Worst time to buy a PC

So, ~7 weeks after the Coffee Lake release I finally got my i7 8700k.
I seem to belong to the lucky ones since most of the day one preorders in germany are still not delivered. I dont think that the delivery situation is getting any better in December or Janurary.
I ordered at 5 online retailers at the same time. One of them turned out to be a scammer and was selling CPUs via Amazon marketplace. Fortunatly Amazon has a good buyers protection and refunded dozens of buyers in Germany and UK.
Strangely this seller was selling stuff on Amazon for +1 year and had pretty positive reviews.... until now... reviews dropped below 30% meanwhile.
However, I got my money back and a CPU from a different retailer a few days later.

The new PC is meanwhile build.
My hardware did change a bit from what I have posted on page one of this thread.
Case: Sharkoon S25-W
CPU: I7 8700k
Board: MSI Z370 Gaming Pro Carbon (without the AC -> wireless; I dont need such a crap)
CPU Cooler: Le Grand Macho RT
RAM: Gskill Ripjaws V 3400 cl16
SSD: Samsung Evo 960
Graphic Card: Gigabyte Aorus GTX 1080 Extreme

Additionally to that from my old PC a Bequiet l8 600w PSU, 3 internal HDDs, 1 SSD, 1 external HDD, 1 internal card reader, 1 CD drive.
The costs increased a bit because that CPU is a bit more expensive than the original i7 7700k that I had in mind and the prices for the RAM pretty much exploded in the past few weeks (20% increase).
The 3200Mhz RAM I originaly wanted are meanwhile as expensive as the 3400Mhz RAMs so I simply took the faster ones.
However, since I had to wait that long I took care of the additional funding in the meantime.

I started building the new PC on Saturday and yeah... almost 4 hours... mostly because of the clean cable management I did.
I was a bit worried about getting windows 10 installed.
Originally I upgraded a few years ago from a Windows 7 OEM to Windows 10. New hardware means that I can not use the old OEM key (that only works on a retail version).
When Windows 10 got released back then, I bought a new Windows 7 CD for just a few €, so I was hoping that this one would work.
But there still was the risk that this Windows key would be accepted and that Windows 7 wouldnt install from that CD on a NvME SDD (since windows 7 never had drivers for such hardware).
Surprisingly the Windows installation went better then I thought, because I installed Windows 10 directly via USB and entered that Windows7 product key. Yep, you can activate Windows 10 with a Windows 7 product key meanwhile. My advice would be to see if you can buy such a key online for a few € if you intend to install Windows 10 on new hardware.

The past 2-3 days Ive spent installing software, doing updates (so many Windows updates) and doing thousands of detail settings. I have the habit that everything has to be perfect, so it takes alot of time to restore all the settings and configs and... omg... my game profiles and keybinds (oh fuck!). Ok, better now than in December because then I have alot of other work to do.

So far I only installed a few games that I regulary play and tested them for 5-10mins. A nice improvement.
Yesterday I went into overclocking and yeah... I seem to be able to boot Windows with 5Ghz.
I am not sure how stable it is. I decided against 5Ghz stress tests when I noticed that one of the case fans stopped working. The other 2 remaining case fans also didnt produce much airflow.
So, I replaced the broken Fan with one 120mm coolermaster Fan from my old PC in order to find the error source.
It looks like the sharkoon case fans are pure crap. There seem to be mechanical problems which stop the fans randomly. I guess there is a friction problem. Next to that, even when they are running at full speed they dont really produce a good air flow. You notice almost nothing when they are spinning. The coolermaster fan on the other side was working ALOT better.
But ok... if you buy cheap you get cheap.
The Sharkoon case itself is pretty good... it is big enough for such a massive CPU cooler and such a big graphic card, has the PSU tunnel, has cable management, lots of device mounts, etc.
But the preinstalled case fans are crap.
The Sharkoon case did cost me 50€... the next better case with similar features and dimensions easily would have cost 150-170€. In my eyes thats pretty expensive for a case.
I have meanwhile ordered a bunch of Bequiet Silent Wings to replace these case fans but that is still cheaper than going with a high-end case.

After noticing this small problem, it of course didnt make much sense to stress test the CPU at 5Ghz. The lack of airflow in the case due to the crap fans wouldnt have lead to any good results (probably even would have been dangerous).
I did a 30mins stress test at 4.5Ghz on ALL cores instead (thats about 5% faster than the official specifications for that CPU). Despite the not really existing airflow in the case, the temperature remained in a 70-75°C range. Thats actually not that bad. 15-20°C before it gets too hot (and that without a delidded CPU). None of the cores showed better or worse results than the other cores. I have no doubts that with new case fans I can get to 5Ghz or even 5.1Ghz.

