Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

My B&H Photo order of an AMD 5900x CPU finally shipped.. I had sorta forgot about it given I ordered it the day the orders opened.

TheGameguru wrote:

My B&H Photo order of an AMD 5900x CPU finally shipped.. I had sorta forgot about it given I ordered it the day the orders opened.

January 1945?

The last of my parts arrived today. I'll be assembling my PC tomorrow. I'm giddy with excitement, can you tell?

merphle wrote:

The last of my parts arrived today. I'll be assembling my PC tomorrow. I'm giddy with excitement, can you tell?

Good luck have fun!

New build has been running great. Playing games at 1440p max settings is quite the upgrade! My replacement CAS 16 memory should be here by Monday. I decided to splurge and go for 32 GB.

Tried to post a pic but the site is not liking a Google drive link. How does one post a pic here?

Edit -

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/tTdnyD4b/20210424-151242.jpg)

Upload to imgur

Heretk wrote:
merphle wrote:

The last of my parts arrived today. I'll be assembling my PC tomorrow. I'm giddy with excitement, can you tell?

Good luck have fun!

Success!

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

The hardest part of my build, by far, was installing the Big Black Dick Cooler, a/k/a the
Noctua NH D15 chromax.black

Hm, my 2 week old build suddenly had the USB 3 ports on the front case non responsive tonight. I was using a USB bluetooth adapter in one for my PS4 controller. Tried a USB thumb drive on both slots and nothing. Since I can see in the side of my case it looks like the connection is still solid. Guess I will power down to open up and double check.

If it's not just the connection, then what? Any bios settings that disable USB? Or windows settings that let the slot itself go to sleep?

EDIT: Looks like connection. I barely touched it and it made a click noise like it locked into place. Odd that it came loose. I tugged a little more cord out from behind the panel to give it some slack. Hopefully that won't happen again.

Heretk wrote:

Tried to post a pic but the site is not liking a Google drive link. How does one post a pic here?

postimages.org is the quickest, easiest way to upload an image for embedding.

Serengeti wrote:

And I just ordered an Alienware box with a 3080. Shipping estimate is 6 weeks.

Just got a shipping notification, 34 days early. Noice.

Heretk wrote:

New build has been running great. Playing games at 1440p max settings is quite the upgrade! My replacement CAS 16 memory should be here by Monday. I decided to splurge and go for 32 GB.

Yeah, that's been my experience, too. The games are more or less the same, and don't actually look that much better in most cases, but I don't have to worry anymore about trying to downscale games to work on my 970. They almost always did, worked beautifully, and played well, but I had to spend time experimenting with each title to find a good config. (example: Horizon Zero Dawn ran very nicely at 1080p Medium settings, but it took me 45 minutes or so to dial in on that config.) (also, HZD was really fun, and it's past its teething problems. Recommended.)

With the 3070, I just set everything to Ultra/1440p/144Hz and it just works. With GSync, I don't have to worry that games don't have consistent frame rates. I don't get any tearing, as the system just renders frames when they're ready, and I'm typically way over 100fps in most titles. At least with singleplayer games, it's become plug-and-go in a way I've never seen before. Even when my 970 was new, I still had to think about refresh rates, making sure it stayed at 60 or higher, and I really don't anymore.

If I was still fast enough to play multiplayer competitive games, I imagine I'd probably spend some time tuning to make sure they stayed near 144Hz, but those days are long behind me. As is, I can just set everything to max and play without having to analyze. It is very nice.

I do have to say, though, that I remain impressed with the 970. I really got my money's worth out of that card. Despite the crap around the last 512 megs being so slow, it did an awesome job for many years, and would still work okay.

If you're stuck without one of the new cards, you should still be able to get about 90% of the same experience, you'll just have to spend some time tweaking settings down some. Don't let FOMO push you into overspending. The new cards are great, but they're really worth about MSRP. They would be excellent upgrades at retail price, but buying a whole system for one is not really worth it, unless you can genuinely use the system upgrade.

I'm trying to do the 970 to 30x0 upgrade. No joy in finding anything. But, I'm also not willing to pay scalper's prices.

I'm finding that I don't really want to play a lot of newer games on my computer anymore because it feels like the 970 is just straining so hard to keep up. Also, I'd really like to move up to a 1440 monitor, but I just know that the 970 isn't going to be able to keep up with it.

FYI, I did a full rebuild of my computer last year and the 970 was the one thing I kept because I was waiting for the 30x0 cards to A) be released and B) come down in price. That was silly of me.

The 970 can sometimes do 1440p, depending on the game. Valheim, for instance, ran okay, and delivered 35FPSish, although my card sounded like a leafblower when I did that. It's really best at 1080p, where it's got substantial muscle, but games that don't use many full-screen effects will often run nicely at 1440p or 1600p.

You can get perfectly playable games in pretty much every case if you're willing to fiddle, and you actually end up losing surprisingly little. Red Dead Redemption, for instance, doesn't look that much better on a 3070. But, yeah, the sense that the 970 is working so hard is distracting. It's a constant, low-level irritation, both when first configuring a game, and then while playing. Both go away with the upgrade. GSync's real nice, too, so you don't have to think about framerate so intensely anymore.

