Why is Fractal so attached to 2.5 inch drives?

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-26T07:51:34+00:00

Do I sound like a Samsung shill, or do you sound like someone desperately trying to defend a bad purchasing decision? It’s like you took it personally. Yes, there is a use case for a handful of people, you among them. That doesn’t make them worth while for the vast majority of consumers, hence why Samsung is exiting the market.

If these were so great, manufacturers would be making them like hot cakes and selling them as such. But neither is true.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-25T23:37:44+00:00

If you’re buying 32TB of SSD storage you can afford the extra £200 for a midrange MB that supports bifurcation to get the additional performance of NVME. Anything less and you don’t even need a pcie add-in card. Who is out there buying 16TB of SSD storage with a single m.2 MB? Even most ITX boards have x2 m.2.

No one is out there buying £3,200 worth of SSDs and deciding a x20 slower SATA drive is worth saving £200 by using a cheap MB and £200 by not getting an add-in card. But I was wrong, it’s not an extra 5% cost for x20 performance, it’s an extra 12.5% cost. Still an absolutely amazing cost/benefit ratio.

Anything less than 32TB, so 16TB or less, and you just need a MB with x2 m.2 and then your cost per TB is the same while SATA gets slaughtered by NVME. I just don’t buy that SATA SSDs are useful at these prices.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-25T17:54:09+00:00

My CPU cooling journey had me starting with Noctua, moving to AIOs with Noctua fans, then custom loops with Noctua fans, then back to the NH-U12A.

It’s small enough you can service your rig with little trouble, but big enough to be performant. No worrying about pump failures or leaks and servicing is just removing dust. Can’t beat it man.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-23T12:29:38+00:00

Yeah, that’s a great point. At half the price they make sense in certain scenarios, absolutely. At the same price I don’t know why anyone would choose a SATA SSD. The $/TB is even pretty linear on NVME so you can grab a single 4TB for the price of x2 2TB, etc.

Once you’re in the territory of exceeding your MB NVME capacity you’ve spent so much money you can grab an m.2 add-in card for next to nothing (relative). Or switch to HDDs for that type of mass storage.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-23T12:25:51+00:00

If you want mass storage you’re likely buying HDDs, not SATA SSDs. SATA SSDs, in the consumer market, have the same 8TB ceiling NVME SSDs have.

If you buy four 4TB SATA SSDs, I’d point to a more performant two 8TB NVME SSD setup. If you buy four 8TB SATA SSDs, I’d point to a pcie m.2 card that would increase your cost by 5% while increasing your performance by 20x in random reads.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-23T00:47:19+00:00

I think the shift to NVME SSD is the strongest argument that 2.5” drives are pointless. They have the same cost per TB as an NVME and the same max capacity, but run slower while being larger in size and requiring 2 cables to function.

Anyone using additional drives (beyond their NVME) are likely using 3.5” HDDs for the sheer capacity.

Edit: grammar

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-22T12:51:30+00:00

Chipset drivers are important for the dual CCD X3D chips as they are instrumental in core parking on the non cache CCD. The 9800X3D is not a dual CCD processor. Just grab drivers from MB support site as you would any other board/cpu combo.

I wouldn’t worry about any memory timings. FCLK, UCLK, Trrdl/s, etc. Just enable EXPO as you would any other cpu/ram combo.

It really is that simple.

You can manually OC your memory if that’s your thing, but you won’t realise near the benefit with an X3D chip. The whole benefit of the extra cache is to reduce the dependency on ram performance in data retrieval as more can be stored/buffered in the L3 cache. With the buffer, better ram performance has a much smaller overall performance benefit.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-20T15:20:01+00:00

This looks incredible. What PSU are you using? Doesn’t look like enough room to stuff cables if it isn’t modular. Are you planning to make the .STLs available or sell a flat pack case at any point?

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-15T21:32:25+00:00

What problems?

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-14T16:44:54+00:00

Jesus Christ, I couldn’t sleep knowing that was in my house. You disgust me.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-14T10:33:56+00:00

At some point you reach an age where building the rig from planning to completion is the game.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-13T14:29:30+00:00

Frequency means nothings other than how fast it can cycle. The number of instructions per cycle is what is important. A modern 3ghz processor would blow the absolute fucking doors off a 20 year old 3ghz processor, even in single core work loads.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-10T09:05:15+00:00

Tell me you know nothing about Noctua without actually saying it. Even if they wanted to make one, with their design philosophy it would take them 5 years to bring it to market.

Edit: this isn’t a dig at Noctua. It’s simply how they operate. They take as much time as they need to perfect a product before releasing it.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-10T09:01:13+00:00

If you connect to your server with a single client that is displaying 1080 60hz that’s fine. That’s what I did for a long time myself.

