Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

I recently got the TP link for work. It can be upgraded to OpenWRT easily and it's been solid for about a month now. It has decent coverage but I read that signal strength isn't it's strong point. The Asus and Netgear would probably be better if coverage is a priority.

A good year at work meant a tidy little raise and a decent bonus, so I'm considering a new build for the first time in about six years.

I've put together a list here: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/FK7P7T

This is a slight modification of the PC Part Picker "Glorious" AMD build. I'm still mulling over what case to get (it's way too damn hard to find a case without a side window - I definitely don't want the light show that is on their list) and I don't need a PSU or GPU - the PSU in my current rig is a recent (<6 mos) replacement for one that exploded on me, and my GPU is already an RTX 2080, so I'm set for those.

Basically I guess I'm looking for input on anything anyone has to say about these choices, with the qualifier that I'm not really looking to save money, so that's not a question here. I'm saving money by reusing my PSU and GPU.

I'm looking for input primarily because, while I have been super enthusiastic about building PCs in the past, more recently my attitude has been, once I had something that was "working," I stopped keeping up with the "latest and greatest," so I'm essentially out of the loop on all the weird model numbers, generations, etc. that actually matter. I suppose I can trust PC Part Picker's listings to a degree, but if there's something better, or something bad, about the choices there, I want to know.

Looks like a nice system. I'm leaning towards the Fractal Design Define Mini C for my next build. Might be too small for your build unless you switch to a micro board like the ASRock X570M Pro4 Micro ATX.

That build is certainly fine. Just make sure whatever case you get has a mounting point for a 360mm rad.

*Legion* wrote:

That build is certainly fine. Just make sure whatever case you get has a mounting point for a 360mm rad.

Since I posted that list, I actually found one that I'm likely to go with. One of the big reasons I picked it is because it explicitly points out that it will mount a cooler that size. The other, of course, being that it has a "no window" option.

If price isn't an issue, I would look into getting a board with better VRMs Just in case you want to do a little overclocking now or in the future. This is the board I got https://pcpartpicker.com/product/4qs...

Also why would you not get a gen 4 NVME SSD, that's the whole point of going with a x570 motherboard. I believe this is the one I bought. https://pcpartpicker.com/product/Mh9...

If you aren't going to go Gen 4 with your SSD then maybe look at last gen board? Although with those you need to make sure the bios is flashed to except the new AMD Ryzen CPUs.

One last note! Apparently Ryzen CPUs play best with Memory that has Samsung B die chips. You might want to do some research on that.

Gaald wrote:

Also why would you not get a gen 4 NVME SSD, that's the whole point of going with a x570 motherboard. ... One last note! Apparently Ryzen CPUs play best with Memory that has Samsung B die chips. You might want to do some research on that.

These are the kind of catches I was hoping to get. Thanks! As it turns out, the RAM on my list qualifies.

Gaald wrote:

If price isn't an issue, I would look into getting a board with better VRMs Just in case you want to do a little overclocking now or in the future.

I appreciate the suggestion, but overclocking has never been something I've dabbled with.

So I've thrown together five Ryzen systems in the last three years. From a lowly R5 1400 machine my dad's been reading his emails and shopping on for almost three years (three years and not one phone call asking me why it won't come on, a success) to my current silly X570/3950X machine. That in no way makes me an "expert" but I will offer a couple of my current general opinions.

It's true that Ryzen responds well to RAM frequency. DDR4-3600 CL16 is the sweet spot. Find a kit that's on your motherboard's QVL list if you want to really be sure, but IMO the B-die RAM kit thing is overblown.

If you really dig you'll find people that thought they bought B-die kits, got super proud of getting their B-die kits, got their overclocked speeds like they were supposed to, and then later found out the brand had substituted other memory modules in the same model number kit and they had been getting the same RAM timings on dual-rank e-die memory from Micron or whoever the whole time.

Also, if you don't really need and/or want PCIe 4.0 for some very specific work related reason, there's a lot of good reasons to buy X470/B450 instead of X570 boards. One, it's just cheaper. Two, the BIOS' have had time to mature. People have had time to figure out the quirks.

