EPTComputer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 743
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When using this resource, please read the opening post. The Tech Support forum regulars have helped create countless of desktop systems without any compensation. The least you can do is provide all of the information required for them to help you properly. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8986 Posts
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ZerOCoolSC2
8986 Posts
So far I got the mobo, case, ram, gpu, and cpu. I'll get the PSU, fans, storage next. Then everything will be done and I can start the build. I'll post pics of everything once it all arrives. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
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SC-Shield
Bulgaria826 Posts
 By the way, I haven't found a game which I can't run on RTX 3080 yet but I guess such games will appear soon if not already. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
On February 18 2024 02:16 SC-Shield wrote: It's been almost 3 years since I built my latest PC. Is there any good roadmap in the next 1-2 years worth upgrading to in the future? E.g. RTX 5000 is for certain, but if you know about CPU perspective that would be greatly appreciated. By the way, I haven't found a game which I can't run on RTX 3080 yet but I guess such games will appear soon if not already. Mid to high end Nvidia on launch, 2-3 gens apart as budget suits (so probably like 5080 for you) has held up as probably the best strategy IMO in the last 15 years, even more so recently. There are a bunch of different factors going into that, e.g. * They hold value very well (with mining booms, my 1080ti and 3080 were both worth more *used* after 1-2 years than i paid for them new, although that's definitely not reliable.. i don't think we've seen the end of the "consumer GPU work for $$" metagame) * I don't feel like the age of the tech is appropriately priced into the market. Having a 3080 on day 1 when it's gonna be king of the hill for 2 years has more consumer value than having one a few months before the 4000 series release. If you could choose between having a 3080 in Sept 2020 through Sept 2024 vs having one in Sept 2022 through Sept 2024, obviously the first option is worth more - but the GPU vendors really don't treat it as such, at least not to the extent that they should. We obviously recognise that e.g. an i7-2600k isn't worth $317 any more, but people seem to lose track of this on shorter timescales like 2-4 years. For example, i don't consider a 4080 super at $1000 mid-gen to be any better value than a 4080 for $1200 on launch - the 4080 was just getting progressively worse and worse value with every passing week, and the 4080 super kicked things back to where they used to be. Both are much worse value than older series, like 1000 and 3000. $200 is the "rent" for running that hardware for the most valuable 14 months of its life. * Efficiency pays. Running older or slower hardware at a given performance level costs more, so past a certain point it's more expensive to run older/slower hardware. This is a big part of why holding onto a graphics card for more than a few gens just doesn't make sense. With current hardware, 2/3'rds of power consumption is the graphics card and 1/3'rd is everything else put together. This might sound kinda silly, but with my system running the vast majority of the time my 4080 super uses 1-2 kilowatt hours per day less than the 3080 which means that keeping the 3080 would cost £10 in month of additional power. That's a pretty WTF number, and one that is rarely taken fully into account when considering keeping a graphics card for a few more years (+£240). You can mitigate it of course, but increased power upkeep on older and less efficient hardware is a serious consideration. The majority of cost that a heavy user experiences for owning a 3080 is not in depreciation of hardware, but in power. Even if you're happy with your current performance level, it actually makes ££ sense to buy a newer/faster card which is more efficient in of itself, and then use its performance headroom to heavily undervolt it for massive efficiency gains. As a bonus, this is a walk in the park for the silicon and all of the electronics on the board, so any old board/cooler can do it (no need to buy the expensive ones) and chance of failure when running like that is massively lower than normal. Some numbers: A 3080 FE on Time Spy does about 17,700 points. If i match those power levels with a 4080 super, it does 70% more performance. That matches up decently with TPU's review where they have 4080s at +64% efficiency vs a 3080 in a range of games. If i undervolt the 4080 super as far as it will go, that efficiency lead increases to 2.3x - and the performance is still 60% faster than the 3080. This runs at minimum fan and 45c. If you compare it to an overclocked 3080 the result is even worse - the maximally undervolted 4080s remains 44% faster than the fully overclocked 3080, but the efficiency is now >2.8x higher. Taking numbers like that into account.. this is a single generational change, albeit a solid one for efficiency. You can see how things can get really out of hand with 2 or 3 generations of hardware improvements, as newer hardware can do the same thing - or much better - with a pretty small fraction of the power. That reduction in running cost alone is a seriously large incentive, and one that particularly stings if your card is high end (high power) and already two gens out of date. You can spend more money hanging onto it for too long rather than replacing