but I see a potential problem of continual insertion and removal, which could wear out the contacts. looking at one of my WD Blue 2T drives, the wearable brass strip-like contacts are on the drive. but what I have done is where I bought a batch of identical encasements I use the same transformer for several. but I only share transformers of identical encasements.

I want only 1 insertion action at the following:
1. mobo sockets
2. add in card sockets
3. hub sockets
4. built in cable sockets eg built in hub cable socket
5. device sockets

because each insertion and removal will wear out the socket, instead to have insertion and removal "at a distance" at an extender. eg if a USB3 drive has a removable socket, then I will plug and remove that repeatedly at one end of an extender cable connected to a hub socket.

I insert and remove all the time with USB hubs, and I have lost count of how many hubs I have had to discard!

never again! (via extender cables).

We do not know what kind of hardware future brings, thus, it would be impossible to predict how long your new build is able to hold it's own, until low-end prebuilt PCs catch up.

but one can look at the past! with investments they always warn "past performance is no indication of future results", BUT all investment decisions ARE based on extrapolating the past, and it does USUALLY work if used with skill and experience. its a practical MO at least, I think the manufacturers slow down advances in order to make more money from progress. eg if you went from 1980 technology to 2040 technology in one day in 1985, you'd not make any further money for the next 55 years!


so what they do is artificially fake slower progress! they might have the technology of 2030 already, but they only move the consumer technology to that slowly. eg my 2010 PC is 4-core, but I think even in 2015 supermarket PCs were 2 core.

someone told me future iphone versions are already designed, they just wait till the market for the earlier one to dry up before announcing the new one publicly as if freshly designed!

basically I can guarantee you that progress wont be too fast! because of conflicts of interest caused by overhasty progress.

thus if you look at the timelags in the past for a low end budget supermarket PC to catch up with a £500 optimised home built PC tower, that will probably be accurate for the future.

As of selling it 2nd hand, it depends on usage case. E.g old Xeon CPUs, with multiple cores, are still somewhat viable as gaming PCs. But if it's for office use, then it doesn't matter at all how beefy CPU it has in it. Nor it matters what OS it runs. Since while Win can restrict older hardware (e.g Win11 won't work on my PC, "officially"), one just needs to install GNU/Linux disto on the old machine and machine lives again.

my 2010 PC doesnt meet Microsoft's criteria for Win 10, so I never upgraded, until I contacted Norton that their latest version didnt run on XP on my 2010 PC, they told me "oh, you can install Windows 10 on your 2010 PC", I then tried that and no problem! works flawlessly, but eg I cant use higher than HD res, but that probably just needs a new gfx card. But I am right now working towards a brand new PC in order to get better speeds and hardware compatibility.

also I think various of the sockets on my current mobo and cards are worn out from too much insertion and removal.

Yes, you can.

With DDR5, even when using single stick, you get dual-channel RAM. This wasn't possible with DDR4 and older versions. You had to have 2 sticks in proper slots for dual-channel.
E.g in DDR4, one stick has single 64-bit channel. So, if you wanted to have dual-channel RAM, you needed to have two sticks. But in DDR5 stick, it has two 32-bit channels, making dual-channel RAM possible even when using single stick of DDR5.

clever engineering! dual channel with a single stick!

These 140mm Noctua fans are one of the best in terms of airflow and static pressure. So, cooling wise, they are great.
Of course, there are even better fans out there, like Delta industrial fans (essentially king when it comes to fans). Also, very robust. But since Delta Electronics makes industrial fans, they aren't that well suited for PC case fans. So, 2nd best option to Delta, is Noctua.

E.g Delta Electronics industrial 92mm, 11000 RPM fan;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAFB9w2Rh0Y


Or Delta Electronics industrial 200mm, 7400 RPM fan;

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blU_2wIMT4U


Noise wise, it's a balancing act. Reduce fan RPM too much, to get minimal noise, whereby fan hardly moves any air. Increase fan RPM to get more airflow but also more noise. So, only trick that works, is using as much fans as PC case supports, so that each fan has to work a bit, to maintain overall good airflow with minimal noise.

I will try this rationale of mainly using the system at the lowest RPMs,

Given that my Corsair ML Pro fans at 2000 RPM produce 37 dB(A) and Noctua fans at 2000 RPM produce 31.5 dB(A), then yes, at ~1000 RPM, Noctua fans are quieter than my Corsair ML Pro fans.


Hard to tell.

My IBM and Intel 286/386/486 PCs were all in "factory" form, meaning laying on their side. Same with Pentium I 133 and Pentium i 166. Once i got Pentium II 266, it came in "tower" form, standing upright. So, around that time i guess. Btw, my Pentium II 266 was brand new in 1998.

is that sideways form internally identical to the tower form, but with say drive bays the other way round?

the Amiga 1000 used a sideways form

CableCreation products have reviewed well, as being durable and long lasting,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/page/C41CD2B9-4085-4AD3-8BE1-2C0FE023C150

With SATA, you can, since there are SATA extension cables as well, both the power and data cables.

are there any specific purchase links for such that you can recommend?


I bought various SATA cables to the mobo, and the best ones have a release clip for insertion and removal, vastly better than ones without that clip!

so for extension ones, maybe some have a better design for easier connecting?

As of M.2, well, that's direct connect port and only way would be using PCI-E to M.2 adapter.


MSI Pro MoBo 1st M.2 slot is PCI-E 5.0 (aka Gen5), same as it is on MSI Godlike MoBo. Both M.2 ports are identical.


This refers to 2nd PCI-E slot on the MoBo (when you read from top to bottom).
On MSI Pro MoBo, 2nd PCI-E slot is physically x4 slot, which only has PCI-E 3.0 and it is x1, meaning that it is one lane slot..... It's getting to complex to write it down, so take a look of this image instead, that i made, for clarification;

the diagram greatly helps, a picture is worth a 1000 words!

which is the E-key in the diagram? presumably for the wifi?

Color legend;

Red - PCI-E slots
Blue - M.2 slots
Cyan/light blue - actual space where M.2 drive goes


Workstation use, by using two GPUs side-by-side for 3D render. Won't help for gaming, since SLI/Crossfire is long dead when it comes to gaming.

ok, I have a widescreen active 3D TV, so potentially could be interesting!but initially I wont use an external GPU.

"A bit" is severe understatement.

Those guys in USB, they really went haywire with the naming scheme.

Explanation of it goes like so;
USB 3.2 Gen 1 = 5 Gbit/s (or 0.45 GB/s)
USB 3.2 Gen 2 = 10 Gbit/s (or 1.1 GB/s)
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 = 20 Gbit/s (or 2.2 GB/s)

very useful clarification! I had wondered whether 2x2 meant some kind of twin socket!

As of why MSI Pro MoBo has only 2x USB 10 Gbit/s connectors and 4x USB 5 Gbit/s connectors, while MSI could've just added 6x USB 10 Gbit/s connectors - cost.
MSI Pro MoBo is mid-tier and to keep the price low, it also won't come with as many fast USB connectors as e.g MSI Godlike MoBo comes with.


As is written on MSI comparison, the headline essentially means;
M.2 slot, either Gen3 (PCI-E 3.0), Gen4 (PCI-E 4.0) or Gen5 (PCI-E 5.0).
Whereby next line actually tells which gen (version of PCI-E) the M.2 slot is.
E.g PCI-E 5.0.

"x4" for M.2 slot means that the M.2 slot utilizes 4 PCI-E lanes.

there is then the problem of how to tell which socket is which version of USB ?


with my 2010 mobo, I noticed that wireless is much slower if I use some USB sockets,

but I cannot see any indication of which are the slower ones, and have to find out the hard way of webpages taking 10 years to load.


is the hardware marked in any way, or do I have to study a manual?

For other E-ATX options, other than MSI Godlike, you have:
* MSI MEG X670E ACE, specs: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-ACE
* Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME, specs: https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-crosshair/rog-crosshair-x670e-extreme-model/

Asus are using the same "X670E" label as MSI?

how does the Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME
compare with the Ace? both in terms of price and in terms of specification versions, speeds, socket counts?

And some more options from other brands as well, like AsRock (4x MoBos) and Gigabyte (2x MoBos).

E.g comparison between MSI Godlike, MSI Ace and MSI Pro;
link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...0U=,TUVHLVg2NzBFLUFDRQ==,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

And 2-way comparison between MSI Godlike and MSI Ace;
link: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...TUVHLVg2NzBFLUdPRExJS0U=,TUVHLVg2NzBFLUFDRQ==

MSI Ace MoBo essentially costs half of what MSI Godlike MoBo costs, despite both being E-ATX and almost same features.

yes, I think Ace will be a much better decision if it is £700 less. I have scrutinised the 3 way comparison.

I would prefer to compromise number of sockets rather than specification level and speed.

and the Ace can do dual GPU, maybe I wont ever use that, but I keep my options open.


better to have fewer top speed top spec sockets than to have more lower speed or lower specification version sockets.

the Ace is interesting because its the same spec and speed as Godlike, just with fewer sockets.

I think I currently use 3 SATA sockets, but an M.2 drive would replace one or two of the SATA drives, which then just leaves the panasonic 3D bluray writer on SATA.


with the 3-way comparison, the Ace does 5 system fans, whereas Godlike and Pro are 6, is this a problem?


also "Power Connector (PCIE_PWR 4pin or 6 pin), Godlike is 1, the others are 0, what is this attribute?


"Slow Mode Booting Jumper (JSLOW)", Ace is 1, the other 2 are 0.


SATA 6G, Godlike is 8, the other two are 6.

What you loose out, is CPU.

Z790 chipset is Intel and supports only Intel CPUs.

argh! I didnt read carefully!

This is true to an extent.

Most MoBos have the additional PCI-E slots to utilize chipset PCI-E lanes, rather than CPU PCI-E lanes. And on some MoBos, you can "turn off" other PCI-E slots. Well, those actually come as "turned off", whereby when you want to "turn them on", you have to divide the available PCI-E lanes between 1st PCI-E slot and other PCI-E slots.

for the PCI_E's, some say source is CPU some say Chipset,

eg

PCI_E2 source: CPU CPU Chipset (Godlike vs Ace vs Pro)

PCI_E3 source: CPU CPU CPU

M.2_2 source: Chipset Chipset Chipset


much of a muchness or very relevant whether one is chipset or CPU?

I am going the other direction now for the Ace, more subdued whistling!

 

[Richard1234]

That depends on PC case manufacturer, but the consensus is, that most people who buy PC cases, are such penny-pinchers, that they won't buy additional case fans and are happily using the few fans PC case comes with. So, not to let those people to overheat their PC, case manufacturers add few fans with their PC cases, that would suffice for bare minimal airflow.

For enthusiasts, these extra fans are essentially dead-weight, since stock fans usually are poor performing ones and are replaced regardless. E.g i have a stack of 140mm Corsair AF140L fans that my PC cases came with. Those are airflow fans and poor ones at that. So, i have no use for those fans.

you should consider selling those on ebay. what you need to do is firstly arrange a parcel, enclose them in waterproofing, eg press seal freezer bags, then shield from knocks eg bubble wrap, and then arrange a box eg tailor a box from a bigger box. then find out courier prices, for the UK I use courier comparison sites eg parcelhero and parcel2go. At this point list the items on ebay, either all of them as one joblot listing, or item by item, listed as unused. also use ebays Global Shipping Program (GSP), where you despatch them "locally", but ebay deals with international despatch. eg I listed an item for £6 including £2.80 UK postage, and someone from Spain bought the item paying £22, where I just received £6 and I posted it to ebay's UK GSP address. that item took months to sell.

on ebay if you search for the same item, on the left you can select "Show only" + "sold items", to see if others have sold such and what they got. You can list things for any price, but noone might buy, "show only" + "sold items" shows items which someone did buy, eg in the last 90 days.

