PC Building Guide and Discussion #12

[Commander Clueless]

That Acer would be a good pick.

Another option: Dell 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop - Platinum Silver (AMD Ryzen 5 2500U/1TB HDD/8GB RAM/Windows 10) - Bilingual

Not quite as sleek as the Acer, but it does come with a full 1080p display, which is nice.

 

[Dick Sledge]

My mom is starting her own business and I've decided to build her a decent pc as a Christmas gift or early gift.

She doesn't have anything right now so it could be for personal and business. I might do a ryzen system with a 2200g.

 

[Mrb1p]

That Acer would be a good pick.

Another option: Dell 15.6" Touchscreen Laptop - Platinum Silver (AMD Ryzen 5 2500U/1TB HDD/8GB RAM/Windows 10) - Bilingual

Not quite as sleek as the Acer, but it does come with a full 1080p display, which is nice.

How would the integrated graphics compare to a card like the Vega on the other one to run low end games smoothly?

 

[Commander Clueless]

How would the integrated graphics compare to a card like the Vega on the other one to run low end games smoothly?

They are both the same APU (Ryzen 5 2500U) meaning they use the same integrated Vega 8 graphics.


This isn't the same laptop (HP Envy), but it should give you a decent idea of what to expect:

Ryzen Mobile Finally Arrives: AMD Ryzen 5 2500U Review (Graph about halfway down the page)


You will see better frames-per-second performance on the Acer because it uses the 1366x768 resolution instead of 1920x1080, but of course at the sacrifice of a lower resolution.

 

[Mrb1p]

They are both the same APU (Ryzen 5 2500U) meaning they use the same integrated Vega 8 graphics.


This isn't the same laptop (HP Envy), but it should give you a decent idea of what to expect:

Ryzen Mobile Finally Arrives: AMD Ryzen 5 2500U Review (Graph about halfway down the page)

Oh alright. I like that. Thats pretty good.

 

[SniperHF]

Looking through my drives, I'm stunned my main storage drive is still working. It's just a generic Seagate 1TB but it has been used daily since 2012.
Before that I had the worst luck with drives. Haven't had one last this long since IDE drives.

 

[Kestrel]

Looking through my drives, I'm stunned my main storage drive is still working. It's just a generic Seagate 1TB but it has been used daily since 2012.
Before that I had the worst luck with drives. Haven't had one last this long since IDE drives.

I think I've only ever had one hard drive "fail" - and by fail, I just mean it has bad sectors. I wouldn't trust anything to the drive, but it's actually the main drive in my cousin's r7 2700 build until he has money for an SSD. It started life as the main drive in my Q8200 system back in the day.

Edit: I have had 2 SSD drives that I was responsible for maintaining fail - but they were both from the early days of SSD, with one being a 64, and the other being a 32 GB drive.

 

[guinness]

I've had a HD fail once in ~20 years of PC ownership (~5 PCs, 3 laptops, a netbook, currently on Mac #3).
Part of me trusts SSDs more, IIRC, they can withstand a few million read/writes and wear leveling, whereas HDs are pretty robust, they do have moving parts.

I am excited for the future of SSDs, not only do they make old boxes feel new again, they are getting cheaper and faster, even the low-end SATA ones. Just put a Crucial MX300 (their old model) in an old MBP, and it's getting about 500 MB/s read write, it soundly beats the 2 year old SSD in my current Win10 laptop...which means I'll need to upgrade too, since I need more space anyway.

 

[Bocephus86]

I've only had 1 HD fail through all sorts of computers through the years, but I wouldn't say I am a heavy drive user on any machine (internet browsing, gaming or work/school: not a big media guy).

The drive on my work PC failed about 3 or 4 months ago, was a PITA. It was a hybrid that came with the machine (Acer; I think the drive was Toshiba? I can't remember) & about 30 months old at the time. I have a large work dropbox synced to it my PC (8 people), I assume that constant stress beat the crap out of it. I was also not great at shutting it down periodically.

Replaced it with a 500 gig SSD & now back up everything, often.

 

[Commander Clueless]

Back when I was working in a computer shop, we would get drives failing the tests all the time. Personally, I don't think I've ever had one fail on me...although I don't think I use mine as heavily as others.

