Question New PC build, need someone to overlook build and give advice on possible mistakes and or improvements.

[MJC1219]

I recently built my first PC and I wanted it to be VR capable. I looked up some builds and got my parts together and built it. It runs fine I just want to ensure I made no obvious mistakes and see what could be done to improve the build. Below are the specs and pictures of the Build.

Case: Thermaltake Level 20 MT
PSU: Corsair CX750M
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Plus
CPU: Intel i7-9700k
GPU: geforce rtx 2070 gaming z 8g
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 16GB (2@8GB)
CPU Cooler: Intel Thermal Solution ts13x
Storage: WB Blue 1TB 3D NAND Sata SSD
Fans: 6 ThermalTake Pure Plus 12 RGB TT Premium Edition 120mm
Display: Dell 27 Gaming Monitor S2719DGF

I learned later that the 3 intake fans on the front of the case were not very effective due to there only being a once inch gap between the fans and the glass. To compensate I put to more intakes on the side. I mounted the radiator to the rear exhaust and put one more exhaust fan on the top of the case. all fans but the 3 front intakes are set to variable speed based on temperature. Also I have been considering moving the radiator to the top and moving the top fan to the exhaust.

Please let me know your thoughts.

Thank you!

 

[Eximo]

An Intel all-in-one? Interesting choice. Probably a little overpriced for what it is, but it matches well. But nearly any all-in-one would have done with the fan replaced.

Power supply isn't the best quality. A budget friendly offering from Corsair. Personally would have gone with a smaller gold rated power supply. 550W-650W.

Very positive pressure build. Should keep it fairly dust free as long as the intake fans are filtered.

Probably would have gone for an NVMe SSD for the boot disk. WD Blue 2.5" is not the top of the line, but for a 1TB disk it is an attractive price.

Hardware choices are fine otherwise. A very powerful gaming system.

 

[MJC1219]

An Intel all-in-one? Interesting choice. Probably a little overpriced for what it is, but it matches well. But nearly any all-in-one would have done with the fan replaced.

Power supply isn't the best quality. A budget friendly offering from Corsair. Personally would have gone with a smaller gold rated power supply. 550W-650W.

Very positive pressure build. Should keep it fairly dust free as long as the intake fans are filtered.

Probably would have gone for an NVMe SSD for the boot disk. WD Blue 2.5" is not the top of the line, but for a 1TB disk it is an attractive price.

Hardware choices are fine otherwise. A very powerful gaming system.

Yes, I learned later that the WD Blue probably wasn't my best choice. I was considering getting a WD Black NVMe either 256gb or 500gb for my motherboard and use that for the OS and current games I was playing and have the WD Blue for storage, however I do not know how I would transfer the OS or anything onto the new SSD.

Any advice on radiator and fan position? As I said I put 5 intakes because the 1. the front fan has no controller so the speed is set and 2. there is only a 1cm clearance between the intake fans and the glass so air pull is somewhat inhibited. Also I have 1 spare solid black fan that came with the case.

 

[Bearmann]

Yes, I learned later that the WD Blue probably wasn't my best choice. I was considering getting a WD Black NVMe either 256gb or 500gb for my motherboard and use that for the OS and current games I was playing and have the WD Blue for storage, however I do not know how I would transfer the OS or anything onto the new SSD.

Any advice on radiator and fan position? As I said I put 5 intakes because the 1. the front fan has no controller so the speed is set and 2. there is only a 1cm clearance between the intake fans and the glass so air pull is somewhat inhibited. Also I have 1 spare solid black fan that came with the case.

The WB Blue Sata SSD is a good mainstream drive. A NVMe would probably only save you a few seconds on start up.

 

[Eximo]

Yes, I learned later that the WD Blue probably wasn't my best choice. I was considering getting a WD Black NVMe either 256gb or 500gb for my motherboard and use that for the OS and current games I was playing and have the WD Blue for storage, however I do not know how I would transfer the OS or anything onto the new SSD.

Any advice on radiator and fan position? As I said I put 5 intakes because the 1. the front fan has no controller so the speed is set and 2. there is only a 1cm clearance between the intake fans and the glass so air pull is somewhat inhibited. Also I have 1 spare solid black fan that came with the case.

