Shopping Advice - Black Friday - Blue Monday Sales
nonesuch00
Posts: 18,729
Hey, like others I am also bulding a real desktop PC. Owing to my relatively tiny budget, I have decided to go with a x570 AM4 AMD motherboard and a AMD Ryzen 5 3400G APU (Radeon RX Vega GPU) spead over multiple months.
I'm not skimping on the individual components quality or price but then again I'm not buying anything like an MSI x570 'ACE' or MSI x570 'Godlike' motherboard that are extremely expensive and I'm guessing extremely high quality.
I have my list at PCPartPicker.com & my shopping cart at smile.amazon.com loaded and ready to go.
My plan is between the Black Friday sales until December 31 I should daily check on any very steep discounts. By steep, I mean 33% or more off what the price started as when I started my list. When a discount is that big I buy the discounted component and mark it off my list. And repeat until my budget is gone ($258 currently but will be $446 by December 1st, lol there go all my planned hazelnut, rowan, persimmon, and medlar trees 
).
$446 is almost 50% of the total pudget I need to completely buy all the components for my planned computer.
I need advice on where to be on the look out during holiday season for great holiday Black Friday type discounts so I can get my PC build in February instead of March (when I'll be again outside).
I have discovered in the week I've had a shopping cart filled with my desired components at Amazon computer components sell out quite quickly and quite often but I'm resisting buying at higher prices based on that however.
Thanks.
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Comments
Don't forget that, for Iray, the AMD GPU will not do anything (it can be used by dForce, which just needs OpenCL).
Yes, thanks. The AMD GPU would be useful for the Black Friday sale of Marvelous Designer if they do it again next year. Also for the Pro Renderer in Blender.
I'd have to save at least 6 months to be an nVidia card by which time maybe an nVidia card would be out the can RT raytrace in 4K. I'll have to read about the line of nVidia GPUs technical capabilities before buying. At those prices I don't want to buy before that can do RT raytracing of a complex 16GB DS scene at 4K resolution. I think they are still lacking there.
Yes, thanks. The AMD GPU would be useful for the Black Friday sale of Marvelous Designer if they do it again next year. Also for the Pro Renderer in Blender.
I'd have to save at least 6 months to be an nVidia card by which time maybe an nVidia card would be out the can RT raytrace in 4K. I'll have to read about the line of nVidia GPUs technical capabilities before buying. At those prices I don't want to buy before that can do RT raytracing of a complex 16GB DS scene at 4K resolution. I think they are still lacking there.
Oops double post so I'll edit into a new post.
I've build a Black Friday shopping cart at NewEgg too and they are actually claiming to be having 'Early Black Friday Sales'. Having never participated in a Black Friday sale before I don't know if that's really good sales they are doing. It's certainly not the 50%+ sales Marvelous Designer & DAZ 3D do.
Those looking for DDR4 memory using 4GB or 8GB modules or SSDs 512GB or less will find some really good deals at NewEgg (look also in their eMail Deals section) but as I'm looking only for 2TB PCEi 3.0 NMVe SSDs and 3000+ DDR4 32GBx1 RAM modules so I'm much less likely do see those get big discounts. Personally and practically speaking that will be more than sufficient for 10+ years barring some major computing design change and not the usual rinky-dink incremental changes. If it takes AMD 10 years to finally release a consumer entry level 256 core Ryen 45 TDP APU modern Zen architecture; it takes 10 years. I think realistically it's something they should be releasing within 5 years from a technical perspective.
NewEgg is probably the biggest online computer retailer, Amazon might be bigger but as you've seen Amazon has issues. If you create an account and sign up for their email you'll get an email every morning with their various sales of the day, or at least links to all with the highlights in the email.
If you live close enough to a Microcenter to drive to it they often have fantastic sales. In particular they pretty much always give a discount when you buy a CPU and motherboard together.
On parts the Athlon 3000G is launching Nov. 19. It's the $50 lowest end of the 3000 series APU's. 2c/4t with Vega 3 graphics. Saving $100 on your CPU might get you close to something like a GTX 1650 which is selling for $150. A 4Gb card may not be ideal but it will certainly render much faster than a 3400G.
Thanks. There is one additional option I have just realized I dismissed out of hand too quickly. And that is to buy a new sub-$700 laptop, as for example from Lenova, and then upgrade the SSD to 2TB and the RAM to 32GB. The laptop will have to support 32GB RAM though. I've already started hitting 16GB RAM limits on a DAZ Studio scene I created on my current laptop.