I won't get super into details because the explanation would take ages, but I honestly regret not just buying an X470 board and doing a BIOS upgrade before installing the 3950X. Would have saved me $100 and worked just as well, and I have no use for PCIe 4.0. My Gigabyte X570 Aorus Master is... the hardware is so hilariously overbuilt even for the 3950X it's ridiculous. But I kinda hate the BIOS, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah, after looking into it, I realized I misread the RAM pick - it's not b-die, so I started looking around for alternatives, even found a b-die finder and...

Then Googled "how much does b-die matter with a Ryzen" and promptly decided thereafter that I didn't care.

As for PCIe 4.0, I'm not sure I care that much about it either, but it does kinda help with future-proofing (especially if I end up going another 6 years before doing a new build), and it means that I don't have to flash a BIOS before I finish my build.

The B-die RAM thing doesn't matter nearly as much as it did in the days of first-gen Ryzen.

I wasn't sure how much it mattered either, but then saw a recent video where it was mentioned. So I figured it was still something to consider. I lucked out and just happened to get a couple of sticks of ram that were B die.

I didn't get 3600 ram. I got 3200 and wondered if I should go and return it for 3600 ram. Does it make a big difference?

Middcore wrote:

The B-die RAM thing doesn't matter nearly as much as it did in the days of first-gen Ryzen.

This.

Any talk about "Ryzen needs B-die" is two generations out of date. Ryzen 1st gen had issues with memory compatibility at higher memory clock speeds, and B-die was more successful at reaching those speeds on Ryzen systems than the pack.

Gaald wrote:

I didn't get 3600 ram. I got 3200 and wondered if I should go and return it for 3600 ram. Does it make a big difference?

No.

*Legion* wrote:
Middcore wrote:

The B-die RAM thing doesn't matter nearly as much as it did in the days of first-gen Ryzen.

This.

Any talk about "Ryzen needs B-die" is two generations out of date. Ryzen 1st gen had issues with memory compatibility at higher memory clock speeds, and B-die was more successful at reaching those speeds on Ryzen systems than the pack.

Gaald wrote:

I didn't get 3600 ram. I got 3200 and wondered if I should go and return it for 3600 ram. Does it make a big difference?

No.

PC enthusiasm has infinite memory. People still swear up and down that AMD (ATI!) has sh*tty drivers.

PCIe 1.0 is actually fast enough for a huge number of games.

3D graphics are inherently quite low-bandwidth compared to the quality you get, because the system is batching up geometry calls rather than just sending flat pixels. Originally, AGP was really intended to accelerate 2D graphics, which were very hard to do on a PCI slot. (even 640x480x60, in just 256 colors, is about 18 megs a second, which was a substantial load on old PCI.)

AGP and then PCIe happened right around the same time that the PC market was converting wholesale to 3D, so the marketroids grabbed it and pushed it as what you needed for the fastest/shiniest/best graphics, but it was totally a lie. Early 3D accelerators didn't need AGP, they would run fine in a standard PCI slot. There was effectively no difference between the two for games that did interstitial level loading, where you sat at a static screen while textures got loaded after a level change, and then the textures stayed unchanged until the next static loading screen. On PCI, the load screens would take an extra two or three seconds, but play would be the same.

Eventually, they started to stream in textures, and that's where the higher bandwidth started to really show. Streaming textures doesn't work on PCI, there's just not enough bandwidth. But even PCIe 1.0, in an x16 slot, can move a hell of a lot of data, and even today, there aren't that many games streaming in data fast enough for it to be a bottleneck.

It can be, in some cases, and you can see maybe a 10% boost in moving from 1.0 to PCIe 2.0, but to my knowledge, that's as far as it matters. Past there, I think there's effectively no difference for the games out today. PCIe 3.0 is twice that fast, and then 4.0 is twice that fast again, and it's likely to be a great long while before we start needing 4.0 for gaming.

4.0 will be of great interest to big servers, where total system bandwidth can really be an issue. But for us down here in the consumer market, it may be quite some time before we see any benefit.

If anything down here in the cheap seats will truly demand 4.0, it'll probably be VR (edit: or multiscreen gaming, same basic idea), and probably not for at least several more years.

