X370 Gigabyte Gaming 5 / 1700x

Ankle_Flasher · September 19, 2017, 11:17am

The noisy / dusty old nerd room. Shapoko inside was a bad choice…

A buddy was kind enough to let me take her floorboards for a new desk!

Parts finally arrived! (and new desk in place)
From left to right…

Fractal design R5 mid tower
1700X (week 7 )
Samsung 960 EVA M.2
Corsair Hydro H100i V2
32GB G-Skill Ripjaws 5 (F4-3200C16D-16GVKB)
PCI -> USB generic card (GPU passthrough hopefully )
Corsair RM850W Gold
Gigabyte gaming 5 (arrived with BIOS B3)
Quattro K2000
Samsung 940 500GB SSD
4*1TB WD Green
1060GTX 6GB

I have high hopes of a ZFS pooled GPU passthrough machine for gaming / fiddling around with machine learning / CAD.

Get into appropriate attire, and break out a scalpel to treat the hardware with the respect it deserves.

Such a classy power supply! Got the chip in, and using Wendel’s mount-the-cooler-outside-the-case-first technique. Worked nicely!

Put one of the supplied temperature probes under the M.2 SSD.
There is an on-PCB temp sensor around that area already, but I like the idea of having a second opinion.

Apologies for the potato quality, was too excited.

Ended up with a bit of an odd configuration as I didn’t want a top-mount radiator (dust), and a bottom mount wouldn’t fit next to the power supply.
Ghetto mounted the HDD rack with 2 screws through the grilling in the bottom of the case, and promised myself i would print a bracket for it (later / never).
Radiator and two 120mm fans mounted nicely in the front of the case barely behind the dust filter.
1060 juuust clears the HDD rack in its new position.
Cooler pipes felt a little strained, but didn’t buckle, so uhhh, nice!

Glamor shot!

The LED illumination on those memory slots mocking me with their emptiness. Good thing I don’t have a case window…

Soooo Linux (MX-16, Fedora 26, Ubuntu 16.04, Arch) hang issues. BIOS update didn’t help.
LG 2440x1080 wide screen arrived so wussed out to Windows 10 to test it out.

BIOS F22A didn’t let me boot the previously mentioned distro versions, but Ubuntu 17.10 artful seemed to be up to date as per this thread.

It works!!
Time to celebrate someone else’s hard work (thanks kaihengfeng!) with a nice beer.
Keyboard & mouse mat is super nice too.

Will update with my travels into the land of GPU passthrough

far-bound · September 19, 2017, 11:24am

-No BCLK overclocking on the Gaming 5, should have gone with the GA-AX370-Gaming K7.
-And you mounted your AIO tubes up… the pump/coldplate is the highest part of the loop… oh dear.

Ankle_Flasher · September 19, 2017, 11:37am

… oops Hope I the thermal paste isn’t too messed up to just flip the block over.
Will read up on the BCLK thing. What am I missing out on?

anon56517415 · September 19, 2017, 1:42pm

Enjoy your new pc.

far-bound · September 19, 2017, 5:19pm

Well, considering you don’t know… then you are not missing anything. It’s just that spending money on a X370 without a clock generator (for BCLK overclocking) does not make sense to me. If you are just going for the old 4.0Ghz you can do that on a decent B350 (and save some money). But whatever its fine.

And no, you have to flip the radiator so its tubes down, that way the pump doesn’t suck in air.

And why are you using a scalpel to open boxes!? (only joking)

Raziel · September 19, 2017, 6:03pm

Don’t worry about BCLK, you are not missing much. There are plenty of options you may use with that board that are far better than a B350, so you didn’t waste money.

For optimal air flow and cooling you could move the rad to the top as exhaust, have two intake fans in the front and no fan on the rear. Use fan curves to balance. Flip that PSU so fan faces down so it intakes outside air and does not compete with your GPU for air.

Ankle_Flasher · October 9, 2017, 9:37am

Thanks for the comments & recommendations!

So i finally got some time and figured I would cobble together a ghetto battle-station seeing as I have more screens than desk. Went to the local hardware store and found a pole the same OD as my screen stand, then spoke to a mate with skills…

Cheapest spray paint was a poor choice, but it’s going to be behind screens - right?

Once all that was done, I couldn’t ignore:

Sooo… went ahead and top-mounted the radiator.
Still playing around with the fan curves, and am planning on bending up some acrylic to keep the dust out.

Can’t help but feel I am doing it wrong, logo is upside down.
Eh, fingers crossed Mr Cunningham has me on this one…

PS: ChooChoo ZFS play with all that spinning rust

edit: not disregarding your advice Razeil - just got lazy with the rebuild…