So update since returning to the 5600.

One crash. Same Green screen and reboot.

But only that once.

I did some changes to the GPU fan curve after that so it’s more aggressive. I also found an that my CPU has somehow stopped using the AMD P-state driver and went back to the ACPI driver. Managed to get the AMD P-State driver working again after some back and forth with the Liquorix kernel team, and the problem seem to be resolved now.

I next re-enabled VAAPI GPU encoding. So far so good, the green tint issue is no more.

So yeah.

Got the 5600 back from RMA. The shop also did tests before sending the card to Asrock for RMA and confirmed the issues, and after the card came back from Asrock to ensure the problem has been fixed.

Spent Boxing Day evening installing it and doing some preliminary tests- so far no more artifacting, but I’m a bit concerned about video encoding.

Well, artifacting started happening on the screen and the random reboots returned. Since there's artifacting this time, I reckon it could only mean one thing. So I downgraded the GPU to a old spare RX 470 I have lying around.

So far, stability seems to have returned, but yeah, looks like the RX 5600 bit it. Heck, it may even been defective from the start and had just degraded to the point where the problems are starting to become more pronounced. I don't know if I can get it RMAed tho, and part of me wants to wait for a RX 7700.

So yeah, I reckon it'll be staying on the RX 470 for a while.

That worked. Four hours, not a single crash or screen artifact. The cable really fixed it. Just a pity that it has to cost me so much...

I had another GPU related crash while streaming Trails of Cold Steel III on Friday, so I impulsively decided to follow up on the state of PCIe 4 riser cables in Malaysia. And as it would stand, Lian Li's offering has finally arrived. I impulsively ordered it without properly thinking.

It arrived in a nondescript box.


Great, RM300 for a bunch of wires. And the money was supposed to be for my cellphone bill. This better be worth it.


Okay. Time to get this over with. I did one more quick measure and yeah, 8 inches is long enough.

Here's one last look at the old riser cable in place:


I removed the old riser cable. Then I connected the new riser cable to the GPU first, then slid the GPU in. Next I secured the GPU to the case (again, no easy feat due to the size of my hands), plugged in the power cables to the GPU, plugged the riser cable into the motherboard, and finally secured the riser cable to the case.


Fingers crossed, I powered up the system.

It boots.


So I started to go about testing the new cable. First thing is to set the link speed to full throttle.

I noted my first difference then. On the old cable, there is a noticeable delay between the keypresses and response in the UEFI setup screen on GEN4 mode. On the new cable, there is no delay. I took that as a good sign.

I followed it up with OBS running in dummy mode (everything except forwarding the stream to the restream.io servers) and proceeded to fire up satisfactory, because I am tired of Cold Steel III for now. And there appears to be no crash even after 2 hours. On the older cable a crash would usually happen 30-40 minutes in.

One way to only find out for sure tho- tomorrow's Friday. I will be streaming as usual (assuming my ISP isn't saturated on the uplink again). Here's hoping that last Friday's crash would be the last time I'll have any crashes with the ingest system.

Sorry I took so long to put this up. Kept slipping my mind. Anyways, here’s part 2 of the build, the final touches being put on the Rainbow Warrior. And the machine powering up for the first time.

Reality is setting in- the extra long PCIe riser that the case uses is causing instability issues with the GPU in PCIe 4 mode 🙁

It's all fun and games unless you actually try to stress test the GPU. Then the errors start popping up.
And the worst thing is, only one company makes aftermarket PCIe riser cables that is PCIe 4 certified, and it's expensive AF 🙁 According to my correspondences no other companies plan to launch PCIe 4 cables until shintel launches Rocket Lake next year 😕

The world is stupid. Why must they bow to shintel? Why is AMD being punished for being a pioneer? Apple adopts firewire and USB first, everyone hops on the bandwagon. Apple adopts Thunderbolt first, everyone hops on the bandwagon. AMD adopts PCIe 4 first, gets punished.
Fuck the world. It's stupid. Everyone is stupid.

First half of the build, done in a livestream yesterday. Hurt my back plenty doing this. I was bedridden for most of today due to the fact. But I managed to pull it together and finish it today- which I filmed as an offline video. That part will go up in the next few days. But for now, time for me to celebrate the birth of the Rainbow Warrior, whose name is at the moment undecided.

