Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

Stele wrote:

As long as you're getting a brand new card I think you take what you can get right now.

And maybe hold your old card for an emergency for the first month at least.

Then sell it to me if it's better than my old 1060 ;)

Heh, well, sad to say the only reason I'm making the purchase is so that I can give my old card to my nephews -- otherwise there's no way I'd be touching the current market with a ten foot pole.

Basically, back in March they called me and said they wanted to learn how to build a computer, so I was like, "yeah, that's a great project, let me just see what availability is like for budget parts," thinking maybe I'd be able to swing a Ryzen 5600x and a 3060 or 3070 for them with a few week's worth of searching.

Well, no there were no 5600x anywhere to be found for less than twice MSRP, but I immediately found a 5800x at MSRP on Amazon, so I was like, "great, maybe a bit less budget than intended, but this might be easy!"

And now, here we are almost four months later and the only card I've managed to buy in all that time is a 3080 ti. So, yeah, good news is, they're going to have a much better computer than I originally intended, with a 5800x and my old 2080 ti. Bad news is the state of my bank account.

Edit:

Ugh, delivery window of July 18th to 22nd despite being sold direct by Amazon, so I guess I've got plenty of time in the cancel window to watch for a better/cheaper card. Oh joy.

I swear, the stupid markup would have almost been worth it if I could have immediately stopped watching for stock. I'm definitely done chasing Best Buy and Amazon drops though -- those processes are just too frustrating. Probably just keep following Newegg Shuffles and praying for the EVGA queue to pop for me.

As I keep saying, Intel cpus and mbs are the only ones you can currently get at msrp with any regularity. Don't sleep on the i5-11400 or the f version for (mid tier) budget builds.

Can't help with video cards at all. That's just a mess for everyone.

Yeah, thankfully (at least back in March when I bought them) I had no trouble getting that 5800x and the motherboard I wanted to pair with it.

Honestly, cost aside, I'm just thrilled I'll finally be able to get the boys all the parts they need -- they really deserve to have something fun this summer after the time they've had recently.

I've given up trying to get a PS5 and with the GPU parts challenges, I think I'm ready to just pay a company to build it and ignore the calendar until it shows up.

I've heard a few recommendations that Maingear seems to do a nice job. Any thoughts on that?

If you're more concerned about getting a quality build with quality support than you are about getting the most power per dollar, Maingear will do you right. You're going to pay a premium, but you're paying to bring the grief factor way down.

Thanks. I'm also fine with skipping the hassle of chasing down parts during this current shortage as long as I'm leaving that to someone reputable.

Looking for a quick sanity check on some upgrades. I've got a Ryzen 5 3600 in an Asus ROG STRIX B450-F motherboard. Looking to upgrade my PSU, RAM, and adding a second hard drive. Currently running 16GB DDR4 3000 RAM and a 3070 GPU with a 10 year old 600W PSU. Here's what I'm looking to update:

Thermaltake 850W Modular PSU
32GB DDR4 3200 Corsair RAM
Samsung 1TB NVMe SSD

Any silly mistakes there?

I'd spend a hair more on the power supply and get the Seasonic Focus PX Platinum. At that price, you're already so close to a higher caliber power supply. (EDIT: Amazon's out of stock for the moment, but NewEgg has it in stock at the same price).

If it were my build, I'd probably end up spending less on the SSD. I would definitely get a Gen3 NVMe drive, but there's plenty that are closer to $100-110 for 1TB. I own three ADATA SX8200 Pros. The differences between same-generation NVMe drives seems awfully hard to notice.

The SSD change is a much less strong recommendation. If you really want the Samsung, you can stick with it. But the PSU change, I would pretty strongly recommend.

That Thermaltake power supply shows up low on both the PSU hierarchy lists I looked at. Not sure how good any of these lists are but Seasonic power supplies tend to be near the top, and I know a bunch of people on here think they are great as well. You might want to look at the Seasonic Focus Plus Gold power supplies?

I think I have seen this list posted here before.

https://linustechtips.com/topic/1116...

Thanks! I went for the the Seasonic power supply and decided to stick with the Samsung SSD. Now to wait impatiently for the delivery...

No need for the thread anymore I guess...

Newegg will now build your computer for you. I'm not sure I trust Newegg much these days... last couple of builds have been more Amazon based for me... but I wouldn't mind having this done for me these days assuming I could get a card. Although I am not sure one of the custom shops wouldn't be a similar value albeit with a shorter list of parts.