That of course isnt a setting I would use all the time. During the normal daily use of the PC I most likely wouldnt need that much speed. (and the energy consumption at such speeds is much higher)
But it is nice to have an overclocking profile that can deliver that speed if needed in certain situations.

Another problem I ran into was the XMP setting for the RAM.
When I enabled the XMP option in the UEFI the system turns instable during boot and resets to the default settings of 2133Mhz. That is a bit strange since the RAM are listed as being compatible with the mainboard and should deliver the 3400Mhz without any problem. I already contacted the manufacturer to see if there is a specific setting I have to use.
Until I get a response, it turned out that I can run them stable at 3333Mhz and CL15 (which also is pretty nice).

It takes its time to get everything working the way I want.
Putting the minor problems aside I am very satisfied with this new PC.

The performance was needed for rendering or compiling stuff.
But minecraft was installed by default...

Crossfire of course was the first game I have installed. Plus all the modding tools.

MSI Z370 GAMING PRO CARBON (MS-7B45) Performance Results - UserBenchmark
UFO rating
The CPU can perform better but it is currently running at stock speed. As I mentioned I want to replace the case fans first.
But eventhough with stock settings it performs good enough.

I am not sure about the graphics card. It currently runs in silent mode but the test results showed that it went straight over 2000Mhz. The founders edition of the GTX 1080 only runs at a bit more than 1600Mhz.

The boot drive is of course fast (less than 10 seconds until Windows has finished loading). Only the 960 Pro will be faster.

The last 3 drives are of course performing terible. Two of them are pure storage drives based on pretty old hardware and the Toshiba is an external drive connected via USB2. The drive case does not have an USB3 port yet.

It looks like the memory also performs pretty good eventhough I have effectively downclocked it. Maybe I should try to overclock it. The board supports up to 4000Mhz Ram speed but I doubt that it will run stable then.

Edit by

I ran the test again at 4.5GHz and the CPU performance increased to 111%. The 113% average would be activated MultiCoreEnhancement at 4.7Ghz. So nothing unusual The 127% top result was done at 5Ghz but actually its pointless to hunt for such scores.

Got the new fans and the pc is running stable at 5Ghz
Results look a bit better for almost everything.
MSI Z370 GAMING PRO CARBON (MS-7B45) Performance Results - UserBenchmark

Dunno why it shows 4.95Ghz on that benchmark. Maybe because Ive set it to boost to 5Ghz instead of constantly using that clock speed.
RAM seems to perform better and the graphic card also.

I switched the 250gb hdd with the 1tb hdd that originally was in the external case because I use the 1tb more frequently while the 250gb is just a backup disk. That increased the speed of the more frequently used drive.

I guess with that I will stop messing around with the settings. I have a running OC profile now which I can use when needed but its time to set it back to some lower and especially cooler settings. At 5GHz two cores hit 90°C while the others are not that far from that during heavy stress tests. Under 4.5Ghz settings i am not even hitting 70°C.

the thing is my old PC is no more.
nothing I can clone any longer

liquid cooling of course was an option but its alot more expensive.
For 5ghz you would need a somewhat bigger liquid cooler. You dont even need to start with a 120mm AIO.
Best would be a relative thick 280mm radiator with an AIO or even a custom liquid loop.
But there the costs are way beyond 100,-€.

The air cooler I have is extremly big and originally was designed for passive cooling. But the RT version comes with a silent fan. I dont really hear it as it turns mostly with just 300rpm. I think it does go up to 1000rpm, but even then its pretty silent. The biggest noice I notice comes from the HDDs.

AIO (All In One liquid coolers) also dont have loud Fans. Even if they would be loud you just could replace them. But from what I have read the water pump is a bit louder.
And the water pump is also the reason why I decided against liquid cooling.
Because if my air cooler dies then I simply buy a new fan for 15€ (for that price you get a very good one).
If the water pump of an AIO dies you can take all that shit and throw 100-150€ out of the window. You have to completely replace the whole setup.

Good air coolers are not even far away from cooling performance from water cooling. Often just a few ° difference. Sometimes air coolers are even better.
You cant get around the physics here. Water of course is able to absorb alot more heat than air. Thats why heat increases slower on liquid coolers when the CPU performance rises.
But when that CPU performance is gone the energy remains stored in the water for a longer time. It takes longer for water coolers to cool down again.

One benefit of water coolers clearly is the fact that the heat gets transported directly to the radiator and then out of your PC. You dont need a good airflow in your PC case.
The only other serious heat sources are your graphics card and the mainboards power phases.

almost finished to restore my settings

yeah, more or less.
A desktop design ive put together. I like it clean and functional. Nothing is worse than a mess where you cant find the stuff you need to work with.
The most important functions are accessible directly from the desktop, from the additional launch taskbar or are sticked to the right side of the start menu. No pointless searching anymore. No stupid music player windows floating around. No unneccessary stuff visible.
And everything is lightweight to reduce the cpu load and the required system resources.

