HP OMEN X 900-080nz upgrade part 3

[NonSequitur777]

@Myoubouh,

The HP Pavilion 590-p0030 is/was an entry-level to mid-range consumer desktop geared toward everyday productivity, light multimedia, and casual use, whereas your OMEN X was HP’s flagship -a high-end gaming line at the time!

Bottom line: By design, the Pavilion 590-p0030 was never a premium or high-performance desktop, but my upgrade work, however, shows how far these machines can be stretched. It is an example of turning an everyday, sleepy consumer PC into something much closer akin to a custom mid-tier system -without abandoning the original platform (too much).  😄

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777

[Myoubouh]

Okey, then that was not a flagship PC like the Omen X. Hum, maybe with some luck it will have no problem. 

Can you give a look at this page, and if you see a card the same size you showed me and that is better than the one you showed me, tell me. 😄

Thanks a lot for all as always. 

Kind regards. 

[NonSequitur777]

@Myoubouh,

What "page" are you referring to? -There is no link.

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777

[Myoubouh]

Sorry, my bad. ^^

GPU 

Kind regards.

[NonSequitur777]

@Myoubouh,

The least expensive RTX 5070 Ti options, the Palit RTX5070 TI GamingPro-S and the Gainward GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Phoenix-S are both about 33.2 cm in length: you'll have to make a careful measurement inside your case to ascertain if these cards will fit.

The ASUS Prime GeForce RTX 5070 OC 16GB GDDR7 is priced right: CHF 513.– and is 30.4cm in length, which we know will fit inside your PC sans any issues: https://www.digitec.ch/fr/s1/product/asus-prime-geforce-rtx-5070-oc-12-go-carte-graphique-55066624.

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777

[Myoubouh]

For this GPU I don't want low quality ones. 

The Asus Prime GeForce Rtx 5070 OC 16 GB GDDR7 is not the one in the link, but I found the 16gb one. Is it better that the one you showed first ? (the white one ?) To be sure I'll go with something of 30.4cm size that will fit for sure. 🙂

[NonSequitur777]

@Myoubouh,

They are the same for all intents and purposes, just different looks.

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777

[meteorick · Accepted solution]

I have the exact same machine as you, and, like you, I spent quite a bit of time planning an upgrade, which I finally completed a couple of days ago. I am happy to share what I learned, in case it helps you and others who stumble upon this thread.

If I remember correctly from the start of this thread, your motivation for the upgrade is to be able to play very recent games on the machine. My motivation was a bit different: first and foremost I wanted to get silent fans, because the original fans' noise was driving me crazy, I could no longer concentrate while working; second, I wanted to have extremely fast and smooth desktop and software development experiences. The two GTX1080 in the original machine are perfectly fine for my gaming needs, since I play mostly CPU-bound games (2D, indies, 4X strategy, retro), and if I want to play GPU-bound games I'll do it elsewhere (PS4/PS5). So I kept the dual GTX1080 but changed pretty much everything else in this machine.

At the start of the thread, I believe you asked whether it would be possible to change the motherboard. After some research, I found out that the answer is yes. The Munich-S motherboard is a standard Micro-ATX motherboard, albeit with a few peculiarities. Fortunately, these peculiarities do not prevent having (almost) everything working after you replace it with any other Micro-ATX motherboard. In particular, I was concerned that the lighting of the case would stop working, but it didn't, and I found out why: it is not controlled by the motherboard itself, but by a secondary board that is connected to the motherboard via a standard USB connector. I am really happy that I managed to keep the retro feel of the case while at the same time have a super fast machine, as you will probably understand. 😉 As for what I did not manage to get working: 1) the wifi led located next to the power button, which is controlled by a specific connector in the Munich-S motherboard, for which I did not find an equivalent in the new motherboard; 2) idem concerning a connector labeled "SENSOR2" (which I do not even know what it was for); 3) the audio-out and mic-in ports, also next to the power button, on the Munich-S motherboard they are controlled by a 11-pin connector labeled "F_AUDIO1" but the new motherboard has instead a 9-pin connector labeled "JAUD1" (which I believe is the standard), so I did not dare to try and connect them -- the motherboard offers the same ports on the back panel anyway, and I use USB for audio anyway, so no big loss. That's it, otherwise everything works perfectly.