it, all other benefits aside. ---------- As for 3080 running stuff, the biggest problem that i had was Cyberpunk but that game is just programmed badly and has tons of latency no matter what you do. It's 100% a game problem, the latency goes away for the most part if you play at 300fps but yeah that's not gonna happen. For other games, i have really appreciated the extra power for: * Witcher 3 Remastered - esp. DLSS framegen * Horizon: Zero Dawn - the sequel comes out next month on PC, looks great and includes DLSS framegen also * Stormgate - esp. DLSS framegen * Baldur's Gate 3 - With the 3080 i ran a base resolution of 720p in act 1+2 with 1080p in act 3, while with the 4080 super i run a base resolution of 1080p in act 1+2 and 1620p in act 3 so both visuals and FPS are bumped up. Act 3 is very often CPU heavy enough to force the FPS down to 100-150fps, so it leaves more resolution headroom on the table. On the 3080 with 1080p render, the game would fall to double digits sometimes because of GPU limitations. That won't bother most people i guess, but when you have a GPU doing 90fps and CPU doing 300 i like things to be snappier and smoother - especially since the game doesn't support Reflex. The extra rendering resolution makes a big difference graphically as well. I've averaged 2.6 hours a day in there since August, so the cards get a good workout :D * Doom Eternal with modifications to enable quality far beyond maximum - Unfortunately at least when i tested it before, this required a tool to modify memory in the game while it's running which is very much not a good idea to install on a main gaming system/OS. Some games will shoot first and ask questions later when it comes to anticheat even though it has nothing to do with competitive integrity, it's just tweaking graphics for a singleplayer campaign. It looks truly amazing though.. and that was even without HDR. Playing HDR + Tweaked RT on a 4k OLED at like 120fps must be godmode experience. -------------------- For CPU, it looks like Zen 5 is going to be mostly the same stuff but better. We don't have very finely tuned performance numbers yet.. the kind of plausible range would be about a 12-30% upgrade, mostly coming from faster cores. AMD's roadmap says 10-15%+ IPC gains, but they have a + on there and at this point they listed +8-10% for Zen 4 which they ended up revising upwards to 14% - that, as well as potential slight clock increases, is why i don't rule out the upper range of that estimation entirely. The memory controller and infinity fabric stuff might get a refresh on the IOD, or might not - this is non-negligable from a performance standpoint as e.g. DDR5-5200 to 5600 buys ~5% performance in many games, as does an increase to the OC ceiling. The L1 data cache is going to be 50% wider (and i believe have 50% more bandwidth along with that, as well as many more changes to feed it) - this is one of the foundations of overall core performance that will affect pretty much everything. They're moving from TSMC N5p to N4p, which is slightly (~4% IIRC) denser and faster with all else being the same. Intel is going to release arrowlake against it, which is basically v2.0 of meteorlake. They made a lot of changes with meteorlake, mainly going to a smaller manufacturing process (Intel 4 rather than Intel 7) and a tiled chiplet architecture connected via in-package silicon bridges (EMIB), but it was overall a pretty bad flop because it was more expensive to produce and it didn't hit either their performance or efficiency targets - being often worse than last gen. They skipped releasing it entirely on desktop, choosing to re-release 13'th gen as 14'th with no hardware change. On laptop they mostly hid behind it having an additional "AI accelerator" which is, at the moment, of highly limited usefulness (AMD's Phoenix chips have one too). It's not entirely clear what went wrong here. Arrowlake is going down a process node *again* (from Intel 4 to Intel 20A, which is another way of writing 2nm basically) and they are supposed to be ironing out teething issues as well as upgrading the Pcore to be much wider so there is hope that it'll leap over the 13'th/14'th gen in both performance and efficiency, competing well against Zen 5. The big elephant in the room is Zen 6. Zen 2 through 5 use the same chiplet with IFOP (infinity fabric on package) interconnect which looks broadly the same. Zen 6 is supposed to be the gen that makes a big step beyond that. The most probable upgrade is to an organic interposer like the one that they used on RDNA3 GPU's. These are somewhat more expensive and complex than the current solution, but far more capable - promising around 10x bandwidth density and a 5x reduction in interconnect power compared to the current solution. We know that these are real numbers because they already exist on RDNA3. It would mean that AMD chips could properly scale onto DDR5 rather than having this weird interconnect which may only be half as fast as the memory sometimes. It would massively reduce interconnect power despite that, a substantial weakness in the current parts. It could also improve latency. Such a fundamental change in packaging also opens up more possibilities when it comes to different chiplets working together or sharing cache pools, and this is a very sensitive area for gaming performance. One of the biggest questions for Zen 6 it what platform it's going to run on. It seems likely that it will be released on AM5, and if so, that would be a real gamechanger as a drop-in upgrade. It's not guaranteed or confirmed yet, though. It would be the difference between AM5 having a "meh" legacy vs a truly awesome one. Intel by comparison, released only very minor revisions on their LGA1700 socket and have dropped it already, with their zen 5 competitor coming on a new socket. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8986 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
