Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

500,000 graphics cards found in an abandoned container

A simple administrative error
Spoiler:

To his surprise, the boxes were full of RTX 3080 ! Neither one nor two, Choi warns his superiors of his discovery. After investigation, it turns out that these 500,000 Nvidia graphics cards were placed in this container. without proper documentation, after their manufacture in August by Samsung.

Edit: No, half a million GeForce RTX 30 series GPUs were not lost in shipment and now found

After the news started to spread, however, the article's author added an update saying, "This is a fake news story created and published on December 28 in celebration of the Holy Innocents Day in Spain. The content of it is false and has been created with a satirical humorous purpose. We hope you had fun reading it."

Apparently December 28 in Spain is somewhat akin to April Fools' Day, in which it is common for false news stories to be posted, usually with a humorous slant.

What? That sounds like they just doubled their stock...

Just wondering, how many total cards does nividia make for every generation?

Edit: in comparison with other video cars sales this seems like nothing. It’s common for nividia to sell around 9 million video cards per quarter. But then again, that’s still an absurd amount to have lying around.

I use brobot to monitor stock and it’s seeing regular AMD 6800, 6800XT, and 6900XT’s stock updates. You just can’t ever get them since they are gone instantly.

Ran a couple of benchmarks to see the improvement of going from a i5-8600k clocked at 4.7ghz to the 5900x. I was pretty shocked by the performance difference.

i5-8600k @4.7ghz OC
------------------------------
Cinebench R23- 6552
Cinebench R20- 3730
Timespy - 5213

5900x
-----------------------
Cinebench R23- 20363 102.62% difference
Cinebench R20- 7952 72.28% difference
Timespy- 13 171 CPU 86.57% difference

In terms of overall computer usage I can throw anything at this computer. My CPU is only at 100% when I am rendering in Vray for work. I can have 20+ chrome tabs open, discord, a 4k YouTube video playing while playing Warzone and my CPU maxes at 45% cpu usage.
With the i5 I was getting 100% usage with just Warzone and had to close other apps and use the Process Lasso app to just give discord some breathing room to work properly. I am again blown away.

I wouldn't have expected any less TBH. The 5900x is indeed a monster!

gewy wrote:

I think EVGA has a queue system to buy their cards directly. When your number is up, they e-mail you and you have 8 hours to order. Gonna be a long wait though- not sure they’ve even filled the first day’s orders yet.

I've been keeping track of the EVGA queues. Here is the latest status. They resume drops to the queues next week when they return from holiday break.

So ironically enough after what I said about availability for AMD GPU's, I am now the (proud?) owner of a PowerColor Red Devil RX 6800 XT Limited Edition (one of only a thousand, supposedly). Well, nominally I am... it's still in packaging in sunny(?) City of Industry, California.

A stock alerts Discord I'm in pinged it on Newegg yesterday evening and I clicked on a lark expecting it to already say sold out. Then when it wasn't sold out on a lark I clicked "add to cart." Then at every stage of the checkout I expected it to fail but next thing I know I'm getting a notification my credit card has been charged.

Have mixed feelings about it, my plan was to hold out for a 3080 since I felt anything less wouldn't be a big enough upgrade over the 2080 I have now. I got my hands on a 3060 ti and a 3070 but sold them both off at cost to people locally who hadn't been so fortunate. I know the 6800 XT trades blows with the 3080 unless ray tracing is taken into account, and ray tracing is still something I have such mixed feelings about. Anyway I'm looking forward to trying it out, and I figure worst case I should be able to sell it and get my money back.

One advantage of the short supply of GPUs - I can now look at the upcoming 3080ti without going "damn it!"

Moggy wrote:

One advantage of the short supply of GPUs - I can now look at the upcoming 3080ti without going "damn it!"

Given how narrow the performance gap between the 3090 and 3080 already is, I wonder if there's really all that much room for a 3080ti to slot in. I guess it will basically be a 20GB version of the 3080.

I'm probably gonna stick with targeting a regular 3080.

It'll be interesting to see just how it stacks up against the other two cards. Some of the conjecture articles I've read think it will come close to the 3090 for typical game playing but without the workstation HP. Which would be perfect for me.

