Computer talk OS Windows Linux MAC

[boredjedi]

The CPU has a strange design with a raised metal plate and exposed circuitry underneath, looks tailor made for letting excess thermal paste drip onto the circuitry. I've never seen anything like this, CPU usually has a solid surface so the circuits are not exposed.

Oh yeah forgot about that new lid design. My current CPU was still made with the classic lid design.
Noctua for example sells a thermal paste guard for that newer lid design.

Basically clear plastic sheet that's cut to the shape of the lid

https://noctua.at/en/na-stpg1

https://www.reddit.com/r/Noctua/comm...ua_am5_natpg1/

[boredjedi]

Found some little rubber parts and apparently you are supposed to put them under your M.2's if they are single sided, which, as far as I can tell, all three of them are, though of course it doesn't say that on the packaging anywhere, so I have to completely re-do the M.2 installations and put these rubber pads under them. So irritating. Hope I can get them out without damaging them, they are under heat sinks with thermal pads, and snap into place.

Rubber parts? All I had to make sure was to remove the protective sheet on the thermal pad
that's on the heat spreader for the M.2 drive.






It's space for either single or double sided M.2. No rubber spacers needed.

[boredjedi]

One more for now. I looked at the manual for your new mobo
Yeah has this rubber piece I guess a spacer for a single sided
M.2 drive.

[chuft]

Interesting about the plastic sheet made to go around the CPU. I wonder if that defeats any advantages of the new design. Trying to imagine why they made the chip that way. Oh well if this CPU is kaput I'll get ahold of some of those for the next one. Thanks. And no thanks to AMD and their stupid design. If it needs a 10 cent plastic part to protect it they should include it with the $200 CPU. Or design their chips more intelligently. Thermal paste is not optional.


I still have no idea what that mobo manual is talking about in Step 5. The picture makes no sense to me. I tend to skip "optional" steps (which apparently is not optional for the rubber thing if you have a single sided SSD, a term I have never heard before). They should not call it optional if it is required. Step 5, I have no idea what they are saying. Not a good manual at all.



>It's space for either single or double sided M.2. No rubber spacers needed.

But that's the problem. The heat sink with the thermal pad, to work, has to press down on the M.2. If there is no support underneath, it bends the M.2 down over time. They put the rubber pad on the mobo to support a double sided SSD from below, but it is not tall enough to support a single sided SSD, which most of them are (all the Samsung EVO's and PRO's for example) so you have to add another rubber thing on top of the bottom one to make it tall enough to support the M.2. Having empty space underneath a M.2 that is receiving pressure from above is the problem.

[boredjedi]

The only thing you have to worry about with Thermal paste is if you use conductive paste.
Most of the thermal paste nowadays are non conducting. Even the one I bought for
this newer rig Arctic Mx-4 (carbon microparticles rather than metal such as silver).
I picked that one because at the time it was the best in class for thermal dissipation properties not for being conductive or not.
Though I didn't need to worry about that with this CPU.

I think most PC users are using the newer non conductive paste rather than the old style like Arctic Silver.

[boredjedi]

>It's space for either single or double sided M.2. No rubber spacers needed.

But that's the problem. The heat sink with the thermal pad, to work, has to press down on the M.2. If there is no support underneath, it bends the M.2 down over time. They put the rubber pad on the mobo to support a double sided SSD from below, but it is not tall enough to support a single sided SSD, which most of them are (all the Samsung EVO's and PRO's for example) so you have to add another rubber thing on top of the bottom one to make it tall enough to support the M.2. Having empty space underneath a M.2 that is receiving pressure from above is the problem.

Dubious design it seems. I can only comment about mine since it's my only experience with that.
It was fairly straight forward. No need to put pressure on anything. Once the the M2 drive was seated,
the heat sink sat right on top and just needed to screw it down on both ends. Even that didn't put pressure.

[boredjedi]

https://help.corsair.com/hc/en-us/ar...er-Supply-Unit


Taking a break for dinner and trying to get the energy to continue. I doubt I will be able to finish it tonight.

In that link there's a power supply tester. I just added that one to my order list. Keep meaning to get a new one just in case.
Price isn't bad either $15. My old one is from 2 decades ago and just has green leds. I don't remember that paper clip test.


The two most popular power supply testers currently are "Thermaltake Dr. Power III, and the Fuhengli Power Supply Tester"

This is the Fuhengli

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-PC-T.../dp/B076CLNPPK

The “paper clip” test (shorting power and ground pins on the ATX power connector) can’t verify that all other connectors are working properly.
This little device helped me confirm a DOA motherboard and saved me a lot of hassle. It is well worth the money.

Thermaltake (up to date for 2025 power supply specs)
A bit more expensive at $49

https://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-S.../dp/B0CZ2YF2FR

[chuft]

Yeah I was reading up on it yesterday and it seems the thermal paste that comes with my cooler is non-conductive so hopefully that won't be an issue.

That PSU tester sounds expensive, but good to keep in mind if I have an issue.

Once the the M2 drive was seated, the heat sink sat right on top and just needed to screw it down on both ends. Even that didn't put pressure.