I don't know if that was an indicator of the average, or just an indicator of the quality of drives we used to sell.

Mind you, this was 10 years ago....I feel old now.

 

[waffledave]

Hi guys, would appreciate a bit of advice here.

I built a PC in 2013 and it is still holding up pretty well. I've only ever changed the HD to be an SSD but besides that, I haven't had to upgrade anything.

Here is the benchmark result: Asrock Z77 Extreme4 Performance Results - UserBenchmark

I have never really had any issues running anything to be honest, though I know at least the GPU is getting a little dated.

I mostly use the PC for gaming (though I tend to gravitate towards indie games so the hardware needs are not huge). I am also a software developer, and while I primarily use a different device for work I have been planning some personal projects and intend to build some Unity games. I have done this before with my PC without any real issues.

I am moving to a new place, a lot bigger than where I'm coming from. We were living in a loft-style apartment so I could just sit on my PC and my wife could watch TV and we were still kind of "together" and could still chat and stuff. But in the new place, my office (I work from home often) will be on a different floor from the main living area, so I won't be able to sit at my PC while still chatting with my wife like before.

I also want to take advantage of the new space and get a bigger monitor, a curved ultrawide or something like that. I'm just not sure if my GPU can handle that, I don't really have that much hardware experience. I currently run dual monitors without issue. I could upgrade the GPU but I'm so far gone from my PC building days and I don't know what my motherboard can really handle.

So I am considering a few options and would like your advice...

1) Try and upgrade current machine
2) Buy/build a new machine
Or... 3) Buy a decent gaming laptop along with an EGPU so that I can take it with me outside the office so I can spend time with my wife, and then dock it to the EGPU box and kind of have that "desktop experience" when I want to work/play by myself.

What do you guys think? Budget is pretty flexible.

 

[Kestrel]

Hi guys, would appreciate a bit of advice here.

I built a PC in 2013 and it is still holding up pretty well. I've only ever changed the HD to be an SSD but besides that, I haven't had to upgrade anything.

Here is the benchmark result: Asrock Z77 Extreme4 Performance Results - UserBenchmark

I have never really had any issues running anything to be honest, though I know at least the GPU is getting a little dated.

I mostly use the PC for gaming (though I tend to gravitate towards indie games so the hardware needs are not huge). I am also a software developer, and while I primarily use a different device for work I have been planning some personal projects and intend to build some Unity games. I have done this before with my PC without any real issues.

I am moving to a new place, a lot bigger than where I'm coming from. We were living in a loft-style apartment so I could just sit on my PC and my wife could watch TV and we were still kind of "together" and could still chat and stuff. But in the new place, my office (I work from home often) will be on a different floor from the main living area, so I won't be able to sit at my PC while still chatting with my wife like before.

I also want to take advantage of the new space and get a bigger monitor, a curved ultrawide or something like that. I'm just not sure if my GPU can handle that, I don't really have that much hardware experience. I currently run dual monitors without issue. I could upgrade the GPU but I'm so far gone from my PC building days and I don't know what my motherboard can really handle.

So I am considering a few options and would like your advice...

1) Try and upgrade current machine
2) Buy/build a new machine
Or... 3) Buy a decent gaming laptop along with an EGPU so that I can take it with me outside the office so I can spend time with my wife, and then dock it to the EGPU box and kind of have that "desktop experience" when I want to work/play by myself.

What do you guys think? Budget is pretty flexible.

32 core Threadripper 2990wx with dual 1080 TIs... sorry, just had to be that guy. I don't really know what your work CPU demands are like - do faster CPUs tend to make the work go better/quicker, and is it thread dependent? ie would a highly multi-threaded CPU be more advantageous to what you do, or is the CPU's speed at one or two cores more important? I've never dealt with software development, so I'm out of my league in answering those questions.

 

[SniperHF]

1) Try and upgrade current machine
2) Buy/build a new machine
Or... 3) Buy a decent gaming laptop along with an EGPU so that I can take it with me outside the office so I can spend time with my wife, and then dock it to the EGPU box and kind of have that "desktop experience" when I want to work/play by myself.

