My Core i7 updates in 2012-2022:

Here and there the need arises for fixes and improvements to my “super-PC”...

2012. The front-bay Crystalfontz CFA 635 YYE 20x4 LCD module was beautiful, but had quite a few issues under Windows 7. Therefore, when one day the unit died, I decided not to replace it. I installed instead a most needed—for digital cameras and smartphones—multiple card reader, the Akasa AK-ICR13 USB3:

    

This unit provides six card slots (which require a USB3 port) and a USB3 port (which requires another USB3 port!). Luckily this PC has a PCIe card that provides several additional USB3 ports.

2013. To my installed flightsim paraphernalia of Joystick, single Throttle and Pedals, I now added two Saitek Throttle Quadrants, really needed when flying twin-engine aircraft. The levers' “reverses” can be used as programmable buttons, and the six rockers buttons below the lever are also programmable.
I glued in place suitable labels and scales, as shown on the right hand side:

    

The next wish was a “gamepad”, a programmable keyboard where I could control most instrument panel functions by pressing buttons as on a real aircraft (rather than the cumbersome mouse clicks). I got the lovely Logitech G13 Gameboard. You can develop separate programs for different games or applications. Each program can have three macros with button assignments, and each macro can have its own colour for the LCD and the luminous buttons. In my default program (Flight Simulator of course!) I programmed the three macros as follows, with suitable labelling:

1. (red) Radio sounds, lights and radio frequencies. I glued labels above the button lights.
2. (green) Autopilot functions. I glued labels below the button lights.
3. (blue) Aircraft loading and other auxiliary menu functions. Blue labels on top of the buttons.

    

Finally I put joystick, throttle, quadrants and gamepad together screwed onto a single wooden plank, which I can move to the PC keyboard drawer “when I fly”:

    

My full Flight Simulation equipment at this stage can be seen in the picture below:

    
             (This picture is the basis for an interactive one that can be found in this webpage.)

At this point I realised that I could increase my processing speed by just having a faster RAM memory, so I substituted the original RAM strips with three Crucial Ballistix Tactical DDR3 1600MHz 4GB, with their impressive coolers:

   

2014. After seven years of good services, my legendary Logitech MX Revolution mouse went down. In spite of ridiculously high prices for second-hand units, and web talk that there was no real substitute, I found that this was not true. A recent model had virtually all the features of the MX Revolution and then some, and performed as both a “gaming mouse” and a “programmable mouse for applications”: this was the impressive fully-featured Logitech G700s:

    

Moving house in 2014 I found that moving the tower around with a 1+ kilogram of CPU cooler hanging from a vertically-positioned motherboard was too risky for the latter, so I removed the Thermaltake Frio. When ready to assemble the tower again, I found that a much better solution was to have a lightweight liquid cooler, such as the very-favourably reviewed Cooler Master Nepton 280L:

    

Both the box and the unit are beautiful, with plenty of accessories, but three problems occurred:

1. The thermal dissipator was not easy to fit on top of the case inside, but eventually I managed.
2. The reviews observed that the bundled 14" fans were too noisy. So I got instead two Noctua NF-A14 PWM fans, which also came with plenty of useful accessories:

    

These fans fitted beautifully on top of the case (below its top original SpineRex cover grille), extracting the hot air from the dissipator. This is the view from above without the grille:

    

3. The original Spinerex upper grille fitted fine over the fans, but it blew the air upwards. There was barely one inch between it and the computer table, so the hot air went partly forward, partly backward, not an ideal arrangement. I discarded the lovely Spinerex grille (nobody can see it anyway once the tower is in place!) and put instead two simple bathroom vent grilles, which throw the air backwards:

    

By comparing the case interior in 2011 and 2015, the internal air flow improvement is apparent:

    

2015. The original UPS (the low-priced PowerWalker 1500VA) went down, so I got the much more expensive but favourably reviewed Elit Queen 1500VA:

                       