I don't know why it's the case that much more difficult to manufacture laptops with more expensive components and labour sell cheaper than the DIY desktops but I guess that's the market price gouging game and 3D enthusiasts for every last penny.
Still it's 50 - 50 that I'll get a laptop even though it'll be within 15% comparable performance with the AMD Desktop build I've planned and cost about $200 - $300 less (mostly the expense of my buying a 2nd screen for a dual screen setup if I build a desktop) when all is said & done. However I will have already done all possible upgrade paths on the laptop to RAM & SSD and will be limited at 32GB RAM and 2TB SSD in all likelihood. There might be CPU / APU unit upgrades possible.
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I've been comparing CPU & GPU mobile benchmarks and the best values are found in the new Ryzen / Vega laptops. I've been searching for nVidia laptops at the Lenova site with similar value but they're much more expensive and so far only an nVidia 1050 with 3GB RAM has been found by me and 3GB RAM is far too little.
Surprising both intel mobile CPUs and AMD mobile CPUs are right around the same bench mark as my 7 year old i7-3630QM mobile CPU. However, on the GPU, the 3500U with Radeon Vega 8 integrated graphics is 360% faster than the Intel HD Graphics 4000 from 7 years ago and 150% faster than the current intel UHD Graphics 620. The nVidia 1050 mobile with 3GB RAM is about 300% faster than the Radeon Vega 8 mobile graphic though.
If one un-throttles onto the desktop the speed than all are faster yet again and then there are also the extra 2 cores to a default of 6 now becoming standard.
If I'm going to stick to my current configuration using a Ryzen 3400G in a desktop there is about a 25% performance gain for an extra $300.
If I instead buy a Ryzen 5 3600 and the best discrete video card I can buy for sub-$300 then the total price is approaching $1500 is 3 or 4 year old tech but performance will be 100% improved.
Hmmm, not sure now. I feel the discrete video card capabilities I want is not yet available so why spend the money building a desktop before it's available and risk total system obsolescence?
Decisions, decisions....
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Turns out at the Lenova.com site I am eligible for a military discount which is quite substantial and while I couldn't find any desktops at Lenova that had any more value than what I could build myself via Amazon/NewEgg and so on; Lenova does have a long list of AMD Ryzen 5 Generation 2 laptops that are going on Black Friday Sale and combined with my military discount would be the much better value than building me a desktop.
Since I only want to use future proof parts on the desktop except for the CPU/GPU which have very short life cycles the best I can do with a desktop is to dump the Ryzen 5 3400G and instead get a Ryzen 5 3600 and AMD RX 570 8GB video card.
So it's by a Lenova AMD Ryzen 5 3500U laptop that will go for about $500 (on Black Friday sale) plus $200 for 2TB SSD plus $60 for 16GB DDR4 RAM so about $760 for a good laptop or it will be a desktop I build for about $1100 with future proof components like MSI x570 MB with wifi 6, 32x1GB DDR4 RAM, 2TB SSD (unfortunately PCIe 3). The desktop could be cheaper depending on what components goes on sale during the holidays.
I'm looking forward to an AMD video card with 8+ GB memory and ray tracing ability that is PCIe 4 unless the laptops get discounted to less than $400. The RX 5700 8GB RAM has about 10% better performance then the nVidia 2060 video cards but lacks ray tracing capabilities. I'd guess that the ray tracing capabilities is going to be the next big step for AMD video cards that they'll be pushing to add.
Well, if you are going to wait 6 months for an Nvidia GPU, you may as well wait a bit longer for them to release their next generation cards. Nvidia will be releasing Ampere in 2020, though specific date is yet known.
At which time, you can either grab a new Ampere or a discounted Turing because the Turing cards will almost certainly drop in price. If my belief that Ampere being a huge leap is correct, then Turing prices will drop like a rock. So I think waiting a little longer will pay off big time for you there. Plus the extra time could allow you to save up a bit more money.
As for the rest, its tough to say, it just depends on what is on sale. You have lots of options, and one thing you may consider is instead of a new Ryzen, you could buy a last gen Ryzen 2000 part at a great price that can offer more performance. Ryzen 2000 chips are on sale quite frequently these days with how successful the 3000 series has been.
