New PC upgrade: Parker

Happy new years and holidays everyone. I’ve been quiet over the winter but am still keeping this website alive.

I rebuilt my PC from scratch a few months ago, but didn’t think of posting about it until now. My previous machine used mid-range 6 year old parts, so the performance jump was substantial. “Parker” is the name of the PC, inspired by the Parker Solar Probe.

I give my computers the names of spacecraft missions. Parker happens to reference the record-breaking speed the probe will achieve (~200 kilometers per second!) and the far more intense heat load the new computer puts out. While my earlier PC had a CPU + GPU TDP of around 200 watts in a 50 litre mid tower, this one is probably closer to 400 W in a 10 L enclosure.

Previous rig

The first PC I built was from late 2016. It was somewhat budget constrained but was still capable of 1080p gaming.

This PC was powerful enough to run what I needed and showed me the benefits of a desktop and monitor setup. But as time passed, I noticed some shortcomings that I wanted to address in a future build.

1. Mini ITX

   Using an ATX mid tower made sense at the time; it had space for storage expansion or unimpeded air flow, and I thought working with smaller cases would be difficult.

   But rather soon, I noticed how unnecessarily large mid towers were. My case, the Fractal Define R5, was over 50 L in volume and a pain to move around because it’s a bulky 25 kg steel box. I never used most of the case’s volume, which felt wasteful.

   Every time I helped someone build a PC, I’ve recommended a micro ATX tower as the upper limit because there just is no benefit from going larger for most people. Micro ATX is much smaller, often cheaper, and still has all the functionality most users would need. I decided to go one step further and shrink down to mini ITX, because seeing pictures of people cramming 2080 Tis into 8 L cases was something to behold.

2. Eliminate hard drives

   SSDs were far more expensive in 2016 than today. A 1 TB drive cost over $200 USD and M.2 drives used SATA, not PCIe. Hence, my PC used a small SSD for the OS and hard drives for everything else.

   Hard drives are generally inferior to flash storage. They are noisy, big, heavy, fragile, and slow. The only advantage they continue to have over flash storage is capacity per dollar, but most people won’t need enough storage that SSDs become prohibitively expensive.

   SSDs are just superior in about every metric. Building a mini ITX computer meant space was now an important consideration, and so using compact NVMEs was borderline mandatory.

3. Moar cores

   Less than a year after I bought the i5 6500, AMD came back from the brink of bankruptcy with Ryzen and disrupted the CPU market. Generational performance gains quickly grew and my i5 aged rather quickly. It was still handling its workload just fine, but the performance gain was something I narrowly missed out on.

Stop-gap upgrade

Around the middle of 2021, I got my hands on a spare computer and did a partial upgrade. The main goal was to get a beefier CPU and get an AMD video card, since I started using Linux and encountered problems with Nvidia drivers.

This was a rather mediocre upgrade. The 6850K had signficantly better multithreaded performance than the 6500, but Broadwell-E was far outclassed by even the latest midrange.

Every other component was outdated. DDR4 was mature by now and 2400 MT was considered slow. The GPU was a complete sidegrade and came with noticeable coil whine and cheap fans. I was also still stuck with an ATX mid tower, but this time the case was a cheap OEM box so it was a downgrade. The upgrade was free though, so it was adequate enough for the time.

Brand new machine

Middle of this year was when I realized my computer was slowing down. The RX 480 was one of the best mid-range cards ever released, but it was starting to bottleneck badly. Even the latest consoles far exceeded my PC’s performance. Mid-range CPUs had triple the multithread power and close to double the gaming performance, and I wanted to prepare for HRR and 4K gaming. So, I decided to start from scratch and fulfill my goals mentioned earlier. The resulting system is this:

NVMEs

I should have bought NVMEs for my older systems when they became affordable, they make upgrading from SATA SSDs feel like going from hard drives to flash storage again. My boot time, from choosing an OS on the bootloader to getting to a log in prompt, was cut from 15 to 3 seconds coming from a SATA SSD. That’s amazing. Installing programs is drastically faster, loading times in games are lower, and the computer feels more snappy.

Temperatures are also very manageable, I’ve seen the highest temperatures of the rear-mounted drive peaking at ~70 °C from sustained writes. NVMEs are also great because they don’t need any cables and therefore reduce clutter. All in all, using NVMEs was a staggering upgrade from SATA flash storage.

Intel vs AMD

The CPU market has been experiencing a golden age ever since Ryzen launched, and the Zen 4 vs Raptor Lake fight is the most neck-and-neck so far. Ever since Ryzen gained momentum, Intel just kept getting pummeled each generation. That’s why I thought I would be going with an AMD CPU this time. If the Zen 4 launch went better, I probably would have. But after seeing Zen 4 and Raptor Lake reviews, I decided to stick with Intel.

The arguments of DDR4 support and cheaper motherboards don’t apply to me because my setup is expensive and an AM5 system would have cost just as much. With nearly identical platform costs, I still decided to stick with Intel because:

1. AM5 is completely new and I would rather not be a beta tester
2. LGA1700 motherboards seemed better than price equivalent AM5 boards

The 13600K is a beast. The performance gains going from 6 cores to an effective 10 core chip is massive. I did a very rough test by comparing LLVM compilation times, which constantly loads all threads. The 13600K was at stock and the 6850K was overclocked to 4.1 GHz. The 13600K was 3 times faster. Gaming performance is also significantly better, there’s less stuttering and average frame rates have literally doubled in many games.

In the end, I’m happy that the CPU space is healthy. The fact that you can’t go wrong with either AMD or Intel is something that hasn’t been seen in a very long time.

AMD vs Nvidia

If only the same positive outlooks of the CPU space applied to GPUs. This market has been a mess since the 2020 shortage and I didn’t feel like giving money to either AMD or Nvidia. So, I went with a used 6800 XT for a decent discount over MSRP. Despite costing significantly more, the 6800 XT still delivers better cost:frames than the RX 480.

Switching to a high-end GPU feels incredible. I’ve been playing Final Fantasy VII Remake with no mods at 4K and get 100 FPS on average, which completely blew me away.

Mini ITX Experience

Mini ITX is a great form factor and I’m glad I chose it. My case, the FormD T1, is slightly under 10 L in volume. It’s small enough to actually be a proper “desktop”, rather than being hidden under the desk to save space.

The T1 was the best case for my preferences. It’s designed for high air flow, which I prefer to liquid cooling. The case offers granular support for GPUs from 1.25 to 3.25 slots thick. The thinner the GPU, the bigger the CPU cooler can be, and vice versa. This flexibility makes me confident that I’ll probably never need to buy another case. The case also looks slick and has incredible build quality.

The T1 is well ventilated with mesh sides and porous top and bottom panels. The resulting build is incredibly quiet despite the powerful hardware. Because there are no hard drives, the only mechanical parts are fans. I can’t even tell if the computer is on just by noise at idle.

Overall, the T1 is tiny yet supports components like a 4090, should be future proof, has great thermals, and looks amazing. It’s also extremely minimal; definitely worth the investment.

Wrap up

The PC upgrade timeline summary is this:

Upgrading my PC reminded me of the joy I first experienced years ago from building my first. Going from 1080p 60 Hz to 4K 120 Hz gaming was revolutionary and the additional performance improvements are greatly welcomed. To top it all off, the system is packaged inside a portable 10 L enclosure.

Parker has a bright future, literally (the probe) and figuratively (the computer), and I’m excited to see what I can get out of it.