PC Building Guide and Discussion #12

[God King Fudge]

And that's when people say "this is my endgame...for now" .

Cases are bit of fickle thing, but it was nice being to hide cables behind the tray with my current one, there are only so many ways to design a box IMO.

Very true. I have a really basic case (Rosewill Challenger) from the ultra budget build I started with and while it's been a good case for me, the cable management options aren't great and I'm ready for something a bit nicer. Trying to nail down which one is a bit of a challenge, though. So many options out there.

 

[Dick Sledge]

I say go for the 2600 and gamble. Live life on the edge.

Lol right. That's actually what I'm leaning towards. Microcenter has the 2600x bundle with Asus x470 Prime mobo for $309 and the 2600 with the same mobo for $279.

Save $30 and take my chances.

 

[SniperHF]

Starcraft II mods with lots of units is basically unplayable while it works as intended in normal games, PUBG I run at low settings and still drop in to low 30's or high 20's at times. Quake Champions It's on such low details it's a blur...

Would the GPU upgrade signigicantly improve this? And I've never overclocked a CPU - is it hard?

Probably. A 1080 is quite a massive upgraded on a 950.
I dunno about SCII and what the mods are doing to it so it's hard to say there.

PUBG is a notoriously bad performing game even on good systems. I'm sure your old GTX 950 (A mid-low end card new ) was holding you back there.

It will certainly let you up the graphics settings on Quake Champions.

Overclocking isn't too hard but I'd give it a try as-is with the 1080 first and see how it goes. It should be fine.

Save $30 and take my chances.

The 2600 non-x has been on sale lately in the US, the difference is like $55.

 

[sigma six]

How do you guys feel about modem/router combos?
I thought to replace the one I rented from comcast with a $200 Motorola that drops my network pretty regularly.
It's going back. Looking at a Netgear Nighthawk of a similar spec but IDK. Maybe separate router and modem would be better?

Not too into the network stuff and want speed, but don't need all of the advanced features per se.

 

[Dick Sledge]

Traveled to Microcenter for the first time. Had to go to Ohio.

Picked up the Asus x470 prime and the 2600. Along with 3 case fans.

I'll be honest I wasn't that impressed with the store as a whole. Sure it had components I couldn't compare at retail anywhere else but the build your own pc section was quite small with limited brands.

It reminded me of a Best Buy with a small ass magnolia room in the corner where all the cool stuff is.

*lowered expectations*

 

[SniperHF]

Picked up the Asus x470 prime and the 2600. Along with 3 case fans.

I think the best in-store PC components retailer is Fry's Electronics. But they only have like 15 locations.
But it's the only place I know of you can still go to see a dozen or more cases on display for example.

How do you guys feel about modem/router combos?
I thought to replace the one I rented from comcast with a $200 Motorola that drops my network pretty regularly.
It's going back. Looking at a Netgear Nighthawk of a similar spec but IDK. Maybe separate router and modem would be better?

Not too into the network stuff and want speed, but don't need all of the advanced features per se.

I don't keep up on home network gear, market changes too damn fast.

I do tend to prefer separate modem and routers just because I'd rather be able to upgrade/change the router/wireless piece without the additional cost of the modem. Where as the modem itself will usually last a longer time period.

 

[Dick Sledge]

The closest Fry's to me is well over 300 miles away.

 

[God King Fudge]

Check Google Express if there's a good price on something at Fry's. Just bought an i5 from Fry's through GE and got free overnight shipping.

Speaking of the i5, new Firestrike results.

Graphics score went down for some reason, physics way up. Getting there. Another stick of RAM, new SSD and then it's saving up for the 1080.

 

[SniperHF]

Graphics score went down for some reason, physics way up. Getting there. Another stick of RAM, new SSD and then it's saving up for the 1080.

Nvidia GPUs in particular (though AMDs will do it too to a lesser extent) do not run at consistent clock speeds. They have a performance/load/heat curve that bounces around based on those factors.
If you have a program installed like MSI Afterburner you can see the clock speed of your GPU in the on screen display. If I don't force mine to stay flat, it will bounce around between 1200 and 1266mhz.

