It is time, my friends, for personal rig update 2015, where I build a droolw
worthy rig, touching its RAM and
savoring its drives while you guys
watch and sometimes press the like button, depending on whether you're into
the whole multi-art video, of which this is definitely one, and like whoring
thing, which is definitely what I'm doing right now.
Corsair delivers real mech or Oh, here I have one. Hi. Real neck or nothing with
their new Strafe mechanical keyboard featuring genuine Germanade Cherry MX
key switches. Click on my chin to learn
more. I'm going to move my chin now just for you for a
loop. So, let's start with the story so far. This is the final version of
personal rig update 2012, which as some of you know took until 2014 to
finish. Oh, that took a long time. So, the highlight points here are 4960X 6
core processor, GTX Titan. We've got uh
oh, an LSI 9268i RAID card with eight Corsair 120
gig force SSDs running in RAID zero.
They're actually refurbished drives, although they've held up just fine until
now. So, I guess what we need to do aside from just listing components is do
a couple pre-update benchmarks to find out where we're sitting at and where we
need to end up. So, Cinebench, we're looking at
1,68 points. And then Crystal Disc Mark,
just a very rudimentary um disc benchmark. Whoa, we're looking
at about 800 megabytes per second reads, 321 megabytes per second sequential
writes. So, as you can see, that RAID array has degraded a lot in the last few
years since I've been using it because on most RAID controllers, trim
functionality is not supported in RAID.
So, the timing is right for our personal
rig update. Let's have a look at the new components that are going to be taking
the place of what's already in here. All right, so let's do this whole video
style. I'm actually not upgrading the graphics card. this time around. And the
reason for that is quite frankly I don't game that much these days and when I do
I'm usually gaming at 720p streaming to my Shield Portable. So is a Titan enough
for that? Yeah, I think probably. So first up, the new platform. This is the
Rampage 5 Extreme that some of you will recognize from my blue painted
motherboard guide. It used to be red, now it's blue and it is going in the
personal rig. Also replacing the 4960X
is a 5960X. So I'm adding another two CPU cores. And then I'm sticking with 32
gigs of RAM, but this time a more subdued 32 gigs of RAM. No flashing
lights or anything. This is just a kit of Corsair Vengeance LPX 2400 MHz
DDR4. So that's what we got for that. Next up, and this is kind of a funny
funny story. I have another Rampage 5 Extreme.
Not because that one is broken or anything, but as you guys may or may not
have noticed, I have taken this heat
sink and ASUS ROG logo off and I have
actually misplaced it. So, I will be
Frankensteining one off of another board that Luke used for a build guide. And
then I have a very cool finishing touch
because as some of you noticed when I painted the board, the one thing left on
it that was still red was that freaking glowing logo. So I had a buddy of mine,
Rich Suros, better known amongst the modding community folks as Darth Vivas,
whip these up for me on his laser
cutting machine, which we first witnessed at Mod 24. So check this out.
He's actually sent me a variety of different ones to use, and I will be
replacing the stock ROG logo with either
a black one or a blue one depending on
uh how they look. I'm going to try those babies out. Check that out. Doesn't that
look sick? So, a huge shout out to Darth
Beas for sending these little custom pieces over to me. These look absolutely
fantastic. And for our next trick, yes, this is the
piece that I'm really excited about. This is an Intel 750 series 1.2 TBTE PCI
Express NVMe SSD. It has been a long
time since I paid less than a dollar per gig for those refurb drives. Like way
back in 2012 or something like that, I want to say it's been a long time since
any SSD has actually tickled my fancy
and made me want to upgrade to it. Well, this is finally it. It's an capacity
upgrade. It's a speed upgrade. And it's a space-saving upgrade. I no longer have
to have a whack of SSDs bolted to the back of my motherboard tray and a PCI
Express card. This is just a simple PCIe
uh Gen 3 4X card that is going to do everything that my previous bulky setup
did and better with trim support, so the
performance won't degrade over time. Really excited about this one. So, I
guess that's pretty much it. Let's get
started. Mostly unobstructed access.
Now, some of you might wonder why I went with a Rampage board instead of a WS
board like I did last time around. I'm on the record as being kind of a fan of
the whole nononsense WS board concept.
The reason is that ASUS opted, for
whatever reason, to put a PS2
port on the ROG board this time around
and not on the WS board. And when you're troubleshooting something, let me tell
you, a PS2 port can be an absolute
lifesaver. That and the ROG board comes
with a 3x3 AC wireless solution that's actually
like pretty freaking fast. So there you
go. Went with this board. Oh yeah. Wait, what? Those LEDs
are red.
I assumed they were white and that it was just a red layer in between. I don't
think you can paint LEDs,
Brandon. So, I actually have to plug into the top SATA port here because I
scratched the uh the finish of the paint on the inside of the connector there. I
am going to have to touch that up a little bit. But, uh other than that, there shouldn't be any other red bits
visible with all the components installed. And speaking of all the
components installed, there's actually not that much left to do here, is there?
Let's go get the new
SSD. Yeah,
boy. Just like that. So, very much performance. I I
wish Intel would clue in and use black PCBs, but if they're not going to do
that, then I guess a heat spreader on the back is the next best thing. So,
there it is, friends. 1.2 TBTE 750
series. Look at all those flash chips.
