Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

Tempest wrote:

B&H gave me an estimate of shipping for my 5900x:

March 8

........

I messaged them today to ask what my rough status was, and they didn't directly say, but sort of weasel-wordily implied that they might ship by the end of the month. Not, of course, in any way that I could hold them to, but they're definitely not saying March.

anyone get a 6800XT? I had one in my cart at newegg but as fast as I could hit checkout said it was no longer available.

Malor wrote:
Tempest wrote:

B&H gave me an estimate of shipping for my 5900x:

March 8

........

I messaged them today to ask what my rough status was, and they didn't directly say, but sort of weasel-wordily implied that they might ship by the end of the month. Not, of course, in any way that I could hold them to, but they're definitely not saying March.

I think you may have ordered it a few hours before me. I put mine in at 4:50am EST. Seems the people getting is in Dec ordered it within an hour of it going like at 1am EST.

AMD.com has the "add to cart" icon up for the 5900x briefly at 9EST this morning I guess while the GPU's were going on sale but it just kept telling me I couldn't add to cart. What a time to be alive.

This is the gigabyte b450 mobo I bought 9 months ago. It is now $62 and I have had zero issues with it. I know you are looking to upgrade but support for ryzen 3 for b450 is coming in January so you can upgrade within 3 months. (which you won't need to but could if you had to)
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0...

The 6800xt impressions that Linus did tempered my hype quite a bit. I know I wouldn't stream or use ray tracing but it still seems like a good card all around. I guess waiting wouldn't hurt more. *shrug*

I still need to look at more reviews, but yeah, at this point, I think I'm still looking at the 3080 for my GPU.

Not that it matters, cuz I can't get either of them anyway.

AMD saw everyone dumping on Nvidia for their paper launch on the 3000 series and I guess they were just like "Hold my beer we can do better"

Cause they even have B&H putting up a big bold disclaimer essentially saying "We got zero Radeon 6000 series cards. None. Nada. Zilch. Don't bother, cause we aren't" and they aren't taking any preorders at all.

I've noticed that many places are listing the 3070 for $549...
The 6800 doesn't sound like that bad a deal after all.

Tempest wrote:

I think you may have ordered it a few hours before me. I put mine in at 4:50am EST. Seems the people getting is in Dec ordered it within an hour of it going like at 1am EST.

I think it went live at 12AM EST. My order confirmation email came in at 1:05 AM, but at the time I was pretty sure the queue had been up awhile, as I got the pointer from /r/buildapcsales on Reddit. (and I got the pointer to that subreddit here.)

I was a little too slow on Newegg the next morning, and missed out there.

edit to add: just got a notification email that they shipped it, and it should show Monday.

Thin_J wrote:

AMD saw everyone dumping on Nvidia for their paper launch on the 3000 series and I guess they were just like "Hold my beer we can do better"

Cause they even have B&H putting up a big bold disclaimer essentially saying "We got zero Radeon 6000 series cards. None. Nada. Zilch. Don't bother, cause we aren't" and they aren't taking any preorders at all.

And to think, this tweet was less than 2 months ago:

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/agV8A7S.png)

fangblackbone wrote:

I've noticed that many places are listing the 3070 for $549...
The 6800 doesn't sound like that bad a deal after all.

The cards from AIB's with custom coolers, overclocked, etc. always cost more than reference/founders.

At least Nvidia isn't pulling the sh*t they did with the 10-series cards, where they touted one (lower) MSRP but sold the "Founders" cards at a higher price like they were something special, knowing full well every AIB would price their cards at the Founders level or even higher and making the MSRP practically meaningless. They billed the GTX 1070 for example as a $379 card but you couldn't get one for anywhere close to that for at least a year.

So I went ahead and put myself on the waitlist for an EVGA 3070... I was waiting to see what the AMD cards were like, and they look good, but I think I'd prefer a 3070. But then I forgot to waitlist right away, so that extends the wait. Sigh.

I guess I'll get to do another upgrade in, like, April or something.

One good part of doing it in two pieces: I'll get to enjoy a "new system" twice. I'm trying hard to convince myself of that, anyway.