Son of a Female Doggo. I just got that Corsair.

Grenn wrote:

Son of a Female Doggo. I just got that Corsair.

I don't imagine you will be able to get much from NewEgg with this service for a while. They can only build with what they have in stock at their California warehouse. The PC builder has one RTX 3080 model in stock and it's priced over $1800, and one 3070 model for about $1200.

I may have asked this before, so bear with me. If I wanted to save some stuff from my old pc, is it possible to plug in my old hard drive to the new pc and just move the data? I'm talking some pictures, videos, and saved game files.

Grenn wrote:

I may have asked this before, so bear with me. If I wanted to save some stuff from my old pc, is it possible to plug in my old hard drive to the new pc and just move the data? I'm talking some pictures, videos, and saved game files.

Yes. You'll need a USB-to-SATA adapter. The new computer will read it as an external drive.

Edit to add: might not work if the two computers have different operating systems. I couldn't get a Windows 10 PC to recognize an HDD with Windows 7 installed on it.

You can install the old hard drive into the new computer as an extra drive too? As long as the drive is not encrypted or you didn't change OS to one that can't read the partition, it should be readable by the new computer.

Yes, in most cases it is no problem at all. I do it all the time for file recovery. Operating system doesn't matter as long as it has a supported file system. Sometimes I even do it between Linux, Mac, & Windows. I can't think of a reason a Windows 10 PC couldn't read a Win 7 drive unless it had bad sectors, contained corrupt partition data, or was encrypted (as Kazar pointed out) . Sometimes particular folder permissions can be finicky but that can be figured out with a quick google search.

I would advise to first install Windows completely, and only THEN plug in the extra drive and start copy-pasting.

Windows 10 Home for the old pc, Windows 10 Home for the new one. Awesome. It arrives today. Hopefully, I can post about it later tonight.

Snagged a Ryzen 7 5800x and an EVGA 3080ti combo today for a fairly decent price. Was eyeing a 3090 for a while but for literally the price of a 3090 I got almost the same performance and a decent bump up with a new iteration CPU from my current Ryzen 9 3900x.

Plus with the parts market where it is right now I think I can sell my 2080ti and Ryzen 9 3900x for around $1,200 - $1,500 CDN making the upgrade cost $500 - $800. All in all a pretty good morning

I might do my next build in the O11 Air Mini. I had seen the O11 Dynamic Mini a while back, but wanted something with less tempered glass and more airflow and here it is. I like the idea of being able to put an ATX board in a tiny case and still have room for an AIO cooler.

New computer came in and everything looks ok. One thing, though. My old pc case had a shelf area for hard drives and this one doesn't seem to have that.

Grenn wrote:

One thing, though. My old pc case had a shelf area for hard drives and this one doesn't seem to have that.

Take off the back panel of the case.

*Legion* wrote:
Grenn wrote:

One thing, though. My old pc case had a shelf area for hard drives and this one doesn't seem to have that.

Take off the back panel of the case.

This. They are hiding hard drive mounts all over the place in cases these days. My case has a couple of SSD mount that as best as I can figure would require the removal of the PSU if I ever wanted to install them there.

beanman101283 wrote:

Thanks! I went for the the Seasonic power supply and decided to stick with the Samsung SSD. Now to wait impatiently for the delivery...

Everything showed up yesterday and installation went off without a hitch. It's so nice to finally have a modular PSU and not have a rat's nest of extra power cables stuffed wherever I can make them fit. Since this is my first NVMe drive, I didn't realize how tiny they were.

Moved my Steam library, Final Fantasy XIV, and AC Valhalla over to the new drive. Steam makes this very easy now, which was nice. FF14 was a manual process, but it fired up just fine afterwards, and the load times are noticeably improved compared to the old SATA SSD. I didn't notice much difference in AC Valhalla's load times, but they were already pretty quick so it's fine.

Yeah, load time improvements will be hit and miss, depending on title. Reading data from storage into memory is just one part of the loading pipeline, and SATA SSDs are fast enough already that in plenty of game engines, you're already spending most of your time waiting for CPU work to be done, not drive I/O.

Of course, as assets get bigger, drive I/O comes roaring back into being a larger part of that loading time equation.

So if I successfully, install the old hard drive and I go to initialize it, it asks me if I want to format it. Will that erase everything?

Yes.

Yeah. More than likely you don't want to do that unless you have copied everything you need off of it.

Ok, so initialize but don't format. Got it.