If I read your specs correctly:
i5 3570 (non K, no overclocking)
GTX 660
8GB RAM

Depending on what you're playing, I'd probably get a new video card and add 8GB more RAM and call it a day.
A non-overclocked older i5 is starting to show its age a bit, but is still mostly viable.


For the monitor, so if you have say a 21" 1080p monitor right now, you could get a 24" 1080p monitor and it wouldn't affect your performance if you just want more size.
Going 1440p or 4K would be too taxing on the 660 in current games. It would still work though and it would be fine at the desktop level. Ultrawide is usually either 2560x1080 or 3440 x 1440. 2560x1080 is slightly more demanding than 1080p, 3440x1440 is more demanding than 1440p.


For the laptop, these days you mostly don't need an EGPU for performance reasons. Laptop graphics cards have come a *VERY* long way.
You can get a laptop with a nearly full power GTX 1060 or 1070 in it. Or even a 1080 I suppose

But they can be a tad noisy so you might need to research the best ones to get for that.

If your budget is there you could pretty easily upgrade the desktop and get a viable gaming laptop in lieu of buying one whole new system.

 

[waffledave]

Thanks @Kestrel and @SniperHF

For work I just need a decent processor and 16 GB RAM, that's the most important.

Lots to think about but most likely I'll just end up adding more RAM and changing my video card. I'll see how much time I spend in the office alone and make a judgement call based on that.

 

[Kestrel]

Thanks @Kestrel and @SniperHF

For work I just need a decent processor and 16 GB RAM, that's the most important.

Lots to think about but most likely I'll just end up adding more RAM and changing my video card. I'll see how much time I spend in the office alone and make a judgement call based on that.

Sounds like the smarter way to go. If you end up doing a new computer later, you can always move the video card over to it. The biggest reason to go to a "modern" setup is if you have something that is hungry for extra threads. ie I do a lot of video encoding, so I'm all over a seriously multi-cored CPU - but for something like games, you can save big bucks just upgrading your video card and using what you have for a system. You know your workload best, and if your current CPU does the job well, why blow money?

 

[waffledave]

Sounds like the smarter way to go. If you end up doing a new computer later, you can always move the video card over to it. The biggest reason to go to a "modern" setup is if you have something that is hungry for extra threads. ie I do a lot of video encoding, so I'm all over a seriously multi-cored CPU - but for something like games, you can save big bucks just upgrading your video card and using what you have for a system. You know your workload best, and if your current CPU does the job well, why blow money?

For my actual job it's hard for me to use anything besides my work machine anyway. Some of the projects I work on take 16-20 hours to fully set up, and honestly I'm not even really supposed to have this stuff on a non-company machine anyway for security reasons, since the code and data belongs to some major corporations.

The "work" I'd do on my home PC is mainly making games. Yes there is a fair big of multi-threading there obviously but I am a one man show so I'm not really making anything too major. For now my next project is going to be a multi-player space shooter similar to Subspace/Continuum (though I'm only making it for use in my office). Most of the games I make are 2d or 2.5d and I'm not an artist so I use simple free assets.

 

[Matias Maccete]

@waffledave I had the k version of that same processor up until about 6 months ago, and even over clocked it struggled to hit 60fps @1080p with some games. If you plan on playing anything new or demanding at 60fps you may want to upgrade, but if you don't need 60fps or don't play anything too intensive it's probably still fine.

 

[TheMule93]

Currently I have a gtx1080... Im debating whether to upgrade to Turing or not. I guess we'll see benchmarks pretty soon. Will be interesting if the 2080ti gets released immediately... I think if that's the case id like to think that this will be a pretty short generation in which case I may just wait for the big 7nm node shrink that should come in 2019. Plus id prefer to upgrade to a more refined ray tracing architecture rather than the first iteration of it

 

[SniperHF]

The only reason I'd upgrade from a 1080 right now is if I was trying to do 4k or 1440p high refresh rate.

 

[Commander Clueless]

I too am debating upgrading from the 1080, but we'll see with the benchmarks. I run 100Hz 3440x1440, which the 1080 is great for....but new tech is always tempting.

If the jump from 10 series to 20 series is as big as 10 was from the 900 series, I'll be interested.