I've just decided to wait until Q1 of 2021 before starting to build. Not willing to deal with the aggravation of getting parts. The supply chain has to catch up sometime. Right?

Me, I'm hoping to get a 3070 before the 4070 is announced.

I've been following the EVGA queue system for North America pretty closely. Here is the latest status report if folks are interested.

Man, that must drive EVGA bonkers, seeing all that money waiting for them if only NVidia would give them any damn chips.

When an MSRP of 499USD is announced for the RTX 3070 (as an example), does that assume taxes or not? I'm still wondering how to interpret these figures, as the median price for an RTX 3070 over here is 650EUR or so. (you can extrapolate that to other graphics cards or computer components by the way)

My theory is that the manufacturers take an immediate 20% margin by converting directly from USD to EUR (as the exchange rate has hovered around 1.2USD per EUR for years) + 21% VAT in Belgium.

That's without tax. Sales tax is typically around 10%, thought it varies based on what city and state you live in.

Thanks Malor, that makes sense.

In Belgium it's illegal to advertise prices to the consumer market without VAT (and other taxes) included, but in the US with 50 states having potentially different sales tax rates it makes sense to publish taxes excluded.

dejanzie wrote:

Thanks Malor, that makes sense.

In Belgium it's illegal to advertise prices to the consumer market without VAT (and other taxes) included, but in the US with 50 states having potentially different sales tax rates it makes sense to publish taxes excluded.

It isn't just the states. You have different tax rate from city to city.

Edgar_Newt wrote:

I've been following the EVGA queue system for North America pretty closely. Here is the latest status report if folks are interested.

The 3080 FTW3 Ultra that he mentions is what I ended up with barely two weeks ago, and I was in the queue in the AM hours from release day.

Honestly surprised they made it through most of the rest of launch day already on it. Though I guess it's probably the least popular model given the price so maybe there's less total people in the queue?

Either way, honestly, EVGA is the one and only company that at least found a way to lessen the annoyance of trying to get a card.

3080 FTW3 Ultra is the most popular 3080 but it has also had, far and away, the most cards drop to the queue from EVGA. Some card models, however, like the standard Gaming models have had just one (or zero) drops this entire time. Imagine signing up on launch day in the first minute as your only EVGA auto-notify sign-up and you are still waiting for the first drop. Ugh!

well for buying a 3070 i see you can buy a whole computer with one inside of it: https://www.amazon.com/Skytech-Chron...

just wondering, what is the actual price of the 3070 they are charging here?

then you could sell the rest of the computer to a sucker fellow googer

FiveIron wrote:

well for buying a 3070 i see you can buy a whole computer with one inside of it: https://www.amazon.com/Skytech-Chron...

just wondering, what is the actual price of the 3070 they are charging here?

then you could sell the rest of the computer to a sucker fellow googer

Impossible to say the actual price of the 3070 they're using because "brand may vary." Possibly they're getting some kind of bulk discount as a system integrator too. But I'm going to assume based on the pic and based on the fact system integrators like this typically avoid high-end variants of parts so they can advertise a certain spec while maximizing their margins that it's not going to be one of the more desirable models.

Let's call the value of the 3070 inside that thing ~$550-600. The rest of the parts in that probably aren't worth a grand. The ability of prebuilt system integrators to get their hands on GPU's consumers can't remains a source of frustration, but prebuilts are still usually poor value for the money.

I wasn't sure that my old case would move enough air to keep the new CPU and motherboard properly cool, so after looking around awhile, I picked up a Cooler Master SL600M. Three main things attracted me about it. The first is that it does bottom-to-top airflow, using two massive 200mm fans in the bottom to blow air upward, and exhaust it out the top. Instead of the normal front-to-back pattern that we've been using so long, this design is moving the heat in the direction it wants to go anyway; it reminds me a bit of the new consoles in that regard. Second, the front panel is not flat on the top, it's at an angle; I keep accidentally hitting the power button on my current build, which is maddening. Third, the panel finally has enough USB ports.... two USB 2.0, two USB 3.1, and a USB 3.2 C port. (this matches the Crosshair 8 Hero almost exactly; it has one more USB 2.0 port left after hooking up all the others.)

