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PC Build and Initial Thoughts - RTX 5090 & Core Ultra 9 285k Series 2

 

     Retired is the venerable RTX 2080 and 10700k Combo that kept my gaming career alive the last 7 years, retired to the garage as a working and reliable substitute if ever we need it again. Much like a SR71 Blackbird- it will be reactivated when needed. 

PC Specs:

• Core Ultra 9 285k
• ASRock Z890-Pro Motherboard
• RTX 5090 TUF 3 Slot, 3 Fan, 32gb DDR7 (HP Edition)
• 64gb Kingston Fury Beast DDR5 5600 XMP/RGB Heatsink Ram 4x16
• Samsung 980 Pro 2tb. Gen 4 NVME
• 360mm Liquid Cooler LCD Cap
• ASRock 1200w Platinum ATX Power Supply
• HP45L Omen Max case

Other Stuff:

• 2x Ultragear 31.5" Curved 32G6OWA Monitors
• Wacom One Tablet
• Logitech Extreme 30 Pro
• Razer Nostromo Chroma
• Razer Deathadder Elite Chroma
• Razer Cynosa Chroma
• Razer Kraken Pro 3.0 Chroma
• Yeti Blue Boom Mic
• Edifier W4 Pro Speakers
• Panasonic HC-770V camera
• Eureka Pro Aero Wing 72" desk

Why did I upgrade?

I had wanted to upgrade to 1440p and use our spare 4k monitor in the garage for gaming for some time, but the 2080 can barley cut the mustard when it comes to Ray Tracing and frame rate at those resolutions, so I was stuck with some good but old 1080p monitors. It was time to upgrade the monitors, but I had to get everything with the PC in line first. Unfortunately the PC was a little late, so the monitors were the first upgrade, as mentioned in a previous post.. for a steal. It's been over 6 years. It's fucking time. 

Why 5090?

I mean, why not. If you can get it for around MSRP, I think the answer is do it. You can spend over 2k for a 5080, but if you wait and do the research, you can get something you want for the same amount.. which was what I did for this particular PC. I know it's overkill, but the last time I had a cutting edge PC was over 6 years ago, I think its time to go flagship again and really play these new games how they were intended to be played.

• YOLO
• Only 30% higher cost as 5080 in my area at the time of this post
• Available at the time
• Want this to last me 6 more years
• Wanted to go big with dual 1440p or 4k monitors
• I heard 6 series wont be until 2027

Why Intel??

I know I'm going to get a bunch of shit for not getting one of the new AMD X3D processors that are beating the pants of anything for the same price. 2 year old processors from team green still can rate very highly in most gaming benchmarks. I get it.

• I like intel. IMO - No issues, compatible, reliable.
• My son has a 14700k and the thing is still a performance beast in anything you throw at it. The lifespan is pretty good. 
• Power draw and temps are lower
• Great for gaming and productivity both
• I think they will make more improvement down the road
• Known AMD issues with processors melting and getting sent back sounds scary to me
• Price was $100 lower than a Ryzen 9 9950x3d for very similar performance

Other Notes: On the surface, I really don't know what to say that I have not already. I'm doing everything I did before, but everything is just so much better. Fast, damn near totally silent. I never realized how loud my old PC was when things were ramping up. I feel like I could take on anything, any game, I never have to look at the graphic details.. just turn them all up to max. I miss this feeling. Do you want to play Cyberpunk 2077 on Overdrive? Yeah, me too, so here we are. There is a noticeable but very faint sound as the power supply turns on and off when I'm doing different tasks; this is the only perceptible sound I can hear from the PC at any time, even during gaming. Even when benchmarking on 3Dmark's Time Spy Extreme, I never hit 60c on the video card or the processor. I reran the benchmark twice without changing anything, my best score was 22858. With some light overclocking, I can see getting easily into the 25k range.

It's HP Parts dude.. and that review.