 

[Richard1234]

I'll compare MSI Pro against MSI Ace (E-ATX),
MSI comparison: https://www.msi.com/Motherboards/Pr...are=TUVHLVg2NzBFLUFDRQ==,UFJPLVg2NzAtUC1XSUZJ

Besides the more connectors for M.2 and also faster USB ports MSI Ace has, it also offers more extra stuff with MoBo;
Accessories with MSI Pro:

Accessories with MSI Ace (E-ATX):

can you clarify what that M.2 Xpander is? I think it was in some photos, but I have lost track where.


also how will I know which USB socket is which specification, are they labelled, or do I have to pore over the manual?

Another big difference, especially in terms of performance, namely system stability, is the amount of power phases MoBo has. This (power phases), is something commoners don't know 0 about, but experts know very well the importance of it.

For example;
MSI Pro has 14+2+1 power phases
MSI Ace has 22+2+1 power phases
In comparison, my MSI Z170A Gaming M5 (from 2015) has 12 power phases

What's the diff? Well;

this is useful info, what are the power phases for the Godlike?

where do you find the power phase info?

As of to know more about MoBos, i suggest that you read/watch their reviews.

MSI Ace review: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/msi-x670e-ace-review

MSI Pro review:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=scux4n5neVg

do you have a review link for the Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME?

 

[Aeacus]

but I personally think this problem is best dealt with by the OS and not by the hardware, because the hardware wont know when a sector is "deleted".

the OS thus just keeps track of how many scans of the disk have been done and once this reaches the limit, the disk now is read only, even though various zones have been written to much less.

You're forgetting one crucial aspect as of why it can't be OS'es responsibility and why each drive does the counting for themselves: OS reinstall. Or system swap.

Now, if OS would keep the track of read/writes on a SSD, as soon as you wipe the OS and make clean install (or transfer the drive from one system to another, e.g during PC hardware upgrade), all that tracking data is gone. So, it is best when SSD itself keeps track of it, since then it doesn't matter which system you use it in or if you wipe the OS and make a clean OS install.

is that sideways form internally identical to the tower form, but with say drive bays the other way round?

More-or-less, yes.

MoBo location has remained the same between factory and tower type. PSU has moved around a bit. Early towers had the PSU at the top, just like your current build has it. While current/modern towers have the PSU at the bottom.

Though, with tower case, you don't have to put it upright actually. You can lay it on the side as well and it works just fine. Though, airflow would be a bit different since when you lay the tower on it's side, airflow would be: front and left - intake, right and rear - exhaust. Where by natural convection, hot air would collect just below the transparent side panel (since that would be the top of the case then).

are there any specific purchase links for such that you can recommend?


I bought various SATA cables to the mobo, and the best ones have a release clip for insertion and removal, vastly better than ones without that clip!

so for extension ones, maybe some have a better design for easier connecting?

Well, i linked the CableCreation amazon page. Just navigate to correct cable and buy it.

Now, i don't have any CableCreation products for myself.
Instead, i have CableMod cables,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/products/?orderby=date

From CableMod, i've bought USB extensions (internal USB 2.0), fan cable extensions, I/O extensions,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/product-category/cable-extensions/

And of course, full power cable kits as well,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/product-category/cables/

They also sell SATA cables, those good metal clip ones. But since i already had SATA cables with metal clips (were included with my MoBo), i didn't buy those from there.
But what i additionally bought, were cable combs and screws as well,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/product-category/accessories/

CableMod is my de facto store for my PC modding.

that you can recommend?

Oh, one thing that i need to clarify about that;

Do note that all the PC components that i've shared here in this topic (and elsewhere in the forums) are suggestions and not recommendations.
Suggestion, as such, is an idea that i present for your consideration while backed up with additional data (specs page, reviews, comparisons etc) where you have easy way to access for additional information. With suggestion, it's up to you to decide which part to go with.
Recommendation, in the other hand, is a statement where i basically say that:"this is the one", without proving why i want you to go with this part and where you only have my word to rely on.
If i do recommend something (happens very rarely), i also state that it's a recommendation.

which is the E-key in the diagram? presumably for the wifi?

This is actually very good question since i couldn't find the M.2 E-key on the MoBo itself. Nor is there any word about it in the MoBo manual.

I'm starting to think that the wi-fi module is built-in, and the description on MSI site is wrong.

Found this in-depth unboxing video of the MoBo, which goes over all ports MoBo has, but doesn't show the M.2 E-key port (since MoBo doesn't have that);

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG9yGTOz-f0


Since this is an issue, i ended up posting my question regarding this on MSI official forums,
topic i made: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/amd-600-series-mobo-m-2-e-key-wi-fi-card-slot.392680/

I'll let you know what response i get.

very useful clarification! I had wondered whether 2x2 meant some kind of twin socket!

USB revisions have more-or-less doubled the speed with each revision. But naming scheme did hit the gutter at some point.

Speed - Official name - (What the actual name could be);
1.5 Mbit/s - USB 1.0 - (USB 1.0)
12 Mbit/s - USB 1.1 - (USB 1.1)
480 Mbit/s - USB 2.0 - (USB 2.0)
5 Gbit/s - USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 Gen 1 or USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 - (USB 3.0)
10 Gbit/s - USB 3.1 Gen 2 or USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 or USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 - (USB 4.0)
20 Gbit/s - USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 - (USB 5.0)
40 Gbit/s - USB4 - (USB 6.0)
80 Gbit/s - USB4 v2.0 - (USB 7.0)

I find the naming so stupid. 5 Gbit/s speed has 3 different names. Like... why?
Same with 10 Gbit/s speed, also 3 different names.
In my opinion, when speed doubles, just call it new full revision, e.g for 10 Gbit/s, call it USB 4.0 or just use the speed metric, not the Gen 2x1 or what not.

there is then the problem of how to tell which socket is which version of USB ?
with my 2010 mobo, I noticed that wireless is much slower if I use some USB sockets,
but I cannot see any indication of which are the slower ones, and have to find out the hard way of webpages taking 10 years to load.
is the hardware marked in any way, or do I have to study a manual?

also how will I know which USB socket is which specification, are they labelled, or do I have to pore over the manual?

Best option, read the holy bible of PCs (aka MoBo manual).
Also, USB ports at the back of the MoBo, doesn't say which version/speed they are. Sure, some are color coded but even the color can't be trusted.

Asus are using the same "X670E" label as MSI?

X670E isn't a label. It is the actual chipset.

For example, AMD 600-series has 5 chipsets;
A620
B650
B650E
X670
X670E

Intel 700-series has 4 chipsets;
B760
H770
Z790
W790 - this is workstation/server chipset

how does the Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME
compare with the Ace? both in terms of price and in terms of specification versions, speeds, socket counts?

Comparison: https://versus.com/en/asus-rog-crosshair-x670e-extreme-vs-msi-meg-x670e-ace

with the 3-way comparison, the Ace does 5 system fans, whereas Godlike and Pro are 6, is this a problem?

No, not a problem.

MoBo fan headers are +12V and rated for 1A. Those Noctua fans i suggested, consume 0.18A per 1 fan. So, you could hook up to 5x fans per one MoBo fan header.

Since some PC case fans need 0.3A to operate, or even 0.4A, my rule of thumb is to use only 2-way Y-splitter, by connecting two fans on single header. And not more, just to be safe.
E.g using this Noctua Y-splitter, 3x in the box,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NA-SYC1-chromax-black-Y-Cables-Black/dp/B076542HBN/

Do note that connecting more than one fan to the MoBo fan header, means that all fans connected to single header will run in sync and individual fan control is impossible.

also "Power Connector (PCIE_PWR 4pin or 6 pin), Godlike is 1, the others are 0, what is this attribute?

MSI Ace MoBo also actually has that power connector but labeled as PD_PWR1.

From MSI Ace manual, page 46:

To achieve USB PD 60W fast charging for JUSB2, the PD_PWR1 connector needs to be connected to the power supply unit.

This power connector is for redundancy and supplies more and stable power to:
* the GPU in PCI-E slot - PCIE_PWR
* or to the USB ports, when using USB ports as charging ports - PD_PWR1

"Slow Mode Booting Jumper (JSLOW)", Ace is 1, the other 2 are 0.

From MSI Ace manual, page 51;

JSLOW1: Slow Mode Booting Jumper
This jumper is used for LN2 cooling solution, that provides the extreme overclocking conditions to boot at a stable processor frequency and to prevent the system from
crashing.

Since you're not going to use cryogenic fluids to cool your CPU, this feature is useless to you.

much of a muchness or very relevant whether one is chipset or CPU?

CPU PCI-E lanes are faster than chipset PCI-E lanes since CPU PCI-E lanes are hardwired directly to CPU. While chipset PCI-E lanes go to MoBo chipset and take a long way around, before reaching CPU.

The PCIe lanes on a motherboard originate either from the processor itself or the motherboard chipset.

Generally, the processor lanes are reserved exclusively for the graphics card x16 slots and M.2 slots for high-speed SSDs, as they require to move data without being bottlenecked by the chipset.
On the other hand, chipset lanes connect to onboard USB, other M.2 and PCIe slots, and SATA. The chipset itself transfers data to the processor via a dedicated 4-lane PCIe bus.
So, all devices connected via PCIe lanes to the chipset will have a cap on their maximum bandwidth leading to bottlenecks.

While choosing a motherboard, you must ensure that the PCIe slots you plan to use are directly connected to the processor. You can run a PCIe slot wired to the chipset, but you will risk running into bottlenecks.
A sure way to identify your physical PCIe x16 slot connection would be to identify the lanes allocated to it, as 16 or 8 lanes will directly link with the processor. The topmost PCIe-Slot is almost always connected to the CPU, but do consult your Motherboard manual to make sure this is correct.

Source + further reading: https://www.cgdirector.com/guide-to-pcie-lanes/

you should consider selling those on ebay.

No thank you.

Corsair AF140L fans are so poor in terms of airflow, that my moral compass won't let me to sell them or even give them away for free.

can you clarify what that M.2 Xpander is? I think it was in some photos, but I have lost track where.

Sure.

It's add-on card that slots into PCI-E x16 slot and houses one M.2 PCI-E 5.0 slot on it + provides active cooling for M.2 drive.

Further reading either from;
MSI Ace manual, pages 40 and 41,
or from this article (with pics): https://videocardz.com/newz/msi-sho...der-z-card-for-next-gen-storage-up-to-128gb-s

this is useful info, what are the power phases for the Godlike?

MSI Godlike: 24 + 2 + 1 with Duet Rail Power System (DRPS). And rated for 105A.
MSI Ace: 22 + 2 + 1 with Duet Rail Power System (DRPS). And rated for 90A
MSI Pro: 14 + 2 + 1. And rated for 80A.

All three have digital power design.

where do you find the power phase info?

From official specs page, on the Overview tab.

E.g MSI Godlike: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-GODLIKE
Scroll down until you hit "Power and Cooling". Then when you scroll a bit more, image changes to show MoBo power solutions, including power phases amounts.

Or MSI Ace: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-ACE
Scroll down until you see Cooling, Power Solution and DIY Friendly on the left side. Then select "Power Solution" and "Structures" tab should be the 1st to open, showing the power phases of the MoBo.

Or MSI Pro: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-X670-P-WIFI
Located on the same spot as with MSI Ace MoBo.

do you have a review link for the Asus ROG CROSSHAIR X670E EXTREME?

Sure, page 3;
TH review: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/x670e-flagships-roundup/3

1st page of that roundup talks about MSI Godlike, 2nd page talks about Gigabyte Auros Extreme, 3rd page is Asus Rog Extreme and 4th page is the roundup/comparison/conclusions.

For more in-depth review of Asus Rog Extreme, here's TweakTown review;
link: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10301/asus-rog-x670e-crosshair-extreme-motherboard/index.html

 

[Aeacus]

Since this is an issue, i ended up posting my question regarding this on MSI official forums,
topic i made: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/amd-600-series-mobo-m-2-e-key-wi-fi-card-slot.392680/

I'll let you know what response i get.

So, got a word back and "technically", MSI isn't wrong about this.

There is M.2 E-key slot on MoBo and one can replace/upgrade wi-fi card, but it is made so complex that one has to rip their MoBo apart to actually do that.

