Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

I get that. I am on that side of the argument and trust me, having just bought a b450 mere days before, it hurts.
But I do see the flip side where limiting customer confusion and the fact that the 400 series has an abundance of upgrade options (1600AF, 3100, 3300x, through 3600 and 3700 all the way up to 3900x). That covers a huge spectrum of cpu power (slower and cheap 6/12's, on to fast and bargain basement 4/8's on to server worthy 12/24's)

I can't begrudge AMD doing this. They have given us a lot over the last 4ish years...

fangblackbone wrote:

I get that. I am on that side of the argument and trust me, having just bought a b450 mere days before, it hurts.
But I do see the flip side where limiting customer confusion and the fact that the 400 series has an abundance of upgrade options (1600AF, 3100, 3300x, through 3600 and 3700 all the way up to 3900x). That covers a huge spectrum of cpu power (slower and cheap 6/12's, on to fast and bargain basement 4/8's on to server worthy 12/24's)

I can't begrudge AMD doing this. They have given us a lot over the last 4ish years...

I can begrudge them for it but I guess I'm too cynical to be very outraged. I've been telling people for a years that multi-billion dollar corporations aren't their friends, whether it's "just" a few billion or tens or hundreds of billions, and that if AMD got a whiff of market dominance they would start to become just as lazy and anti-consumer as Intel has been. I am here for the AMD heel turn.

Oh I definitely agree.
I love AMD the underdog.
The path of AMD the dynasty has yet to be written.

As a side note, I am rooting for intel. (in the gpu sector, heh)

@bobbywatson - One more recommendation. Get an aftermarket cpu cooler. The one that comes with the ryzen 3600 works but it slid quite a bit putting it on. Plus my finger touched the thermal paste so it is really easy to do. You will obviously have to find a low profile one. Or you could replace the thermal paste with a high end one. The stock wraith cooler has no heat pipes so I am wagering that will make a difference in my system.

So one of my cores is way hotter than the others and has reached 87 degrees doing one of the Blender test renders. (i.e. maxes out all cores) Most of the cores idle at 38 and cap at 51 degrees. I have the one that can get to 87 and idles at 38. And I have one that idles at 14 and caps at 38 degrees.

I am tempted to go into the bios and disable turbo clocking or lower it a bit. I don't really need it.
I need to go into the bios anyways to turn on tmp or whatever that will clock my RAM at the right speed (3200). It defaults to 2133Mhz.

It is weird that WoW is the only thing that makes the fan noticeably audible. It could be the gpu fan or it has been getting hot in the afternoon here...

Thanks, I will keep this in mind!

So I figured that my fx 8300 might have been holding my Radeon 580 back so I looked up single core performance for the fx8300 and ryzen 3600. Um, it is almost an 75% increase for single core on the ryzen 3600, NICE!

Anecdotally I thought WoW might be running better. But I said to myself "it is just WoW, it is not taxing anything at 1080p". But with those single core numbers, the fx8300 could have been holding back the rx580 noticeably, even in WoW.

Yes, the FX chips were hot garbage. The reason Ryzen was so amazing when it arrived is because of just how bad the FX lines were.

Piledriver (eg. that 8300) wasn't quite as garbage as Bulldozer, but they were still 2013-14 CPUs with 2008-09 Intel single thread performance.

Regarding my issues with Subnautica and possible upgrades:

I got some new ram (8GB more) on Friday and installed it. Good news. I was able to play several times over the weekend and didn't have any crashes thus far. Before, it seemed like my ram usage was capping out, then the game would hang and crash. Now, I can watch the ram usage get up to 8-9GB at it's highest. So maybe there was something weird going on there. I did have a couple times over the weekend where the game would briefly pause, usually when changing environments. But it would almost immediately get back to normal.

Thanks all for the advice and help.

bobbywatson wrote:

Are all power supplies the same physical size? If not, that is a factor I need to consider, as big ones may not fit inside the case.

Didn't see anyone answer this question you had and the answer is sort of. There are a few common form factors but there is also a bit of variance from model to model. For instance modular power supplies (power supplies with plugs for cables instead of built-in cables) tend to be slightly longer than non-modular ones. That Silverstone case included in that build requires an SFX (100mm) or SFX-L (130mm) power supply. I would say go with a modular SFX one.

