Splitting out my race and flight sim PC

[Neilski]

It would even enhance the performance for simracing

Good point.

Afaik Win 10 got an update for the big/little Intels, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Ohh, that very vaguely rings a bell...

 

[Lesthegringo]

Hit a big speedbump - none of the sellers on Amazon will ship any of the better Intel CPU's to Qatar, not sure why. I have got everything else no problem, but no CPU...

Weird

I'll have to see what's available locally, not sure I'm going to like the price

Les

 

[Lesthegringo]

I'm very pleased to say that there is a guy here from the US who is travelling back to visit his family who will be bringing a CPU back for me, so all being well in a couple of weeks I will be set with the new PC! He's a fellow simmer, however with a taste for Helicopters, so in turn for helping build his Apache rig, he will be a good Samaritan.

Cheers all

Les

 

[Terry Rock]

Win11 still works well with the Reverb G2.
I believe I heard somewhere that from 24H2 support for WMR will diminish.
Guess you'd be okay if you stick with 23H2.

 

[Lesthegringo]

I'm still erring on the side of sticking with Win 10, if noting else because I know what I am doing with it. As the PC will be dedicated to the race sim, I can't see Win 10 causing any issues

 

[Lesthegringo]

The hardware finally arrives tomorrow, so will start building. However I have a question about installation of the OS and sims. I will have a 2Tb NVME drive, and my intention is to put the OS on that, however am I better off putting the actual sims on a different NVME drive? The motherboard can accept up to three M2 type drives, so it is easy enough to install another and put the sims on that

What's the perceived wisdom?

 

[blekenbleu]

motherboard can accept up to three M2 type drives

Some motherboards offer better access to one NVMe than others;
I would put OS, GPU drivers, SimHub, etc on that,
then e.g. Steam and games on another.
FWIW, with 32GB, I install a 2GB RAM disk, redirecting cache and logging folders to it

 

[Lesthegringo]

Thanks, will do

I have a bit more of an immediate problem, which I know is not insurmountable but is a bit of a pain. The guys delivered the CPU to me today (hooray!) but when I opened it up, he'd ordered the one without the heat sink and fan (boo!). I'm certainly not going to complain at the guy, he did me a massive favour, so I will just look for a solution. The first one out of the box is that I have an old i7 LGA1151 CPU heat sink and fan from a previous build where I used an aftermarket heatsink and fan. Without the Mobo on hand I can't check the hole spacing, but would assume they are different. Can anyone confirm?

I suspect that buried in amongst the pile of old PC bits and bobs is a CoolerMaster fan and heatsink assembly that I removed from a PC at some point. I think it has one of those universal adapters on it, but also suspect that due to it's probable age it is not going to cover LGA1700. So I may end up having to buy a CPU cooler.

Les

 

[blekenbleu]

CoolerMaster fan and heatsink assembly

LGA1700 UPGRADE KIT​

 

[Lesthegringo]

Thanks, unfortunately I am limited to what is available locally if I want to get it without paying more for shipping than for the cooler! There are some computer part shops here, I will have to see what they have. Hopefully I can find something

Les

 

[Lesthegringo]

All, I have an additional question, before I commit to the build. The 'old' PC that was doing the dual duty of race and flight sim is based around an i9-9900K CPU at 3.60Ghz (coffee lake) on a Gigabyte Z390 GAMING X-C with 32Gb of DDR4-2666 Ram

The new dedicated race sim PC will be the following
Core i5 12600k
Asus TUF H760-Plus Mobo
Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6400mhz (2x16Gb)

I am assuming that despite being an i9 versus an i5, the later hardware is the better package, and therefore would be best used on the race sim that I will use for VR?

Cheers

Les

 

[Lesthegringo]

The majority of the parts arrived yesterday, and I was able to get a CPU cooler from a local supplier. The parts that didn't arrive were the GPU and the NVMe drive. However I have an old GTX660 card plus a few SATA HDD's so I thought I would put it together as far as I could and then put in the remaining parts once they arrive.

