[tech] Upgrades for Pinball and Clownfish

[Bob Adamson]

Hi Tom,

 

My 2c…

 

CPU: The most recent rebuild of porcupine went with a Ryzen 2700 – I’m curious why you went with a lower spec on these two?

GPU: Spec looks good – where did you find a vega 56 card for under $600 though!? I had a look around and had real problems with vega 56 availability, so I’m suggesting nvidia alternatives. The thing that kills the most graphics cards in UCC is without a doubt the fans seizing; I strongly recommend getting ball bearing fans where you can. I can’t find anywhere that lists the fan type on the MSI vega 56 card, but usually they advertise when they have the feature – definitely go with that if it has decent fans and your stated price. Otherwise, something like the Asus RTX 2060 <https://www.pccasegear.com/products/45183/asus-geforce-rtx-2060-turbo-6gb>  might be worth a look? You will want to double check the PSU size in clownfish if you go with the MSI – it suggests a 650W.

Mobo: Good

RAM: Good

Storage: SATA presents a bottleneck that really sucks these days, and I think an M.2 SSD is the way to go. We went with an M.2 Samsung 970 EVO (MZ-V7E500BW) on porcupine and that seems to be pretty good. I would get this for both new machines and treat the 500GB SATA SSD as a spare/upgrade for something else.

PSU/Case: I believe that both pinball and clownfish were built with several iterations of machine in mind, so the case and psu *should* be okay. The only thing we got bitten by with porcupine is the case fans. I ended up getting one of these <https://www.ple.com.au/Products/625721/Corsair-SP120-120mm-Static-Pressure-RGB-Fan>  for the rear, and one of these <https://www.ple.com.au/Products/620077/Noctua-NF-R8-80mm-Redux-Ed-PWM-Cooling-Fan>  for the front.

 

Bob

 

From: tech-bounces+bob=ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au at ucc.asn.au <tech-bounces+bob=ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au at ucc.asn.au> On Behalf Of Tom Almeida
Sent: Wednesday, 10 April 2019 6:32 PM
To: tech at ucc.asn.au
Subject: [tech] Upgrades for Pinball and Clownfish

 

Hi all,

 

After having recently had a look at the specifications for various machines in the clubroom, it has become pretty apparent that both Pinball and Clownfish are in dire need of an upgrade. I've listed their specs below:

 



Name

CPU

GPU

Mobo

RAM

Storage


Pinball

Intel Core i5-750

NVidia GeForce 960

ASUSTeK P7P55D LE

8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1333

Samsung 850 EVO 500GB


Clownfish

AMD A8-3850

NVidia Geforce 8800 GT

ASUSTeK F1A75-M LE

8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1333

Corsair Force 3 120GB


Obviously Pinball has a "good enough" GPU and a pretty decent SSD, so those are likely not needing upgrading, however it seems to me as though almost everything else should be upgraded. Here are what I'd like to propose as new components for both of the computers:

*	CPU: AMD Ryzen 2600 - $244
*	GPU: MSI Radeon RX Vega 56 Air Boost - $550
*	Mobo: ASRock B450 Pro4 - $139
*	RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) - $150
*	Storage: Samsung 860 EVO 500GB - $120

All together, this would be a sum total of ~$1736 for all the parts for both computers given that everything gets bought new.

 

Please let me know what you all think.

 

Cheers,

[THA]

											

 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au/pipermail/tech/attachments/20190414/2ba684fa/attachment-0001.htm