Help me build my PC 2017 Catch All

The thing I don't miss is having to set the jumpers on drives, especially when you had to trial-and-error it because they weren't clearly labeled.

Malor wrote:

Yep, lotta truth there. Swapping video cards or adding an expansion card is often the first experience.

Mine was adding a hard drive and controller to an XT. That was a project.

Installation of M.2 SSD complete and if I broke anything, I haven't discovered it yet!

That was the babiest of baby steps!

My first foray into building was adding RAM to my family's "Dude, you're gettin' a Dell" -era Dell in hopes of achieving higher fps in Microsoft Flight Simulator.

Added a video card and ssd this year, my first time opening a pc up and I felt pretty alpha afterwards lol

*Legion* wrote:

Nothing wrong with buying a prebuilt.

The first baby step to building for a lot of people is slapping a newer GPU into a prebuilt.

Reminds me of when my friend took me as a scared little 17 year old and cracked open my family computer and put in a Diamond Monster 2. That's all it took for me.

Those Ryzen 3's look amazing! Super low TDP's and increased cores and power for pennies. I mean the $500 12 core that beat the intel 12 core that costs $1200 is nuts.

Hey everybody!
(I'm going to happily ramble a bit about my new build - if you want to skip to my question just scroll to the bottom)

I just finished doing my first big system upgrade in nearly five years. My i5-4440 ran like a champ all that time, and the only update I made during those five years was to upgrade my video card to a 1060 6GB a little over a year ago. However, the upgrade bug was strong this year, so I did the deed and upgraded my motherboard, CPU, RAM, and hard drive.

My final build:
MSI Z390 motherboard
i5-9600k
Noctua NH-U9S CPU cooler
Corsair Vengeance 2x8GB 3000mhz DDR4
Crucial MX500 500GB SATA SSD
EVGA GTX 1060 6GB

All of this was stuffed into a 12 year old Antec Sonata III case, which has served me well across many builds over the years. The PSU is a Corsair CX750M.

There were a few interesting things about this build:
1) It was my first-ever attempt at a non-stock CPU cooler. The Noctua ended up being fairly easy to install, and it is very quiet!
2) I decided to be a crazy man and not reinstall Windows from scratch (though I did burn a Win 10 ISO from Microsoft's site on a DVD to be on the safe side), and to my shock everything worked! I didn't even have to re-activate Windows. Once I installed the motherboard drivers from the disc everything started behaving itself.
3) I'm been really pleased with how and quiet and cool the system is with the new cooler (I also installed a low-noise front 120mm Noctua fan in the front). On my old system, I typically ran about 65c on idle, and 97C on full load. With the new system, I'm running about 38c on idle, and 65c on full load.
4) I've always been a fan of MSI, and their BIOS is pretty darned cool. I love the board explorer (lets you see everything that's plugged into your system). I also appreciated the easy overclocking options - I enabled two different options, OC Genie and XMP profile, and blammo, my CPU was stable at 4.6ghz, and it correctly clocked the RAM at 3000mhz. I'm sure I could get more performance with manual timings, but I just don't have the inclination to spend an afternoon messing with timings and constantly clearing the CMOS after a failed boot - sometimes it's nice when these things just work without a bunch of fiddling.

Build Question:
I have *never* been able to properly mount SSD drives in this case (Antec Sonata III) - I've never found an adapter that works! I've bought this Sabrent kit, and this kit, and neither fit in the Antec case's 3.5 inch drive bays. I've tried attaching drive rails first, but they're ever so slightly too small, and the caddy won't lock in properly. I managed to make one of them work by bending the rail clip back so it sort of wedges into the side of the case, but it's hardly an elegant solution. For the other drive, I simply duct taped it to one of the case's support rails, where it's working fine, but again - not exactly the most solid solution. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of issue/ this case/ general SSD mounting hardware advice?

If you have a free 5.25 bay you can get SSD enclosures that will allow you to mount them inside a bay. You can usually get 3 or 4 in there. They are designed for Raid but no reason why you couldn’t use them normally.

https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Brac...

Short of that I’ve seen people use command strips to simply attach them. They do get hot though so I would expect that to melt at some point.

Hi. RAM prices have dropped a bit lately. I've had 32 GB in my Amazon wishlist for quite awhile, and it's finally dropped below $200 (heck, even sitting around $170).

Should I upgrade from 16 GB, or is there really no point beyond #PCMasterRace

Vrikk wrote:

Hi. RAM prices have dropped a bit lately. I've had 32 GB in my Amazon wishlist for quite awhile, and it's finally dropped below $200 (heck, even sitting around $170).

Should I upgrade from 16 GB, or is there really no point beyond #PCMasterRace

Smarter folk than me in this thread have said jumping from 16Gb to 32Gb makes little functional difference for gaming, but is significant for memory-hungrier stuff like video editing.

16GBis fine for now if all you’re doing is gaming. Now if your streaming and or doing other multitasking then yes going up to 32GB could prove beneficial.

TheGameguru wrote:

If you have a free 5.25 bay you can get SSD enclosures that will allow you to mount them inside a bay. You can usually get 3 or 4 in there. They are designed for Raid but no reason why you couldn’t use them normally.

https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Brac...

