This Machine

This Machine Kills Fascists.

This Machine is a return to my “Confidence is Quiet” roots.

It’s a machine that’s not trying so hard to show it’s sophistication.

As always, this build enjoys a new set efficiencies over any of my previous systems:

• 100% Linux. No more dual-booting into an adware shithole for games.
• No SATA allowed - ride or die for NVMe m.2.
• No Moving Parts (Except Fans.)
• All Fans are now PWM / Thermal Scaled on a Fan Curve.
• Re-Enforced PCIE Slots so I don’t have to improv fixes for gpu-sagging.

I’ll post about the software later, but here’s a snack.

Ship of Theseus.

Something that made this much easier was replacing components slowly over time, rather than all at once. This not only eased the financial burden - it helped free me to choose the right hardware for the job. It does involve research and staying on top of the trends for the direction hardware is heading so it can be a trade-off in time if you’re not subscribed to Obscure Hardware Trends Weekly.

Started from the bleeding edge of 2017 now we here. ☝️

In 2019, I began to rethink some of the choices I’d made in life for my hardware. The tldr is: I adopted some new methods in how I designed my systems. Some of these worked out well - some of them did not.

What’s in the box!?

NZXT’s H510 Case seemed too good to be true on paper. Especially for it’s modest price point (~$70USD.) However this case exceeds at almost every turn.

I’d seen this case show up in a million “Battlestation” Threads - but nobody explicitly drew attention to it. For such a striking appearance, very little is usually said. The utter failure of my previous corsair case was a huge drive to nail down some of the final components of this build.

Every piece of this case has a simple and well performing function. It’s a few cubic inches smaller than my previous case(s). Without a doubt the space it occupies is maximized in purpose.

If I had to complain - I would say the build-quality of the metal feels a little cheap. But Flint still doesn’t have clean drinking water, and Nazi’s are back so I’m not sure if I’ll return it yet. 🤔

Huge Fan

Noctua are the cadillac of the airflow / static pressure fan game, and there’s just no way to say something like that without coming off as an insufferable fucking prick.

The price was hard to swallow at first, but went down easier with more research. 6-year manufacturer warranty for bearing replacements is worth it on it’s own. I’m not even sure I’ve had a fan last that long? 120mm case fans are a universal truth now so these should last quite a few miles.

What’s cooler than being cool?

Moving on with thermals: I moved back to Air Cooling from the Closed Loop Liquid Cooling I used in my previous design. Performance was consistently 👌 and I didn’t have any issues.

However, if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all. So I try to plan for things to fail intelligently and gracefully.

Fluids in these systems are a thermally-conductive mineral oil that isn’t electrically-conductive. If When a hose or seal leaks - this helps to minimize damage.

However, this is still what experts call “pretty fuckin’ bad” and I would rather move these issues to less mission critical systems. I’ll likely revisit liquid cooling in the future.

I go into more details in this post

No SATA? How could you be so controversial yet so brave?

I’ve removed my “Cold Storage” 7200 RPM Disk Drives. I’ve also pressed farther into the future and removed SATA SSDs. I promise I’ll come back for you.

While looking over a friend’s final draft for hardware, I vehimetly rejected this idea. Then I realized it was a good idea and I was wrong. I’m not sure how I’ll ever recover.

However, my storage has just been moved into a NAS, rather than discarded all together. This is a 1990’s Barbie Organ-Bag situation I guess.

A tldr for m.2 NVMe - storage devices slot straight into the motherboard and use the faster PCIe bus, instead of the usual SATA bus. It’s a very honest name. Not great. But at least it’s specific. Here’s a really blown out shitty picture of my OS Drive.

Download more RAM

32GB of Corsair RAM OC’d to 3600MHz leaves 2 DIMM slots unoccupied. This helps thermals and allows for easy future upgrades. I may move from Corsair Vengeance RAM back to my first love: GSkill RipJaws as their Heat Spreaders are shaped to be less intrusive to larger CPU Heatsinks.

Gas me tf up

A fully modular 750W PSU is more house cleaning and making the most of my space. This also opens up options for custom length cables later on.

Mama Bear ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ

ASUS TUF X570 was chosen considering AMD’s vague language and less than forthcoming marketing about compatibility with new Gen 3 Zen Architecture. (Not to be confused with the current Ryzen 3XXX generation of Ryzen CPUs.)

This was the most feature rich Motherboard with the X570 Chipset, which should be pretty tolerant moving forward. I’m hoping to dig into an Audio Issue in the Linux Kernel LTS affecting this chipset’s Audio.

“A deal at twice the price!” -Faust

AMD Radeon 5700XT GPU is an attention-commanding center piece here.

This is the component I spent the most time wallowing about in my mind. The logistical reasons for choosing this GPU have carried on in my mind since before I began planning the 2017 build. Budgets, timing, and the bitcoin boom kept me on my Nvidia GTX 1080 which I’d gotten for a song.

After ~3 years of back-and-forth I decided to shoot my shot. I’ve eyed PowerColor’s RedDevil series because of their chart-topping thermal performance which often beats out meme-worthy-shit-posting cards like the THICC. I would also be fucking liar if I said the aggressive design wasn’t a contributing factor.

I’m a slave to appearances.

The primary goal has been to remove myself from Nvidia’s Closed Source Proprietary Drivers and reward one of AMD’s best engineering strides: Pushing their Linux Graphics Drivers directly into the Linux Kernel Firmware Tree. This ensures any Linux Distro booting a modern kernel will have full GPU support out of the box.

Linux as a first-class citizen.

Finally! The Year of the Linux Desktop! /s

#!/bin/bash

year=$(date +%Y)
echo -e "${year} is the year of the linux desktop!"

Big Brain Time

Finally we land at the CPU - an AMD Ryzen 2700X. This was the first component that kick-started the full rebuild almost a year ago.

On paper this was a modest spec-bump to the 1700X it replaced. But prices bottomed the absolute fuck out and this fixed some early-adoption kinks found in 1st Gen Ryzen chips.

Planning ahead was already paying off as I was able to use it as a direct drop-in replacement. At the time of writing, this chip is not new. But it’s a great spot to lay and wait for the future Zen 3 chips to stabilize.

An 8-core, 16 thread fucking beef bus for well under $300 bones. What a muther honking value dude.

All that to say:

I bought a bunch of shit. Then I put it together like legos and felt a false sense of accomplishment.

You can read my embarrassing human thoughts about it here.

This puts me in a unique position for hardware, and I plan on going back through my old builds, documenting them, and talking absolute mad shit about some of the things I did. And when I build a new machine, I will do the same for this build and cringe at what I thought was so great.