Upgrade time!

Post 00038 | May 29th 2023

I think it's time to put a graphics card in my media centre PC. Don't get me wrong, I still love my 5600G - It's the little engine that could. It still impresses me how much performance you get from a chip this affordable. It is by far one of my most favourite CPUs ever released. That said, the times are a changing. It's still playing most games I want to play and for it and for the few games it can't run, I have been using streaming the game from my gaming PC. And therein lies the problem:

Nvidia being Nvidia

Literally the only reason I bought a used GTX 1080 for my gaming PC was because of GameStream. The Nvidia Shield was (and is) one of the best Android TV boxes on the market and it's ability to stream high-end games from a PC was groundbreaking. It was snappy and looked great. So of course, along came the capitalist to destroy monetise all that is good.

In January, Nvidia announced that they would shut down local game streaming and instead focus on Geforce Now, their online streaming service. In a February update, they removed the any GameStream functionality from Shield devices. Apparently that's something you can just get away with. It's not like local game streaming strained their servers - most of the heavy lifting was done on the customers' PCs. This would be like Sony sending out an email, going "Just FIY, next month we will break into your home and steal your CD player. Please subscribe to Music Unlimited™".

Predictably, the open source community has already gone great lengths to pick up the pieces. Moonlight is already a household name for anyone who used GameStream, allowing you to stream to anything from a Chromebook to a PS Vita. Sunshine, the other piece of the puzzle, is a self-hosted game stream host and will essentially take care of what little involvement Nvidia had in the streaming process. The main benefit of Sunshine is the fact it supports AMD and Intel GPUs and other operating systems like Linux and Mac OS. It's seeing regular updates so I am sure it will become a worthy replacement in no time. For now though, it still seems a bit too hacky for day-to-day use. It probably wouldn't require much tinkering to make it work, but I have to say the entire thing has left a bad taste in my mouth. If Nvidia has already decided we should stream from their Geforce Now servers, why wouldn't they release a driver update that broke the Sunshine/Moonlight efforts as a side-effect? I'll keep the GTX 1080 around in my Windows PC as it still does what I need it to do, but when it gets time to replace it, it won't be with an Nvidia card. Until then, I have decided to put a graphics card in my media centre to rely less on having to stream.

I ended up buying a used Sapphire branded Radeon RX 6600 for €200, shipping included. It has a bit better performance as my GTX 1080, but at a much lower power draw. This should still be plenty powerful as be will be connecting to a 1080p 60hz TV. I could probably have gotten away with powering it with a PicoPSU but in order to do that, I would need to find a better power brick. In the end it made more sense using a SFX power supply I had lying around.

New case: Ikea Hacking Time!

My current case, as introduced in post 00029 was a quick and dirty 3D print that doesn't have space for a graphics card or a power supply. It has also started to deform a bit from the heat, so even if I was going to print another, it would have to deal with even more heat from the added components. Even if I printed a new case in a more heat-resistant filament, it wouldn't alter the fact that I am beginning to get a bit bored of 3D printed cases. Despite my best efforts, it will always look like a lump of plastic because that's what it is. There's already an abundance of plastic in the world, and I would prefer not to add more to the pile if I can avoid it.

So, I started looking for alternatives. Laying out all the different components where I want them, I noticed the footprint is roughly 20 cm deep and up to 28 cm wide, which is a bit smaller than a sheet of A4 paper. That's when I got the idea to look at document storage boxes. The Ikea Tjog at €6 seemed to fit the bill perfectly and it made of a mixture of cardboard and paper, meaning it is very recyclable and easy to cut holes into. This is what I came up with:

Inside the box. An MSI AM4 ITX motherboard with the aforementioned GPU, a Noctua L9x65 cooler and a Cooler Master SFX Power Supply

I designed a tray for all the parts and split it in two to make it fit on my printer. I cut a matching hole in the back of the box and bolted it all in place using M3 screws. I cut holes in the side to give the GPU some air and hole in the lid to give the air somewhere to escape. These holes were covered with some steel mesh, glued in place with a glue stick.

