I recently built a new PC and I thought I share a few gotcha's and initial impressions. Background: My original 2011 build was a 3.4 GHz Quad core i7-2600K on a Intel z68 motherboard with 8Gb ram and a Cooler Master air cooler. I was running Windows 7 Pro After the official launch of PA in the fall of 2014, I upgraded to a 1080p monitor, GTX 750 TI graphics card and 16Gb ram. The final upgrade to that rig was early this year when I bought SSDs, a large 4K screen and a GTX 1080. This is where I hit the wall as playing at 4K with this combination was not pleasant. When I'd choose to play AI skirmish, the lobby screen would slowly render, one section at a time. Then when the game started, even before spawning, rotating/moving about the planet was noticeably "not smooth", even with reduced graphics settings.. Dropping to 1440p was a huge improvement in speed and smoothness, although loading the skirmish lobby was still a bit slower than at 1080p ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Now on to the meat of the matter. New rig: 6 core/12 thread 3.7 GHz (base) i7-8700k Case - Fractal Design Define R5 - http://www.fractal-design.com/home/product/cases/define-series/define-r5-blackK Air cooler - Noctua NH-D15 - http://noctua.at/en/nh-d15.html Motherboard - ASUS ROG Strix Z370-E Gaming - https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-STRIX-Z370-E-GAMING 16 Gb Memory - Ballistix Tactical DDR4-3000 - http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/blt2k8g4d30aeta My plan was to just move my existing graphics card and SSDs over to the new rig start playing. Gotcha #1 - The newer generations of Intel chips will only properly run on Windows 10. Everything booted up fine, but there was no Windows 7 USB support so I couldn't do anything anyway. I got Windows 10 on a flash drive and was going to upgrade from there. Gotcha #2 - I booted to the flash drive OK but it refused to install. What once was PC BIOS is now UEFI. Among other things it means that hard drives formatted for BIOS use a Master Boot Record (MBR). Hard drives formatted for UEFI use Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table (GPT). So Windows refused to install on a MBR drive on a UEFI system. And I could not find a way to convert from MBR to GPT without destroying all my data. So I moved my boot SSD back to the old rig and installed Win 10 there. Mistake #1 - I activated Windows 10 prior to moving the boot SSD back to the new rig, so after the move, Windows recognized it was on a new unit but my activation code was keyed to a different machine. After a couple of hours troubleshooting, I got hold of Microsoft through their support chat program. I gave the rep remote control of my machine, he did his IT magic and then I was good to go. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Observations: The Fractal Design Define R5 case is well designed, roomy and has sound-deadening material on the inside (see pictures below). The Drive cages are modular and are easily removed and reconfigured. The 3.5" cages are oriented so you remove the drives directly out to the side instead of pulling them towards the back of the PC where the internal components may interfere. I left the 5.25" drive cage in for my optical drive and card reader. I removed the 3.5" cages because I mounted my SSDs behind the motherboard. (pictured below) The Noctua NH-D15 air cooler is a monster and you would be well served to make sure it will fit in your case before ordering one. I included a shot of my previous Cooler Master below for reference. The ASUS ROG Strix Z370-E Gaming motherboard has a load of lighting options, but I can't speak to them directly as they are not a priority to me (quietness is ). The first thing I noticed when booting up is that the UEFI (bios) now supports a GUI. Much more convenient to mouse around. And boy-howdy is it a overclocker's paradise. You can tweak things until the cows come home. Windows 10 - Once I got the updates out of the way and figured out how to bypass the login screen, I can boot straight to the desktop, open a browser and be at my first web site within 30 seconds. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Performance: The Z370 chipset officially supports DDR4-2666, but I installed and am running DDR4-3000. Other than that everything is running at stock/default values. Ambient temp is 22C/72F. Running PA on a 1440p screen, max graphics setting (less AA), offline using local server and hyper-thread enabled, against a single AI on PAX system. I set things up such that we could play long enough to impact sim speed. Just before sim speed dropped below 100%, the CPU was 55C/131F and running at 4.3 GHz on all cores with about 30% CPU usage. The CPU fan was running a silent 350 RPM. (The CPU fan is set to run at max speed (1500 RPM) at 75C/167)F I encoded a hour-long video to very high quality .mp4 file. CPU averaged 65C/149F at 4.2 GHz on all cores with CPU usage at 95% and CPU fan at 575 RPM.
