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Technology Thread: Building a Desktop Computer

Sorry to flood this thread and be needy, but any thoughts on this build?

CPU Intel Core i5-4590
Motherboard Asus Z87-Pro
RAM 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB
PSU EVGA 600W 80 Plus or 600B
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 280
Hard Drive WD Caviar Blue 1TB
Solid State Options Samsung 840 EVO, Crucial MX100
 
bojanglefunk said:
Sorry to flood this thread and be needy, but any thoughts on this build?

CPU Intel Core i5-4590
Motherboard Asus Z87-Pro
RAM 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws 8GB
PSU EVGA 600W 80 Plus or 600B
Gigabyte AMD Radeon R9 280
Hard Drive WD Caviar Blue 1TB
Solid State Options Samsung 840 EVO, Crucial MX100
Click to expand...

That's not bad, go w/ the Crucial BX100 for the SSD, easily the best value SSD right now imo wrt costs and speed. (the mx100 has been decommisioned from what I understand, w/ the BX100 replacing it for the people who don't need the encryption features, and the mx200 being the slightly more expensive option).

If you're going to go single stick of RAM it's probably ok for your needs, and gives you a clear upgrade path if you can pick up the same stick again down the road.
 
dot com said:
^Yeah I've had a Samsung SSD fail, but neither of my two Crucials
Click to expand...

Yeah, even my early model 128GB Crucial is still going strong. They've definitely got my #brandloyalty now.
 
Sweet, thanks for the tips guys. Now I just gotta get to it. Probably a project for June.
 
My Corsair H100 pump appears to have died so I replaced it with a Noctua DH-15. Biggest heat sink I have ever seen. My case now has three 200mm, and three 150mm fans.

Also picked up a new 250gb Samsung EVO 850. My 128gb was filling up much too quickly and it is annoying to have to delete and reinstall 40gb games.

Last thing on the agenda is a new graphics card as my 560TI 448 isn't cutting it any longer. I'm going to wait until AMDs Fiji announcement at E3 and then make a decision. Hopefully there will be more aftermarket 980TIs available by then if that is still the best thing out.
 
You went from liquid cooling to air cooling? Was water just too much trouble?

I have the DH-14 and it's fantastic. I imagine the 15 is too.
 
bym051d said:
You went from liquid cooling to air cooling? Was water just too much trouble?

I have the DH-14 and it's fantastic. I imagine the 15 is too.
Click to expand...

I don't like the idea that the pump can just die like that and there isn't anything I can do past the warranty date. The self contained water cooling units are really pretty cool but if I did it again, I'd go back to making my own system. I did that once in high school but my hardware wasn't good enough to really take advantage of it.
 
My computer is much, much quieter now under load. It's really pretty impressive.
 
best free unzip utility that won't load up my computer with bloatware or expire after 30 days. Go.
 
Crisis averted. Nearly learned the hard way about having an adequate backup solution.

During my upgrade to Windows 8.1, I noticed some IO errors on my main backup drive. Proceeded with the upgrade and ran CHKDSK on the drive that was giving me some issues. Dumb mistake. I soon lost the ability to access the drive at all. Anytime I would momentarily see it and click into it, it would freeze explorer, requiring a complete restart.

The drive wouldn't show up in disk management or the bios. I took the drive out of its external enclosure and hooked it directly into an SATA port. Still no sign that it was there.

I eventually stumbled upon a clue which led me down the road to recovery. It was still showing in devices as an expansion disk. I figured that this was a good sign so I used this program http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk to try to recover the partition that CHKDSK had corrupted. I was finally able to access it, but I think the drive is still dying. I'm madly transferring data to other drives as we speak and every 15 minutes or so, the drive will hang and I'll have to restart. Luckily, I got all of the important stuff off of it, but it's been a nightmare. I almost lost all of my pictures.

Obviously, not having a backup to your backup is really dumb. I'm going to pick up two additional internal drives(potentially RAID 5?) to centralize my data and then I'm going to sign up to a cloud backup solution for the really important stuff. Pictures are irreplaceable and I have not done nearly a good enough job with keeping up with the ones that aren't taken on my phone.

Backup your data folks!
 
RAID 5 seems like overkill in a PC. I backup 3 times a week to my home NAS (RAID 1) and backup constantly "to the cloud."
 
bym051d said:
RAID 5 seems like overkill in a PC. I backup 3 times a week to my home NAS (RAID 1) and backup constantly "to the cloud."
Click to expand...

Yeah, I thought about RAID 1 as well, but we'll see. I'd love to get a NAS, but I don't want to drop that much right now. With Netflix, Google Music, and the other viable streaming options, my data usage is going to continue to drop. Honestly, cloud backup might be enough for me.

What service do you use? Also, which NAS do you have?
 
I have an old Synology (DS-212, IIRC). They have a wide variety of models that have tons of features and are supported for a long time. Mine is 4 years old and running current code.

I've been using Carbonite for years and loved it.
 
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Thought this would be an interesting watch for you guys. (yes I know it's long and I'm sorry)
 
TWDeac said:
Yeah, I thought about RAID 1 as well, but we'll see. I'd love to get a NAS, but I don't want to drop that much right now. With Netflix, Google Music, and the other viable streaming options, my data usage is going to continue to drop. Honestly, cloud backup might be enough for me.

What service do you use? Also, which NAS do you have?
Click to expand...

Yeah, I've gone to just using Dropbox for all my documents/pictures/etc backup. Haven't booted up iTunes or played a movie natively in forever. The paid version of Dropbox is more than enough for that stuff. And really the most convenient part is having it all available on all my different machines/platforms.
 
Deacon923 said:
best free unzip utility that won't load up my computer with bloatware or expire after 30 days. Go.
Click to expand...

Whenever you go to install anything, see if ninite.com has it available first. Strips out all the bloat from any install. No "opt in/out" installs. Just the app you want and nothing else. My IT guys swear by it.
 
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