Tag Archives: pc

New PC: Crinus Muto

Boxed PC parts arranged photogenically

I have now painstakingly assembled all the parts to build an almost entirely new computer, reusing only the graphics card from my current PC. Over an extra long weekend, a handful of weekends ago, I just as painstakingly attempted to assemble them into some semblance of a computer, repeating events that occurred nine years ago.

Which is to say, it’s been a while since I’ve built a new PC.

Just like last time, I’ve been thinking about putting together a new PC for a while now. I haven’t, mostly, because while my PC may be getting a little long in the tooth, it still plays the games I want to play. I’ve upgraded it a little since then  — a new graphics card, and a new NVME SSD to add to the pre-existing NVME boot drive, but apart from a few peripheral changes — which I don’t really count as upgrades per se, as they’re, you know, peripherals, that’s it! It’s as stock as the day I put it together, all those years ago.

Because as much as I wanted to upgrade my PC, there were things that just took precedent. Other, adult stuff. But bit by bit, piece by piece, I knew what parts I wanted, even if I wasn’t sure what the overall platform would be, or even when I would be building it.

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 4.7 GHz 8-Core Processor $879 @ Scorptec
CPU Cooler Deepcool LS320 WH 85.85 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler $89 @ PLE
Motherboard Asus ROG STRIX X870-A GAMING WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard $799 @ Computer Alliance
Memory G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-7800 CL36 Memory $230 @ second-hand
Storage Intel Optane 905P 960 GB 2.5″ NVME Solid State Drive $711 @ Newegg
Storage Crucial P3 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 3.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $331 @ Amazon Australia
Storage Kingston KC3000 4.096 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $379 @ Centrecom
Video Card EVGA FTW3 ULTRA GAMING GeForce RTX 3070 8 GB Video Card $1149 @ Mwave
Case Fractal Design Torrent RGB ATX Mid Tower Case $299 @ Scorptec
Power Supply SeaSonic VERTEX PX-1000 1000 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply $409 @ Scorptec
Headphones SteelSeries Arctis Nova 7P Headset $239 @ Amazon Australia
Keyboard Ajazz AK820 MAX Triple-mode hall-effect keyboard $108 @ AliExpress
Mouse Logitech G Pro X Superlight Wireless Optical Mouse $50 @ second-hand
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total $5672
Generated by PCPartPicker 2025-02-28 01:10 AEDT+1100

While that all seems like it adds up to a pretty big number, it’s all been spread across a few years. It’s honestly a pretty mediocre time to build a new computer. It might be an OK time to build a new PC if you’re planning to reuse your graphics card, as was the situation that I found myself in, but if you want to buy a new graphics card, then it’s a terrible time to build a new PC. Your graphics card will be the most expensive component by far and might even be the entire cost of the rest of your PC depending on which model you’re buying, if you can even find one in stock to buy in the first place. Like I said, terrible time to be building a new PC if you need to buy a new graphics card right now. Might be better in the coming months, but that remains to be seen.

As for me, I’m reusing two parts from my current PC. A 4TB NVME SSD, and my beloved RTX 3070 graphics card, which technically makes it the first part I purchased for the new computer, even if I didn’t know it at the time. I bought a 3070 in 2021, right in the middle of Covid and paid an embarrassing amount for it, as was the custom at the time. While I kinda wish I waited for 3080s to be in stock, I had a good reason for upgrading at the time, because my just-as-old GTX 980 was showing worrying signs of instability and was likely on its last legs.

And if we’re not counting peripherals, I bought an Intel Optane SSD back when you still could in 2023, with the intention of using it solely as my boot and temporary ShadowPlay drive. While I don’t think I’ve had an SSD die on me due to exhausting its write capacity, I know it’ll be hard to kill an Optane drive with writes, even if I’m trying to. For context, my current nine-year old boot drive, a 512GB Samsung 950 Pro, has had about 50 TB written to it in that time.

I picked up a DeepCool 120mm AIO mid last year for about a third of the price of what a Noctua NH-D15 G2 would have set me back, and as the 120mm variant was also quickly becoming unobtainable, I could have it in any colour, as long as it was white. Which pretty much sealed the deal on whether I’d be doing an all/mostly-white build, because next was the case. I’ve wanted a Fractal Torrent ever since I saw reviews of it a few years ago, and I ended up grabbing the white RGB version in the middle of last year, around the same time as the cooler. At the time I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do an all-white build, but I figured I at least wanted a white case and white cooler, even if the rest of the system was black. I think the contrast would have been nice.

