Another new PC Build

[ChristopherP]

Mother in Law's Surface 2 RT is dying so she wants a desktop for her desk... Having a jig around with some stuff at home and building her a machine based on the Ryzen 1500X machine that I finished recently with a few updated bits, and I'm going to build a machine for myself with the following bits:

1 x 250GB Samsung 960 Evo PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive
1 x Corsair 16GB DDR4 Red Vengeance LPX 3200MHz Memory
1 x Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti OC 4GB Graphics Card
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 CPU Air Cooler
1x AMD Ryzen 5 1600X 6 Core AM4 CPU/Processor
1 x ASRock AMD AM4 Ryzen AB350 Gaming K4 ATX Fatal1ty Motherboard
1 x CIT Hero MATX Midi Tower Case with 1 x USB3 No Side Window

Not the fastest/highest specced/costliest machine in the world but it's my first jump into the world of NVME storage. Graphics card is mid range and I'll be doubling my RAM to 16Gb so hopefully powerful enough to run X Plane 11/FSX at 1080p and run Adobe Photoshop nicely.

By all counts these Ryzen chips seem to be pretty well received and reviewers tout them as the 'Return of AMD'

Annoying the retail box for the 1600x doesn't ship with a cooler though. Not sure why that is.

Fingers crossed it'll be a decent little mid range PC.

 

[V_R]

Looks good Chris.

 

[Ian]

Solid system there Chris - I think the 1050Ti should be plenty for XPlane 11, although maybe not on absolute max settings (but high nevertheless!) .

I'm thinking about making a jump to Ryzen in time too, looks like a cracking CPU!

 

[ChristopherP]

So the machine is built - runs quite nicely. I was quite impressed with the NVME storage - for two reasons, one being I expected the actual size of the drive to be much bigger and the other is that it makes the PC a whole load neater inside as there are no cables as everything is on the motherboard.

Photos:

A couple of odd things though...

My Akasa multi-card reader that plugs into a USB header on the motherboard prevents the PC from booting properly and throws an A4 error on post causing the machine to hang for 2-3 minutes before proceeding to windows. No idea why this would be - worked fine on the previous board no issues at all. Tried different headers - same problem. Have had to leave the thing unplugged - which is an issue as I need it for photography. Any ideas?!

Second observation - the 1600X processor despite being a retail pack does not come with a cooler. Some versions do, some don't, so I had to buy an aftermarket one. I would have much preferred the stock AMD Wraith one really. Bit strange it's not included.

Most importantly - XPlane11 seems to run nicely with all settings maxed out, and the machine is pretty snappy.

 

[Ian]

Looks really nice Chris!

Funnily enough, I've got an Akasa multi-card reader and it causes no end of problems on occasion. Windows 10 sometimes goes crazy, detecting a number of USB drives that don't exist, or disconnects a memory card during format. I've never had problems during boot, but if the same types of odd error happen if it tries to boot from a USB or memory card, perhaps it would cause that. If you disable the option to boot from USB drives, does it then work ok?

 

[Abarbarian]

The one problem with the NVME drives is that they speed the pc up too well. Things just happen so quickly that the poor old grey cell can not keep up.