Is there a go-to recommendation for case fans these days? I'm fine with the brown Noctua colour scheme. I do not need RGB.
edit: I want to expand on this question. When I bought this Meshify C, I just used the stock fans, front and back. Using a NH-D15 cooler on the CPU. What is the recommended configuration and what types of fans?
BlazeFire on
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minor incidentexpert in a dying fieldnjRegistered Userregular
Yeah, similar thing with the toughfan 12's. Suppose to be near copies to the noctua NF-A12's with almost identical performance depending on who's testing them, just not shit brown. But I just swapped out a couple of of them for the chromax NF-A12's that were finally released. And the actual Noctuas seem to be slightly quieter for similar performance in my case. May just be the different bearing (I assume a better one) giving it a slightly different tone around the RPMs I usually run, making it less noticeable overall.
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Is there a go-to recommendation for case fans these days? I'm fine with the brown Noctua colour scheme. I do not need RGB.
edit: I want to expand on this question. When I bought this Meshify C, I just used the stock fans, front and back. Using a NH-D15 cooler on the CPU. What is the recommended configuration and what types of fans?
If noise isn’t a concern, Cryorig makes some serious air movers.
If you want a balance of noise/performance then Noctua is kind of difficult to beat.
Man, I had a moment where I was trying to research some period appropriate graphics cards where my head really spun.
So I won an auction for $20 for an ASUS CULS2-C motherboard. This is an old Pentium III platform. Threw a 1.0 Ghz Coppermine-T in there. It's not the exact same processor, but it's basically the same as the P III 1000 that came out in March 2000 for almost $1000. A Geforce 2 GTS would have come out a month later.
Consider at the tail end of 1997 when a Pentium II 300 was just hands down one of the fastest CPUs you could get your hands on, and a fully decked out OEM system with one would run you $4000 in 1997 money. Probably something closer to $6500 now. And in three short years, CPUs were fully over 3x faster, to say nothing of broader architectural improvements. Like the FSB going from 66 Mhz to 133 Mhz. Or going from PCI to AGP 4x. And that GF2 would be so far and away better than the Voodoo or Riva128 you would have had access to in 1997 as well! How many times better could you even say it was? It had over 10x the VRAM, could push many multiples the pixels more, had all manner of advanced capabilities.
And then 3 years later you had the first Athlon 64s which all ran in the 2 Ghz range, once again fully doubling on hz alone, with other performance multiples found in architectural improvements as well. Like DDR memory and integrated memory controllers. And stretching just a little bit more you got the Geforce 6 series which was one of the most groundbreaking leaps in performance we'd seen until the recent RTX 3000 series came out. Which would have been all the more impressive if prices hadn't more than risen to match.
So anyways, I'm trying to decide whether I want to put a Geforce 3 or 4 I've "borrowed" from a work closet full of "junk" on the P III board, and it's remarkable how quickly hardware fell into mismatch. You see reviews from the time, and posts on enthusiast forums quickly pointing out that just about anything after a Geforce 2 will be bottlenecked on "only" a gigahertz machine.
Meanwhile, my PC is coming up on 2 years old. It's got a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 2070 Super. In the next year, I'm not sure I'm expecting anything new beyond what is already on the market, aside from maybe a Ryzen 5000 series refresh? I've heard rumors of an RTX 3000 series refresh as well, but Nvidia is under no market pressure to do so. So where does that leave me? Three years on, I could get a CPU or GPU in the same class that is about 20-30% faster? At exorbitant prices?
Well, CPUs are reasonable I guess.
On the one hand, the longevity of the hardware you can buy now is outstanding. On the other hand, it sure does feel boring.
Anyways, expect some glamor shots of my completed P233MMX/Riva128 retro build soon. I even got fancy, and since I'm using a "Super" Socket 7 board, clocked the 233 at 250 with a 100 Mhz FSB and PC100 ram. It was free performance, and got my Q2 FPS into a steady 30.
+5
GnomeTankWhat the what?Portland, OregonRegistered Userregular
edited October 2021
Finally took the time to undervolt my 3090. I've got it running at [email protected], getting equivalent performance as I was getting pre-undervolt, but now it's drawing ~250W of power instead of over 300 and sits at around 67C even under heavy gaming load.
I tried to get it to run at 1900mhz but my card just can't do it at 825mv and 825mv was my real goal. I had it up to 1890 and it felt stable, but backed it off to 1875. Didn't feel the need to push the ragged edge.
The promised glamor shot. I went all out on that ancient Evercase model from the UK. Paired it with some beefy Yamaha speakers and a matching subwoofer under the table you can't see. And take a close look at that case badge too. Has an SD to IDE converter, and I found a nice 3D printed bay mount for it so I can easily pull the card and move files over.
Also funny story. Tried installing the Geforce 3 on that CUSL2-C board, and it just beeped that it could find a graphics card, and then didn't want to boot again when I put the Geforce 4 back in. Got it back eventually after a few tense moment of just leaving it off and clearing the CMOS.
So that's a scary card to try again. Think I'll just stick with the Geforce 4, no matter how mismatched it is with a Pentium III.
If I remember correctly, setting your desktop to a flat color in 9x and then setting it to a wallpaper maintains the flat color around the icon text, in case that off-green bothers you.
Man, I had a moment where I was trying to research some period appropriate graphics cards where my head really spun.
So I won an auction for $20 for an ASUS CULS2-C motherboard. This is an old Pentium III platform. Threw a 1.0 Ghz Coppermine-T in there. It's not the exact same processor, but it's basically the same as the P III 1000 that came out in March 2000 for almost $1000. A Geforce 2 GTS would have come out a month later.