And over the past six to eight months, the system has come together all by itself, bit by bit, piece by piece. Another SSD was next, then some RAM, and evidently the marketing is working (or I’ve been watching too much LTT), because I had my heart set on a Seasonic PSU and wouldn’t settle for any other, even if there were technically better options available with the requirements that I had (80 Plus Platinum or better, ATX 3.0 or better, Cybernetics A or better, etc). While I consulted the PSU tier list, the models at the top of the list either weren’t available in Australia, or commanded a higher-than-expected premium over competitors, with the rest of their A-tier PSUs being more or less the same. So, the marketing worked, and I now own a Seasonic power supply. PSU tier list be damned. While the original plan was for more RGB, I’m still on the fence whether I want to do that, and/or some custom length sleeved cables. As nice as it might be, as much of a little pizzazz that it would add, it seems like a bit of a pain to have to undo all my hard work when I spent two hours cable managing the thing. We’ll see.

With the rest of the system now put together, all I had to do was decide on the platform. If the graphics card is the most important component of any higher-tier gaming PC, then the CPU and motherboard are undoubtedly number two and three.

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The new NAS

PC parts for a custom NAS build

It’s close enough to 2023 now, and off the back of my QNAP being on borrowed time, it’s time to think about a new NAS. I’ve had a couple of NAS iterations over the years, starting off with a $200 HP MicroServer, then the aforementioned QNAP, and now, whatever I want to go with next.

I could, of course, go with another consumer-grade NAS like a Synology. Or even a QNAP if I am feeling particularly brave. Apparently, Synology units with processors that had the LPC CLK issue weren’t affected to the same degree as QNAP units were, because they implemented their LPC interfaces at 1.8V, preventing 2V over that circuit being an issue like it was in the QNAP units. That and/or in combination with a firmware update that somehow mitigated the issue, meant that a Synology unit would have been the more reliable choice at the time, and we wouldn’t even be having this discussion if I had purchased a Synology instead of a QNAP back in 2016.

Alas, I did, and we are.

Which brings us back to the original question: what kind of a NAS do I want in 2023, that will hopefully last 5-7 years, if not more?

I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. There are definite, distinct advantages to having an all-in-one unit like a QNAP or Synology. You get the smallest possible chassis, minuscule power usage, and the entire software experience that buying a QNAP or Synology gets you, which means that even if you’re going to run your own Docker containers and just use the software to manage your storage, it’s definitely a more cohesive, user-friendly experience compared to rolling your own OS. But even after all that, I’ve been drawn to the idea of building my PC to serve NAS duties for a while now.

Why? It comes down to hardware, both in terms of choice and flexibility.

Buying a consumer-grade NAS like a QNAP or Synology means you’re buying into their ecosystem, with all of the advantages and disadvantages that entails. Yes, you can upgrade the RAM and install your own drives but that’s about it in terms of upgrades. With the exception of some of their pricier units, you can’t drop-in a PCIe card to add discrete graphics, or more M.2 drives, or even 10 GbE, if that ever becomes a thing at home. Maybe it will, maybe it won’t.

There are some Synology units that let you buy a PCIe expansion card that lets you add 10 GbE as well as more M.2 slots (in addition to the ones you already have), by the time you pony up for one of the pricer Synology units and the PCIe expansion card, you’ve basically spent as much as you would have if you picked your own parts and built your own PC from scratch, with none of the benefits of having custom hardware. It’s a trade off. I think it makes way more sense to buy a QNAP or Synology NAS, compared to building your own, than it does for you to buy a pre-built gaming PC from a major computer retailer like Dell or HP, purely because you’ll get more value out of a consumer NAS that you do out of a gaming PC that uses non-standard parts and layouts. You’re far more likely to want to upgrade your gaming PC within its expected lifetime than you are your own NAS, and you’ll appreciate standard PC components at that point, way more than you would if you were to upgrade your NAS. But I digress, and that’s a topic for another time.

When you’re building your own NAS out of commodity PC hardware, you have the complete freedom to choose which standard PC components you want, and the flexibility that affords you down the line. You might not ever need to upgrade your QNAP or Synology CPU in the lifetime of your NAS — but don’t you wish you could, when something better comes along?

But if there was a single reason I wanted to build my own NAS, it comes from being able to have access to hardware transcoding. Specifically, Intel Quick Sync Video.