I've purchased that exact item (as Amazon so helpfully reminded me when viewing the page).

It worked great.

WizKid wrote:

16GBis fine for now if all you’re doing is gaming. Now if your streaming and or doing other multitasking then yes going up to 32GB could prove beneficial.

This is exactly what I do - gaming. I don't stream to Twitch or anything.

I’ve actually used open screw points (like in a HD mounting frame) to just screw in an SSD, without any special hardware. All sorts of ways to jerry-rig SSD attachments.

You can literally just stick an SSD somewhere with 3M Command strips or double-sided tape. I've seen builds with the SSD just suspended in the air by its cables. There is no practical reason they need to be firmly secured.

That’s why I made the duct-tape comment above. I think people thought I was joking.

I am glad I am not the only one who though that just letting my ssd dangle was worth not having to fuss over placement and cable lengths.

I have four SSD's hidden behind a motherboard tray that didn't have any SSD mounting points behind it.

They're just on with stick on Velcro.

hashtagyepjustputthemwherever

WizKid wrote:

16GBis fine for now if all you’re doing is gaming. Now if your streaming and or doing other multitasking then yes going up to 32GB could prove beneficial.

I find it handy for running virtual machines. You can easily do three or four 4GB VMs and still have plenty left over for everything else.

Having a boatload of RAM was also really important for compiling Chromium for awhile. Don't know if it still is. A 16G machine was like a fifth the speed of a 32G one for awhile. (so, like, five hours to compile instead of one.)

I don't know if games need it or not, I rarely run a game without having 32G available.

Thanks for the ideas on the SSD mounting options. I might look into that 5.25 solution, since I have two free bays.

Oh, and one other thing I bought that is a great help in keeping the system clean - an XPOWER computer vacuum. I hadn't dusted out my system in about two years, and the amount of junk it blew out of there (including a dead centipede) was pretty darn impressive. It's loud, but not quite as loud as I was expecting based on some of the reviews.

Puce Moose wrote:

Oh, and one other thing I bought that is a great help in keeping the system clean - an XPOWER computer vacuum. I hadn't dusted out my system in about two years, and the amount of junk it blew out of there (including a dead centipede) was pretty darn impressive. It's loud, but not quite as loud as I was expecting based on some of the reviews.

I know I've raved about this product some pages ago in this thread. Every PC builder should own one or a similar product like it IMO. It has a permanent home on my workbench.

I bought a Datavac on sale locally and I am looking forward to using it soon when I clean out my PC.

Yeah, the only diff seems to be that the XPOWER is plastic, while the DataVac is old school sheet steel. I have the latter and it will fill a room with computer case dust in about 2 seconds, so use it outside lol. It needs a choking hazard label for indoor use.

It's the one thing we all agree on around here.

IMAGE(https://i.imgflip.com/32zdue.jpg)

Hello, I'm interested in upgrading my current PC. I'm thinking I could just replace my video card but I'm not sure. I have 16:10 1200 monitors.

I’m concerned that video cards are so expensive these days.

MotherBoard: ASUS H97I-PLUS
CPU: Intel i5-4690 CPU 3.50Ghz
RAM: 8GB DDR 3
Video Card: GeForce GTX 770
Update: I do have a solid state.

Thank you!

Welcome to GWJ! What do you want to upgrade to do, play games? I would recommend if you don’t already have an SSD do that first as it will make everything feel faster. Then RAM to 16gb and a video card will get you a couple of more years probably.

Thanks LeapingGnome,

I want to play games at medium to high settings. I want to have a good framerate so it is enjoyable. I do have a Solid State and will be upgrading my ram.

Do you have any recommendations on affordable cost effective video cards?

chronomagus wrote:

Thanks LeapingGnome,

Do you have any recommendations on affordable cost effective video cards?

What is your budget?

Hey WizKid,

My video card budget is probably around $300.

From my own research, i’m considering the Radeon RX Vega 56 vs the GeForce GTX 1660 Ti.

That processor is still decent, although the Haswell generation took a major hit to I/O speed from the patches to fix some of the dreadful hardware security bugs that have been surfacing. This means that games may load a little slower than they did before. But the actual CPU speed is still quite good, so once they're loaded, you won't notice much different. Newer CPUs are less impacted by the I/O problems, and there are starting to be games that will take advantage of 8 real cores and DDR4 memory, but you can likely put that upgrade off for at least another year yet. In two years, I'm betting you'll be feeling pretty squeezed.

To my mind, you're looking in exactly the right spot; a video card upgrade will make the computer feel almost new. Others here are following GPUs more closely than I am, but I've gotten the impression that the 1660Ti is a pretty decent card, priced at a fairly reasonable level. You don't want to go into the 2XXX series, they waste too many transistors on ray tracing, which is presently of fairly limited appeal. (it may end up being big, but probably not this generation.) So they cost a lot extra and don't actually run the existing games any faster.

I'm not sure how the Vega 56 compares, though. Typically, AMD cards run hotter and louder to match a same-speed NVidia card, but frequently cost less. But that's a general observation, and you'll want opinions from people with specific knowledge of those two exact cards.