     How do you think I was able to afford this? All the discounts available, $1000 off the price of a new 5090.. the list goes on. You can buy this total build refurbished for $6999 right now, which is way less than the cost of the parts if you can get them with the bullshittery going on with ram pricing. The parts I did have to complete this build were all bought on sale. I'm very aware of the review by Gamers Nexus, and made notes when watching it. Scam? I think that's a little harsh. I bought a new revision of essentially the same item, and have zero issues with anything out of the gate except for bloat, which took me 15 minutes to uninstall. Did I have to go into the BIOS and click the "Unlock" button to get all the features I paid for? Yes, and that was a 2 minute pain in the ass that I'm willing to deal with. Overall I thought his review was very exaggerated until the end, where he actually reviewed the PC with the performance unlocked, and everything worked fine. Criticizing the cooler was expected, and the case design, but was not very honest, because if you took ANY radiator out of the PC and aimed a fan at it, it would perform better outside the confines of a case. The temps on mine are always under 50c, and have never hit 60c in any testing. I saw the GPU get to 57c when playing Indiana Jones and the Great Circle for about an hour. Overall, I'm impressed and whatever issues people see in that video, I'm not experiencing that with this case or build. Whatever bios or software changes have been made since that review have fixed whatever issues Gamers Nexus complained about. 

*Edit* The price of this PC has been raised to $7999, but it sometimes on sale for slightly less as mentioned above. Full transparency, I paid $3789 before tax and shipping. 

*Edit #2 Sept. 2026* People are now buying the 45L with the 5090 to shuck it and sell the video card on Ebay. Sheesh.

This is for you guys - Thanks for reading.

Teaser - New PC Build.. Coming soon.

 

Core Ultra 9 285k - RTX 5090 - Full Review next week if all goes as planned.

Blood [DOS] (1997) Full game in browser!

 

This game is just as badass as it looks.

     Think of a Doom and Duke, Hexen and Heretic... but refined, more features, and a ton more horror elements and gore. Blood was the first FPS games that used Voxels, advanced lighting effects, and far improved sound and level design. It retro-futuristic wild west feel was far ahead of its time, and has a last effect on gaming to this day. 

Play it now in your browser for free now!

Monitor Upgrade: 2x LG Ultra Gear G6 32G60WA

 

Going curved, from flat

     Why upgrade? If you have been following along from previous posts, it's been quite a while since I've upgraded my monitor.. six years to be exact. I've been rocking the same 27" Acer Predator 272B with 240hz refresh, the shitty View Sonic 27" with decent color, and the Samsung frame above that.. for quite a while. I'm very happy with the Acer- it's been a capable gaming monitor now for that whole time, with zero issues at all. It is a little heavy, so not easy on monitor arms, but that is not a big deal and almost not worth mentioning. I just think it's time 1080p does not do it anymore for the games I'm playing. I realized I don't need 240hz for FPS games- I really can't see the difference after 150 or so that I'm aware of, and that I'm more sensitive to screen tearing and frame drops. After much research without the money to really do anything about it, I decided I wanted identical monitors, curved, and from what reviews and the general consensus says, 2k high refresh is where it's at, curved if you want to go that route. 

I found these on sale- $19.99 each.

     The price to upgrade made no sense when I was happy with the current monitor situation, but when I saw these two G Ultra Gear G6's out on clearance at Walmart for $166 each, I jumped at the chance. 32 inches, two of them, 2k, high refresh.. let's go. The monitor arms were also on clearance, and I'm still working on getting them perfect with tension. I think I'm at the very limit of weight and tension that they will allow. 

They look great at least!

     The bevels are really slim, the size is much larger than I'm use to, but the 74" desk was easy to accept the size difference without looking stupid. Getting the monitors to line up was actually pretty easy, the desk has a split in the middle so I lined everything up with that, and mounted the monitors in the same position, then fine-tuned from there. Overall, I'm really happy and think this is a significant upgrade from the previous configuration. I do plan on getting a whole new PC in February, so this was needed to bring me in to the next generation of computing.

Almost there. Need some cable management. 

Monitor review: 

• The unboxing was easy, and general set up was good, no issues. 
• HDMI only supports 2k at 144hz, and I've tried a very good cable, so had to switch over to Display Port, which is not really a big deal. 
• No matter which ones I plugged in, the PC would recognize the monitor order backwards from where they were previously, but that was an easy fix. 
• Power supply to the monitor is a large brick, as opposed to the previous standard PC power cable needed for the other two monitors, so I had to source another power strip and make that work.
•  These monitors do not have a USB hub, so I have to find out what to do with the 3 things I had plugged into the monitor, which was more work than it should have been. I miss that feature. 
• They look and feel like a premium product.
• Navigating options and menus built into the software of the monitor was easy, and had all the features I want. 
• I could sit the monitors farther back, and higher up, being they have the exact same mounting height, allowing me to bring my seat up into a high position
• 2k is a bigger difference than I thought it would be, even in the desktop, coming from 1080p. The physical size of the monitor makes up for the difference in window/text/icon size, so I have no problem seeing them. I find that I have more room now for tabs and windows, even more than before, allowing me more freedom when doing multiple things at once. I have no shortage of monitors, but this just seems better.
• I'm not sure I'm use to the curve of them yet. Windows seem concave at the edges to me. The glare is reduced, so the coating on the monitor is great, but there are 8 windows behind me, so there is now a bright-ish spot during some times of the day. Overall, I do like being surrounded by screen, and it does feel immersive. 
• I've tried gaming over both monitors with Nvidia surround, and while a huge pain in the ass to set up, (and it does not allow the Wacom tablet screen to work) it does perform flawlessly. I'm on the fence if I should buy the screen lighting bending apparatus to put between the screens to blend the edge. 

