I think this is a non-issue. If it was, you’d be hearing a lot of Floridamen in the news going into bequiet!'s HQ and beating the designers who thought of using glass panels on the cases.
I do wonder about why I don’t hear about people reacting to the tempered glass side panels just randomly shattering if it happens like with coffee tables.
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Coffee tables are exposed to hot mugs on cold days, creating thermal shock, the hot cups are warmer than any air that will come out of your components. The only way it would shatter would be if your room is cold and your hot CPU would bypass the rad and touch the glass.
But the reason I prefer metal cases is protection against EM radiation from outside, helps keep the PC a bit more stable.
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I’m in the basement which would help a bit with EM radiation and since there’s no overclocking planned I feel like it probably should be fairly stable. I do feel like part of why I’m second guessing myself is just not feeling as confident as I’d like to about everything since with the kind of money the case and everything costs you definitely don’t want to be regretting it.
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I mean, EM rad is probably not a big deal with a glass side panel either. People have ran PCs with glass, or worse, acrylic side-panels, or worster, open-air cases for extended periods and there was no additional instability or corruption to speak of, it’s just me being a sicko. Besides, having non-transparent panels means easier to hide cables, wink, wink, nudge, nudge.
can always just have the right side facing away from everything the way the desk is shaped it’s not like cables have to be visible, so I do think I might think about what is less expensive. I think part of it is getting second thoughts about the Darkbase just because it’s been around for 5 years so I’d presume that for high-end cases they would want to do something sooner than later.
The case is the last thing I’d worry about in a build. I can go in a dumpster and pick up an old antec case that should fit everything in. For 15 year old+ cases, thermals might be a problem, but modern cases (past 10 years or so) should be good enough, because they allow more airflow.
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Nice builds.
Couples of notes :
If you aren’t overclocking and don’t need the IO, you can also look for a b650 motherboard for a better price.
The samsung 970 is starting to be a litle long on the tooth. I would recommend the wd sn850x instead. Take a look at The Big Gen4 SSD Roundup - Best SSDs for PC & Playstation 5 in 2022 - YouTube for a nice review and recommendation.
You have 3 nvme drive on there. Do you need all 6TB immediately? You might want to get a fast drive and some slower drive for bulk storage.
The PSU looks to be way more than what you need, 850 to a 1000w is probably enough. Take a look at PSU Tier List rev. 14.8 - Power Supplies - Linus Tech Tips for a tier list of recommended psu
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the reason I was looking at X670 boards is for USB 4 connectivity that seems to be not super common even for X670 and as far as I could tell was non existant in B650. From talking with others here yeah I probably should switch from 3 nvme to something else. Would it be a good idea to have 2 just so SSD contains everything for the gaming VM and 1 for non bulk storage of everything else with upgrading the size of the NAS storage for bulk storage.
Thank you for mentioning the PSU tier list looking in their discussion there’s an updated version here. But yeah I probably went overboard for PSU and will choose something more reasonable. PSU Tier List rev. 16.1A - Cultists Network
@ultraforce, you didn’t go overboard on the PSU when considering the future trend of CPU and GPU getting more power-hungry. A little more power is better than not enough.
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After going to a store I think I might go with the Silent Base 802 instead it’s a bit smaller then the Dark Base, has a bit better airflow and is about 100$ less expensive.
I should probably not be thinking about this with the 1 case to do everything I could ever imagine wanting. Instead going with a case that meets noise and temperature needs with drive expansion being something I can simply have a separate case or computer for in the future rather than try to do it all in one. Though I might also want to consider Fractal Meshify 2 or the Torrent but I’ve heard the Torrent’s default fans are a bit overly loud which makes me think Silentbase might be a better choice.
Installing the liquid cooler for the CPU was dead easy. The cooler came assembled and filled. Mounted the radiator. Bolted on the CPU heat sink. Done.
I would rather not run the CPU at full power and go air cooler instead of an AIO I just am not familiar with and feel a bit uncomfortable about the whole idea of the water.
Do you have any recommendation on desktop distros to use? I just got the motherboard in and wasn’t sure if an image based distribution might be the right choice for the desktop distro.
For beginners, I am biased towards Fedora. Wendell also uses Fedora. It’s a solid distro and I’ve used it on my work laptop without issues. I’m currently using something else, but only because I like minimalism.
From other people, I hear OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is good too, but I can’t vouch for it, as I never used it. Others like Pop!_OS, but I would discourage you from going on Ubuntu-based or Debian-family distros for a desktop, just my $0.02. Again, I’m biased and pointing it out. I believe Fedora is the only good desktop distro for people that don’t want to build their desktop from the ground up.
Do you recommend choosing any spin or version that I think may be best suited for me or do you think best to just go vanilla?
Any spin is fine. I had a colleague using default, I preferred the KDE Spin, on which I later installed sway. Was working very nicely. Another colleague also used KDE Spin and was happy. Can’t comment on other spins, just default GNOME and KDE Spin.
Okay, I’ll probably do the KDE spin or the KDE image based spin.
Also I’m not sure if I should make a separate thread to ask about this but how significant is the change between PCIe 4 and PCIe 3 storage devices. I bought 2 WD Blue SN 570s but on a forum more gaming related I was told that it is probably worthwhile replacing that with 4.0 speed drives.
Not worth it. Even SATA 3 is still fine. You will not notice it in daily tasks. The throughput is wow and all, but you are still limited by the underlying NAND technology. You are writing to its DRAM cache for a burst, but it will eventually fill up (especially those WD drives, which are known to lose performance past a certain write size in one go).
Let’s put it this way, although this is just my bias showing. I have 2x 1TB Intel 670ps (I think) in a ZFS mirror, which are QLC PCI-E 3.0 drives and I run both my host and my Windows VM on it and loading times are still about the same in games. I can also launch more VMs in parallel and still not notice it. As a side note, I’m also running an x8 4.0 Radeon RX 6600XT in a x16 3.0 slot, so it is limited to x8 3.0 speeds and I also do not feel any need to upgrade. I also used the RX 6400 which was limited to x4 3.0 speeds and was still chugging along just fine.
It might make sense to get PCI-E 4.0 NVME drives if you are going with something more performant, like 4x drives in stripped mirrors, or 5x in RAID-Z1, in which case the small performance difference adds up. In this case, with 2 drives in an array, you won’t feel the difference (used to run 4x 2TB Samsung 860s in md RAID-10 for about 30 VMs, all of them still felt snappy - the server? a meager proliant microserver gen8 with a celeron dual core and 8gb of ram, the VMs were still smoking fast, compared to the spinning rust arrays we had).
Okay then, will stick to the two SN-570s.