PC Upgrade - Looking for advice

You mentioned this in a couple threads, now. Can I ask why you’re so worried? From what you posted, I take it that you used to assemble your own systems in the past. For me, while the frequency of doing builds has dropped significantly over the years, I find modern PCs very easy to assemble compared to the old days.

Cases aren’t sharp anymore, standards are more prevalent, connectors and sockets are more robust. Software is more standardized and you don’t have to fool around with the bios or an autoexec file as much, or at all.

The options are arguable more daunting, but it sounds like you had no issue with the selection/shopping part. I’m curious to know more about why you decided to farm out assembly, this time.

I did this long before any big case makers were doing it. I went to a custom acrylic design studio, sold them the design for the case for a discount on the actual parts. I mean, my case looks cool and all, super clear, but dang I had no idea this much acrylic would be so heavy. And all the special screws and lack of easy mounts. I’ve missed that.

Ah, well after you wrote 9800x I looked it up and it is an actual cpu that released two weeks ago that got almost zero marketing!

Now I have to go look that up heh.

How many builds have you done in the thing? Silverstone first did it 10 years ago.

Anyway, I love the case, except for the fact that ideal thermodynamics mandate a blower-style card which, outside founder edition cards, are getting harder to find.

This isn’t rational. I know this. Yet, whenever I even open my own PC, I’m worried either something is going to break, or I’m going to break something.

I also have less patience than I did when I was younger, truth be told. This is because, in 2015, I moved all the guts of my PC to a new case. The only thing new was the case. Everything else was the same. I took fucking notes about what was plugged in where so everything could go back to exactly the same place.

Windows wouldn’t boot. I still, to this day, don’t know why, but I spent a weekend on this thing trying to figure out why it wouldn’t boot to Windows, ultimately having to do a wipe and reinstall anyway.

When my PC doesn’t work right, I’m the gloomiest gus first-world guy you could possibly imagine. Much of my emotional well-being is tied into this thing – like I said, not rational – and if it’s not happy, I’m not happy. If I’m the cause of it being unhappy, I’m even less happy.

So now, I’m at a place in my life where I can afford to pay an expert – someone who does this far more frequently than I do, which is more than twice a decade – to handle the stressful stuff of putting it all together and getting it working. I’m not losing any more weekends or entire weeks because a build of mine went astray.

I built my own rig a couple weeks ago and wasn’t nervous about it, but I’ll tell you why it was difficult. Because I’m 50 and can’t fucking see these tiny pins on the motherboard anymore. It was an awful dance of putting on my glasses, taking off my glasses, a flashlight, moving lamps next to my work area…the only thing missing was a magnifying glass.

I’m now nervous about my next build in a few years.

The two challenges I had were the damn M.2 slot and a vague feeling that my cable management wasn’t elite enough.

By that point they’ll be bio based, or neuromods.

It’s probably been 12+ years.

You trendsetter, you.

This will be your drive speed as the bottleneck, fwiw, not your video card.

Do you think that is the case even if the CPU is a 3570k (unclocked)? I could try upgrading with just a new big SSD, but don’t really want to do that if it won’t make the game fairly fast. Right now, it’s nearly unplayable due to load times.

I’ll verify when I get home, but I think I have a 3570k (not overclocked - I know, stupid) CPU and a 1050 GPU. I’m not necessarily looking to play higher than 1080p with decent graphics settings (don’t need everything on ultra, but high or at least medium would be nice).

It’s possible your CPU might be influencing load times, but your video card won’t have anything to do with it. Even with a slower CPU an SSD will show you quite a bit faster load times (and just about everything regarding the desktop experience will also feel better). The biggest hurdle you may face is if the motherboard has a SATA … uh, version? That can give you the full SSD speed. I recall my previous gaming PC (that my son is using) could have had a SATA SSD installed but iirc the bandwidth on my board was lower than what the SSD could achieve by a lot (this is, I believe, why putting an SSD into an XBO or PS4 helps, but not nearly as much as you’d think it should).

SSD will help load times a lot if you’re on a mechanical drive, but as Scott mentioned your motherboard may crimp it’s speed. Your SATA slots may share bandwidth with your video card slot as well.

Once you get into a battle, everything else will stay exactly the same speed as you experience now. Turn times will also be just as slow. There are some games that stream HD data. Subnautica is one, so an SSD will make a huge difference on-the-fly. Warhammer 2 does not need to stream HD data so it’s just the getting the data into memory. The game however is very cpu and GPU intensive. It’s on an old engine so it does a terrible job of using multiple cores.

A bit late but Filco Red switches. I have a filco from 2011 and 2016, they still work. The 2011 one has no ink left on the WASD keys thought (guess which one is for home and which one for work).

This looks like the current upgrade thread…

I was surprised to find my current homebuilt PC is quickly approaching it’s 10th birthday:

i7-920
6GB RAM (tri-channel!)
nVidia GTX 960
Corsair TX650W power supply

It’s managed to last this long because 1) I’m a web dev, and work doesn’t tax it much 2) I mostly got out of PC gaming for the last several years, and the stuff I have played was older.

I’m kind of coming back to the hobby and playing some newer games, and the kids are old enough now that they’re playing stuff like Fortnite on it and our other PC (i5-2500k, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800GTX). So the system is finally showing it’s age.

I’m pretty happy with everything else, but the core components need replacing. I’ve fallen out of touch with what’s out there, so I could use some suggestions as to what to look for. My general philosophy has always been to find the best price/performance level.

So any suggestions as to what I should be looking at?

CPU: I do occasionally get some video work, so not sure if that makes the 9700k more attractive than the 9600k. I also am getting into more .Net work, so will be compiling with Visual Studio. That’s probably the top end of the CPU intensive work.

RAM: I will likely go for 16GB of RAM at this point because I’ve been playing around with Docker and occasionally run VMs for work and actually ran out RAM.

Video: The GTX 960 still holds up really well, but I’m going to pass it on to the secondary system to replace the 9800GTX. I think I usually look at the $200 price point for video cards, so what’s that equate to today?

Thanks for any help!

I’d go for a RX 580 at the $200 price point. Great card for 1440 gaming or lower on almost any modern game.

If you’re going to spend some money, don’t go halfway if you want to do some decent PC gaming. It just doesn’t make sense at this point.

I’d suggest Intel i7 9700k, Gigabyte z390 Aorus Pro (choose version based on whether you need wifi or not), 16 Gig DDR4 for dual channel (8x2) and just spend what you’re comfortable with for the speed. Video card gives you the most flexibility based on budget. I have a GTX 1080 and I like it a lot, but I know it won’t push max graphics at 4k.

Just keep in mind the Ryzen 3000 series is being announced at CES this month and will be launched soon. From the leaks/rumours it sounds like it could be a big leap.