PC Specs & Upgrade thread

[enderzero]

What you rockin', where you headed?

[enderzero]

So as I've mentioned I don't do much of my gaming on my PC these days. Mostly that's on account of the fact I converted to a full time standing setup and playing games and standing doesn't strike me as fun. That said, since the 'Rona started I moved my Xbox to my office/garage TV which is also hooked up to my PC so it occurs to me that I could just as easily be playing PC games on that TV (assuming they were game pad type games).

The only real gaming that I have done on my PC in the last few years has been VR on my Vive. It was just barely powerful enough to run early gen games but then my VIve broke so no big loss. But I have a Quest now which can actually be now tethered and acts as a Rift more or less. But not with the meager specs I have.

So all of that is a way of talking myself into it getting pretty close to UPGRADE TIME!!

Here's what I'm running now:

i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad
Gigabyte GA-Z170X-Gaming 7
Gigabyte GTX 980 4GB
32GB (2x16) G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200
1TB Samsung 850 EVO
8TB Seagate Barracuda Pro
Cooler Master N400 ATX
EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W 80+ Gold
LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray

And here's where I'm thinking of going:

Ryzen 5 3600 3.6GHz 6-core
Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE WIFI (already purchased)
TBD 2060 Super
32GB (2x16) G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 (pulling from last build)
1TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 M.2-2280 NVME
14TB Seagate Exos (already purchased)
Case = same until the CM694 finally becomes available in the US
EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W 80+ Gold (pulling from last build)
LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray (pulling from last build)

The biggest question mark for me is the 2060 Super since it's currently impossible to find under $400, the same price as the base 2070 and $100 more than the 2060 base and only $100 less than the 2070 Super. If it just fell a bit it would be a no brainer but for what I want it still seems the right move.

Any thoughts are welcome.

[Megatron]

When are you planning to upgrade? I imagine the price on 2080s are going to dump when 3080s drop, I think the launch announce is in a few days.

Here is what I've got now:
GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI
Intel Core i9-9900KF Coffee Lake 8-Core, 16-Thread, 3.6 GHz (5.0 GHz Turbo) LGA 1151 (300 Series)
G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3600 (PC4 28800)
EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti DirectX 12 11G-P4-2281-KR 11GB 352-Bit GDDR6 PCI Express 3.0
Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 1TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D2, QLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDPEKNW010T8X1
Intel 660p Series M.2 2280 2TB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 3D2, QLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) SSDPEKNW020T8X1
EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G5, 80 Plus Gold 750W, Fully Modular, Eco Mode with FDB Fan
Fractal Design Meshify C Black ATX High-Airflow Compact Mid Tower Computer Case
Noctua NH-D15 chromax.black, 140mm dual-tower CPU cooler (Black)

[enderzero]

Wowzers that's some pixel pushin power! Cool didn't know about the 3000 series. I'm not in a hurry. Just bored.

[Megatron]

Yes, it's pushing not very many pixels extremely well. That said, I mainly made it to push sound processing. I do want to try CP2077 when it comes, and this box will already be under-powered for that number of pure piping pixels by then.

[R3C]

I've got 6 "desktops", several laptops, and misc. items. My "main" desktop though is:

i7-9700K
16GB Corsair-something-something-DDR4
EVGA RTX 2070-Super
MSI-Something-something motherboard Z390ish...

None of my PCs have spinning media of any kind. All SSD. Cisco Gb wired network through the house.

The other PCs are all fairly similar, but a step down. (trickle effect)

Sorry I'm not as specific as I once would have been. Hehehe

I do like that G.Skill memory. I had been using it exclusively for a while, but got a good deal on some Corsair modules last build.

[enderzero]

I'm doin it. I'm taking the plunge! Goin 2070 Super.

I feel like my PC knows I'm planning to upgrade soon. Been buggy city this week. Restarting explorer every few hours and chrome moving like molasses. IT KNOWS!!

[R3C]

It must know! I haven't actually experienced those sorts of PC problems in quite a while. I guess my PCs are pretty clean though even after a few years. The ones that play games mainly do that only, so Windows and Steam more or less. The others are pretty task specific too. I also run all my design software in a VM, so I can move it around when needed.

Nice on the Super! I'm enjoying mine.

[enderzero]

It's the all new all new all new Specs & Bench thread! I had fun going back and reading this.

The new PC is UP & RUNNING.

Ryzen 5 3600 3.6GHz 6-core
Gigabyte X570 AORUS ELITE WIFI
Gigabyte RTX 2070 Super Windforce OC 3X
32GB (2x16) G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200
1TB Sabrent Rocket 4.0 M.2-2280 NVME
14TB Seagate Exos
EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650W 80+ Gold
LG WH16NS40 Blu-Ray

It's 2020 so instead of me posting a screenshot of my benchmark scores, here is my historical benchmark google sheet.

On the 3D gaming side of things, results seem to be about 100% to 120% rise on DX10/11 tests and 150% rise on DX12. That's actually a lesser jump than my last big upgrade which went from an i5 2500k & Radeon 5770XT to a i5 6500 & GTX 980 and produced 300-600% bench numbers.

Computing tests, PCMark 10 in particular, was an average of 62% rise. But real world scores are pretty impressive with my WinRAR tests rising an average of 131% and my Premiere export test almost hitting a 500% increase in speed dropping from an hour and 7 minutes down to 11 minutes!

Memory tests were a bit screwy and I'm gonna start a new thread to tap into your expertise which may account for the PCMark 8 scores being all over the place.

One other quick piece of analysis: I ran some of those benchmarks on the same system when it was a fresh install 5 years ago. Interesting to see that 5 years of OS use costs the system somewhere in the neighborhood of 4-9% scores. Iiiinteresting.

[R3C]

PC hardware just doesn't make huge jumps much anymore in my experience. The GTX 970/980 and the GTX 10xx series seem to have been the biggest video performance jumps in years. The 20xx are great, but they're only slightly faster in rasterized rendering than the 10xx series. It seems that hardware is just moving into more parallel / more features, and less like for like speed.

That's actually ok with me. I still play at 1080 even on our 4K TV. I just don't think there's much benefit of continually higher resolutions. I'd much rather crank all visually interesting settings up in games, and maintain either 60 or 120 frames per second. I'd say that my GTX1070 and RTX2070Super are comfortably able to do that in every game I play at that resolution.

Hopefully the RTX30xx cards will make a good jump though at the very least for ray tracing performance.

CPUs are fine these days too. More threads, marginally faster per core, and no software to really push any of it. Video editing would be the main thing. Games and audio software will run on anything moderately modern. It's much easier to keep a PC for a few years these days without upgrading much.

What's odd is that there really isn't very much that's super interesting about the top end these days. The cost for top end is very disproportionate for only moderate improvement over mid-high-range. The REALLY interesting area these days is the low end. It's insane what you can put together for almost no money now, and still be able to comfortably play a PC game at high settings. (or even hold onto from one's older builds)

I have an i5 4690K, 16GB, GTX-660Ti, SSD system that's basically just a bunch of my older parts tossed together, and it will still play anything I throw at it more or less. (with a few exceptions) I also put together a cheap AMD APU system around a Ryzen 3400G (for CPU and GPU) and it does great for what it's supposed to do (which is allow a fourth player to play Borderlands games in the house at 1080 high settings. The whole system cost around $375 or something. (I already had the storage...)

[McNevin]

Nice PC Ender! I'd like to join you in the AMD club again soon. As of now I'm rocking twinsies with J3RK on an I7-4790K, which is probably my favorite computer I've ever owned. Even with a GTX770 it still plays pretty much anything I attempt to play these days, which isn't much (as you all pretty much have echoed). I do however want to play CP2077 as you all also have expressed, so that is why I'm looking at AMD. I just helped Sherry's brother retrofit an old PC for under $500 , and it destroys mine. 3200A, x570, 512 pcie m.2 NVME!

Oh and Megatron your computer is crazy! That should def play some CP2077!