The last piece of the puzzle- the Fractal Designs Celsius+ S24 Prisma, arrived today.

All the parts are here.

Building will commence tomorrow.

So the stage is set. 99% of the parts are set in stone and building can begin soon. Here's the (almost) final line-up, as some of the items are not showing due to being in pending state as they do not exist in the builds.gg database yet:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 3950X 16-core 32-thread, inherited from the Pinkeye Revenger (which will be receiving a Ryzen 9 5950X in it's place, because Big Navi needs a Ryzen 5000 series CPU to enable SMA)
  
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB. Good enough for real-time 4K transcoding. Not sure about 8K, but should be forwards compatible.
  
• Memory: 2x Corsair Vengeance Pro RGB 16GB 3200-16-18-18-36, /Revision C (Hynix/Micron die)/ (not optimal as it's not optimized for Ryzen, but hopefully it won't be giving us much trouble. Didn't want to get Dominator because 1. I thought the RGB on the Dominator was fugly (seriously, single RGB lights instead of one long strip diffused, plus lots of covered space in between), 2. It was way more expensive, and 3. I'm not the type to cause trouble to anyone, but I do harbor feelings of revenge- hence being drawn to the Vengeance name). Meanwhile the LPX does not have RGB.
  
• OS Storage: Gigabyte Aorus M.2 PCIe 4.0 512GB. One of the worst performing Gen 4 sticks out there now that Samsung's superfast offering is in the market (the Gigabyte manages a humble 5Gb/s while Samsung's offering clocks in at a whopping 7Gb/s), but for booting Linux off, should be plenty.
  
• User Storage: 4x Apacer Panther AS340. I've been flipping between multiple brands, but hey, this was cheap on the 11/11 sale, so yeah. I will attempt something new and try to set this up as ZFS RAID-Z2 or maybe BTRFS RAID-5. Hopefully by running a RAID I should be able to record in 4K or maybe even 8k. Sponsored by my mom - thanks, ma!
  
• Case fan: Cooler Master MasterFan Pro 140 Flow RGB- a spare that have seen some use in and out of some cases, but currently unused.
  
• Extra case fan: Scythe Kaze-Hachi SC8010KH12H-P. Can't find anything online, but I found plenty on one of the local e-shop sites. At worst case it's bootleg Scythe merchandise, but as long as it's PWM 4-Pin, it'll do. This one will be taped down to the front of the case. Since the Celcius+ and Freezer II fans all connect to a single Pump header on the motherboard, that leaves two free headers on the case. So one header will go to the MasterFan Pro which has a proper mount on the bottom cover, that leaves one more header. That's where the Scythe comes in. Bonus points for the front of the case actually having a grill in the front, even though there is nowhere to mount a fan.
  
• Case: Lian-Li O5S-X. A slightly larger version of the O5 that supports water cooling, although it only accepts 120mm and 240mm radiators. Hence the limitation mentioned above. Lian-Li no longer officially lists it as still being manufactured, but apparently they still have some remaining ex-stock.
  
• Accessory: Jonsbo LB-3 RGB Light Bar. Since the Celcius+ will use the ARGB headers instead of the RGB header, something else should be plugged in to the RGB header. So I got this. This actually provides a daisy-chain tho, which I intend to hook up to the MasterFan Pro 140 Flow RGB. Now I just need an RGB extension cable, I'm pretty sure I have one somewhere.
  
• Accessory: Lian-Li SD-01A desktop conversion kit. This one was a PITA to get. It allows the O5, O6 and O7 series to be used flat on a surface like a desktop case. I actually had to get a friend in the US to buy this for me and ship it over because no one here has this. Seriously, what's the deal with tower cases anyway? We need more desktop cases in the market!
  