 

[mouser]

How do you guys feel about modem/router combos?
I thought to replace the one I rented from comcast with a $200 Motorola that drops my network pretty regularly.
It's going back. Looking at a Netgear Nighthawk of a similar spec but IDK. Maybe separate router and modem would be better?

Not too into the network stuff and want speed, but don't need all of the advanced features per se.

I prefer to keep them separate simply because I've historically found myself upgrading them for different reasons on different schedules.

 

[sigma six]

I prefer to keep them separate simply because I've historically found myself upgrading them for different reasons on different schedules.

Yeah, I decided to go with separate components like I used to.
Pretty useless to lose the network in the middle of games or shows several times per day.

 

[sabresfan129103]

I didn't realize how big of a jump in power the 1070 is to my gtx 780. (like double the performance in some games at 1080p). I know a 2070 is probably overkill for 1080p gaming, but that card should get me through the next 5 years or so. Maybe in 2019 I'll look to upgrade to that.

 

[Commander Clueless]

I didn't realize how big of a jump in power the 1070 is to my gtx 780. (like double the performance in some games at 1080p). I know a 2070 is probably overkill for 1080p gaming, but that card should get me through the next 5 years or so. Maybe in 2019 I'll look to upgrade to that.

The new 2060 might throw a wrench in the price-to-performance range as well, so keep an eye open for that.

 

[Dick Sledge]

I have a rx580 now. I'm probably going to see if there's black friday or cyber monday deals on a 1070 or 1070ti.

Then just sell my 580.

 

[SniperHF]

Intel's supply issues are supposedly going to continue to last a while. More room for AMD to capitalize if they continue to have good releases.

The new 2060 might throw a wrench in the price-to-performance range as well, so keep an eye open for that.

The pricing on the 2080 made it somewhat uncompetitive, I suspect the same thing might happen there.

 

[mouser]

I wonder how soon we'll get the 2060. In the 10 Series is was like a 2 month gap between the 1080 and 1060. However I'd imagine a lot of future 20 series release dates are going to be influenced by the existing 10 series chip inventory. Which I have no guess at how deep it is.

If past performance jumps hold true the 2060 should be close in performance to the 1080.

Edit: adding a little more info, there was a report in June that Nvidia had a glut of inventory after agreeing to take back 300k GPU's from partners. Underestimating pent up gaming demand while overestimating declining crypto mining demand. We might see an abnormally long wind down on the 10 series cards.

 

[Commander Clueless]

The pricing on the 2080 made it somewhat uncompetitive, I suspect the same thing might happen there.

Emphasis on the might. Let me dream.

I'm hoping the rumoured lack of RTX "features" (in quotations because we haven't been able to see them in real action yet) gets rid of the "shiny new" tax that makes the 20 series a bad bang for buck currently, but we'll have to see.

 

[God King Fudge]

So I'm really stumped on this new mobo. It's an ASRock Z370 Pro 4. I downloaded their appstore thing and ran the live BIOS update. I get the prompt to shut down to update the BIOS, but my PC just sits at a black screen. I let it sit there for 30+ minutes and it never did anything. I just powered off and it booted right back to Windows. My PC is on and fans are spinning during the black screen time. My main monitor is showing no signal and my secondary monitor is getting signal, but it's just a black screen.

I tried rebooting directly into UEFI but I get the same results. I was thinking maybe at first it was a monitor issue since the main monitor doesn't show it's getting a signal, but I unnplugged it with just the second monitor plugged in that gets signal and it was just a black screen as well.

Any ideas?

 

[SniperHF]

So I'm really stumped on this new mobo. It's an ASRock Z370 Pro 4. I downloaded their appstore thing and ran the live BIOS update. I get the prompt to shut down to update the BIOS, but my PC just sits at a black screen. I let it sit there for 30+ minutes and it never did anything. I just powered off and it booted right back to Windows. My PC is on and fans are spinning. My main monitor is showing no signal and my secondary monitor is getting signal, but it's just a black screen.

