I concede. My lifetime experience is doing it exactly once, and I did in fact buy a proper tube of arctic fire 5 or whatever was recommended here.
Heh. When I built my current computer (which, woah, it was 10 years ago!), I had about 48 hours of insane frustration because nothing would work, before I finally figured out I’d put too much (i.e., “pea-sized amount”) of thermal paste on the CPU, and a tiny tendril had leaked out. I’ll definitely be carefuller this time.
My current computer doesn’t overheat, in its current case. Is there any reason why the newer components would overheat?
Checking compatibility, I’m not seeing any issues when I add your case and the longest 1060 3 GB listed on pcpartpicker, so it looks like everything should fit together.
If you particularly like your case, and feel comfortable pulling everything out of it, yeah, I see no reason you need to upgrade it. It’s old (from 2010) so it doesn’t have modern sensibilities like a psu shroud, cable management channels, etc… but should function just fine, I would think.
I guess the worst thing that could happen is you get all the parts, something about the case doesn’t work so you have to then buy a case and wait another week for it to be delivered. In the grand scheme of things, that wouldn’t be the worst problem in the world.
Oh, btw, the point upthread about Windows was a good one. Unless you tied your Windows activation to a Windows Live account, changing your motherboard means you’ll need a new Windows license. But “need” is a strong term. Windows itself is happy to run without being activated; it just won’t let you change the wallpaper and probably nags you to activate, but it’ll run indefinitely. And activation keys are pretty cheap on the gray market.
Unless anyone sees any issues with the parts I listed several posts up, I think you’re a go as written, no case needed. Maybe a case fan, but you can always add one later if stuff is running hot.
I’d at least wait a day or two to be sure. The M.2 drive already went back up $10; maybe worth watching that through the weekend to see if it bounces down again.
Not really, no. The 10400 runs pretty cool, no overclocking, and the 1060 already doesn’t run hot. The M.2 drive might but they run better hot anyway.
Excellent. (And I do have Windows 10 listed on a Windows Live account from way back when, so hopefully that’ll make it easier to transfer to the new drive). I’ll keep any eye out and maybe make the purchases on Saturday or Sunday. Thanks again!
Perfect, so Windows is free. Gotta love that.
My understanding is that you’ll start normally, connecting only the system drive (M.2) and installing Windows fresh, then activate it by tying it to your Windows Live account. This will automatically de-activate your old machine, which won’t exist anymore but even if it did would still run fine, just no wallpaper and maybe some nagging.
You got a spare 16 GB or bigger 3.0 USB stick? You 100% want to install Windows using one. If you don’t, pick one up at Walmart for under $10. And be sure to plug it into a 3.0 port around back, not a 2.0 front port!
It occurs to me your old case has the advantage of having 5.25" drive bays. (Most modern cases work better when you pull the drive bays out.) If I were going to buy a spinning disc as my D: drive, I might consider the Western Digital blue line, which is currently $55 for 2 TB or $90 for 4 TB. Just saying…
Can I ask a question relevant (I think) to this?
Spinner disks. The state of them nowadays. Or “I’ll never buy another SMR disc”.
I know people still use them for larger storage and I use them for backing up stuff for archive, or keeping things on my NAS for watching on my raspberry pi kodi box. But my last purchase of a 4GB Western Digital Passport drive leaves me with something which writes at 2MB/s. Yes, that slow, one 50th of the speed of a normal hard drive.
And the technology, which seems pretty much unavoidable on the 3-6TB drives nowadays is SMR (Shingled magnetic recording). This in effect is archive disks, with low speeds for rewrites. The disk manufacturers don’t publicise they’re using this technology but it pretty much seems ubiquitous for that range of drives nowadays. I thought I’d buy larger to avoid, but some of them are also SMR at the larger sizes, or very hard to find a list to work out if they are. CMR is the technology you want, it’s what disks used to use.
I’m bringing it up there, because someone mentioning a cheap 4TB disk, and maybe in the future you’ll feel nostalgic for the disk speeds of 2015 when seeing how slow a file is being written to your newish disk.
I know a lot use SSD’s, their price points being decent nowadays, though not there for large storage. But even SSDs run out, I’ve got one which has gone about 7 years in. Not even used daily too.
That’s a pretty compelling point. For me personally, I’ll never buy another spinning disc for a few reasons:
First it’s so much easier to install either an M.2 drive or even an SSD then an HDD. Or, rather, M.2 and SSD installs don’t mess with your cable management like the hard drive cage does in many modern cases.
Second, the speed. I have a feeling after having no spinning disks, going back to one would feel akin to going back to floppy disk or USB 2.0. Just intolerably slow.
And third, the noise. You really can’t beat the silence of no moving parts for SSDs.
But now it looks like you’ve added a fourth reason and it’s the most compelling: You could end up with a shingled disk.
I’ve heard of shingled disks in the context of those massive 20 terabyte spinning disks, not little 2 terabyte ones, but I’m not surprised to hear the technology is infecting smaller drives. Just another reason nobody should ever buy another HDD ever again.
Well, the best pastes can drop temps another 6C over Arctic Silver which is significant. More like 3.5C for non-conductive pastes which is probably not system-breaking unless you have far bigger issues but it can determine how often your fans ramp up or whether or not your CPU throttles under heavy workloads.