Undecided:
CPU Cooler: *huge fanfare* Water cooling is on! This is so far the only unconfirmed part of the build. On one side of the ring, it will be the Arctic Cooling Freezer II 240 and on the other side, a Fractal Design Celcius+ S240 Prisma. Limited to 240mm radiators only because of the case. I am heavily leaning towards the Fractal Design Celcius+, but if all fails, I will have to get the Arctic Cooling Freezer II (which, despite it's bulky Darth-Vader-Cyclops-Minion pump design, is known to just barely fit on the extremely fussy Asrock X570 PG ITX/TB3). To be honest, the AC Freezer II doesn't meet my criteria because it lacks RGB and just barely fits. But hey, I can always tack on some spare Silverstone ARGB fan rings I happen to have spares of (one of those times where my order from Amazon went missing, but suddenly turned up in the mail in battered packaging 9 months later after Amazon had sent replacements because some idiot at a post office in the US had routed the package to a small country in East Africa where it sat for months until someone knowledgeable came along and re-routed the package to the correct country) - at least the fans will still have RGB, right?

So yeah, we're getting pretty close to building this! Hopefully we can get this over with by the end of next week!

Although, I plan to get the AverMedia LiveGamer Bolt GC555 next month, once the PS5 finally launches in Malaysia.

Well, only now did I look at the cooling options seriously, and this build is starting to look like the first one I’d be doing water cooling on. Most definitely an AIO because I don’t want to mess with this stuff too much. However, the possibility of air cooling is still there- I may be going for a Noctua NH-L9x65 with the fan upgraded to a full sized one (making it a Noctua NH-L9x76). It’s pushing things, but the cooler will still fit. A lot of the coolers are not an option due to either the overly tall heatsinks of the motherboard or the extremely low profile of the case.

So after I watched the highlights of AMD's new Big Navi cards. Summary: this machine is inheriting the Ryzen 9 3950X from the Pinkeye Revenger. The Big Navi cards shine the brightest because they're built around a new feature found only on the Ryzen 9 5000 series CPUs, namely the ability for the CPU to DMA data from disk straight into GPU memory. Naturally, this means the 3950X on the Pinkeye Revenger isn't good enough anymore. But is still fine for the streaming build.

I also decided to go with a semi-Frankenstein CPU cooler after reading all those appalling reviews of the Cooler Master G100M. I plan to use a Shadow Rock LP cooler but with the fan replaced with a ID-Cooling XF RGB fan. Higher CFM should mean better running cooler? I hope. But yeah.

I am also considering upping the RAM to 32GB. If you're going to do 8K you might as well have the memory for it.

So first thing- CPU has been changed to a Ryzen 7 5800X. The original decision was for a Zen 2 CPU, but that was only for a week before I realized that 1. I already have a Zen2 machine (the Pinkeye Revenger), and 2. My machine would probably only be built after I get all the parts over the course of several months, so with that I set my sights on a theorized Ryzen 7 5700X. Unfortunately AMD then announced the 5800X and no 5700X, so the 5800X it is. Sadly, this means that the build cannot be completed before November 5th at earliest, and probably even later since the CPU will take time to reach Malaysia. Nonetheless the 5600 will not do because each CCX has 8 cores, but the 5600X has only 6, meaning two defective or disabled cores, and to me that is a no-no- all 8 cores has to be working because perfection. Remember that one of my points of contention with the Threadripper 1950X is that two of the four core complexes are dummied out.

Secondly, with the announced CPU will have a TDP of 105w (10w higher than the 95w TDP supported by the G200P), I'm forced to change that part of the plan as well, with the cooler now penned to be a G100M, which supports CPU TDP of up to 135W. However the G100M is a tall boi, and stands 7.4cm tall according to CoolerMaster's spec sheet. Lian Li's spec sheets say that the case will fit a cooler of up to 8cm tall. This means very little clearance for the cooler, but hopefully it will suffice. The bigger issue at hand is now how am I going to return the darn G200P?

Lastly, I've gotten another sponsor for the four SSDs- my mom. Well, more like gotten another loan. So this means being able to go back to four Kingston 480GBs. Additionally those Silicon Power SSDs has risen sharply in price, making them less desirable.

So yeah. The G200P in the picture? It's going back to the store for a G100M. Hopefully the store will accept exchanges...

PSU has changed again, this time to a 650w FSP Dagger Pro. It’s only 80+Gold which means power draw will be higher. But it was over RM200 cheaper than a Corsair SF600.

Well, things are getting tighter. So I figured I'd cut some costs.

PSU has been downsized to 600w. Hopefully it wouldn't make any difference, and Outervision PSU calculator says I can get away with it, but we'll never know.

SSDs, brand switched from Kingston to Silicon Power. They're cheaper marginally, but I'm also walking on a tight budget.