What to upgrade?

[Foggy]

I got most of the stuff ordered by now

RAM and CPUs have been ordered as we talked about. The same for the Asus DDR4 board.

For the DDR5 motherboard I jumped on a deal for the ASRock Z790 Steel Legend WiFi at a 35% off so it ended up being less than the Z790 Pro RS WiFi.

I have a question about the SSDs. I am wondering if this SAMSUNG 980 PRO M.2 PCIE 4.0 NVME 1 TB would be as good or better than the Kingstons you recommend. Right now this big box store has a deal going with my credit card company so I get 20% of the list price, putting the Samsung a tiny bit below the cheaper of the two Kingstons. Link https://www.power.no/data-og-tilbehoer/ ... p-1118854/

This is the same store where I got the CPUs and the Asus mother board - using the same deal

For thermal paste I decided to go with the older Arctic MX-4. It's what I used for my current build and it's easy to apply. I don't trust myself to be able to get the new Arctic MX-6 spread out thin and evenly. I figured a proper application is more important than using the very latest difficult-to-apply thermal paste. Along the same lines I decided to pick up the Thermalright Intel12th13th Generation LGA1700 to help me get an even distribution of the paste. https://www.amazon.com/Thermalright-Gen ... B0B5Q34SZ1

That's the update for now

[Foggy]

I have a question about the SSDs. I am wondering if this SAMSUNG 980 PRO M.2 PCIE 4.0 NVME 1 TB would be as good or better than the Kingstons you recommend. Right now this big box store has a deal going with my credit card company so I get 20% of the list price, putting the Samsung a tiny bit below the cheaper of the two Kingstons. Link https://www.power.no/data-og-tilbehoer/ ... p-1118854/

Never mind this question. I confused the 980 pro with the 990 pro.

[Japanese Capacitor]

For thermal paste I recommend Gelid GC Extreme - it's easy to apply, cheap and from the best performing ones, so better than MX-4, but ofc it's like few degrees difference.

This contact frame is generally waste of money - it's not meant to help you distrubute a thermal paste, in fact you will have more job to do (and some risk) with installing it than with applying thermal paste. This kind of frames were an answer to some first 600 mobos bending 12-gen CPU due to having badly constructed socket. I really doubt it's not solved still, so now this frames are just gimmick for people who read bad things about this problem (people having few degrees higher temperatures) and are terrified.

About applying the paste, it's not something to worry about - just too little means worse temperatures, too much doesn't affect them. The easiest, but even way of applying is making three 1mm-thick stripes going from up to bottom edge of CPU, at best leaving 2mm gap from the edges in case of paste not flowing out from IHS. Then just slowly, evenly put a cooler on it and don't raise it if it already touched the paste.

[Foggy]

I have everything ordered now. I took your advice and got the cheaper of the two Kingstons. Oddly enough the Renegade was cheaper at at deal on amazon.de. https://www.amazon.de/dp/B09K3H2YHX/ref ... rrency=EUR.

About applying the paste, it's not something to worry about - just too little means worse temperatures, too much doesn't affect them.

I thought too much paste was a problem. The best transfer of heat happens when metal touch metal, i.e. to have the lid of the CPU touch the base plate of the cooler. The problem with that idea, is that inherit unevenness om metal means you have air bubbles trapped between the two metal plates. Since trapped air works as is an fantastic barrier against heat transfer, you need the paste to fill those small pockets of air. My intuition would be that too much paste also would also reduce heat transfer from the CPU to the base plate of the cooler.

Source, own experience with wearing layers of cloths during the Norwegian winters, and errr, Intel https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... paste.html

From Intel's site:
- Apply thermal paste onto the center of the CPU’s IHS. You only need to apply a small amount — roughly the size of a grain of rice or a pea — onto the center of the integrated heat spreader.

- Install CPU cooler. Use light, top-down pressure to place the base-plate or waterblock of your cooler onto the CPU, and hold that pressure while attaching the cooler to the mounting mechanism. You’ll want to use enough force to keep the cooler from sliding, and to evenly distribute the thermal paste, but you don’t want to push hard enough to bow the motherboard or damage the CPU. Keep the cooler in place as you attach it to the motherboard in a diagonal pattern, securing the screws (assuming you are using a screw mechanism) as if you were drawing an “X” with them. Do not fully tighten the screws until you have attached all four, then turn each a few times before moving on to the next in order to ensure even pressure.

