Semantic Nonsense: Dear Colonel, I have found someone else

It has been 475 days since the KFConsole was officially unveiled. And that still is the last word on the subject.

We’ve been waiting so long on a release date Intel has released 3 new generations of the Nuc 9 Extreme module originally advertised as the brains of the operation, rendering it obsolete without a spec bump before release. Assuming it ever releases.

I have speculated for the past year or so that a novelty item, however useable, is not a high priority for computer suppliers constrained by the global pandemic, the shipping shortage, labor crises, crypto bros hoarding GPUs, raw materials crises, threat of war against Taiwan, and so on, when more lucrative and higher-volume items can be manufactured instead.

For what it’s worth, Cooler Master still has the Website up. While the smart money is on a no-show, nobody on the inside at KFC or Cooler Master has been willing to say that the Console has kicked the bucket.

So while the computer that captured my heart looks increasingly not to be, I turned back to the itch from early 2019 to build a new system. While at the time I was going to make it a new hackintosh, any return to system building in 2022 would be for strictly a streaming rig, relieving the laptop of the admittingly tenuous and not officially supported setup of slapping the Elgato capture card into a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure.

And, truth be told, I’m genuinely worried about the continued supply of practical computer-chip-containing products. If everything were to go properly belly up soon, it would be nice to have refreshed the household electronics so they were at the beginning of their service lives rather than the end.

I also opted to put together an AMD system this time. I had already done an Intel build for the Hackintosh and AMD had been performing much better for a while now. I had already purchased a micro ATX case for the 2019 project (the Hackintosh’s 77-Litre Cooler Master HAF XM was far more monstrous than necessary, as was it’s full ATX motherboard). As I was giving up 50 Litres of passive air cooling going down to the Rosewill Line M case and had a budget to work with, getting a Threadripper was out and probably overkill anyway. That meant the field was narrowed to a midrange or lower Ryzen processor (the 5600X).

Going from there, the best AMD chipset available on a mATX motherboard that will take the selected processor was the X570. This part was remarkably easy, because there’s only one mATX motherboard on the market using the X570 chipset, the ASRock X570M PRO4.

The only other new parts picked up from there were 32GB of RAM, a wi-fi/bluetooth card to sit in the motherboard’s dedicated M2 slot, and a 650w fully modular power supply. 650w is overkill, yes, but it gives me plenty of room to upgrade the CPU and GPU, and it was cheaper than most of the 550w models due to a random sale.

This new build inherited everything else from the Hackintosh. I reused the original Blu-ray drive, the second Boot Camp SSD (now formally Windows) and the second graphics card (an 8GB Radeon RX580) seeing as GPUs haven’t come down all THAT much yet. And, of course, the Elgado capture card — the reason why I needed the extra PCI slots a mATX board offers instead of buying a single-slot mITX board.

While the SSD is only half a Terabyte, I still have a small army of obsolite 256 GB SSDs that can be combined into a larger logical drive as needed. Considering the purpose of this new PC is to run streams and play Windows-only Steam games (and not music, videos, documents, etc.), I’m not sure I’ll end up needing too much extra storage. But these things have a habit of sneaking up on you, so it’s good to have an option.

The build was not without its hitches. The first processor came with bent pins, and I knew I wasn’t cool enough to fix them myself. I had to ship the processor back and await its replacement as the days ticked away on the return periods of the rest of the components. There was no way to test any of them without just building the computer, so I’d have a tight schedule should any of the other parts turn out to be duds.

Luckily, the second processor arrived in pristine condition, and everything came together with a few more panicked moments because I suck at setting RAM sticks, apparently. The case was exceptionally cramped (perhaps I should have allowed myself a few more litres…) and attaching cables was a particularly taxing task.

Everything is as done as it needs to be now, but there are a few nagging issues with the build. The front panel audio ports aren’t recognised by Windows. The back-panel audio works fine, so it’s merely a nuisance, albeit one I’d like taken care of. The other problem comes back down to the size of the case and the size of the cables from my power supply.

There are places to tie cables down, but given their thickness and given them being at least twice the length they need to be for such a small case, there aren’t many good places to stuff them all winding end over end on themselves repeatedly. Honestly, I think the real solution is to take advantage of that fully-modular bit and buy shorter replacement cables. In the meantime, zip ties have been strategically deployed to keep the wires out of the fans.

The new PC had had some stress testing and shakedowning, but the real test will come this Saturday as it runs a stream for the first time. Assuming I get the stream bot ready in time. In any case, be sure to come by at the end of the week to help me break it in properly.