Customized computer?

[Animeniax]

Holy... thats a crazy price. I havent seen the msi below 325$. Only some zotec at 290$. Amazing buy there. Dunno whats going on with those cards in EU they are selling at 340€ (375$).

I put off buying this card for 6+ months because it was steady at ~$330 and no major games were coming out on PC. I got burned on my last purchase of the 770 because the prices dropped a little more than 3 months later, just outside the EVGA buyback program window. I haven't seen any other stores selling the EVGA 970 for this cheap, but Newegg sometimes has good deals like this.


Please forward me AC Syndicate :)
Ok, as soon as I get the certificate for it I'll PM you with the code.

[Buffalobiian]

I
Ok, as soon as I get the certificate for it I'll PM you with the code.

I actually ended up getting R6 Siege and it's been pretty fun since.

Dell Demonstrates 30-inch 4K OLED Display (http://www.anandtech.com/show/9923/dell-demonstrates-30inch-4k-oled-display)

I seriously can't wait for 120Hz OLED monitors, 4K or not.

[shinta|hikari]

What do Hz do for a monitor?

[Buffalobiian]

Smoother movement and quicker input delay, when combined with decent pixel response times.

This site is very good if you're interested in reducing motion blur.

http://www.blurbusters.com/faq/oled-motion-blur/

edit:
120Hz is half the story. I already have one of those monitors. It's the combination of that an OLED that I'm keen for as the latter has great pixel response time and contrast.

[Kraco]

They say Freesync/G-sync does a lot more for a screen than simply a higher than normal refresh rate. But of course that only applies to games. It's not like desktop applications couldn't keep up any Hz count for the screen. It's too bad Nvidia once again had to go for closed technology, so one is married to the particular GPU vendor with a particular screen. Since I like to switch between AMD and Nvidia, I couldn't get one of those screens even if I wanted. At least not while they add extra to the price.

After my bad experience, I'm not sure I'd get another Dell. But it's not like all screens wouldn't go oled in the future, unless something better appears or it never gets any cheaper.

[Buffalobiian]

G-sync would be great for anything that can't push 120Hz all the time, and I'd love to have that onboard.

Freesync doesn't seem to be up to par with G-sync either.

[Kraco]

Freesync doesn't seem to be up to par with G-sync either.

Yeah. I reckon it's because Freesync relies less on special extra electronics on board. Ought to be cheaper, though. But then again, AMD stuff is always more cost effective for the buyer than Nvidia (which is why AMD is poor and Nvidia bosses are swimming in money).

[Buffalobiian]

I bought the Logitech Z533 over the new years sales for ~67AUD. Overall I'm disappointed. They're clear with decent bass extension, but their SNR is complete shit. Just by having the speakers on without sound, there's an audible hiss coming from the satellites. It's less noticable when you're listenning above moderate levels. Luckily for me I use speakers rarely, and at least they're still an upgrade from my Logitech R20s that have a broken volume knob and power button. The transient response of these speakers also aren't great. In fast/complex passages you can hear them failing to articulate.*

Ideally I'd get bookshelf speakers at around the 500 dollar mark but there are size restraints to consider right now.

* = these complaints are coming from someone who uses the AKG K701 as a primary listening headphone. These are pretty godly and are top as far as transient responses go. You'll only beat them with HD800 or Stax headphones. In retrospect it should be no surprise that I'm slightly disappointed. For the price however, they're decent. I'd still be hesitant to purchase them at this price given the soft hiss though.

I also bought a totally unnecessary GTX1080 to replace my GTX970. No complaints there. Now I can push 120fps on high detail in rainbow six instead of low.

[Kraco]

I don't know how you can be disappointed. They are cheap and they are Logitech. I'm sure they are worth exactly the money paid. Surely you didn't expect anything remotely close to what an audio enthusiast would be looking for?

[Buffalobiian]

I was disappointed because they had raving reviews mostly - and they were presumably reviewed at their recommended retail price of ~110-160AUD. To be honest they actually sound pretty damn good for their price.