Liquid Freezer 3 420 for 82 euros for example. The LF3 looks basically slightly better than the LF2 but only iteratively so. | ||
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SC-Shield
Bulgaria826 Posts
I agree about energy efficiency as well. Here energy consumption at domestic level is still not on the free market or whatever is called, so prices are fine. I think they intend to change that from 2026. Business is on the free market for energy though. However, it's not just that - I especially dislike the idea of having to cool a CPU that runs 200-250 W and it seems Intel is going in this direction where they don't care about efficiency as much as AMD. This just forces you to buy a really good cooler, which costs money and if you pick the wrong one, you end up with noise which is even worse... Anyway, thanks once again! | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8986 Posts
On February 21 2024 16:37 Cyro wrote: Arctic listed some insane deals yesterday, maybe europe only though - https://www.arctic.de/en/23YearsARCTIC/ Liquid Freezer 3 420 for 82 euros for example. The LF3 looks basically slightly better than the LF2 but only iteratively so. They have the deails on amazon. 110$ for the LF3. It does look nice and very functional. If the NZXT doesn't work out, I'll give them a look. I was not expecting this GPU to be so monstrous. Have to get a vertical mount just so it has sufficient room and the cable isn't pressing against the side panel. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
On February 21 2024 21:28 SC-Shield wrote: Thanks for insights Cyro! It sounds like a good idea to wait for Zen 6 in my case. My Ryzen 5900x is still going strong, I don't usually hit its limits and I don't play such games which are that CPU intensive apart from SC2 where frames are ok enough. It sounds like Zen 6 will bring a lot of improvements. I agree about energy efficiency as well. Here energy consumption at domestic level is still not on the free market or whatever is called, so prices are fine. I think they intend to change that from 2026. Business is on the free market for energy though. However, it's not just that - I especially dislike the idea of having to cool a CPU that runs 200-250 W and it seems Intel is going in this direction where they don't care about efficiency as much as AMD. This just forces you to buy a really good cooler, which costs money and if you pick the wrong one, you end up with noise which is even worse... Anyway, thanks once again! Zen 4 and vcache are both pretty strong on SC2 so 5900x > 7800x3d is over 1.5x but yeah, by zen 6 that could be a 2.5x or something. Even if gains are fairly incremental, 1.5 * 1.2 * 1.2 is 2.16x. For efficiency, i expect Arrowlake to be massively more efficient than current options and also running at lower clock speeds but who knows, really. The part that really annoys me TBH is that Intel is quite far behind on their power management and clock controls, so you actually have to configure them carefully so that they never hit their max temperature because they will stutter if they do. AMD shipped products in 2019 which deleted that problem from existence, but Intel didn't seem to notice. I was not expecting this GPU to be so monstrous. Have to get a vertical mount just so it has sufficient room and the cable isn't pressing against the side panel. They do cool really well for it! Not that long ago cards ran much louder fans and much higher temperatures despite pulling half of the power. Having 2.83x the volume really does help there. Yeah it has gotten a bit difficult at times. I'm using this matx board and 3 of the 4 sata ports cannot be unplugged/plugged while the graphics card is installed, nor one of the CPU's m.2's or even some miscelaneous stuff like some fan headers. My case (the Torrent) could close the side panel with a 4080 super Aero and 12vhpwr cleanly, but the main building compartment is unusually wide. | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8986 Posts
![[image loading]](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/803624473785663498/1210207326313914368/rn_image_picker_lib_temp_b0aac121-1a5e-4312-9050-8f6fdc1047ac.jpg?ex=65e9b867&is=65d74367&hm=a3666ca74c0c70ee91a18095940e32689349087402ef6c5176756dc24630f4f6&) | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
what do you mean with externals not working? | ||
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ZerOCoolSC2
8986 Posts
On February 22 2024 22:43 Cyro wrote: She's a chonker what do you mean with externals not working? The hard drives weren't being recognized. Did a reset (BSOD actually) and it's being recognized. One anyway. I'll test the other now. Also just sent you a message on discord ^_^ | ||
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mantequilla
Turkey779 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
On February 24 2024 19:34 mantequilla wrote: is going from an i7 4790k to i3-13100F an upgrade or sidegrade? It's a pretty big upgrade for everything. Way better core, 70% more cache, DDR5 (or DDR4, but i don't recommend that) instead of DDR3. from quick googles, +50% on Cinebench r23 (which isn't very cache/mem heavy) and +77% on Cinebench 2024 which is moreso. | ||
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Jonoman92
United States9104 Posts
