General PC Help Thread 2

[Xeno]

I am waiting to upgrade my GPU next year, with luck there will be some announcements of a new RTX sometime in May.

[Zilnad]

Thanks for the input so far, guys. I'll go back to the website this afternoon and alter the build a little. The closer it gets to £1000 the more tempted I'll be to go for it. I'm glad I wasn't wrong about the price on that GPU, that's a relief to know I can pretty quickly knock off a hundred.

[Jenuall]

Yeah plus you'll be saving cash whilst getting a better GPU, it's a win win!

I imagine there will be new RTX cards at some point next year but I figured now was a decent time to jump to the 2070 for me. My 970 has done brilliantly but is definitely starting to show its age so this should be a nice bump. Plus I'm still only playing at 1080p and that isn't likely to change for a while yet so the 2070 Super should be able to breeze through stuff at that resolution for the foreseeable future!

[Zilnad]

Yeah I'm thinking that I might stay with 1080p for now as well. If only to keep costs down. And you never know, one day I might actually be able to save enough to play Half Life Alyx!

Current draft (after changing HDD, SSD and GPU)

£187.98 CPU - Intel Core i5-9600K 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor
£24.99 CPU Cooler - Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler
£189.56 Motherboard - Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
£58.00 Memory - Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory
£89.98 SSD - Intel 660p Series 1.02 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive
£50.97 HDD -Western Digital Blue 2 TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
£485.06 GPU - EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER 8 GB BLACK GAMING Video Card
£50.95 Case - Phanteks P300 ATX Mid Tower Case
£88.98 Power Supply - Corsair RMx (2018) 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

£1226.47

Got a few compatibility notes though but these are pretty Greek to me.

Note:The Gigabyte Z390 AORUS PRO WIFI ATX LGA1151 Motherboard has an additional 4-pin ATX power connector but the Corsair RMx (2018) 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply does not. This connector is used to supply additional 12V current to the motherboard. While the system will likely still run without it, higher current demands such as extreme overclocking or large video card current draws may require it.
Note:The motherboard M.2 slot #1 shares bandwidth with a SATA 6.0 Gb/s port. When the M.2 slot is populated, one SATA 6.0 Gb/s port is disabled.
Note:Some physical dimension restrictions cannot (yet) be automatically checked, such as cpu cooler / RAM clearance with modules using tall heat spreaders.

It would be really nice if I could get a new machine in time for Cyberpunk but I've got time to ensure I'm making the right decisions on parts. It's such a big investment, I don't want to go wrong.

[Meep]

Meh, it's just an extra 4 pin on the mobo to aid with overclocking. I probably wouldn't even bother using it but I suppose its nice to have.

I would question buying such a high end motherboard. You are spending more on it than you are the actual CPU. If you want performance than spend as much as you can reasonably afford for CPU and then get a half-decent compatible motherboard as its very unlikely the motherboard will be the limiting factor unless its total garbage.

[Zilnad]

Thank you, these are the things I need to know. It's all making me feel very stupid but I'm glad to have such great help from you all and I hope I'm not being a pain.

I'll look at alternative motherboards later as I don't think I want to go higher than £200 on the CPU. Just wondering what the difference between i5 and i7 is?

[Xeno]

For £4 more you can get a Corsair RM (2019) 850 W 80+ Gold on amazon right now which won't have the same issue with the 4pin as well as being fully modular.

There are features you get in more expensive boards like built in wifi and USV 3.1 gen 2 Type C. I would recommend looking at some of the Asrock boards.

i5 has less cores than the i7, neither have hyper-threading, that is reserved for the i9. you will also notice slightly lower clock speeds.

[Jenuall]

It's kind of an awkward time to be sizing up CPUs. The generation of consoles we've just had have been very weak from a CPU perspective which means very few games are really pushing on that front and so a decent i5 has been enough to see people through the last 5ish years. There's a suggestion that the next consoles are going to push harder on CPU which means a future proof PC may need to look at something with more cores/threads in order to remain "competitive"

[Xeno]

A good portion of games are single core bound even now, that is changing but not fast enough to be worried about cpu bottlenecking.

https://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/Z390%20 ... /index.asp seems to have a lot including 2.5Gb LAN, nothing you have will use that but it's there if you do have a router that is capable. Around £130

[Xeno]

Oh and if you want to save a tenner, intel released a KF chip of their main 9 series cpu (9600KF, 9700KF ect) which have no onboard graphics capability. You are still overclock the cpu if you wish.