But then there's also the case of hiss when the audio is off. I've had cheaper speakers in the past that were otherwise sonically inferior, but were at least silent when they were meant to be. This is supposedly a common flaw in "powered speakers", but none of the powered speakers I've owned had this problem.

[Buffalobiian]

I don't think my setup had changed since my last post, until recently.

Decided to spend money that I probably didn't have to on cpu/mobo/ram. Came from a DDR3 quadcore in ?2013 to Ryzen 5600x, some 3600mhz ram and a Asus Dark Hero motherboard.

Performance is better I think? In Overwatch I'm still getting 200fps because I play on Medium 1080p anyway for that.. but some other games where I was more CPU bound I've experienced smoother gameplay. Borderlands was giving me intermittent problems, and MW Warzone too.

The CPU loves to boost and gets warm, that's for sure.

[Kraco]

I have also noticed with the Ryzen 3700X that it indeed likes to boost. It seems like you can't move the mouse without one core jumping to the high gigaherz for a moment. On average, though, it might not matter so much because apparently Ryzen, unlike Intel's CPUs at least in the recent past, put unused cores to sleep. So, cores won't be idling at 900MHz, or something, doing nothing, but they will actually be at 0MHz, figuratively speaking. If I've understood it correctly.

[Buffalobiian]

I have also noticed with the Ryzen 3700X that it indeed likes to boost. It seems like you can't move the mouse without one core jumping to the high gigaherz for a moment. On average, though, it might not matter so much because apparently Ryzen, unlike Intel's CPUs at least in the recent past, put unused cores to sleep. So, cores won't be idling at 900MHz, or something, doing nothing, but they will actually be at 0MHz, figuratively speaking. If I've understood it correctly.

Yeah, that's what they do.

I routinely see lots of cores sleeping, and the ones that do turn on usually go anywhere from 3.7-4.6GHz when awake. Ryzen Master shows this and later calculates an "effective clock" when it tries to average out clock speed over time.

I suppose overall at stock it'd run cooler than my old Intel 1230v3 CPU, but that thing will turboboost to 3.7GHz (as is the Intel stock Turbo-boost setting) even if it hits 95C. Only at 100C will it back off. The Ryzen by default takes temps into its own boosting considerations, and thus will never boost past 4.2GHz when it's past 75C or something for example, even though it's still quite far from its TJMax of 95C. As such, I end up having to adjust the fan curve to cool more aggressively as well, which means that it ramps up and down sometimes when firefox opens.

I haven't run into that USB dropout issue that plagued these chips over the past year. I guess the supposed BIOS update fixed it after all.

[Kraco]

I haven't run into that USB dropout issue that plagued these chips over the past year. I guess the supposed BIOS update fixed it after all.

I still haven't even installed the bios update. One these mythological days I will get down to it, at the same time replacing the last spinning HDDs with SSDs, and reinstalling Win10.

[Buffalobiian]

I still have 2x12TB HDDs running. Until write endurance isn't a thing for SSDs or they get cheap enough for lots of storage, I guess I'll be hanging onto HDDs for some time yet. That said, my 8 year old intel SSD is still kicking with 42% life left.

[Shadow Skill]

This is my new gaming PC, I built 2 years ago, except the GPU I got in June 2021

CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
GPU - EVGA FTW3 Ultra 3080Ti
Motherboard - ASUS TUF Gaming X570
RAM - 3333mhz 32GB RAM Trident Z Neo
Western Digital SN 850 NVME m.2 SSD 1TiB at 7000mb read and 5300mb write speed
Monitor - ASUS MG248QR 24 inch
Samsung TV - 65 Inch 8K (I play on this)
Keyboard - EVGA Z20 (Clicky)
Mouse - Logitech 502 Hero
Cam - Logitech Stream Cam

[Buffalobiian]

This is my new gaming PC, I built 2 years ago, except the GPU I got in June 2021

CPU - AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
GPU - EVGA FTW3 Ultra 3080Ti
Motherboard - ASUS TUF Gaming X570
RAM - 3333mhz 32GB RAM Trident Z Neo
Western Digital SN 850 NVME m.2 SSD 1TiB at 7000mb read and 5300mb write speed
Monitor - ASUS MG248QR 24 inch
Samsung TV - 65 Inch 8K (I play on this)
Keyboard - EVGA Z20 (Clicky)
Mouse - Logitech 502 Hero
Cam - Logitech Stream Cam

How far do you sit away from the TV?

