Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

Wouldn't buy now. AMD's offerings are about to get more competitive with RDNA 2 (which is powering both new consoles as well), and in response, NVIDIA's Ampere sounds like it's shaping up to be the kind of jump they haven't bothered to make in years.

GPU upgrades have been pretty crappy for about 3 years, and there's a good chance they're finally going to get un-crappy this cycle.

I would suggest waiting. While yes it's true that there are always new cards around the corner, the combination of short supply and new cards probably being announced in the next few months it is not a great time to buy a card.

Of course if by some miracle you can get a great price on a good upgrade, then sure go for it. But I don't think now is a good time to be looking. You will probably just regret doing so later.

Yeah, there's a huge gap between the supposed prices on the review sites and the actual sales price on the market right now. That was also the case when I bought the RX580 back then (due to the bitcoin craze at that time) but at least my current video card is okay performance-wise.

Thanks for not enabling me

edit: the new AMD cards will have ray-tracing in some form as well, judging from the recent PS5 trailers, so better to wait.

Yes, it is better to wait.
Anything that is a good buy now will only get better with price drops when the new cards come out. Either that or they will get replaced.
That being said, the 5700XT is a good buy but last I checked the 5700 was marginally less performance for a bigger price difference. Neither of those cards do well @4K gaming though well suited for 1440p.

edit: checking newegg, it looks like that has changed. 5700 is $339, 5700xt is $379 in USD. So to me that is a toss up since it is an 8% performance difference.

You can flash the BIOS on a "vanilla" 5700 and raise the power limit a bit, quite safely, and it gets very close to the performance of the 5700 XT.

But yeah neither of them will reliably get you 4k/60fps in current games. 5700 XT and 2070 Super are thiiiiis close to being able to do it. But you still need 2080 or better if 4k is the goal IMO.

If you "must" buy now I wouldn't get anything in a higher price bracket than 5700 XT or 2070 Super, the 2080, 2080 Super, and 2080 ti are just too much money to spend on cards that will be superseded within 6 months. It's true that if you wait to buy because new hardware is coming you'll wait forever... but I think we're at a major inflection point right now with a new console generation about to start (since console capabilities are still the limiting factor for a lot of games since the console market is bigger), ray tracing should become a mainstream feature on more new titles within a couple of years instead of just a glorified performance-killing tech demo, and true 4K at decent frame rates is finally almost within reach. (Although 1440p at high refresh rates is still the best of both worlds for most gamers who play a wide variety of titles.)

Thermal paste patterns tested:

Looks like X and || patterns are winners

They did not test the dot line dot pattern however

Man, only built like two weeks ago and already can't remember what pattern I used for the paste!

I wonder if that's why I haven't been getting quite as good results as I was expecting, for the last few years. It's normally been acceptable, but never really great -- I use the one-dot approach. I'll have to try an X.

Malor wrote:

I wonder if that's why I haven't been getting quite as good results as I was expecting, for the last few years. It's normally been acceptable, but never really great -- I use the one-dot approach. I'll have to try an X.

Yea I have been using the one dot about the size of a piece of long grain rice method for years myself. I did recently pull off the cooler from my 2011 i5-760 build so I could clean the dust out of it and it looked like I had good coverage. Probably better than in that video.

I think a lot of people in the overclockers scene like to use the final technique shown where you do a very thin layer over the full heat spreader. The X pattern looks like something to consider though.

From the videos I have seen where people tested thermal paste applications, the results all seemed to point to more is better. Even if the stuff squeezed out the sides, as long as the paste wasn't conductive it didn't make performance worse.

What matters is the quality of the paste and that you get good coverage between the heat spreader and the cooler . Not enough coverage was bad as well.

I did the X pattern on my latest build and if I had to do it all over again I would have added a few dots just to be sure. I may end up pulling that cooler off at some point down the road and reapplying, but my temps haven't been that bad. I was hoping for slightly better though.

I have a 3800X (not overclocked) with the Black Edition Hyper 212.