Very simple to move an OS to a new drive. Programs like Macrium Reflect, Clonezilla, and many others. Many SSD manufacturers offer a canned version of Acronis True Image for free that will only work with their drives as the destination.

As for the radiator and fan position. Probably fine the way it is. I can't think of a reason a different configuration would be better.

If you had a larger radiator (240mm) than I would almost try mounting it near the front as an exhaust and turn the rear into an intake just to see how it would behave. Or with more fans, mount the larger radiator as intake in the same position, leave the front as intake, and add top exhaust fans, and the rear as exhaust.

 

[Eximo]

The WB Blue Sata SSD is a good mainstream drive. A NVMe would probably only save you a few seconds on start up.

Start up is not the only factor. A terrible metric anyway since it is such a minor part of the computing experience. Even back in the hard drive days you could easily achieve a sub 15 second cold boot with Windows 7. Cheaper drives don't have good sustained performance. Once their limited cache fills up, or even worse on the dramless drives, they will slow down to fairly slow speeds. Not a big deal if they are only used as storage. But this is the OS drive, so it is performing double duty.

It is certainly noticeable in general computer usage if you do anything substantial. Heavy gamers will certainly notice the increased load times for maps/levels when the drive gets saturated.

My point was the cost difference is minimal these days. No reason to create bottlenecks if they can be avoided. Besides, a discrete boot drive and maybe one or two heavy hitting games (or just favorites) can go on the fast drive, leaving the SATA SSD for bulk increasing your total storage.

On a more budget system I would certainly agree, 1TB TLC budget SSD is better than a 1TB 7200rpm disk any day.

 

[Bearmann]

Start up is not the only factor. A terrible metric anyway since it is such a minor part of the computing experience. Even back in the hard drive days you could easily achieve a sub 15 second cold boot with Windows 7. Cheaper drives don't have good sustained performance. Once their limited cache fills up, or even worse on the dramless drives, they will slow down to fairly slow speeds. Not a big deal if they are only used as storage. But this is the OS drive, so it is performing double duty.

It is certainly noticeable in general computer usage if you do anything substantial. Heavy gamers will certainly notice the increased load times for maps/levels when the drive gets saturated.

My point was the cost difference is minimal these days. No reason to create bottlenecks if they can be avoided. Besides, a discrete boot drive and maybe one or two heavy hitting games (or just favorites) can go on the fast drive, leaving the SATA SSD for bulk increasing your total storage.

On a more budget system I would certainly agree, 1TB TLC budget SSD is better than a 1TB 7200rpm disk any day.

I wouldn't say that I disagree, but again you're talking about start up and loading large games. A fast processor and an adequate amount of RAM governs the majority of the computing experience. The WD Blue (not dramless) is a middle of the road SSD, some are better, many are worse. Whether Sata or NVMe, I would never let an SSD get more than 80% full, and those new QLC NVMe drives, probably 70% full. I'm still of a mixed mind about the new NVMe QLC drives- once their cache fills up, they can slow to HDD (or maybe even slower, I can't recall) speeds.

 

[cryoburner]

It is certainly noticeable in general computer usage if you do anything substantial. Heavy gamers will certainly notice the increased load times for maps/levels when the drive gets saturated.

The cache is for writing to the drive. It shouldn't make much difference for reading from it, such as when loading games. One could potentially encounter a situation where the SSD's cache is filled when copying over a directory of games to the drive from another SSD, but for the most part, I don't think the limited cache of these drives would be much of a concern in a gaming system.

And while the fastest NVME drives are technically capable of faster reads and writes, the performance for most tasks is not going to be all that different. Nearly all benchmarks of game load times that I have seen have shown fast NVME drives as being at best only around 10% faster at loading games than SATA SSDs offering double the capacity for the same price, and in many games providing no additional benefit whatsoever. That's because the game isn't just loading files off the drive, but also uncompressing and processing the data in those files. In general, there shouldn't be all that much benefit from going with the fastest NVME drives over mid-range SSDs. I probably wouldn't bother adding another SSD until more storage is needed.