[Shadow Skill]

How far do you sit away from the TV?

4-5 feet, why?

[Buffalobiian]

4-5 feet, why?

I'm imagining you using keyboard and mouse with a 65inch TV so wondered how far away the screen is from your face, and how much of your visual field the screen fills up.

[Shadow Skill]

I'm imagining you using keyboard and mouse with a 65inch TV so wondered how far away the screen is from your face, and how much of your visual field the screen fills up.

LOL!!! I had to figure this out when I got this TV. 4-5 feet feels perfect for my visual acuity and response time. Viewing angles as well. :)

[Buffalobiian]

My brother's AMD 5600X CPU from 2021 had been throwing intermittent crashes since we had bought it. The more memory you run on it, or the quicker you clock it, the more frequently it crashes. He decided to RMA it when there weren't any games games coming out that he was interested in playing, and the shop ended up refunding him after AMD found a fault. I presume it's the memory controller on the chip.

So we bought a 5800X3D instead. It still threw the intermittent error when the RAM/infinity fabric was overclocked, with windows event viewer logging it as a CPU/memory channel? thing. So after that, I left the infinity fabric and memory on default.

A few days later, the PC resets and fails to POST. Motherboard diagnostic LED says "DRAM", but apparently that just means the PC encounters a fatal error as it tries to check the DRAM. Swapping out different kits of RAM didn't resolve the problem, and I can't reflash the BIOS without key components being operable.

So now I'm going through the RMA process again. Perhaps I got unlucky with AMD's memory controller lottery. Perhaps his board is frying CPUs (though the old chip didn't exactly get worse with time). We'll see.

I do have my own computer's mobo and CPU on the same platform that we could test, but mine is rock solid and I don't really feel like changing that.

[Kraco]

Why are you trying to overclock them in the first place? CPUs these days aren't mean to be overclocked, except for setting the memory to the specs the memory kit is meant for. Otherwise only overclock them if you want to compete in overclocking for benchmarking. Especially the AMD X3D CPUs are really bad choices for overclocking because the extra cache layer hampers heat transfer, making them run hot even on stock clocks. If you continue on your overclocking journey, you will sooner or later get a negative RMA request, with the explanation being overclocking. You don't even gain that much from it.

[Buffalobiian]

You overclock the infinity fabric commonly to match the XMP speeds on your RAM so their data cycles are in sync. Many chips will reach 1800 fine, though 5000 series chips only actually support up to 1600 I think.

The motherboard automatically does this when you set everything to auto but set your RAM to DOCP (equivalent to XMP)

XMP is technically overclocking since it's not a JEDEC spec.

[Kraco]

Sorry, I must have read your post poorly, since I was basically criticising you for what I suggested myself. I got an impression you were really trying to push the frequency up, beyond merely the manufacturer's stated specs. While using XMP indeed is overclocking (unless it's some terribly cheap memory meant to be used on the CPU default settings), I'm more used to hearing memory overclocking in the context of pushing it further than the XMP.

[Buffalobiian]

My brother's AMD 5600X CPU from 2021 had been throwing intermittent crashes since we had bought it. The more memory you run on it, or the quicker you clock it, the more frequently it crashes. He decided to RMA it when there weren't any games games coming out that he was interested in playing, and the shop ended up refunding him after AMD found a fault. I presume it's the memory controller on the chip.

So we bought a 5800X3D instead. It still threw the intermittent error when the RAM/infinity fabric was overclocked, with windows event viewer logging it as a CPU/memory channel? thing. So after that, I left the infinity fabric and memory on default.