Just a quick video my son playing Doom over both screens for example

NEC PC Engine LT - An interesting and very rare console way ahead of its time.

 

It's expensive and rare so I don't own one.

The NEC PC Engine LT was released in 1991, and it was an expensive Japanese only release then, so did not do well. For less money you could get the Turbo Express which had a way to connect to an external monitor and used batteries, where the LT needs an AC adapter to fully work. The trade off? Better quality backlit screen and compatibility with all your old gadgets and gizmos that hook up to the PC engine already. This console fits the same cradle as the Core Grafx, so could slot the Super CD Rom adapter, audio enhancer, different card readers for the three different kinds of CD roms you need, and the myriad of other add-ons that you don't really need, but want.

Interface unit! Super CDRom2! It's like a transformer. 

     Long before the release of the Gameboy Advance SP, you could play 16 bit (well, not quite) games on a backlit screen, play modern titles available on the SNES, and look much cooler doing it. 

People need to stop being so hard on the Sega Tower of Power.

     Sega did not have an original idea with adding more consoles and adds on to current systems, it was being done for a while. While NEC and Sega were building higher and more elaborate, Nintendo was adding full blown RISC processors, math co-processors, ram, DMA, flash memory, and custom sound chips to it's game carts and wrapping it up in the price of the game, as opposed to making cheap add ons as a requirement to play games. No surprise, if the game is more accessible, more people will purchase it, and so Nintendo won this war in a big way. Not to be outdone, it got way worse than just the tower of power; they even made a Laserdisc console system, PC computer combo units.. the list goes on and on and on. Even if you had your NEC Turbo DUO-R SuperGrafx with an Arcade Card, you would not be able to play any of the Fatal Fury games, or any of the rare titles, because they require the Arcade Card PRO. Don't forget a special controller that does not come with the console as well. You see where I'm going here. 

     I could go on forever about this, and I just might in another post. For now, enjoy more pictures of this unique handheld that inspired a whole marketing angle years later. 

r/bindingofisaac - We're taking over.

Hold R and pray. 

    I noticed a fun trend on r/bindingofisaac where people took increasingly shitty pictures of what was happening on the screen, and then asking a question of the community on how to solve said question. People are breaking out the worst possible flip phones and digital cameras from 20 years ago.. so I decided to grab some of my son's camera equipment that is already set up, and take a few pictures:

     Nothing is shittier and more deserving than actual VHS camcorder from JCPenny in the early 1980's. Beat that Isaac fans!

PS: I actually still play Isaac very often, and I'm a huge fan. 

The Venerable RTX 2080

I've had this thing forever.

     A little history: I bought my RTX 2080 OC on launch day for $849 from Best Buy. It had been years since I bought a card on launch day, and I wanted the best, and the RTX 2080 was the IT card at the time. I had an aging 1070 that performed perfectly, and is still hard at work in the PC next to me my son uses for school, paired with my old 8700k.. chugging along just fine.

The lineup at the time.

     I had no idea that I would have been better off with the GTX 1080ti. I was told by Nvidia and their marketing department that the card would have ray tracing and 8GB of their new memory would be enough. For $300 less dollars, I could have got the 1080ti, but I wanted the new hot performing card. 

I was lied to.

     The numbers came out no sooner than I got the card home and in my PC. The 1080ti with a mild overclock and a fan on it would easily beat the shit out of the 2080, and later, they added RTX support for the card. It was looking like I was had, and I paid too much. Relegated to my fate, I made the best of it, and overclocked the dogshit out of the poor 2080 for the next 4 years. 

This is a 2080 after 4 years of overclocking.