TheGameguru wrote:

PC enthusiasm has infinite memory. People still swear up and down that AMD (ATI!) has sh*tty drivers.

I've been reading up, and the Linux community is pretty solidly behind ATI now as the adapter of choice. Particularly with Vulkan, the true open-source drivers on that side of the fence have apparently become better than the NVidia proprietary ones, sometime over the last three or four years.

This startled me, because for many years, the official ATI drivers (fglrx, I think) were a total pile of crap, just absolute steaming sh*t that you didn't want anywhere near a working system. Rather: a formerly working system, they were that bad. NVidia's approach of providing a thin shim for the Windows drivers was the only one that worked.

Apparently, that's not true anymore. The open source ATI drivers are, to all reports, excellent. I have no personal experience yet, but the word on the street is very favorable.

Gaald wrote:

I didn't get 3600 ram. I got 3200 and wondered if I should go and return it for 3600 ram. Does it make a big difference?

To back up Legion and Guru, nope.

4K by 4K textures have been standard in games for years now. So I would assume that puts stress on PCIe these days. The average graphics card now also has 2-3GB minimum of memory as well.
And megatexture while promoted in RAGE, first appeared in Enemy Territory: QW in as far back as 2007.

And with 3D normal maps and tessellation becoming more not just for content creation but also in games, the envelop is only going to push further. I would not be surprised to see models being boxes (or a billboard?) in games with 3D vector multi-million pixel displacement maps. Because at some point, it will be a lot less work to make LoD's by down rezzing a texture than retopologizing 10's or 100's of 1000's of polygons. I guess animation is the big limiter. (same as it is with voxels)

TheGameguru wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
Middcore wrote:

The B-die RAM thing doesn't matter nearly as much as it did in the days of first-gen Ryzen.

This.

Any talk about "Ryzen needs B-die" is two generations out of date. Ryzen 1st gen had issues with memory compatibility at higher memory clock speeds, and B-die was more successful at reaching those speeds on Ryzen systems than the pack.

Gaald wrote:

I didn't get 3600 ram. I got 3200 and wondered if I should go and return it for 3600 ram. Does it make a big difference?

No.

PC enthusiasm has infinite memory. People still swear up and down that AMD (ATI!) has sh*tty drivers.

In fairness AMD has had driver issues with the Navi cards, although I personally haven't had any problems with my 5700 and the newest driver release from a couple weeks ago has reportedly fixed stuff for many if not most people. They just don't have the resources to pour into driver development that Nvidia does and it persistently holds their hardware back.

But yeah this stuff just gets turned into memes, basically. People parroting stuff to feel knowledgeable, or to spread FUD about the rival of the company they fanboy.

Middcore wrote:
TheGameguru wrote:

PC enthusiasm has infinite memory. People still swear up and down that AMD (ATI!) has sh*tty drivers.

In fairness AMD has had driver issues with the Navi cards, although I personally haven't had any problems with my 5700 and the newest driver release from a couple weeks ago has reportedly fixed stuff for many if not most people. They just don't have the resources to pour into driver development that Nvidia does and it persistently holds their hardware back.

But yeah this stuff just gets turned into memes, basically. People parroting stuff to feel knowledgeable, or to spread FUD about the rival of the company they fanboy.

PC enthusiasm is kind of like "baby's first technical expertise". Lotta guys who want to feel like tech geniuses because they put together a midrange PC and read stuff on testing websites. Tiny but measurable differences in performance get blown up into Big Deals.

Sounds good I am sticking with my 32gigs of 3200 ram because, knock on wood, everything seems stable!

I need help. Sorry for the long post in advance. I posted in the tech help thread as well but maybe some of you might have some suggestion.

I bought this monitor https://www.asus.com/Monitors/TUF-Ga... I started using the monitor with a display port cable but then switched over to HDMI 2.0 when an issue I couldn't resolve came up. I will describe the issue later in the post.

