Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

It's probably substantially lower per-core, per-work-unit, but you have 50% more cores, and you can get a heck of a lot more work done with each one. At peak, the system is probably putting out close to the same heat as the old system (check the TDP ratings for a reasonably accurate comparison), but is probably doing like four times as much actual work.

Going from a Piledriver to a Ryzen 3 is a whopper of an upgrade.

So I'm pretty sure I'll need a new PSU. Is there any downside (besides expense) to buying a higher wattage than you strictly need at the moment?

Nope other than expense. And you don't need one of those ridiculous 1000W or higher PSUs.

Yeah don't go nuts. I have a 750 watt gold certified power supply in my system that I just built a few months ago. I was only going to go with 650 watt because even that would have been more then enough but the 750 was on sale for pretty much the same price.

I think for power supplies getting gold certified or higher (if you can afford to pay extra) is important though. They are more efficient and should be built with higher quality parts.

There is no downside to buying a PSU that delivers more power than you need, apart from probably paying more at a time when PSU prices are already ball-achingly high.

Do not choose a PSU by brand or by 80+ rating, though.

Yeah, I noticed that prices are historically high and that a lot of places are straight-up out of stock.

I was eyeballing a Corsair 750W Bronze semimodular, but it literally went out of stock as I was looking at it. Pulled the trigger on the same model but 550W instead, before that sold out too!

That corsair 750W is probably the one I purchased a couple years ago and it is doing splendiferously.
Knock on wood of course, don't wanna jynx it.

I am so glad I built my new computer earlier this year. With prices going up and inventory shortages I feel vindicated! At the time I was worried I might have been too hasty.

Timing is everything Gaald.
Unfortunately, most of the components I want haven't hit the market yet. The B550 boards have been seen but afaik, no prices are listed.
Same goes for Ryzen 4000 & the next gen GPUs.

The way it's going I won't be able to finish this until next year.

FWIW, AMD might be releasing refreshes of several 3000 series parts, price drops on the current. And the refreshes will have higher clocks, etc.

Would be kinda spitting in Intel's face with their "new" series launches.

*Edited, because I can't find the article now. Maybe just rumor.

Thin_J wrote:

FWIW, AMD just announced refreshes of several 3000 series parts, price drops on the current. And the refreshes will have higher clocks, etc.

Kinda spitting in Intel's face with their "new" series launches.

Intel: "Where'd you learn to pull this kind of move?"

NVIDIA: *looks away, whistling*

It is exactly that kinda move, if they do it. So far after digging for it again all I can find is yesterday's official MSRP drop for the 3900X.

Man, it is really weird to see Intel failing as badly as they are. They always used to be the Process Masters. I have some vague memory of them firing a bunch of people and slimming down about eight years ago, and now I'm wondering if they got rid of their skill base. TSMC is wiping the floor with them.

It's not that AMD's designs are that much better -- in fact, they're probably not quite as good in an absolute sense. But they're on a smaller node and are getting the benefits of the reduced power draw and increased clock speeds. They're making Intel look terrible, simply by using foreign fabs.

That's gotta sting, if you're in Intel management. It's also ouchy for people who want us to be leaders in chip fabrication, one of the best, highest-skill manufacturing industries ever created. When we're getting out-skilled by Asia in chip fabrication, the American manufacturing story of the 80s through the 2010s, you know we've got serious problems.

AMD isn't the only one using TSMC and 7nm either.
I really wonder what the issue is at intel. They have been struggling to get passed 14nm for a while.

The price drop for the 3900x while nice, is only ~10% ($390). I was expecting 20-25%.

My new laptop has the Ryzen 9 4900HS, and I'm very happy with both it's power for light to medium gaming as well as the battery life for browsing/desktop use when it's not plugged in.
I'm excited to see what they look like in the desktop space. I couldn't be happier with the Ryzen 7 1700 I have in my current desktop build.

Malor wrote:

Man, it is really weird to see Intel failing as badly as they are. They always used to be the Process Masters.

Well, except the time 12-15 years ago when they had to give OEMs allegedly anticompetitive deals to keep them from buying AMD chips. But yeah, they held the lead for a solid decade after that.

Phishposer wrote:

My new laptop has the Ryzen 9 4900HS, and I'm very happy with both it's power for light to medium gaming as well as the battery life for browsing/desktop use when it's not plugged in.
I'm excited to see what they look like in the desktop space. I couldn't be happier with the Ryzen 7 1700 I have in my current desktop build.

Unbelievably, that 4900HS is only Zen2. The 4000-series of desktop CPUs coming out in ~September will be Zen3, which are rumored to have a ~15% IPC improvement as well as a CCX redesign that'll reduce the maximum core-to-core latency imposed by the chiplet design. I'm hopeful that this latency reduction will finally let AMD catch Intel in high FPS gaming.