[Jenuall]

Looking at doing a fresh build in the new year, what are the current recommended bang for buck CPUs? I know the i5 9600k and Ryzen 5 3600x seem to be pretty popular options.

Very tempted to bite the bullet and push for something a bit higher this time round, maybe the i7 9700k or Ryzen 7 3700x. I went with the i5 4690k in my last build back in 2014 and whilst it has served me very well overall I was a bit frustrated when the CPU became something of a bottleneck for achieving a consistent 60fps in several have after only a couple of years.

[Jam-Master Jay]

Looking at doing a fresh build in the new year, what are the current recommended bang for buck CPUs? I know the i5 9600k and Ryzen 5 3600x seem to be pretty popular options.

Very tempted to bite the bullet and push for something a bit higher this time round, maybe the i7 9700k or Ryzen 7 3700x. I went with the i5 4690k in my last build back in 2014 and whilst it has served me very well overall I was a bit frustrated when the CPU became something of a bottleneck for achieving a consistent 60fps in several have after only a couple of years.

I went from a 4670k to 3900x as I was lucky with my preorder (I know ) not being price-gouged but the constant delays due to no stock was terrible. Still, I got some decent components at okay prices thanks to Black Friday.

Hard to beat Zen 2 as a bang-for-buck CPU right now. It must be stated that despite being compatible with previous generation AM4 motherboards there are still a lot of BIOS issues about which have prevented many builds from even booting. The flagship X570 boards seem to fare better but they're more expensive than previous generation flagships were at which point the savings on CPU may have been negated. B550 boards should be coming soon though so hopefully they'll be a good option.

I suppose the thing with PC hardware is there's always something better on the horizon. We should have new RTX3000 series cards by summer which I'll be interested in as I'm still using my 1070 and AMD and Intel should have new desktop CPUs out towards the end of next year.

[Xeno]

I would keep an eye on CES coverage to see what is coming soon (7th to 10th Jan). It may be a very interesting event.

[Jenuall]

3900x looks like a beast of a CPU, need to look at the cost of other components but that will probably be a bit outside of my price range.

Most likely looking at either the 3600x or 3700x realistically, it's whether the 7 is with the £100 odd extra for what looks like only a 10-15% increase in performance.

I was reading about the potential bios issues with the B450 boards which is a bit annoying, do the X570 ones offer many benefits that justify their extra cost?

EDIT: Good shout regarding CES Xeno, I'll definitely be keeping an eye on that. Likelihood is that I'll be looking at buying parts in Feb/March so I can't imagine anything new will be out before then but if there's something significant on the horizon then I may adjust my schedule!

[Winckle]

I have a B450 motherboard, and I was fine. You have to do a BIOS upgrade, but it sounds far scarier than the reality of just "putting a USB stick in the rear USB slot with the little switch and red highlighting, then press the switch and wait for it power up, upgrade, then reboot."

[Jenuall]

From what I read you needed a compatible 1000 or 2000 series CPU in order to do the upgrade though? As I've not got one of those I was wary.

[Winckle]

Nope, many motherboards can do upgrades to it without a CPU. Look for motherboards with a "flash BIOS" button on them. I have the b450 gaming plus model.

Here's the relevant bit from the manual:

BIOS Setup
Updating BIOS with Flash BIOS Button

Before updating:
Please download the latest BIOS file that matches your motherboard model from MSI®website and rename the BIOS file to MSI.ROM. And then, save the MSI.ROM file to the root of USB flash drive. Important
Only the FAT32 format USB flash drive supports updating BIOS by Flash BIOS Button.

1.Connect power supply to CPU_PWR1 and ATX_PWR1. (No other components are necessary but power supply.)
2.Plug the USB flash drive that contains the MSI.ROM file into the Flash BIOS Port on rear I/O panel.
3.Press the Flash BIOS Button to flash BIOS, and the LED next to the button starts flashing.
4.After the flashing BIOS process is 100% completed, the LED would be off simultaneously.

[Jenuall]

Coolio, good to know.

[KjGarly]

My PC's old Motherboard is an M-ATX spec (Micro I'm assuming) so going by these pics I should have enough space for a standard ATX board shouldn't I? Once I know that I'll purchase one (Needs to be compatible with my I7 7700)





Current MB is an MSI H110M-PRO-VH

[Jenuall]

State of that cable management.

What case have you got? You should just be able to google the specs for the case and it will tell you what motherboard sizes it supports. It certainly looks big enough for a standard ATX but it will depend on things like the mounting points etc.