However I cannot get it to display anything on the monitor when booting up. The Q-LED diagnostic 'BOOT' LED is lit (in green) despite having a know good HDD connected. I have swapped the SATA cable, changed the HDD power connector, I can feel the HDD is spinning. Everything seems to be working fine, except I get nothing on the monitor, not even the BIOS Boot screen or splash screen. That means I can't even go to BIOS settings to check the boot order or that it is recognising the HDD. I have connected the monitor via HDMI and DisplayPort cables, even trying the native ones on the motherboard. The monitor does work, I robbed it from another PC for the test.

Obviously I cannot test it with an NVMe drive fitted until it arrives, ditto the 4070 Super, but I would at least expect it to boot into BIOS with a SATA drive connected.

I followed this https://www.asus.com/uk/support/faq/1042678/##5 support page, but no help

I reseated the GPU and RAM, and even reduced the RAM to just one DIMM stick. Apart from the BOOT Q-LED there is no other indication of anything wrong

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Les

 

[RasmusP]

All, I have an additional question, before I commit to the build. The 'old' PC that was doing the dual duty of race and flight sim is based around an i9-9900K CPU at 3.60Ghz (coffee lake) on a Gigabyte Z390 GAMING X-C with 32Gb of DDR4-2666 Ram

The new dedicated race sim PC will be the following
Core i5 12600k
Asus TUF H760-Plus Mobo
Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6400mhz (2x16Gb)

I am assuming that despite being an i9 versus an i5, the later hardware is the better package, and therefore would be best used on the race sim that I will use for VR?

Cheers

Les

Yes, by a mile!
The differences between i3 to i9 within the same generation are:
- more cores (but you don't need more than 5 for simracing)
- more cache (some games benefit quite a lot, some not at all)
- higher clock speeds (lately it's not that much and for older generations, you could easily overclock the i3/i5 to almost match the i9)

But they all have the same architecture and cores. The i5 is simply an i9 with some malfunctioning and therefore disabled cores and less cache.
Overclock it to the same speed and you won't see any difference when running a non-cache-sensitive benchmark like Cinebench at only 6 threads/cores.
But the difference between your 9900k and 12600k will be massive

The majority of the parts arrived yesterday, and I was able to get a CPU cooler from a local supplier. The parts that didn't arrive were the GPU and the NVMe drive. However I have an old GTX660 card plus a few SATA HDD's so I thought I would put it together as far as I could and then put in the remaining parts once they arrive.

However I cannot get it to display anything on the monitor when booting up. The Q-LED diagnostic 'BOOT' LED is lit (in green) despite having a know good HDD connected. I have swapped the SATA cable, changed the HDD power connector, I can feel the HDD is spinning. Everything seems to be working fine, except I get nothing on the monitor, not even the BIOS Boot screen or splash screen. That means I can't even go to BIOS settings to check the boot order or that it is recognising the HDD. I have connected the monitor via HDMI and DisplayPort cables, even trying the native ones on the motherboard. The monitor does work, I robbed it from another PC for the test.

Obviously I cannot test it with an NVMe drive fitted until it arrives, ditto the 4070 Super, but I would at least expect it to boot into BIOS with a SATA drive connected.

I followed this https://www.asus.com/uk/support/faq/1042678/##5 support page, but no help

I reseated the GPU and RAM, and even reduced the RAM to just one DIMM stick. Apart from the BOOT Q-LED there is no other indication of anything wrong

Any ideas?

Thanks in advance

Les

Ouff, that doesn't sound great..
Did you try another sata port on the mobo?
And I'm not sure, but the bios might even work without any HDD connected.

 

[Lesthegringo]

Thanks Rasmus

I borrowed an NVMe drive from a neighbour to test. It didn't work even with that. I suspected I had a dead something, possibly motherboard. Even with the NVMe drive fitted it has the boot Q-LED lit, and nothing appeared on the monitor.