Consider at the tail end of 1997 when a Pentium II 300 was just hands down one of the fastest CPUs you could get your hands on, and a fully decked out OEM system with one would run you $4000 in 1997 money. Probably something closer to $6500 now. And in three short years, CPUs were fully over 3x faster, to say nothing of broader architectural improvements. Like the FSB going from 66 Mhz to 133 Mhz. Or going from PCI to AGP 4x. And that GF2 would be so far and away better than the Voodoo or Riva128 you would have had access to in 1997 as well! How many times better could you even say it was? It had over 10x the VRAM, could push many multiples the pixels more, had all manner of advanced capabilities.
And then 3 years later you had the first Athlon 64s which all ran in the 2 Ghz range, once again fully doubling on hz alone, with other performance multiples found in architectural improvements as well. Like DDR memory and integrated memory controllers. And stretching just a little bit more you got the Geforce 6 series which was one of the most groundbreaking leaps in performance we'd seen until the recent RTX 3000 series came out. Which would have been all the more impressive if prices hadn't more than risen to match.
So anyways, I'm trying to decide whether I want to put a Geforce 3 or 4 I've "borrowed" from a work closet full of "junk" on the P III board, and it's remarkable how quickly hardware fell into mismatch. You see reviews from the time, and posts on enthusiast forums quickly pointing out that just about anything after a Geforce 2 will be bottlenecked on "only" a gigahertz machine.
Meanwhile, my PC is coming up on 2 years old. It's got a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 2070 Super. In the next year, I'm not sure I'm expecting anything new beyond what is already on the market, aside from maybe a Ryzen 5000 series refresh? I've heard rumors of an RTX 3000 series refresh as well, but Nvidia is under no market pressure to do so. So where does that leave me? Three years on, I could get a CPU or GPU in the same class that is about 20-30% faster? At exorbitant prices?
Well, CPUs are reasonable I guess.
On the one hand, the longevity of the hardware you can buy now is outstanding. On the other hand, it sure does feel boring.
Anyways, expect some glamor shots of my completed P233MMX/Riva128 retro build soon. I even got fancy, and since I'm using a "Super" Socket 7 board, clocked the 233 at 250 with a 100 Mhz FSB and PC100 ram. It was free performance, and got my Q2 FPS into a steady 30.
Next year is when AMD are scheduled to launch Zen4 on 5nm with DDR5 (Q4). Plus MCM video cards (sure they're expensive but you can save on heating!). Plus however Alder Lake does, plus the successor whose name temporarily escapes me. Plus Nvidia's new arch which looks very promising.
The fly in the ointment is that tech scarcity will still be happening so stuff is going to be priced in kidneys per ghz..
So I’m rebuilding my PC this weekend. That I built in June. It’s been an ordeal.
Motherboard (ASUS X570 Strix-e) functioned fine but then began a slow death in mid September; blue screen restart loop that I eventually traced to one of the two Ethernet ports; straight up can’t plug anything in without bricking my system. The second Ethernet port didn’t crash but didn’t function right either, and windows could no longer initialise the onboard wifi even after a reinstall.
Rebuild was delayed due to my whole state being locked down. In the meantime I used a wireless dongle but the system developed an additional fault where certain USB ports will randomly crash my entire system while being used; got around that by moving all my peripherals to a different set of ports.
Finally dismantled the system (I needed a little help) and went for a warranty swap which the company was happy to do but…they’re out of stock. Offered me an ASUS X570 TUF as all they had, which is notably inferior. So I’m warranty REFUNDING that instead, and have bought a different board from another store so I can rebuild my PC and no longer be computerless.
"Life before death, strength before weakness, journey before destination."
I'm thinking I'm going to grab a new PC before the end of the year so it's time to talk to people who spend way more of their free time learning about this sort of thing than I do!
In 2015 I built a computer that's served me well. It's an i5-6600 3.30Ghz CPU with 16 GB RAM and a GTX 970 that I put in later. It cost like $1000 initially.
What kind of computer do you need? Standard gaming PC, basically hoping to do general bullshit with a computer that no longer randomly bluescreens + skip a console generation. What's your budget for this project? About $2000 for the box, with some wiggle room. What needs to be included in that budget? I may also want a monitor, which I would be willing to moderately bump the price up to get but I'm not interested in going to like 4K ultrawide. I've been at 1920 x 1080 for a long while and I'm interested in hopping up a level to 1440p, and also not having a bunch of tearing issues. What are your performance needs? For games, what resolution do you game at, and what kind of performance do you want to see there? It will be primarily about web browsing + game playing with a little bit of not very intensive useful work, so it'd be neat to be able to play the current gen at reliable 60FPS/1440p though if I'm honest I frequently pop things on the TV which is I think 720p so Do you have any partiality towards specific manufacturers, like Intel/AMD, AMD/NVIDIA, or perhaps specific vendors? Nope! I'm figuring on going with NVIDIA because that seems to be the current top choice with the 3000-series but if someone knows a reason that AMD would be better/cheaper I'm totally open to it. Do you have any specific needs? That is, are you looking for quiet operation, small form factor, significant upgrade-ability, or other specific features? As long as it's quieter than my PS4 I don't care, and my current one is the largest case I've ever seen so really anything will be a smaller form factor. I'm open to any ideas about convenience features, though. Mostly what I want to do is to be able to easily pop things back and forth to the TV and duplicate the display to the TV so my partner can watch while I play one of the games too finicky to do from 10 feet away on a TV. I think that's basically taken care of by a card with multiple HDMI ports though.
