Circuit City on the Edge of Forever

King of Posters
1987

you could … theoretically, yeah … just run a tiny bootloader from a micro usb-stick, and let that point towards the HDD drive in the optical drivebay (SSD would give you better performance in an instant, if you really meant HDD as platter, fwiw), but beware, that is an adventure until it works.

sidetrack:
how to get OS on that HDD is another adventure, easiest would be

  • to do a barebone win install in another PC, and then slap the HDD into the optical drivebay,
  • install the bootloader on the usb-stick (in case you want a quick&dirty method: you could just install any slim linux distro on the usb-stick and configure the bootloader to auto-boot the win partition from the HDD and never use the linux distro. wasted space, yyyeah, but probably saves you some hassle)
  • hope for the best that windows auto-configures itself like it seemed to do since Win7 times.

Would save you replacing the mobo/laptop, if you are so inclined.

1 Like
1988

if it’s msi it’s the board

2 Likes
1989

hey, I had good luck with my last MSI board

let me tell you, it made the E5200 scream

2 Likes
1990

(I actually run my 12700k on an MSI board and seeing as they make the only ~200 dollar Z690 board, I’ll live but shit, sturdy VRM and 4 m.2 ports, seems good)

1 Like
1991

AsRock and Zotac are interchangeably great for ITX and have been for a decade in my experience

3 Likes
1992

I was gonna upgrade proactively for a change rather than waiting until there’s something I can’t run but I honestly feel like I can probably give 2023 a pass for high end stuff the way this is going

and I really wasn’t looking forward to having to drop half a G on storage alone, fuck it

really getting ridiculous though

1993

They should be easier to cool with a low profile Noctua in a sub-20L ITX, though, right?

1 Like
1994

yeah but I already have the Dan A4 AIO loop and they’re raising the TDPs at the high end anyway because the iGPUs probably cancel out any package thermal improvements

AMD doesn’t really do headroom for better or worse

the weird thing is that the rumour mill is trying to suggest that AMD wants Zen 5 on 3nm which is almost certainly not gonna happen

3 Likes
1995

170w TDP (65w bump). Ouch. I’d probably go 12th gen Intel if I were building a brand new PC today.

3 Likes
1996

you hate to see it!

2 Likes
1997

I do have a 3900x sitting around doing nothing. I never even pulled the stock cooler out of the box.

1 Like
1998

I have a 4690k-to-8600k hand-me-down upgrade ready for my partner’s PC but got really lazy about it when the Steam Deck filled literally all but one anti-cheat-incompatible need

I want to reclaim some desk space from my ATX tower so maybe I’ll use the ITX board for that in a Meshlicious or similar

2 Likes
1999

it seems like everyone is waffling hard on PCIe5 and USB4 at the start of this generation too, which is sort of understandable, but come on man

what am I excited to play in the next year? the new hitman level? baldur’s gate 3 final release? not much! the whole industry is basically taking a nice break from having to ship anything

4 Likes
2000

you missed it, Newegg had the Mesh w/4.0 riser and Q58 on sale over the weekend

the problem with this is that the percentage of Zotac ITX boards is much higher in relation to their portfolio than it is at ASRock

which is to say ASRock has a hell of a lot more chances to be some real duds

3 Likes
2001

yeah this is why im kinda sorry i bothered buying a ryzen and an rtx card

im sure the i5/1060 i ran previous would manage romancing saga 1 hd

that was a nice system, dirt cheap and all, built on a whim when the mbp keyboards were garb

2 Likes
2002

just got the costco MacBook Air ™ how do I right click

6 Likes
2003

Feeling so vindicated in my recent build choices now, lol

2 Likes
2004

tap with 2 fingers, and tap with your pinky on Cmd for middle click

2005

note that AsRock Rack is a different beast to AsRocks… price-wise and feature-wise.

I thought that indeed i am stupid for buying their 470something…

this board for my NAS, considering that price. Paid a bit less, but not much south of that… Those two 10Gb PHYs alone made up ~100 bucks at the time i bought this board, 64GB ECC has to offload its contents somewhere, so bought it and never looked back (until today).
Testdrove a Ryzen5 3400GE in it, put that into an upgraded machine for my older Brother when the Athlon 200GE (don’t ask) started getting long in the tooth, and now it houses some Ryzen 5 3xxx + a somewhat passive-cooled lameass Radeon I bought as fallback/shunting GPU.

However, when i finally upgraded my test-install of TrueNAS and added that 6tb SSD storage pool this weekend… it slowly feels like it was still a stupid, but at least somewhat funky choice. :curly:

2006

In the inner chamber