I've been sorely tempted by the 3600 and the 3700X since they released. I'm currently holding out for B550 and the 8 core/16 thread 4000-series chip later this year. My i5-4670K has served me well, but 7 years later, 4 non-hyperthreaded cores is not enough. September can't come quickly enough.

I'm getting that upgrade fever going around. Tempted by that 3900x.

If the rumors about the "XT" refreshes of the 3000 series are true the announcement is expected on June 16.

It's being attributed to something in Gigabyte's B550 Press materials, apparently.

The rumor details claim base speeds all over 4ghz for a 3600XT, 3800XT, and 3900XT, and boost speeds 2-300mhz higher than the current chips.

This sounds questionable, to me, based on clocks on even the best samples of Ryzen 3000 series chips. And the more I read about this the more it just sounds like wild fantasy, but I guess it's not long to wait to find out if it's just rumor or not.

It sounds very plausible to me.
My current ryzen 3600 is 3.6/4.2 and there videos all over youtube about how overclockable the 3100 is. Also factor in the out of this world 4900HS laptop cpu with such a teeny power draw. These are the same generation chip but the difference between the chips tells me their manufacturing has improved quite a bit since the 3600 was designed.

And one more thing: the 3300x is a single CCX chip...

This is interesting, in hindsight. A few years after this, Sun exchanged a lot of IP with AMD relating to MC/MT chip technologies, for several years. Then, in 2016, Sun/Oracle laid off it’s hardware (and Solaris) designers, many of whom landed at AMD.

And that’s how technologies transfer.

So I finally have my $20,000 Solaris workstation? (indirectly)
Yay!

Yep, that’s about the size of it. Sigh.

I was thinking, the other day, how ridiculously powerful even ordinary user boxes have become, and that puts an even finer point on it.

Linus Torvalds just updated to a 32-core Threadripper, and is saying that his compile times have dropped to a third of what they were. I imagine his bottleneck is probably disk I/O, with that many cores.

Twenty years ago, it was unusual, though not unheard of, to run a dual-core Linux machine. And it had huge problems with scaling due to the Big Kernel Lock... only one CPU could be running kernel code at a time. This was the big reason to go with Solaris back then, because it had better locking and would scale much better with additional CPUs.

Nowadays? 32-core machines for individual users have become a thing, and the Linux kernel handles them just fine, thank you very much.

Back then, I would have expected a machine like that to cost twenty million dollars or more.

I've had a surprising experience. I've upgraded my router trying to get my Steam Link App to work. No dice.

But when I fixed my Pc's internet connection issues it is super stable and playable. Guess who is playing in bed before sleeping? This dude.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane, Malor. Almost exactly 20 years ago my main server was a NetFinity 5500 with 8 500MHz Pentium III Xeons in it running Linux. That thing ran Red Hat Linux until that went away, then CentOS until 2011 when it was finally decommissioned due to age - still working. It weighed a couple hundred pounds and you didn't want to try having a conversation near it when it was booting up or under load. It also would have cost a fortune, but I got all of my work machines from the reviews team after they were done with them.

Now my personal desktop's CPU dwarfs that machine in performance at less than a fifth its TDP. A single 4.2GHz multithreaded core in mine would barely have to try to crush it. I spent a total of $600 for the parts last year.

iPhones have over 100,000 times more processing power than the Apollo 11 computer; with 4GB of RAM they have over a million times more memory, and with 512GB of storage they have over seven million times more storage.

And if I did my math correctly, a freaking TI-86 calculator even has more processing power, RAM, and storage than the Apollo 11 computer.

I never worked with the Apollo computers, so that doesn't mean nearly as much to me as seeing 32-core, 128+gigabyte Linux workstations that well-heeled mortals can afford.

That said, I was watching a Youtube series on trying to power one of those old Apollo flight computers back up. Did you know they had woven ROM? The bits are represented by permanent magnets wired into a grid by seamstresses in extremely precise patterns, like core memory, but fixed. It was then rolled up into a "rope", and folded carefully into the case.

Yep, rope memory. Actual ropes have much finer detail than the ROM they used for those things.

Malor wrote:

I never worked with the Apollo computers, so that doesn't mean nearly as much to me as seeing 32-core, 128+gigabyte Linux workstations that well-heeled mortals can afford.

That said, I was watching a Youtube series on trying to power one of those old Apollo flight computers back up. Did you know they had woven ROM? The bits are represented by permanent magnets wired into a grid by seamstresses in extremely precise patterns, like core memory, but fixed. It was then rolled up into a "rope", and folded carefully into the case.

Yep, rope memory. Actual ropes have much finer detail than the ROM they used for those things.

I got to see one of a couple of years ago! At the Museum of Living Computers
IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/yYrzsXrp/20181117-155718.jpg)

merphle wrote:

over 100,000 times more processing power

over a million times more memory

JavaScript: "I'm gonna go ahead and take a few of those zeroes off."