Brandon Whitehead's Tech Blog

After recently downsizing back to Mini-ITX, I hit a snag when it came to my current CPU and its thermal performance. To cool my i7-7700K, I utilized the be quiet! Shadow Rock LP that I had purchased for my 2015 Mini-ITX build. In 2015 that build contained an i5-6600K and the Shadow Rock LP had no problem keeping that cool. Unfortunately, the i7-7700K is a notoriously hot running CPU and the Shadow Rock LP simply couldn't keep up. Especially with the limited airflow of the FTZ01. I was thermal throttling even at stock speeds. Putting the CPU under heavy AVX loads like HandBrake encoding made that very apparent. Not to mention the fan noise from the cooler running at 100% to keep things cool became rather annoying. Prior to downsizing to ITX I initially had the i7-7700K under a be quiet! Dark Rock TF cooler which performed well at keeping the i7-7700K under check. With the i7-7700K, the only way to truly wrangle in the temperatures (especially if overclocking and without modifi...

Introduction I never thought that I would want to have two Desktop PCs for myself. I had traditionally used one Desktop PC to "do it all". Afterall, that's one of the benefits of a PC to begin with. You can spec it for entertainment, work and other usages all within 1 device. Prior to acquiring 2 Desktop PCs, I had a Gaming PC, a personal laptop and a work laptop. I don't really count the personal laptop because it is about 8-9 years old (as of this article's publishing date) and not very usable anymore. For the work laptop, I try to strictly keep everything work related on that since the equipment is provided by my organization. I don't like to use it for personal things as much as I can. So realistically, I had one usable computer for home. My gaming/primary PC was used as my "swiss army knife" where it could game, host VMs and do more. As we all know though, a swiss army knife can only do so much without showcasing its shortcomings. That is unle...

Quick gallery of images before getting to the review ADATA XPG SX8200 SSD Rating ★★★★★ (5 out of 5) Pros Performance Price  Paid $49.99+tax for it Management software  Mine works but has an interesting bug. It shows my SSD as being at 65,263 Degrees Celsius for its current operating temperature #FIRE Included heatsink is nice  Although, I'm not using it Cons 240GB version has a little bit slower performance than the higher capacity versions of this drive but I doubt it's truly noticeable Other Thoughts I bought this to replace my previous M.2 NVMe boot drive (a 1TB HP EX920) on my gaming PC. I migrated the 1TB SSD to an Intel NUC so I needed a new boot drive for my gaming PC. I no longer needed 1TB of space so I started looking at 240-256GB capacity drives. Newegg/ADATA happened to put this 240GB drive on sale so I immediately grabbed it after reading some very positive reviews of this drive. Compared to a lot of the other options, this ...