My new motherboard is the "MSI MAG B850M MORTAR WIFI". I chose it because I wanted to make sure I could use the dual GTX1080 GPUs. When I researched this topic, I found out that 1) Nvidia SLI (the ability to use the two GPUs at the same time to generate the image) has been dead for a long time and modern Micro-ATX motherboards do not support it, but 2) having a second GPU is still great with "lossless scaling" (a technique that increases FPS in games by having the second GPU generate intermediate frames using AI, specially in older games which had the FPS capped), and 3) due to limitations in modern consumer CPU architectures (in my case AM5), the motherboards have a limitation in the number of PCI lanes that are available, and therefore the various PCIe and NVMe slots have to share those lanes. In practice this means that not all micro-ATX motherboards are alike when it comes to supporting a second GPU, some won't even have a second slot at all, while others have as many as 3 additional slots but each will be limited to using one PCIe lane, and that is not fast enough to host a GPU; the GTX1080 works with 8 lanes on PCIe 3.0 -- unfortunately, as far as I could see, there are no Micro-ATX AM5-architecture motherboards on the market that offer 8 lanes for a second slot (which is understandable since not many people use a second GPU anymore and the PCI lanes will be used for other things like SSDs instead), but fortunately this motherboard offers a second slot with 4 lanes on the faster PCIe 4.0 standard, which is equivalent to using 8 lanes on the old PCIe 3.0 standard with around 97% of the speed. Good enough for me!

This specific motherboard has the connectors in different places wrt the connectors in the Munich-S motherboard, and because of that some of the original cabling is too short, the cables do not reach the connectors on the new motherboard, so I bought extensions cables to solve that issue. Moreover, one of the two USB-3 connectors on the new motherboard uses a newer format called "Type-E" instead of the regular 20-pin connector, so I bought an adapter for that too. What kind of issues you will have with cabling is going to depend on which motherboard you choose and where its connectors are placed, but for reference here is the list of what I bought in case you decide to get this specific motherboard (search in places like AliExpress for this):
- 30cm Motherboard Front 9Pin USB2.0 Male To Female USB Extension Cable
- 30cm Motherboard 20Pin USB3.0 Male to Female USB Extension Cable
- 30cm Motherboard Type-E to 20Pin Male Adapter Cable
- 2x PCI slot cover (if you are not using a second GPU)

A couple of notes on the above. The only cable you really need to buy is the "Type-E to 20Pin" adapter cable. At first, I actually managed to connect the other two cables directly by taking them out of the cable holder and passing them over the motherboard to reach the connectors, but they got a bit too stretched to my liking, so I ended up buying the extension cables. There is one other cable, the one labeled "F_PANEL" (for the power/reset button), that also needs to be extended but luckily I found an extension included with the motherboard called "EZ Front Panel Cable", so I just used that (and connected it to the connector labeled "JFP1" on the motherboard).

As for choice of CPU and RAM, that has only to do with the chosen motherboard, nothing specific to this machine anymore. Just for reference, I went with the "Razen 5 9600X" CPU because it's probably the best value for money in single-core speed at the moment (I do not need multi-core processing all that often), and it runs super cool -- it does not even need anything like the original liquid cooling system that came with this machine. By the way, unfortunately the original liquid cooling system does need to be replaced, because it screws to the motherboard in a way that is specific to that Intel architecture (I think even with more modern Intel architectures it won't work, let alone AMD architectures). Alas, we lose the nice red liquid tubes and the Omen logo of the original water cooling system. To replace it I got a "Be Quiet Pure Loop 2", which has a single 120mm fan like the original (as said, even that is overkill for this CPU, but I wanted something with the same format of the original). The ARGB lights of the new cooler are actually quite cool, no pun intended, and I don't miss the old one that much... 😉 Then I got a couple of "Be Quiet Silent Wings 4 120mm" fans to replace the two original fans in the front and back of the case, and now I'm typing this while hearing a gentle soothing hum, which is very pleasant. As for RAM, I went with the "TeamGroup T-Create Expert 32GB DDR5-6000" (2x16GB modules). I think the RAM in the original machine should work since DDR5 is backward compatible with DDR4, but I did not test it. I chose this RAM because it's great value for money -- its speed (in particular the CAS latency of 30-36-36-76) is amongst the best in the market at the moment for AM5 architecture. FYI, it appears that there are some technical reasons as to why you should get 2 RAM modules and not 4, and should not go beyond 6000Mhz, otherwise your RAM will actually perform (much) worse in this architecture. So this one fit the bill perfectly. Finally, I got a 4TB "Samsung 990 Pro" SSD, and removed the HDD that came with the original machine from their bays, no point in having it anymore since its half the size of the SSD. I still appreciate having the drive bays in this machine, and plan to purchase a couple of huge 25TB+ drives later on when they become cheaper.

That's about it I think. In the end, the hardest part was the prior research itself, replacing the components was not that hard, and everything worked right off the bat. I'm really happy that I can continue using my beloved "retro cube" for at least another ten years or so!

[Myoubouh]

Thanks a lot Meteorick I think this will be usefull for all owners of the cube machine for the present and the future. 

Do you know by chance wich size max gpu we can put inside the machine ? We saw that the previous GPU's we were talking about should work, but if we can put something even bigger would be cool to know. 

One more time thanks for all, it was so good to know that the lights will still work with a new motherboard ! =D

[NonSequitur777]

@meteorick,

Outstanding feedback -thank you: nothing beats the actual hands-on experience and skillful rebuild efforts!

Kind Regards,

NonSequitur777