I gamed on this card like it was my last. If I'm paying $849 for something that was beat by a previous generation, so be it. I started competitive Overwatch in 2018, and went top 500 for almost a year in FFA, and you can imagine what that does to a card. There are chinese bitcoin miner rigs that have less hours on their cards than my poor 2080 does. 

This is for beginners.

     I'm still salty. I've since built several PC's for my gaming family, and upgraded my own PC, and now we have two 30 series GPU's in the house that out perform the 2080, but not in my PC.. no way. I'm stubborn, and this fucking nerd is going to extract every ounce of longevity out of this card; so I did what at PC enthusiast would do, I repasted the die, put new thermal pads on, and replaced the whining dead fans with new OEM ones... then cranked it up to 11. For the next year and a half, I ran the card on the ragged edge, even going so far to buying an after market GPU socket fan to blow even more air on the card, and mounting a high performance fan on the side to hopefully exhaust even more of the hot air away.

New year.. same me.

     Now its the middle of 2024, and I just took my PC apart to clean it, and guess what, the 2080 is still in there, chugging along, overclocked to the moon and screaming during my extended playthrough of the new Robocop game with DLSS on. On epic settings, still over 100fps, fans on 91% of max, sitting at 77c temps under load. I'll be honest, I did not think this card would last 6 full years dialed up to 11. Like I mentioned, I have a slot fan and a blow fan aimed directly at it at all times and have done some work on it to keep it alive, but I never expected this kind of value from a card that no one wanted, and no one should have bought. After years of eSports and every triple A title from the last 6 years, this card has performed amazing, and never left me feeling like I needed to upgrade right away. My son's new PC, which is a 14700k with a 4070ti is light years ahead of my 10700k rig, but I still don't feel like I'm missing anything. I played 80 hours of Baldur's Gate at 100fps on epic settings very recently with zero issues or crashes. I've made up my mind, I'm going to wait until the 50 series drops, and get a 40 series card on sale and move on with my life.. but I wanted to share how my mistake turned into one of the best gaming choices of my adult life. 

Classic Game Room (CGR) is back.

      CGR has been around since I graduated high school in 1999. It's the first real game review show I cared about, and easily the best one on the internet for some time. Mark Bussler (pictured) has cancelled the show and revived it more times than I can count, changing the names several times instead of calling them seasons. Each time it comes back you can expect some special features DVD's, merch, and behind the scenes content offered up on Kickstarter for a few years before it's time for the next reincarnation. 

      Very recently I noticed CGR was renamed again back to Classic Game Room, and not one of Mark's other interests- Drawing, making music, reviewing comics and hot wheels cars.. etc. It's been 5 freaking years since a we have seen any retro game content, and his channel starting turning out views in the hundreds, and at one time, I stopping checking in completely. I've bought the merch, have some DVD's- I'm a fan, but let's play to our strengths Mark! We want more Classic Game Room. The fans have spoken, and now we can celebrate a return that I hope lasts more than a short season. 

     Anyways, enjoy the master in his element. 

Laptop Testdrive - MSI GS76 Stealth

 

I thought I would post a quick review of this laptop, since it's been my daily driver for work, for about the last 2 months. Some light gaming, multi-monitor workloads, and a little bit of benchmarking have been done in that period of time.

I bought the computer here. 

Specs:

• 99.99wh battery
• 32gb 3600hz ddr4
• 1tb m.2 drive
• 2tb back up solid state drive
• i9 11900h
• RTX 3070 (full desktop version)
• 360hz refresh IPS panel

Summary:

     It's a lot overkill for what I needed at work, and it was never intended for such a purpose. I have a nice-ish work HP laptop- fake ass shitty quad core i7 1165g7, 16gb ram, touch screen, fingerprint scanner. VERY Basic, but much better than average for spreadsheets and email, and the price was right at $599. The screen cracked, and in the process of repair, the shop damaged the laptop so it's being replaced. I had to use this new laptop that I ordered from Best Buy as my new work replacement in the interim. I ordered this particular laptop with the idea that I would be gaming out in the world a little more being that I travel so much. This is by far the most expensive and most powerful laptop I've ever had. I spec'd it out with the only option not checked being the 64gb of ram; 32 should be enough for any game or anything really. 