So those are the headline features that got me to buy in. I wanted a silver one, but those are insanely expensive, well over $600. So I settled for black; it's still aluminum, just with a powder coat. To save $400, I can live with black.

I've been installing all the new parts, in anticipation of the CPU showing soon, and find I quite like it. However, it has one truly egregious failure: no reset button. Yes, you read that right, there is no reset button anywhere on this case. I despise this misfeature, and it's almost enough to send it back, but not quite. I'll keep it, but grudgingly. That absence pisses me off.

That's the biggest reason I can see to reject it, so I figured I'd get it out there up front, so you can skip the rest of this review if you're already not interested.

Other than that, the case is downright decent, but weird. For instance, it doesn't have drive bays. Yep, you read that right. There are no drive bays at all. If you have a 5.25" device, too bad, there's no place to put it. Smaller devices can be mounted on these little plates that are kind of stuck everywhere. There are, apparently, four spots for SSDs and four spots for 3.5" drives. I've only spotted two SSD mounts and three 3.5 mounts so far, but I think the rest are behind a bracket I haven't removed yet. (that's for the power supply, which I'm recycling from my current build, and don't have any spares for now.)

In this case, you mount the power supply where the drives usually go. Yep, you mount the power supply in the front top of the case, with the wires going downward. It looks like it will be a very clean, nice design if you have a modular supply. If, like me, you're using an older beast with lots of fixed cables, it looks like it may be.... erm, challenging. I'm not sure where the cables are going to end up just yet, won't know until I actually try to mount it. It has a sort of a cable spillover pool in its enclosure, with an angled window to pull cables through, but I'm not sure it will be enough for the 850-watter I plan to put in there. Those things have an assload of cables.

It still, however, has a power plug in the bottom rear, with an internal power supply extension cable to carry it up to the power supply's mount point. Weird design, but it looks easy to work with.

Mounting the motherboard was dead simple; all the standoffs were in the right place, so it was just a matter of dropping the board in and screwing it down. Routing all the cables from the front panel was easy, too; there's quite a lot of cable management space, and at least so far, the build is extremely clean. Most cables just poke up at the edges of the board and immediately plug in.

The case has an unusual feature; a controller board. It takes an SATA power plug, and both drives a light in the front panel and serves as a fan controller. It can control up to four fans, taking direction from a sliding switch on the panel. It can run the fans at several fixed RPM levels, or it can plug a sensor into the motherboard and sync all four fans to that signal. I was going to bypass this feature, but I belatedly discovered that, for all the crazy number of ports the Crosshair 8 Hero has, it has only 3 CHA_FAN hookups, and I want to use four fans. Thus, I ended up using the fan controller on one, and hooking the other two to the top 170mm fans.

Which leads into the basic design: the plan is to use the bottom 200mm fans in push, and two top 170mm fans in pull; the idea is to try to keep positive pressure in the case. However, the top mount is weird, and I'm finding that this wasn't necessarily a great idea. You can attach three 120mm fans up top, two 170s, or two 200s; in the case of the 200s, you pull the mounting plate out completely and just bolt the 200s direct to the frame.

I wanted smaller fans for the positive pressure thing, so I went 170, and that was sub-optimal, because their mounting plate blocks a lot of their airflow area. It fits 120s perfectly, but it has these bars down the side for mounting the fans that block a lot of the additional area in the bigger fans. With this case, stick with either 120s or 200s. Don't use 170s.

Overall, the case is very easy to work with. Despite the odd design, things are pretty easy to get to. The instruction manual is dismal, but once you figure out that the top and front are held on by plastic tabs you have to reach inside and squeeze to release, getting to those areas is dead simple. The top has one screw; the front just pulls off, but you have to take the side panels off to get to the catches.

I actually quite like one of the SSD mounting areas; there are two 2.5 mount points (they have surrounding enclosures, but aren't really bays), on the back side of the motherboard plate, directly behind the lowest PCI/PCIe slots, and right next to the case fan controller. So power will be easy to route, because you'll just go in a chain of controller -> SSD 1 -> SSD 2, and then the signal cables have a nice short run. You can come right off the edge of the motherboard into cable management, and thread them right over. They'll be a little harder to add and remove than a normal bay, but those two are in good spots.