First off let me say the picture on this monitor looks great! And would probably work well in a 1 monitor computer setup, but unfortunately there are a few flaws. First of all the menu system is total ass. The input select is buried several clicks in, which wouldn't be so bad if the monitor didn't also auto select the next active input if the current one you are using looses it's signal. So for example I have my cable box plugged into this monitor and my PC. The cable box never shuts off, it just goes into screen saver mode when not active. If I restart my computer or the computer goes to sleep and the monitor is on it will auto switch to the input for my cable box, and there is no way to turn that "feature" off. Not even in the factory menu. It's a pain in the butt but I could live with it if this next issue didn't make things worse!

I bought the Asus monitor in part because it was a gsync monitor and I have a GTX 2700 super. Apparently that feature only works on display port. Unfortunately Display port and multi monitor setups can be a nightmare. Something I was not aware of before buying the monitor.

The issue is when I turn off the new Asus monitor or it goes to sleep, the video card thinks the monitor was physically unplugged from the system. Windows 10 then sends all icons and windows from that monitor to the only other monitor that is connected to the system. When the Asus monitor gets turned back on or comes out of sleep mode the system thinks I plugged the monitor back in and resets all the icons but also takes all the windows from active programs and sends them back to the Asus monitor, even the ones I want to stay on the secondary monitor. Which means I have to place all the windows back to where I want them, whenever this happens. This is annoying as all hell!

I have been researching a way to fix this for days. I have tried registry edits, and programs that "might fix" the issue and nothing has worked. Microsoft refuses to do anything about the issue and Nvidia refuses to as well. Considering this monitor already has a couple of other annoyances, and I am forced to use display port to also get gsync then I don't see any reason to keep this monitor.

But what monitor can I buy that won't have the same problem? I want a 27", 1440p monitor with gsync preferably, and most importantly won't disconnect from the system when it goes to sleep or turns off while using a display port cable. My old 27" Dell 60hz 1440p monitor uses display port and does not have the same issue as the new Asus one, but no one advertises the hot plug display port issue in reviews so I have no idea what monitor I could get!

By the way apparently this issue has been around for years. Like more than 5 years now.

Deleted

Odd question:

I want to update a Windows 7 machine that's been running the same motherboard, CPU, and memory since 2009. It's my Windows Media Center machine that's running CableCARD and OTA tuners.

I've talked about updating this thing for a few years just due to hardware age concerns, but it's run fine all this time. Only things that have been replaced are hard drive upgrades, a PSU, and I think one fan died (mostly air cooled anyway, CPU is low enough power to not have a fan on the heat sink).

I was looking at a Ryzen 3 or 5 "G" variant with onboard graphics in a 65w chip. My concern would be drivers. I was looking at motherboards like the Asrock B450 Pro 4, but it only lists Windows 10 as supported and only has downloads for Win 10.

AMD does list B450 chipset drivers here.

Any recommendations?

Looks like there are a few YouTube videos about it and this article may help. Says the main issue is getting USB to work

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Looks like there are a few YouTube videos about it and this article may help. Says the main issue is getting USB to work

Thanks. I'll try to read up and see if it's worth the risk. Luckily the motherboard has a PS2 port still to get through setup. Believe I still have a PS2 keyboard (or adapter) around, too.

I'm not at all familiar with Media Center, but I will make the observation that you might be able to do something similar with Linux and Plex or one of the other media engine things it has. Linux usually has drivers for just about everything built-in, and it's not doing any of the 'Windows 7 won't patch itself on newer chips' bullsh*t that Microsoft is pulling. It'll run on that old machine, and it'll run on anything newer you stick in there, and it can almost always do that without a reinstall. Whatever you connect a Linux drive to, it's probably going to boot and work fine, as long as it's still x86/AMD64.

Most people aren't that thrilled with it as a desktop environment, even still, but it's often very good at server-style stuff. If you can find equivalents for the features in Media Center you use, it might solve multiple problems at once.

Gaald wrote:

I need help. Sorry for the long post in advance. I posted in the tech help thread as well but maybe some of you might have some suggestion.

I bought this monitor https://www.asus.com/Monitors/TUF-Ga... I started using the monitor with a display port cable but then switched over to HDMI 2.0 when an issue I couldn't resolve came up. I will describe the issue later in the post.