I got linked this guide, with pictures, on how to do that,
link: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?...working-internet-drivers.391595/#post-2232280

But since wi-fi card itself is located inside the housing of where wi-fi antennae go, replacing it is an ordeal and a half.

At this point, i really don't get why MSI would list it as one of the "features".
And why not put the M.2 E-key slot on the MoBo into easy access spot. Laptops have done it for decades.

In any event, at least this is solved now.

 

[Richard1234]

You're forgetting one crucial aspect as of why it can't be OS'es responsibility and why each drive does the counting for themselves: OS reinstall. Or system swap.

Now, if OS would keep the track of read/writes on a SSD, as soon as you wipe the OS and make clean install (or transfer the drive from one system to another, e.g during PC hardware upgrade), all that tracking data is gone. So, it is best when SSD itself keeps track of it, since then it doesn't matter which system you use it in or if you wipe the OS and make a clean OS install.

I should rephrase my suggestion! I meant make it part of the filing system rather than the hardware.

then even if its a USB3 SSD, move it to another computer and no problem.

at the start of each scan, it can note the scan count in the FIRST filesystem "write quantum" of the disk. where by write quantum I mean eg if this is 16K, it means the filesystem just writes aligned 16K's of data, and not smaller amounts, but could write a multiple of this, eg 7 x 16K.

quantum just means "indivisible thing", where in this case it is indivisible by the filesystem, but might be divisible by the hardware.

that way if you reinstall OS or use a different OS, by looking at the first quantum, it knows which scan we are on. with a new disk it will start as say 0, eventually after the scan completes, this becomes 1, then after next scan completes it becomes 2 etc. thus the filesystem just reads the first quantum and notes the scan number.

if each write also notes the current scan number on the quantum as metalevel data, eg this hypothetically might jump from 3 to 5,

and the quanta would note scan numbers as eg:

3 3 2 0 1 0 2 0 3 2 1 3 3 2 1 0 2 1 .....

where they never exceed 3 in this example, and eg 0's are quanta written in scan 0, unchanged since, 1' s are quanta which were written in scan 0, then overwritten in scan 1. 2's are quanta which were written in scan 0, we cannot say if they were written in scan 1, but they were written in scan 2, but the first 3 above were not written in scan 3.

then a filesystem at startup time for the disk can worst case scan the entire disk and find the final quantum with the current scan number, and thereby move the cursor just beyond that quantum as the last written quantum of this scan.
but I would look at a faster MO, eg maybe each 1G of completed quanta would have metalevel scan data. then you can just check in 1G steps, and then narrow down the search to 1G beyond the last completed 1G.

but the above is just to show it can be done.

some of those 3's might be deleted already, but this info is in the filesystem metalevel data, where the hardware cannot know this. there could be 50G of deleted data for a compressed backup of some drive's sectors! you dont want the hardware shunting this junk around in order to even the spread!

with time, the disk will gradually fill up with unchanging sectors.

an unusual use of disks is for virtual memory, but I think that nowadays with eg 64G of memory, you no longer need hard disk assisted virtual memory. the max memory I have needed for some software was a few 100MB, and in the early days I tried hard disk assist and it was unviably slow. eventually I upgraded the memory to some gigabytes, and now no problem.

More-or-less, yes.

MoBo location has remained the same between factory and tower type. PSU has moved around a bit. Early towers had the PSU at the top, just like your current build has it. While current/modern towers have the PSU at the bottom.

Though, with tower case, you don't have to put it upright actually. You can lay it on the side as well and it works just fine. Though, airflow would be a bit different since when you lay the tower on it's side, airflow would be: front and left - intake, right and rear - exhaust. Where by natural convection, hot air would collect just below the transparent side panel (since that would be the top of the case then).

main potential problem is for drives that would be sideways. eg I am not sure if a bluray drive would work sideways, would depend if they designed it for this. an SSD would be no problem,

Well, i linked the CableCreation amazon page. Just navigate to correct cable and buy it.

I meant for SATA extenders, that page was for USB cables.

as regards those USB3 cables, some are 3.0, some are 3.1, would these handle the 10G speeds of later USB3.1 and the 20G speeds of later USB3.2?

Now, i don't have any CableCreation products for myself.
Instead, i have CableMod cables,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/products/?orderby=date

From CableMod, i've bought USB extensions (internal USB 2.0), fan cable extensions, I/O extensions,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/product-category/cable-extensions/

And of course, full power cable kits as well,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/product-category/cables/

They also sell SATA cables, those good metal clip ones. But since i already had SATA cables with metal clips (were included with my MoBo), i didn't buy those from there.
But what i additionally bought, were cable combs and screws as well,
link: https://eustore.cablemod.com/product-category/accessories/

now I located from the above this URL:

SATA Data Cables – CableMod EU Store

eustore.cablemod.com

but those say SATA 3, would those handle the fastest SATA version for say the Ace?

the info says SATA6G, I dont know if that 6 is a SATA version?

would I need SATA 6 cables and extenders?

CableMod is my de facto store for my PC modding.


Oh, one thing that i need to clarify about that;

Do note that all the PC components that i've shared here in this topic (and elsewhere in the forums) are suggestions and not recommendations.
Suggestion, as such, is an idea that i present for your consideration while backed up with additional data (specs page, reviews, comparisons etc) where you have easy way to access for additional information. With suggestion, it's up to you to decide which part to go with.
Recommendation, in the other hand, is a statement where i basically say that:"this is the one", without proving why i want you to go with this part and where you only have my word to rely on.
If i do recommend something (happens very rarely), i also state that it's a recommendation.

if you say the basis of a suggestion or recommendation that is also useful, eg based on reviews, or based on personal experience, or based on published specification, or based on benchmarks.

benchmarks are like inflation measures, they dont necessarily mean your specific use is better, just a hypothetical use is better. eg when Apple was based on PPC CPUs, they were obsessed with the speed at which I think Photoshop could do specific ops. but a lot of that speed was probably from clever software, rather than hardware. eg Photoshop processes jpegs much faster than if you use some free software.

with hifi, some firms overstate the specification, some understate eg if they say 60Watts it might be 80Watts, whereas an understatement might include inefficiency, where it says 60Watts, but is in fact 50Watts of useful power. the other 10Watts is heat!

the best hifi often has lower specification, but in fact is far better than the ones which publish high specification. in the old days of hifi enthusiasts, hifi shops would have a listening room because enthusiasts regarded listening directly as the only reliable test of what is good.

and eg some hifi headphones would say 20Hz to 20000Hz, but in fact ones which said worse range eg say 40Hz to 15000Hz could be much better sound.

This is actually very good question since i couldn't find the M.2 E-key on the MoBo itself. Nor is there any word about it in the MoBo manual.

I'm starting to think that the wi-fi module is built-in, and the description on MSI site is wrong.

Found this in-depth unboxing video of the MoBo, which goes over all ports MoBo has, but doesn't show the M.2 E-key port (since MoBo doesn't have that);

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jG9yGTOz-f0


Since this is an issue, i ended up posting my question regarding this on MSI official forums,
topic i made: https://forum-en.msi.com/index.php?threads/amd-600-series-mobo-m-2-e-key-wi-fi-card-slot.392680/

I'll let you know what response i get.

ok, I had a look at that thread, and then your later update on this.

with that thread the guy mentions a version of the mobo without the wifi, is that an even worse idea if the wifi gizmo is a nightmare to access?

USB revisions have more-or-less doubled the speed with each revision. But naming scheme did hit the gutter at some point.

Speed - Official name - (What the actual name could be);
1.5 Mbit/s - USB 1.0 - (USB 1.0)
12 Mbit/s - USB 1.1 - (USB 1.1)
480 Mbit/s - USB 2.0 - (USB 2.0)
5 Gbit/s - USB 3.0 or USB 3.1 Gen 1 or USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 - (USB 3.0)
10 Gbit/s - USB 3.1 Gen 2 or USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 or USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 - (USB 4.0)
20 Gbit/s - USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 - (USB 5.0)
40 Gbit/s - USB4 - (USB 6.0)
80 Gbit/s - USB4 v2.0 - (USB 7.0)

I find the naming so stupid. 5 Gbit/s speed has 3 different names. Like... why?
Same with 10 Gbit/s speed, also 3 different names.
In my opinion, when speed doubles, just call it new full revision, e.g for 10 Gbit/s, call it USB 4.0 or just use the speed metric, not the Gen 2x1 or what not.

or include the spec in the naming like with the M.2 drive sizes,

eg USB 20.3 means 3rd version of 20Gbit/s speeds.

at the end of the day with USB you are buying the speed, so include the speed in the name.

the different versions with the same speed: I dont know what differentiates those?

the best naming systems are self descriptors. the original Motorola 68000 was called this I think because it had 68000 transistors. but then they numbered the later ones eg 68010, 68020, 68030, 68040, 68060

Best option, read the holy bible of PCs (aka MoBo manual).
Also, USB ports at the back of the MoBo, doesn't say which version/speed they are. Sure, some are color coded but even the color can't be trusted.

if I can even find the old mobo manual!

X670E isn't a label. It is the actual chipset.

For example, AMD 600-series has 5 chipsets;
A620
B650
B650E
X670
X670E

Intel 700-series has 4 chipsets;
B760
H770
Z790
W790 - this is workstation/server chipset

are these lists in increasing potency order?

Comparison: https://versus.com/en/asus-rog-crosshair-x670e-extreme-vs-msi-meg-x670e-ace

ok, that's very interesting, probably I will go for the Ace, because I wont be overclocking, where it is faster memory without overclocking, and it has an extra PCIe x16 slot, and an extra USB3.2 2x2 slot.

I will disregard a £26 price disadvantage on a £776 price.

if it were £200 then maybe, but long term I wont notice that extra £26, it is "margin of noise".

but I will have to study the other URLs you gave later as running out of time today.

No, not a problem.

MoBo fan headers are +12V and rated for 1A. Those Noctua fans i suggested, consume 0.18A per 1 fan. So, you could hook up to 5x fans per one MoBo fan header.

Since some PC case fans need 0.3A to operate, or even 0.4A, my rule of thumb is to use only 2-way Y-splitter, by connecting two fans on single header. And not more, just to be safe.
E.g using this Noctua Y-splitter, 3x in the box,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Noctua-NA-SYC1-chromax-black-Y-Cables-Black/dp/B076542HBN/

Do note that connecting more than one fan to the MoBo fan header, means that all fans connected to single header will run in sync and individual fan control is impossible.

I'll have to ask clarification on such things later once I decide on the config.

MSI Ace MoBo also actually has that power connector but labeled as PD_PWR1.

From MSI Ace manual, page 46:

This power connector is for redundancy and supplies more and stable power to:
* the GPU in PCI-E slot - PCIE_PWR
* or to the USB ports, when using USB ports as charging ports - PD_PWR1


From MSI Ace manual, page 51;

Since you're not going to use cryogenic fluids to cool your CPU, this feature is useless to you.


CPU PCI-E lanes are faster than chipset PCI-E lanes since CPU PCI-E lanes are hardwired directly to CPU. While chipset PCI-E lanes go to MoBo chipset and take a long way around, before reaching CPU.

Source + further reading: https://www.cgdirector.com/guide-to-pcie-lanes/

ok, I had no idea about this.

No thank you.

Corsair AF140L fans are so poor in terms of airflow, that my moral compass won't let me to sell them or even give them away for free.

for me, I would discard them then because I have run out of space!

everything I buy uses space I dont have, so if something is of no use, I either sell it or junk it.

some things are unethical to sell, because nobody should buy such things!

I only keep things I no longer use if they are from when I was in my 20s or younger, as museum pieces to remind me of the good old days when I was young!

but things I buy in this era which I wont ever use again, I either sell on ebay or I junk them.

in the old days, manufactured items had a lot of character, where you wouldnt want to discard them. but today's manufacturing is matter of fact and arbitrary, where I will discard without hesitating.