Well mine works the same way. The pressure comes on the M.2 when you screw down the heat sink and the thermal pad presses on the M.2 from above. Maybe yours didn't have a thermal pad. Something to be aware of anyway next time you build. Look for those rubber spacers/supports.

[chuft]

[boredjedi]

Congrats!!!

[chuft]

Weird right to the end. Yesterday I was wiring up the front panel headers and I could not find the HDD drive light cable. Turns out this case does not have one! Apparently that's the thing now, people have gone from RGB crazy to not even wanting to see a blinking hard drive activity light.

And now today - see the third M.2? That's a freebie NewEgg throws in with a 9600X purchase. They say - and the package containing it says - Patriot P400 Lite 500GB. But what the BIOS shows is Viper VP4300L 2 TB, which is not only four times the size, but has a better controller apparently.

I'm not the only one discovering this mislabeling of the package.

https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/co...a_2tb_instead/

I suspect this is why NewEgg is giving them away, even though they are better than what the package says. It's an entirely different product. I just threw it in there because I had a third M.2 slot, figured why not. Had no idea it was actually 2TB.

[chuft]

Since I have a third SSD sitting in there, it occurred to me I might be able to make a dual boot system with Win11 and Linux, in case Microsoft goes off the deep end again with Recall or OneDrive or something. While reading about that, I read that apparently, when you install Windows 11, it might put its boot partition on something other than the Windows drive. So I could end up with Windows on C: and the boot record on D: and the system would not boot if anything ever happened to the D drive. (It might even put it on E: which is where the Linux install would go, which would be bad.) Very annoying they would make the installer do that. I am surprised it even can if you don't choose to format the second or third drives yet when installing Windows on the first.
Microsoft



It seems, even if I don't want to dual boot Linux, that I should once again take the M.2's out except for the first one, and then install Windows on that, and then put both other M.2's back, format the second one from Windows, and install Linux on the third one, which should detect Windows and give you the choice of which to use when booting in the horribly named GRUB.



Was that what you two were talking about before with removing M.2's for dual boot? I thought you meant you were swapping one out for another one when you wanted to boot into the other OS, which sounded like a real pain. From what I can gather you can leave them all in there and just choose an OS at boot time. Though due to Windows schenanigans it is best to have Linux on its own drive, think that's due to the newer UEFI stuff and how it handles boot partitions. I guess in the past with the old way, you could have them both on one drive without Windows overwriting the Linux boot partition during updates and whatnot.

Surprised Pooky has been silent during my entire build experience, thought she had an interest in PC hardware from your previous convo's.

[chuft]

Now I am reading that Secure Boot is a problem if you want to have both Win11 and Linux. If you turn it off, Windows is less secure, if you turn it on, Linux GRUB has problems and needs a lot of tweaking and fiddling. Bah.


Should have known Linux would be a headache one way or another.



I miss those old controls that would let you have the text be centered and flow around an image instead of just be at the bottom of the inline image.

[LazyPooky]

Surprised Pooky has been silent during my entire build experience, thought she had an interest in PC hardware from your previous convo's.

I read it and take notes. This would be a good time to upgrade to a new since it has been 2 years already, but I'm so busy with other things that I don't have the time to really explore all the new stuff right now. I don't even know if the prices a good. Perhaps next month.

I saw that the Dollar is cheap now compared to Euro so that would make prices to go down if stuff comes from there. Not as low as 2020 but close.



I bought the upgrade at the same time as the components for the glm-server. I remember, I spent some time to figure out how to reduce the power consumption of that server-computer because it's on 24/7. For measuring (in Watt) I used the Brennenstuhl power consumption meter because that one is the most accurate.

https://ie.rs-online.com/web/p/energy-meters/7975459

Without monitor, keyboard and mouse attached the power consumption is close to 10 Watt.

[BRBFBI]

Should have known Linux would be a headache one way or another.

Oh, and I suppose it's all Linux's fault.

I gave up on dual boot years ago. I seem to remember an issue where one of them corrupted the other. I wish I remembered the specifics.

One thing I like about Linux is that it's very easy to implement full disk encryption at install. If my laptop is lost or stolen it would cost roughly ten billion USD worth of electricity to brute force a five random word passphrase. Compared to "normal" file-system level encryption, full disk encryption encrypts everything: swap spaces, temporary files, metadata. Your Windows install might not even be doing file-system encryption since, if it doesn't like your unique combination of hardware, Windows won't implement encryption at all and not even warn you.

For those who don't know, having a password on your home screen is not the same as having encryption. But most of you are more tech-savy than me and ensuring that Windows is appropriately encrypted won't be a big hardship. My laptop is my bank vault, my investment firm, a repository of every digital mail I've ever sent, and more. It is essential that it is properly secured. I use Windows on my desktop, but that's just for photo editing and gaming.

I saw that the Dollar is cheap now compared to Euro so that would make prices to go down if stuff comes from there. Not as low as 2020 but close.

What happened to my beautiful 1 USD = 1.14 EUR ratio from my first trip to Europe 🥲 Those were the days.