PC Building Guide and Discussion #11 (everything is expensive...)

[SeidoN]

AMazon UK has a RX580 for £240 preorder but no indication of when it ships

 

[Commander Clueless]

LOL all the less than 5 egg reviews on that card are from miners

I particularly enjoyed the guy who said it's great for mining and that he bought 40 of them, but seemed puzzled as to why the prices had gone up.

Sapphire is the best partner manufacturer in the business IMO.

Yep. I typically find Sapphire the best for AMD and EVGA the best for NVIDIA, although EVGA did have that big snafu recently with the ACX coolers...

Really not a fan of their look for the 580s, but that's a minor complaint. Heck I don't like XFX's look this go around either, and they usually have some snazzy ones.

 

[542365]

How difficult is replacing a CPU? After helping my friend build his PC I'm a bit antsy to upgrade mine a bit and that's the obvious starting point for my build. Installing the CPU was simple, but replacing it seems like a different ballgame.

 

[KingBran]

How difficult is replacing a CPU? After helping my friend build his PC I'm a bit antsy to upgrade mine a bit and that's the obvious starting point for my build. Installing the CPU was simple, but replacing it seems like a different ballgame.

Really depends on your MoBo and how much crap you have installed that is in front of it / would be in your way for your hands to get in there.

My old MoBo / case I had to remove my gfx card and one dim and the PSU to make enough room to get to it. I had a really goofy (but awesome) shaped heat-sink that was real awkward to work with so that didn't help.

It can be a pain in the butt (read: time consuming) but it's not a difficult task.

 

[Commander Clueless]

How difficult is replacing a CPU? After helping my friend build his PC I'm a bit antsy to upgrade mine a bit and that's the obvious starting point for my build. Installing the CPU was simple, but replacing it seems like a different ballgame.

It's not too terribly difficult.

If you wish to re-use the cooler, you'll need to clean it with isopropanol and re-apply your own thermal paste. A quick YouTube tutorial will show you how. Spoiler alert: there's a lot of squabbling over the proper "method" out there....


If you get a new CPU and cooler and you aren't re-using your old CPU or cooler, it's pretty much just a remove and replace.


The hardest part is picking one out that works with your motherboard.

 

[Kestrel]

I particularly enjoyed the guy who said it's great for mining and that he bought 40 of them, but seemed puzzled as to why the prices had gone up.

Yep. I typically find Sapphire the best for AMD and EVGA the best for NVIDIA, although EVGA did have that big snafu recently with the ACX coolers...

Really not a fan of their look for the 580s, but that's a minor complaint. Heck I don't like XFX's look this go around either, and they usually have some snazzy ones.

I'm tempted to grab a nice GPU if/when prices drop, off the second hand market, although I suppose there's definitely a risk grabbing what's potentially a mining card - but I would think there should be some decent prices at that point.

And yeah, I wasn't a fan of how the Sapphire 580 looks, but like I said, it's going in a windowless wooden case, so I figured it's not worth investing any money in the appearance. Otherwise, I would have been tempted to get a different one for more money.

How difficult is replacing a CPU? After helping my friend build his PC I'm a bit antsy to upgrade mine a bit and that's the obvious starting point for my build. Installing the CPU was simple, but replacing it seems like a different ballgame.

As others have said, it's not hard. My one word of advice is: patience. It may be a hassle if you have to remove a few other components, but never do anything in a rush when you're dealing with your computer, and you should be okay. The other suggestion is this: when you put new thermal paste on the heat sink (assuming you are reusing it), the idea is to put on as little as possible - it's meant to fill in the cracks between the CPU and the heat sink, not be a big pasty layer. That said, if you're not sure how much to put on, in my opinion, a little too much is better than a little too little. I always put on too much and it hasn't killed anything yet

 

[Bocephus86]

Random-ish question for you guys: Is it worth trying to OC my GTX1060 (6 gig)? I've kind of bought/installed everything I want for my PC and am undertaking a cable organization project this weekend so I'm looking for another mini project to undertake after that. I bought a locked CPU so I figured maybe OCing the GPU a bit would be fun to do (never OC'd anything before) but I have no idea if it's really worth it or not; I'm sort of doing it just to do something, which generally isn't a good idea...

This is the card if that matters:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125901

And it's gone up 60 bucks since I got it before last Xmas; crazy. I had been tossing around an idea of replacing it with a 1080 ti but then reality hit; ~700 bucks right now is better spent elsewhere (after sinking a combined 1500ish dollars into everything else barely 8 months ago).

 

[Commander Clueless]

If you wanted to do it for a fun project, maybe, but GPU Boost 3.0 takes most of the fun out of OCing modern NVIDIA cards. It pretty much pushes you to the limits automatically based on temperature.

You could use an aggressive fan profile to stimulate this at the expense of noise perhaps.