While video transcoding isn’t generally a problem for me right now, that’s not to say it won’t be in the future. The Celeron J1900 in my current QNAP supports Quick Sync, and I haven’t had an issue streaming most of my content to iOS devices via Plex due to the wonders of direct play and most of my content being in a format that’s compatible with my devices. But between various CPU architectures, Quick Sync support for different codecs and formats varies. My current CPU, while it supports H.264, will only support decoding HEVC H.265, not encoding it, with zero support for newer video codecs like VP9 or AV1, or even 10 or 12-bit HEVC H.265 which is sometimes used by HDR versions of those videos. I don’t currently have Quick Sync video working on my current QNAP, but that is probably a configuration issue on my part; it’s entirely possible I haven’t set it up correctly in the Plex container.

Not supporting hardware-accelerated video encoding/decoding means we’re back to software decoding. And if YouTubers are to be believed, AV1 is going to be the next big thing, so even if we have to wait for a couple of years for it to be adopted by content farms, won’t I be glad I’ll have picked a 12th gen CPU that can handle decoding AV1 in hardware, as opposed to some Ryzen chip that would have had to rely on sheer CPU grunt to do software encoding?

While this might not be a big deal right now, it’ll matter if everyone starts using the royalty free, and even more efficient AV1 format. If that happens within the remaining lifetime of my QNAP, that’ll be an issue for me because it will mean I’m back to software decoding everything. I’m using software transcoding now, and it’s an extremely poor experience on a quad-core 2.0GHz CPU, even on my local network. The good news is, only Intel Arc has access to AV1 hardware encoders, which means everyone else has to throw CPU grunt at the problem, if they want to encode their content in AV1.

The other main advantage of rolling your own NAS hardware is that you can run whatever OS you want on it. While there are technically ways you can run other OSes on QNAPs or Synology units, it’s a hack. Building my own NAS lets me choose between straight Linux, like whatever version of Ubuntu that I ran on my HP Microserver, or the more storage-focused flavours of Linux/BSD like Unraid or TrueNAS. TrueNAS in particular is interesting because it is known for natively implementing OpenZFS, which is generally regarded as the best storage-focused filesystem. I don’t currently have a need to run any of the crazier storage configurations afforded by ZFS as I’ll be limited by the hardware and case that I’ve chosen (at least to begin with), but it’s nice to know they’re an option, if I decide to do that later on down the track.

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Return of the Obra Dinn

I’ve played a lot of video games in 2018. I got a taste of the grind in Destiny 2 when it was free, fought in the frontlines in Battlefield 5, taken down other drivers in the Burnout Paradise remaster, constructed mining ships of my own design in Space Engineers, explored a vast universe in No Man’s Sky, and even tried out the DayZ 1.0, alongside my usual staple of Dota 2. But besides all the well-known games that I’ve played, there have been exactly two indie games which have been great enough to capture my attention, and this post is about one of them.

Return of the Obra Dinn is from Lucas Pope, who you might better know from the immigration paperwork game Papers, Please. Return of the Obra Dinn is slightly different, in that it’s still about paperwork, but this time around you play the part of a insurance investigator. Officially, your job is to determine how much should be paid out to the crew of the good ship Obra Dinn, which in turn means figuring out all 60 crewmembers, and their fates.

To aid you in doing so, you have a magic pocket watch. And a notebook, but we’ll get to that later. One of Return of the Obra Dinn’s core gameplay loops involves finding a dead body, standing over it, and then using your magic pocket watch to go back to the moment of that person’s death. These death scene freeze frames don’t allow you to interact with anyone or anything, with the idea being that you can walk around, observe, inspect, gather clues, and hopefully identify who was present and what was happening, all from a few voice lines and a still frame of the exact time they died. Sometimes, one death scene will lead to the discovery of another body, which is another scene, and so on, until you have a little series of events.

These events, in turn, make up “chapters” within your notebook, which describes itself as the catalogue of adventure and tragedy that befell the Obra Dinn. By going around the ship, discovering more and more bodies, and more and more scenes, you’ll start to build up a depiction of the characters so you can start putting names to faces — no easy task, given the one-bit graphics and often obscure clues and hints that you’ll need to pick up on.