Unfortunately, there will be no way to return the motherboard from here, so that meant I just had to try stuff and see if it worked. Believe it or not, I tried a DVI cable (remember those...?) simply because I had one, and it worked.

So with a massive sigh of relief I can report it's working OK now, although I still will have to install the GPU and my MVMe drive when they finally get here. Interestingly, even after a trial installation of Win 10, DisplayPort is not supported. Hopefully all that will be corrected with the definitive GPU

 

[RasmusP]

Wow, quite a weird case!
It seems that the DP Port causes some error before the mobo can even figure out where it is.
With a faulty GPU, the Q-LED should point to the GPU, but it doesn't, weird.

In any case, great to hear that everything is working, or rather will be working with the parts you'll actually use

 

[RasmusP]

Just a little addition about single thread performance:

Intel Core i9-9900K @ 3.60GHz vs Intel Core i5-12600K vs AMD Ryzen 5 5600X vs AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D vs Intel Core i5-14600K [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

That score scales with clock speed, but not with the cache sizes, so it's more of a single-thread-productivity score, or for games like Battlefield 2042, where the performance between my 7600X and 7800X3D is absolutely identical.

9900k = 2932 points
12600k = 3954 points

That's a massive difference! And the 12600k caches are bigger, than the caches of the 9900k, which can be another plus for sims.

 

[Lesthegringo]

That's good info, thanks!

I should be getting the NVMe drive today so will do the definitive installation (apart from the GPU, not sure when that will turn up). I will be able to load up Steam, plus all the games one another drive once I get it, but for the time being it will all go on one for testing. I seem to remember that transferring them all is pretty easy

Cheers

Les

 

[Novopaine]

Regarding the display issue, most monitors are pretty good and detecting what type of cable you plugged in and switching to that as the source. But not all. There should be a button on the monitor to select the Source, like DVI, HDMI, Display Port, etc. Have you tried manually switching it?

Another note, the 12600K should have an basic iGPU built into the CPU. So you don't even need the GTX 660 to test out the system. You can at least rule out a bad cable, monitor, or a bad video card. On the other hand, if you have a 12600F or KF, don't try it as those lack the iGPU completely.

One thing to note, the iGPU could be disabled if you have the GTX 660 installed, or it might be using the dGPU as the master, which might explain why you saw no picture when you tried those connections.

 

[Lesthegringo]

Thanks, interesting how it works. I have to confess it had me worried for a while, thankfully all that is behind me.

One other note that I have to report is with the PSU cables, specifically the SATA drive ones. One of the cables only works at the first of the four SATA connections, and the other seems to have intermittent connections to some.

I was connecting four old SATA HDD's (2 5inch, 2 3.5 inch) so that I could repurpose them to put the downloads and music / video / picture files on. One of them worked fine with a USB HDD drive saddle, but when I connected it to the PC it wasn't being reported. Simply touching it showed that the HDD was not spinning, so I moved the connector from the last one on the cable (the only one with a straight connector) to the next one down, which was at 90 degrees to the cable. That seemed to cure it.

I noticed that once I had it all running without the case rear cover on, I had all four SATA drives reporting, but once I put the case cover back on, two of the drives stopped reporting. It's looking like the SATA power cables are being squeezed by the cover, and either the connection to the HDD is being disturbed or the cable itself has a bad connection.

It's by no means a show stopper, as I have some other cables I can use, but I was a bit disappointed with the poor quality control. The drives are not essential, as three NVMe drives directly on the Motherboard totally 5Tb is going to be more than enough. I just wanted to use the old drives for something rather than have them sitting doing nothing.

A feature that I am pleased about is the sheer silence of the PC. The case came with three 120 fans, and seeing as there were two spare fan connections I robbed a couple of Cooler Master 12mm fans to add. As a result (without the definitive GPU admittedly) you just cannot hear it at all. Very nice. I suspect the 4070 Super will change that, but let's see

Les