Honestly, I’m now thinking of sticking with current/last gen now with the release of Zen 4 looking like it’s less efficient in performance/watt than the previous gen.
Currently I have i7-8700, 1060 6GB. Still good for a while.
Thinking of going:
5950x for max longevity as well as max perf per watt
A nice high-end motherboard
RX6800/RTX3070/something RDNA3 in the 200-250W range
Some nice high-speed DDR4 before it starts going up in price instead of down.
I already have:
Lancool II Mesh
RMX750 PSU
KC2500 1TB M.2 PCIe 3.0 SSD
Liquid Freezer 2 280 CLC
Yeah; I’m thinking probably 13th gen Intel CPU, AMD RDNA 3 GPU if either of those make sense when they finally show themselves. Right now, Nvidia doesn’t seem remotely worth it on the higher end of the GPU side and AMD is just too pricey of a platform if leaning toward the higher end on the CPU side; those X670 motherboards are ridiculous, but I need my lanes.
First: with a high-end CPU and MB like this, take a look at the LGA1700 contact frames, AFTER they are tested with Raptor lake CPUs – it should be a cheap and easy way to make your cooling solution perform better:
Second: only a single 2Tb SSD may end up quickly full – all the gen5 SSDs announced so far will have 4Tb versions, but no idea how the costs will scale yet. You may be smart to wait and expand later, but only one of those m.2 slots is gen5.
Thanks, I didn’t know about the contact frames. I’ll check those out! The cooler I’m opting for has pretty solid performance in extreme test situations with the 12900K, so hopefully the 13900K will be okay with it at stock. But good to know there’s an option to level it up!
As for the SSD, I have a bunch of storage that’s not listed there that I’m bringing over from the two older systems I’m selling: Two 2TB gen 4 m.2 SSDs, a few SATA SSDs, and a couple of large hard drives. But yeah, if I do opt for a Gen 5 SSD, I’ll likely go 4TB. My MSFS install is already up to 1.7TB. :)
I’m still annoyed that they designed these things so that your video card will have to run at x8 if you use a Gen 5 m.2 SSD, though.
I went with
i7 12700K,
32 GB DDR4 RAM
GTX 3060 Ti
750W Gold PSU
I think it was about 1500ish when I got it in the spring.
Should last me a good few years.
The Zen4 and 13 series jump is hilarious to me, as they didn’t really get much out of gaming improvements from them. There really isn’t anywhere to go. The Zen4 has some crazy productivity software gains, but nothing really in gaming. CPU’s are being bottle-necked by GPU’s at this point.
Not at “this point”, at every point. CPUs don’t matter much for gaming unless you play at 1080p. And then you’re getting such high framerates with any modern competitive GPU, even a mid-level one, that it doesn’t matter anyway.
Nividia claims that with DLSS, the 4090 can get 83 FPS in MSFS at 8k. I do have to wonder, what area they are flying in/over and what the level of details are for the object and terrain details.
It’s better, and with my system it will shift from CPU-limited on DX11 to GPU-limited on DX12. But there are plenty of detail/distance sliders that I don’t have maxxed out, so I’m assuming if I go to a 4090 with DLSS I’ll be back to CPU-limited even if I run DX12. MSFS has headroom to bring any component to its knees if you want it to.
MSFS uses the CPU for a lot of scenery processing in addition to flight modeling, atmosphere modeling, AI, etc. And it’s poorly multithreaded. (Better than FSX and Prepar3D, which can still slow to a crawl with scenery add-ons in areas like Seattle on a modern system despite being based on an 18-year-old engine, due to being almost completely single-threaded.)
They probably can in Kansas. Bet they can’t in London.
Amazon: Still not showing RTX 4090s. I guess people with the sense to sleep will be able to order at some point in the future.
Best Buy: Total flustercluck. Nvidia FE (my first choice) sold out in seconds despite rumors to the contrary. Got an MSI into my cart and it sold out while I was in line. Ditto on a Gigabyte, which is fine because I didn’t really want one of those. Luckily, in another tab, I was on NewEgg and…
NewEgg: MSI 4090 scored! They ended up getting orders for all the parts of my new rig except for the power supply and SSD.
I’m sad EVGA didn’t want the $16 profit they’d apparently have made from me if they’d not dropped video cards.
Happy to get MSI, though. My 3080 is from them. Thought about the water-cooled version but after having had a CPU AIO die, I didn’t want to get the most absurdly priced video card I’ve ever purchased with moving parts more complicated than fans.
Now, back to bed for a couple more hours sleep, to be woken up by the phone I got up at 5 am to purchase last month.