Increasing power targets and manually adjusting frequency doesn't tend to gain you much at all from what I've seen. Mind you, I don't really touch my blower style 1080....it gets hot enough as is.

 

[Bocephus86]

If you wanted to do it for a fun project, maybe, but GPU Boost 3.0 takes most of the fun out of OCing modern NVIDIA cards. It pretty much pushes you to the limits automatically based on temperature.

You could use an aggressive fan profile to stimulate this at the expense of noise perhaps.


Increasing power targets and manually adjusting frequency doesn't tend to gain you much at all from what I've seen. Mind you, I don't really touch my blower style 1080....it gets hot enough as is.

Hahah, while there goes that idea I guess - Boost 3.0 is that standard boosting the cards do themselves, right? Or is that an after market program that effectively OC's the card for you?

I'll have to just really commit to this cable project then, been putting it off for too long anyway (I was sloppy when building and now every time I look at it I'm too annoyed to start). After that I think I'll switch my old PC over to Linux and see how that is; it's just collecting dust in my closet right now anyway.

 

[SniperHF]

How difficult is replacing a CPU? After helping my friend build his PC I'm a bit antsy to upgrade mine a bit and that's the obvious starting point for my build. Installing the CPU was simple, but replacing it seems like a different ballgame.

What did you want to upgrade to?

Hahah, while there goes that idea I guess - Boost 3.0 is that standard boosting the cards do themselves, right? Or is that an after market program that effectively OC's the card for you?

Boost is built in. If you want to observe how it works, install something like MSI afterburner and check the core clock speed graph after playing a game. You'll likely see the clock speed flutter all over the damn place. Unless you have a framerate cap/vsync on or playing a game that isn't demanding.


Anyway, there's OCing and there's OCing . Because of boost if you went in and turned the core clock up it probably wouldn't do much like has been said.

But if you increased volts, went more aggressive with the fan curve, and perhaps more importantly put more attention on the memory OC you might get something out of it. Modern cards can be starved for memory bandwidth so a memory OC can sometimes be a big help where in the past it didn't do much.

 

[Commander Clueless]

Hahah, while there goes that idea I guess - Boost 3.0 is that standard boosting the cards do themselves, right? Or is that an after market program that effectively OC's the card for you?

Correct, it's NVIDIA's thing.


As Sniper mentioned, you could play around with the memory clock. That might help a bit.

But I wouldn't expect to see anything more than a few frames out of your work. Most of the "fun" of "OCing" these days is trying to get better temperatures.

 

[542365]

Thanks for the responses guys. Doing a little more research I wanted to upgrade to something like the Ryzen 1600x, but I'm fairly certain my MOBO doesn't support Ryzen, so I'd have to get another MOBO so at that point I'm disassembling my entire rig and spending more than I really want to spend right now. I'll probably look into it after Christmas.

 

[SniperHF]

Thanks for the responses guys. Doing a little more research I wanted to upgrade to something like the Ryzen 1600x, but I'm fairly certain my MOBO doesn't support Ryzen, so I'd have to get another MOBO so at that point I'm disassembling my entire rig and spending more than I really want to spend right now. I'll probably look into it after Christmas.

That's what I was driving at

Yeah you need a motherboard with any CPU upgrade that would be worth getting IMO. Which also means you'd likely need a new CPU cooler as well, though some CPUs include coolers. And a new motherboard means new RAM as your old board is DDR3 where as most new stuff is DDR4.

The 1600x doesn't have a cooler for example. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as aftermarket ones are usually better anyway, just something else you need to factor in.


If you wanna make things interesting though you could try OCing your FX CPU in the meantime

 

[Kestrel]

I'd be tempted just to get the 1600 instead of the 1600x. The included cooler with the 1600 is pretty good, and if you want to play with overclocking anyway, you're losing very little going that direction instead of with the x model.

 

[Bocephus86]

Appreciate the knowledge bombs guys, probably will skip of the OCing for now - but will download the afterburner thing to get an idea about my FPS and whatnot; I havent had a problem yet with any game, and I've been on Ultra for nearly all, but curiosity and all.

My next purchase will be a solid monitor; have 2 decent ones but not really great. I don't play FPS really so I'm not so worried about refresh rates but I'd love a larger screen with more lush colors, immersing you in the environment more (I play RPGs like Witcher/Fallout/Skyrim and then mostly strategy type games ala total war(all), Civ, Sins etc).

 

[Kestrel]

If refresh rates aren't an issue, IPS monitors do very well with colours - they also have a fantastic viewing angle - you may have noticed that some monitors wash out if you're not looking at them from dead center - IPS monitors don't do this, at least not until you reach a ridiculous angle you wouldn't watch from anyway. They tend to be worse for refresh rates though.

 

[Commander Clueless]

IPS monitors are my jam. There are some good TN ones, but I really prefer IPS.

