For Christmas we got my son a bunch of computer parts to upgrade his main gaming PC. We had gotten him a RTX 2060 graphics card before the current shortage but his i5-3570 CPU was slowing him down. The most recent 12th generation Intel CPUs seem great and certainly worth the price premium over the 11th generation but he has a mini-ITX case and ITX motherboards that support the latest CPUs are still expensive – for enthusiasts only at this point. So I went with an i5-11600k CPU which is a 4X speedup over what he had, and twice as fast as any of the other computers around here (I like buying off-lease corporate PCs for pennies on the dollar.)
Also had to get memory and a new motherboard. Over the break we stuffed them into his case, a Cooler Master Elite 120. So much cat hair! With a new motherboard and CPU, Windows 10 was no longer activated, so we bought a new license from a sketchy website – MySoftwareKeys.com. It activated fine, which is good since the instructions on the Microsoft website for telephone activation don’t seem to be valid in recent Windows 10 versions.
There isn’t a lot of room in ITX cases so the CPU fan tends to be close to the power supply. CPU fans blow down onto the CPU heat sink and power supply fans blow air from the PC case out through the vents on back. It would be nice if the two fans worked together to move air through the system, but if you mount the power supply with the fan facing the CPU it seems like they are fighting. So I opened up the power supply case and flipped the fan upside down so it is sucking air in through the back vent and out to the CPU fan below, which blows it through the CPU heat sink into the case. It seems like this would improve the airflow but now the air is warmed by the power supply before going to the CPU – hard to be sure what’s best without measurements or simulations.
I put the old motherboard in another ITX case I had around, a black aluminum Lian Li. The fan situation is the same so I flipped the fan in that power supply over as well – those are the only fans in this system but the case is a single sheet of aluminum so I hope it will radiate heat well.
I didn’t want to pay for another Windows 10 license when I had a valid one from before the upgrade. I went through a whole process of installing a disk with Windows 7 on it that came out of an HP corporate PC that has been scavenged for parts, then upgrading it to Windows 10, then finding out that the disk was bad and giving constant read errors so I couldn’t clone it to the SSD I actually wanted to use. In hindsight, the original Windows 10 license was probably attached to the motherboard so I should have just tried installing to the SSD without hooking up the old hard disk first. And the hours that I spent on the failing disk weren’t worth saving the $24 that a new Windows 10 license cost. But it’s working now at least.
I installed an old GTX 745 video card that must have come with a used Dell PC I bought. They are going for like $60 on eBay these days, about right when a used GTX 1050 is going for $150.