I sold some car roof racks by Thule which I had installed but never used, collection only, starting bid £50, no bids but 3 people said they'd buy if I despatched. I then arranged boxes for UPS despatch, too long for other couriers, I halted bidding at £140, and the guy said he would have bid up to something like £170.

but you might keep them if you intend to reconnect them if you decide to sell the tower cases.

Sure.

It's add-on card that slots into PCI-E x16 slot and houses one M.2 PCI-E 5.0 slot on it + provides active cooling for M.2 drive.

Further reading either from;
MSI Ace manual, pages 40 and 41,
or from this article (with pics): https://videocardz.com/newz/msi-sho...der-z-card-for-next-gen-storage-up-to-128gb-s

I'll have to study this later, I have had an initial look.

MSI Godlike: 24 + 2 + 1 with Duet Rail Power System (DRPS). And rated for 105A.
MSI Ace: 22 + 2 + 1 with Duet Rail Power System (DRPS). And rated for 90A
MSI Pro: 14 + 2 + 1. And rated for 80A.

All three have digital power design.


From official specs page, on the Overview tab.

E.g MSI Godlike: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-GODLIKE
Scroll down until you hit "Power and Cooling". Then when you scroll a bit more, image changes to show MoBo power solutions, including power phases amounts.

Or MSI Ace: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MEG-X670E-ACE
Scroll down until you see Cooling, Power Solution and DIY Friendly on the left side. Then select "Power Solution" and "Structures" tab should be the 1st to open, showing the power phases of the MoBo.

Or MSI Pro: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-X670-P-WIFI
Located on the same spot as with MSI Ace MoBo.

its a challenge to locate that info even after you explained! but I did eventually locate this.

Sure, page 3;
TH review: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/x670e-flagships-roundup/3

1st page of that roundup talks about MSI Godlike, 2nd page talks about Gigabyte Auros Extreme, 3rd page is Asus Rog Extreme and 4th page is the roundup/comparison/conclusions.

For more in-depth review of Asus Rog Extreme, here's TweakTown review;
link: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10301/asus-rog-x670e-crosshair-extreme-motherboard/index.html

will have to study this later as it looks involved, and I have run out of time today!

 

[Aeacus]

eg I am not sure if a bluray drive would work sideways, would depend if they designed it for this.

Depends on the disc tray. Some disc trays keep the disc in place, even when the ODD is in vertical position.

as regards those USB3 cables, some are 3.0, some are 3.1, would these handle the 10G speeds of later USB3.1 and the 20G speeds of later USB3.2?

Each cable should have the speed rating written on them and/or on the retail package.

but those say SATA 3, would those handle the fastest SATA version for say the Ace?

the info says SATA6G, I dont know if that 6 is a SATA version?

would I need SATA 6 cables and extenders?

There are 3 revisions of SATA;

SATA 1 - 1.5 Gbit/s or 150 MB/s (aka Serial ATA-150)
SATA 2 - 3 Gbit/s or 300 MB/s (aka Serial ATA-300)
SATA 3 - 6 Gbit/s or 600 MB/s (aka Serial ATA-600)

So, SATA 3 is the same as SATA6G.

a version of the mobo without the wifi, is that an even worse idea if the wifi gizmo is a nightmare to access?

For example, none of my MoBos have built-in wi-fi, so, i don't find it bad at all. Especially since you can always buy and use PCI-E based wi-fi card.
E.g this thing,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ziyituod-Bluetooth5-2-Tri-Bands-Ultra-Low-ZYT-AX210/dp/B08NJ4HTL3

if I can even find the old mobo manual!

Nowadays, most MoBo manuals can be downloaded from the official specs site of a MoBo. That's how i got e.g MSI Ace manual, so that i can quote stuff from it to you.

are these lists in increasing potency order?

Pretty much.

but you might keep them if you intend to reconnect them if you decide to sell the tower cases.

Won't be selling them. They are for the keeps. Especially my Corsair 760T V2 Black, which costed premium and is nigh-impossible to find on sale right now. Not to mention it being the perfect PC case for my taste and needs.

I don't have lots of stuff since i'm not a hoarder, thus, i have plenty of free space where to house my PC hardware.

 

[Richard1234]

Depends on the disc tray. Some disc trays keep the disc in place, even when the ODD is in vertical position.


Each cable should have the speed rating written on them and/or on the retail package.


There are 3 revisions of SATA;

SATA 1 - 1.5 Gbit/s or 150 MB/s (aka Serial ATA-150)
SATA 2 - 3 Gbit/s or 300 MB/s (aka Serial ATA-300)
SATA 3 - 6 Gbit/s or 600 MB/s (aka Serial ATA-600)

So, SATA 3 is the same as SATA6G.

ok, so the SATA 3 cables probably will work, do these also give the speed ratings?

For example, none of my MoBos have built-in wi-fi, so, i don't find it bad at all. Especially since you can always buy and use PCI-E based wi-fi card.
E.g this thing,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ziyituod-Bluetooth5-2-Tri-Bands-Ultra-Low-ZYT-AX210/dp/B08NJ4HTL3

but have you scrutinised the specific Ace without wifi product?

in terms of price also, and is it the same nightmare to install via the E-key, ie is that E-key kind of unusably complicated?

Nowadays, most MoBo manuals can be downloaded from the official specs site of a MoBo. That's how i got e.g MSI Ace manual, so that i can quote stuff from it to you.


Pretty much.


Won't be selling them. They are for the keeps. Especially my Corsair 760T V2 Black, which costed premium and is nigh-impossible to find on sale right now. Not to mention it being the perfect PC case for my taste and needs.

I don't have lots of stuff since i'm not a hoarder, thus, i have plenty of free space where to house my PC hardware.

at least you only hoard stuff which doesnt devour storage! ie you hoard PC stuff, where eg all my own computer stuff including my Amiga stuff I think would fit in a broom cupboard! the storage problem is from hoarding of other stuff.

I used to be a hoarder until 2021, at which point I reached crisis level, and no longer hoard, and have been frantically getting rid of stuff, and progressing too slowly. Always trying to firstly sell on ebay, then junking. some things junking directly eg I had this great model of the solar system, with rotating planets and commentary. but it no longer functioned, AND vastly better ones for sale on ebay, so I kept the really great astronomy CD software, and junked the machine!

maybe you can wire up those fans into a hover board?


I have now studied those more involved URLs you gave, where some of that is work to understand, where I just have a general understanding now, the specifics are a bit of a jungle.

from this I have arrived at some questions.

on one URL's discussion thread, someone said of some Asus mobo having 2 sockets which are "either or", you can use the one or the other, but not both. I dont know if that Asus ROG has that for its sockets? where the socket counts could be misleading, ie total socket count could be less than the sum of the socket counts. and then whether the Ace is "either or" for some things?

looks like I may have misread the info also, and the Asus ROG has faster unclocked memory?

it supports ECC memory which the Ace doesnt, but in practical terms eg price and speed, is ECC support important?

error correction must add some latency, but maybe this is within the allowed latency. and must add some cost?


with Asus ROG vs Ace we have:
M.2: 5 vs 4
PCIe 5.0 x 16: 2 vs 3

you said earlier that expander for the Ace converts PCI-E x16 slot to a M.2 PCI-E 5.0 slot,
so in fact would you say as regards M.2 and PCIe 5.0 x 16, that ROG and Ace are the same via that conversion option?

there was a comment in one thread that the person preferred a direct socket rather than needing a converted one which needed cooling.

but the default without the expander for the Ace, namely M.2=4 and PCIe 5.0 x 16 = 3 must be plenty?

is there an advantage of that expander, or is it just to use when you run out of sockets?

for USB3.2 Gen2x2, we have 2 vs 1,
and for USB4 40Gbps: 2 vs 0,

for USB options would you say ROG is better?

one other thing is I read in those URLs mention of USB internal headers on mobos, for my Gigabyte mobo I found these a bit inconvenient, how exactly are you supposed to use these, and where would the user sockets be?

with my Gigabyte mobo, I was able to connect some to the front of the tower case's inbuilt sockets. but because the tower is in a storage cupboard, it is tricky to access both the front and the back of the tower, so I arranged the back of the tower to be accessible.

at one point I think I had a memory card reader attached to some, just lying loose on the floor via the open side of the tower, but I eventually removed that as I was no longer using it, and decided it might be draining the system's resources, eg some of the card sockets would appear as unused drives unless you inserted a card. And as the repeated insertion of dashcam SD card wore out the SD card, I quit using it, and now access device SD cards via USB cables instead, eg the SD cards for my cameras.

I dont want a ton of USB headers on the mobo, but where its tricky to utilise them. With ROG versus Ace with the Enthoo Pro tower case, can you assess what is the MO to utilise ALL internal headers.

BTW with the earlier URL https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10301/asus-rog-x670e-crosshair-extreme-motherboard/index.html

the Gigabyte mobo wins virtually every benchmark, but maybe there is the problem that the ones for sale could be worse spec than those they supply reviewers? where they make an expensive review board in order to win the benchmarks, but then sell you a substandard one.

it also only wins by a thin margin, generally in the 3rd, 4th or 5th digit, ie where the difference is at the 3rd 4th or 5th digit, the variance between those systems also is generally at those digits, so most of those benchmarks are a much of a muchness. time is elastic, I dont think it will make any practical difference, its what I call "margin of noise".

eg say you backed up a drive and this took 8 hours. a 1% difference would be 8 x 60 x 0.01 = 4.8 minutes. its like the people who drive too close to the next vehicle, when in fact that will only make a max of 2 seconds difference to the journey, 2 seconds is the official UK minimum spacing for all vehicles and conditions, and a much more jumpy stressful journey! I try to keep 4 seconds, but sometimes someone overtakes into the extra space! that way if the next car jams the breaks, I can gradually halt my car.

the reviews say the ROG's startup menus are more direct, where you dont have to wade through submenu after submenu.

 

[Aeacus]

ok, so the SATA 3 cables probably will work, do these also give the speed ratings?

SATA 3 has been around for so long, that i even haven't seen SATA 1 or SATA 2 cables. All cables i've seen, are SATA 3. Also, there may be print on the cable or not. E.g CableMod custom sleeved cables doesn't have that print on them (would ruin the clean look).

but have you scrutinised the specific Ace without wifi product?

in terms of price also, and is it the same nightmare to install via the E-key, ie is that E-key kind of unusably complicated?

What i did say, is that PCI-E based wi-fi cards are usually worse off than those either built-in to MoBo or slotted to M.2 E-key slot.

Installing PCI-E based wi-fi card is easy, since it slots into PCI-E slot. But replacing that M.2 E-key wi-fi card on those MSI MoBos is very tedious, since you have to rip apart the MoBo (i linked the guide on how to do it).

Though, some variants of MSI MoBos (Intel side) have the M.2 E-key slot in easily accessible place, e.g MSI Pro Z790-S Wifi,
specs: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-Z790-S-WIFI
Where that M.2 E-key is just next of the CMOS battery.

on one URL's discussion thread, someone said of some Asus mobo having 2 sockets which are "either or", you can use the one or the other, but not both. I dont know if that Asus ROG has that for its sockets? where the socket counts could be misleading, ie total socket count could be less than the sum of the socket counts. and then whether the Ace is "either or" for some things?

From what i was able to gather, regarding PCI-E slots, both MoBos (MSI Ace and Asus Rog Extreme) have the same PCI-E lane splitting and neither is better from another one.

It goes like so;
By default (how MoBo comes as configured):
1st PCI-E x16 - runs in x16 mode
2nd PCI-E x16 - disabled by default
3rd PCI-E x16 - runs in x4 mode

From BIOS, you can "activate" 2nd PCI-E slot, via PCI-E lane splitting, whereby end result will be:
1st PCI-E x16 - runs in x8 mode
2nd PCI-E x16 - runs in x8 mode
3rd PCI-E x16 - runs in x4 mode

As far as M.2 slots go, there is 0 word on MSI Ace manual that populating any or all of them, would disable something else. So, all is good.