Make no mistake, Return of the Obra Dinn is hard. The game warns you fairly early on that in your quest to identify all 60 passengers and crew and their fates, definitive information that will let you decisively identify someone and their fate is rare. While you’ll usually have some idea of how a person died thanks to your magic pocket watch, working out who they are based only on contextual clues — what they’re doing in any given scene, what they’re saying, what they’re wearing, who they appear with — is challenging in the extreme. The game helps by blurring faces in the notebook until it thinks it has revealed all the information you’ll need to positively identify someone, but you’ll still need all of your powers of observation to do so. At times, you’ll need to jump between different scenes in order to work out who someone is, taking a look at where they are, what they’re doing, and so on.

It’s all very murder-mystery. Only instead of trying to work out who (or in some cases, what) did the deed, the real challenge is putting names to faces.

Unfortunately, that’s also where Return of the Obra Dinn falls short. There’s basically no replayability, given that once you’ve figured everything out, that’s how it is for the rest of time. It’s for this reason that I don’t recommend doing what I did and looking up a guide, no matter how stuck you are. The problem with this kind of game is that it’s hard for a guide to point you in the right direction, and they may end up just spoiling a few characters or two. Instead, I recommend using all the available clues; the game provides you with all of the details that you need to identify someone, even if they’re obscure as all hell. Once you’ve unlocked every scene, go through and review all of the scenes an individual appears in and try to work out who they are based on what they’re doing, who they’re with. In any scene, there’s usually something that gives away who someone is, even if you have to use a different scene to know what that is.

Return of the Obra Dinn is currently $28.95 (that’s Australian dollars to you, pal) on Steam, and you should absolutely buy it if you’re at all a fan of putting your observational skills to the test, feeling like a right Sherlock Holmes when one of your inferences pays off, or just lucky when you guess the identities and fates of people you have no idea how to otherwise identify. It’s a masterpiece.

Secondhand Mac Pro Pricing Is Ridiculous Now

IMG_3038If money was no object, my dream Mac would be the Mac Pro. Back in high school, we’d have these impromptu competitions to find the most expensive computer possible. And since the Mac Pro was both insanely expensive and able to be configured to an eye-watering level of performance, ticking all the boxes meant you could get your Mac Pro configuration towards the $30,000 mark without breaking a sweat.

I’ve never actually owned a desktop Mac before. No desktop Mac has really appealed to me, and as someone who’s had a separate PC for gaming for years, having two desktop machines means I lose out on any potential portability I wish to partake in. So every time I’ve had to decide on a new Mac, the only real decision that makes sense is a MacBook Pro, upgraded as much as I can afford it to be.

So here’s the deal: I use a Mac as my primary machine, and at the moment, it’s a Late 2013, 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. It does everything, from composing blog posts late at night, to writing the daily new summaries in the morning. General web surfing, media playing, and, on occasion, I’ve played the odd game of Dota 2. Although it’s a portable machine, it almost never leaves the spot on my desk where it’s hooked up to my 4K external display, Thunderbolt dock, and all the other peripherals you’d expect to be plugged into your daily driver.

Which brings us to the other side of the equation, my gaming PC. I recently put together an almost-entirely new gaming rig for the purposes of upgrading to a more modern platform, but it’s been pretty lacklustre as far as upgrades go. For what I’m using it for (i.e. gaming), there hasn’t been any real noticeable difference in performance, which is kind of disappointing, and kind of makes me feel like I upgraded in order to keep up with platform changes, instead of upgrading because my old PC was getting a little long in the tooth.

PC performance (Mac or otherwise) has long passed the point where CPU performance makes a difference, which goes to explain why buying a machine from 2010 doesn’t faze me. In terms of general, day-to-day PC performance, the number one thing that matters these days is a fast SSD. Even then, you’re going to be hard-pressed to notice the difference between any modern SATA-based model or the newfangled PCIe-based ones, despite PCIe SSDs have much higher throughput. Again, it all depends on the kind of workload you’re throwing at them, and for gaming, the only thing that matters is GPU and to a lesser extent, CPU performance.

Which is just about where my dilemma begins. The portability on my MacBook Pro is nice and all, but I almost never use it that way. And having such a highly-specced PC that I only use for gaming seems like a bit of a waste. What if I could combine the two? I’d go from two separate computers to one, and I’d have the best of both worlds — a machine that runs OS X for my day-to-day, then reboots into Windows when I want to play some video games.

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The Division Open Beta

10899819070983503872_2016-02-22_00011

This is going to be hard to believe, but sometimes I play other games other than Dota 21. Crazy, I know. But last weekend I played The Division, I title I’ve been looking forward to ever since it brought the hype at E3 2013, at PAX Aus 2013, and then again at PAX Aus 2014. I’m not even sure why I was looking forward to it — the snippets of information that had been given away by Ubisoft/Massive haven’t been much to go on, but the way that everyone else has been talking about the game has gotten me excited. Even after the beta has come and gone, I’m still not sure what the game is about or what the end-game is, so I guess you can say I’m well and truly riding on the hype-train.

