Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

Are there any rumors about when to expect the next generation of graphics cards?

Aren't there new radeon's around the corner? Or is that just the APUs for laptops?

Hedinn wrote:

Are there any rumors about when to expect the next generation of graphics cards?

Expect announcements around March, and releases from anywhere between summer and late fall.

My RTX 2060 Super arrives tommorow! I will pull the 970 GTX and put in my sons' gaming rig build for later this year.

EVGA 2060

Hi, I'm thinking of getting a RTX 2070 Super to hopefully allow some 4k gaming and ray tracing and pretty things in games like Control (but I guess maybe not at 4k?), and also maybe VR at some point (just got back into Elite Dangerous). I'm wondering, would my current hardware support an RTX 2070 Super and let me do those things?

My hardware at the moment:

  • OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit[/li]
  • CPU: Intel Core i7 6700K @ 4.00GHz
  • RAM: 16.0GB Dual-Channel (VENGEANCE LPX) @ 1334MHz (16-18-18-35)
  • Motherboard: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Z170 PRO GAMING (LGA1151)
  • Display: BenQ EW3270U (3840x2160@60Hz)
  • Existing graphics: 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX TITAN (NVIDIA)
  • Power: EVGA 850W P2 SUPERNOVA PSU
  • Case: OBSIDIAN 750D FULL TOWER ATX CASE

Thank you!

I'd say you are fine. Maybe drop in an SSD if you don't have one, for the OS (and another for games, if you're feeling it). I'd also upgrade to 32G RAM, but that's personal preference. Overall, I'd say the new card will do quite well.

Robear wrote:

I'd say you are fine. Maybe drop in an SSD if you don't have one, for the OS (and another for games, if you're feeling it). I'd also upgrade to 32G RAM, but that's personal preference. Overall, I'd say the new card will do quite well.

Thanks!

Are there games that benefit from 32GB of RAM? I just went from 8 to 16 on my new build.

So my new 1440p 144mhz monitor dropped to 60hz refresh and won't change back. I have rebooted, re-seated cables, updated GPU drivers and will swap the Displayport 1.4 cable out this weekend as a last ditch. Cannot think of anything beyond that other than to RMA to monitor to LG.

beanman101283 wrote:

Are there games that benefit from 32GB of RAM? I just went from 8 to 16 on my new build.

More RAM does help to offset the OS and other stuff that is running in the background. 16 is the minimum I would suggest for anyone buying/building a PC today, but 32 is a bit overkill I think. That said RAM prices aren't terrible right now and the new consoles are probably going to have 16 gigs, which will open the flood gates to developers to push for more RAM in PC games. If you only have two slots I would say go future proof with 32 from the start. If you have more slots then you can easily upgrade later.

So M.2 drives... Intel 660p 1TB drives were $80 (sale) -100 just before the holidays, now $125. Did something happen? The 665p is $130. I was really hoping to upgrade from my 256 240GB 2.5" SSD from ... 2014.

Also, I will soon be in need of another media storage drive as my 3TB is less than 10% free, and I would like to rip some more of my discs. Any suggestions on manufacturers and brands these days. My HDD collection is ancient and due for replacement. My 2 newest drives are from 2016, and the other 2 are from 2014. 2 internal, 2 external (1 is basically an offsite backup of pictures).

ok... I just made myself realize how old my machine is, with the components mostly from 2016. Despite this, I guess it would be considered good enough or more than enough in some cases since it's rocking 32GB of RAM. Then again, back then I did some CAD work at home, and I still do some photo editing, video encoding, and of course video games. Thankfully, I've upgraded graphics with a 1070Ti in there and still run my resolution at 1080p. I will probably look at a new build next year, which would be in keeping with my long running once every 5 years schedule.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Did something happen?

Uh, yeah, you could say that.

Also this.

Combine those with the fact that NAND memory was at an all-time low in 2019 and already was projected to rise quite a bit in 2020, particularly with the console manufacturers ramping up purchases for their new machines. The time to buy was during those sales.

I'm pretty sure Cities Skylines with map extensions will use more than 16GB, including the OS. And there might be some other games with large data sets out there (Fallout 4 will use more than 32GB if you have it). I've seen a few games with options to pre-load maps and such, and the OS can use extra RAM as cache. But mostly, I just took advantage of cheap RAM to futureproof.

*Legion* wrote:
mrtomaytohead wrote:

Did something happen?

Uh, yeah, you could say that.

Also this.

Combine those with the fact that NAND memory was at an all-time low in 2019 and already was projected to rise in 2020, particularly with the console manufacturers ramping up purchases for their new machines. The time to buy was during those sales.

