Any PC Builders Out There?

By chance, anyone in here running a NZXT Kraken g12 kit and willing to sell the AMD mount bracket? The one stamped “A”.
I can’t find mine.

 

SSD speeds are a function of three things, the connection speed, the cache speed, and the NAND flash speed.

For connection speed PCI-E is much faster than SATA. SATA over NVMe M2 is pretty common and really no different than using a SATA drive. Only a true PCI-E M2 drive will be able to take advantage of a faster than SATA connection speed. You can tell easily if a M2 drive is true PCI-E by checking how many notches are on the circuit board where it fits into the M2 slot. SATA drives have two notches and PCI-E drives have one.

Cache speed is pretty self explanatory but I'll skim it quick. The cache is a small size drive on the M2 or in the SATA enclosure where files are stored before being written to the NAND. Basically drives can have three types of cache; DRAM, fast NAND, or none at all. DRAM is by far the fastest, it's basically the same as the chips on your motherboard ram, and it's common on all high end drives. Its biggest disadvantage is that it's so much faster than the NAND that it can lead to extreme burst speeds if the NAND is too slow, I'll cover that later. Fast NAND is when the cache is actually higher quality faster NAND than the rest of the drive. This is a newer technique that cuts a bit of cost at the expense of raw speed. Finally some drives have no cache which can lead to absolutely horrible performance under certain workloads and no noticable difference under others. Only the cheapest SSDs have no cache.

Finally the speed is influenced of course by the Solid State memory itself, the NAND chips. There are many types of NAND. What you really need to know is that some NAND is really fast and will last a long time and some NAND is really slow, like HDD slow, and won't last long as long. What makes it hard to tell the difference for the average user is the cache. As long as the cache is big enough to cover up any speed or quality issues with the NAND a user would never notice the difference between a crappy QLC drive like the Intel 660P and a higher end drive like the Samsung 970 Pro. In general just be aware that cheaper drives tend to perform very poorly under heavy write loads that could fill up the faster cache and expose the slow speeds of the likely cheap NAND behind it. Avoid QLC drives since QLC NAND tends to be as slow at heavy writes as a spinning drive.

Looking very quickly at the drive you picked it is clearly a PCI-E drive so that's good, the connection isn't going to limit your speed to SATA levels. The cache appears to be DRAM but it's small. Small enough that users complain of a stutter in speed during long writes. This is fine and is where the lower cost is coming from, just be aware that if you're downloading something big or working with huge video files your write speeds will drop into hard drive territory. Otherwise you'll never notice the small cache. The NAND itself appears to be cheap QLC NAND. It will wear out faster than other types of NAND and speeds writing to it are brutal when the cache fills. I would tell you to avoid this drive except you'll never notice the drops until you hit large files or massive writes. So for your use you may never notice it. I'd I'd with it if you're happy with that but if your not try to find a drive that doesn't use QLC NAND memory. If you'd like to know more about why QLC isn't as good just google the acronym, there are lots of good articles about it out there.

 

It appears the G12 is an Asetek model. Any Asetek ring mounting kit off of eBay or Amazon will fit it, not just the kit from NZXT. I hope that helps.

 

Nice. It's amazing what cable management does for looks.

 

Find an IPS panel display that can pivot 90 degrees. I switched to a second vertical orientation monitor for my twitch and hardware monitoring during games. The vertical orientation works so much better for stacking windows and takes up much less space on the desk while keeping all of the windows closer to you line of sight.

 

So much to learn. Thank you!

 

Thanks man. My biggest pet peeve in PC building is bad cable management. This was the first one I had ever built and it really isn't difficult to cable manage in my opinion so when I see people post "I know the cable management sucks but it's my first build" I cringe. I've since built 3 other PCs for friends and family some of whom have built their own in the past and they said they would rather have me build it since I can cable manage lol.

 

Sorry for the grammatical errors, I wrote that at 3 am while recovering from a bad migraine lol.

 

3 concussions to date, I'm king of the marble mouth and finger tips. Zero judgment. I appreciate the lesson.

 

I'm in the same boat. Played hockey as a kid back when coaches would call you a pussy if you didn't get back on the ice after a head hit.