The Halloween Deal at CyberpowerPC looks pretty good to me and saves me refreshing the Best Buy site for days, but I also haven't built a PC since 2015 so I'm very out of the loop.
My big questions are
CPU: Am I correct in assuming that an i7 is a sweet spot for a machine that will likely end up being mostly for games, or could I drop that to an i5 without noticing much? Motherboard: Is there anything I really need to know about in order to avoid setting myself up for annoyance in any future upgrades? GPU: Similarly, a 3070 seems like the sweet spot for power vs. price. The 3060 seems to be a pretty steep dropoff to save $200, and the 3080 seems like not that much more performance for $500. And the 3090 costs about as much as the machine I would like to build. RAM: I have 16GB in my current machine. Is that also fine still for the new one? I was kind of surprised to not see 128GB builds or something, that's just one of the things I got used to doubling every time I built a new computer. Hard Drives: Is it now the case that you can relatively safely write to and delete from an SSD a ton without fucking things up? I recall that being a reason I went back to storing most of my game library on a big HDD, but it would be neat to have some stuff on the speedier drive so long as repeatedly installing and uninstalling what I'm sure will be 500GB games soon enough doesn't degrade it. And anything significant I should know about current HDDs beyond higher RPM + bigger size = costs more? Sound Cards: These are still totally a trap, right? I feel like I've literally never heard anyone say anything good about sound cards. Cooling: So the CyberpowerPC stuff all comes with a variety of cooling options, and it seems like it defaults to what I assume is kinda shitty liquid-cooling, and the most basic-looking fans. What should I do here? I've basically fucked up all my prior cooling/ventilation solutions to some degree or another. Including the fun time where I found out my thermal past had totally cooked off like 6 months later... I would really like to get this right. Case: I don't really care too much about aesthetics beyond not being super into RGB glowiness, so mostly this relates to cooling/ventilation or other case features I'm not aware of. Other bullshit: I generally figure all the various protection/warranty stuff is probably BS on a site like this, anything look reasonable? Like the Extra Special Wiring and Really Good Thermal Paste and Special Packaging stuff they've got listed.
Also anyone have an idea for what 35 characters I could laser-etch onto the case for $9? My partner has suggested "I AM A FART" but I don't know if that's necessarily what I want to go with.
I'd say for a $2000 price point that Halloween deal seems pretty good.
In your price range the 3070 seems to be the sweet spot for video cards, and an i5 is probably perfectly acceptable if you need to cut somewhere, but an i7 is of course a better bet. I wouldn't worry too too much about the motherboard screwing you for future upgrades, the chipsets tend to go obsolete pretty quickly for CPU upgrades either way and you should get plenty of years before that i7 is a bottleneck.
16G RAM is acceptable but we're getting to the point where I'd seriously consider going with 32G for near-future proofing. More than 32G is just spending extra money unless you have a defined need.
SSDs are fine and affordable for pretty much everything - reliability isn't really an issue. HDD are really just for slow bulk storage anymore but your OS and games are going to be installed on an SSD. 1TB is adequate for a main drive but 2TB is better but even that may start to fill up faster than you would like depending on the games you play.
Sound Cards I dunno? I use whatever is built in and its fine, never felt I was missing anything.
As long as you're not doing overclocking the standard 120mm AIO should be sufficient for CPU cooling. You can get better if you need it but if you're looking for a turnkey solution I'd just go with that.
You can probably look around and find deals that are a bit better / worse, I'd cross-shop MicroCenter if there's one in your area, but its definitely a solid system I'd feel comfortable buying without fear of buyers remorse / FOMO.
+2
jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
Re: Sound Cards
Any sound card that's sufficiently better than on-board audio isn't sufficiently cheaper than a Modi/Magni Schittstack. which is a killer entry level audiophile setup.
That being said, most on-board audio is decent enough these days even on cheaper systems.
Yeah, I think if you're asking "do I need a dedicated sound card" you absolutely do not need a dedicated sound card. You already know if you do or not.
For $2200 that seems like a reasonable deal. It has the new generation Intel CPU's but it's not paired with the new DDR5 which seems like an odd choice. The reviews for those CPU's and the effects of DDR5 are due soon, so we don't know the performance compared to Ryzen 3. I'd also pay the extra $20-50 for a 240/280/360mm AIO because the 120/140 are always terrible value compared to a good quality tower air cooler that costs half as much retail.
There look to be a lot of systems on sale in the $2000-2500 range with good specs but all need some level of tweaking. Cyberpower seems to love pairing everything with the 120/140 AIO's which I'll reiterate are junk. I'm sorry don't have the time today to spec out a better system so hopefully someone else here can make some tweaks and keep things in your price range.
Okay, So I want to replace my really old SSD, or at least get windows off it. I got Samsung magician (Every one of my drives is Samsung).
I see how I can copy over my old drive to my new one. Only issue I have is for all my life, boot drive has been C. I like instinctually knowing which drive is my boot with out a second thought. Went online and changing the letters seems easy enough. If I move my drive over and rename the new one C, will that allow my computer to boot, or potentially mess things up. Am I even making sense?
Okay, So I want to replace my really old SSD, or at least get windows off it. I got Samsung magician (Every one of my drives is Samsung).
I see how I can copy over my old drive to my new one. Only issue I have is for all my life, boot drive has been C. I like instinctually knowing which drive is my boot with out a second thought. Went online and changing the letters seems easy enough. If I move my drive over and rename the new one C, will that allow my computer to boot, or potentially mess things up. Am I even making sense?
A quick search about Samsung Magician tells me that the Samsung Data Migration tool in the software will clone the drive. So you plug in the new drive, run the samsung data migration tool, clone the drive, then turn the computer off and unplug the old drive. And then you're done. Once you boot it back up it should function just as it did before.