Of course, I'm still CPU bound so need to take care of that first.

Speaking of upgrades, any one here entered newegg's "killer rig" competition?

Man that is an ugly case. But hey I won't turn it down if I win.

Chaz wrote:

So, it makes sense to keep the 5600, right? Even though it'll be driving a 3080?

If you consider how long the CPU is likely to last you, the extra money may be well-spent; amortized across multiple years, it might be a wash or even less expensive, because you're likely to keep it longer.

If, however, you're giving up something else in your build to get the 5800X, you might be smarter to buy whatever that is instead.

I've asked so many questions already about installing additional SSDs, but I'm taking the plunge tonight and I'm not at ALL nervous!
IMAGE( https://media.giphy.com/media/l4FATJpd4LWgeruTK/giphy.gif )

Is it best to clone/format the SSDs before installation (as Crucial suggests in their videos), or doesn't it matter all that much? Also, having just cloned and attached an external drive to my Mac, is there any indication which drive you're booting from *after* you boot up? I can anticipate a surreal affair of me cloning my main drive twice and then getting lost regarding which games I'm installing/uninstalling where, since the three drives will initially look the same if I clone, rather than format. Thanks!

What I'd probably do is clone the system drive onto the new drive you want to use, and then pull the old drive out completely. (edit to add: you might have to tell your BIOS to boot from the new drive instead of looking for the old one.) Once you know the clone is working right, you can reformat the old drive. The easiest way is probably to disconnect the new drive, hook up the old drive, and then use the manual partition tool from a Windows install image to just clear everything off it.

Alternately, you could use a Linux installer of pretty much any type, and use its partition tool to wipe the drive.

Remember, if the only drives you have connected are the USB install key and the drive you want to erase, you can't damage anything you care about. Even if you wipe the wrong drive, at worst you'll have to remake the USB key.

The distro has a stupid name, but the Pop!OS Linux installer has a nice straightforward install tool, one of the best I've seen. When you start the install process, it comes up showing you the existing partitions on a drive, and there's a manual partitioning button you can click. A new tool will open in a new window. In that tool, first make sure you have the right drive chosen on the dropdown gadget(the names will be weird, but the size should clue you in), choose Drive/New Partition Table off the menu bar, and then click the green checkbox to commit your changes. Voila, disk wiped. Don't continue with the install, just exit.

Again, if the only disks you have connected are ones you don't care about, you can go hog-wild. You can't do any permanent damage. Just make sure that the new drive is working well and that all your data is safe before wiping the old one.

Once you're sure the old drive is wiped, you can connect it at the same time as the new one. You might have to adjust your BIOS to boot off the new disk, but you might have had to do that when you cloned it anyway. From there, you just partition it, format it, and maybe reassign the drive letter.

edit: oh, one way to test that the drive was wiped is to leave it connected, but disconnect the USB key you wiped it with, and try to configure your BIOS to boot from it. If it absolutely refuses, that's good, the drive has been blanked.

Oh, it sounds like you're adding two drives, not one. I'd clone your existing drive onto the correct new one, hooking up just those two drives. Make sure you are cloning from the full drive to the empty one. Then add the second new drive, disconnect the old one, and leave it that way for awhile. Get the new drives configured however you want them, make sure things are working correctly. Don't hurry, give it a couple weeks.

Then, make a USB key, either Windows or Linux, disconnect both old drives, connect the new drive, and wipe it. Make sure it won't boot anymore. If you get that far, connect all three drives, change your BIOS to boot off the correct one, and you should be golden.

Basically, at every step, you're connecting only drives you want to copy from or modify. If only the correct drives are attached, it's impossible to write onto the wrong one.

Malor wrote:

What I'd probably do is clone the system drive onto the new drive you want to use, and then pull the old drive out completely. (edit to add: you might have to tell your BIOS to boot from the new drive instead of looking for the old one.) Once you know the clone is working right, you can reformat the old drive. The easiest way is probably to disconnect the new drive, hook up the old drive, and then use the manual partition tool from a Windows install image to just clear everything off it.

Alternately, you could use a Linux installer of pretty much any type, and use its partition tool to wipe the drive.

