I am trying to decide whether trying to troubleshoot and fix my old gaming box that I use as a work machine at home is worth it. It keeps blue-screening me with generic errors that the Internet says point towards driver issues. I’m updating all the drivers I can find, but I retired this machine from gaming a couple of years ago because of these sorts of instabilities, so I think there may be something with the mobo/CPU. It’s an older i5 setup. It is also dog slow when it should not be, though part of that is no doubt the accumulation of crapware over the years.
Assuming driver updates, etc. don’t clean it up enough to be reliable, my options seem to be buying a new mobo/CPU/memory set to swap in, essentially building a new machine in terms off work, or replacing it entirely with a prebuilt box. This would not be for gaming, though, just for HTML, web stuff, writing, etc. but it would have to drive three monitors. A lot of the cheap but otherwise suitable work boxes only have like one HDMI and one VGA port or something hideous like that. I am running an old 1070ti in this thing so I have plenty of monitor ports at least, but again, the cheapo biz boxes either don’t have room for a card or don’t have the power supply.
I’m almost tempted to replace my actual gaming rig and swapping my current rig in for my work setup, but I really don’t want to spend the kind of money it would take to get a current gen gaming rig with a 3xxx series card (which to be realistic means getting a pre-built which already has one).
Any ideas about affordable multi-monitor solutions?
I wouldn’t overthink it, just get a laptop. This one’s a pretty good deal. You can plug in one monitor via displayport and one via HDMI. If you need a third screen and the laptop’s built-in screen won’t suffice, just get a USB adapter. You’ll probably want to add another 8GB RAM, which is cheap if you do it yourself.
I have laptops I can use. I need three larger (24" or so) monitors though, and the laptop I would most likely use, my Surface Pro, would require me to buy an overpriced dock. Besides, over $500 for a laptop I’d have to add stuff too anyhow makes it more enticing to rebuild the machine I have with a new mobo/cpu probably.
A lot of what I’m doing from home is stuff like Zoom and Google Meet, etc, usually with many browser tabs open for accessing our LMS and Google Drive stuff from work, all at the same time. Looking at the resource usage, it seems like a ton of memory and CPU use going on. Hmm. Well, I will probably muddle along and try to band-aid the existing rig until the summer when I will have time to do something about it without interrupting too much work stuff.
I think it’s ugly as sin, Menzo, and you can get an (also fugly) Alienware for $649 less with 4 additional CPU cores but 16GB less RAM (which doesn’t matter for gaming anyway).
I’ve been looking at NZXT ever since it was mentioned here. My son even got one from them last summer. I currently have a Cyberpower I got off of Amazon, but the prices and I’m sure quality on NZXT is much better than comparable boxes I’m seeing on Amazon (ASUS or Cyberpower mostly as I trust them). I almost grabbed This build kit but it sold out while I was mulling it over.
Now I’m considering one of their smaller form factor boxes with a 3060 inside But still haven’t pulled the trigger.
EDIT: Doh! The smaller boxes sold out again this morning. Oh well.
Anecdotally and without a lot of technical knowledge, I bought from Cyberpower last year. Most of the computer was okay except the power supply, advertised as a 1000W Gold something something, was awful. The PC constantly rebooted or powered down. Once I bought a different power supply from Microcenter and had that installed, it worked fine. But I don’t think I’ll buy from them again.
My previous PC was a Cyberpower build from Amazon which was perfectly fine until I got a bad case of GPU Fever last July. Initially I just intended to upgrade the video card, but quickly realized it was more cost effective to just get a new system. I went the NZXT route and have been very happy with it.
The Cyberpower is the same price but has a slower GPU than the Alienware I linked earlier. When gaming only the GPU really matters. And yeah yeah MS flightsim and giant strategy games nyuck nyuck nyuck you know what I mean.
I like NZXT BLD in that they let you pick your components, albeit from a very limited list. I didn’t like that they only had 3200Mhz RAM. Anyway, the BLD I came up with cost $2500, $300 more than the Alienware. You get all non-custom components for that and it’ll be much less fugly, though.
Looking at Cyberpower with a 3060ti, I came up with $1864. That saves $336 off the Alienware deal but you lose 4 CPU cores (not that you should really care) and much more importantly downgrade from a 3080 to a 3060ti, which is huge.
FYI I also had to replace my preconfiged CyberPowerPC power supply. It was under warranty, but they’d have replaced it with the same crappy loud no-name power supply, so I just bought a Corsair and didn’t even bother shipping back the other one. (Also had to replace the cooler to stop thermal throttling, but that might not be an issue with the AMD CPUs.)
As for 16GB vs 32GB, unless you play MS Flight Sim or Horizon Zero Dawn, 16 is enough for now, but I prefer to buy “enough for two years from now” as well when the price difference is so small.
As I’ve said before, we bought two NZXT Bld boxes a couple of years ago, and they have been excellent. Build quality was hands-down better than what I could do myself, and better than even the Digital Storm box I had before that (though the DS machine is still going strong and is also very nicely constructed).
For a more traditional (but highly compact) form factor, I’ve really liked MSI’s Trident series. I got one right at the beginning of the pandemic, when I knew I would be spending a lot more time on it, and I recently had to replace it after some power outage related damage. You can get up to a GeForce 3060 in the smallest form factor, or they also put 3080s in a slightly larger form factor, but it’s still smaller than something like an Alienware. Both of my Tridents (GeForce 1660 & 3060) have been pretty quiet, which is also a consideration.
For reference, the smaller Tridents are about the same size as the small Dell Optiplex towers you could find on ebay for ~$100-200, which is what I use for dedicated streaming.
So I have a pretty bitchin’ videocard. It’s an RTX3070. And it’s been slumming it in my computer from 2014 for far too long. In fact, the videocard is actively trying to murder the rest of my computer: my venerable Intel i7-4790 is hitting the limits for CPU loads and the cores’ temperatures are getting silly hot, to the point that it was causing shutdowns. Replacing the thermal paste has bought me some time, but the writing is on the wall: This isn’t enough computer for this much videocard!
So I need a new rig, not including GPU. My current computer was from Maingear, but I don’t have any particular allegiance to shopping with them. @mono found a seller local to me with a variety of options. I’ve reached out to him, but haven’t heard back yet. He seems to have access to an insane number of barebones systems that I can’t really make heads nor tails of. I’m left comparing various CPU and motherboards, which mean bupkis to me.
I just want something fast and capable of keeping cool after I drop in my RTX3070. I’m okay with paying more for something that will hopefully last another eight years. Although I wouldn’t mind saving a few bucks on some quick n’ dirty exchange with someone local, I’d be more comfortable buying from an established online outlet.
So can you guys point me to someplace good for a pre-built system into which I can drop my GPU and hard drives? And more importantly, can someone just tell me the best CPU to get these days that doesn’t cost sillymoney? Mobo recommendations would also be welcome.