Sir CarcassI have been shown the end of my worldRound Rock, TXRegistered Userregular
Quick question about hard drives. I have 2 aging platter drives (a 1TB and a 256GB) that I use mostly for file storage but have some games and programs on. I use my nvme SSD for most things, but will put less important/taxing things on these other drives. I'm looking to replace those 2 drives with something newer, and was thinking of getting 2 HDDs to put in a RAID 1 setup. I can get 2 WD Blue 4TB drives for about $150, which is the most I'm willing to spend on this. These drives are 5400RPM vs my current 7200RPM drives, but I'm getting the impression with that not really being a big difference these days with a SSD primary drive. Are there any pitfalls to going this route that I'm not aware of or is there anything markedly better? I know there is still a risk of data loss in this scenario, but I'm more concerned with drives just dying due to mechanical breakdown than something like a power surge. I'm not really looking for anything like NAS for this (and that's pricey, anyway). Thanks!
Okay, So I want to replace my really old SSD, or at least get windows off it. I got Samsung magician (Every one of my drives is Samsung).
I see how I can copy over my old drive to my new one. Only issue I have is for all my life, boot drive has been C. I like instinctually knowing which drive is my boot with out a second thought. Went online and changing the letters seems easy enough. If I move my drive over and rename the new one C, will that allow my computer to boot, or potentially mess things up. Am I even making sense?
A quick search about Samsung Magician tells me that the Samsung Data Migration tool in the software will clone the drive. So you plug in the new drive, run the samsung data migration tool, clone the drive, then turn the computer off and unplug the old drive. And then you're done. Once you boot it back up it should function just as it did before.
If I want to use the old drive again, how do I remove windows from it? I read in the mean time a fresh install is recommended, and it doesn't seem to hard. The only thing I don't get if if I want to use the old drive, 1) wouldn't everything on there be lost when I reformat it and 2) if not, how do I remove the second copy of windows?
Okay, So I want to replace my really old SSD, or at least get windows off it. I got Samsung magician (Every one of my drives is Samsung).
I see how I can copy over my old drive to my new one. Only issue I have is for all my life, boot drive has been C. I like instinctually knowing which drive is my boot with out a second thought. Went online and changing the letters seems easy enough. If I move my drive over and rename the new one C, will that allow my computer to boot, or potentially mess things up. Am I even making sense?
A quick search about Samsung Magician tells me that the Samsung Data Migration tool in the software will clone the drive. So you plug in the new drive, run the samsung data migration tool, clone the drive, then turn the computer off and unplug the old drive. And then you're done. Once you boot it back up it should function just as it did before.
If I want to use the old drive again, how do I remove windows from it? I read in the mean time a fresh install is recommended, and it doesn't seem to hard. The only thing I don't get if if I want to use the old drive, 1) wouldn't everything on there be lost when I reformat it and 2) if not, how do I remove the second copy of windows?
If you're cloning the drive anyway, you could probably just reformat the drive to get it back to a clean slate
Okay, So I want to replace my really old SSD, or at least get windows off it. I got Samsung magician (Every one of my drives is Samsung).
I see how I can copy over my old drive to my new one. Only issue I have is for all my life, boot drive has been C. I like instinctually knowing which drive is my boot with out a second thought. Went online and changing the letters seems easy enough. If I move my drive over and rename the new one C, will that allow my computer to boot, or potentially mess things up. Am I even making sense?
A quick search about Samsung Magician tells me that the Samsung Data Migration tool in the software will clone the drive. So you plug in the new drive, run the samsung data migration tool, clone the drive, then turn the computer off and unplug the old drive. And then you're done. Once you boot it back up it should function just as it did before.
If I want to use the old drive again, how do I remove windows from it? I read in the mean time a fresh install is recommended, and it doesn't seem to hard. The only thing I don't get if if I want to use the old drive, 1) wouldn't everything on there be lost when I reformat it and 2) if not, how do I remove the second copy of windows?
if you're just cloning the drive and not replacing any other hardware, you don't really need a fresh install of windows, beyond you just wanting to do one for other reasons. clone the entire contents of the drive, and then you can just wipe the old drive. I would clone it, unplug the old drive and boot it once to make sure it all works fine, and then you can plug the old drive in again and wipe it. You then have the new drive with all of the data from the old drive, and an empty drive to do with as you wish.
It's been a long time since I did a fresh installed, so I figured it couldn't hurt anything.
if you do decide to do a fresh install, then unplug the old drive and do a windows install with only the new drive plugged in. plug the old drive back in once you have windows installed and up to date. Then move any data you want off the old drive, and then wipe the old drive. Since there's a windows install on the old drive, I really recommend wiping it just to ensure that the old windows install is gone for good. You can then do what you want with the drive.
couple tips: have a backup of everything you want to keep, just in case. Not one one of the two drives you're working on. a completely separate backup that you should already have.
secondly, use a different wallpaper on your new install than you have on your existing windows install. that way if you plug the old drive in and it boots to that drive for some reason, it's easy to tell the difference. If that happens, you'll have to go into the bios/uefi and change the boot order to boot to the new drive first.
I have so, so my SSD's slammed in my PC. So I figured I'd move over all the files I want to a third drive before hand.
The drive I want windows on is currently formatted, but I already cleaned it out. Will that be a problem?