That doesn't score you a GPU, but I would look for any GPU you can get your hands on for as little as possible. If you are going to upgrade anyway, it wouldn't matter what it is, as long as it can drive a monitor.
For a performance comparison, Gamers Nexus has run a variety of tests with both new and old Ryzen chips. A couple of those tests involve Blender.
You can find the full article here. https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3527-amd-threadripper-1920x-benchmark-in-2019
I bring this up because the 3400G is a $150 part. But it sits kind of low on this test. The 2700 is more than twice as fast in both benches. And the 2700 is only $30 more at Newegg right now https://www.newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-2700/p/N82E16819113498?Item=N82E16819113498 Sure, you are looking for a sale on the 3400G, but the 2700 could also go on an even bigger sale itself.
For that price and performance, I would go for that. So even though it has no GPU built in, you could scrap any GPU you can find off ebay or Craig's List.
Or if the 2700 is still more than you are willing to pay, there are still plenty of other Ryzens to look at. The 1600 also offers a solid bump over the 3400G and it is on Newegg for $100. The 2600 is $120.
Yeah, thanks for that. I've found a website called passmark (www.cpubenchmark.net) and have been comparing discrete video cards and CPUs for a few hours.
Discoveries:
a) A disconcerting discovery was there was no mobile CPU significantly faster than my now old i7-3630QM.
b) AMD Ryzen APUs are nice but on desktops they are now fast enough to be anything more than souped up mobile processors so the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G is out.
c) Paying top dollar for top components now before AMD has a video card that can "real time ray trace" (subjective I know) with 8GB+ memory at 4K is a big risk and potential waste of a lot of money that I can't really afford. As you and I both think competition between AMD, nVidia, and Intel might be big leaps in computing capabilities at consumer entry level prices to us in the next 5 years so I need to get to something modern as in 2018 or never regarding CPU/GPU but not luxuriously expensive so I can bide more time.
d) The entry level desktop AMD Ryzen CPUs, I'm getting the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (performance marks about 19900) without integrated graphics and AMD Radeon RX 570 GPU (performance marks about 15500) are by far the biggest winners in computer power per penny spent. It wasn't even really that close and very importantly they blow my i7-3630QM (about 7200 performance marks) and intel HD Graphics 4000 (at 457 performance marks) out of the water. Those performance marks at the cpubenchmark.net web site make changing my mind easy and configuring my desktop fast (well somewhat, it's taking a few hours).
Really, except for the latest AMD GPUs not being able to do iRay nVidia doesn't have a substantial lead anymore and is trailing in a couple of cases. I don't know if nVidia video cards can use the Pro Renderer or not, they probably can't so AMD Radeon not doing iRay isn't not a surprise really.
I couldn't find any entry level prebuilt desktops that were as nearly a good a bargain as I can laptops so I gave up and went back to pcpartpicker and went back to work to do it myself.
So I decided on these parts:
$169 AMD Ryzen 7 2700
$49 16x1 GB 2666 RAM
$81 1TB Sata III SSD
$45 mid atx tower case
$59 650W Fully Modular Bronze 80+ Power Supply
$139 8GB GDR5 Radeon RX 570
$89 Gigabytes B450M 64GB RAM / 4 Sata / m.2 / Wifi microATX board
Which brings the sub-total on Amazon to $640 before taxes (another $37). So less than $700 for a desktop that was better at that price neighborhood than anything I could find on Lenova, Amazon, or NewEgg. Since I want to take a 2 month summer vacation starting next June I want to have my need to upgrade my computer taken care of and money saved for vacation by next June.
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So when all is said and done I've basically put together a desktop that rates about 15,000 on the scores for both the CPU & the GPU and has more and faster storage / memory options I've chosen than the already built desktops I've been able to find at at Lenova, Amazon, NewEgg, Best Buy, and so on buy at least $50 and usually a lot more. For that reason I don't think I'll get much or any discounts on parts via Black Friday outside the normal discounts I'm already getting but I'm going to wait and see anyway.
My current desktop is at 50% of the cost of my original desktop build intentions but at about a 250% performance improvement on the CPU and at 800% performance improvement on the GPU even though I'm using AMD parts from last year.
I've very happy I decided to investigate the available CPUs and GPUs from AMD on that passmark website before I actually purchase and build my desktop. Very easy to compare and summarize what's available from the options one's interested in.
