Build is done!
So, as it turns out, with the new MoBo, the architecture is a little different from my old motherboard so it actually has the PCIe slot all the way on top of the expansion card stack. So that raises my RTX4060 higher and away from the PSU. This turned out to be good because now there is alot of airspace underneath the GPU, and it was less tight against the chassis and gave more maneuvering room for the GPU to make it into the slot.
The drawback was that I have a video card that I use for ripping whose PCI slot places the GPU directly under the GPU, blocking one of the fans. It's doable as there are 3 fans but I'd rather let the GPU get all the air it can get. So I can't use that card. I may move it to a backup computer I have in the basement. The GPU has been running at 35 Con average. At peak while playing DCS with all the graphics hyped up to high and Ultra, it got up to 45 C.
I went from 22-30 fps to 150-175 fps. I sure did not know what I was missing. Before I had smooth flying and such, but I didn't have all the graphics pumped up. Now I am noticing drop shadows from say my tailfins being casted onto my HUD as I turn, and lots of civilian ground traffic and individual houses and nothing is jittery. Another cool effect I noticed was for explosions on the ground, I see the chock wave, then the initial ball of flame that transforms into a cloud of black smoke as the fuel and heat burn out before it becomes a rising trail of smoke into the sky. What attention to detail!
you can see the added space I have in the pix below, compared to my old MoBo. I have 9 fans running (including the CPU fan and GPU fans) with space for one more and a radiator if needed but I think I'll be fine. Lots of pretty lights that I could care less about but it still looks fun..gamers these days are all about bling I guess. Even my DDR5s light up and cycle colors.
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The main part of the build took me and Viper (some of you have flown with him before years ago) 5.5 hours (including a 1 hour pizza and beer break). The hardest part was putting in the GPU with cable management. We started at 530 pm. Then next hard part was when we booted her up and we couldn't get the BIOS, but then we did eventually (RFTM!)
After that the problem was that the BIOS wasn't seeing any boot drives at all, and had offered no choice to find any. I had my old SSD still installed and it didn't even see that to be able to boot into Win10. I had bought Win11 on USB so had the idea of booting with that on as a boot drive but it took me 30-60 minutes of troubleshooting to resort to that.
And that is what worked. My BIOS booted to the SUB drive, and started installing Win11, and did it right to the NvMe. I don' t know if it just defaults to that, or if it noticed it didn't have space anywhere else and just went to that, but either way it worked...until it wanted to connect to the Internet to continue installation and was not seeing the Internet. How could it, if the OS wasn't even installed for proper protocols? It took probably another hour for me to finally go to my celphone and Google a way to bypass that, and the solution offered worked. I had to restart the installation but when it came back to that part, it actually gave me an option to bypass the connectivity part. Geez, microsoft, why didn't you have that option from the get go? Anyone without any kind of computer savvy would not have known what to do or if that was a viable option. After that, the OS finished installing and I was now in the weird world of Win11 (my fist time seeing it).
At that point, I had to keep my priorities straight so I immediately started downloading DCS. I had just upgraded my Internet connection to 1.2 Gbps down that day, so this was a good test. I downloaded DCS in less than an hour.
During this time Viper and I took a break and hit the pool to cool down. He went home after and right at midnight I went back to finish the DCS install. I started DCS and I was like...HEY! Where's Sinai?!?!? I looked all over, restarted rebooted etc. Nothing.
Then I realized I downloaded the stable version not the beta. It took about half an hour with installation but I got it done. Since my old hard drive was still in the computer I was able to get many of my keybinds and such out of it and paste it into the new DCS installation. Then I had to tweak everything and reset axes. I also had the big pain of setting up Voice Attack because when I bought it, I bought it under my old email which is no longer. So I had to find the old registration email on my old hard drive and to do that I had to transfer that POP file into my current email client and get it to read it. It wouldn't take after several attempts but I finally got it to go, found the registration key, and emailed Voiceattack of my address change. Next was setting up VAICOM Pro and pasting my profiles in. That worked, but for some reason my profiles weren't doing my special commands. I figured I'd fix that later because at this point, with all the DCS tweaking and the other apps needing to get in and on, the sun was rising and the birds were singing. I still had an issue with my USB 3.0s not working, but this was enough for now and I had 4 USB2s working. So I finally wrapped up for the build at 530am.
Fun.
I tied up some loose ends yesterday, more on that later...
v6,
boNes
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"Also, I would prefer a back seater over the extra gas any day. I would have 80 pounds of flesh to eat and a pair of glasses to start a fire." --F/A-18 Hornet pilot