What I'm hearing is my steps are:
Remove all files I want to keep off old hard drive to third one
Get windows on USB stick
Remove old boot drive
Disconnect all other drives except the new boot
Install windows
Make sure it works
Reconnect all drives
Reconnect old boot
Wipe old boot
Taking a look at the Halloween deal with y'all's input:
- Added Asetek 670LS 240mm Gen 6 Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ Copper Cold Plate + 2x Phanteks SK120 PWM Radiator Fans which is $45, based on Cormac's insistence that 120mm was actual shit. I have no basis for comparison so I trust an authoritative internet person.
- Removed all but the 1TB WD Blue SN550 Series PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD for storage, I'm going to just grab either another bigger SSD and/or an SSD and a big platter drive somewhere else. Looking at the drives on offer beyond this one none of them are particularly amazing prices from Cyberpower.
- Added a 750w power supply... which seems like too much? Is that too much? Is 600w too little? I'd be happy with 600w if it's not going to cause issues, this is just a matter of seeing that 750w was $2 extra and figuring higher numbers = good, but I feel like there are probably downsides to having a gigantic power supply?
Oh! And final question: Should I go with Windows 10 or 11? I find 10 perfectly fine, 11 is in the "trust us it'll be 100% better for everything" vs "wow the new OS is shit" stage, which is it according to this thread?
So after that, with 5% off for not giving a shit about shipping times, this is ~$2150
I figure that breaks down roughly to:
$500 for a 3070
$400 for an i7
$220 for the motherboard
$100 for storage
$130 for Windows
$200-ish for various other hardware like the power supply and RAM
Which is like $1550, leaving $600 for labor costs/other
I guess if I'm being honest the average price for a 3070 is more like $750 now... so call it $350 for labor? I feel like that's probably reasonable, particularly as I know I'd be freaking out about putting this together since it's been so long.
Also I checked and unfortunately my nearest Microcenter is like two and a half hours away which is more than I'd be willing to drive for anything but a real good deal. The only thing showing up on their site that contains a GTX 3070 is either a $1500 or $1700 bare-bones setup that seems to be the card itself and either a $350 or $180 motherboard. Which seems like not worth the hassle of 5-6 hours of driving.
Iirc, microcenter prebuilds can use basically any part they have in stock, so you can actually get babe brand cooler, hard drives, ram, and psus instead of the overpriced grab bag you have there. Not sure if it's worth driving 2 hours for though.
Can't speak for everybody but 11 has been just fine for me, loaded it launch day. You can always upgrade to 11 for free down the road if you feel more comfortable with 10 though.
Can't speak for everybody but 11 has been just fine for me, loaded it launch day. You can always upgrade to 11 for free down the road if you feel more comfortable with 10 though.
I'd have no concerns going with the newest Windows on a mid to high end system at all.
I might not rush to upgrade my system, and if I was on something low end I'd probably stick to what already works.
But most complaints about new Windows versions have traditionally been people trying to run in on inadequate hardware, or people who absolutely hate change. If you arent one of those you should be fine.
I figure I'll upgrade to 11 when I have a more concrete reason to than "it's new".
Also maybe when Windows 10 hits EOL.
If, and it's still a big if, Intels new chips are legit, then Windows 11's scheduler is probably going to represent a significant boost in performance.
This of course requires two things
A - Intels chips being the new hotness. They also are forcing reviews to only be released on the day of release, which gives me reason to doubt they've got the uplift Intel claims they do (They tested a 5950X on a Win 11 machine pre-fix)
B - Windows 11 scheduler likewise being the new hotness. This is firmly within the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp.
I hope both are true because it's going to keep AMD from getting complacent, which we already kind of saw a bit in the 5000 series release.
I've been running 11 since release and have had zero issues aside from getting used to some of it's interface quirks. I did notice a small performance loss before the L3 cache issue was fixed very quickly. There was this tiny bit of lag when opening folders but I saw zero difference when gaming.
For me upgrading was easier than doing a clean install of 10. For some reason I was never able to figure out or rectify I could not install major OS updates since March. I must have spent 8-10 hours trying every possible fix and suggestion I could find and nothing worked. I still may do a clean install of 11 before FFXIV Endwalker comes out because I often get a bug where my Downloads folder will refuse to open until I start deleting files in it by accessing it through Bandizip.
@durandal4532 Microcenter can also assemble a PC for you from the ground up using any of their in-house parts. I want to say the fee is on the order of $150 but I haven't used the service. Their in-house brand builds are the Powerspec brand. I suspect like you noted, you'll still be hamstrung by GPU availability. It was at least worth a look so you have another comparison. (it's also a tech junkie's paradise and I have to stop myself from buying nice but ultimately useless items because they'd just be spares)
Regarding PSUs -- this goes WAAAYYYY into the weeds, but using a higher wattage PSU on a lower-spec (power wise) system doesn't mean the PSU runs at peak efficiency. I'd have to go back and check info from GamersNexus, but ~50-60% load gives peak efficiency. That being said, a higher wattage PSU will probably run cooler and quieter since it won't need to have its fan spinning. Also you won't see any effect on your overall performance, so it's just graph epeen at the end of the day. The PSU will only provide the power the computer needs and not any more (i.e. a 600W and a 750W will still only provide 400W to a system drawing 400W)
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edit: I want to expand on this question. When I bought this Meshify C, I just used the stock fans, front and back. Using a NH-D15 cooler on the CPU. What is the recommended configuration and what types of fans?
Hard to beat whatever size Fractal case suits your needs if you don’t care about glass windows and seeing RGB lighting.
Caveat that I've read people saying they have a particular tone at certain rpms that might bother you.
If noise isn’t a concern, Cryorig makes some serious air movers.
If you want a balance of noise/performance then Noctua is kind of difficult to beat.
