This is the rest of my 9 year olds build. We actually powered it on a few hours ago. I'll share a pic of the finished product. He has no idea how lucky he is but he did all the work himself!
Ryzen 7 7700X
RTX 4070
32GB DDR5 RAM
2 1TB m.2 SSDs
Show Us Your Stuff - v2.0
He finished the build! Works like a charm. Now to get him playing “real” games…
Spent hours yesterday building my six hard drive, one SSD NAS from its mid ATX case into the Fractal Design Define 7 XL. The instructions were bad, so it was like figuring out a puzzles.
Spent several more hours, mostly today, troubleshooting why it wouldn't power on. One of the SATA power cables was not compatible, from a different PSU manufacturer, I think. From an old PSU I threw away. So I used my extension cable and now have like five hard drives connected to one plug. Corsair CX650M. I had to store almost all of the hard drives near the bottom because of the limited reach of those SATA power cables. I saw Linus (Yeah, I know...) use a RAID card that has just two SATA cable plugs but with cables that split into many when he demonstrated this case, but the card was about 400 dollars and I don't do RAID in TrueNAS.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09L42N4QX
I use this cheap thing. Will replace it one day.
Moved the top fan to the bottom too.
Have it in a corner behind my bicycle and Blu-ray cabinet where the robot vacuum won't bump it.
So glad this is over, because the last part was seriously making me unhappy. I like the case. Can confidently throw the box away.
Since I use the keyboard with the TV much more now thanks to the small, low desk that I can roll away when not in use, I thought of putting the full sized keyboard back on the desk.
Nope, nope, nope. It sucks! So much space used because of the navigation keys and number pad, the mouse so far away if you want to keep the alphabet centered for your typing.
Got the 84-key board in 2022 because I wanted something smaller for a coffee table at the time, which I no longer use. To think I only realized how crappy full sized keyboards are because of that.
Since I last posted in that System Wars thread that's no longer stickied, I replaced my Sony tower speakers and subwoofer with Q Acoustics 3050 and SVS SB-1000, installed acoustic panels behind the first reflection point (which probably do almost nothing because of how acoustically compromised my room supposedly is), replaced the TV cabinet with a VESA mount, put the computer desk inside the in-wall closet and the dresser by the window where the desk was, and purchased a rolling desk (that comes up to a little under 24 inches after modification).
You can see holes in the wall above the green chair where Atmos speakers used to hang. Tried the Atmos speakers front-high for a few years. Found that it made the sound stage too front-heavy and made it too difficult to tell what sounds were going above. Then spent a year and a half with the Atmos speakers hanging from upside-down wall-mounted bookshelf arms above the seat, pointing straight down, since I live in an apartment that I can't install ceiling speakers in and the seat was at the wall. However, I realized that having the seat right up against the wall probably wasn't good for reflections. My head is now about fifteen inches from the wall when I sit there and the Atmos speakers were slightly behind my head. Also found that having the two Atmos speakers almost directly above made the sound stage too back-heavy. So, after five or six years with Atmos, I finally removed the Atmos speakers from my system. "Downgraded" from 5.1.2 to 4.1. (No center speaker anymore either because I could never get the speaker high enough beneath the TV and I rarely watch with other people anyway, meaning that not sitting in the center is almost never a problem and the phantom center of two front speakers makes more sense.) Almost all the movies I watch are in two-dimensional surround, mono or matrixed stereo. When I watch older movies with Atmos mixes, I almost always pick the older sound mixes because they're more tastefully done. I can point to several mixes where some of the height effects don't make sense. It's like they place the sounds there just so that listeners are satisfied that all their speakers are used. (Not to mention the LFE being too strong in some of the Atmos remixes.) Atmos and DTS:X make up such a minority of the content I consume. If you can't sit in the center of your listening space, if your seat is right up against the back wall or almost, don't bother with Atmos. The height effects will be largely wasted and sound more gimmicky than they should.
I will fill those holes with plaster at some point. The bucket of plaster is by my left surround, acting as a doorstop.
Go with this configuration if you can accommodate it, you centered under four speakers...
https://www.dolby.com/about/support/guide/speaker-setup-guides/7.1.4-overhead-speaker-setup-guide/
...or don't bother with Atmos.
I put in a USB 3.2 front panel with a 3.5 to 5.25" adapter bracket. The fit was a little awkward. Panel is not completely flush with the adapter bracket, but slightly back. Wanted it to have a memory card reader for the music that I transfer to my slow-transferring portable music player.
Only problem now is that my SATA power cable doesn't have enough reach for both the Blu-ray drive and new front panel. (The panel needs PSU power.) I ordered a short IDE to SATA cable.
Some new audio gear...
Kali Audio IN-8 V2 Studio Monitors/Speakers
Sennheiser HD 490 PRO Professional Studio Reference Headphones
Sennheiser Momentum 4 Wireless Headphones
Novation FLkey 61 MIDI Controller Keyboard
Working on this thing right now. 2 20 core CPUs. 768GB of RAM. I might be able to finally run Crysis!
Log in to comment