Animation of what needs to be cut from the box to make room for the tray

The box came with a steel handle that has little cut-out to fit a label. I cut a hole where the label would go in the front of the box and printed a bracket that would house four USB ports. If I wasn't going power the PC on with the wifi relay I wrote about in post 00035, I would probably have placed a power button here instead.

And that's basically the case sorted! I thought the last case was a cheap and cheerful case, but somehow this managed to be even easier to make and even cheaper in parts. I also really liked building it - Mixing 3D design with old-fashioned arts and crafts was an enjoyable experience. Stay tuned for next time where we will be making one out of paper mache!

Here are the STL files if you want to print your own. While the motherboard stand-offs won't look too nice, it does print without support. I didn't see much sense in going lower than 50% infil as there isn't much to fill in anyway.

The RX 6600

Right, the build is complete - Time to see what the card is capable of and if it is happy with living in a shoebox.

The latter of the questions can be answered pretty easily: At stock settings, running a combination of Cinebench and Furmark to stress both the main heat-makers shows the temperature of the RX 6600 stayed at 75°C while the 5600G reached 88°C. While not ideal, you have to bear in mind that Furmark makes use of both the integrated and dedicated GPU cores, which is not something you'd be doing normally. This was more meant as a stress test, so it's good to see it stays within spec. We can do better of course; I usually run the 5600G with a 0.175V undervolt which lowers the temperature to below 80°C, albeit at a slight hit to performance.

When it comes to fan noise, the Noctua L9x65 CPU cooler is louder than the Sapphire card. However, none of this really mattered, as Cooler Master, in their infinite wisdom, decided to delve into the bottom of the bargain bin to find the most basic of blowers to their power supply. You'd think a company with three decades of computer cooling experience, literally calling themselves "Cooler Master" would be able to provide a decent fan, but alas no. The fan isn't meant to be user replaceable, but that hasn't stopped me before. There's no way I'd let a warranty sticker keep me away from the quiet life. A little solder later, and the horrible fan had been replaced something more upmarket. A small price to pay for my sanity. Now it stays nice and quiet and runs with a constant cool breeze.

I honestly couldn't care less about the look of GPU but for what it's worth, I think it looks snazzy without being to Gamer™ aggressive.

I am very pleased with the performance of the RX6600. I wasn't able to find anything in my Steam library that it couldn't run at 1080p max settings. Granted, I don't play many new, demanding games. Star Ocean 6 which has a few stutters when new areas are loaded, but it does have a reputation for being unoptimised. It is still perfectly playable. In any case, it plays better than it did when I was streaming from my Gaming PC.

I was also pleasantly surprised with the AMD Adrenalin software included with the drivers. Normally, when you want to tune a GPU, you need to run an assortment of third-party programs such as MSI Afterburner and Rivatuner. Adrenalin however has it all integrated. It's fairly modern and easy to navigate. If you don't have any experience with tuning GPUs, there are simple one-click buttons for quick and dirty overclocking or undervolting. It really does make the offering from Nvidia look archaic in comparison. I also wasn't asked to sign in with an account in order to use software unlike Geforce Experience.

As for the Sapphire Pulse card I purchased, I'm glad I went a bit upmarket. The board seem very well-built and while the fan was audible at 75°C, it wasn't so bad that I felt like I had to tinker with the fan curve. Kind of a shame in a way, now that AMD has made such a nice software package.

In conclusion, I am one happy bunny. The card is able to do what I wanted it to do and making the new case went as smooth as I could have hoped. I'm surprised that there doesn't seem to be a case with this layout available on the market. In fact, it doesn't seem like there has been any evolution on the HTPC case market since 2014 when the "PlayStation 4 killer" cases came out. They all use PCIE risers to keep the case thin, although these same risers are almost all PCIE 3.0, meaning there's a good chance they would become bottlenecks in modern systems. By adding a couple of centimetres of height, I have completely alleviated the need for a riser while making the case less wide and deep. At the end of the day that is not too bad of a result.

Perfect fit! It should fit, seeing I made the media cabinet, but still.