My boot SSD has two partitions: Windows and Applications, and Flight Simulator was installed on a hard disk. To improve the longish starting time of Flight Simulator I moved it to another SSD, the very affordable Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SDD:

                      

This was an opportunity to get rid of the initial contraption of adaptors for the SSD. I got a more elegant and solid installation for the two SSDs stacked together, although still (unbelievably) three adaptors are needed, 2½" to 3½", 3½" to 5¼", and the case bay guide screwed to the latter:

    

2016. It was high time to get rid of the original “cheapo” Genius keyboard. I bought instead the beautiful Logitech G810 Orion Spectrum keyboard. Cons: expensive. Pros: (1) mechanical and backlit keys, (2) it fits into the standard PC keyboard space, (3) it is programmable although Function keys only, (4) has programmable keys' backlit colour and (5) it shares a single controlling software with all the other Logitech controllers, which in my PC are the G13 Gameboard and the G700s mouse:

    

In Dec.'16 the beautiful NZXT dual-bay fan controller died. I just wanted two things from a fan controller: (1) the 4 or 5 fan speeds and temperatures visible at once without the need to click buttons to select each fan-probe pair and (2) no bad reviews or serious user complaints. This narrowed the choice alarmingly, and the only model fitting the bill was the Lamptron Fan Controller FC5-V2.
Like virtually all the fan controllers available, this one has no data communication with the motherboard, and therefore the only input is provided by its four rotating knobs. In the display the only identification you have for the 4 fans and 4 temperature probes are just “Fan1” to “Fan4”, which is not too helpful. For this reason I glued onto the front the labels shown below, with hints at fans and probes inside this particular computer:

    

This unit has a more serious shortcoming: the six jumpers inside. To begin with, the knobs control the voltage and therefore RPM. It would have been relatively easy for the makers to design the display to show both, but actually you have in the back two jumpers to select from showing Temperature in either degrees Celsius or Fahrenheit, or else (by inserting both jumpers) Voltage. Another jumper silences the Alarm (which sounds if any temperature probe exceeds the 70ºC). Three further jumpers control the display colour and are for Red, Green and Blue: their combinations yield 7 colours. It is certainly not very practical to have these controls via 6 interior jumpers: once the unit is installed you can no longer change anything! Also, the unit has no on-off switch, which is handy for some repairs. Solution: I used a second front bay for the necessary 7 switches. For the on-off switch I used a double switch (for the 12V and 5V) to which I soldered the cables of a short Molex extension. I also got jumper cables and 6 simple switches, and soldered each one to a pair of jumper cables:

    

Then I suitably produced 7 holes in one of the tower's front-bay covers, and installed there the switches. This is the final assembly installed, a really lovely piece of kit:

    

See below a comparison between the original case front of Dec'11 and the one in Jan'17:

            

2017. By the end of the year the PC was six years old: both processor (CPU) and graphics card (GPU) were now really obsolete. A replacement GPU was (a) more significant for the games I was now playing, (b) more affordable and (c) there were quite a few good choices available. I had noticed problems with my original Radeon HD 6870, so I removed it and found the cooler and fan blocked by dirt. I cleaned it, but when I replaced the GPU the PC did not boot. Now I really needed a new card! I procured in a nearby shop a cheapo 2nd hand replacement, which I used while waiting three weeks for the delivery of the new, beautiful and powerful Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580 8GB Special Edition.

This card is very large and thick, but it fitted (just!). The only problem is that it is also very heavy (399gr), so the corner that is far from both the back plate and the PCIe hangs with some deformation: this is not good for the card and even less so for the motherboard. Solution: I made a support that screws to the card's corner and is attached to a hole in the top rim of the case.

   

At this point the obvious weak link was the original processor, the Intel Core i7-960. By upgrading it I would get a very up-to-date computer for the latest games, and it may well last a few years more. Unfortunately the motherboard of this PC is built around the LGA1366 socket, which Intel described as “the future” back in 2011, yet discontinued in 2012! In that year Intel produced the last and fastest-ever LGA1366 CPU, the Intel Core i7-990X. Every single core is a paltry 9% faster than the i7-960, but with 6 cores instead of 4, the total PassMark score is a significant 56% faster. This CPU has always been priced at around the thousand of US dollars, but In Nov. 2016 at 1/4 the usual cost I got a second-hand unit, which passed different tests with flying colours.