For gaming, make sure you shoot for less than 5ms on response time. Anything higher can cause noticeable ghosting to my eye.

 

[Kestrel]

Yeah, I think TN are fantastic when you're just in need of a respectable monitor on the cheap - as long as you don't get a junky one. I haven't gamed on an IPS... well, I think my TV is IPS, but aside from that, my laptop I'm assuming doesn't have an IPS screen (could be wrong)... but my secondary monitor that I do all my movie watching in my room on... going from a cheapy TN to an IPS made a WORLD of difference!

 

[IamJust0ne]

I'm looking to get my GF a new pc, using it for mostly Sims 4, League, Netflix

I was thinking of building it using really cheap parts, or would I be better off buying something pre-built? Anyone know of any good deals for 'starter' PCs?

 

[SniperHF]

I'm looking to get my GF a new pc, using it for mostly Sims 4, League, Netflix

Unless you just like building stuff I'd get a prebuilt system. Possibly even a laptop.

Any Skylake/Kaby Lake system with an i3 + integrated graphics should do the job.

I like building mini systems for this myself, there are some nice barebones systems out there for just this purpose.

 

[KingBran]

What are y'all's thoughts on NVMe hard drives and USB-C?

I don't mean together, I just mean I think both will eventually become the new standard. My new laptop runs on an NVMe SSD and its less than 4 seconds before I am at my desktop from when I boot. I guess the biggest thing NVMe does is since it's much faster than SATA it's designed to communicate with everything else attached to the MoBo quicker. Which actually is noticeable.

As far as USB-C we have seen it on a few smartphones and it's what the ports are for charging controllers and the console on the Nintendo Switch (Yes, Nintendo did NOT use a proprietary plug to charger their stuff this time ) and we are seeing it on PC's now too. It's fast, smaller and you can plug stuff in any way.

I mean you have a 50/50 shot when plugging in a USB device to a USB port but how many times are you wrong? It feels like 90% of the time I try to plug it in upside down. Ugh.

Anyways, I see NVMe drives becoming the new standard soon along with USB-C.

 

[Kestrel]

NVME's may become the next widespread standard, but I actually wouldn't be surprised to see another standard supersede it before it becomes mainstream. Well, laptops may be a different story - NVME makes it easier to have a snappy SSD drive, AND a good sized traditional storage drive in a laptop, or just simply a laptop with reduced weight and no moving parts. I suspect that for desktops, NVME drives are going to remain a premium part, at least for the immediate foreseeable future.

USB C - it'll take a transition period, but we're definitely making some good headway there. There is definitely some "standards" confusion though, and that may take time to (hopefully) resolve itself. For example - I'm LOVING USB C on my Windows tablet, and the fact that I can charge it with a power bank on the go instead of taking my charger with a barrel connector along and hunting for an outlet, however, my tablet requires Power Delivery over USB C - and the vast majority of power banks - even the ones with USB C - do not do PD over USB C at this time. I'm only aware of two so far, and they're both big bricks, but at ~30,000 mAh, I'm not complaining. I'm looking forward to the day when USB A connectors are just a legacy item, like PS2 ports.

 

[KingBran]

Yeah I think both will take a while to take over. I remember when it was weird to have a PC without a floppy disk drive. My most recent laptop doesn't even have a CD drive and it kind of irks me to think about sometimes. I get all twitchy.

I see desktops getting smaller and smaller too. Unless someone is a gamer there really is no need to have a giant tower.

 

[Kestrel]

Yeah... my server does not have an optical drive - although, if you saw my... "case"... it would be difficult to make an optical drive work anyway. I will likely always have a computer with an optical drive, so long as movies on disc are a thing, so that I can rip them, but outside that, I see very little reason to get one these days. I still remember when the whole disk was "floppy", and not just the interior recorded portion Actually, truth be told, I still remember loading Pharaoh's Curse on the Atari 800 off of a tape drive.

Desktops will definitely keep getting smaller like you say. Us gamers have a reason for larger computers, to a degree, but even then for the most part, I wouldn't bother with a full tower. My parents' next computers, I'm debating whether I'll get them ATX sized cases, or if I'll just get them NUC-style computers, but their current ones are still alive, so no need to plan yet.

Edit: By "get them ATX sized cases", I mean reuse the ATX cases they already have. Another option would be to go ITX - but if I was going that route anyway, the NUC's become more tempting.

 

[Kestrel]

And my sister's Sapphire rx 580 arrived today. It's not nearly as ugly in person as it was on NewEgg's online listing - in fact, it actually looks pretty decent. And for air cooling... wow, it's a really beefy cooling solution! That thing is about as thick, from end to end, as a standard two slot video card can be, and it's all heat sink (plus two fans), with a metal back plate that runs the length of the card's back. I haven't put it through any paces at all, but it is a NICE card!