Overall, it's a great upgrade, but it's one that removes irritants more than adding headline features. For the amount of relief and improvement, it's definitely worth $500, but even $700 is stretching it.

Malor wrote:

But, yeah, the sense that the 970 is working so hard is distracting. It's a constant, low-level irritation, both when first configuring a game, and then while playing.

It's maybe a weird anxiety of mine, but I hate making machines or tools strain. It makes me feel like they're approaching a failure point or like I'm rapidly drawing down their lifespan, even if they're running in spec. So, when the video card is doing the leaf blower thing, it just twinges a whole set of secondary anxieties apart from the sounds of the fans. It makes playing games not relaxing.

One of the things I really like about the Series X is that it doesn't make any noise, even when it is under very heavy load.

Anyway, the 970 was a great card that gave me many years of solid performance. But, I'd like to move on and I can justify spending $700 MSRP on a 3080. I think it's likely that I would get a solid 5 years out of it. I just wish I could buy one at that price.

If you're aiming at 1440p, a 3080 is probably more than you need. That's more of a 4K card. And they originally retailed for $800; with the 25% tariffs that Biden hasn't removed, the new retail on a base card should be $1K, before any scalping. Overclocked/customized cards will go up fast from there, also before scalping.

An Nvidia 3080 Founder's Edition retails for $699 at Best Buy. That's what I want to buy. But, I understand that it is not likely to happen anytime soon.

I'd rather buy a 3080 for future proofing, playing with VR, and to minimize the standard loads on the card (minimize fan noise and straining).

Still kicking myself for not buying stock in Nvidia 22 years ago when they offered a single card graphics accelerator that was clearly going to kick 3dfx's butt.

I purchased my 2060 super RTX card early last year and it runs on my 1440p 32" screen beautifully at 144Hz.

Here is a comparison of the 2060 RTX vs 2060 Super RTX that shows 1080p/1440p/1440p Ultrawide/4K performance.

Can you set it to max settings, though? I'd expect you to need to dial it back a little in the biggest games, like RDR2.

But yeah, in general, older cards hold up surprisingly well. The visual difference from my 970 to my 3070 has not been that noticeable, at least so far. The speed difference and GSync support are both very noticeable, but the actual in-game spectacle isn't something that jumps out at me all that much.

On my 2060 Super gpu, I can get around 55 fps on Ultra settings, 76 fps on High and 112 fps on Medium playing RDR2 at 1440p. At 4K, it can actually get 32 fps on Ultra settings, 44 fps on High and 66 fps on Medium.

Wow, that's really good. I'm not sure I'd do that much better on my 3070.

Yeah, the price for performance on this card is really nice! It really hit that sweet spot for the $400 I paid for it early last year, pre-gpu dearth. I think now, like a lot of other gpu, it is at not-so-nice pricepoint (between $800-$1000, depending on manufacturer).

Isnt the 3070 essentially a 2080ti with a lower MSRP?

I think it is more like a 2080 super with lower msrp and better ray tracing

My new Alienware 3080 is just an awesome little card. It's only 267mm in length, does not extend above the PCIE bracket, and consumes 2.5 PCIE slots. Pretty sure it's the smallest 3080 out there.

Even better, it's damn near silent, or at least quiet enough that you can't hear it over the CPU fan.

Running Control with max graphics settings and medium raytracing settings it keeps a consistent 90fps (my monitor runs 3440x1440 @ 90hz), it never got above 57c in temp.

Awesome little beast!

I'd be curious to find out if it suffers from the power spikes over 400W as other 3080's seem to have?

Hmmmm, maybe I should look into upgrading my graphics card. Let me go check the prices on Amazon...

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/ZtVyeVM.gif)

fangblackbone wrote:

I'd be curious to find out if it suffers from the power spikes over 400W as other 3080's seem to have?

Here's the stats after about an hour's gaming. Not sure if I should be concerned about those memory temps...

IMAGE(https://i.postimg.cc/vm6VYPLX/Untitled.png)

I just read a few days ago that the Founder's Edition and the Dell cards both have super-high temps on the memory. Dunno if it's a problem or not.

If it is, I'm in the same boat.

BTW, this 3070 is quite similar to the design of yours; small, quiet, and unobtrusive. It's Dell-branded, though, rather than having an Alienware sticker on it.

Dell has not yet released a VBIOS that supports resizeable BAR, which is a little annoying.

edit: HWMonitor doesn't give me a memory reading, so I can't confirm your 100C result. I don't like this case very much, but one thing it does really, really well is cool the GPU, so I'm hoping my readings, if I ever get any, won't be so bad.

I think I'd be unhappy with that temp, but I'm not sure I've ever known the temp of the gpu memory so much as the general temp of the gpu that's reported.

I'd find a way to point some more air directly at it, even if it messes with overall interior air flow a little.

Undervolt your 30-series cards, folks.

NVIDIA cranked up stock voltage to make more silicon pass QC. A great deal of 30-series cards are running with way more juice than they need.

I have a minor undervolt set on my 3080 that lives inside a high airflow case, and a more significant one set on my 3070 that lives inside a more restrictive HTPC case.