Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

merphle wrote:

And Rise of the Tomb Raider worked fine? Hmm, maybe it's just a software issue with Subnautica then - try verifying your install?

Yeah. Played through the whole game last year, with this gpu. No issues.

I've verified it through Epic. I tried going through some of the game's error logs, but couldn't really figure anything out there.

Sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a game crashing topic. That issue had just led me to the question of potential upgrades.

vlox_km wrote:
merphle wrote:

And Rise of the Tomb Raider worked fine? Hmm, maybe it's just a software issue with Subnautica then - try verifying your install?

Yeah. Played through the whole game last year, with this gpu. No issues.

I've verified it through Epic. I tried going through some of the game's error logs, but couldn't really figure anything out there.

Sorry, I didn't mean to turn this into a game crashing topic. That issue had just led me to the question of potential upgrades.

Nah we just like solving problems sounds like it doesn't blue screen when it crashes. Maybe something in the windows event viewer?

So I'm delving further and further into my upcoming build to replace my dying PC, and I think I'm going to want to go with an X570 mobo to future-proof as much as possible since I don't want to do this often these days. Unfortunately, all the sub-$200 ones are sold out everywhere. I guess I could backorder to make sure I get one in the near future.

Anyone have a favorite? I've seen some bad reviews of some brands; I was thinking about ASUS.

Yeah, no blue screen. It just hangs/freezes. Then usually will crash and close, or sometimes I'll have to force close it. It usually happens after a few minutes of going through the water. But sometimes I'll be able to play for an hour+ just fine. It hasn't been consistent enough for me to find a specific cause.

And I'd seen plenty of posts about the game being poorly optimized, and people reporting crashes under various circumstances, so am not necessarily thinking it's a specific hardware thing. Though I could certainly see the cooler/temp being a possible cause - will have to check on that later.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

So I'm delving further and further into my upcoming build to replace my dying PC, and I think I'm going to want to go with an X570 mobo to future-proof as much as possible since I don't want to do this often these days. Unfortunately, all the sub-$200 ones are sold out everywhere. I guess I could backorder to make sure I get one in the near future.

Anyone have a favorite? I've seen some bad reviews of some brands; I was thinking about ASUS.

The Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus is the best bang for your buck X570 board right now. If you don't like its aesthetic, the Asus Prime X570-P is basically the same board with a different look but costs a little more. The MSI Tomahawk (not to be confused with the B450 Tomahawk and Tomahawk max) coming out soon could be a contender.

Basically all of the major names have good boards and bad boards so I wouldn't go by brand, though.

merphle wrote:

And Rise of the Tomb Raider worked fine? Hmm, maybe it's just a software issue with Subnautica then - try verifying your install?

Again, I saw very similar symptoms with an overheating CPU. Subnautica is not like most games, in that it's unusually CPU-intensive; it will load down all four cores and reveal problems long before other games will show any symptoms. I don't remember whether I ran Tomb Raider contemporaneously, but I certainly ran similar games without issues at the time.

It wasn't until the herky-jerky framerates started to creep into other games that I realized my CPU cooler was failing. It just took that long for the failure to get bad enough to affect games that weren't Subnautica.

merphle wrote:
Malor wrote:
I received the riser card yesterday, installed my NVMe into it, and popped the card into an open PCIe slot - and it just worked. Drive letter remained unchanged, and CrystalDiskInfo reports that it's running in PCIe 3.0 x4 mode.

Out of interest, what riser card did you order?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0... - $16, nice and simple.

It came today, works a treat. That was one of the simplest things I've ever done on a PC... transfer drive to card, plug in card, done. Everything remains normal, except now it's easy to remove/disable the drive. (by pulling the card, there's no defeat switch or anything.) I didn't even have to mess with the boot order in the BIOS, it was still set correctly.

Things seem maybe a little crisper, but the game I'm playing right now (Mankind Divided) loads at about the same speed it did before. Bandwidth is rarely the choke point in most games, so that's pretty much as expected.

Maybe it's a little bit faster.

Malor wrote:
merphle wrote:
Malor wrote:
I received the riser card yesterday, installed my NVMe into it, and popped the card into an open PCIe slot - and it just worked. Drive letter remained unchanged, and CrystalDiskInfo reports that it's running in PCIe 3.0 x4 mode.

Out of interest, what riser card did you order?

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0... - $16, nice and simple.

