Shane_B.

Which CPU are you going with?

Thermaltake makes good cases. One thing you have to research is, some of the cooling fans for cpu's are so large now, they won't fit in every case. The fan for the build I'm doing now is so large that I was only able to find one case it would fit in. The other requirement was I had to have a 5.25" bay to put a Blueray/CD player/burner in and they are very rare now. There was only 1 case that was wide enough that had a 5.25" bay.

i9 14900k CPU just went on sale on Amazon. Just an fyi ...

I install and service P.O.S. systems. A lot of them are going to Android for their operating system now. I used to install and service systems for KFC. Back in the day they used Panasonic, but it was mostly hardware based at the time. I see a lot of McDonald's are using Panasonic now. DQ is using something else, but the independent franchise owners are forced to. Headquarters connects directly to their system overnight, and takes their cut immediately. I could imagine a day when DQ won't accept cash just so HQ can have their cut instantly. I've been out of the fast food end of it so long now, I have no idea what everyone is using anymore. But the systems I do work on now all use Android. The purchased and the free systems. Edit: To clarify purchased vs. free ... there are companies out there now that will give you a free P.O.S. system if you give them a cut of your credit card income. That's why you see a lot of places adding a 2.5% ~ 3% markup when you use your credit card now.

I'm in the process of building a new PC. Everything has gone up in price in the span of the last 2 weeks. To buy everything for one PC I'm going to have to get the various parts from Newegg, Amazon, and Best Buy. eBay is a cheaper option, but the return process is horrible if you get a defective item. The system I was going to build went up from $1130 to $1380 in just over two weeks. I had everything in my cart on Amazon for a while, all in stock. When I went to order everything this week the mobo, M.2 drive, and ram were out of stock from Amazon. My options were "Used like new" or to buy from independent sellers who are price gouging and have terrible return policies if something is received bad. I'll wait to see what happens. My current CPU doesn't support Windows 11, so I have till October when they stop support for Windows 10. I'm building the system I always wanted and don't want to settle for something less, but I can wait.

Found a reasonably priced mobo that will let you use the gpu and first m.2 slot directly to the cpu without splitting the PCIe lanes. Everything else goes through the z790 controller. I can't believe my old 3060 12gb video card is still going for $700 new. Crazy.

Here's a link to their native 5600 ram. https://www.kingston.com/en/memory/client/ddr5-5600mts-non_ecc-unbuffered-dimm

Ok. I think I got this figured out now. At true native 5600, CL is 46. Any variation of that is considered overclocked. Kingston does actually make true 5600 CL 46 memory. It's their ValueRam line and actually costs more than their Fury line. From what I can tell everything else is 4800 and overclocked. If it says 5600 or higher ... it's actually 4800 OC'd. And that's fine. Every manufacturer now seems to just accept people are going to do it and actually set you up to do it easily. Also, cas latency isn't what the name implies. The actual latency is calculated by a formula. Here's a link to a calculator. https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/ram-latency

Straight from the horses mouth .... "Hello Shane, The JEDEC standard timing for DDR5 5600MT/s is CL46. anything outside of that would be considered overclocking." They replied again and said it is confusing and as long as the Expo or XMP logo is somewhere, they can advertise whatever speed they want with the risk of instability. That said, I've yet to find anything actually 5600. It all seems to be overclocked with a default of 4800. It's odd, because the motherboards say they support 5600 native. I must be misunderstanding something and maybe it is actually available and I just can't find it. I've been perfectly fine with my 6700K and 48Gb of Kingston Value RAM. That has to be CL50 or more.

Thank you! I'm getting frustrated. The motherboard I'm looking at natively supports 5600 DDR5 and 3 other lower speeds. 6000 requires XMP and I don't want to use that. I'm also finding that all stated speeds, such as 5600 or 6000 are their tested overclocked speeds. Every one I've found actually runs natively at 4800, and it's usually only listed when you download and read the spec sheets. All I want is native 5600 CL30 or lower RAM but it doesn't seem to exist. I want to stick with Kingston and they seem to be the clearest/most honest about their specs. We used to use Corsair at work and I used it at home for a while and it never lasted. We switched to Kingston and I can honestly say that in 20 years at work I've never had a bad stick of Kingston ram and my last 3 builds at home all had it and I never had an issue. G.Skill shows the exact ram in looking for on their site, but when you dig deep it says it's actually 4800 and you have to use xmp to get the "listed" speed.

The base/default speed for ram on the system I'm looking to build is 5600Mhz max. I can't find 5600 with a decent latency but I did find 6000/CL30. Can the 6000 be safely underclocked to 5600 and will it negatively effect latency?

I've never understood the purpose of phase alignment or how to implement it. Probably should have paid attention during DAW class I guess. Is it a track by track, bus, or master thing? I know my best mixes have always been on all analog, and there's no phase thingamabobs on it, so I never looked in to it on my DAW.