However, in Asus Rog Extreme manual (page 1-12), there is stated that when installing drive into M.2_2 slot (the lowest M.2 slot on MoBo), it will force PCI-E slots to use less PCI-E lanes, namely;
1st PCI-E x16 - will run in x8 mode
2nd PCI-E x16 - will run in x4 mode
3rd PCI-E x16 - is unaffected and still runs in x4 mode

So, in that sense, Asus Rog Extreme is worse off. Also, for Asus Rog Extreme, you have to use dedicated GEN-Z.2 add-in card (manual page 1-13), that houses 2x M.2 SSD slots and would slot into next to the RAM slots. Using GEN-Z.2 add-in card doesn't disable/lower anything else.

you said earlier that expander for the Ace converts PCI-E x16 slot to a M.2 PCI-E 5.0 slot,
so in fact would you say as regards M.2 and PCIe 5.0 x 16, that ROG and Ace are the same via that conversion option?

All-in-all, MSI Ace is better in terms of M.2 slots than Asus Rog Extreme is, since;
MSI Ace:
* 4x M.2 slots on MoBo itself and won't disable/lower anything when all is populated
* add-in card that gives 5th M.2 SSD slot via PCI-E x16 slot.
Total: 5 M.2 slots.

Asus Rog Extreme
* 2x M.2 slots on MoBo itself. Using one of those two slots will reduce PCI-E slots lane amounts
* add-in card to give 3rd and 4th M.2 slots via dedicated slot
* another add-in card that gives 5th M.2 SSD slot via PCI-E x16 slot.
Total: 5 M.2 slots.

looks like I may have misread the info also, and the Asus ROG has faster unclocked memory?

Both support same RAM speeds;
MSI Ace:

Memory	4x DDR5, Maximum Memory Capacity 192GB Memory Support DDR5 8000+(OC)/ 7800(OC)/ 7600(OC)/ 7400(OC)/ 7200(OC)/ 7000(OC)/ 6800(OC)/ 6600(OC)/ 6400(OC)/ 6200(OC)/ 6000(OC)/ 5800(OC)/ 5600(OC)/ 5400(OC)/ 5200(OC)/ 5000(OC)/ 4800(JEDEC) MHz

Asus Rog Extreme:

Memory	4 x DIMM, Max. 256GB, DDR5 8000+(OC)/7800(OC)/7600(OC)/7200(OC)/7000(OC)/6800(OC)/6600(OC)/6400(OC)/6200(OC)/6000(OC)/5800(OC)/5600/5400/5200/5000/4800 ECC and Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory*

it supports ECC memory which the Ace doesnt, but in practical terms eg price and speed, is ECC support important?

error correction must add some latency, but maybe this is within the allowed latency. and must add some cost?

ECC is server (workstation) RAM and costs more than regular, consumer RAM.

What is ECC?
ECC RAM prevents single bit errors in RAM, it might be relevant for systems with long uptime where data is held in RAM for long periods, or situations where an occasional single bit error may cause catastrophic errors, incorrect calculation, or other undesirable effects. However, due to it's error correction overhead, using ECC decreases computer's performance by about 2 percent.

DDR5 does have some ECC (error correction code) capabilities, which allows it to detect and fix single-bit memory errors. This feature is known as Built-in Data Checking. However, it should be noted that this is not the same as traditional ECC memory which has an additional data correction chip on the memory module. Traditional ECC memory not only detects and fixes errors, but also ensures complete data integrity at all levels. It protects data when it is in the memory cell and during transmission to the CPU or GPU, making it ideal for safeguarding critical data.

Source: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/memory/is-ddr5-ecc-memory/

Note: Asus Rog Extreme MoBo can run the ECC RAM only at 4800 Mhz, which is the slowest speed for DDR5. With slower RAM, e.g 4800 Mhz, you'll loose out on memory bandwidth, compared to e.g 6000 Mhz RAM. But you'll gain better error correction.

there was a comment in one thread that the person preferred a direct socket rather than needing a converted one which needed cooling.

but the default without the expander for the Ace, namely M.2=4 and PCIe 5.0 x 16 = 3 must be plenty?

It's quite plenty.

For most people, 2x M.2 SSD slots are plenty. And most also use only one PCI-E x16 slot, where to put dedicated GPU.

is there an advantage of that expander, or is it just to use when you run out of sockets?

Well, one advantage is drive replacement, since when M.2 is bolted to the expander card, you can take out the expander card from PCI-E x16 slot far easier, than trying to get M.2 drive off the MoBo.

But other than that, expander card is mainly used when you're out of sockets on MoBo.

for USB options would you say ROG is better?

USB wise, yes Asus Rog Extreme is better, since it has 12 USB ports at the rear, while MSI Ace has 11 at rear. Also, Asus Rog Extreme offers 2x USB4 ports, which are the fastest USB ports to this date. MSI MoBo doesn't have any USB4 ports.

one other thing is I read in those URLs mention of USB internal headers on mobos, for my Gigabyte mobo I found these a bit inconvenient, how exactly are you supposed to use these, and where would the user sockets be?

Internal USB headers are used either for added hardware (e.g AIO water cooler, LED or FAN control hub), but most of the times, are used to provide USB ports on PC case front I/O panel. Even the card readers, that you can install and that sit either in 5.25" or 3.5" external bay, need internal USB headers to operate.

With ROG versus Ace with the Enthoo Pro tower case, can you assess what is the MO to utilise ALL internal headers.

Holy hell....

Now, PC case utilizes two internal USB headers;
* USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C
* USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A

This leaves free (on both MoBos);
* 2nd USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A header
* one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C header
* 2x USB 2.0 headers

What you plug into those - that's your call. Phanteks Ethoo Pro TG has 3x 5.25" external bays where you can put additional hardware, e.g card readers or additional USB ports.

E.g this thing would utilize one USB 2.0, one USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A and one USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C + one 5.25" external bay,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oewnvmd-Usb3-1-Usb3-0-Usb2-0-Connector-Black/dp/B0C9LDL5M3/

Leaving only 2nd USB 2.0 internal header free.

BTW with the earlier URL https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/10301/asus-rog-x670e-crosshair-extreme-motherboard/index.html

the Gigabyte mobo wins virtually every benchmark, but maybe there is the problem that the ones for sale could be worse spec than those they supply reviewers? where they make an expensive review board in order to win the benchmarks, but then sell you a substandard one.

it also only wins by a thin margin, generally in the 3rd, 4th or 5th digit, ie where the difference is at the 3rd 4th or 5th digit, the variance between those systems also is generally at those digits, so most of those benchmarks are a much of a muchness. time is elastic, I dont think it will make any practical difference, its what I call "margin of noise".

Negligible difference in terms of performance between tested MoBos. Might as well be acceptable margin of error of the test suite itself.

 

[Richard1234]

SATA 3 has been around for so long, that i even haven't seen SATA 1 or SATA 2 cables. All cables i've seen, are SATA 3. Also, there may be print on the cable or not. E.g CableMod custom sleeved cables doesn't have that print on them (would ruin the clean look).

with CableMod, I dont know if it will be suitable for the UK, as it has 3 portals: dollar, euro and world. I havent tried to go to the checkout, but I envisage the UK having higher postage. I would assume a website with efficient UK postage would have a UK portal.

when the UK was in the EU, ordinary letters to the EU I think were reasonable postage, but if you send a parcel, I think couriers forward charges, eg if I post a parcel to a remote area of the UK eg remote areas of Scotland, its often more expensive.

What i did say, is that PCI-E based wi-fi cards are usually worse off than those either built-in to MoBo or slotted to M.2 E-key slot.

Installing PCI-E based wi-fi card is easy, since it slots into PCI-E slot. But replacing that M.2 E-key wi-fi card on those MSI MoBos is very tedious, since you have to rip apart the MoBo (i linked the guide on how to do it).

if it needed upgrading I would probably leave it in place and use some other socket!

Though, some variants of MSI MoBos (Intel side) have the M.2 E-key slot in easily accessible place, e.g MSI Pro Z790-S Wifi,
specs: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/PRO-Z790-S-WIFI
Where that M.2 E-key is just next of the CMOS battery.

at the moment I am going to buy an AMD system, later on in time I might build a low end Intel system, where I opt for features rather than speed. eg to accept sockets at a slower speed. I have in any case my HP Laptop which I think is Intel multicore, in fact I am not 100% sure what it is!

the problem in this modern era, is there is a blizzard of too much different stuff, and I never get round to most things, because too busy battling other things. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s when reality was very stable, and there were very few options and all were good. where if you wanted information, you had to trek to a bookshop or library or buy a magazine.

From what i was able to gather, regarding PCI-E slots, both MoBos (MSI Ace and Asus Rog Extreme) have the same PCI-E lane splitting and neither is better from another one.

It goes like so;
By default (how MoBo comes as configured):
1st PCI-E x16 - runs in x16 mode
2nd PCI-E x16 - disabled by default
3rd PCI-E x16 - runs in x4 mode

From BIOS, you can "activate" 2nd PCI-E slot, via PCI-E lane splitting, whereby end result will be:
1st PCI-E x16 - runs in x8 mode
2nd PCI-E x16 - runs in x8 mode
3rd PCI-E x16 - runs in x4 mode

I would want initially to not reduce the speed of any socket, thus I wouldnt use that 2nd slot unless no other option or where the peripheral hardware cannot handle the faster speed. ie if a car's max speed went from 600mph to 300mph, that is fine if the speed limit is 70mph! but if the max speed went from 100mph to 50mph, I dont want that if the speed limit is 70mph!

As far as M.2 slots go, there is 0 word on MSI Ace manual that populating any or all of them, would disable something else. So, all is good.

can any of the benchmark programs detect speeds of parallel uses?

eg to read from all the drives in parallel to see total speed. but you would need to have drives connected, and the limiting factor might be the drive speeds.

However, in Asus Rog Extreme manual (page 1-12), there is stated that when installing drive into M.2_2 slot (the lowest M.2 slot on MoBo), it will force PCI-E slots to use less PCI-E lanes, namely;
1st PCI-E x16 - will run in x8 mode
2nd PCI-E x16 - will run in x4 mode
3rd PCI-E x16 - is unaffected and still runs in x4 mode

So, in that sense, Asus Rog Extreme is worse off. Also, for Asus Rog Extreme, you have to use dedicated GEN-Z.2 add-in card (manual page 1-13), that houses 2x M.2 SSD slots and would slot into next to the RAM slots. Using GEN-Z.2 add-in card doesn't disable/lower anything else.

sounds like the USB4 you mention later is the only redeeming feature of the Asus.

All-in-all, MSI Ace is better in terms of M.2 slots than Asus Rog Extreme is, since;
MSI Ace:
* 4x M.2 slots on MoBo itself and won't disable/lower anything when all is populated
* add-in card that gives 5th M.2 SSD slot via PCI-E x16 slot.
Total: 5 M.2 slots.

Asus Rog Extreme
* 2x M.2 slots on MoBo itself. Using one of those two slots will reduce PCI-E slots lane amounts
* add-in card to give 3rd and 4th M.2 slots via dedicated slot
* another add-in card that gives 5th M.2 SSD slot via PCI-E x16 slot.
Total: 5 M.2 slots.

the Asus MO to get more than 2 M.2 sockets is a deal breaker!

Both support same RAM speeds;
MSI Ace:

Memory	4x DDR5, Maximum Memory Capacity 192GB Memory Support DDR5 8000+(OC)/ 7800(OC)/ 7600(OC)/ 7400(OC)/ 7200(OC)/ 7000(OC)/ 6800(OC)/ 6600(OC)/ 6400(OC)/ 6200(OC)/ 6000(OC)/ 5800(OC)/ 5600(OC)/ 5400(OC)/ 5200(OC)/ 5000(OC)/ 4800(JEDEC) MHz

Asus Rog Extreme:

Memory	4 x DIMM, Max. 256GB, DDR5 8000+(OC)/7800(OC)/7600(OC)/7200(OC)/7000(OC)/6800(OC)/6600(OC)/6400(OC)/6200(OC)/6000(OC)/5800(OC)/5600/5400/5200/5000/4800 ECC and Non-ECC,Un-buffered Memory*

ECC is server (workstation) RAM and costs more than regular, consumer RAM.