First off let me say the picture on this monitor looks great! And would probably work well in a 1 monitor computer setup, but unfortunately there are a few flaws. First of all the menu system is total ass. The input select is buried several clicks in, which wouldn't be so bad if the monitor didn't also auto select the next active input if the current one you are using looses it's signal. So for example I have my cable box plugged into this monitor and my PC. The cable box never shuts off, it just goes into screen saver mode when not active. If I restart my computer or the computer goes to sleep and the monitor is on it will auto switch to the input for my cable box, and there is no way to turn that "feature" off. Not even in the factory menu. It's a pain in the butt but I could live with it if this next issue didn't make things worse!

I bought the Asus monitor in part because it was a gsync monitor and I have a GTX 2700 super. Apparently that feature only works on display port. Unfortunately Display port and multi monitor setups can be a nightmare. Something I was not aware of before buying the monitor.

The issue is when I turn off the new Asus monitor or it goes to sleep, the video card thinks the monitor was physically unplugged from the system. Windows 10 then sends all icons and windows from that monitor to the only other monitor that is connected to the system. When the Asus monitor gets turned back on or comes out of sleep mode the system thinks I plugged the monitor back in and resets all the icons but also takes all the windows from active programs and sends them back to the Asus monitor, even the ones I want to stay on the secondary monitor. Which means I have to place all the windows back to where I want them, whenever this happens. This is annoying as all hell!

I have been researching a way to fix this for days. I have tried registry edits, and programs that "might fix" the issue and nothing has worked. Microsoft refuses to do anything about the issue and Nvidia refuses to as well. Considering this monitor already has a couple of other annoyances, and I am forced to use display port to also get gsync then I don't see any reason to keep this monitor.

But what monitor can I buy that won't have the same problem? I want a 27", 1440p monitor with gsync preferably, and most importantly won't disconnect from the system when it goes to sleep or turns off while using a display port cable. My old 27" Dell 60hz 1440p monitor uses display port and does not have the same issue as the new Asus one, but no one advertises the hot plug display port issue in reviews so I have no idea what monitor I could get!

By the way apparently this issue has been around for years. Like more than 5 years now.

Disable sleep mode and run a screen saver?

Malor wrote:

I'm not at all familiar with Media Center, but I will make the observation that you might be able to do something similar with Linux and Plex or one of the other media engine things it has. Linux usually has drivers for just about everything built-in, and it's not doing any of the 'Windows 7 won't patch itself on newer chips' bullsh*t that Microsoft is pulling. It'll run on that old machine, and it'll run on anything newer you stick in there, and it can almost always do that without a reinstall. Whatever you connect a Linux drive to, it's probably going to boot and work fine, as long as it's still x86/AMD64.

Most people aren't that thrilled with it as a desktop environment, even still, but it's often very good at server-style stuff. If you can find equivalents for the features in Media Center you use, it might solve multiple problems at once.

I use it as a six tuner DVR server that feeds Xbox 360's around the house with both live TV and recorded TV, including 4 CableCARD tuners and 2 OTA tuners attached to an antenna.

Can't do that with Linux, Plex, etc.

Yes, it's dated and I probably should just switch to a streaming TV service, but my setup is understood by my family, and I can literally store stuff for years if I want because I can just throw hard drives at old TV shows to keep as much as I want.

What's kept this system alive for me is that I switched to an alternative guide data source for WMC about a year ago called EPG123. MS has since shut off guide data that had been available natively in Windows 7.

I'm not worried about future hardware support as long as I can get it running in the first place. This is a stable system that does one thing.

If it tells you anything about how little I care about future support, this system is based on the Nforce 4 chipset from Nvidia. Back when those were a thing

You'd have to replace your tuners with the ones supported by Plex (can't recall the name at the moment) but should be doable.

bighoppa wrote:

You'd have to replace your tuners with the ones supported by Plex (can't recall the name at the moment) but should be doable.

Plex doesn't support CableCARD encryption. Only place that ever did was WMC*. Partly because it was MS Playready encryption.

*Just remembered that there were some HDHomeRun tuners that worked with CableCARD, but they had a crappy DVR solution last I checked.