   

The “3DMark 11” test on this PC had been for years around 4,000. With the installation of the RX 580 it went up to 14,270, and with the i7-990X it went up to 15,682: at this point the computer reached the 91% percentile of the thousands of PCs in the 3DMark 11 online database. It was now significantly faster than a "Gaming PC - Oculus Rift min." and almost as fast as a "4k gaming PC".

2018. By the end of 2017 the NEC monitor was showing its 9 years of service. During the day the screen grew brighter, and much worse, when the image on screen was prevalently dark, sometimes there were a few annoying fast horizontal 1-pixel-wide green flashes. Let us remember that this monitor had resolution 1600x1200 and the typical power consumption was 75W. An initial search produced a shortlist of 8 models and eventually I got the excellent and very affordable Dell U2415. The resolution was now 1920x1200, very useful in most cases, and in the few old games that only played full-screen in 4:3 ratio, the advanced AMD Graphics driver allowed the monitor to produce 1600x1200 (with two black columns at each side) thus avoiding any distortion. The image and colour of the U2415 were excellent and the typical power consumption was measured at just 22W. The monitor looked the same size or even smaller than the old NEC, because the rim around the screen is very narrow (except at the bottom), but actually the image size was 5mm larger vertically and 90mm larger horizontally.   

      

In October 2018 the Canon iP4950 printer (Dec. 2011) failed to start: it was a power source issue, but a spare part was no longer available. So I got the present equivalent, the Canon Pixma iP7250 Inkjet Printer. With respect to its predecessor iP4950, the 5-ink system and printing quality are similar, but the unit height has been reduced from 153mm to 128mm. A nice touch is that you no longer have to manually open the output cover and extend the tray: they open automatically before it starts printing. The most significant improvement is in the paper trays: rather than a rear tray and a cassette, there are two cassettes in the front, the upper one for pictures, the lower one for paper sheets. The user no longer selects a tray: the printer automatically selects the upper tray for paper sizes from 95x130mm to 130x180mm, and the lower one for paper sizes from 148x210 (A5) up to Letter and A4.

     

2019. So far my PC had still the Audigy 2ZS Platinum PCI sound card from the 2006 Pentium 4 computer. It featured the impressive and unique front-bay “Platinum drive” with plenty of connectors (of which, since I rarely if ever record music with the computer, I only used the headphones socket). However, this old card had problems with Windows 7, and although special drivers were made, some of the original programs no longer run, not even in more recent versions. Even worse, the card had issues back from “computer sleep”: I had to put in Task Scheduler a VBScript that every time the computer came back from sleep it would spend up to a minute resetting sound services and speaker configuration. A requirement for a new card was to run Vienna 2.3, allowing to play with my MIDI music keyboard all the “SoundFont” sampled instruments I made and collected back in the late 1990s. SoundFonts can only run on a card based on the E-MU chip, and there was only one such card now: the Creative Audigy 5/Rx PCIe, first launched in 2014 but still in production. Reviewed online as a top performer both for recording and for sound reproduction—though lacking the “game customisations” of later and more expensive cards—it was now ridiculously priced at €71. On the downside I miss the old integrated Creative Graphics Equalizer (downloadable ones fail to work properly) and Speaker Calibrator. Advantages: the issues back from sleep are much less frequent and also, to my surprise, the sound quality is astonishing, with a crisper sound and distinctively better definition in high frequencies.

   

The Rampage III Extreme motherboard carries only 2 USB3 ports in the back shield. Other than using external hubs, it was useful to have a PCIe card as USB3 hub, so I installed the CSL 7-port USB3 PCIe 1x Card, with 5 external ports and 2 internal ports, SATA-powered.