Pros:

• It's just lightning fast in all desktop processes. As good or better than my overclocked i7 10700k desktop in a compact package, but with increased thermals and sound.
• The refresh rate is insane for what it is. I could not tell that much of a different between 240 and 360, but there was a difference. I felt like I needed to get a new mouse for some reason it was so good. Colors are bright and blacks are pretty black in any situation. When compared to other laptops around the office, the screen is far and away better when viewing at an angle.
• Lots of airflow that I can see both on the top and the bottom of the case. I'm using a laptop cooler, but I don't think it's doing much more actual cooling. This thing is noisy when you get some games going, and there is a button to increase fan speed or reduce it and put it in silent mode. Bloat added software has a control to switch between on-board IRIS graphics, and the RTX 3070.
• The battery when using the desktop graphics and not the RTX 3070 lasts a very long time, almost 3 hours with heavy use. When the graphic card is activated and when playing a game, it lasts about an hour and a half which is not bad at all, all things considered. This is a very large battery, and it adds to the overall heft of the machine.
• The case is metal and feels pretty sturdy with just a hint of flex. It's heavy, machined well, and feels like you are a bad bitch. It could be thinner, but for what you get, I'm happy.
• Has plenty of ports for whatever you need. No issues. 
• The keyboard has decent travel and is a pleasure to type on.
• Trackpad is a medium size, large and the multi-touch control panel works okay.
• Hinges for the monitor are not made of plastic, which is a big selling point to me as I break them.

Cons:

• The sound, although full and bright, is very low volume. My other MSI laptop that is half the price is 3 times as loud. I've tried drivers, settings, any little trick to get it higher to no avail.
• The fans are screaming loud during gaming or anything that uses the video card. You can adjust this, but only between a few pre-determined settings to get a somewhat quieter fan curve. It's a hot little machine. burn your legs hot. No thermal throttling, but at the risk of skin layers.
• Speaking of hot, this PC unless on the highest fan settings, teeters on the dangerous side of thermal throttling all the time. Just let those fans scream and get use to it.
• Switching to using the video card instead of on-board graphics is a really painful process that you will not know if you got right or not, and even then, will only work on the applications you designate. The only way to ensure it uses the video card all the time is to deactivate internal graphics in the device manager.
• 2 USB ports does not seem like enough to me, but I digress. There are a ton of other IO options so you can break out your dongles and get to work. One type C or thunderbolt port seems chincy. 
• I like that it's a heavy machine, but it's heavy, so that's a con.
• Won't fit in a normal 17-17.3 laptop bag. It has a little extra meat on it, so in most cases will not fit in your budget minded laptop bag. 

In Games:

• It runs OG Overwatch at the full 360hz, full ultra everything with not so much as a drop of sweat. The fans turn on and off during play like a jet taking off and I like it.
• Playing Control was awesome. Full RTX DLSS at a high FPS, no issues. Video card temps got pretty high. Having the full RTX 3070 and not the laptop version has it's benefits and it shows.

Conclusion:

      I played a few various other games and there was no stopping this machine. I have the luxury of having a really nice desktop that plays everything on full settings the same way, but I have never experienced this in a laptop before without all kinds of issues.. even with the same or better specs. I feel like this is a true desktop replacement hooked up to a second monitor, keyboard and mouse. Something durable enough to throw in the car and head out without worry. I do wonder if this machine will stand the test of time with it's size and build quality being a little bit bulky. 

Intel i7 10700k - Upgrade and initial thoughts

This chip runs a little hot. Here is my take on it, and my struggles with it so far.

     In a previous blogpost, I wrote about the i7 8700k, overclocking and temps, and what I used specifically to keep it maintained and under control. Well, throw that all out the window, because recently I've upgraded.. to the 10700k. My wife was getting a new PC, and I found a deal on the motherboard and CPU, and we had another case sitting around. My 8700k and RTX 2070 went to my son for his gaming computer, and mine was a fresh build with my aging RTX 2080.

Observations

Right away I noticed in this older Ibuypower case, which was a little smaller than my old one, had a MUCH larger corsair AIO cooler in it, which was a large improvement over my last bog-standard corsair cooler. Even though my old cooler on the 8700k was smaller, it got the job done, and allowed a small overclock for a number of years without issue. 

After moving over the 32gb of ram, video card and CPU in to the new case, I hooked everything up and turned it on. Right away I noticed the PC was thermal throttling.. within 3-4 minutes the computer crashed and rebooted. I checked everything and all the fans were spinning, pump is pumping.. nothing out of the ordinary. I remounted the cooler and reapplied the thermal paste to no avail. I added an exhaust cooler to the top of the case where there was mounting holes for it, which decreased the temps only slightly. I did an RPM test on the fans and discovered one of the fans on the AIO was only just turning ever so slightly, and was bad. I replaced it with one I had laying around, and we were off to the races. 