I tried rebooting directly into UEFI but I get the same results. I was thinking maybe at first it was a monitor issue since the main monitor doesn't show it's getting a signal, but I unnplugged it with just the second monitor plugged in that gets signal and it was just a black screen as well.

Any ideas?

Did it ever work ? Meaning did you ever get into Windows before you did the BIOS update?

Also this is why I don't do BIOS updates unless something is broke.

Do you only have no signal when Windows loads? Or can you not see the BIOS setup screen either for example?

Are you using a video card or onboard graphics?

Did you plug your video connections into the motherboard ports by mistake when they should be plugged into the card?

 

[God King Fudge]

Did it ever work ? Meaning did you ever get into Windows before you did the BIOS update?

Also this is why I don't do BIOS updates unless something is broke.

Do you only have no signal when Windows loads? Or can you not see the BIOS setup screen either for example?

Are you using a video card or onboard graphics?

Did you plug your video connections into the motherboard ports by mistake when they should be plugged into the card?

My PC is operating as normal, I just can't get into the UEFI. I guess this isn't really an enormous deal, but I'd like to eventually be able to get in and adjust some settings. It didn't break anything when I had to abort the BIOS update (thankfully). Both of my monitors work just fine when Windows is loaded, but if I use the "Boot to UEFI" option from the ASRock tools, I get the no signal on the main monitor and black screen on my secondary. I can then power off and both monitors will work fine. It seems to be something with actually getting into the UEFI. Now that I think about it, my main monitor doesn't even come on until Windows loads up. I don't see the ASRock splash at all when I reboot.

 

[SniperHF]

but if I use the "Boot to UEFI" option from the ASRock tools, I get the no signal on the main monitor and black screen on my secondary.

Have you tried getting into the UEFI via Windows?

I think it's Shift + shutdown in Windows 10 then you go through the menus.

 

[guinness]

My PC is operating as normal, I just can't get into the UEFI. I guess this isn't really an enormous deal, but I'd like to eventually be able to get in and adjust some settings. It didn't break anything when I had to abort the BIOS update (thankfully). Both of my monitors work just fine when Windows is loaded, but if I use the "Boot to UEFI" option from the ASRock tools, I get the no signal on the main monitor and black screen on my secondary. I can then power off and both monitors will work fine. It seems to be something with actually getting into the UEFI. Now that I think about it, my main monitor doesn't even come on until Windows loads up. I don't see the ASRock splash at all when I reboot.

Does the board have video connectors? Maybe for some odd reason, it's defaulting to those, and not the video card, prior to booting Windows.

But if you can't get into the BIOS to check...

 

[God King Fudge]

So I did some digging this morning and I actually found that this seems to be a common (in the sense I found quite a few people having similar issues) problem with getting into BIOS using external graphics cards and HD connectors.

I've noticed that I don't see anything on the monitor (either my main monitor connected by DP or my secondary connected using HDMI) until Windows is actually loading up. I don't even see the ASRock splash. So when I started searching more around just not being able to display the bios as opposed to it not working, I was able to find quite a few issues similar to mine.

Gonna try to connect one with a VGA cable tonight directly to the on board and see if that works. Plugging the HDMI directly to the on board last night did not work, so hopefully that will get it going.

 

[Dick Sledge]

So I just finished my build switching from Intel to Ryzen. It post on the first attempt, rgb lit up everything. In the bios I selected my SSD to boot Windows and it booted in right away. With my desktop exactly as I left it and everything I have to automatically load in loaded in.

Didn't ask for another Windows key (as of yet)

Seems like an extremely smooth transition. Aside from some pain in the ass cable management.

 

[SeidoN]

Didn't ask for another Windows key (as of yet)

LTT did a video on this. it took them quite alot of hardware changes to trigger a windows authenticity check