 

Haha BMX for me.

That's a big reason why I enjoy learning new things though. To keep mentally active. Diving into the pc world has been a fun one. I have a feeling it'll keep me busy for awhile. Outside of the gaming aspect. Haha.

I do stuff like custom antenna building and testing for radios and nerd stuff. I like taking anything and seeing how I can improve on it, for the least amount of money when possible. The fun pursuit of crafting, fabricating, and troubleshooting haha

 

Finished building my in-laws new PC. Ryzen 2200G, 8GB of ram, and a 500 GB NVMe drive. It's just for youtube and video poker so that's all they need. I can't believe how badly Intel is out of that market though. The 2200G is a solid entry level processor. Four Zen+ cores at 4 Ghz can handle a lot of home and office work no problem. Pair it with a few Vega cores and it'll decode 4K Youtube all day. The closest competitor you can buy from Intel is the i3 9100, which at the time of purchase was double the price (100 versus 200) for less performance IRL. Honestly other than 1080P competitive gamers what market is Intel still competitive in anymore.

 

Used server market, some NAS type solutions (unraid is still popular with intel but even that is still more in the used market) and uhhhh the silly gamers who want to spend tons of $$$ just to get 5-10fps more over a cpu that is half the price?

 

Another tip on NVME speeds. The number of layers is important. People think more layers is good, it is not. It is good for space density but not speed or reliability.
QLC = 4 layer, quad
TLC = 3 layers, triple
MLC = 2 layers, multiple
SLC = 1 layer, single

Obviously qlc is cheaper since more bits can be crammed into one block. But what they don't say is that in some cases 3 layers of data has to be moved in order to fill the 4 layer. So some writes have to actually write the bit you want plus 3 other bits it has to move. Thus cutting reliably by a lot.

I stick with no more than MLC. 2 layers. Hardly anyone makes 1 layer anymore. And 3 and 4 layer really slow down once the on drive cache fills up. Which may not cause a problem for the average desktop user.

 

I didn't want to get that complicated lol. In general for a PCI-E 3.0 x4 drive TLC is fine with a slight advantage to MLC. For PCI-E 4.0 MLC or SLC is always used for obvious reasons.

I've been shocked with how long the 660P's, the first QLC drives, have held up in the wild. Odds are anyone who buys a prebuilt PC that claims to have a NVMe PCI-E 3.0 drive in it has a 660P. They just haven't been failing in normal use as bad as people expected. The caches are usually large enough for home use, though if you install windows yourself you will witness a hang after the cache fills during the install.

That all being said, I would stick to better tech for any critical data as you suggest. Now that being said, lol, anything critical should always be backed up offsite anyways so YMMV on the value of buying a better drive.

 

Hey no need to attack me like that

 

haha it was more just a silly comment

 

I just finished the last (hopefully) PC I'll ever need. I may have gone a little overboard with the RGB stuff but when you turn the brightness down it's not so bad. This case was only designed for a 120mm radiator on the front location but with a little modification I got a 240 in the top.

CASE: Parvum X2.0 ITX
MB: Asus ROG Strix Z390-i
CPU: Intel i5-9600K
RAM: G.Skill TridentZ RGB DDR4-2666 (8GB x 2)
PS: Corsair SF 450
SSD: Samsung 970 EVO Plus NVMe M.2 500GB & 1TB
MONOBLOCK: EK-Momentum RGB
RESERVOIR: EK-Quantum Volume 120 RGB
PUMP: EK-XTOP REVO D5 PWM
RADIATOR: EK-Coolstream SE240
TUBING: EK-HD PETG 12mm
FLUID: EK CryoFuel Blood Red
FITTINGS: EK-Torque HTC-12 (Black w/red color rings)
OTHER FITTINGS: Miscellaneous EK Elbows & Splitters
FANS: Corsair LL120 RGB
Rad Grill: MNPCTech Machined Billet Pro Line 240

 

Pretty. Home office setup? Curious why you went custom loop on an i5 with no dedicated graphics or was it just a design thing? Either way looks great.

 

damn son that's a sexy custom loop