It came today, works a treat. That was one of the simplest things I've ever done on a PC... transfer drive to card, plug in card, done. Everything remains normal, except now it's easy to remove/disable the drive. (by pulling the card, there's no defeat switch or anything.) I didn't even have to mess with the boot order in the BIOS, it was still set correctly.

Things seem maybe a little crisper, but the game I'm playing right now (Mankind Divided) loads at about the same speed it did before. Bandwidth is rarely the choke point in most games, so that's pretty much as expected.

Maybe it's a little bit faster.

I definitely don't see AC:Odyssey soft-pausing nearly as much since I moved my NVMe drive - now that I think about it, maybe one very brief pause (like sub-second) since then? But I definitely see Dark Souls 2 loading faster when teleporting between bonfires. Just go with it.

Picked up a 1650gtx (4GB), and an extra DDR3 8GB stick with no issues from my preferred supplier. Set me back $300 Canabucks. Installed with no issues.

Wink_and_the_Gun wrote:

Picked up a 1650gtx (4GB), and an extra DDR3 8GB stick with no issues from my preferred supplier. Set me back $300 Canabucks. Installed with no issues.

You should always do RAM in pairs. If you do a single, unmatched stick, that RAM will be in single-channel mode, half as fast. This can really mess things up.

With my old-ass board, they said it won’t make much of a difference... just having more ram = better. I’m due for a new PC, I’m holding off on it until the new graphics cards come out. This is only a stop-gap, until then.

ASRock Bringing Overclocking to Locked Comet Lake-S CPUs, Non-Z Motherboards.

TLDR; They are going to let you adjust the TDP to overclock chips that don't support overclocking. Not as good as what you get from K chips but it will let you get a bit more power out of any chip if your cooling can handle it.

Had a nice financial windfall, so working on replacing all the computers in the house (wife's is 11 yrs, mine is 5, child needs a PC, need to build an HTPC).

Step one is the HTPC. I've been meaning to build one for a while, but this build guide looked good so I've followed that pretty much. The only changes I made were adding the optional SoundBlaster and upping the power supply to a 750 because all the 550s and 650s were sold out.

My wife's machine is going to be a little tricky and I wanted to ask for advice since it's been a while since I built anything. Her machine runs our Plex server, but she still does some light gaming and internet stuff on it. All our movies and TV are stored in our two Synology disk bays (about 84TB) so she doesn't need internal storage. Any thoughts on what to do for her build? She has monitor, keyboard, etc. that we'll be re-using, and I'd like to keep it under $1500.

bighoppa wrote:

Had a nice financial windfall, so working on replacing all the computers in the house (wife's is 11 yrs, mine is 5, child needs a PC, need to build an HTPC).

Step one is the HTPC. I've been meaning to build one for a while, but this build guide looked good so I've followed that pretty much. The only changes I made were adding the optional SoundBlaster and upping the power supply to a 750 because all the 550s and 650s were sold out.

My wife's machine is going to be a little tricky and I wanted to ask for advice since it's been a while since I built anything. Her machine runs our Plex server, but she still does some light gaming and internet stuff on it. All our movies and TV are stored in our two Synology disk bays (about 84TB) so she doesn't need internal storage. Any thoughts on what to do for her build? She has monitor, keyboard, etc. that we'll be re-using, and I'd like to keep it under $1500.

Great AMD Gaming Build.

Great Intel Gaming Build.

Both of these seem like good starting points. Maybe even overkill based on your use case, but well below your budget max. You can change up stuff a bit like more RAM and maybe add in an NVMe drive to use as your boot drive (or a big NVMe drive for boot and storage even).

The gaming build Rykin posted is pretty much what I have and I'd point out it is a very strong gaming build for 1440p so you could consider getting a 1440p monitor with FreeSync if you care about that.

For the HTPC, do you need a console-style case? I wonder how noisy that setup will end up being since it uses a stock Wraith Spire cooler, and a single-fan graphics card. I have an HTPC and I find any noise from it much more annoying that noise from my desktop because I'm usually not wearing headphones when I use it. A Fractal Design Mini C is a nice discreet and quiet case, and it will allow you to use pretty much any aftermarket CPU cooler and a graphics card with a beefier cooling solution.

Middcore wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:

So I'm delving further and further into my upcoming build to replace my dying PC, and I think I'm going to want to go with an X570 mobo to future-proof as much as possible since I don't want to do this often these days. Unfortunately, all the sub-$200 ones are sold out everywhere. I guess I could backorder to make sure I get one in the near future.

Anyone have a favorite? I've seen some bad reviews of some brands; I was thinking about ASUS.