What is ECC?
ECC RAM prevents single bit errors in RAM, it might be relevant for systems with long uptime where data is held in RAM for long periods, or situations where an occasional single bit error may cause catastrophic errors, incorrect calculation, or other undesirable effects. However, due to it's error correction overhead, using ECC decreases computer's performance by about 2 percent.

Source: https://www.corsair.com/us/en/explorer/diy-builder/memory/is-ddr5-ecc-memory/

Note: Asus Rog Extreme MoBo can run the ECC RAM only at 4800 Mhz, which is the slowest speed for DDR5. With slower RAM, e.g 4800 Mhz, you'll loose out on memory bandwidth, compared to e.g 6000 Mhz RAM. But you'll gain better error correction.

I'll probably opt out of ECC, my own programs always do consistency checks which ought to detect errors.

if just 1 bit got corrupted in data memory, consistency checks involving that 1 bit should detect this.

a corrupted bit in program code will probably cause total malfunction.

if a pixel of an image got corrupted, it would need to be a higher bit of a colour component to be noticed. but if it was just one frame of many, it might not be noticed. if it was noticeable, one might run the program again and this time no problem.


with all my programming I have never run into memory errors!

I think with computers, when things go wrong they go badly wrong, so a memory error will probably cause total malfunction when the incorrect memory is eventually accessed.

basically if errors occurred, they probably totally crashed the machine!


I think even with ECC, errors can go undetected, if several bits corrupted in just the right way.

if you are paranoid about memory corruption, your program probably outputs files, and for files involving money, eg say some commercial software, one can generate the software twice, and then filecompare whether the 2 are identical.

when I use encryption, I always also immediately unencrypt, and then do a filecompare of the original directory and the unencrypted ones. also I do this from a saved copy of the encryption, that way I know for sure the encryption was error free, unless there were some ginormous coincidences!

if you download the Windows install DVD ISO from the Microsoft site, they have a long code number to verify it is bitperfect.



the software itself then needs to be written to be "repeatable". where a rerun with the same input outputs the same output.

in particular any use of random number generators needs to be done in a repeatable way.

someone might use the system clock to seed a random number generator, this wouldnt be repeatable, eg for some graphics involving randomness effects.

or eg for games, where each run is a bit different.

anyway, repeatability is a programming constraint, and shouldnt be problematic.


once the system is tested, you can then make it unrepeatable. but for testing, you want a program to be repeatable, otherwise an error could occur at a different place with each run!

It's quite plenty.

For most people, 2x M.2 SSD slots are plenty. And most also use only one PCI-E x16 slot, where to put dedicated GPU.

Well, one advantage is drive replacement, since when M.2 is bolted to the expander card, you can take out the expander card from PCI-E x16 slot far easier, than trying to get M.2 drive off the MoBo.

But other than that, expander card is mainly used when you're out of sockets on MoBo.

ok, just checking, because sometimes I assume something and am completely wrong! eg I assumed chipset versus CPU was the same earlier until you explained why it isnt!

USB wise, yes Asus Rog Extreme is better, since it has 12 USB ports at the rear, while MSI Ace has 11 at rear. Also, Asus Rog Extreme offers 2x USB4 ports, which are the fastest USB ports to this date. MSI MoBo doesn't have any USB4 ports.

what kind of stuff currently would utilise those USB4 speeds?

and

can that be done via a different socket for the Ace?

Internal USB headers are used either for added hardware (e.g AIO water cooler, LED or FAN control hub), but most of the times, are used to provide USB ports on PC case front I/O panel. Even the card readers, that you can install and that sit either in 5.25" or 3.5" external bay, need internal USB headers to operate.

ok, I hadnt thought of going via the drive bays!

for some reason I thought drive bays were just for drives! so I didnt even consider putting the memory card reader in a drive bay! an example of how language affects behaviour.


I think my current mobo has some unused USB headers, so maybe I can try to use those via a drive bay.

where later you gave a drive bay which supplies external USB3 and USB4 sockets,

can you give one which is entirely USB2 to try for my old 2010 mobo?

Holy hell....

Now, PC case utilizes two internal USB headers;
* USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C
* USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A

This leaves free (on both MoBos);
* 2nd USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A header
* one USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Type-C header
* 2x USB 2.0 headers

What you plug into those - that's your call. Phanteks Ethoo Pro TG has 3x 5.25" external bays where you can put additional hardware, e.g card readers or additional USB ports.

E.g this thing would utilize one USB 2.0, one USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A and one USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C + one 5.25" external bay,
amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oewnvmd-Usb3-1-Usb3-0-Usb2-0-Connector-Black/dp/B0C9LDL5M3/

ok, that is now on my shopping list!

Leaving only 2nd USB 2.0 internal header free.

I can see an advantage of using internal header, that if the external socket wears out, I can just change the panel.

whereas the back panel which is built into the mobo, if that wears out, you cant fix that?

Negligible difference in terms of performance between tested MoBos. Might as well be acceptable margin of error of the test suite itself.

a slightly different benchmark and you could get a different ranking!

when I first started learning to drive, we practised a specific roundabout a few times, the instructor then said:

we need to do other stuff now, because otherwise you will become world champion at that roundabout but not be able to deal with other roads!

I think there can be a risk of making stuff which performs really well at some benchmark, but might be worse at other stuff!

with Apple on PPC CPUs, they put huge amounts of effort on optimising Photoshop doing specific ops. as a kind of benchmark, saying this was faster than an Intel based PC.

the real problem with PPC was that IBM were totally disinterested in progressing PPC. PPC is a really great architecture, but if the manufacturer is disinterested then what use?

Apple at some point switched to a proprietory version of Intel x86, and Photoshop and other Adobe software are now available for Windows machines. I bought Creative Suite before it became rental only. Only disadvantage is I am stuck with the software as it was at that point in time, but that is pretty good. I think you can still buy Photoshop elements as non rental, and that is also pretty good.

 

[Aeacus]

with CableMod, I dont know if it will be suitable for the UK, as it has 3 portals: dollar, euro and world. I havent tried to go to the checkout, but I envisage the UK having higher postage. I would assume a website with efficient UK postage would have a UK portal.

From 19th Jan to 19th Feb, CableMod does their annual production facility upgrades of their factory, affecting EU Store and Global Store,
announcement : https://store.cablemod.com/2024-winter-shipping-notice/

I would want initially to not reduce the speed of any socket, thus I wouldnt use that 2nd slot unless no other option or where the peripheral hardware cannot handle the faster speed. ie if a car's max speed went from 600mph to 300mph, that is fine if the speed limit is 70mph! but if the max speed went from 100mph to 50mph, I dont want that if the speed limit is 70mph!

This kind of testing has been done with PCI-E x16 and with GPUs.

Now, PCI-E x8 has half the bandwidth of PCI-E x16.
Same is when you compare PCI-E 4.0 to 3.0, half the speed.

For GPUs, they do not utilize the full theoretical bandwidth of PCI-E revision.

E.g RTX 3080 performance with different PCI-E revisions on 1080p resolution;

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pci-express-scaling/27.html

RTX 3080 is PCI-E 4.0 x16 GPU, so, naturally, in PCI-E 4.0 x16, it runs at 100%.
Now, PCI-E 3.0 x16 has half the bandwidth of PCI-E 4.0 x16 and one might think the GPU performance would be 50%, but this is not so. It only drops 1%.

This PCI-E revision scaling test has also been done with the best GPU currently out there, RTX 4090,
link: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-pci-express-scaling/28.html

So, PCI-E lane splitting, for GPUs, doesn't affect their performance in any meaningful way. Hence why MoBo makers make their MoBos like so.

can any of the benchmark programs detect speeds of parallel uses?

eg to read from all the drives in parallel to see total speed. but you would need to have drives connected, and the limiting factor might be the drive speeds.

I don't know any benchmark software that would test all drives at once, in parallel. However, you can run multiple instances of benchmark software, select different drive for each instance and start them all at quick succession. Since benchmarking a drive takes some time, you can create a situation where all drives are fully utilized at once.

Once such great tool is CrystalDiskMark, that i personally am using too;
link: https://crystalmark.info/en/download/

On that site, there is also CrystalDiskInfo, which is superb software to check the health of your drives. I have and use that too.

what kind of stuff currently would utilise those USB4 speeds?

Not many USB4 devices currently around, but here's further reading,
link: https://bytexd.com/hardware/usb4-hardware-components-with-usb4-in-2023/

As of this writing (2021), there are only a handful of devices that are marketed as "USB 4" devices. These include the Kingston SD5700T docking station, an Acasis M.2 NVMe enclosure, the OWC Thunderbolt Hub and a Cable Matters 40 Gbps cable.

Even without dedicated USB 4 peripherals, you can take advantage of the spec by connecting to Thunderbolt 3 docks, eGPUs and high-speed SSDs.

Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-4-faq,38766.html

can that be done via a different socket for the Ace?

Bandwidth (speed) wise, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbit/s) = 1x USB4 (40 Gbit/s).

MSI Ace has two rear ports of USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, type-C. Now, if you'd have Y-splitter, where on one end, there is USB4 and it splits into two USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports, that you can plug into MoBo, you could, theoretically, get 40 Gbit/s speeds from that one Y-splitter cable.

Another option is to use PCI-E to USB4 expansion card. E.g MSI USB4 PD100W Expansion Card (MS-4489),
specs: https://www.msi.com/PC-Component/USB4-PD100W-EXPANSION-CARD

With this one, you could get 2x USB4 ports and 2x DP input ports.

ok, I hadnt thought of going via the drive bays!

for some reason I thought drive bays were just for drives! so I didnt even consider putting the memory card reader in a drive bay! an example of how language affects behaviour.

5.25" external bay is the most versatile bay when it comes to the PCs, since you can put a plethora of different devices into it, and not just ODD.

E.g i've used 5.25" external bays for: ODD, fan controller and card reader (since card reader is 3.5", i had to use 5.25" to 3.5" adapter frame).

Front I/O panels of my PCs:

I'm one of the few who sees great value in external bays, be it 5.25" or 3.5". Sadly, most people think the 5.25" external bay is only for ODD and since almost no-one isn't using ODDs anymore, PC case manufacturers aren't including the 5.25" external bays with their PC cases anymore. Some PC cases still have 5.25" external bays but those are becoming rare.

can you give one which is entirely USB2 to try for my old 2010 mobo?

Sure.

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASHATA-Computer-Lossless-Transmission-Typewriter-default/dp/B07PVRQZMH/

It needs supplementary SATA power and needs one 5.25" external bay.
Also, do note that one 9-pin internal USB 2.0 header can fully support 2x USB 2.0 headers at max bandwidth. So, when you plug all 7 devices in at the same time and use them all at once, you'd loose out on bandwidth.

Of course, another question is, IF the USB 2.0 devices you use, even fully utilize USB 2.0 bandwidth or not. If they don't, and utilize ~50% of max bandwidth, then you can comfortably use 4x such USB 2.0 devices at once.
Still, this 7 port hub can be used just fine, when all ports are populated. Just don't use all 7x devices at once. Best to use two at the time, while keeping the cables plugged in.

if that wears out, you cant fix that?

If you know how to solder well and have spare parts, you can replace the ports on MoBo.

But if you don't know how to do it, send it to Northridge Fix.
Link: https://northridgefix.com/

They are USA based, but do repairs internationally. They also have Youtube channel where Alex shows the repairs he has done, and people have sent their hardware in as far places as from India or even Australia,
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@NorthridgeFix

Quite interesting to watch. I've watched several videos and have learned quite a lot in terms of electronics repair. Though, i don't know how to solder, still, interesting to learn something new.

 

[Richard1234]

From 19th Jan to 19th Feb, CableMod does their annual production facility upgrades of their factory, affecting EU Store and Global Store,
announcement : https://store.cablemod.com/2024-winter-shipping-notice/


This kind of testing has been done with PCI-E x16 and with GPUs.

Now, PCI-E x8 has half the bandwidth of PCI-E x16.
Same is when you compare PCI-E 4.0 to 3.0, half the speed.