Initial Temps After Repair

With everything running normally I was sitting at 34-37c at idle, and the video card at 37c. When playing Overwatch the CPU would sit heat up to around 80-87c easily and peak a little higher than that here and there. The video card would get to around 75-85c and come back to 67c in between rounds. To be honest I was not happy with these temps at all. I'm use to much lower operating temps with the 8700k when I'm gaming or in load situations without an overclock. I know the 10700k can boost to 5.3ghz, but I have it on a balanced power plan, and don't really need it. I tweaked and added a custom fan curve to stop anything from going too far over 80c to save the CPU. The current configuration was struggling and ramping the fans and pump up to 100% during gaming and testing constantly, so I decided something had to be done.

Changes

I ordered 3 case fans from Amazon. 2 for top exhaust, and 1 to replace the rear fan that seemed pretty slow. I also ordered a slot GPU cooler as this case has side mount brackets so I can aim the cooler right at the GPU. The GPU is so large, it touches the fan mounts on the other side of the case for the AIO cooler. The fans were cheap, but I've ordered them before and they worked great for long periods and could be controlled by the motherboard.

Temps After

CPU idles at 30-34c now with the added fans. I had the dust covers off for added airflow, and have since put them back on. At full load in Overwatch with chrome tabs open and such, the peak temps hovered around 70-75c. I saw the occasional spike up to the mid-80's, but it was quickly handled by the fan curve and brought back down again.. and very quietly. This is the first time I've noticed adding fans quieted down the case as a whole, with the temps being managed better, the fans that are in the system don't have to peak so high in to the noisy range anymore. The GPU idle temps are around 29-35c. Under load in Overwatch the GPU peaks at 67c, so I opened a Valheim server on another monitor, and it still would not go over 67c. It looks like the heating issues are solved. I removed the custom fan curve for this test, but left the ceiling for the temps at 80c, so if it ever went higher, it would react with a 6-8v fan boost in the exhaust fans. 

Conclusion

So far I really like the CPU. After I got the temp issues ironed out, it has proved in the last week or so to be a decent improvement from the 8700k. I noticed in games, my FPS has leveled out, especially in e-sports titles where I would bounce around from 220-240, now it's pegged at 240 in any situation. I was very happy with the 8700k when I moved on from it and would still be using it had I not found this deal. I do not use the PC for rendering or editing, but I'm sure I would see a substantial increase in performance there. In gaming I'm only noticing about an 8% difference in most situations, with some leveling out of the 1% lows.

Update! 4/21/22

I had one more fan from the box of fans I ordered, and found a spot to mount it facing the radiator. There is now a shit-ton of fans in this case. I don't hear a change in the noise level at all. Idle temps are now 26-30c, 32c with some Chrome tabs and discord open. This is a pretty big improvement over the previous resting temps that would bounce around in the low 40's just with some Chrome tabs open. I did a stress test, and saw the spikes in to the high 90's were leveled out, and never got close to thermal throttling. I started up Overwatch with some Chrome tabs and discord open and some other stuff, and the system stayed in the low to mid 70's like before, and still spiked very rarely in to the mid-80's for a millisecond until the fan curve to catch up. I'm seeing that the extra fan just smoothed out the spikes and everything is just running a little cooler now. I think I'm at a point where I'm not going to touch it for a while!

Update! 4/22/22

Had some chrome tabs open and was watching a youtube video, and popped open Cyberpunk 77. CPU temps bounced in the high 80's and touched high 90's and once in a while a few cores peaked at 100c for just a second. Had to quit the game. Ordering a new CPU cooler now as that is obviously the issue. Everything else in the case is way cooler than it should be and functioning properly. More to come. 