Thanks again.
OKey Dokey so I bought an AM4 socket motherboard today for fear it's would sell out soon so no turning back now.
I had $258 discretionary budget and that's not going to build a complete desktop with tech from the last generation of products released about mid-2018 as far as AMD goes so i will build over a 3 month period. I was trying to wait for Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales but because my budget is so small I had to go ahead and purchase most of the components today because they were on discount or were returns to Amazon so you'd talking $5 on this product, $15 on this, and $25 on this and it starts adding up quickly and also increases the change the discounted components would sell before Black Friday. Saving $45 is not a lot but on my budget it's going to be the difference of finishing my desktop by the 1st week of January or the 1st week of February.
So if you're on a really tight budget and want AMD fast computing desktop but cheaply here is what I bought today:
Thermaltake Versa H17 Black SPCC Micro ATX Mini Tower Gaming Computer Case CA-1J1-00S1NN-00 $44.99
Seasonic S12III 450 SSR-450GB3 450W 80+ Bronze ATX12V & EPS12V Direct Cable Wire Output Smart & Silent Fan Control 5 Year Warranty Power Supply $41.84
Gigabyte B450M DS3H WiFi-Y1 (AM4/ AMD B450/ SATA 6GB/s/USB 3.1/ HDMI/WiFi/mATX/AMD Motherboard) $76.24
Patriot Signature Premium DDR4 16GB (1x16GB) 2666MHz (PC4-21300) UDIMM with Heatshield PSP416G26662H1 $48.99
So if you look at the PC Part Picker site which I used to build this list is already a decent cost savings on their "Build Guides" for Entry Level AMD Gaming or Modest AMD Gaming Build but with upgraded GPU (8MB instead of 4GB), CPU, and storage (1TB SSD).
Also, the price comparison function at PCPartPicker is great but it'll be no surprise to anyone that ultimately I am almost certain to purchase all the parts through Amazon to get the actually biggest part discounts and also shipping cost savings. However, PCPartPicker was a huge help in actually finding the components I wanted to consider in a customer friendly format. In two cases I have to manually search Amazon for parts because PC Part Picker cløaimed other sites were cheaper.
To ascertain with CPUs, GPUs, and APUs were the best value for dollar I used the Passmark site as I could evalue a lot of different models very quickly and easier there; must easier than trying internet search to read reviews on Tom's Hardware and other sites which are far from comprehensive and I didn't know model names I anyway.
What caused me to buy today rather than was the DDR4 1x16GB RAM module had only two left and searches show the next cheapest was about $75. As the MB I bought can support 4 16GB modules for 64GB I bought before they sold out.
If you need to go cheaper still you can get the Power Supply down to about $33 and the case down to about $35 too but I tried to compromise between price, visual looks, and component quality. Well according to what seems to be popular among gamers at least.
In December, I will be buying a 1TB Sata III 6 GB/s SSD and either a Radeon RX 570 or 580 or 590 video card. I'm shooting for 8GB but may have to settle for 4GB.
Then finally in January I will be buying a AMD Ryzen 7 2700 or better and I'll finally have a modern desktop.
I won't post the exact model SSD, CPU, and GPU I have in my cart because in 1 - 2 months time they are liable to change anyway.
It's sort of exciting! I've decided I'm not going to copy all my user files over to me desktop so that will tremendously reduce clutter and used storage space. It will reduce load on OS file indexing and security SW too. As I'll only be having a 1TB SSD I will keep all my music video and such from YouTube on my laptop 2TB SSHD. My desktop will only be for Unity/UE4/DAZ 3D/Poser/Blender sort of things. As DAZ 3D purchased product will take up about 400GB installed just for the Content Library/DAZ Connect already 50% of my 1 TB SSD is gone! I will however move my DAZ DIM Install files to an external USB HD to save more space. Tutorial and music videos I'll watch from my laptop. I guess there is a small chance that a Cyber Monday sale in December will temporarily drop the price of a 2TB Sata III 6 GB/s SSD to less than $150 at which time it'd be more affordable to buy it instead of a 1TB SSD. I also have an M.2 slot for SSDs on that MB I ordered today for more SSD sales price flexibility.