Yeah, wasn't sure the outbreak would impact that, too. So maybe buy before things keep going up? Or if I can live with it, wait for next year...

It doesn't seem like prices are likely to trend back downward anytime soon, so yeah, now seems as good a time as any.

Heretk wrote:

So my new 1440p 144mhz monitor dropped to 60hz refresh and won't change back. I have rebooted, re-seated cables, updated GPU drivers and will swap the Displayport 1.4 cable out this weekend as a last ditch. Cannot think of anything beyond that other than to RMA to monitor to LG.

It was the cable. Thanks to the PC gods!

Heretk wrote:
Heretk wrote:

So my new 1440p 144mhz monitor dropped to 60hz refresh and won't change back. I have rebooted, re-seated cables, updated GPU drivers and will swap the Displayport 1.4 cable out this weekend as a last ditch. Cannot think of anything beyond that other than to RMA to monitor to LG.

It was the cable. Thanks to the PC gods!

I didn't notice your first post, but yes, cables have been the root of any problem I had with a 144hz monitor (or 4K HDR TV) not working right.

After so many years of "any cable will do", I've now had to start paying close attention to what cable I buy, and keep a couple "good" ones in reserve, instead of just grabbing whatever from the crap pile of "came in the box with something" cables.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Also, I will soon be in need of another media storage drive as my 3TB is less than 10% free, and I would like to rip some more of my discs. Any suggestions on manufacturers and brands these days. My HDD collection is ancient and due for replacement. My 2 newest drives are from 2016, and the other 2 are from 2014. 2 internal, 2 external (1 is basically an offsite backup of pictures).

Right now while your collection is small go ahead and invest in getting a redundant file system setup. My suggestion is don't worry about brand or anything like that because they are all either likely to die in two years or last you six plus years (I still have 2TB drives from 2013 or so running, but all of my 4TB drives died). My suggestion is to buy minimum 2 6TB or 8TB drives (8 TB seems to be the sweet spot right now, you can often get external ones for around $140) and set them up to mirror each other or use something like Stable Bit DrivePool (this is what I use) or Windows Storage Spaces (this seems to be a bit more picky about what controllers the drives are on so it doesn't always like to work if say one drive is on an Intel SATA controller and the other is on a third party controller or on USB) to create a pool with redundancy.

One of the things I really like about DrivePool is that it is super easy to expand the size of the pool and it can be done one drive at a time and you don't need to worry about having matched drives or anything like you do with some other solutions. Also you can mix and match drive sizes. My setup is currently 5x8TB, 2x6TB, and 5x2TB. You could easily start with a couple of nice new drives and then add in your old drives as well. My case has 12 hot swap bays so now that they are all full my plan is to start replacing the 2TB drives with bigger ones and DrivePool makes that very easy to do as well. A FreeNAS setup or Synology system would probably be better, but this is way easier and more flexible and can be done with just about any old Windows system you have laying around.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/QOIDL1D.png)

Well, the Interl 660p M.2 just went on sale for the next 18 hours. Guess I'm picking it up now.

As for backups, I do have some backups, but i'm also not too terribly worried if I lose the videos since I figured out better encoding since I did the vast majority of them. I've already got my photos, documents, video games, and video game saves (GameSave Manager) backed up using Syncback. Although, I do back most of my videos up occasionally as I have one extra drive I take with us on vacations to watch stuff using a Raspberry Pi. But, I'll look into what you suggest, Rykin.

Wow! Just got the M.2 drive in the mail and since this is the first one I've ever seen in person, I'm shocked at how small it is. In my head, it was about 3x bigger, as in longer than a large cell phone. Instead, it is just about the same length as half of my Galaxy S9+. I guess not having enough experience to picture mm and cm in my head is part of that problem.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Wow! Just got the M.2 drive in the mail and since this is the first one I've ever seen in person, I'm shocked at how small it is. In my head, it was about 3x bigger, as in longer than a large cell phone. Instead, it is just about the same length as half of my Galaxy S9+. I guess not having enough experience to picture mm and cm in my head is part of that problem.

I just bought a 1TB micro SD card with read speeds fast enough to play 120fps 4K video.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Wow! Just got the M.2 drive in the mail and since this is the first one I've ever seen in person, I'm shocked at how small it is. In my head, it was about 3x bigger, as in longer than a large cell phone. Instead, it is just about the same length as half of my Galaxy S9+. I guess not having enough experience to picture mm and cm in my head is part of that problem.

