Retro's PC upgrade

[Retro]

Sometimes it's just not your day and today turns out to be that day for me: my system SSD has just died without warning. It's a Samsung Pro 256GB that I've had for just over a decade and has been flawless in all that time. It was at 90% health and no bad blocks, no degraded performance and now boom! It's just failed completely.

The BIOS can sense it as the power-good beep takes about a minute to happen while it hangs the system, but it can't be seen by it. Moving to a different port makes no difference. Booting off the temporary SSD and then connecting the Samsung and doing a hardware scan causes a long hang and is then again not detected. Disconnecting it and then doing a hardware scan or connecting another drive and then scanning makes the scan complete immediately and the newly connected drive show up. This drive is dead for sure and without warning, it just turned off like a light switch. I'm feeling very frustrated right now as it's really screwed up my plans.

I'd done everything I'd needed to do on the temporary OS copy on the spare SSD and was ready to sort out the original SSD to make it boot etc. Thankfully, I've not done anything too radical on the temporary SSD so the OS copy on there is perfectly functional. Thing is, I've got W11 on it now and wanted to go back to W10 for now on the original SSD as I prefer it in some ways with the interface and wanted to do W10/W11 comparitive benchmarks, but now can't do it so easily. I'll have to make another copy and then roll W11 back and hope the PC still works after that.

So, I figured out how to activate Windows on the new hardware as it turned out that the digital license actually is associated with the account after all since when I connected the SSD to the old PC Windows activated and stated that association. I just had to use the activation wizard to tell it that the new hardware is now the current one. I don't remember seeing that option previously, or perhaps I just missed it, I'll never know.

So, W11 is currently running on a cheap £15 Patriot SSD which I'm sure won't last a decade of hard use, hence I'm gonna have to buy a Samsung replacement now instead and image it over to that. An expense I really didn't need now.

That Patriot SSD:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B087K9L3R5

My new Samsung SSD:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08PC5DKZQ

Both drives are from Amazon, not Marketplace.

My fellow PC enthusiasts will click the link and note that this actually isn't the expected superfast M.2 SSD of some description, but an 870 EVO 1TB SATA drive and give me strange looks along with "R U mad bro?!" pronouncements. Especially so as the 990 Pro 1TB M.2 is only a tenner more, so getting that is a no-brainer, right? Not quite, as much as I'd like to have one.

The problem with the M.2 format that I've noticed from the start, is that it's not easy or convenient to disconnect the drive from the PC and looking at the BIOS on this mobo, I can't see a way to disable it there, either. Since I do need to boot off different operating systems and drives at times for testing and so on, not being able to disable the original boot drive is a major inconvenience to the point of showstopper as I'm not gonna take my PC to pieces to do it every time and then again every time I need to re-enable it.

Besides being screwed into the mobo with a cover sitting over it, the big, heavy, graphics card is on top of it too, so would have to be removed each time as well. Oh, and of course, M.2 drives are by definition, not hot pluggable. So, I'm forced to trade off performance for functionality. However, it's not such a bad tradeoff as even this cheap Patriot boots up lightning fast.

In the meantime, I mourn the death of my trusty Samsung SSD, and am glad that I took a copy just in the nick of time. Note that this calamity was going to happen anyway, regardless of my PC upgrade and if anything, a little sooner since the drive has had a rest while the Patriot was being used as a scratchpad.

What I have to do now is finish off the driver installations, play some games and then run those benchmarks and publish them here. Hopefully no further calamities await me.

 

[i1stadam]

Brilliant read, looking forward to updates

 

[Retro]

Smallish update as things aren't quite finished yet.

Since the 256GB system SSD died, I've bought its replacement from Amazon and installed it, a Samsung 870 EVO SATA 1TB SSD and imaged W11 onto it from the Patriot SSD. It's working fine and I just have to adjust the partition sizes to make use of the extra space.

I've played a few games and they're playing beautifully, with Rainbow Six | Siege on Steam achieving 144fps+ at 4K on my RTX 2080 at times and the low framerate issues on Call of Duty have disappeared, playing fast and smooth now. The second game was the one that really spurred me into upgrading now.

I still have to install things like chipset drivers etc which I'm trying to get from the original mfr's website wherever possible. Intel make this surprisingly difficult, forcing a registration to do so for the Z790, which I'll be doing. I do this to ensure that I get the latest driver, not just the out of date one from the mobo mfr. However, for the Realtek sound driver, I have to rely on MSI as that company doesn't even have the drivers. They've only got a small handful for what appear to be outdated hardware that's not sold anymore.

I'm running W11 and the option to roll back to W10 is unavailable for some reason, even though it was only installed 3 days ago. Therefore, to run the W10 benchmarks, I'll have to reinstall W10 fresh on the now spare Patriot SSD and update it with the latest patches. I want to run all the benchmarks together and then publish them all at once rather than piecemeal.

That's it for now, any suggestions for what to do next or comments welcome.

 

[Retro]

Ok, after another sleepless night, I thought I'd do a little more with the PC setup's fine tuning.

The other day, I installed the chipset and sound drivers. I must admit that I'm underwhelmed by that Realtek audio control panel functionality although the sound quality is good, like I expected. I'll see if I can use my old and trusty Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty sound card with W11 so then won't have to bother with the Realtek.

Unfortunately, the card is now years out of support and the outdated driver had intermittent and serious* issues in W10, so I hope it's a bit better on W11 somehow. I'm not optimistic though and it might be even worse, in which case the card becomes a paperweight and I'd be gutted since the sound quality from it is a cut above the rest, really quite noticeable.

I also sorted out the fan profile for that second fan on the CPU cooler. Previously, it would spin up to 100% every time. To fix it, I went into the BIOS and simply copied the fan profile of the first CPU fan to this and enabled smart mode. It now works properly and my Noctua cooler is more effective at keeping the CPU cool under load.

Other things I still have to do:

• Memtest the memory, but it's been faultess so far, so chances are that it will pass - all 128GB of it.
• Install W10 on the spare Patriot SSD and do the W10 benchmarks to compare with W11. I can then finish them all and finally present them here.
• See if it's possible to fix those cod6 chat audio issues once and for all, although I'm not optimistic. Did a quick test the other day and it was still the same broken experience despite the new hardware. I'm really pissed that I spent £70 on this game, yet effectively can't play it because my friends can't hear me. Rainbow Six | Siege has no such issues and plays at a really high framerate, too. While I intend to play the cod6 campaign, I specifically bought it to play online with my friends so you can understand my annoyance.

*Severe crackling and distortion that would come and go and sometimes needed a reboot, or even just a logoff / logon to fix, for a while. I even had to turn off Windows Fast Boot to reduce the problem. I have no such issues with the onboard Realtek sound card.