I will probably add a cheap entry level nVidia video card in my desktop say a 1660 or 1060 with 8GB RAM if my motherboard/power supply will support having an RX 570 and GTX 1660 in the computer at the same time. The power supply has enough power I know. I'd do that after summer vacation though. Or could always manually swap out AMD & nVidia GPUs in my desktop as needed for what i'm working on at the time and for testing. That is not nice thing about a desktop compared to a laptop.
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Note that the approximate 100% higher CPU benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 at Passmark.com of about 15000 to my current 7 year old i7-3630QM, AMD Ryzen 5 3400G, Ryzen 5 3400U, and similar CPU benchmarks of 8000 are mostly due to have 8 cores and 16 threads on the Ryzen 7 2700 and not because of faster cores.
The Radeon RX 570 however has GPU benchmarks of about 7000 and that compare to my 7 year old intel HD Graphics score of 457 very will. The current top of the line APU from AMD, the AMD Ryzen 5 3400G has benchmarks of about 2000.
So if you are building a mini-PC, like a TV Box to play Kodi or something on Windows 10 a AMD Ryzen 5 3400G is a great buy but not for DAZ, Blender, or other desktop work (although that's all relative opinion as it beats the pants off my current laptop).
I hope you've built PC's before. Building an mATX system in an mATX case can be quite unpleasant even for an experienced builder.
Well last time I build a PC was in 2003 I think it was but i've built them pretty regularly from the mid-90s until 2003 from a full-size tower meant to sit on the floor to a mini-PC that wasn't that much bigger than a Mac Mini.
Even with all those builds some cases were so horribly made that I'd wind up slicing my hands up quite a lot on some cases. Definitely not fun. However, according to everything I've read even cheap cases like I bought are much less likely to cut up your hands as they were 15 years ago and more.
I did almost resort to buying a fully modular PS to help alleviate what I think will be the biggest trouble, routing wiring, but I decided a $20 savings on a PS was too good to pass up especially since I don't use RGB lighting or clear case covers on this PC. I did though pay any extra $8 to get a SeaSonic PS instead of a totally off-brand PS because I was concerned about noise & PS quality. And there were a few cases that were also about $10 cheaper that were bigger or same size but I liked the clean lines of the case I chose.
Yeah, I would say a small case today would still beat those old cases that I swear were lined with freakin' razor blades, LOL. Also the motherboards and connectors are so modular now that part is pretty easy. Cord management could be a hassle.
Also, I read someone write about that motherboard you got, the 2nd GPU slot is right on the SATA ports, so any 2 slot size GPU in the 2nd slot will be a major problem. Obviously this build would not be wise for doing multiple GPUs anyway as it is with such a small case and that 450W PSU would need to be upgraded. But still, just know that you probably cannot ever use a 2nd GPU with this motherboard unless by some magic it is a rare single slot design. They do exist, but are super rare unless it is a very low power GPU.
The AMD 570 is a pretty hard deal to beat at its price, its a way better deal than the similarly priced 1650, they are not even close in performance. But as you know it will not work with Iray. If you are willing to go used, you may find Nvidia cards that can match that performance and price, though maybe not 8GB cards.
Some Nvidia alternatives could the be 970 or 1060 6GB. Those don't offer 8GB, but the 970 can be bought for under $100 with shipping included on ebay these days. The cheapest 1060 6GB I have seen is $116 shipped. These prices could fall a bit more, depending on the market. But the 1060 was one of the most popular GPUs that Nvidia ever released (actually, I think it was #1). So that means there are literally millions of them out there in the wild, and hundreds are up on ebay at any given time. There will never be a shortage of people selling them for years to come, which means you can pick and choose and look for a better deal. If you are lucky, you might find somebody selling one that still has a warranty on it, since EVGA offers extended warranties, and yes, these warranties transfer on second hand sales. Though those might cost a tad more for having a warranty still. But if that card fails, EVGA will replace it for you, no problem. I know this from my own experience after lightning killed my used EVGA. It was such a painless and good experience that I am solidly in the EVGA camp now simply because of their warranty support. Whenever I buy a new card, hopefully next year, I totally plan on it being EVGA, and I plan on buying their absurdly cheap 10 year warranty with it. They offer 5 year warranties, too, and maybe some of those 1060's have a 5 year warranty on them. It would have only cost the person who bought it like $15, so it is totally possible.