Update 4/24/22

New cooler came in this afternoon when I was taking a nap. I ordered the Coolermaster ML240 Mirror, and it was a staggering $50 off for some reason on amazon. On eBay and amazon the cooler retails for 129.99. I found one on amazon for 78.99, which I knew was a risk, but pulled the trigger. It came sealed in the box, everything looked good on the outside. Inside, was ML280 140mm fan and radiator edition. Strange that the much larger radiator and fan combo was cheaper, but maybe it's because it is a very unconventional size. I had no mounting holes and all outlets and intakes were 120mm. I decided I wanted the larger cooler and the savings and grabbed my drill. Made holes for venting the larger area through the front, and made new mounting holes for the cooler. One huge issue, the new fans touch the RTX 2080. I considered modifying the graphics card, but that would take away from the value when I sell it to get a new one. I used a GPU sag bracket against a piece of the case and slowly turned it until the fan did not touch my the very smallest amount, bending the case such a small amount no one would know I had done it. 

Tests: Resting idle temps are unchanged at 26-30c. Stress test did only spiked one core at 70c briefly. Cyberpunk 77 hovered around 55-60c and never moved. I have yet to see any spikes like I observed with the old pump and cooler. This oversized radiator and fans are really doing their job, and I'm glad I decided to keep them. Last note: when removing the old pump and radiator, it sounded like something was loose in there.

Update 5/1/22

The case was just bad. If I had anything else open and ran Cyberpunk, Overwatch.. and had my Valheim server open, it got dangerously close to thermal throttling. There was so many fans in this case I had no idea what to do except move to a larger case with a better design. The 3 fans on the old case in the front were trash Ibuypower specials, hooked up to a daisy chain 5w power supply not attached to the motherboard fan connectors, so were at a static slow speed. The rear fan was the exact same. The whole case was designed for 120mm fans, but the holes that everything was lined up for looked like 80mm. I decided to just get another case and start over. I had a super tower case that a previous build was in that never gave me any issues at all, this one with MUCH better ventilation, tons of space for large fans, and I could mount the radiator at the top as opposed to on the side. I had zero issues moving everything over and getting it setup, which took around an hour. Final thermals with two games running at the same time and under stress testing never got above 65C. Perfect. Idle temps super low under 30c, zero spikes or slow building like the old case. Replaced all garbage fans. There is a two inch gap at the top of the case, which I covered with a screen. You can see the pics of the case in it's final form here. I flipped the fans around so it would exhaust out of the top of the case, completing the loop. Huge fucking difference, everything just works. I was worried I hurt the processor, and my wife had run it to thermal throttle for around a year, so was happy when everything came together. 

3 Years Later 5/9/25

I can't believe I'm on the same system 3 years later! I was reading this post after tweaking some fan settings after adding another fan, and thought I would write a quick update. I'm sitting here watching CPUID HWMonitor while I'm writing this and idle is pegged at 33c, GPU also 33c. Recent changes: I added another fan on the end of the video card, zip tied to the video card support bracket blowing towards the back of the case in the last few days. I found out the port fan blowing up into the video card had the fans on it installed backwards just last year, so took that apart, put it back together and found a PMW controller to plug it into, which I paired to the video card sensor in FANCONTROL. The video card is coming up on it's 7th year of life, as I bought it on release day all those years ago, and I repasted it yet again, but was still getting hot. The fans still work, port fan now going in the right direction and now another small fan blowing over the fins have brought it back down to it's original spec temps. I can hear a slight difference in fan noise as my janky fans ramp up in games, but it performs perfectly. I tested it VS my sons 4060ti and it almost keeps up with it, just using a ton more power and making a ton of fan noise. It's time for an upgrade, and this setup will be moved over to the other side of the office to replace my wife's aging gaming PC, which is my old 8700k with a 3060ti, which will be retired to the garage or to a friends house so their kid can have a budget gaming PC. I rebuilt it a year ago- new case, new AIO and fans, and it's been running really well with zero issues. My wife once in a while says it's slow when loading steam on boot, but I think that's to be expected. What's the new upgrade you ask? I'm currently specing out an AMD build, Ryzen 7 9800x3d with a rtx 5070ti. I never thought I would leave intel, but these X3d series chips have been kicking Intels ass on the reg. Look for that post in September 2025!

Dune 1992 (DOS) Was way ahead of it's time.

 

Play Dune for DOS in your browser here. Works with no bullshit!

     Dune for DOS holds a special place in my gamers heart. It's one of the very first DOS games I was introduced to, being a tried and true Macintosh user. It has DOS demo-scene quality graphics and sound, animations, and awesome call backs to the movie. It has lots of relatability and paved the way for games like Warcraft, Command and Conquer and more. The fully voiced cut scenes, changes in gameplay types and modes were way ahead of their time.

World of Longplays Video

Screen shots from the game I grabbed below: