PC Hardware Talk Megathread

[PsYcNeT]

Honestly, the 500GB 970 EVO M.2 NVMe is on sale for $230 right now and I think that's a better deal (it's also 230 on Amazon if MemEx sells out).

https://www.amazon.ca/Samsung-970-EV...pSrc=srch&th=1

I bought one last week because I needed to reformat anyway and oh god. Windows boots in 6 seconds, WoW loads between zones in less than 3 seconds, BF1 loads a map in 5 seconds, it's unreal.

The 1 TB version is $440.

https://www.amazon.ca/Samsung-970-EV...pSrc=srch&th=1

[GoinAllTheWay]

Those are laptop drives are they not? I'm looking at one for my desktop gaming rig.

[PsYcNeT]

Negative.

99% of modern desktop motherboards should have an M.2 slot, and the better ones will have a dedicated PCI-E x4 lane dedicated to it (though in most cases it will disable a couple SATA lanes).

M.2 NVMe's are 3x-6x faster than a conventional SATA SSD and are the tits.

As long as your motherboard supports PCIe M.2 at the 2280 standard, those drives will fly in your desktop.

[GoinAllTheWay]

Oooooooooooooooook, I see where I'm going wrong. Wow.....those M2 drives are, to put it lightly, waaaay faster than their esata counterparts. Looks like I'm doing a major upgrade, don't think my current board has M2. Dang it.

I'm a fan of the ASUS ROG MOBO's. What's your current favourite? Like to keep the new board around $400ish if possible?

[PsYcNeT]

Honestly, motherboards are usually where I go mid-upper tier (rather than my usual blow the bank on top of the line stuff).

I'm waiting on the 9xxx series Intels before I upgrade my set again (and might even wait longer because there still is no new RAM generation on the horizon), but I'm currently OCing an i7-6700k (2 gens back) @ 4.8 in an MSI Gaming Pro Carbon Z170, which was like a $250 mobo at purchase.

I like MSI and ASUS for motherboards typically. I've tried Gigabyte & EVGA and had failures from both multiple times. I haven't had an MSI let me down yet, but the most recent MSI board I bought was about ~6 months after I got the 6700k, wherein the ASUS Z170 Pro (~$240 at purchase) failed to boot. This may have been due to a PSU issue but I ended up replacing both at the same time.

So basically, for the last 17 years the record for End Of Life success for motherboards for me is:

MSI - 2/2 (natural retirement)
ASUS - 2/3
Gigabyte - 1/2
EVGA - 0/2

Assuming you build on the Z370 chipset, the latest Gaming Pro Carbon would be my recommendation:

https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX68577 - $275

[Raekwon]

Ryzen 5 2600x or i5 8400 and why? My system needs a boost

Edit: Running a i5 4670k right now

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by Raekwon

Ryzen 5 2600x or i5 8400 and why? My system needs a boost

Edit: Running a i5 4670k right now

Are you actually finding the 4670k to be a bottleneck? I don't think either of the chips mentioned would "boost" things as much as you might assume, at least relative to whatever issue you may have.

Are you having slow renders? Bottlenecked video card? Freezing issues?

[photon]

Jeez for that I'm almost temped and I don't even need one.

For the m.2 one too!

[PsYcNeT]

Yeah read-speeds of 3,500MB/s (or, 3.5 GigaBYTES per second) for less than 50c a gig is my sweet spot for storage costs.

With the new z370 motherboards you can run 2 M.2s in Raid 0 too which is...pretty overkill.

[accord1999]

Originally Posted by Raekwon

Ryzen 5 2600x or i5 8400 and why? My system needs a boost

Gaming/modestly threaded workloads (i5-8400) vs heavily multi-threaded workloads (video and 3d rendering) (Ryzen).

If you don't need it immediately, perhaps wait to see how Intel's 9000 series CPUs affects prices.

[GoinAllTheWay]

So if I'm updating my MOBO, I'll have to update my processor too. Any compelling reason to look at an i7? Right now I have an i5 4690 @ 3.50 GHz.

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

So if I'm updating my MOBO, I'll have to update my processor too. Any compelling reason to look at an i7? Right now I have an i5 4690 @ 3.50 GHz.

i7s are mainly better for task work (renders, live audio manipulation, etc.) and as mentioned above, AMD CPUs are generally favored for cost/performance when going into task work. i5s are usually more than acceptable for gaming and day-to-day.

[RinkRat]

Nothing wrong with an i5, I'm happy that a larger amount of developers are making use of the additional cores and threads becoming available though.

I'm a bit of a Total War junkie these days so greater utilization goes a long way in such a CPU intensive games.

[Raekwon]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

Are you actually finding the 4670k to be a bottleneck? I don't think either of the chips mentioned would "boost" things as much as you might assume, at least relative to whatever issue you may have.

Are you having slow renders? Bottlenecked video card? Freezing issues?

No real bottleneck I guess, just upgrade would provide a bit for power along with .m2 support and ddr4.

[TKB]

Just upgraded a from a I5 4670k to the I5 8600k. Very nice processor that OC’s like a champ. Pushed it to 4.6 so far without any problems, going to try running it at 4.8 and see how it handles it.

[TKB]

Should also note that with the I5 4670k paired with a GTX 1060 causes massive bottle neck on high settings in BF1. CPU was running at 95-100 percent. Just replacing it with the I5 8600k allowed me to max everything out with the same 1060 GTX with the cpu running at around 60-70 percent and a constant 60fps. Very impressed so far!

[GoinAllTheWay]

Who do you guys like for cases these days? I've been rocking the same cooler master (galaxy I think) for what seems like years. It's good but it's starting to rattle all over the place and frankly, I'd like something less bulky. I'd like to move to liquid cooling one day but, seems they all offer this right now but for the time being, air cooling will be fine. Something with a good offering of usb 3.0 on the front panel for easy access.

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Who do you guys like for cases these days? I've been rocking the same cooler master (galaxy I think) for what seems like years. It's good but it's starting to rattle all over the place and frankly, I'd like something less bulky. I'd like to move to liquid cooling one day but, seems they all offer this right now but for the time being, air cooling will be fine. Something with a good offering of usb 3.0 on the front panel for easy access.

This case was recommended to me by this very thread and I've loved it:
https://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX55760

Ultra quiet, easy to clean and lots of room for expansion and cooling. Headset, Mic, USB 2.0 and 3.0 plugs on the front top of the case. I use it both as my gaming PC and have a long HDMI cable to my TV for multimedia and people can't even tell it's on or being used when I go between them.

[Raekwon]

Just tried this site http://thebottlenecker.com


Says my CPU is too weak for a 1070GTX, only 15% though so not terrible.

[RinkRat]

Originally Posted by GoinAllTheWay

Who do you guys like for cases these days? I've been rocking the same cooler master (galaxy I think) for what seems like years. It's good but it's starting to rattle all over the place and frankly, I'd like something less bulky. I'd like to move to liquid cooling one day but, seems they all offer this right now but for the time being, air cooling will be fine. Something with a good offering of usb 3.0 on the front panel for easy access.

I recently did a build on a Fractal Design Meshify C.

It has excellent airflow and all the connectivity you would want.

It's also a very pleasant case to build in.

Anything by Phanteks is pretty good as well as the Nzxt collection.

I may do a watercooled build inside a Phanteks Evolve X soon.