I say all this as someone who still owns plenty of Arctic Silver from the days when it was “the best” and still use it regularly just because it’s in my parts bin and I don’t care enough to buy a new tube. While you can certainly use the pre-applied paste on a cooler or the little packet of generic paste that often comes with it, I’d still buy a tube of something. For one thing, it’ll work better than the stock stuff and, for another, if you ever need to remove your cooler (or just mess up the install) who wants to wait on a $10 tube of paste before you can get your computer up and running? Plus a tube will last you near forever.
Good to know. Storage manufacturers are seemingly notorious for shuffling specs and parts and making it hard to determine what the real world performance from your HDD/SSD will be. I still have a place for 2TB of HDD storage in my system – there’s plenty of jpgs and mp3s and other documents that I don’t access often and are small enough that there’s no real speed difference between loading a 300k bmp file from a physical disk versus off solid state. Or things that theoretically would load faster off solid state but I access them so rarely that it’s hard to care and $30/TB storage wins over $110/TB storage.
If you’re gaming or doing media creation or some other task that is regularly taking/writing large data chunks from the drive, you’d want an SSD for that data. For “normal” office/home PC use, you’re probably fine using an SSD boot drive with Windows on it and a traditional 7200 speed HDD for your storage.
Yes, but the point I had was that a disk I bought in 2015 was about 50 times faster than a disk bought in 2020. Probably an extreme case, but a lot are a LOT slower, and while you might not think that’s a problem if you don’t use them often, but you’ll curse it when you find writing 100GB of something takes 15 hours (vs 15 minutes).
Yeah, I got that. Sorry. Was addressing both your point (“check disk information because manufacturers are shady like that”) and EllisDee’s points about HDD/SSD in a single paragraph. Could have been clearer.
Oh man, just since you posted this, that link has increased in price by $50, to $220. I’m finding what looks the same product on TigerDirect for a helluva lot cheaper–is this the same thing? (Edit: just noticed it’s 4 cores instead of 6).
I feel so stupid buying PC parts: I’m always worried there’s some little word in the description (“boxed processor”?) that might completely change what I’m buying.
That’s an i3-10100 which is the budget level CPU in that generation (i5 is typically the mid-range, i7 for power users & gamers and i9 for real enthusiasts)
It’s still the same price at Best Buy and Adorama but both are now out of stock. It’s a couple dollars more at Newegg but also out of stock there as well. Whether any or all of them get new stock in is anyone’s guess.
However, you could get the i5 10400F, which is the same as the i5 10400 except it doesn’t have onboard graphics. It’s nice to have onboard graphics for if the video card dies but meh. You have a video card, you don’t technically need integrated graphics.
pcpartpicker can’t see the one on Newegg but it points to one on Amazon and says it costs $180. However, if you open the link to amazon, it says $185. It almost seems like someone is buying them all up, and that pcpartpicker will update to $185 in a couple minutes.
Here is an i5 10400F on Newegg for $179 with free shipping. You can either wait to see what’s going on – maybe BestBuy gets more stock in next week and you can buy the one with graphics for $165 no harm no foul – or you can snap this one up and call it a $14 “sleep on it” tax.
Weird… usually it’s not a big deal if you have a little bit of overflow, as long as you have non-conductive thermal paste.
Personally I’ve done it the pea-sized blob in the middle or the “X” method, and can’t say either works better than the other. Nor does the type of paste matter much either; it’s cheap, and the differences don’t matter much. If you have to buy it, you might as well get the good stuff, but use the free stuff if you have it, as the good stuff is still pretty cheap relative to everything else in your rig.
If anyone cares, I’m using Arctic MX-4 that came free with my Arctic Esports Duo 34 cooler. If I had to buy some, I’d probably get the Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut- it’s around $10 for a small tube (1 gm) good enough for a CPU or two, and it’s highly rated, etc…
Sure, but SSDs have gotten so cheap, that you could easily have a few terabytes of SSD storage (even M.2 NVMe) for a few hundred bucks that is orders of magnitude faster than spinning disks of any speed. I mean, I have a couple of terabytes of M.2 NVMe SSD drives, and find myself rarely using the spinning disks except for archival type stuff like old photos and MP3 files and stuff that the speed isn’t very noticeable on.
Not sure if this pcpartpicker item list will link right, but worth a shot:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/vrhmP6/intel-core-i5-10400f-29-ghz-6-core-processor-bx8070110400f
That’s the i5 10400F listing, which shows it out of stock at Adorama but only $151. Then if you open that Adorama link:
It says “temporarily not available, On Backorder, Order now your card won’t be charged until it ships.”
I mean, I kind of want to say to go with this backordered no-graphics one regardless. $151 is a pretty sweet price. But I could understand the impulse to grab the one from Newegg for $179 now for peace of mind.
EDIT: If you open the pcpartpicker link above and scroll down, there’s the cool graph of price change history at various vendors.
Sure. Or three times+ as much HDD space. Or just save 66% of what it cost you. People have different motivations.
Thanks–I clicked that link, saw it on Amazon for the $180 price, and went ahead and got it. I suspect I have an old video card sitting around somewhere in case things go south with my current one.
Okay, one more question, having bought other components: if I currently have a CPU cooler, how necessary is this piece? My current fan is this, which isn’t I suspect any hot shit, but has done the job so far.