When I finally got my hyper 212 evo, I used the ÷ pattern. So far so good!

fangblackbone wrote:

When I finally got my hyper 212 evo, I used the ÷ pattern. So far so good!

That's a very divisive pattern. Glad it's worked for you.

Unfortunately, while of some importance, it is not always integeral

fangblackbone wrote:

Unfortunately, while of some importance, it is not always integeral :(

I couldn't really differentiate between some of the patterns post-spread.

I fear proponents of certain application methods don't understand that they are all merely symbolic.

I look forward to more complex analysis. It's likely that the optimum technique is dependent on the variable viscosity of the thermal paste. Do you think there are non-Newtonian TIMs? I'd try out a Leibniz TIM.

In other news:

Western Digital adds “Red Plus” branding for non-SMR hard drives

From now on, all WD Reds are SMR drives... shingled magnetic recording. Shingled drives are normal on reads, but are atrocious on many writes, and they're particularly awful in a NAS drive, which is what Reds are supposedly for! This is a goddamn self-made disaster on WD's part.

They're moving the CMR (conventional magnetic recording) drives to the Red Plus line.

Upshot: don't buy Reds. They are unfit for purpose. And considering the incredibly exploitative decision-making on display here (taking advantage of the ignorant for profit, exploiting the name they've built up), I'd suggest not buying WD for anything, since who knows what other damage this clueless management team is doing?

I ended up grabbing a Sapphire Pulse 5600 Xt from Amazon when it went on sale yesterday. I'm running a 480x and it's starting to struggle especially with my 144hz monitor. I'm only interested in 1080p so I think this will be a nice mid cycle upgrade until Big Navi drops in price a year or so from now. I would have liked Ray tracing but for the card I would feel comfortable buying it wouldn't be worth it.

Good I ust used the thinly apply to the whole chip. Seems to be one of the good ones.

I think the important part is knowing what your CPU looks like under that heat spreader. In some cases, the die is much smaller underneath that spreader, and having coverage over that die is the most important part. In other cases, though, there's more on the new chips.

For example, this is what the CPU I just used in my new build looks like without the heat spreader:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/uR0szh8.jpg)

I think I may redo the thermal paste on mine knowing this now.

What drives do y'all use for your NAS drives instead of WD Red, then?

Whatever drive is included in the much cheaper external enclosure that I shuck for use in my server

OK, yeah, I was thinking about that. So an 8TB Seagate external drive is cheaper than the 6TB IronWolf NAS internal. Is the external HDD an IronWolf, or some other type?

mwdowns wrote:

OK, yeah, I was thinking about that. So an 8TB Seagate external drive is cheaper than the 6TB IronWolf NAS internal. Is the external HDD an IronWolf, or some other type?

They tend to be random drives. You never know what you will get. I recently got one that was a white label NAS drive which is typically sold to OEMs.

Edit: Checked some of my recent drives and they are Seagate Barracuda's that use SMR

Might just stick with the Toshiba N drives I was looking at, then.

Be careful, Toshiba and Seagate been submarining SMR drives into their consumer channels as well. Check to be sure that any drive you buy is CMR.

Well, unless you know it's SMR, realize that write performance can sometimes suck horribly, and are getting it for a good price in exchange.

Where do you see the SMR/CMR distinction? I'm looking at the specs for the drive on NewEgg but don't see it there. Also tried zooming into the pic of the actual drive in the picture (obviously not representative of every drive) and don't see it in the sticker on the drive. Should it be on the box or somewhere else?

I think you have to look up the drive by model number.

mwdowns wrote:

Where do you see the SMR/CMR distinction? I'm looking at the specs for the drive on NewEgg but don't see it there. Also tried zooming into the pic of the actual drive in the picture (obviously not representative of every drive) and don't see it in the sticker on the drive. Should it be on the box or somewhere else?

That's part of the problem - they aren't labeled. You can find lists online of what models from what makers are SMR.