The Asus TUF Gaming X570-Plus is the best bang for your buck X570 board right now. If you don't like its aesthetic, the Asus Prime X570-P is basically the same board with a different look but costs a little more. The MSI Tomahawk (not to be confused with the B450 Tomahawk and Tomahawk max) coming out soon could be a contender.

Basically all of the major names have good boards and bad boards so I wouldn't go by brand, though.

Unfortunately, neither of those are available on any of pcpartpicker's favorite retailers, and those retailers don't seem to be taking orders on future stock at the moment.

I'm starting to think my issues with Subnautica might be memory. I installed some temp monitoring software. During a couple gameplay tests, the cpu got up to about 60 degrees or so. I also ran a couple short (5 minute) sessions of the Intel burn test. It did get hot there (85-90), but then I realized I was using the stock cooler since I'm not overclocking. A little research lead me to believe that the burn test isn't really intended for stock coolers? Not entirely sure, but the cpu temp seemed fine in-game (60) and during regular use (35).

The ram usage did keep creeping up constantly as I was playing, particularly while driving around the game. And did crash around 6GB of usage. I found a post where someone suggested increasing their virtual paging file size. I tried that out and was able to play for longer with no crashes, and watch the ram usage go higher than before.

So, since a ram upgrade from 8 to 16GB would be useful no matter what, I'm probably going to go on and do that soon. Does mixing brands matter? A few years ago I bought these at 1600, 9-9-9-24, 1.5v. So I was going to buy another pair with the same timings. I found these on Newegg. Honestly not sure what a reasonable DDR3 price/brand is.

I think that memory looks fine. However 75% memory usage while high isn't quite at a level that should crash a system. Might be worth running a memory test to make sure it's working properly before adding the new sticks.

As long as you buy the RAM in matched pairs, you're fine. Each pair of slots is on a separate channel, and they're independent of each other.

Just don't, in general, mix sticks that are different, even if the 'headline stats' are the same. There are a lot of different timings for DRAM, and if you have a mismatched pair, the system will choose the slowest number in every category. Both sticks will end up functioning at their least common denominator, the slowest of the two choices for every timing.

Matching the headline numbers across the two pairs of RAM won't hurt, and it will keep your machine running at, more or less, a consistent speed.

I went and looked, and was thinking maybe I'd suggest replacing the RAM completely with some quality CAS8 stuff, but all the CAS8 and CAS7 RAM is exceedingly expensive. From what I can see on Newegg, you've got a good option there. You could also add 16 gigs, for a total of 24, which would give the system a little more headroom. If you plan to keep it more than another year or two, that probably wouldn't hurt. But if you're thinking about a whole-system upgrade anytime in the near-ish future, the extra money wouldn't help much.

Fedaykin98 wrote:

Another question: Quiet cases. I discovered when I made my last build that this matters a lot to me. Right now I'm looking at the Maingear Vybe, which is reputedly very quiet.

Y'all have any thoughts or recommendations?

I may be too late to this discussion, but I just built my new rig with this case, and the thing literally has automotive-style sound dampening material on the inside walls of the case. Quiet is an understatement.

My only complaints with this case are:

  • It's heavy
  • The sides are closed only by magnets

The magnetic latches originally seemed like a feature, until I started doing cable organizing behind the panel on the right side. Your cables have to be tight and flat, or that side won't close, and there's no way to lock the panel shut aside from the magnets. That's probably why they have so many velcro cable ties actually built into the case on that side.

You're not too late Mike, thanks! Right now it looks like I'm delaying my build as x570 mobos are sold out everywhere. For the moment, my dying computer is hanging in there.

Hang in there compy 386!

"I took two at least that could not have lived."
"As did I. As did we all."
"Even the Arab gutted one."
"There was some life left in him."

Man I love that movie!

Fedaykin98 wrote:

You're not too late Mike, thanks! Right now it looks like I'm delaying my build as x570 mobos are sold out everywhere. For the moment, my dying computer is hanging in there.

NewEgg has some available to order. Not sure what all you are wanting out of one though.

I'm reading all these nightmare reviews of the 5700 XT on newegg across multiple manufacturers. If I'm going to throw a card into an 5 year old system is there a go to version or should I look towards Nvidia.

i7 4790k
Asus Maximus VI Extreme Z87 mainboard

EvilDead wrote:

I'm reading all these nightmare reviews of the 5700 XT on newegg across multiple manufacturers. If I'm going to throw a card into an 5 year old system is there a go to version or should I look towards Nvidia.

i7 4790k
Asus Maximus VI Extreme Z87 mainboard

A few things to remember

1. User reviews always have inherent negativity bias in that people who have bad experiences are far more likely to write reviews to complain, whereas people who are satisfied with their product are too busy happily using it to bother.