I remember having a similar experience when I ran into my first one in the wild. Was in a Dell Optiplex that we were expecting SSDs in, but figured they would just be SATA ones.

mrtomaytohead wrote:

Wow! Just got the M.2 drive in the mail and since this is the first one I've ever seen in person, I'm shocked at how small it is. In my head, it was about 3x bigger, as in longer than a large cell phone. Instead, it is just about the same length as half of my Galaxy S9+. I guess not having enough experience to picture mm and cm in my head is part of that problem.

If you open up a SATA SSD drive, it's mostly empty:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/3gPlsnC.png)

The only reason the casing is as big as it is is to maintain compatibility with standard 2.5" laptop drive bays.

Hey all,

The PC I built last year is acting up. The fans rev up to full power every 10 seconds or so when playing a game. Doesn't matter what game. I checked the temps and they are not warm at all. This is a Corsair H115i I believe that is revving up the fans.

Any ideas?

*Legion* wrote:
mrtomaytohead wrote:

Wow! Just got the M.2 drive in the mail and since this is the first one I've ever seen in person, I'm shocked at how small it is. In my head, it was about 3x bigger, as in longer than a large cell phone. Instead, it is just about the same length as half of my Galaxy S9+. I guess not having enough experience to picture mm and cm in my head is part of that problem.

If you open up a SATA SSD drive, it's mostly empty:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/3gPlsnC.png)

The only reason the casing is as big as it is is to maintain compatibility with standard 2.5" laptop drive bays.

I would imagine this varies with the capacity of the drives. There are some enterprise level SSDs that use the 3.5 inch form factor so they can cram 100 TBs of chips in there.

Balthezor wrote:

Hey all,

The PC I built last year is acting up. The fans rev up to full power every 10 seconds or so when playing a game. Doesn't matter what game. I checked the temps and they are not warm at all. This is a Corsair H115i I believe that is revving up the fans.

Any ideas?

Check BIOS and/or check the fan software, it might need calibration. It's also possible the CPU is spiking in temps so the fans rev up, that's a guess. Also if you haven't blown out dust in a while, do that.

Balthezor wrote:

Hey all,

The PC I built last year is acting up. The fans rev up to full power every 10 seconds or so when playing a game. Doesn't matter what game. I checked the temps and they are not warm at all. This is a Corsair H115i I believe that is revving up the fans.

Any ideas?

What temps are you checking? Are you running CoreTemp and reading the values out of the processor, or are you using some kind of external measurement on the heatsink?

We've had quite a few liquid coolers fail in this forum; at a first guess, the pump may be giving up or the liquid may be drying out. I had a slow failure on an Intel liquid cooler that drove me bats until I finally figured out I was having temperature problems. I thought it was the Subnautica alpha sucking. It wasn't.

Malor wrote:
Balthezor wrote:

Hey all,

The PC I built last year is acting up. The fans rev up to full power every 10 seconds or so when playing a game. Doesn't matter what game. I checked the temps and they are not warm at all. This is a Corsair H115i I believe that is revving up the fans.

Any ideas?

What temps are you checking? Are you running CoreTemp and reading the values out of the processor, or are you using some kind of external measurement on the heatsink?

We've had quite a few liquid coolers fail in this forum; at a first guess, the pump may be giving up or the liquid may be drying out. I had a slow failure on an Intel liquid cooler that drove me bats until I finally figured out I was having temperature problems. I thought it was the Subnautica alpha sucking. It wasn't.

Thanks Malor. Temps while playing Division 2 are maxing at 68 C. So not too bad I believe.

Balthezor wrote:

Hey all,

The PC I built last year is acting up. The fans rev up to full power every 10 seconds or so when playing a game. Doesn't matter what game. I checked the temps and they are not warm at all. This is a Corsair H115i I believe that is revving up the fans.

Any ideas?

Are you checking actual CPU temperature or just reading the coolant temp for the 115i? I ask because Corsair sucked at telling you what it's software was actually showing you for a long, long time.

If you're reading your CPU temps in other software then ignore that question.

I'd guess that either the fans are set based on your cpu's temperature and not the coolant's so quick spikes cause them to immediately rev up and back down or the fan curve sucks and doesn't ramp up gradually, and your CPU is riding the line where it's set to crank them up.

I've seen a lot of stock fan curves set this way over the years. It's like 30% at 30 degrees, 50% at 50, but then 80-100% fan speed at like 60-70 and that's just a ton of noise and it doesn't generally increase cooling ability enough to justify all the extra noise.

Along with optimizing the fan curve, on Ryzen individual core temps can spike for very short time periods (fractions of a second). In the BIOS there's an option to have a lag time so the fan won't react if the spike goes away on its own. I typically make that a few seconds to smooth things out.