New PC Upgrade 2020 into 2021

[Pew-Pew]

Actually Neth, I do have a GTX 980 Ti (6 GB VRAM if that matters) sitting around that I just replaced with an RTX 3070. Fancy it? Dunno how much you were willing to pay for a graphics card, but you can have it for £120. Graphics card market is awful at the moment because of all the shortages, these are usually going on Ebay for upwards of £200+... Which is mental for a 5 year old card, albeit one that was top of the line at the time.

[DjchunKfunK]

Making decisions about a current PC hardware purchase based on what the market may be like in the future (especially several years away) tends to be a fool's errand, if only because it moves so fast. If Intel is the right choice now, I'd be hard pressed to go against that on the basis that I may want to buy another CPU in a few years.

Honestly, though, I've not looked in depth at hardware for a couple of years so I've no idea what I'd go for at any price range right now.

I'm not saying you should make decisions based on this alone I'm just pointing out that the AMD chips have an upgrade path which is an added value, you don't need to use it but it is there. I personally think that Intel chip is too low powered to be any good long term but it does very much depend on what you want to do with the system.

[2Channelwonder]

Actually Neth, I do have a GTX 980 Ti (6 GB VRAM if that matters) sitting around that I just replaced with an RTX 3070. Fancy it? Dunno how much you were willing to pay for a graphics card, but you can have it for £120. Graphics card market is awful at the moment because of all the shortages, these are usually going on Ebay for upwards of £200+... Which is mental for a 5 year old card, albeit one that was top of the line at the time.

Let me PM you about that Pew. [EDIT] PM'd.

[Pew-Pew]

Replied.

Like I said to Neth in the PM, I also have an Asus Z170-A mobo with an i5 6600k and 16 GB of DDR4 (2666 MHz) RAM if anyone wants it. It's just sitting on a chair since I took it out of my case a couple of weeks ago.

[2Channelwonder]

PM tennis at Gamers Arms! but it's so nearly sorted.

Wikipedia's just as great as Google, fully up to speed with what's out there and am not paying the premium for PCI-E 4.0, happy to stay on 3.0 and that was the last worry I had about standards motherboard-wise. So back on track, nothing wrong with another few hours drilling through info before shelling money out with a clear picture of what to expect.

[2Channelwonder]

All I know is if someone had told me that Nvidia update their drivers between weekly to monthly if you stay at or near the top of the range I would've snapped up a GeForce card years before these shortages but at least the GPU is the one part of this build that's not in doubt, compared to the shifting sands in the CPU arena, they've both launched new ranges and as recommended with last month's Custom PC and countless Youtube vids I'll have to decide between reputedly crippled RAM speeds with AMD and the pins in the mobo malarkey with Intel, not a great Hobson's choice and I hope that both are just hangovers from a couple of old generations ago.

I just have to hang on to the hope that with new CPUs in Spring there will be newer mobos with a trickle-down for PCI-E 4.0 natively and properly supported by both chipmakers. I will be hacked off if PCI-E 4.0 is in the latest consoles for no extra charge

[EDIT] Also I was very happy to get over my problems with the upside down cases because I have a dead video recorder that's nearly a perfect square and that will be perfect for rising the finished case off the floor - the piece of old wooden desk I'm currently using with the Jeantech is too flat to the carpet for a modern case, a decent 2-3in off the floor and that's the end of any worries about static or dust bunnies getting into the case.

[Pew-Pew]

I'm not sure what you mean about crippled RAM speeds with AMD, it's not really a problem as far as I'm aware - even with the previous gen.

PCI-E 4 is also supported on the latest gens of motherboards, so that's not an issue either! e.g. the x570 mobo I bought a few months ago supports it, as do B550 mobos etc.

[Drarok]

All I know is if someone had told me that Nvidia update their drivers between weekly to monthly if you stay at or near the top of the range I would've snapped up a GeForce card years before these shortages

Not sure if you count 2 generations old (I have a 1070) as near-top of the range, but I still get regular driver updates.

[Sly Boots]

All I know is if someone had told me that Nvidia update their drivers between weekly to monthly if you stay at or near the top of the range I would've snapped up a GeForce card years before these shortages

Not sure if you count 2 generations old (I have a 1070) as near-top of the range, but I still get regular driver updates.

1060 here, and likewise.

[Raid]

My AMD Fury X (GTX980TI equivalent) was still getting occasional driver updates before I replaced it at the start of the year. Still, it's nothing compared to my new 3080 which has probably had four new drivers since January.

[2Channelwonder]

I'm not sure what you mean about crippled RAM speeds with AMD, it's not really a problem as far as I'm aware - even with the previous gen.

PCI-E 4 is also supported on the latest gens of motherboards, so that's not an issue either! e.g. the x570 mobo I bought a few months ago supports it, as do B550 mobos etc.

Yeah I've been looking around at some of the vids and tech sites on my last all-nighter getting the new info and thankfully at the basic Ryzen 5 3600 level almost any decent branded RAM rated at DDR4-3200 is the rating that AMD matched to most motherboards and going up to 3600 is purely a question of price vs CAS/CL rating depending on if anyone's going to bother overclocking.

So that's one potential problem in the rear view mirror, that just leaves Intel's pins-in-the-mobo running joke or should I say, stylised design choice.

[DjchunKfunK]

AMD chips are more fussy when it comes to RAM speeds, you want 3200 minimum, and especially fussy when it comes to Dual Channel.

[Pew-Pew]

Going above 3200 MHz has very little benefit though. When you actually look at benchmarks, any (tiny) differences are in high FPS, very CPU limited scenarios. Really not worth the extra money required going for higher speeds/lower latencies. I had this issue when I built my system a few months ago, just ended up getting CL16 3200 MHz RAM for my Ryzen 5600x. I dunno how the prices are now, but back then RAM was quite expensive in the UK. I had to stop myself from going down the whole 'number of ranks' rabbit hole, too. It's very easy to get sucked into these things that ultimately make little difference to the final performance of your system in gaming etc.

Dual Channel is absolutely a must though, it can make quite a large difference.

[2Channelwonder]

Any questions about backup I'll put in the other thread but someone just put me out of my misery and tell me that any type of SSD can have any NTFS preformatting unmounted with any enclosed HDD software and replaced with FAT 32 for conventional writing and rewriting like a giant USB Flash Drive - even if some of them top out at 1 million rewrites and then brick themselves.

I'm just not interested in the current acceptance of write once and then you can't overwrite if it's NTFS (unknown if WinFS also addresses SSD drives like this). FAT 32 put it this way you tend to lose a flash drive before you write anything to it more than a million times and you can just reformat and start all over again like a conventional mechanical drive and that's what I want out of any SSD. I know that using FAT 32 would lose me dozens more GB for a table of contents but it's a small price to pay as long as it's physically possible.

If it's completely impossible then the SSD would be a future upgrade and I'm starting with a new desktop drive after putting the other working 1Tb into this PC, but there was no escape from the damaged drive in a USB cradle taking a decent 2-3hrs to rescue everything off that partition.

So SSD experts hit me with that info, thanks! Can I also assume that if you go retail kit with a NVMe/Stick SSD you get a heatsink or shroud or is it just down to extra fans in the case?

[Pew-Pew]

Neth, I still don't really understand why you don't want NTFS for your drive. It would make no difference to your use case. Maybe you're misunderstanding the difference or something? Of course you can rewrite over stuff on an NTFS drive.

What are you doing with these drives? Anything particularly unusual?

You don't need to cool SSDs. Some motherboards have a 'heatsink' that you sandwich on top of them, but it isn't necessary/makes very little difference.