Two of the 3.5" mounts are underneath the front cover. They're flat plates with rubber standoffs. You take the plate off, align the drive, and use these special screws they give you to go through the rubber standoff and into the bottom drive holes. Then you reattach the plates and run your cables. I'd prefer bays, particularly with snapin trays, but this is workable. Those thick grommets should do a very good job of isolating noise from the case frame.

Then there's a third 3.5" plate right where the rear case exhaust fan, right next to the CPU, normally goes. That's a very weird place to put a drive. With a standard tower cooler, that'll be the hottest place in the whole case. You can't put a fan there, it's solid aluminum, and I guess they didn't want to leave it blank, but I sure wouldn't want a drive there, especially a spinning one.

I think there's more bays on the side of the cage where you mount the power supply, but I haven't opened that area of the case yet. There's a big blocking panel in front that I haven't taken out.

So I guess my final verdict will depend on how hard the power supply is to work with, and then how well the case keeps things cool. It certainly looks promising. It's a classy design from the outside, it's built extremely well, and it looks like it will be superb at cooling. I can't test any of that until Monday at the earliest.

But, wow, weird design.

If you're willing to spend some time in a stock drop discord, or are available to jump on stock alert tweets straight away, it's certainly possible.

I picked up the aforementioned Gigabyte Gaming OC 3080 for £690 inc delivery via Amazon Global Store, possibly the cheapest I've seen it since launch day. However, I ideally wanted a TUF OC, which just seemed impossible in the UK... The Asus Official Store in Germany sell them fairly regularly, but only ship to Germany...

Until.... I managed to snag one of those too, via the same stock alert systems, for £750 from Amazon UK directly.

So the Gigabyte will go to my friend, at cost, who doesn't have the time during the day to play sniper, and I'll keep the TUF for myself.

I also had a chance this morning to purchase a Ryzen 7 5800X for £403 - a whole £7 less than MSRP over here - I didn't, as I shouldn't upgrade my CPU.... but still tempting... The 5900X, however, is absolutely sold out.

Anyway, the items are there if you can spend some time playing sniper, but if it's a case of waiting until you can just walk/browse to a shop and buy one there and then, who knows... Feb/March? Get one for close to MSRP?... April?

Two additional thoughts on the SL600: first, one of the main reasons I bought it was because of the front panel being at an angle, so I wouldn't keep hitting the power button by accident. But the power button is still on top! Argh! Fortunately, however, it's recessed a little and requires a great deal more pressure, so it should fix my problem anyway.

Second, they advertise 'three positions!' on the metal shield on the top of the case. When it's 'closed', snugged down, the air exhausts to either side; there's about a 1.5-inch airspace above the fans, with a very large vent all around the side. The metal top really just catches dust. But then they crowed about the 'open' position, which is about 1.5 inches higher. The thing is, that's just pulling the shield upward, so that the rubber feet on the end of the three metal posts get squeezed in the entry holes. So, yay, now the top is farther up. But, it's wobbly. That's a dumb idea, pure marketing crapola. You'll most likely want it either on or off, not in between. Grr at the marketroids. "Don't put the top in all the way, and it's a feature!"

Oh, a third thought: it's a bottom-draw case, so it's got nice metal stands that lift the bottom off the ground by maybe 2 or 2.5 inches. The metal stands have big rubber feet on the bottom, so it should be safe to use on a smooth or easily-scratched floor. Replacing them should be easy, too, if they get damaged or the glue stops working.

It also has a nice plastic mesh air filter on the bottom, easily removable for cleaning. Upside: you can slide it out without opening the case. Downside: not from the front, only from the back. Sigh.

Malor: Double check the manual on the power button, I had one case where a quick press would just do a reset and a short hold would do the full shutoff.

No drive bay?

I mean I know there's not much physical media anymore but I think I'd at least want a Blu Ray dvd combo drive just in case. Heck I still might want to watch a movie on my PC when other family is hogging the TV.