So I won an auction for $20 for an ASUS CULS2-C motherboard. This is an old Pentium III platform. Threw a 1.0 Ghz Coppermine-T in there. It's not the exact same processor, but it's basically the same as the P III 1000 that came out in March 2000 for almost $1000. A Geforce 2 GTS would have come out a month later.
Consider at the tail end of 1997 when a Pentium II 300 was just hands down one of the fastest CPUs you could get your hands on, and a fully decked out OEM system with one would run you $4000 in 1997 money. Probably something closer to $6500 now. And in three short years, CPUs were fully over 3x faster, to say nothing of broader architectural improvements. Like the FSB going from 66 Mhz to 133 Mhz. Or going from PCI to AGP 4x. And that GF2 would be so far and away better than the Voodoo or Riva128 you would have had access to in 1997 as well! How many times better could you even say it was? It had over 10x the VRAM, could push many multiples the pixels more, had all manner of advanced capabilities.
And then 3 years later you had the first Athlon 64s which all ran in the 2 Ghz range, once again fully doubling on hz alone, with other performance multiples found in architectural improvements as well. Like DDR memory and integrated memory controllers. And stretching just a little bit more you got the Geforce 6 series which was one of the most groundbreaking leaps in performance we'd seen until the recent RTX 3000 series came out. Which would have been all the more impressive if prices hadn't more than risen to match.
So anyways, I'm trying to decide whether I want to put a Geforce 3 or 4 I've "borrowed" from a work closet full of "junk" on the P III board, and it's remarkable how quickly hardware fell into mismatch. You see reviews from the time, and posts on enthusiast forums quickly pointing out that just about anything after a Geforce 2 will be bottlenecked on "only" a gigahertz machine.
Meanwhile, my PC is coming up on 2 years old. It's got a Ryzen 3700X and an RTX 2070 Super. In the next year, I'm not sure I'm expecting anything new beyond what is already on the market, aside from maybe a Ryzen 5000 series refresh? I've heard rumors of an RTX 3000 series refresh as well, but Nvidia is under no market pressure to do so. So where does that leave me? Three years on, I could get a CPU or GPU in the same class that is about 20-30% faster? At exorbitant prices?
Well, CPUs are reasonable I guess.
On the one hand, the longevity of the hardware you can buy now is outstanding. On the other hand, it sure does feel boring.
Anyways, expect some glamor shots of my completed P233MMX/Riva128 retro build soon. I even got fancy, and since I'm using a "Super" Socket 7 board, clocked the 233 at 250 with a 100 Mhz FSB and PC100 ram. It was free performance, and got my Q2 FPS into a steady 30.
I tried to get it to run at 1900mhz but my card just can't do it at 825mv and 825mv was my real goal. I had it up to 1890 and it felt stable, but backed it off to 1875. Didn't feel the need to push the ragged edge.
The promised glamor shot. I went all out on that ancient Evercase model from the UK. Paired it with some beefy Yamaha speakers and a matching subwoofer under the table you can't see. And take a close look at that case badge too. Has an SD to IDE converter, and I found a nice 3D printed bay mount for it so I can easily pull the card and move files over.
Also funny story. Tried installing the Geforce 3 on that CUSL2-C board, and it just beeped that it could find a graphics card, and then didn't want to boot again when I put the Geforce 4 back in. Got it back eventually after a few tense moment of just leaving it off and clearing the CMOS.
So that's a scary card to try again. Think I'll just stick with the Geforce 4, no matter how mismatched it is with a Pentium III.
Next year is when AMD are scheduled to launch Zen4 on 5nm with DDR5 (Q4). Plus MCM video cards (sure they're expensive but you can save on heating!). Plus however Alder Lake does, plus the successor whose name temporarily escapes me. Plus Nvidia's new arch which looks very promising.
The fly in the ointment is that tech scarcity will still be happening so stuff is going to be priced in kidneys per ghz..
https://slickdeals.net/f/15355552-500w-seasonic-focus-sgx-500-80-gold-modular-sfx-l-power-supply-newegg-ar-45
Motherboard (ASUS X570 Strix-e) functioned fine but then began a slow death in mid September; blue screen restart loop that I eventually traced to one of the two Ethernet ports; straight up can’t plug anything in without bricking my system. The second Ethernet port didn’t crash but didn’t function right either, and windows could no longer initialise the onboard wifi even after a reinstall.
Rebuild was delayed due to my whole state being locked down. In the meantime I used a wireless dongle but the system developed an additional fault where certain USB ports will randomly crash my entire system while being used; got around that by moving all my peripherals to a different set of ports.
Finally dismantled the system (I needed a little help) and went for a warranty swap which the company was happy to do but…they’re out of stock. Offered me an ASUS X570 TUF as all they had, which is notably inferior. So I’m warranty REFUNDING that instead, and have bought a different board from another store so I can rebuild my PC and no longer be computerless.
In 2015 I built a computer that's served me well. It's an i5-6600 3.30Ghz CPU with 16 GB RAM and a GTX 970 that I put in later. It cost like $1000 initially.
What kind of computer do you need? Standard gaming PC, basically hoping to do general bullshit with a computer that no longer randomly bluescreens + skip a console generation.
What's your budget for this project? About $2000 for the box, with some wiggle room.
What needs to be included in that budget? I may also want a monitor, which I would be willing to moderately bump the price up to get but I'm not interested in going to like 4K ultrawide. I've been at 1920 x 1080 for a long while and I'm interested in hopping up a level to 1440p, and also not having a bunch of tearing issues.