2. The 5700 XT cards with the initial AMD reference "blower" cooler design were noted to be hot and loud, although much can be accomplished on the former front with a set of washers. Since then better cooler options have become available from most of the AIB partners, and the only ones to definitely avoid are the XFX THICC (they said they were fixing it but who knows) and the Asus STRIX and TUF (although again, the STRIX can be improved by increasing mounting pressure).

3. The Navi cards had some driver bugs for the first few months, although I believe these were overstated (see point 1, and remember that in tech circles small problems tend be blown out of proportion because they are repeated memetically by people who like to feel knowledgeable or put down the rival of the parts they fanboy). I personally have been using a 5700 since last September with absolutely 0 issue. The majority of people who did have driver problems on these cards saw them ironed out by the driver revision which came out in February.

All of that said, the 5700 XT is up to partnering with a CPU much better than your aging 4790k. If you want a card you can hang on to for a couple of years through rebuilding on a more modern platform, then the 5700 XT isn't a bad choice, if you want to ensure you aren't spending more money than necessary on a card that could end up bottlenecked by your CPU, I would look at the Nvidia 1660 Super or perhaps a 5600 XT. If you think you do want the 5700 XT's level of performance but aren't quite sure, the non-XT 5700 runs $50-100 cheaper, and with a BIOS flash and power limit mod can actually get almost within margin of error of its bigger brother's performance. On the Nvidia side, the competitors would be the 2070 and 2070 Super, but these come at a price premium their marginal performance advantage can't match, although they do have secondary features if you plan to do things like stream gameplay or record audio.

Rykin wrote:
Fedaykin98 wrote:

You're not too late Mike, thanks! Right now it looks like I'm delaying my build as x570 mobos are sold out everywhere. For the moment, my dying computer is hanging in there.

NewEgg has some available to order. Not sure what all you are wanting out of one though.

Hey, thanks for finding that! I'm off to look for reviews.

I'm jus waitin on my b450 mobo to arrive

@Middcore

In regards to your first point I looked at a few cards on sale and the reviews are recent. I get that reviews are going to skew towards the neg but I compared to the cheapest 2070 & 2070super (but significantly more expensive) which seem to be more favorable. For example:

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon...

Thanks for the all the info, it helps narrow things down. I always like to buy for the future but I'm going to do some searching on how much the CPU will bottleneck the cards. That's interesting regarding the vanilla 5700. I will definitely look into that a bit today.

EvilDead wrote:

@Middcore

In regards to your first point I looked at a few cards on sale and the reviews are recent. I get that reviews are going to skew towards the neg but I compared to the cheapest 2070 & 2070super (but significantly more expensive) which seem to be more favorable. For example:

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon...

Thanks for the all the info, it helps narrow things down. I always like to buy for the future but I'm going to do some searching on how much the CPU will bottleneck the cards. That's interesting regarding the vanilla 5700. I will definitely look into that a bit today.

AsRock is brand new to producing GPU's, like their first ones literally came out in the past year. Not surprised they don't have a decent cooler design figured out for a more power-hungry card like the 5700 XT. (Not to mention the Challenger is one of the most butt-ugly designs on the market IMO but that's me.) I wouldn't even consider them when I could get a 5700/XT card from Sapphire or PowerColor, or even Gigabyte.

Middcore wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

@Middcore

In regards to your first point I looked at a few cards on sale and the reviews are recent. I get that reviews are going to skew towards the neg but I compared to the cheapest 2070 & 2070super (but significantly more expensive) which seem to be more favorable. For example:

https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon...

Thanks for the all the info, it helps narrow things down. I always like to buy for the future but I'm going to do some searching on how much the CPU will bottleneck the cards. That's interesting regarding the vanilla 5700. I will definitely look into that a bit today.

AsRock is brand new to producing GPU's, like their first ones literally came out in the past year. Not surprised they don't have a decent cooler design figured out for a more power-hungry card like the 5700 XT. (Not to mention the Challenger is one of the most butt-ugly designs on the market IMO but that's me.) I wouldn't even consider them when I could get a 5700/XT card from Sapphire or PowerColor, or even Gigabyte.

OK thanks. I will keep an eye on those brands. I see the PowerColor vanilla Red Devil mentioned in a lot of XT BIOS upgrade threads.