I looked up his neck of the woods but I can't tell if it was touched by the wildfires or not. He may have had to relocate or is busy helping others with the recovery if it did hit his area. Or the reduction surgery took a toll on him and he's still in recovery.

Nice circumvention there Craig. 🤠

One of my favorite albums is Song For Juli. Rip.

Ain't seen him around in a long time. Last I heard he went in for ***** reduction surgery. Darn thing was too big. Haven't heard from him since.

No I didn't. That's weird. I never got a notification there was a reply to that thread. I will check. Thanks for letting me know!

Candy Crush and Angry Bird players would beg to differ either you. 😁 Android is an open source operating system. You can even customize your cell. Apps such as banking require certain security programs running and they will not work if you do though. I work on point of sales systems. Those touchscreen machines they use in restaurants and bars and retail stores. All the ones we sell and service run on Android.

Still haven't found a solid answer. What I have found is, in the price range I'm looking at I can't find a single mobo that has all the same gen pcie slots and it makes sense after really reading up on it. PCIe 4 has gpu and 1st m.2 slot shared Gen 4, and any others are Gen 3. Gen 5s have shared Gen 5 gpu and 1st m.2 slot and the rest Gen 4. So, what I'll do is get Gen 5 so it's a little future proof for future gpu's and use the Gen 4 m.2 slots for drives. I can't imagine any of it really matters. I've never had a single issue running anything DAW related on my old 6700 except for having to freeze Ozone from time to time.

I recently saw somewhere that they are not backing down on the new hardware requirements, but you can keep it running past EOL by paying MS to keep the security side of it updated so you dont get hacked. No more bug fixes or new features, but you can pay to keep the security side of it up to date. I saw it mentioned in a pc builders youtube video I was watching and I've never heard of that before. So, I don't know if it's true.

Here's a question I can't find an answer to. If you have a PCIe Gen 5 mobo, you only get one Gen 5 GPU slot and one Gen 5 M.2 Drive slot. The rest are Gen 4, if the mobo even has more than one m.2 slot. The Gen 5 GPU slot and the first Gen 5 m.2 slot are shared and have direct lines to the CPU. If there are any other m.2 slots they are Gen 4 and have their own processor. On every PCIe Gen 5 mobo I've found, if you have the Gen 5 GPU and first M.2 slot filled (Gen 5), your CPU lanes are split between the two slowing them both down. My question is after explaining all that lol, If you have a PCIe Gen 4 only mobo, a Gen 4 GPU and a Gen 4 m.2 drive, does it still get split, or are both directly connected to the cpu equally? I can't seem to find an answer anywhere.

I've been doing a lot of reading on these Gen 14 cpus. I definitely don't want to go with the new Ultra cpus. The cost/benefit factor doesn't add up. From what I read they run on a lot less power, but are barely faster than the Gen 14's. I'm leaning toward the i7 now. It has the same amount of P cores as the i9 and faster, which is what's important for daw's. Three interesting things I've read. 1. One of the problems with Gen 14 was bad chips that oxidized on the inside. That's been fixed. 2. All BIOS's overclock them even when set not to. You have to manually set them up and you have to do it immediately. Once they run for a while at the wrong settings they are permanently damaged. That wouldn't be a problem for me because I never overclock and always go in and manually override the cpu and memory swttings to base specs. 3. You can continue to safely use Win 10 after it's end of life. You can buy security updates yearly for it but you only get security updates. No new features or bug fixes. I have an RTX 3060 12GB video card. I only play one game and not very often anymore. I like Fallout. A 3060 is overkill I think for DAW ussage so I think I'll be very happy if I go with the i7. I see no need for the i9. I'll mainly use my PC as a DAW, Word and Excel, and very very light gaming. I do just fine with the light photo and video editing I do with my current i7 6700k so I think I'll be in good shape with the i7 14700k.

I posted this in the proper sub forum but didn't get a response, so I'll try here. I'm just beginning to research CPU's seriously for the first time since I built my i7-6700k based system. Its not supported by Win 11 so its time to start looking before Win 10 reaches the end. I see the new Core Ultra chips are the latest, but the benchmarks I'm seeing are basically showing the i9-14900k's are almost equal performance wise and cost far less than the top Core Ultra. The 14900k is older now though. Is there any reason not to consider it for a new build? Ozone 9 Advanced really struggles on my 6700K. Will I see an improvement on a 14900k? Thanks for any input.

I'm just beginning to research CPU's seriously for the first time since I built my i7-6700k based system. Its not supported by Win 11 so its time to start looking before Win 10 reaches the end. I see the new Core Ultra chips are the latest, but the benchmarks I'm seeing are basically showing the i9-14900k are almost equal performance wise and cost far less than the top Core Ultra. The 14900k is older now though. Is there any reason not to consider it for a new build? Ozone 9 Advanced really struggles on my 6700K. Will I see an improvement on a 14900k?

I'm more of a Down By The River kinda guy. More heartfelt. Less commercial.