TL;DR

After 6.5y+ of service my PC needed a refresh – so it has a new motherboard, CPU, RAM and SSD, and I’ve taken the opportunity to switch to Linux. It’s still completely silent, but noticeably faster :)

Background

I built a Silent PC based on a Streacom DB4 case back in the summer of 2018. It’s been great, and for most of those years it still felt like my ‘new’ PC.

But… with Windows 10 end of life approaching I have been considering upgrade options.

And then it failed. Before heading on my recent ski trip I did an ‘upgrade and shut down’ but things weren’t right. I had to pull the plug to power it down. When I returned it wouldn’t power on. A new power supply didn’t really fix things, it would power on, but wouldn’t boot without crashing :(

Parts

I needed an ITX motherboard that would work with the DB4 heat pipes, which at first glance isn’t many of them. The ASRock Z790M-ITX looked good, and a quick email to QuietPC confirmed that they use it in DB4 builds (and got them my purchase).

With a motherboard selected the other parts were chosen to fit:

• Intel i5-14500 CPU
• 64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6400MHz RAM
• Crucial T500 2TB SSD

I’ve kept the GPU from last time, an MSI GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Aero ITX OC 4GB. It’s staggering to me that (almost) 7y on there aren’t better choices, but it seems the lower power budget for passive cooling is an ignored market segment.

Just worked :)

The (re)build this time felt more straightforward, perhaps as I had a better idea what I was doing (and the potential pitfalls). With the system partially assembled I went for first boot and it was fine. After a quick UEFI upgrade I completed assembly.

Kubuntu

I was always very happy with Windows 10, but part of the story here is Microsoft pulling the plug on that.

I’ve never got along so well with Windows 11, and the more AI and advertising it gets, the more I’ve disliked it.

So… time for a change. For me at least this is the year of Linux on the Desktop.

I’ve been an Ubuntu user for over 15y, so I considered Ubuntu Desktop and Mint, but with a recommendation from John O’Hara (another recent Linux desktop convert) I went with Kubuntu for a KDE desktop.

The install experience was super quick and easy (much faster than Windows), and post install everything seemed to ‘just work’. One day in I’m pretty happy with the new experience (which doesn’t feel like too much of a wrench from the old experience).

Faster

The old silent PC always felt fast, but the rebuild is noticeably quicker. I’m not sure yet whether it’s Linux vs Windows, or the newer hardware (or a bit of both), but it’s subjectively MUCH faster.

Returning to Geekbench 4 I get 7310 for single core (1.69x) and 48642 for multi-core (2.36x).

SSD cooling

Last time around I noted:

There’s not much talk about thermal throttling of SSDs, but it is a thing, and it can badly hurt user experience when your writes get queued up. I do worry that my new M2 drive is sat baking at the bottom of the new rig, and if I find myself taking it apart again I might stick a thermal pad in place so that it can at least conduct directly onto the motherboard tray.

I never did get that thermal pad in place (as I needed to dismantle everything to get to it), but the old SSD held up just fine without one.

The new motherboard has quite a fancy SSD heat sink arrangement, which is nice :)

No dust

The internals of the DB4 were surprisingly clean. Anything with fans would be disgustingly full of dust after 7y; but no air movement means no dust ingestion :)

AM4 was not a path to easy upgrades

I’d got the last system with the quaint notion that AMD’s socket AM4 would be around for a while, and I’d be able to upgrade my CPU to a later model. Well… the first part of that was true. As AM4 gave way to AM5 I looked at my options, and my motherboard had never been able to support anything newer :(

This time around I’m conscious that LGA1700 is old, and I’m struggling to find a reason to care.

Conclusion

Moore’s law might be slowing down, but it’s been almost 7y since my last upgrade, and so I’ve been able to get a system with ~2x CPU, 2x RAM, 2x SSD. Hopefully that will keep me going for another happy and quiet 7y or so.

Switching from Windows to Linux has been a lot less disruptive than I thought it might be. I can see a good future for all that perfectly good hardware that’s going to have end of life Windows on it later this year…