Observations 1: Saturday Oct 27th, 22:00 hours. Day after build, running off a live usb stick.
- NCIX took forever to process and ship order because something was missing (?) packaging was good though.
- Arc Mini case has shitty rubber feet, they are just glued on, one just popped off when I rotated it on carpet. Gonna glue them on with something more beefy.
- The Arc Mini rubber graumet mounting holes for cable management are flimsy. They work so far though.
- Arc Mini has very little clearance behind mobo tray for cables. They fit though, and the side panel isn't warping, seems sturdy.
- Arc Mini has really nice detachable dust filters. Might want to get another 2 fans (one front one top) since they are already really silent.
- Amazing temps out of this thing so far. After 2 hours of prime95 torture at stock frequencies the CPU peaked at 41c, and averaged between 39 and 40. Board never got hotter than 27c, and ambient is 26c. Overclocking will be minimal, but I'll do some since the thermals are so low.
- Hard to read if the PSU voltages / wattages are good. lm-sensors returns rubbish because the ISA adapter is crap on the Asrock board. Don't really care, the board was cheap and is fit for purpose.
- A Hyper Evo 212 will overlap DIMM slot A1 on the board. If I get another two fans, I'll step that up to 4, with 2 slim (probably 2 120mm, but might try 140 on the side panel, the heatsink overlaps some of the fan mount) so I can mount a slim fan on the pull of the heatsink and have room for all 4 dimms. Also could get low profile dimms, the corsair dominator ones have crappy cheap plastic heatsinks that take up a ton of room. If I get more ram, definitely get low profile.
- Fan control doesn't even matter on this case (it came with a fan knob backplate piece for the spare expansion slot port off the back) the fans are silent any way you slice it. It is somewhat annoying how the fan control knob uses 4 pin power and thus can't use firmware / os fan control. The board only has 2 more fan headers anyway, and one of them is "cpu2" which I imagine means dual fan cpu coolers. The singular other header is near the front. It would suck with a dual fan configuration because the mobo only supports one extra fan, and I'd like to have those speed controlled most since they would make the most obvious noise (again, if there was any).
- The bundled cpu cooler was silly. It would probably be pushing 60c under load instead of 40 and be loud as expletives because it only has a 60mm or something fan.
- Cable management could have went better, the backplate fan controller wires just lay on the psu, the mobo headers are all jutting out since they are all vertical from the board, so they all bend sharply to enter cable maangement slots.
- The hot swap drive bays are nice. They aren't "really" hot swap, since you need to mount drives, and there is nothing holding the cabling behind in place, so if you unplug and remove one you have to keep track of the wires somehow. But they are significantly better than my old Armor cases hard metal drive cage where every drive gets screwed in with the cage.
- The memory is so far running solid at stock frequencies. Hopping to OC it to at least 2200, data shows it really ups APU performance. Don't really want a voltage hike, DDR3 is finnicky over 1.5.
- The ASrock UEFI bios is ok and sucks simultaneously. As my first real hard look into UEFI, mouse control is so convoluted and unnecessary, but by using a full graphics stack rather than just a text terminal it takes a lot longer on the startup and it seems sluggish since I imagine it doesn't have very complex graphics drivers. It is the "future" though, so might as well deal with it.
- UEFI Shell is still retarded. The syntax is so convoluted and arbitrary, given that they could have taken a few decades worth of shell experience, they really bombed on it imo.
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