For GPUs, they do not utilize the full theoretical bandwidth of PCI-E revision.

E.g RTX 3080 performance with different PCI-E revisions on 1080p resolution;

Source: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-3080-pci-express-scaling/27.html

RTX 3080 is PCI-E 4.0 x16 GPU, so, naturally, in PCI-E 4.0 x16, it runs at 100%.
Now, PCI-E 3.0 x16 has half the bandwidth of PCI-E 4.0 x16 and one might think the GPU performance would be 50%, but this is not so. It only drops 1%.

could be because of a bottleneck somewhere, I dont know the specifics of the benchmarking and hardware, but say you have CPU + memory + GPU creating the graphics,

eg CPU running a program from memory, progressing a 3D scenario as data in memory, and the CPU sending subprograms to the GPU via memory,

then it is highly unlikely all 3 components have exactly the right speeds the other 2 need,

the CPU will always work at top speed with the internal register data, which for 64 bit mode, are 16 special memory cells of 64 bits each, called registers or machine registers or CPU registers, which for 64 bit x86 are named rax, rbx, rcx, rdx, rsi, rdi, rbp, rsp, this set are 64 bit versions of the original 16 bit x86, and then a further 8 named r8, r9, r10, r11, r12, r13, r14, r15

16 in total,

rsp has a special function which is the stack pointer, but if you are careful you can use it for other things.

but normally you have 15 for your program, and rsp is reserved for the stack.

they had a presentation at our uni one day, where the presenter was the guy who invented subroutines! subroutines work via a memory stack.

if you write a program where the main work is with these 16 memory cells, then it will be really fast, eg say a program to count how many bits in a 64 bit number.

the x86 CPU also has other kinds of registers available eg for floating point numbers,

anyway, the next fastest speed will be memory in the L1 cache, and then the L2 cache, then the L3 cache, then uncached memory beyond all the caches.

ie there are 5 speeds for CPU data: cpu register data, L1, L2, L3, physical memory


where the programmer doesnt have control of the cache usage but the hardware manages these automagically. for the programmer the data is either in the above registers or in memory, there is no middle ground. your only control is to switch off caching. if a program tries to localise its memory processing, then it will be faster via the automagic caching. so eg if you wanted to invert the rgb pixels of non displayed image data, it will be faster to process r,g,b of pixel 1, then r,g,b of pixel 2, .....

than to process r of pixel 1, r of pixel 2, .... r of pixel 2073600=1920 x 1080, then to process g of pixel1, 2, 3, .... then process b of pixel 1, 2, 3, 4, ... of an HD image.

because if you process all 3 components of an rgb pixel, these will be consecutive bytes, and there will be less cache reloading.

now displayed images can be a different problem because these are fake memory and typically you need to disable caching for memory mapped hardware, where hardware pretends to be memory. It is probably more than 10 years since I programmed this but I think caching can be disabled per memory page via the memory management table.

anyway, the CPU isnt as fast as you think it is! its only really fast when the program is entirely in caches, and the data is entirely in the 16 cpu registers of 64 bits each.

there is also the complicating factor of speculative execution, where modern x86 will speculatively do later instructions using current data, and then discard those where the input data has changed, where it is kind of caching future action, leading to faster code.
now if the benchmark program ventures beyond all the caches, then the CPU slows down towards the memory speed.

tautologically they wouldnt use CPU caches if memory was as fast as the CPU! just the fact they use L1, L2, L3 caches, means the memory is significantly slower than the CPU, ie the memory cant keep up with the speed of the CPU, but you use the caches to mitigate, where the caches PRETEND to be the memory chip, but that pretence eventually runs out if you keep wandering further away in memory.

anyway, the physical memory is definitely slower than the CPU, and the GPU is potentially faster than the CPU but in a more specialised way. if it was slower what point in having a GPU! might as well just have another CPU as a GPU instead! thus the mere existence of GPUs means they must be faster than a CPU for their work.

so if you keep increasing the data speed between CPU and GPU, these 2 might function faster than the speed the memory can keep up with, where further increases in CPU or GPU speed are money wasted. its like having a car engine that moves the wheels so fast the tyres catch fire like a meteor! or maybe a car skidding on ice, where the ice cannot supply the traction. the engine can do 70mph, but the ice can only do 1mph. try to go faster and the wheels skid!

clever programming can mitigate eg the example above of fully processing each pixel, rather then processing red for all pixels, then green for all pixels, then blue.

also if I remember rightly pixels are arranged row by row in memory, starting at the top left, row 0 going from top left to top right, then down one pixel to row 1, going from left to right, till eventually you get to the lowest right corner.

whereas in maths, we tend to have the origin ie (0,0) at the lower left, and top right is furthest out.

PAL tv is unusual because I think it goes from left to right, then right to left, then left to right etc. but a computer image for a PAL monitor will usually be left to right only.

the advantage of PAL over NTSC is that if there is interference, PAL becomes monochrome, as the 2 opposing directions cancel out, whereas NTSC becomes garish colours leading to the nickname NTSC = "never the same colour"!

in particular it means if a program processes row0 left to right, then row1 left to right etc,
this is better use of caches than say processing row0 right to left, then row1 right to left, etc
and this is better than processing columns column0, then column1, then column2, etc.

so just doing the same processing in a different order can make a program much faster.


with HD resolution, 1 row would be 1920 x 3 = 5760 bytes. this is where cache sizes also is important, if L1 cache is 6MB, then the entire image could fit in the L1 cache and it could be a much of a muchness, but if the CPU has a 1K cache or something like that, it becomes very relevant!

but then if you have an animation of 10 seconds of 30 frames per second, where each one is HD at some 2MB, then you are talking some 600MB of memory.

or if you have 4K resolution, 3840 x 2160, that is 24883200 bytes, ie some 24MB, and that now blows the 6MB L1 cache 3 times!


note also that graphics sometimes is r,g,b,r,g,b,.... but sometimes it is done as consecutive 32 bits per pixel, where 24 are for the colours, and the remaining 8 are "alpha channel" used eg for transparency effects for overlaid images, and overlaying could be done by hardware, where eg the top byte says which overlaying it is, where potentially you could overlay 256 images.

when I programmed graphics via VESA, the system supplies lots of different graphics modes, and you then choose one, ie these scenarios are different user options. but it is so long ago I forget the precise ones available for my 2010 mobo. each PC potentially has different options.

the Amiga 500 used interleaved bitmaps, where the image was stored as planes of bits, but this MO is now obsolete, and 3rd party hardware firms created byte per component graphics. The Amiga CD console went for byte per pixel which is very fast graphics, with just 256 colours. I think the Acorn Archimedes computer which used the original ARM chip had 256 colour graphics.

the advantage of 32 bits per pixel, is you can read the pixel in one machine instruction, as one 32 bit read. whereas with r,g,b,r,g,b, the pixels are in 24 bit blocks of 3 bytes, which sometimes will cross 32 bit boundaries. advantage is less caching needed.

anyway, with that benchmarking, my money is that the bottleneck might be the physical memory. but you'd have to dissect the programs actions and collate this with how the hardware is arranged, in particular the memory, cpu, gpu and buses.

I havent actually studied the x86 buses, but just understand the concept. you can program without knowing these things, but if you know them you could write a faster program.

with graphics programming, clever programmers will design the game around the hardware limitations, and eg if you know the sizes of the caches, you might adapt the resolution to fit entire images in say the L1 cache. a game might force you to be stuck in one zone, then when you progress from that, it is one way, where it could precompute that progression whilst you were stuck in the zone.

in all cases, reducing resolution should greatly speed up graphics. eg HD graphics could be 12x as fast as 4K. 24MB per frame versus 2MB.

This PCI-E revision scaling test has also been done with the best GPU currently out there, RTX 4090,
link: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-geforce-rtx-4090-pci-express-scaling/28.html

So, PCI-E lane splitting, for GPUs, doesn't affect their performance in any meaningful way. Hence why MoBo makers make their MoBos like so.

do you have the info on the memory speeds?

the existence of L1, L2, L3 caches must mean memory is a lot slower than the CPU.

I dont know also if you know the speeds of L1, L2 and L3 cache memory?

would of course depend on the CPU, but maybe for say the AMD cpu requested earlier.


I imagine the GPU might have special onboard memory, but the data on this memory might need to be shunted from normal memory initially, and that might need to be read in from disk, and maybe processed also.

with the Amiga, it had a kind of 2D GPU called the blitter, which was optimised for rectangular graphics ops. blit = "block image transfer".

but when David Braben wrote the 3D game called Virus, he didnt use the blitter because he said the timecost of setting up the blitter was more than the time saving of using it, so he just did all graphics using the CPU, and it was the only realtime 3D graphics I saw on an Amiga 500, which had an approx 7MHz Motorola 68000 CPU. He wrote that originally as the flagship game for the Acorn Archimedes, where everyone said wow! but eventually he ported it to the Amiga 500 and I think Atari ST where it was just as impressive! An example of clever programming masquerading as fast hardware!

to use the blitter, you had to point its registers at the memory in question, and set up various config registers, I think these were set up via "fake memory", ie the phenomenon of memory mapped hardware, where certain zones of physical memory in fact arent memory at all but are commands for hardware listening to the memory bus.

I have the hardware manuals giving the specifics, but I'd have to spend an afternoon deciphering it!

I don't know any benchmark software that would test all drives at once, in parallel. However, you can run multiple instances of benchmark software, select different drive for each instance and start them all at quick succession. Since benchmarking a drive takes some time, you can create a situation where all drives are fully utilized at once.

Once such great tool is CrystalDiskMark, that i personally am using too;
link: https://crystalmark.info/en/download/

On that site, there is also CrystalDiskInfo, which is superb software to check the health of your drives. I have and use that too.


Not many USB4 devices currently around, but here's further reading,
link: https://bytexd.com/hardware/usb4-hardware-components-with-usb4-in-2023/


Source: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-4-faq,38766.html

ok, I had a read of both. it says USB4 could be 20Gbits/s, you'd have to verify a specific USB4 was 40Gbits/second.

the 2nd article talks of the naming, where they are now going for speed based names,

in maths, skilful naming is very important. change the naming scheme and things can become much better. maths people will spend a lot of time trying to decide what is a good naming system, and people have devised ingenious naming schemes. eg bra and ket for ( and ).


with the english language also, some usages of words are much better than others. for written english for confusing matters, I will try to use better wording.

the most important attribute of a bus is its speed! so this has to be the best naming MO to name involving the speed.

if you did a new version of IDE which did 40 Gbits/second, then potentially you can create an adaptor to rejig that as a USB4 socket of 40 Gbits/second.

I find it amusing that USB4 is now moving to daisychaining devices, that is how SCSI did things, and I remember a shop assistant saying SCSI has been superceded by USB where its not via daisychaining. things have gone full circle.

the amiga external floppy drives also were daisy chained, where each connected to the next one.

eg I remember in 1976 a guy in my class having a red led digital watch, I think by Timex. then move to 1978 or 1979 and liquid crystal watches superceded led ones. then fast forward towards the 2000s, and TFT screens emerge, and I think then they had lcd screens, and today we are back to led screens! and some watches have led screens, where light emitting diodes have superceded liquid crystal diodes.

Bandwidth (speed) wise, 2x USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20 Gbit/s) = 1x USB4 (40 Gbit/s).

MSI Ace has two rear ports of USB 3.2 Gen 2x2, type-C. Now, if you'd have Y-splitter, where on one end, there is USB4 and it splits into two USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 ports, that you can plug into MoBo, you could, theoretically, get 40 Gbit/s speeds from that one Y-splitter cable.

Another option is to use PCI-E to USB4 expansion card. E.g MSI USB4 PD100W Expansion Card (MS-4489),
specs: https://www.msi.com/PC-Component/USB4-PD100W-EXPANSION-CARD

With this one, you could get 2x USB4 ports and 2x DP input ports.

that is then an argument to get the Ace, because if USB4 starts to become mainstream, I can use it via that adapter. I would buy that if and when it becomes necessary, not for the initial system.