Remember, if the only drives you have connected are the USB install key and the drive you want to erase, you can't damage anything you care about. Even if you wipe the wrong drive, at worst you'll have to remake the USB key.

The distro has a stupid name, but the Pop!OS Linux installer has a nice straightforward install tool, one of the best I've seen. When you start the install process, it comes up showing you the existing partitions on a drive, and there's a manual partitioning button you can click. A new tool will open in a new window. In that tool, first make sure you have the right drive chosen on the dropdown gadget(the names will be weird, but the size should clue you in), choose Drive/New Partition Table off the menu bar, and then click the green checkbox to commit your changes. Voila, disk wiped. Don't continue with the install, just exit.

Again, if the only disks you have connected are ones you don't care about, you can go hog-wild. You can't do any permanent damage. Just make sure that the new drive is working well and that all your data is safe before wiping the old one.

Once you're sure the old drive is wiped, you can connect it at the same time as the new one. You might have to adjust your BIOS to boot off the new disk, but you might have had to do that when you cloned it anyway. From there, you just partition it, format it, and maybe reassign the drive letter.

edit: oh, one way to test that the drive was wiped is to leave it connected, but disconnect the USB key you wiped it with, and try to configure your BIOS to boot from it. If it absolutely refuses, that's good, the drive has been blanked.

Thank you! I'm actually just installing extra SSDs to help with game storage. So I guess I'd clone the main HD to a new SSD, then boot from the new SSD and add/delete games and files from there as I need?

Yeah, pretty much. Clone HD to SSD, disconnect HD, tell BIOS to boot from SSD, and off you go. Test that for awhile. Then add other SSDs once you're comfortable.

Make sure you don't erase the HD until last, when you're confident in the new drives and how you have them set up. Don't reconnect it until you're ready to wipe it, and keep the other drives disconnected while you do that.

edit: I gotta say, with the M.2 drives, it makes me very nervous that I can't easily disconnect them. I wish there was an easy way to just disable them in the BIOS. It means I have to be super careful and pay close attention, instead of just using my old fallback of disconnecting drives I care about when making destructive changes.

Malor wrote:

Yeah, pretty much. Clone HD to SSD, disconnect HD, tell BIOS to boot from SSD, and off you go. Test that for awhile. Then add other SSDs once you're comfortable.

Make sure you don't erase the HD until last, when you're confident in the new drives and how you have them set up. Don't reconnect it until you're ready to wipe it, and keep the other drives disconnected while you do that.

edit: I gotta say, with the M.2 drives, it makes me very nervous that I can't easily disconnect them. I wish there was an easy way to just disable them in the BIOS. It means I have to be super careful and pay close attention, instead of just using my old fallback of disconnecting drives I care about when making destructive changes.

Much obliged! I had no intention of wiping the original HD, simply stripping files and games from the cloned SSDs. I heard that it was better to play faster games from the original HD unless it's quite old.

Natus wrote:

Much obliged! I had no intention of wiping the original HD, simply stripping files and games from the cloned SSDs. I heard that it was better to play faster games from the original HD unless it's quite old.

Many games will load substantially faster from SSD. The older and smaller it is, the more likely it is to not to be upgraded much in the move.

Not wiping the HD could make things a little more tricky. When you first connect it to the dual-SSD system, make sure the BIOS is definitely booting from the SSD. Before shutting down, maybe put a file on the SSD's desktop so you instantly know if you booted on the wrong drive. And then immediately go into drive management and check that the drive letters came out right. Things could end up horribly amiss.

Once you get the old drive locked down on a new drive letter (ie, not C:), everything should be fine from there.

Over the holidays I made a casual foray into the realm of stock tracking for components. Wasn't too hard to snag a 5600x from Amazon. Yay. Getting it later this week.

But it's painfully evident that getting a new GPU at MSRP (except maybe the overpriced 3090) is not on the table at the moment, at least for me. They rarely came up compared to the CPU's and with all the different models it seemed like it would be a lot harder to keep a handle on to buy quickly. And I'll be damned if I'm gonna be stuck with some kind of tacked on power supply combo from Newegg. Screw that. I'd rather just pay a price markup; seems more honest.