Both sides covered in flash chips. I
think the ideal spot for it would actually be here. Put the sound card
back in its prior location. Easy.
Now, so that's in. I need new thermal compound. Where's the back
plate? Come on, post. Come on,
post. Time to consult the manual.
What? Thanks, manual. Oh, you have got
to be kidding me. Okay. Okay. Well, it says no signal detected, so it may be
broken anyway. But I did not have the monitor plugged in. As much as I want to
go back to the drawing board and paint another motherboard, not in the plan. I
need this one to work. Then why'd you paint it, Lionus? Well, I don't have to
answer your questions. Nobody's fooled, Lionus. You were asking yourself the
question in a different voice. Shut up, you. Oh, we got stuck there this time.
That's okay. We're just going to take it slow then. One at a time. Come on,
computer work with me. You got to at least give me consistent results here.
Well, maybe if you hadn't painted me, Lionus. Maybe if you just shut up.
No. Okay. Well, it's after 6. I'll just
have to keep working on this. So, significant progress. I
figured it out. This chip has a weak
sauce memory controller. There's actually nothing wrong with the CPU. But
what I didn't realize was that this motherboard, having been used as a test
bench before, was configured with XMPP
enabled. So that chip's weak memory controller didn't like it at all. So as
soon as I put another 5960X in there, boom, all four DIMs, no problem. XMPP
working, all that good stuff. So I ran
and found myself a Windows 10 RTM ISO.
Installed that puppy. It looks like they have brought back the simple do this
later instead of getting product keys right away. And we are launching Windows
10. Let's get some benchmarks. Hey, we're started. I
actually haven't run Windows 10 yet at all. So, this is my first kick at the
proverbial can. You know what? The last
time I went for gold, like on RTM day,
was Windows Vista, and that worked out great. So, uh I'm just going to go for
it. Like, I'm I'm switching out, right? There isn't even room for more logos on
the front. Look at all the logos. Lightcribe. Remember that? Did anyone
ever once burn a light scribe disc? Yeah, I was to ask. Have you Have you
ever done it? Does it work?
Presumably. They could have. It could do absolutely nothing and we'd have never
known. The consumer has been played. So,
I'm fairly sure when batteries bulge that's considered a bad thing. Danger of
explosion. Bang. Okay. Well, whatever. Let's do our Let's do our Crystal Disc
benchmark in the meantime. So,
bam. Let's find out just how fast this
drive is, whose speed is documented all over the internet already. Anyway, I
don't know why the control panel won't launch, though. I like I just hate that
when a brand new fresh install when you like bork it up in the middle of like
installing drivers cuz you never know. Should I go back and do a fresh format?
Will this cause problems later or is it probably fine? Like, is it never going
to rear its ugly head down the road? No way of knowing. All right, looking good.
So, we do have an improvement in CPU performance. We did see this coming.
It's scoring 1389, but Crystal Disc
Mark, the SSD, that is where the real
performance improvement is coming in.
read speeds in the neighborhood of in excess of 1 Gigabyte per second for both
sequential scenarios, both read and write. And even 4K reads and rights are
looking pretty strong, although that read number does look a little bit on the low side. With that said, there's
still got to be some room for driver optimization on uh Windows 10 here,
particularly on the NVIDIA side where we can't get the control panel open right
now.
But the real test for me, the thing that drives me absolutely crazy about this
machine is the boot times. So, let's go
ahead and shut her down and find out how long she takes to start up with the new
SSD array or system. SSD. There's just
one SSD now. It's not an array. The number to beat is 2 minutes. Here we go.
Here we go. Here we go. Here we go. Bam.
About 45 seconds. So, thanks to not having to wait for this card to
initialize, I have reduced my boot time to less than half of what it used to be.
But that is actually not the end of this
project. I said this was going to be a multi-part video and then I proceeded to
do a quick motherboard swap and it appears to be basically done. Appears at
first glance to the inexperienced
viewer. Some of you may have noticed
that this fan is actually broken. So
clearly I have not performed the final
upgrade. No, I will
be taking it to the next level. Other
experienced viewers may have noticed this in the new hardware pile that I
didn't mention at all before. Yes, I will be working with Protoase to
manufacture a custom new rack mount
computer case to replace my venerable TJ7. I will be
moving both mine and my wife's computers
to rack mounted cases in a separate room
in order to achieve the ultimate in PC silence. I'll be running a single
Thunderbolt cable to each of those machines to a Thunderbolt splitter dock
thing in order to have all of my peripherals running at the same time,
and that will be documented over the next few parts of Personal Rig upgrade
2015. But for now, I at least get to enjoy the speed of the new hardware
that's going into the machine. I may also throw a graphics card upgrade into
the mix at a later date as well. So, in
the meantime, guys, dislike this video if you thought it sucked. You guys all
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lot. If you're done doing all that stuff and you're looking for something else to
watch, Luke actually just finished up a great video on the Intel Compute Stick.
This is kind of the opposite end of the spectrum, but whatever. If you're wondering about what a little tiny
beanie computer can do, then go ahead and check that out. I'll see you guys
later. Line us away.