5.25" external bay is the most versatile bay when it comes to the PCs, since you can put a plethora of different devices into it, and not just ODD.

E.g i've used 5.25" external bays for: ODD, fan controller and card reader (since card reader is 3.5", i had to use 5.25" to 3.5" adapter frame).

Front I/O panels of my PCs:

I'm one of the few who sees great value in external bays, be it 5.25" or 3.5". Sadly, most people think the 5.25" external bay is only for ODD and since almost no-one isn't using ODDs anymore,

I use plenty of optical disks, namely BD-R, as BD-RW is too expensive. I think 25Gig BD-R is something like 20 pence a disk. where 1 TB of data costs maybe £8, that is seriously cheap data storage. you need to get some bluray writing software, I use some by Roxio which is good, and allows you to edit videos.

if you have a ton of archived data, which you are unlikely to use, but dont want to discard, eg dashcam footage of long journeys, BD-R's are a very cheap way to archive that data.

if you put dashcam footage on BD-Rs, bluray players will then play those vids directly from the BD-R!

PC case manufacturers aren't including the 5.25" external bays with their PC cases anymore. Some PC cases still have 5.25" external bays but those are becoming rare.
Sure.

Amazon UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASHATA-Computer-Lossless-Transmission-Typewriter-default/dp/B07PVRQZMH/

ok, that is on my shopping list for my old computer!

It needs supplementary SATA power and needs one 5.25" external bay.
Also, do note that one 9-pin internal USB 2.0 header can fully support 2x USB 2.0 headers at max bandwidth. So, when you plug all 7 devices in at the same time and use them all at once, you'd loose out on bandwidth.

that maybe explains some of the USB speed problems I get with the mobo USB panel.

Of course, another question is, IF the USB 2.0 devices you use, even fully utilize USB 2.0 bandwidth or not. If they don't, and utilize ~50% of max bandwidth, then you can comfortably use 4x such USB 2.0 devices at once.
Still, this 7 port hub can be used just fine, when all ports are populated. Just don't use all 7x devices at once. Best to use two at the time, while keeping the cables plugged in.

the problem is when the wireless USB goes too slow, which depends on which sockets I use, its possible the hub prioritises some sockets over others.

If you know how to solder well and have spare parts, you can replace the ports on MoBo.

But if you don't know how to do it, send it to Northridge Fix.
Link: https://northridgefix.com/

could be useful!

They are USA based, but do repairs internationally. They also have Youtube channel where Alex shows the repairs he has done, and people have sent their hardware in as far places as from India or even Australia,
youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@NorthridgeFix

Quite interesting to watch. I've watched several videos and have learned quite a lot in terms of electronics repair. Though, i don't know how to solder, still, interesting to learn something new.

I have a defunct calculator from 1977, which maybe they can repair!

 

[Aeacus]

do you have the info on the memory speeds?

For RTX 4090?

RTX 4090 has 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM.
Where memory BUS width is 384 bit, bandwidth is 1008 GB/s and memory frequency is 1313 Mhz (21 Gbit/s effective).
Full specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4090.c3889

I dont know also if you know the speeds of L1, L2 and L3 cache memory?

L3 cache access time is 8-10 nanoseconds.

Source; at 5:40 (or watch the whole video):

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCpVhKvmCY


Here's further reading about 3D V-Cache on R9 7950X3D and it's minute details (probably too complex for your understanding);
link: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-shares-new-second-gen-3d-v-cache-chiplet-details-up-to-25-tbs

I have a defunct calculator from 1977, which maybe they can repair!

Well, you could take pictures of it and send the pics to them, before actually shipping the item over. This way, they can have heads-up of what you'd want them to fix.

 

[Richard1234]

delays in replying as I needed to consolidate the info so far, I have now completed an initial consolidation, will need to study further also. this kind of info has to be reread more than once as earlier comments can relate to later comments.

will post later some specific questions, not yet processed the info fully enough!

For RTX 4090?

RTX 4090 has 24 GB of GDDR6X VRAM.
Where memory BUS width is 384 bit, bandwidth is 1008 GB/s and memory frequency is 1313 Mhz (21 Gbit/s effective).
Full specs: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4090.c3889

that is extreme! you must reach the point where the bottleneck is the human eye?

L3 cache access time is 8-10 nanoseconds.

the Ryzen 9 7950X3D is 4.2GHz base clock, which is approx 4GHz,

a nanosecond is 1 cycle at 1GHz which is thus some 4 clock cycles of the approx 4GHz clock.

so 8 nanoseconds is some 32 clock cycles,

its a long time since I worked on such things, and I need to restudy such things, but probably the innate speed of a CPU instruction is 1 clock cycle, at least with say the original MIPS RISC, that averaged one instruction per clock cycle via working on 4 different phases of 4 instructions at the same time, ie 1 instruction was maybe 4 cycles, but they split this into say phase 1,2,3,4 so the CPU was working on phase 4 of instruction 1 at the same time as phase 3 of instruction 2 at the same time as phase 2 of instruction 3 and at the same time as phase 1 of instruction 4, leading to an average of 1 instruction per cycle. which is the "assembly line" MO.

lets say this is true for x86, which does need verifying, then you have to also add in the latency of accessing any memory.

so one access of L3 memory would stall the cpu by some 32 clock cycles.

whereas if that same data was in cpu registers you could do 32 instructions in that time, ie where the data is accessed from L3, the CPU is now 32x as slow.

of course now this data will now be in the L2 and L1 caches, and revisits to this data will be much faster.

now with an 128MB L3 cache, you could literally boot the computer and have a session of browsing the internet and doing some emails entirely from the L3 cache! ie where physical memory is starting to become a prop.

I can imagine cpus being rejigged so you dont even need physical memory, and all the memory is just cpu caches. you'd just need physical memory for loading data from disks where this will happen outside the cpu via the various buses. and physical memory doesnt need to be huge.

---------------------- bus -----------------------------
cpu memory disk

the disk writes to the memory via DMA, and then when complete it signals the cpu, which then reads that memory, when the cpu has completed, it signals the disk to read some further data to physical memory.

I dont think a disk can write directly to a cpu's caches, but maybe they can engineer that.

a bus is just a shared phone system, where anyone can talk and anyone can listen, but only 1 person should talk at a time, via some protocol, but several can listen, typically various peripheral hardware will listen out for the fake memory addresses they work with.

where many listen, but there is only one intended recipient.


the cpu reads from the physical memory where the data now would be entirely in the cpu caches, and only move to physical memory for disk writes.

where the physical memory can be just used as a relay for data.


I forget whether multicores need physical memory to synchronise their caches, I actually have the manual pages for this in front of me, but it requires study, thus not sure if you could do away with physical memory for multicore other than for peripheral hardware reads and writes.

AMD uses something called the MOESI protocol for cache coherency of multicores, where M = modified, O = owned, E = exclusive, S = shared, I = invalid. where these letters are the states of a particular cache line of a particular core. I think a cache line will always be exactly one of these 5 states.

where if one core writes to a cache line, where another core has that cached, the other core's cache line is now probably "invalid". if it reads data which is in another core's cache, that data is "shared".

but I would have to spend some time trying to decipher it. to program you dont need to understand such things, only to know that the caches are kept coherent automatically for you.

anyway it looks like one core will try to read data from the cache of another core before it tries to access physical memory, so potentially a multicore system can work entirely from the L3 cache other than reading and writing to things such as disks.

I need to also study the caching MO, where first problem is locating the information,

13 years ago I could tell you all these things from the top of my head!

Source; at 5:40 (or watch the whole video):

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSCpVhKvmCY


Here's further reading about 3D V-Cache on R9 7950X3D and it's minute details (probably too complex for your understanding);
link: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-shares-new-second-gen-3d-v-cache-chiplet-details-up-to-25-tbs

I have to do some further study, with programming you dont need to know everything about the hardware, the hardware is a black box, and you only need to know the interface to the black box, for the workings of the black box usually generalities are sufficient.

same way to drive a car, you dont need to know how the clutch works! just that you need to disengage the clutch to change gear, and then re-engage at the new gear, and to re-engage gradually and in parallel to increase the accelerator.

the car engine is a black box for the driver, all they need to know about is how to use the pedals and levers etc, and how to refill the wiper liquid and refill the oil etc.

they dont need to know what a carburretor is!

I am gonna have to study further the info so far, in order to progress the PC build question.

 

[Richard1234]

apologies for the delay in posting, but I had to complete a very complicated tax return by midnight 31st Jan 2024, which has taken days to complete, a lot of tax due, but in fact I got a credit of some £29 because evidently overpayment last year! completed that Friday, but no free time till this evening, where I have been going through the information so far.

anyway, I have decided to go for the Ace, but after a lot of study of the info so far which is a bit of a jungle, I dont think you gave any full systems involving the Ace, I think you just gave for eg the Godlike, I dont know if you can give a full system involving the Ace including purchase links? eg a top end one versus affordable one, including the Enthoo Pro tower case, the Ace mobo, I think you said 140mm Noctua fans, I dont know how many I would need for this config,
I am thinking of getting that internal USB header:

Amazon.co.uk

also the memory, was thinking of going for 64GB, I presume DDR5 is the best option, maybe the only option for this mobo? any alternative options on this eg top end top speed versus affordable option?

was thinking initially to just go for the inbuilt graphics, to see how that fares, because if its good enough, the longer I delay getting a GPU the better the technology and or the lower the prices. delaying is a good way to get better quality and lower prices! but at some point you have to make a decision!

as regards the M.2 drive, I think you said this one:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/product...tb-m2-2280-nvme-solid-state-drive-mz-v8p2t0cw

and I think for a top end PSU the Seasonic prime tx-1600?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Seasonic-A...are-gb-5412520377897037000-21&geniuslink=true

as the total system is going to be some £3000, I'd rather spend the extra £100 for the tx-1600 than the tx-1300 as £100 is just a margin of some 3% on the total price. whereas going for the Godlike would add an extra 25% on the total price which I think is disproportionate to the extras that I would get.

I have learnt from general experience that its always better to pay a smaller margin more for a better specification than to try and minimise costs and later on find you cant do certain things. but if the margin is too big, you have to consider whether you will really utilise the extras, sometimes better to just buy a brand new system in the future when you know for sure what you want.

I think you said the Ace will allow for a dual GPU? initially I would go for no GPU, but I like to have the facility for as much as is possible in the future,

when I say top end system, this request is tempered by the later info, eg I dont necessarily want some ginormous M.2 drive, but a 2T is probably sufficient, and eg I think 32GB memory will be plenty but will probably go for 64GB just to be sure. and also I would initially opt out of the GPU, but you could include that for future reference where I can subtract out that price for the current cost. as regards the memory speed, I dont want to pay a huge amount extra just to get a small speed increase, and I wont ever be overclocking, I use everything within the official limits, as that way I am covered by all guarantees.

I used to obsess about speeds when I had a Motorola 68020 based system in the 1990s! as it was so slow for so many things, but the low end PCs today are faster than our university's mainframe, and low end speeds are more than plenty to be honest. but nonetheless I would like to get the affordable top end of memory speeds for this system.

 

[35below0]

Sorry if this has been mentioned or if you know already, but you mentioned in the OP that you have spare Win 10 licenses. They are shared between Win 10 and 11 so if you need 11, you can activate it with one of your unused licenses.

 

[Richard1234]

Sorry if this has been mentioned or if you know already, but you mentioned in the OP that you have spare Win 10 licenses. They are shared between Win 10 and 11 so if you need 11, you can activate it with one of your unused licenses.

I wasnt aware of that!

so far I have just activated one win10 license, can I use that one also for win11 if I stop using the win10 installation?

I decided to buy a batch of licenses because with XP I wish I had bought up some when the next version of Windows was released, as that would be a really matured version of XP. the version I did have needed a separate SP2 (or was it SP3?) disk for some software to work, and I had to obtain one from the internet when I reinstalled the system, as the original install got updated via automatic updates.

where it would have been better to have bought a matured version of XP with that built in.

its a kind of insurance policy,