[Japanese Capacitor]

You bother too much with something not to bother with. There're many ways of applying thermal paste and in fact differences between them are negligible, like one or two degrees. You have to try hard, do it intentionally uneven or use it too little to get noticeably worse results. There're many tests online showing such experiments. Long story short it's simple: too little works similarly to no thermal paste - bad. Too much doesn't matter, because in the end screwing your cooler will make the excess flow out from IHS, what is also bad due to making everything around dirty, but here maybe this contact frame will help and justify it's purchase With heat transfer not liking air you are right and that's why I advised you to not raise your cooler after it touched thermal paste - if you raise it, air bubbles get into paste.

Linked Intel's advice is old, from the times before LGA1700, so more square CPUs. Doing it with rectangular CPUs will result in not having top and bottom of IHS covered. Probably another neglibible temperature penalty. Do it like I told you and don't overthink it

[Foggy]

Do it like I told you and don't overthink it

Okay

I don't expect much will happen before next weekend here. Need to wait for the parts.

[Japanese Capacitor]

Fine, this is how it is with completing parts from various shops :] Btw with planning such shopping don't try to hard to make it as cheap as possible, but balance it with being as fast as possible. Most important is never allowing situation when waiting for some component ends your return period for another - it's just hit or miss with something being broken from the start; coming from return (I wouldn't even try such); having problematic volume of coilwhine or e.g. RAM not working correctly, so forcing you to tweak it yourself or change it. Executing it as fast as possible gives you also time for any potential swaps.

[Foggy]

Quick update again.

Upgraded one PC with the Asrock motherboard, DDR5 ram and of course the new CPU. Just had time to turn it on. Bios comes up fine, it sees the RAM, CPU temperature is 36C. I also see the old regular HD, but it sees none of the M.2 SATA SSDs. I did not have time to troubleshoot it yet. Since Windows is on one of the SSDs, there is currently no OS.

I have been so confused about how to hook the SSDs up. I feel the one in the adapter card ((Silverstone SST-ECM20 PCIe card) should have worked, but maybe I put it in the wrong PCIe slot, or maybe it needs extra power. Will have to look at it tomorrow.

I would like to know if one of or both the M.2 SATA SSDs should work in the regular M.2 slots. I took at chance and just put one in one slot, and it fits alright, but I'm not seeing it in the BIOS.

[Japanese Capacitor]

I assume that you installed all with reading the manual. On Z790 Steel Legend there're some traps like installing drive in one M2 degrades your GPU to x8 or some M2 doesn't work when other is occupied. Sometimes using some M2 disconnects some SATAs, but I don't recall it being like that with this board - all info like that are in board's specification and manual.

Start with updating the bios and installing fresh Windows 11 on Renegade drive (CPU may work better with 11 and it's generally time to leave 10). Remember about need of activating non-system drives in Windows' Drive Management or whatever it is in english. Then if still a problem, try these fixes: https://www.remosoftware.com/info/solve ... ed-in-bios

[Foggy]

Update on PC no. 1

The adapter card (Silverstone SST-ECM20 PCIe card) needed to be hooked up to a SATA port on the motherboard with a cord. Once I did that, it worked fine

I have to get back to the other one not working later. I took note of your suggestions below.

Update on PC no. 2.
We worked on the Asus motherboard PC today and ran into some problems. It would not post - as in we could not even get to the Bios. The led on the chasis flashes very fast indication a RAM issue. We took everything but the CPU and cooler out of the new motherboard and put everything back into the old motherboard and everything works fine. The RTX 4070ti works there, as do all the 32GB of ram. We moved everything back to the new motherboard, but it will not boot to BIOS. Tomorrow we will try to clean the DIM slots and brush the RAM as Asus recommends in their troubleshooting, but I am not very hopeful that it will work. I have contacted the shop we got if from (big box store) to see what they say to do next.

[Japanese Capacitor]

You mean DRAM motherboard led? At first give your PC time to execute first turnin on - then it trains RAM and it may take even up to few minutes without giving screen. If still a problem, first check if all stick sit as they should. Then try it with just two sticks (don't mix sets or channels - manual) or even one. Other cause could be bent pins on mobo, because it usually results in some bigger or less problems, so it's worth to be checked, but rather after anything else. I even heard that CPU cooler screwed too tight can cause problems with RAM. Also removing bios battery may help, but it's not likely if motherboard was for sure new.

[Foggy]

You mean DRAM motherboard led?

Yes.