Ok first off well done. now as someone with a lifetime's worth of case-building, driver and os fiddling, I'm going to lend you my experience: Upgrading windows (especially in the case of windows 10) is a big no no. upgrading oses in general is terrible practice. I can understand that for a new user installing an OS fresh may seem daunting but it's actually been made incredibly streamlined and accessible. it gives twice the performance and thanks to greats apps such as steam being back up and running with all your apps is only a matter of seconds (if you're forward thinking enough to place all your programs on the Storage HDD that you then only have to move) second you could have found the driver workaround for USB and whatnot. microsoft is devious as it gets but it knows it runs on devs so it doesn't fuckk over those guys too at least not too hard. so for "devs" there's always a "hidden door" somewhere. third if there's no other crucial windows-only app you need (the list these days is so short I can only name Maya-Autocad and photoshop otherwise literally everything else has been ported) why didn't you just go to linux? "not everyone's doing it"? oh yes they are. microsoft is no exception. you are now (thanks to windows 10) booting a hybrid linux-Dos kernel on your machine. but yeah if you're tired of windows forcing their way with you : then you probably should get them off your back once and for all by switching to linux. PA is an app who's linux port is absolutely phenomenal. kiss UI lag goodbye. all this being said well done though and good part picks. keep us updated and don't hesitate to ask if you need a linux gaming shaman. PS : why is OS upgrading especially bad in the case of windows 10 ? because you get the worst of the telemetry in that case. I think the best edition for the lest telemetry is windows 10 pro (bought and installed new) also this community hosts file will be good help blocking windows 10 telemetry : https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
Thanks. I may have been a bit sloppy with my language. iirc I selected 'install and keep data and profiles' or something to that effect. I was aware of the USB issue going in, but in researching, the discussions seem to revolve around installing Win 7 on a new Intel gen. In just swapping my existing drives over, I didn't expect MS to kill the USB support I already had I've got a new m.2 SSD due to arrive today, so I may do a fresh install on that and then reinstall my current programs there. Hopefully I'll have enough room to shuffle things around so I can convert/reformat my current drives from MBR to GPT.
there's fresh install where either you have a DVD or you bough win 10 online and you download it and put it onto a usb key and then reboot to the usb key (or DVD) and go through the install process from there. if you "keep old files" in any way shape or form that's not a fresh install, it by definition, falls into the "upgrade" category. I'm preferring urban definitions here rather than windows lingo because one is built to be explicit, the other to confuse. again. don't install your programs on C. have a dedicated secondary programs SDD if you must have faster speeds then HDD but keep only the OS on C. this way come time to reinstall you just unplug all the other drives other than the one you want to install on and then the whole install process (including your programs) takes a lot less time because you don't have to reinstall your programs. (unplugging the other drives before an install seems just common sense practice but actually when it comes to windows, I'd strongly recommend it, even more so, because windows installer actually reads BIOS boot order and if the drive is not physically first it will place the EFI boot partition on whatever other drive. making it impossible to dissociate the two drives. For example move your HDD separate to your SSD to another PC : windows won't boot because of the missing efi partition). Steam, origin, epic games launcher, adobe CC and many other platforms allow you to point to an install folder on any drive and take care of placing the missing registry entries in the OS for you so your apps are up and running in seconds. (for linux there isn't even the registry part so it's even faster and this (apps that are portable in just via their folder) is just the default for nearly every app.) up x1000 GPT all the way.
I bought Windows 10 already on a flash drive so I'm good to go there. I currently have a 1 TB SSD and a 2TB SSD and both are getting full. I may not have room to offload the 2TB to convert it to GPT. We'll see. Thanks for the recommendation to disconnect the other drives. I'll definitely do that. I'll also place the new drive as first in the boot order as soon as I install it. The m.2 SSD I'm getting is 1TB and between the money I shelled out and my need for more storage space, I'm not inclined to only have my OS installed (unless I misunderstood you). I'll chalk it up to "lesson learned" and settle for second best for now. In the future though, I may get an SSD just large enough for the OS and go that route.
Installed the new SSD and did a clean install of Windows 10 on it after disconnecting the other drives. (as opposed to upgrading from Win 7 on the older drives) Notes: - If the name of the user file matters to you, i.e. C:\Users\[user name]\ , I recommend not being connected to the internet during the initial install. Otherwise it will automatically take the first 5 digits of your email address. - you can bypass the login screen by running "netplwiz" and unchecking the box for " Users must enter name & password" - If you use Firefox and/or Thunderbird, the small utility "Moz Backup" makes transferring your profiles and data a breeze. - After installing Quicken and PA, I just replaced their data files by dragging the old ones over from the old drive and that put things right in short order. - This gave me a chance to re-install just what I still use day-to-day after collecting programs over the past 6 years. - On the flip side are those set-and-forget programs that I use but don't don't see because they work behind the scenes, so I forgot I had them installed until things don't work as expected - And I already have benefited from a clean install because previously I would always get a "installation Failed" error when installing my video driver. Now that's history. Likewise for Windows Update. All the updates installed except the most recent one and it would tell me that the update failed every time I turned on my PC. Now I'm fully up to date after the first go. - And I'm still impressed how quickly Win 10 boots up. I go from down cold to reading this forum in 30 seconds.