Fans begin to spin up. About 3-5 seconds later they stop. And this keeps repeating. Doesn't even get to the BIOS flash screen most of the time. Eventually it does successfully start. But today it was taking ages and I'm unsure if this is somehow causing damage so I don't want it to repeat for minutes and minutes. I've considered it could be the CMOS battery. (It's a 2015 build, RAM and GPU have been upgraded but nothing else has.) I didn't think the CMOS battery being bad would prevent it from booting though. Once the computer starts up I haven't had any issues. Am pretty stumped. PSU issue perhaps since startup is perhaps a larger task than keeping it running? I happen to have it open to pasting the mobo model: GIGABYTE GA-Z97-HD3 (rev. 2.0) LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard PSU: Antec BP550 Plus 550W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply - Intel Haswell GPU: SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 DirectX 12 11265-01CPO 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 CrossFireX Support ATX Video Card Processor: i5-4690k | ||
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iPlaY.NettleS
Australia4335 Posts
On April 20 2024 07:20 Jonoman92 wrote: I'm concerned about my computer. It keeps taking more and more tries to successfully boot up. What happens when I push the power button: Fans begin to spin up. About 3-5 seconds later they stop. And this keeps repeating. Doesn't even get to the BIOS flash screen most of the time. Eventually it does successfully start. But today it was taking ages and I'm unsure if this is somehow causing damage so I don't want it to repeat for minutes and minutes. I've considered it could be the CMOS battery. (It's a 2015 build, RAM and GPU have been upgraded but nothing else has.) I didn't think the CMOS battery being bad would prevent it from booting though. Once the computer starts up I haven't had any issues. Am pretty stumped. PSU issue perhaps since startup is perhaps a larger task than keeping it running? I happen to have it open to pasting the mobo model: GIGABYTE GA-Z97-HD3 (rev. 2.0) LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard PSU: Antec BP550 Plus 550W Continuous Power ATX12V V2.2 80 PLUS Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply - Intel Haswell GPU: SAPPHIRE NITRO+ Radeon RX 580 DirectX 12 11265-01CPO 8GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 CrossFireX Support ATX Video Card Processor: i5-4690k A month old so you've probably worked it out by now but it sounds like a PSU issue to me. | ||
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Jonoman92
United States9104 Posts
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DarthPunk
Australia10857 Posts
I am just looking for some advice regarding possible upgrade paths for my PC, Currently have a 3900x, 16 gb ram, x570 mobo, 2080ti. I just got a new monitor which is 4k 240hz, so that is what I will be driving. options: 1 - upgrade now to a 5800x3d, get another 16gb of RAM, upgrade to a 7900xtx or 4080super 2 - hold off till the end of year/ early 2025 and upgrade to AM5, new RAM, 9800x3d or whatever that tier of SKU ends up being, look at RDNA 4 or rtx5080 3 - same as option 1 but to a 5080 or future RDNA 4 SKU. It's been roughly 5 years since I built this PC and that tends to be my upgrade cadence. thoughts/opinions would be appreciated, essentially: is it worth the extra $$$ to change platform in my use case with the next upgrade probably 5 years out. I play a mix of esports and AAA titles. I'm fine to play on 'sweet spot' settings, don't need to max everything, RT is nice to have, but not a deal breaker. I really like DLSS but also not a deal breaker if I am getting +20% raster performance for example. Edit: I can get a sapphire pulse 7900xtx for 730 usd but it’s time sensitive. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20295 Posts
On June 04 2024 16:30 DarthPunk wrote: Hi. I am just looking for some advice regarding possible upgrade paths for my PC, Currently have a 3900x, 16 gb ram, x570 mobo, 2080ti. I just got a new monitor which is 4k 240hz, so that is what I will be driving. options: 1 - upgrade now to a 5800x3d, get another 16gb of RAM, upgrade to a 7900xtx or 4080super 2 - hold off till the end of year/ early 2025 and upgrade to AM5, new RAM, 9800x3d or whatever that tier of SKU ends up being, look at RDNA 4 or rtx5080 3 - same as option 1 but to a 5080 or future RDNA 4 SKU. It's been roughly 5 years since I built this PC and that tends to be my upgrade cadence. thoughts/opinions would be appreciated, essentially: is it worth the extra $$$ to change platform in my use case with the next upgrade probably 5 years out. I play a mix of esports and AAA titles. I'm fine to play on 'sweet spot' settings, don't need to max everything, RT is nice to have, but not a deal breaker. I really like DLSS but also not a deal breaker if I am getting +20% raster performance for example. Edit: I can get a sapphire pulse 7900xtx for 730 usd but it’s time sensitive. 5800x3d would probably do fine for you unless you really want max CPU perf. The AM5 platform is currently a lot of money and bother to get like +30% for games, zen5 x3d will probably expand that to maybe +50% and it'll be a couple of years until zen6 x3d exists to be a really compelling upgrade. The upgrades to Zen 3 and to vcache were much more impactful and easy since it doesn't require any software or hardware change other than taking off the CPU cooler and swapping CPU. No different board, no different RAM and no reinstalling windows BS. At the top end of the gains, going from a 3900x to 5800x3d was +150% perf on WoW. | ||
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