Late last year I set out to update one of our project builds, specifically the build that I have been using as my main PC. I was fighting performance issues with the latest games. But more importantly, things were starting to break down and I had been ignoring them. I had a hard drive that was making noise and an SSD that was slow compared to modern drives and that wasn’t large enough for my needs. Cooling was noisy and I found out when digging into things that the heat contributed to the hard drive failure as well. I was also dealing with weird network hiccups that seemed to indicate a motherboard issue or a PSU problem so in past episodes I updated the cooling, the PSU, the video card, and all of the storage. But that left the main issues with the CPU performance and the motherboard issues, plus not having as much ram as I would have liked for Microsoft Flight Sim. Well, I’ve put it off a lot longer than I should have, but today I’m going to update those last few areas.
Article Title: Project Build Crushed Update - Part 3
Project Sampling provided by: Western Digital – Noctua - Corsair – Asus – Intel – Cooler Master - Nvidia
Written by: Wes Compton
Amazon Affiliate Link: Asus – Intel – Crucial – Cooler Master
Links to the rest of the project: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3
CPU/Motherboard
Well, all the way back to the start I’ve been trying to work out a few weird issues in this system that were tied back to network issues and sometimes issues with storage as well and after trying other options the signs were pointing to motherboard issues. This works out though because the early Threadripper in the original Crushed build has been looking a little dated. So to start things off on this portion of our build I needed to lock down which CPU and motherboard I would be going with. The last few AMD launches we haven’t been able to get our hands on their highest-end options both with Ryzen and Threadripper and the Ryzen 3900X in our test bench has been running into some CPU limitations prompting an upcoming GPU test bench upgrade. This meant two things, the 3900X is still tied up on that test bench until I swap things out, and also the test bench is going to the i9-11900K which eliminated that as an option as well. I decided to go with the i9-10900K which has more cores than the 11900K which fits well with my gaming and work usage anyhow. Plus moving from the Threadripper 1920X to the 10900K offers a big jump in single-core boost clocks going up over 5GHz from the 4GHz of the 1920X.
Then for the motherboard, I had a few options in the Z490 lineup but the ROG Maximus XII Extreme which I covered back in June of last year. Is an absolute monster and surprisingly would still fit in the Case Labs case. It also has both 10G and 2.5G networking and had a ton of front and rear I/O options as well as on-board headers like the 20! PWM fan headers. Now our case doesn’t have room for that many fans, but I shouldn’t have to worry about fan headers being close to where I need them with that many. 2x2 Wi-Fi 6 is also there which I normally wouldn’t need, but considering the network issues I’ve run into I have found it to be a great backup option when needed.
I could go on for a while with some of the other features that the Maximus XII Extreme offers us, but I would suggest if anyone is interested to check out my previous review of both the board and the 10900K