A bit strange is that when I recorded that small vid it still recorded music when I muted the volume. It was clearly muted my surround speakers. Maybe the recording software fetches the audio from a different source.

Ok, about 6 weeks ago I have build my new PC and roughly one week after that I ran into a problem.

Once a day at random times when I was in games, all of a sudden I either got crashes and messages that told me that my graphic card disconnected. Or I got crashes and afterwards had strange green artifacts on my screen when I rebooted.
These problems appeared at random times in different games without any indication that something were wrong.
Usually after a few reboots everything worked well again.

So clearly a graphic card related issue.
The first I checked of course was the temperatures and the graphic card fans.
The fans were not spinning at all but the teperatures were not really high. Reading the manual revealed that this is absolutely normal since the card is passively cooled until the temperature increased to +50°C. The good airflow in the PC case was enough to cool the graphic card (the highest temp I have so far observed was 63°C while the fans started spinning very slowly). With other words temperature was not the problem.

Another thing I noticed is that despite being correctly mounted this graphic card did hang down a bit on the right side. On the left side it of course is fixed with screws but on the right side it was hanging down a bit (maybe half a cm) -> it was visible that there wasnt a perfect horizontal alignment.
This card is the 2nd heaviest gtx 1080 on the market so I assumed that this could be the issue. Too much weight, causing the PCIe slot pins to lose contact.
To shorten this a bit... yes this was the issue.
These giant 2.5 slot graphic cards have a weight problem. I am glad that I have a motherboard that has steel reinforced PCIe slots that didnt take any damage from that weight.
When I had the graphic card in hands for the first time I was really surprised how heavy it is... even compared with the monstrous big CPU cooler that you can see in the pics below.

My advice. If you have such a heavy graphic card... a 2.5 slot gtx 1080, or a 1080 ti or even a titan. Make sure to use motherboards with reinforced PCIe slots.
And also use PCIe bolsters or additional mounts that keep your graphic card in place.
You can buy such stuff online from the different graphic card and PC case manufacturers... usually thats 30-50€.
Or you can do what I did.
Order chinese food, take the chopsticks and cut them into the right length (paint it black -> for aestethics) and put them between graphic card and PC case.
For meanwhile 4 weeks there has not been a single problem anymore.
Why chopsticks?
Because of chinese food. Its also significantly cheaper than anything you can buy from the hardware manufacturers.
You might also consider to put small pieces of rubber at both sides of the sticks if you want to reduce vibrations from the fans (to make sure that everything is absolutely silent).

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Oh, and actually before I came to the conclusion that a weight problem might be the cause I thought that it might be a power problem since I read some forums where people said that its better to use two seperate power cables instead of a split one. As you can see in the pics I still use two cables but I will certainly remove one again to get the cable management done better.

Ive just found a website which stated a weight of 1.86kg for the card that i am using.
Just imagine such much weight on a plastic PCIe slot.
Even with the screws holding it at the case the length of the card creates a noticable imbalance to the right side.

I have the version which has its overclocking profile set to 1936Mhz (and Ive observed it to peak as high as 2100Mhz during stress tests). That one has 3 large fans which overlap due to their size (thats one of the reason why its so thick), a giant heatspreader with large heatpipes and big blocks of cooling rips. And since that isnt enough already a big backplate.
Its no surprise that it gets so heavy. But thats a general problem with PCs these days. The more powerful you make them the harder it is to prevent overheating.
Laws of physics can not be ignored. Energy can not be created, nor can it it be consumed, it can only be transformed. Every (almost) watt that goes into a PC is eventually turned into heat.

One other option I forgot to mention.
Some cases allow to vertically mount graphic cards. (I believe my sharkoon case also is able to do that).
That way the weight problem is resolved since the graphic card can not bend down. It also looks pretty cool if your mainboard isnt that good looking already. But for that you require an additional PCIe extension cable. It at least would be an option and most cards look great from below.

I guess if you mount a graphic card vertically then its mostly for aestetics. That means that you most likely have a windowed case which very often dont have holes for airflow.
However due to the vertical alignment the hot air would go up where back fans or top fans could blow it out.
If there is liquid CPU cooler, you most certainly would never run into problems since graphic card and vrms are the only sources of heat inside the case.

going to delid my cpu this evening

I hope everything works and I won't ruin my 400€ processor

its dead jim

no, actually it booted up fine

the procedure felt like a brain surgery

the worst part is the cracking noise when the IHS breaks of the PCB

and of course working so precicly ... with my shaky hands