Many games and flight simulators require (or else are best run at) full-screen. Problem is, you cannot play and at the same time watch your “Windows gadgets” to check for hardware use and temperature. The solution is a second monitor, but I have hardly any space in my PC desk. Luckily, lately hi-resolution mini-monitors are available at a ridiculous price, so I got an Eyoyo 8in. 16:9 IPS, with a 1280x720 resolution. It is so diminutive that, with some reworking of its base, it fits below my main monitor.

    

2020. We referred above to the Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SDD, installed in 2015. By now, large-size and affordable SSDs were available, so I replaced it with the Samsung 860 QVO 2TB SDD.

    

I migrated to the new 2TB SSD the partitions for Documents, Flight Simulator, Games and temporary files: all these now enjoy from almost three times the speed, making most operations in the PC blazingly fast. The PC had now some 4TB of disk space, of which the 2TB HDD are only used for old backups, software installer storage and music recordings.

Shortly afterwards at times I could hear a screeching noise: it came from the internal fan of the original Power Source Unit (PSU) Enermax Revolution 85+, 920W. This fan is non replaceable, and this PSU was approaching its useful life. It was high time to replace it, also considering that it encumbered the case interior with some native cables that were not used, that the power consumption (measured by the UPS) had never gone beyond 400W, and that this PSU with its “80 Silver” rating was relatively inefficient at low loads, which is where my PSU runs more than 90% of the time. New online calculations showed that 550W was enough, and 650W safe. After much search, my choice was the Corsair RM750x, rated “80 Gold”. Compared with the PSU power consumption in 2011, there is now an average 20% reduction due to more efficiency in both GPU and PSU. Also, internal cabling is now less obtrusive, although visually it may not seem so because of the white colour: I got the white model of this PSU simply because the black model was only available from a dealer with poor reviews.

   

The PC still had its original HDDs (Hard Disk Drives). They accounted for two Terabytes (Tb) of disk space, one Tb in two HDDs in RAID1 configuration, and the other Tb in the third HDD in simple AHCI configuration. Now the latter started to have issues: frequently it would become "read only", thus useless for its main backup purpose, and the only solution was, every time ... to reboot (!). It was high time to afford the next step: to get rid of these bulky and power-consuming devices (up to 30W each when in reading/writing operation). I replaced them by yet another Samsung 860 QVO 2TB SDD, identical to the one recently acquired. Note also that that the three HDDs, with their individual copper coolers and metal cage, had an overall weight of over 3Kg, now replaced by the few grams of an SSD. Together with the less bulky PSU and cables, the computer had now (see the comparison at the end of 2014) a further improvement in air flow inside the case, as shown by this comparison between 2014 and now.

    

Inevitably in a computer built at the end of 2011, many components undergo failures. The subwoofer in the Logitech X-540 5.1 speakers started producing a very annoying low-frequency humm: eventually I found that the source was in the internal amplifier and there was no economical repair possible. Replacement was not easy: “5.1” sets that reviewers found neatly inferior to the X-540 now retailed for anything from €140 up, and you could find online new unopened X-540 sets on sale ... for €400! I had no intention to fork out similar amounts. Eventually I found that 5.1 sets have consistently a very poor value-for-money, and that a much better situation is with simple stereo speakers: with two such kits you can get quadraphony (“4.0”), which is as good as 5.1 provided the speakers (now with no subwoofer attached) have a reasonable bass range. Having read different comparative reviews, eventually I installed two sets of Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II, at €69 per pair. Comparison with other more expensive stereo speakers I had at home confirmed what I had read in the reviews: indeed I was surprised at finding, with tests, that the frequency range was quite flat down to 50Hz, impressive for speakers that measure just 230x84x133mm. They also have an unmatched clarity in reproducing complex symphonic music.

    

2021. The Elit Queen UPS after only five years (and a battery replacement) gave up. UPS's are now quite expensive and I got the affordable (but not too efficient!) Vultech Pro 1500VA/800W.