On the other hand, sticking with the 1080 and picking up a custom cooler might be in order...

 

[Puck]

I don't know if someone mentioned this already but Intel is planning it's own series of discrete video cards. They might not be high-end gaming at first but with Intel's resources, if anyone can get into that market, I suppose it's them. It might mean lower prices down the road. Maybe.

Intel plans to release its first discrete GPU in 2020

 

[guinness]

First?
Intel740 - Wikipedia

BTW, I need some help with laptop, it's a Dell Inspiron 13 5000, with a i7-7500u, and lately, it will not run without running hot at load (~100 C), throttling, or randomly shutting down. I'm guessing it's either heat or power-related, but I don't know how to diagnose it.

Also, it's shut down while running off battery. Even tried undervolting it, which helps with the throttling, but didn't improve stability. Even restarting and just running FF causing it to shit itself. Repasted it again today with AS 5. I desperately would love to replace it's HSF, but it's a laptop, so...

Ambient temp is roughly 26 C, outside is about 29. For comparison, the MBP that I'm typing on (Core i5-3210M) is running around 80 C, but not crashing left and right.

 

[SniperHF]

Also, it's shut down while running off battery. Even tried undervolting it, which helps with the throttling, but didn't improve stability. Even restarting and just running FF causing it to **** itself. Repasted it again today with AS 5. I desperately would love to replace it's HSF, but it's a laptop, so...

Is the fan working? Maybe it's working but is too slow?

How about without the battery? Adapter in only + battery popped?
I don't think that would explain overheating though.

When you've re-applied thermal compound, maybe the heatsink isn't getting good contact? Something loosens when you reassemble the rest, not tight enough in the first place.

Could possibly be the VRMs overheating causing your crashing not the actual CPU temp. I'd try and identify them on the board and see if they have any cooling at all, possible they don't. Or if they do maybe the heatpads are worn out/dirty.

Just going grab bag here:
Increase memory voltage.

Disable hyper threading.

Run it open with a fan pointed at it and see if that keeps temps down?

Check the event log for WHEA-Logger errors.

Have you tracked what the actual vcore voltage is? With offset voltages I don't trust what the BIOS says until I put it under load in Windows with HWMonitor open and see what the number is.

 

[guinness]

Is the fan working? Maybe it's working but is too slow?

How about without the battery? Adapter in only + battery popped?
I don't think that would explain overheating though.

When you've re-applied thermal compound, maybe the heatsink isn't getting good contact? Something loosens when you reassemble the rest, not tight enough in the first place.

Could possibly be the VRMs overheating causing your crashing not the actual CPU temp. I'd try and identify them on the board and see if they have any cooling at all, possible they don't. Or if they do maybe the heatpads are worn out/dirty.

Just going grab bag here:
Increase memory voltage.

Disable hyper threading.

Run it open with a fan pointed at it and see if that keeps temps down?

Check the event log for WHEA-Logger errors.

Have you tracked what the actual vcore voltage is? With offset voltages I don't trust what the BIOS says until I put it under load in Windows with HWMonitor open and see what the number is.

Fan is near pristine, although IMO, like the heat sink, it's rinky dinky.

Saw some tiny heatsinks for sale on Amazon, although I'll have to check the available space between my mobo and bottom case to see if they'll fit on the VRMs and still have clearence. A voltage offset of about -80 mV seems to give less throttling (using Intel's extreme tuning utility) but also last night, the laptop ran fine for the time I was on it, so it could just been the ambient heat at the worst part of the day.

But my biggest frustration, is that the laptop isn't that old, ~1.5 years, and I didn't have many problems before this year, I got a shutdown playing Sims 3 of all things back in the spring or so, and it's been downhill since then, but maybe also a BIOS update (IIRC, for Spectre/Meltdown) tweaked something. It's almost going to make we want to go back to a 15" laptop (and not a Dell) for my next, as otherwise, they could be trying too hard to make thin and light, at the expensive of poorer cooling. Could also me getting that Dell QC luck, and something HW going on.

 

[Dick Sledge]

Does anyone use rgb fusion through their gigabyte board?

If so, why does it suck? How can I make it not suck and actually work?