What are your performance needs? For games, what resolution do you game at, and what kind of performance do you want to see there? It will be primarily about web browsing + game playing with a little bit of not very intensive useful work, so it'd be neat to be able to play the current gen at reliable 60FPS/1440p though if I'm honest I frequently pop things on the TV which is I think 720p so
Do you have any partiality towards specific manufacturers, like Intel/AMD, AMD/NVIDIA, or perhaps specific vendors? Nope! I'm figuring on going with NVIDIA because that seems to be the current top choice with the 3000-series but if someone knows a reason that AMD would be better/cheaper I'm totally open to it.
Do you have any specific needs? That is, are you looking for quiet operation, small form factor, significant upgrade-ability, or other specific features? As long as it's quieter than my PS4 I don't care, and my current one is the largest case I've ever seen so really anything will be a smaller form factor. I'm open to any ideas about convenience features, though. Mostly what I want to do is to be able to easily pop things back and forth to the TV and duplicate the display to the TV so my partner can watch while I play one of the games too finicky to do from 10 feet away on a TV. I think that's basically taken care of by a card with multiple HDMI ports though.
The Halloween Deal at CyberpowerPC looks pretty good to me and saves me refreshing the Best Buy site for days, but I also haven't built a PC since 2015 so I'm very out of the loop.
My big questions are
CPU: Am I correct in assuming that an i7 is a sweet spot for a machine that will likely end up being mostly for games, or could I drop that to an i5 without noticing much?
Motherboard: Is there anything I really need to know about in order to avoid setting myself up for annoyance in any future upgrades?
GPU: Similarly, a 3070 seems like the sweet spot for power vs. price. The 3060 seems to be a pretty steep dropoff to save $200, and the 3080 seems like not that much more performance for $500. And the 3090 costs about as much as the machine I would like to build.
RAM: I have 16GB in my current machine. Is that also fine still for the new one? I was kind of surprised to not see 128GB builds or something, that's just one of the things I got used to doubling every time I built a new computer.
Hard Drives: Is it now the case that you can relatively safely write to and delete from an SSD a ton without fucking things up? I recall that being a reason I went back to storing most of my game library on a big HDD, but it would be neat to have some stuff on the speedier drive so long as repeatedly installing and uninstalling what I'm sure will be 500GB games soon enough doesn't degrade it. And anything significant I should know about current HDDs beyond higher RPM + bigger size = costs more?
Sound Cards: These are still totally a trap, right? I feel like I've literally never heard anyone say anything good about sound cards.
Cooling: So the CyberpowerPC stuff all comes with a variety of cooling options, and it seems like it defaults to what I assume is kinda shitty liquid-cooling, and the most basic-looking fans. What should I do here? I've basically fucked up all my prior cooling/ventilation solutions to some degree or another. Including the fun time where I found out my thermal past had totally cooked off like 6 months later... I would really like to get this right.
Case: I don't really care too much about aesthetics beyond not being super into RGB glowiness, so mostly this relates to cooling/ventilation or other case features I'm not aware of.
Other bullshit: I generally figure all the various protection/warranty stuff is probably BS on a site like this, anything look reasonable? Like the Extra Special Wiring and Really Good Thermal Paste and Special Packaging stuff they've got listed.
Also anyone have an idea for what 35 characters I could laser-etch onto the case for $9? My partner has suggested "I AM A FART" but I don't know if that's necessarily what I want to go with.
In your price range the 3070 seems to be the sweet spot for video cards, and an i5 is probably perfectly acceptable if you need to cut somewhere, but an i7 is of course a better bet. I wouldn't worry too too much about the motherboard screwing you for future upgrades, the chipsets tend to go obsolete pretty quickly for CPU upgrades either way and you should get plenty of years before that i7 is a bottleneck.
16G RAM is acceptable but we're getting to the point where I'd seriously consider going with 32G for near-future proofing. More than 32G is just spending extra money unless you have a defined need.
SSDs are fine and affordable for pretty much everything - reliability isn't really an issue. HDD are really just for slow bulk storage anymore but your OS and games are going to be installed on an SSD. 1TB is adequate for a main drive but 2TB is better but even that may start to fill up faster than you would like depending on the games you play.
Sound Cards I dunno? I use whatever is built in and its fine, never felt I was missing anything.
As long as you're not doing overclocking the standard 120mm AIO should be sufficient for CPU cooling. You can get better if you need it but if you're looking for a turnkey solution I'd just go with that.
You can probably look around and find deals that are a bit better / worse, I'd cross-shop MicroCenter if there's one in your area, but its definitely a solid system I'd feel comfortable buying without fear of buyers remorse / FOMO.
Any sound card that's sufficiently better than on-board audio isn't sufficiently cheaper than a Modi/Magni Schittstack. which is a killer entry level audiophile setup.
That being said, most on-board audio is decent enough these days even on cheaper systems.
There look to be a lot of systems on sale in the $2000-2500 range with good specs but all need some level of tweaking. Cyberpower seems to love pairing everything with the 120/140 AIO's which I'll reiterate are junk. I'm sorry don't have the time today to spec out a better system so hopefully someone else here can make some tweaks and keep things in your price range.
I see how I can copy over my old drive to my new one. Only issue I have is for all my life, boot drive has been C. I like instinctually knowing which drive is my boot with out a second thought. Went online and changing the letters seems easy enough. If I move my drive over and rename the new one C, will that allow my computer to boot, or potentially mess things up. Am I even making sense?
A quick search about Samsung Magician tells me that the Samsung Data Migration tool in the software will clone the drive. So you plug in the new drive, run the samsung data migration tool, clone the drive, then turn the computer off and unplug the old drive. And then you're done. Once you boot it back up it should function just as it did before.