The case linked in the build looks interesting. The GPU setup is nice and it has room for a slim optical drive. The motherboard chamber is pretty tight though. Not sure what your experience building PCs is but small form factor builds can be tricky. It is a 12 liter case so it isn't the tiniest. I built a system in an 8.5 liter case (with an optical drive) for my stepdad and it was a very frustrating build.

After busting a new lan card in the pc rig: it works. I get constant downloads around 70 megs? I'm content again. Download some games and rip some ps2 games.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Yeah, it's doing weird stuff. Gonna table it for today. Will have to go through the motherboard manual and check error codes and troubleshooting options. I can't get it back into default bios settings now. Hopefully fixable.

I suppose I could probably replace motherboard with same model worse case. That would be a nightmare of work though. I put a lot of care into installing it with thermal paste and whatnot. It's an EVGA Z370 FTW.

Good news everyone! I'm typing from my PC again. After checking the manual, I found that my motherboard has TWO BIOSes. I tried the other one, and could get it to boot to windows with the old one. Then I found the BIOS reset button was on the back in the I/O section for some reason. I had always seen them on the motherboard back in the day, so I didn't realize where it was at. Reset BIOS 1 and manually entered all my settings that I had saved by taking photos of every frickin BIOS screen instead of loading the saved profile. That worked. Thank goodness I have the experience to have done that! I had some custom voltage settings for my overclock that would have been a pain to re-figure out.

There are some new security settings, so it was good to get that updated. I had done the update right after the critical Intel fail, but hadn't done any since.

So, I'm back to trying to find my M.2 drive. I'll try the Samsung Magician and see if that works.

Well, Samsung Magician doesn't see it. Hmmmm... So weird.

I would try disconnecting every device you don't need. Unplug all the SATA devices and remove all your PCIe cards (assuming you have onboard graphics as a fall back otherwise I guess you need the GPU). Disconnect network and all the USB except your keyboard and mouse and see what you get. Try the drive in both of the M key m.2 ports on your motherboard (the E key port is too short for the SSD you bought and it wouldn't work anyway).

Alternatively you can get a m.2 to USB adapter (you need an M key adapter for the Samsung 970 Evo) and test the drive itself to make sure that is not the issue.

Oh man, that'd be a tall order to unplug all that stuff and get it plugged back in correctly. I have 6-8 drives along with a SATA adapter to add more slots and tons of USB stuff. Definitely got a frankencomputer on my hands. It could be the problem, although I kinda doubt it since the BIOS does seem to be enabling the M.2 port and disabling the SATA ports correctly. It just doesn't see an NVME device.

Since I have 2 M.2 slots, I could put the drive in the other M.2 slot and check to see if the BIOS recognizes it. I'd have to disable SATA 0 and 1, which I could do for the purposes of testing briefly. I think I'll do that and then see if I can exchange it for another through Amazon or RMA it if I can't do that. I do love the idea of testing it with an M Key adapter, but I don't really want to cough up $25 for it.

If I can exchange it and then the next one doesn't work, I'll probably just try and get my money back or sell the drive. I could just swap out a small SATA SSD that I have for a big one at some point and call it good.

Sounds like you need to consolidate some drives...

fangblackbone wrote:

Sounds like you need to consolidate some drives...

I'm going to be doing this when I build my new PC. Any tips other than just the obvious of buying a big drive and copying things over?

I used to have a frankencomputer as well with a bunch of internal drives and an external 4 bay USB case (that I need to sell now that I no longer need it) plus like 3 standalone USB drives. I spent a lot more than I planned on building a new file server to solve that problem, but it has reduced the number of computer related headaches I have had.

My system is currently running with 14 drives. Booting from a 256gig NVMe m.2 SSD (wish I had gotten a bigger one now, the Plex cache is over 100gigs) with a 1TB SATA SSD and 12 SATA HDDs hooked into a 16 drive SAS card (SFF-8087 ports on the HBA is very handy for reducing the number of cables you have to run) setup as a drive pool with file redundancy. The case has room for at least another 8 drives (not in hot swap bays though) and maybe as many as 12, but I am hoping to never need more than 12 drives for my storage pool. It is made up of 5x2TB, 2x6TB, and 5x8TB drives so I plan to retire the 2TB drives (one of which is almost seven years old!!!) when I need more space. The next drives I buy will probably be 10TB as they are starting to be available in the $150 range.