At first I wasn’t sure about the concept of a third-person cover-based shooter on the PC. Then I realised one of my favourite games of all time was a third-person cover-based shooter: Mass Effect. And the more I thought about it, the more I saw similarities between the two games: both are cover-based shooters. Both are futuristic. Both have RPG-like elements in terms of gear and skills. While Mass Effect undoubtedly has the far stronger storyline, I’m hoping The Division’s Dark Zone, PvP multiplayer will make up for the complete lack of late-game content we’ve seen thus far and give it at least a little longevity after the main story is done and dusted.

I almost gave up on The Division. After finishing the initial intro and browsing same-ish city blocks, I wandered towards the first objective, cranked the difficulty to high, and dove in. After ten deaths in the same spot, I gave up and was ready to hang in the towel on the whole thing — and I would have, if it hadn’t been for a friend that wanted to co-op with me.

We actually ended up making it through that mission, even though we died a few times in the exact same spot, but having a friend turns out to make all the difference in the world (or at least in that particular instance of mission).

With both of the two storyline missions under our belt (for an estimated 10% story completion of the entire game) in one sitting, we did what two guys would do next and passed into the Dark Zone.

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In the Dark Zone, not only are you fighting up much tougher AI for better loot, you’re also competing with other players for the same. Loot is instanced so you can never “steal” someone else’s loot by landing the killing blow on a big boss, but what you can steal is their loot when they go to extract the loot so it becomes available for use. Dark Zone loot isn’t usable until it’s “extracted”, which is dicey process of calling in a helicopter, waiting around for it to arrive, and then not getting killed while your character is going through the motions of attaching the loot to the zipline dropped by the helicopter. It’s all very Metal Gear Solid, only with the added threat of someone lobbing a few grenades on you as you’re going for the extract, and then raining bullets on you from the high ground.

Which is to say, the Dark Zone is pretty fun. If you’re playing solo, it’s the thill of being a lone wolf — not necessarily taking out groups of the strong AI by yourself, but contributing enough lead to share in the spoils, then either taking advantage of someone else’s extraction helicopter or calling in your own and hoping like hell someone doesn’t decide you’re a good target.

Ars Technica played through the closed beta on Xbox One a few weeks earlier, and while they say The Division is a repetitive shooter that has neither the cover-based shooting mechanics of Gears of War or the looting and gear-based aspects of Fallout or Borderlands, I disagree. The Division is different enough from all those to set it apart, and what people have to realise is that it isn’t a cover-based shooter with RPG elements, it’s an RPG with cover-based shooter elements.

Playing through the open beta taught me that the pursuit of better gear came above all else, and with the amount of weapon customisation and all the other RPG-type elements that were hinted at in the game but not actually present in the open beta (including food and managing hunger levels in a desolate, virus-ridden New York landscape, the various skills granted by unique weapons, the focus on cosmetic appearance, and more), my guess is there’s going to be playing of role-playing in The Division, whether that means going Rogue in the Dark Zone or just sticking to the streets of New York, trying to do… whatever the hell the main protagonist is trying to do. Seriously, what is this game about?

Seeing as I’ve pre-ordered the game, I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

  1. Which reminds me, I should probably write something about that again. It’s been a while, and I’ve got stuff to say. ↩

New PC: Firebolt

DSCF0895I was actually in San Francisco when Intel was hosting their annual developer forum last year. At that stage, I hadn’t really thought about putting together an almost entirely new PC, but you could say it planted the seed. After all, my current PC was over five years old, and despite a steady string of graphics cards upgrades, it was probably about time for something new and shiny, seeing as my computer didn’t even have USB 3 yet.

When I got back to Australia, I spent a few good months thinking about whether I wanted to get a new PC or not. There was nothing particularly wrong about my current rig, besides being a little long in the tooth. Depending on the games I was playing, the CPU could be a little bit of a bottleneck, but the GTX 980 meant things still hummed along just fine on screen.

By the time December came around, I had all but made up my mind. I was going to build a new Skylake-based PC, recycling only the graphics card, hard drives, and a fan controller from my current computer. Now all I had to do was decide on some parts, but here’s how it all breaks down.

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