So, I'll leave this to the people with more time and patience. The brief experience has not left me optimistic things will change in the next month or two either. And there seem to be grumblings that crypto mining is picking up again. Heh.

Get in the EVGA cue for whatever card you want and just wait for the e-mail. It's the easiest way to get a card. You may just have to wait a while. It will save you a lot of aggravation.

Gaald wrote:

Get in the EVGA cue for whatever card you want and just wait for the e-mail. It's the easiest way to get a card. You may just have to wait a while. It will save you a lot of aggravation.

Here is the current state of the North American EVGA queues. Best of luck hunting for your GPU!

Edgar_Newt wrote:
Gaald wrote:

Get in the EVGA cue for whatever card you want and just wait for the e-mail. It's the easiest way to get a card. You may just have to wait a while. It will save you a lot of aggravation.

Here is the current state of the North American EVGA queues. Best of luck hunting for your GPU!

My 3080 order timestamp (XC3 Black) is about two hours later than where that doc says they're at. So that should set up me up nicely for what? July? October?

I managed to order a 3070 today! Best Buy restocked a bunch of 3070 and 3060ti cards very briefly this morning, and I managed to snag one of the 3070s.

They also restocked a much smaller quantity of 3080s and I was sadly unable to get my hands on one of them. But at least I can cross the 3070 off my list. One card down, one to go.

Gaald wrote:

Get in the EVGA cue for whatever card you want and just wait for the e-mail. It's the easiest way to get a card. You may just have to wait a while. It will save you a lot of aggravation.

Yeah, I should have done this a long time ago since there’s no obligation to buy. Ah well. With my 1/4/21 queue date I’m not even confident I’ll have it before the end of the year.

My 10/8/20 queue dates still seem hopelessly distant. :/

I'm virtually certain I will be able to snipe one via a retail channel before my EVGA lottery number comes up.

ubrakto wrote:
Edgar_Newt wrote:
Gaald wrote:

Get in the EVGA cue for whatever card you want and just wait for the e-mail. It's the easiest way to get a card. You may just have to wait a while. It will save you a lot of aggravation.

Here is the current state of the North American EVGA queues. Best of luck hunting for your GPU!

My 3080 order timestamp (XC3 Black) is about two hours later than where that doc says they're at. So that should set up me up nicely for what? July? October? :lol:

...2023. Sounds right.

*Legion* wrote:

I managed to order a 3070 today! Best Buy restocked a bunch of 3070 and 3060ti cards very briefly this morning, and I managed to snag one of the 3070s.

They also restocked a much smaller quantity of 3080s and I was sadly unable to get my hands on one of them. But at least I can cross the 3070 off my list. One card down, one to go.

I was able to get a n EVGA 3070 today as well for my brother! I got it at Best Buy of all places. I've been striking out for months with their terrible system. I was kinda freaking out when they were asking for verification codes but I guess they held it for me. Phew. It was pickup only but I guess that makes sense since they want to double verify who these cards are going to.

Tempest wrote:

I was kinda freaking out when they were asking for verification codes but I guess they held it for me.

Oh god yes, at that part I was like "welp, it'll be gone now" and wondered why I hadn't been asked to verify during my previous logins and even recent order.

But I guess that is part of the high-demand product checkout, and your item is held by the time you're at that stage.

Now sell me a 3080, BB!

Forgot I should probably do a completed build post, so here it is!

Components:

Spoiler:

- Ryzen 5 5600x
- Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite V2
- 2x16gb Gskill Ripjaw 3600
- Gigabyte RTX 3080 Gaming OC
- Corsair H115i Capellix
- Samsung 970 Evo 1tb
- Seasonic PX-750
- Phanteks Eclipse P500a
- Noctua NF-A14 chromax
- Phanteks Halos Lux Digital
- 1tb SSD ported over from my old machine

Pictures!
IMAGE(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50806673208_3eaf6b569a_b.jpg)
IMAGE(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50807418226_2665902122_b.jpg)
IMAGE(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50807418261_d3a77c5cc6_b.jpg)
Party mode!
IMAGE(https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50807531357_7bb22002f4_b.jpg)

I'm happy with how it turned out. I haven't done a massive amount of benchmarking, but it looks like it's scoring as expected with no extra tweaking, and CPU/GPU temps at full load aren't going above 64 degrees. Even better, the new machine is quieter at full load than my old machine is at idle. I'm probably still going to go in and play with the fan curves to see if I can drop the noise even further, since I've got some headroom on temps.