As it stands now we are waiting for a new MB. We may have acted a bit hasty here and returned the MB before we tried all your steps. We may not have given it more than a minute or maybe two to start. We did try different RAM configurations to no avail. Ofc. made sure the RAM was pushed all the way down on both sides in the middle etc. My biggest regret is not trying to loosen the CPU cooler a bit. And we did not try removing the battery.

Anyway, we expect the new MB to arrive later this week.

About the Asrock MB and the M.2 SATA SSD. Could it be that my MB plain and simple does not support M.2 SATA SSDs? The Asus MB documentation clearly states that it supports SATA mode on one of the M.2 slots. This is not the case with the Asrock Z790 Steel Legend WiFi. From their website:

CPU:
- 1 x Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_1, Key M), supports type 2260/2280 PCIe Gen4x4 (64 Gb/s) mode*
- 1 x Blazing M.2 Socket (M2_2, Key M), supports type 2260/2280 PCIe Gen5x4 (128 Gb/s) mode*
Chipset:
- 1 x Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_3, Key M), supports type 2242/2260/2280 PCIe Gen4x4 (64 Gb/s) mode*
- 1 x Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_4, Key M), supports type 2242/2260/2280 PCIe Gen4x4 (64 Gb/s) mode*
- 1 x Hyper M.2 Socket (M2_5, Key M), supports type 2260/2280 PCIe Gen4x4 (64 Gb/s) mode*
- 8 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s Connectors

What is confusing though is that the Storage QVL Hyper M.2 SSD (chipset) Support List includes SSDs like:
WD......... 1TB SATA3 2280 WDS100T1B0B-00AS40 and
Kingston 120GB SATA3 2280 SM2280S3G2

Not quite sure what to do. I guess I can buy another PCIe SSD, but it's a shame to throw away the old SSD.

[Japanese Capacitor]

Board being just broken is always an option, so maybe it was the case. When you work with electronics, remember to ground yourself before - people not doing it happen to kill motherboards without any sight. The thing with the cooler was one I only heard about and I'm not really convinced, but maybe with screwing it too tight or not evenly it's possible and maybe this contact frame is more prone to such scenario. On the other hand screwing cooler too loose means higher temperatures.

Your 850 Evo are physically compatibile to work with listed sockets and they should work, but sometimes such don't - you just have to try them. With using your extension should be no problem.

[Foggy]

Another small update.

We got a new Asus motherboard and then everything worked! All the old DDR4 also RAM (36GB) fired right up as well. Very happy about this.

About the Asrock PC. I ended up submitting a ticket to Asrock about the M.2 SATA SSD. I was sort of expecting this to be the answer by now:

"The M.2 slots on the Z790 Steel Legend WiFi are PCIE only.
They are not compatible with your SAMSUNG M.2 SATA SSD."

I have to say, I do appreciate the clear communication from Asrock

Anyway. The Kingston Renegade SSDs that I ordered from Amazon never showed up , and I actually think they never will, so I went ahead and ordered two 2 TB from a "local" store. They deliver Sundays and I'll have the new SSDs tomorrow afternoon.

I really have not spend much time yet looking at fan control yet. Do you recommend doing so in the Bios? I think I read that is what you did for your setup.

I am also thinking about ditching the adapter card, and only use this new 2 TB card. I suspect the adapter card hamper some airflow.

Also, any tips on how to move program files from one SSD to another? Just install them one by one anew?

Lastly, I must thank you for your excellent help throughout this process! Fantastic help and much appreciated!

[Japanese Capacitor]

About fan control, do just how I explained it in my build's thread. First set all case fans in bios to constant inaudible speed. And there's the question, if they are able to run inaudibly? (ofc from reasonable distance, one you sit from them) If not, I think they should be changed, because I find just zero-noise during idle/light load like webrowsing as absolute basis of quiet computing. Coming back, before load change their speed to constant well balanced one in terms of cooling and noise with mobos's Windows software (A-Tuning/ASRock Motherboard Utility for ASRock and Armoury Crate for ASUS). My way here is case fans louder than any other component happens to be - it covers components changing speed (what I find irritating) and generally your PC will be the same quiet everytime what is nice.

About SSD adapter, maybe first check if it really affects temperatures.

With programs, fastest and non-problematic will be to just instal all new. Fresh installs of latest versions works best.

Remember about updating motherboard bioses and all of the drivers. ASRock in board's downloads even has Auto Driver Installer and with ASUS, if I remember well, you update drivers with Armoury Crate.