Tearing down the £1000 GPU
Must not be a good design if you need to rip it up , out of the box,
A watercooled one from the same or similar manufacturer exists, but its just as pricey and in addition requires a whole set of other custom water loop components.
It's not about a "bad" product, it's like buying the family model car and swapping the parts that make it the sports model for much less money. Follow?
so you didn't build a computer. you did some plumbing and noise abatement.
pooh. SIMM . lol ! 18 pin dil ic's in sockets. HUNDREDS on them on an intel above-board with daughtercard ! double stack em with the top one having pin 14 bent outwards and wired to ground to double the memory.
metric, LOL. we used 100 mil jumpers !
This isn't the 1980s.
a proper one only needs a 10 pin usb cable in idc header.
Fans? How many USB? What type? A or C? What version, 2.1? 3.0? 3.2? 3.2 Gen 2? Turns out you use a lot of them these days. I have about 16 in total and more than half are occupied + 4 hanging off a hub.
Disk headers? Expansion cards? I suppose in those days a motherboard did jack shit all except manage CPU and memory and the PCI/ISA bus. These days the only expansion card you would consider is a video card and even then if your not interested you can get CPUs and Mother boards with onboard video.
So that's: CPU, Memory, HDMI 4K video output, HD Audio, Wifi, 8-16 USB ports front and back, audio plugs front and back, half a dozen individually controlled fan headers, Sata and PCIe disk controllers, hardware raid controller. All of that and more on top no just the motherboard. Not a PCI card in sight yet. I2C bus, GPIO bus, SPI bus, RGB 281* buses, analgoue RGB buses. 5Gigabit network adapter + 2.5Gb adapater.
I stopped building my own computers when intel stopped making motherboards. It's not worth the hassle anymore. I did setups with hundreds of machines for lab automation. Supermicro or intel motherboards , 19 inch rackmounted cases.
My last personal build was 10 years ago. I've switched to used Z workstations. Cheap ,( written off ) , lots of power / memory / storage and compact (laptop). no need for hefty water cooled towers.
Sounds like you missed the fun stuff. The big change requiring the tower (and mines a MIDI Tower) is the amount of power these things consume and thus the heat they produce. 320W for just the video card. Another 120-140W for the CPU. Another 100W for the mainboard. That's a LOT of heat to get rid of. "Why get rid?", all modern components will slow themselves down to remain within thermal limits and stability. So your lovely 4.6Ghz processor in your latest Z workstation with it's rubbish, "to a budget" cooler, rapidly drops it's clocks to 3.8Ghz as it can't handle the heat output at 4.6Ghz. You might as well have bought the 3.8Ghz beside it for £300 cheaper.
I too use ex-corporate surplus PCs. At £400-500 they are not exactly free though and typically from looking at the, about 4 generations out of date. Circa 2010 maybe. I prefer the older SFF PCs for media centres. With a cheap 1030 video card they do decent 4K output for the TVs. Rubbish for gaming though, they can't even work the 1030 hard the CPU is so slow, like Gen3 or Gen4 intel.
I also notice, if you care to look at the newer models, they seem to be using an awful lot of the same components as I am. Most likely more OEM models, or 'white labelled' where they can. Not sure about HP, but Dell make nice cases, although, again, all the bits that really matter beyond the headline stats are made to a budget and it shows in all their models.