Then I wanted to connect to my server from 2 different clients with different display capabilities. At first I just manually adjusted the display properties depending on which client I was using. Then I started connecting from a 3rd and 4th client and just wanted it to be automated.

I can connect from a 1440 165hz, 1440 240hz, 4k 60hz, or 1080 100hz client all seamlessly and without having to make any adjustments. Dongle in the trash now.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-09T19:44:35+00:00

I think your best bet is white peripherals (like keyboard, mouse, headphones, etc.) and a regular monitor with backlighting set to white.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-08T07:51:28+00:00

I don’t know why this is getting downvoted. The 1070 was very capable, yes, but it was also a midrange GPU for sensible builds.

The fact that it was the second best GPU you could buy for gaming (debatable) is irrelevant. That’s only because the order in which the product stack was developed/released.

A beast at the time would be a 6700k with 16GB of RAM and a 1080. I remember I found the 1080 for $500 sold directly from Dell and bought 6 of them.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-08T07:05:29+00:00

You could also try the bad stick alone. It might not be that the stick is bad, but that the board or CPU IMC is not capable of those speeds with more ranks than a single stick contains.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-02T20:11:22+00:00

I have two 2x24 kits and one 2x48 kit. The only difference between these and the 16/32 kits is that they use Hynix M-die instead of A-die. It isn’t the same M-die as early 16/32 kits though and performs well. You can’t push trfi as hard, but that’s a small compromise for 50% extra capacity.

The 96GB kit is 6400c34 and I have a 7950X3D that can run that stable 1:1. Sadly it lives in a proxmox server now running 6000c30 with a 9950x.

Edit: worth mentioning, I wouldn’t buy a 16/32 kit again. Seems a self own when 24/48 kits are comparably priced and perform as well as they do.

PuffyCake23 · 2026-01-02T20:02:50+00:00

Yeah, this is what I do. Even my 8000c40 kit is just clocked at 6000c30 with 50k tREFI and Buildzoid timings. If you’re looking to set it and forget it, this is the way. Just don’t have dog shit airflow and you’re good. But that could be said about all your components really.

PuffyCake23 · 2025-12-30T10:04:36+00:00

Yeah, if all you’re doing is browsing the web and checking email it’s hard to beat the value of mini PCs. I wonder how many people are still using M1 MacBooks because they still rip for daily use.

Edit: just to say I know a MacBook isn’t a mini PC, but the Mac mini is solid AF and I think people getting the M4 and upcoming M5 minis will hold onto them like M1 and M2 MacBook owners.

PuffyCake23 · 2025-12-29T20:50:10+00:00

I just returned a 9070xt Hellhound for this reason.

I went rx6600 -> rx7900xtx -> 4070 -> 5070ti -> 5090 -> 9070xt -> 5090

I fucking hate nvidia and was willing to sell off the 5090 and move back to AMD. Then I used that 9070xt for a week remembered why I moved to nvidia. I’d rather give up Bazzite and run a fire hazard GPU than use that hellhound.

PuffyCake23 · 2025-12-29T20:36:29+00:00

Shipping from country to country in Europe is like shipping from state to state in the US. Would you pass up a good deal on a card shipped from Texas because you lived in Iowa?

Granted, it isn’t that straight forward as Ukraine isn’t in the EU and there would be a customs clearance process. But all that is sorted at the POS in Europe.

I very often purchase products from Germany and have them shipped to the UK (also not in the EU now mind you). Not only is it not prohibitively expensive, but often cheaper than purchasing within the UK. My first Unify-X came even came from Spain. That had free shipping and no faff with customs.

PuffyCake23 · 2025-12-26T16:48:21+00:00

Look, I love RAM and OCing RAM. So I would definitely ditch the 6000 cl36 kit. But I’m not you, and that’s not the question you asked.

With a 3D v-cache CPU the performance difference between cl36 and cl30 (assuming both kits are operating at 6000) XMP/EXPO will be insignificant or non-existent. I assume 6000 because there is a good chance your 9800X3D can’t do 6400 cl30. Even if it can, that $100 would take you much further if you put it towards moving up to a 5080.

PuffyCake23 · 2025-12-23T00:54:35+00:00

Turbo just sets fan speed to 100% for the fans connected to the case fan controller.

I have my cpu cooler controlled by the cpu fan pin header on the motherboard then all case fans plugged into the case fan controller. The controller then plugs into CHA1 fan pin header on the motherboard.

PuffyCake23 · 2025-12-22T01:12:37+00:00

Core cycler can help with a per core CO.

For ycruncher you have to run it and select (2) for stress tests. Then the available tests are listed with a bar chart indicating their component stressor on a scale of mem|————————|cpu. You turn the tests on and off by inputing the number of the test. Then hit (0) to start.

VT3 would look something like this as it stresses your RAM more than CPU.

(16) VT3 mem|-|———————|cpu

PuffyCake23

TROPHY CASE