A few days later, the PC resets and fails to POST. Motherboard diagnostic LED says "DRAM", but apparently that just means the PC encounters a fatal error as it tries to check the DRAM. Swapping out different kits of RAM didn't resolve the problem, and I can't reflash the BIOS without key components being operable.

So now I'm going through the RMA process again. Perhaps I got unlucky with AMD's memory controller lottery. Perhaps his board is frying CPUs (though the old chip didn't exactly get worse with time). We'll see.

I do have my own computer's mobo and CPU on the same platform that we could test, but mine is rock solid and I don't really feel like changing that.

Well the good news is the store accepted the CPU return without much scrutiny and offered a refund immediately.

The bad news is that the PC still won't boot after I bought yet another CPU for it. So now it's a hunt for other things.

I should unplug the sound card and other peripherals, then see if I can find a power supply somewhere to test. If all that is done and fruitless then I think I have a pretty good case for swapping out the mobo.

[shinta|hikari]

Just trash the whole thing and start anew.

[Buffalobiian]

I came home after a night shift to find that one of my hard drives just went offline. No prior warning, but now it clicks and won't be recognised by the OS. It's a 12TB Western Digital Gold drive. Mainly just had anime and movies on it, and was the backup drive for holding my main drive SSD's images etc. So not a big deal.

While dealing with this, my other 12TB WD Gold drive dies. I'm presuming this is from the same batch since I bought both from the same store at the same time. Now this one hurt a bit more because it had recent anime as well as music, and I like my lossless music collection.

So that's around 24TB gone now. I'll see how much data recovery costs, mainly for the music, but chances are it'll cost between several hundred to several thousand dollars, and I might as well hunt down all the music again - along with all the annoyances of dealing with Chinese file hosting mirrors.

Even if I had them in RAID1, in this scenario things wouldn't have been saved, unless I had the foresight of backing up the music onto a much smaller 4TB HDD - which I didn't.

Anyway, I'm using some spare HDDs now for storage while my SSDs still chug along and my OS remains untouched. Gonna shop for some HDDs in the next few days. Apparently they go up to the low 20s in TBs now. Maybe I'll do 22TB RAID1 or something next.

[Kraco]

I'd recommend having backups of anything you aren't ready or capable to easily redownload on external HDs that aren't running 24/7. I like to presume not being turned on all the time prolongs their life, seeing how I have a couple of usb2 externals that still work, as much as the usb2 interface can be considered to work in 2024, being as slow as romance in a shounen manga.

Still, lousy luck to lose both like that. Smells like either planned obsolescence or your PC (PSU) sending a power spike the HDDs' way to fry them.

[Buffalobiian]

My intel SSD from the early 2010s has finally reached the end of its endurance lifespan. For the same amount of money that I paid for this 240GB drive then, I could buy a 4TB NVMe drive today.

Installation was fine, though it took more coordination trying to place then screw this drive in place (without removing the CPU tower cooler or graphics card) than most procedures I've needed to do.

Data migration using Samsung's SSD management app and then converting it from MBR to GPT was easy enough. The drive runs anywhere from 56 to 66C right now, which is within spec (<70C operating temp).

Hopefully this drive lasts for a long time as well.

I bought a drive with a heatsink, and I'm intrigued that most heatsinks on SSDs really are heatsinks that increase surface area slightly, but mainly increase thermal mass to soak up spikes in temperature during bursts of operation, despite PCIe4 drives being known to throttle under operation at times. It's only the PCIe5 drives that really offer substantial fins for cooling dissipation (as OEM anyway).

[Kraco]

I used to have a 1TB system drive (PCIe 4) with a heatsink and a 500GB game drive (PCIe 3) without. I later replaced the 500GB drive and got one with a heatsink. My system drive actually came without a heatsink, so I got a third party one for it at the same time. Both are Samsung 980 Pro drives now. So, theoretically I could compare if the aftermarket passive cooler is better than the original Samsung one, but I won't bother. There would be the airflow difference as well, seeing how one is above the video card, one well below.