Fedaykin98 wrote:
fangblackbone wrote:

Sounds like you need to consolidate some drives...

I'm going to be doing this when I build my new PC. Any tips other than just the obvious of buying a big drive and copying things over?

Yes. Buy a couple of big drives and then setup some sort of file redundancy and then copy everything over. Also if you can don't use your daily driver PC for this. This is a great sort of thing to do with an older PC instead of selling it/trashing it/giving it away. Also Synology makes some pretty good NAS devices. I could have actually gotten a 12 bay Synology Disk Station for what I paid for my custom built solution and had money left over (I spent about $3000 over the course of 4 to 5 months on mine) :/

Cripes, my net connection is almost fast enough to throw my old drives up to the cloud ;P

Tuffalo, you made sure your mobo can actually see NVMe drives? With the right firmware? Check the manufacturers website, and if it's not in the specs, examine the notes for each of the firmware upgrades.

Yeah, it has been updated to the latest BIOS and always had a section on NVMe devices in the menu, and no NVMe devices are detected. I'll try the other M.2 port and see if it's detected on that one. If not, I'm gonna exchange it.

So, some NVMe drives might not be compatible? That would be soooooo dumb. Are you saying check the firmware info on the NVMe drive?

I put in the 5700 XT yesterday and my framerates skyrocketed in Warzone. It is quieter than my 970 GTX was while idle which is nice.

One possibly troubling thing was is that I have already had two issues during non gaming usage. Once during a reboot the windows circle stopped spinning and the computer just hung. A second one waking from monitor off state this morning. It just wouldn't wake and I had to hard reboot the computer to get it to work. I can't remember the last time my computer froze before this. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is a one off and not a pattern.

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers and used DDU prior to installing.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Yeah, it has been updated to the latest BIOS and always had a section on NVMe devices in the menu, and no NVMe devices are detected. I'll try the other M.2 port and see if it's detected on that one. If not, I'm gonna exchange it.

So, some NVMe drives might not be compatible? That would be soooooo dumb. Are you saying check the firmware info on the NVMe drive?

No. M.2 and NVMe are two different things.

M.2 is a physical connector standard of which there are 3 variations in common use Key B, E, and M. Your motherboard features two of these variations with 2 slots in Key M and 1 slot in Key E (this is the short one above your first PCIe slot). Different keys support different functionality and different amounts of bandwidth. Most of the keys only support 2x PCIe lanes. Key M supports 4x PCIe lanes which is required for NVMe.

NVMe is a communication standard that can be used with any physical connection standard that supports 4x PCIe lanes like a Key M M.2 slot or a U.2/U.3 port or even a 4x or greater PCIe port.

The drive you have should work in either of the two M.2 slots labeled as #9 on page 12 of your manual. It will not work in the slot labeled #10. If it is not working in either of those slots I would suggest unplugging all SATA devices connected to the motherboard (any connect to a PCIe card should be fine) and testing again. According to the manual you need to disable SATA ports 0 and 1 to use the top M Key port and disable SATA ports 4 and 5 for the other one.

EvilDead wrote:

I put in the 5700 XT yesterday and my framerates skyrocketed in Warzone. It is quieter than my 970 GTX was while idle which is nice.

One possibly troubling thing was is that I have already had two issues during non gaming usage. Once during a reboot the windows circle stopped spinning and the computer just hung. A second one waking from monitor off state this morning. It just wouldn't wake and I had to hard reboot the computer to get it to work. I can't remember the last time my computer froze before this. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is a one off and not a pattern.

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers and used DDU prior to installing.

OK, so this is a thing. Neither monitor will wake up from off state after they have been off for a bit. If I unplug the monitor cable and plug it back it it will come on. This didn't happen with the 970 so it's definitively something with the new card hardware or software.

EvilDead wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

I put in the 5700 XT yesterday and my framerates skyrocketed in Warzone. It is quieter than my 970 GTX was while idle which is nice.

One possibly troubling thing was is that I have already had two issues during non gaming usage. Once during a reboot the windows circle stopped spinning and the computer just hung. A second one waking from monitor off state this morning. It just wouldn't wake and I had to hard reboot the computer to get it to work. I can't remember the last time my computer froze before this. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this is a one off and not a pattern.

