Main System Upgrade(s)!

So, nothing super important here. Just thanking everyone (and a select few specific people) for support, and showing some transparency into where some of your money (including Daz assets.) is going. Play Sheet #6 should be up in a few, and worst case, tomorrow afternoon.

So, I'm pretty happy to make this post. Mostly because it means that Move The Chains is seeing some pretty significant jumps in support vs WWJK. First and foremost, this wouldn't've been possible without people supporting my work here. Patreons, Itch buyers, the few quiet SubStar supporters, and even people wishlisting on Steam (which you should do if you haven't already. :P)

A massive, massive shoutout in particular should go to Chain Breaker. An anonymous user who doesn't want to be named also deserves some love. Along with Foxracing for part selection/advice. 

So, what's being upgraded? Well, basically everything needed to be upgraded to work for the system I had in mind. Here's a list of everything, then I'll get into some of the logic behind the decision to for a few.

CPU: 10700 > 13700k

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z490 UD > Asus ProArt Z790 Creator Wifi

RAM: 64GB DDR4 > 96GB DDR5

Case: Corsair 5000D Airflow > Lian Li O11 Dynamic Evo XL

PSU: MSI MEG Ai1300P > Prime PX-1600 ATX 3.0.

GPU 1: Strix (which I already owned, as many already know.)

GPU 2: Suprim Liquid X

Part selection logic:

Let's start with the elephant, the second 4090. Adding the original 4090 and it's VRAM was game changing (which hopefully will reflect in future renders.). SLI/NVLink doesn't exist anymore, so while it'd be nice to have 48GB of VRAM, it's not going to happen. But what it does do is make things faster. The first 4090 halved my original render times, and the second halved those. Sometimes more, given the scene. I'll get into this more in the upcoming progress report, though.

Going with a 13900k felt like overkill for my case, though. I don't do many CPU-heavy tasks, nor do any of the games I play need it. It's pointless extra without much else changing from the 13700k. It has enough lanes, more than enough power for me, and the temps are still manageable. Same logic went into the RAM here. Went with the best mix of capacity and speed without needing to fiddle with timings and voltages. Especially since 4 sticks causes issues.

The ProArt Z790 was just the best happy medium of the options currently out. It had enough slot spacing for both GPUs, offered x8/x8, and some nice IO. It was either this or the Dark Hero, which wasn't out at the time of purchasing.

Case upgrade was absolutely needed for this to be a reality, though. The Strix and Suprim are a bit of tight fit (mostly because of the hoses on the Suprim), so I imagine it being a fair bit tighter in a smaller case. Credit goes to Foxracing for this one. His build was largely a template for my own, just with a bit of part swapping.

1300W probably would've been been enough for two 4090s, but the Seasonic having two 12vhpwr connectors was enough to pull the trigger. That and it doesn't have that plastic burning smell that the MSI (pretty sure it's soldering, but never did go away) did. Seasonic's dependability was another big one here.

Ignore the rainbow puke. Just the last images I grabbed

So, what's next? Not much. It's pretty much as far as I can go without going into watercooling and server hardware. If there's anything, it's the CPU temps being a bit higher than I'd like, but at 70C under the heaviest loads it'll see, it's perfectly manageable as is. That being said, the next step is probably getting bigger fans and an AIO (as this one, sans the LCD, is getting a bit older). Will likely upgrade to a 420mm AIO and get some better 140mm fans. Likely something daisychain-able as I'm sick of spending an hour fucking around with Corsair's cables lol. That'll be saved for some other time, though.

Again, just to reiterate. Thanks to everyone who has supported. I felt this post was important for the sake of both showing appreciation and keeping the transparency I find important for spaces like this (I put in what I expect to see, so to speak.). I'm not making this post to brag or show off. I just want to show people that their money is going back into this and I'm not running around doing fuck all with it, and again, thank those who've made it possible to do so.