1060s can also be found in very small form factors, so they would fit easily in that case. That is something you will need to examine very closely, the physical size of any card so it fits in that case. GPUs can be very big. Even some of the cheaper cards like a 570 can have 3 fans and take up a lot of space. If you do go for a 1060, make sure its not a 3GB model, there are lots of those out there, too.
The big brands tend to round the corners of the sheet metal in cases so getting your hands sliced up is less frequent. Cases still have sharp edges so do be careful especially in tight places.
I strongly recommend do a dry fit outside the case to verify the rig posts. I just put it all together on the MoBo box and power it on and wait for the post (with no OS installed it should go into the BIOS. Once you're sure everything works then I'd install the PSU in the case and plan the routing of the cables, as much as possible run them behind the motherboard tray (generally speaking the right side of the case). Then when you install the motherboard it should be easy to simply plug in the 8 pin and 24 pin. Having the power cables in place for the drives and the GPU will also make your life much easier. Also look at the motherboard and the cables for the front panel connectors. The audio and usb ones can be routed to reach their plugs but being otherwise out of the way. Then the power and reset buttons can be planned for. In a cramped case like yours you might want to have a pair of tweezers you might want to have them handy.
No worry, I am running CPU renders on a 16GB RAM i7-3630QM laptop for years now. Even though I am buying an AMD GPU for motives are for other than DAZ Studio renders. In any case, the now AMD 8 core CPU will speed things up for me compared to my current situation.
After I return from overseas this summer I plan on buying a mini-GPU in the form of an nVidia RTX 2070 (which only requires 2 months of saving on my part) if the new nVidia Ampere equivalent is out of my price reach.
In my case this is a case of building an much faster upgradable desktop that lets me extend use of my financial investment in computer parts much longer than I can with a laptop although it seems every year there are quite good and modern laptops that go for $500 and even much less. On my budget I have to plan things to be much more frugal than I got used to working as a programmer.
Thanks for the advice. I used to be a programmer and I'm really getting the Radeon RX 570 to check out a few programming concepts to see if they can spark my interest in programming again. If it doesn't than well $139 isn't that big a wasted investment.
After I satisfy myself messing around with that RX 570 than this summer (summer 2020!) I will be buying a Zoltec mini 2070 I think is what they called it. And you are right it does need two slots but because it actually does realtime ray tracing I want to put it in the motherboard's PCIe Express x16 3.0 slot and relegate the Radeon RX 570 to the PCIe Express x16 2.0 slot. That is if the case and motherboard layout support it. A 450W PS should be enough if the mb doesn't crash because of 2 GPUs. Gigabyte recommends against 2 GPUs too but they admit that this motherboard is technically supposed to be able to handle it. At any rate, I will probably upgrade to a 550W PS to eliminate lack of power as a culprit if I start having strange SW or HW behavior after upgrading to two GPUs. I also have no qualms about swapping them in and out as needed if 2 GPUs won't work.
I'm pretty satisfied that I've put together the most horse power in a PC as cheap as I could that I can buy in the USA. It's up to $970 now. Not that $970 is actually a little bit of money for 99% of us. That's because I decided not to dawdle around and added 3 more sticks of 1x16GB RAM to max (64 GB) that out and a 2 TB PCIe 3.0 NVMe SSD system disk (because, ahem, my DAZ Content Library is 400GB so that virtually rules out my planned 1 GB SSD which gets formatted down to 960GB) with a Seagate hybrid SSHD 2 TB 2.5" 7mm drive as an incremental with imaged backup drive. Those adjustments mean I won't finish the basic build of the desktop until February again.
Correction: a Zoltec RTX 2070 mini will bring the cost of the build up to $1400 but I'm not really considering that card a necessity of the build. You could sub it for the RX 570 and the basic build cost would be instead 1230 so that's a very expensive entry level desktop. It's no wonder I defer buying expensive latest gen GPUs in favor of waiting for one that can do 16GB 4K realtime ray-traced scenes, the RTX 2070s only have 8GB but at $400 it's reasonable to consider it when the rest of the desktop is finished for a few months.
Thanks. I'll do that. I've never actually tried to hide wires before. I always just stuffed them in the case after plugging them in but a case and motherboard like these will have to change that approach.
Cable management is not something I usually bother with for my own computer. I do on ones I sell. I don't like building mATX or microITX but when a customer really wants it I will and have found that thinking out the setup and managing the cables makes things so much easier.