Steam Support is the worst. Seriously, the worst
If I want to use the old drive again, how do I remove windows from it? I read in the mean time a fresh install is recommended, and it doesn't seem to hard. The only thing I don't get if if I want to use the old drive, 1) wouldn't everything on there be lost when I reformat it and 2) if not, how do I remove the second copy of windows?
If you're cloning the drive anyway, you could probably just reformat the drive to get it back to a clean slate
if you're just cloning the drive and not replacing any other hardware, you don't really need a fresh install of windows, beyond you just wanting to do one for other reasons. clone the entire contents of the drive, and then you can just wipe the old drive. I would clone it, unplug the old drive and boot it once to make sure it all works fine, and then you can plug the old drive in again and wipe it. You then have the new drive with all of the data from the old drive, and an empty drive to do with as you wish.
if you do decide to do a fresh install, then unplug the old drive and do a windows install with only the new drive plugged in. plug the old drive back in once you have windows installed and up to date. Then move any data you want off the old drive, and then wipe the old drive. Since there's a windows install on the old drive, I really recommend wiping it just to ensure that the old windows install is gone for good. You can then do what you want with the drive.
couple tips: have a backup of everything you want to keep, just in case. Not one one of the two drives you're working on. a completely separate backup that you should already have.
secondly, use a different wallpaper on your new install than you have on your existing windows install. that way if you plug the old drive in and it boots to that drive for some reason, it's easy to tell the difference. If that happens, you'll have to go into the bios/uefi and change the boot order to boot to the new drive first.
The drive I want windows on is currently formatted, but I already cleaned it out. Will that be a problem?
What I'm hearing is my steps are:
Remove all files I want to keep off old hard drive to third one
Get windows on USB stick
Remove old boot drive
Disconnect all other drives except the new boot
Install windows
Make sure it works
Reconnect all drives
Reconnect old boot
Wipe old boot
- Added Asetek 670LS 240mm Gen 6 Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ Copper Cold Plate + 2x Phanteks SK120 PWM Radiator Fans which is $45, based on Cormac's insistence that 120mm was actual shit. I have no basis for comparison so I trust an authoritative internet person.
- Removed all but the 1TB WD Blue SN550 Series PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD for storage, I'm going to just grab either another bigger SSD and/or an SSD and a big platter drive somewhere else. Looking at the drives on offer beyond this one none of them are particularly amazing prices from Cyberpower.
- Added a 750w power supply... which seems like too much? Is that too much? Is 600w too little? I'd be happy with 600w if it's not going to cause issues, this is just a matter of seeing that 750w was $2 extra and figuring higher numbers = good, but I feel like there are probably downsides to having a gigantic power supply?
Oh! And final question: Should I go with Windows 10 or 11? I find 10 perfectly fine, 11 is in the "trust us it'll be 100% better for everything" vs "wow the new OS is shit" stage, which is it according to this thread?
So after that, with 5% off for not giving a shit about shipping times, this is ~$2150
I figure that breaks down roughly to:
$500 for a 3070
$400 for an i7
$220 for the motherboard
$100 for storage
$130 for Windows
$200-ish for various other hardware like the power supply and RAM
Which is like $1550, leaving $600 for labor costs/other
I guess if I'm being honest the average price for a 3070 is more like $750 now... so call it $350 for labor? I feel like that's probably reasonable, particularly as I know I'd be freaking out about putting this together since it's been so long.
Also I checked and unfortunately my nearest Microcenter is like two and a half hours away which is more than I'd be willing to drive for anything but a real good deal. The only thing showing up on their site that contains a GTX 3070 is either a $1500 or $1700 bare-bones setup that seems to be the card itself and either a $350 or $180 motherboard. Which seems like not worth the hassle of 5-6 hours of driving.
I probably won’t get one, but I’m very curious to see if I should even hold off on 6th gen Ryzen next year and get 2nd gen 10nm Intel.
I'd have no concerns going with the newest Windows on a mid to high end system at all.
I might not rush to upgrade my system, and if I was on something low end I'd probably stick to what already works.
But most complaints about new Windows versions have traditionally been people trying to run in on inadequate hardware, or people who absolutely hate change. If you arent one of those you should be fine.
Also maybe when Windows 10 hits EOL.
If, and it's still a big if, Intels new chips are legit, then Windows 11's scheduler is probably going to represent a significant boost in performance.
This of course requires two things
A - Intels chips being the new hotness. They also are forcing reviews to only be released on the day of release, which gives me reason to doubt they've got the uplift Intel claims they do (They tested a 5950X on a Win 11 machine pre-fix)
B - Windows 11 scheduler likewise being the new hotness. This is firmly within the "I'll believe it when I see it" camp.
I hope both are true because it's going to keep AMD from getting complacent, which we already kind of saw a bit in the 5000 series release.
For me upgrading was easier than doing a clean install of 10. For some reason I was never able to figure out or rectify I could not install major OS updates since March. I must have spent 8-10 hours trying every possible fix and suggestion I could find and nothing worked. I still may do a clean install of 11 before FFXIV Endwalker comes out because I often get a bug where my Downloads folder will refuse to open until I start deleting files in it by accessing it through Bandizip.
Regarding PSUs -- this goes WAAAYYYY into the weeds, but using a higher wattage PSU on a lower-spec (power wise) system doesn't mean the PSU runs at peak efficiency. I'd have to go back and check info from GamersNexus, but ~50-60% load gives peak efficiency. That being said, a higher wattage PSU will probably run cooler and quieter since it won't need to have its fan spinning. Also you won't see any effect on your overall performance, so it's just graph epeen at the end of the day. The PSU will only provide the power the computer needs and not any more (i.e. a 600W and a 750W will still only provide 400W to a system drawing 400W)