      

After seven years the on/off switch of my Logitech G700s mouse switch would often fail to switch the unit on (if the unit is left always on, the PC does not go into sleep). Recent Logitech mice are not attractive and anyway incompatible with my Logitech Gaming software: eventually I found that a contemporary model, the Logitech G602 mouse, with a few less features (internal memory for a single program instead of three) was better in other respects, more stylish, faster response, lightweight. I had to have it shipped from the USA at high cost, but it proved to be an excellent piece of kit.

    

2022. At the end of the previous webpage we saw a picture of the front of the initial 2011 tower: the blue fan in the bottom came installed, affixed to the back of a special plate screwed to the case sides. Actually the blue colour in that picture is the result of computer wizadry: the blue LED light has to go through holes in the plate and the front bay covers, with a dark-grey sponge filter and a metal grille. In real life you can hardly see those LEDs! In November 22, after 11 years of good service, that blue fan started to be a bit noisy, so it was high time for something new and much more spectacular: for just €16 I got the Cooler Master SickleFlow 120mm V2 ARGB fan. As noted by reviewers, at full speed it is noisy, but at the about 2/3 speed I normally use it via the Lamptron fan controller, the noise is barely audible. A separate SATA-power-fed 3-button ARGB controller (€10) allows to cycle the RGB LEDs through several “modes”, and also to control the RGB change speed and luminosity, independently of the fan speed. What was far from simple was to install it. Just replacing the original fan would have it, again, hardly visible. Therefore I discarded both the original fan, its plate and the front bays with their filters and grilles. From other discarded tower parts I concocted two metal pieces to support the new fan standing just a few millimetres back from the tower front, covered by a thin transparent filter.

   

In the process I also removed the DVD+RW: this 13-years-old remnant of the P4 PC had started to fail, and it was not really needed having a Blu-Ray unit as well. See below a comparison between the original case front of Dec'11 and the one in Nov'22:

            

At this point it is illustrative to compare the main computer components (case fans are not included) when it was first assembled at the end of 2011 and as per end of 2022:

Component	2011	2022
Monitor - Main	NEC LCD2170NX 21" 1600x1200px	Dell U2415 24" 1920x1200px
Monitor - Auxiliary	-	Eyoyo IPS 8" 1280x720px
Uninterr. Power Supply	PowerWalker 1500VA/900W	Vultech Pro 1500VA/800W
Power Supply Unit	Enermax Revolution 85+ 920W	Corsair RMx 750W
Fan Controllers	NZXT Sentry LX	Lamptron FC5 V2, ARGB controller
Motherboard / Chipset	Asus Rampage III Extreme / X58A	=
Memory	3x DDR3 1066 4Gb	3x DDR3 1600 4Gb
Processor	Intel Core i7-960 3.2GHz	Intel Core i7-990X 3.47GHz
Processor Cooler	Thermaltake Frio	Cooler Master Nepton 280L
Graphics card	Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 Vapor-X	Sapphire Radeon RX 580 Nitro+ SE
Graphics memory	1 Gb	8 Gb
Sound card	Creative Audigy 2 ZS (EMU CA0108)	Creative Audigy Rx (EMU CA10300)
Disks - Windows	Crucial M4 SSD 240Gb	SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD 240Gb
Disks - Softw., Docum.	2x West. Dig. SATA6 Blue 1Tb RAID1	Samsung 860 QVO 2Tb
Disks - Depot, Backup	Western Digital SATA6 Blue 1Tb	Samsung 860 QVO 2Tb
Blu-Ray and DVD	LG BH10LS30	=
Speakers	Logitech X-540 5.1	2x Creative Gigaworks T20 Series II
Keyboard	Genius KB-320e	Logitech G810 Orion Spectrum
Mouse	Logitech MX Revolution	Logitech G602
Joystick	ThrustMaster Hotas Cougar	=
Quadrant + Gamepad	-	2x Saitek Quadrant + Logitech G13
Scanner	CanoScan 4200F	=
Printer	Canon iP4950	Canon iP7250