Some random thoughts on the whole experience as someone who hasn't built in quite a while:
- It's really weird only connecting one lead for the power button from the case to the block of motherboard pins, instead of a whole bunch for power, reset, power led, hd status, speaker, etc. And the motherboard came with a handy little block you can plug the leads into and then plug the whole thing into the motherboard. Sweet! But I still managed to get the one lead plugged into the wrong place, just like I always do.
- M.2 drives are disturbingly small, and extremely convenient.
- Modern cases are so much nicer than the last cases I've had. There are actual trays for 2.5" SSDs tucked away behind the motherboard. There are preinstalled zip ties and movable panels for cable management. The power supply frame that lets you just slide the thing into the motherboard and secure it with a pair of thumbscrews are great, and then there's a whole shroud to hide cables in. It's just much better to work in.

- RGB was by far the biggest pain to deal with. Ranting spoilered for length.

Spoiler:

The case I got came with three RGB fans, plus some built in LED strips, so I figured I may as well commit to doing RGB. My motherboard has ARGB headers that the case lighting was compatible with, so I tried to get a CPU cooler that would work with that too. Unfortunately, it seemed like the best-reviewed AIOs that were available also required that you use their software, none of which was compatible with my motherboard. I eventually gave up and ordered the Corsair cooler.

Cabling everything was, as expected, a mess. The AIO required using the Commander Core box they included. That needed to go somewhere, but the cables from the fans wouldn't reach all the way to the basement, so it had to go where the SSD mounts are. Since the cables get connected on both sides, it wound up taking up two SSD slots to fit, which wasn't a problem, but was annoying. Then the sheer number of cables to manage was kind of bonkers, since all six fans had two each, plus the connections to the motherboard.

After I got everything up and running, I did like the configuration options available in the Corsair software. The motherboard software did control all the other lighting, but had way fewer options, and a lot of those didn't look great. I think since the fans, halo, and case LED strip all have different numbers of lights, the animation length is wrong for the shorter ones (front fans), so they wind up with gaps in the animation cycle. So I started looking to see if there was any way to get everything controlled by the Corsair software. The Phanteks plugs are different from the Corsair ones, so couldn't go directly in. There are adapter cables, but those specifically don't work with the variant of the control box the AIO came with. I could swap out all the fans with Corsair ones, but those are ridiculously expensive. Even within Corsair's ecosystem, there's a lot of fragmentation around what fans work with what control boxes, so that's confusing too. I even looked into swapping to an Asus motherboard, since those work with iCue, but then discovered that while the 12v headers on those can be controlled in iCue, the 5v addressable headers can't be, which kind of defeated the purpose.

Since I wasn't going to get everything together under one software, I started trying to at least get the non-Corsair stuff to work better. I tried some third party software, but none of that worked. I thought maybe I could pull the case LED strip out of the daisy chain and put that on its own channel, but it connects to a hardware control board that's inaccessible without removing the front fan frame, and I haven't gotten around to trying that yet.

Ultimately, I settled on using what I have and found a lighting scheme that works for me, but man, the current state of RGB is a huge mess.

- The 3080s really are as big as advertised, and mine isn't even one of the bigger ones.

- I'm really frustrated that my 34" ultrawide is still out of commission, so I can't see what the new machine can do on it.

So what's next? I think I might want to get a second m.2 drive to either supplement or replace the SSD I brought over. I maaaaay also want to get an extra LED strip for the top to brighten things up a bit more on the inside. I mean, at this point, why not, right? I've also got a 10tb external drive that I haven't decided what to do with. My original plan was to shuck it, put it in this machine, move everything from the 5tb external I'm using for mass Plex storage onto that, and repurpose those. But now I'm thinking about trying to build a small dedicated server so I don't need to have my main machine running 24/7, so who knows.