I did uninstall the Nvidia drivers and used DDU prior to installing.

OK, so this is a thing. Neither monitor will wake up from off state after they have been off for a bit. If I unplug the monitor cable and plug it back it it will come on. This didn't happen with the 970 so it's definitively something with the new card hardware or software.

Connected to the monitors with the same cables you were using on the 970? Sometimes DisplayLink has issues with returning monitors from sleep.

The outputs are all different so both cables are different but known working cables borrowed from work. They were used with a similar setup on an RX580 which has the same outputs. Standard HDMI and 3 displayports (non mini)

What is DisplayLink?

I just ran into this making me think there might be issues with HDMI on these cards.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/com...

Rykin wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Yeah, it has been updated to the latest BIOS and always had a section on NVMe devices in the menu, and no NVMe devices are detected. I'll try the other M.2 port and see if it's detected on that one. If not, I'm gonna exchange it.

So, some NVMe drives might not be compatible? That would be soooooo dumb. Are you saying check the firmware info on the NVMe drive?

No. M.2 and NVMe are two different things.

M.2 is a physical connector standard of which there are 3 variations in common use Key B, E, and M. Your motherboard features two of these variations with 2 slots in Key M and 1 slot in Key E (this is the short one above your first PCIe slot). Different keys support different functionality and different amounts of bandwidth. Most of the keys only support 2x PCIe lanes. Key M supports 4x PCIe lanes which is required for NVMe.

NVMe is a communication standard that can be used with any physical connection standard that supports 4x PCIe lanes like a Key M M.2 slot or a U.2/U.3 port or even a 4x or greater PCIe port.

The drive you have should work in either of the two M.2 slots labeled as #9 on page 12 of your manual. It will not work in the slot labeled #10. If it is not working in either of those slots I would suggest unplugging all SATA devices connected to the motherboard (any connect to a PCIe card should be fine) and testing again. According to the manual you need to disable SATA ports 0 and 1 to use the top M Key port and disable SATA ports 4 and 5 for the other one.

Okay, first of all, thank you for the info and advice. I have not been keeping up on SSD info and reviews the last few years. I had time to do more troubleshooting today. First thing I did was move the drive to the other slot which disabled the SATA 0 and 1 ports automatically. I actually unplugged a SATA controller in a PCIE slot I had as well just to see if that was the problem given your advice. It worked! The drive showed up in the NVMe section in the UEFI. So, I then plugged the SATA controller back in, and that didn't affect anything, so it wasn't that. I then tried going back to the other M.2 slot, and it saw it... when I left both M.2 ports enabled in the UEFI. When I disable the first, it then doesn't show up.

So, for whatever reason, the 2nd M.2 slot only works if you've enabled the first slot. This wasn't in the manual or clear at all. You can disable the second and enable the 1st only, however to leave you some SATA cables. Pretty dumb in my opinion and made me waste a lot of time. Whatever.

What I wasn't sure about is if I moved my SATA SSD with the Windows install to another SATA port, if it would screw things up. Thankfully it doesn't at all. Phew! I've got a couple small SSDs I can move to SATA 4 and 5 since those are enabled. Gonna label where all the SATA numbers are now since it's getting a bit more Frankensteiny. At this point, I'm kinda giving up on particularly pretty cabling, but I do want to get things labeled.

Glad to have this NVMe SSD installed, and hopefully it futureproofs me somewhat with what the new consoles are going to do. I realize this is a little apples/oranges.

Next upgrade will happen when the new Nvidia cards are realeased! My 1080 is still chugging strong for 1440p without any of the ray tracing lighting stuff. I'll still hold off even when Cyberpunk 2077 comes out. I can make my card work okay for that and enjoy the upgraded version when the new cards come out eventually. I feel like that happened with Witcher 3 for me too. I played part of it and then got an upgraded card at some point before finishing.

How do you differentiate between permanently sleeping monitors and computers that froze while sleeping?

Fedaykin98 wrote:

How do you differentiate between permanently sleeping monitors and computers that froze while sleeping?

I logged in via remote desktop. Next step I tried unplugging the HDMI cable and plugging it back in and that "woke" the monitor.

Good news Tuffalo! Sounds like they don't want to leave a connector in the middle of the path unterminated. Glad you got it fixed!