PC Building Guide and Discussion #13

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SniperHF

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That's what I have, a Sapphire card. I was just poking around at the plastic next to the logo on top and it didn't exactly feel like a button, but it did give a little, so it might've triggered it.

One of hte reasons I like Sapphire cards is they often do have dual bios. Comes in handy on occasion.


What is the card? A 79xx? R9 290/280 ?
 

Caeldan

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The one thing with my new build is that I can't find a board layout for my video card... So there's a few headers that I have zero idea what they might be used for, since I forgot to look super close before I installed the card.
 

Osprey

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One of hte reasons I like Sapphire cards is they often do have dual bios. Comes in handy on occasion.


What is the card? A 79xx? R9 290/280 ?

R9 270X. I was shy to mention it cuz it's ancient, from 2013 :o. I really need to upgrade, but it's hard to justify it when I have so many older games in my backlog that I still need to play that don't require anything better. I'm perfectly happy playing 5-year-old games. 5 years from now, I might upgrade to an RTX 2080 in order to play all of the 2019 games that people are currently raving about :P.
 
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SniperHF

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R9 270X. I was shy to mention it cuz it's ancient, from 2013

Which is basically a slightly supped up 7870, so more like 2012 :P

Those were good cards. Still run most things due to early DX 12 support.

Half my parts are about that old anyway.
 

Osprey

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Which is basically a slightly supped up 7870, so more like 2012 :P

Those were good cards. Still run most things due to early DX 12 support.

Half my parts are about that old anyway.

Mine are, too. I have the money to upgrade, but I just don't feel compelled to yet. I just played a few hours of Two Point Hospital at 1920x1080 and max detail and it was buttery smooth. Of course, that's not a terribly demanding game, but I tend to prefer less demanding games, anyways. The last demanding game that I just had to play immediately was Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and that brought my card almost to its knees, but I managed. Maybe Cyberpunk 2077 will be the next game like that and will compel me to upgrade. We'll see.
 

SniperHF

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Kingdom Come:

KCD will crush your CPU too if it's not 6 threads or more.

It's the reason I upgraded from a 2500K to a 3770k. (remember a few pages back I said I'm the weirdo who actually upgrades CPUs on the same board :P )
 

Osprey

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KCD will crush your CPU too if it's not 6 threads or more.

It's the reason I upgraded from a 2500K to a 3770k. (remember a few pages back I said I'm the weirdo who actually upgrades CPUs on the same board :P )

You're not the only such weirdo. On my last board, I upgraded from I, think, an Athon 64 x2 to a Phenom II. Later, I upgraded the board to what I'm using now and was able to re-use the Phenom II. A few years ago, I upgraded the Phenom II to an FX 6300. I like that AMD doesn't change the sockets all that often and, even when they do, there's often backward and/or forward compatibility (ex. my old Socket AM3 Phenom II worked in my old AM2+ motherboard with a BIOS update and still worked in my current AM3+ board, which, with its own BIOS update, could accept the FX 6300). In fact, come to think of it, I think that I had a regular Phenom in there, as well. That would mean that I've gone through 4 CPUs on my last 2 motherboards.
 
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Smash88

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Mar 15, 2012
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I recently upgraded to a 4K TV.

My computer has a Ryzen 5 2600 with a Rx 570 GPU. It works flawless for 1080p.

Now I'm thinking of using the 4k tv as a new monitor. Will I need to upgrade my GPU to play in 4K?
 

SolidSnakeUS

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To play well at 4K? Yeah, you'd definitely need to upgrade your GPU. To take full advantage of 4K, you'd probably need a 2080 Super or 2080 Ti to really do some good stuff with it. The other thing to remember is that almost all TVs do not have the low response times that monitors usually have.
 

Smash88

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To play well at 4K? Yeah, you'd definitely need to upgrade your GPU. To take full advantage of 4K, you'd probably need a 2080 Super or 2080 Ti to really do some good stuff with it. The other thing to remember is that almost all TVs do not have the low response times that monitors usually have.

Cool thanks,

So if I did upgrade the GPU, would I also have to upgrade the CPU, or would it be ok?

Edit: Although woah, yeah I won't be spending over 1K on a video card.. LOL
So I guess I'll just stick with the 1080..
 

SniperHF

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Cool thanks,

So if I did upgrade the GPU, would I also have to upgrade the CPU, or would it be ok?

Edit: Although woah, yeah I won't be spending over 1K on a video card.. LOL
So I guess I'll just stick with the 1080..

Your CPU is fine.

IMO you don't need to go all the way up to the 2080+ level if you are okay with not playing at "ultra" settings. More like high.


5700, 2070, can handle 4k 60FPS @ high (as opposed to ultra)
XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC III Ultra Review

It also certainly depends on what you want to play.
 

Osprey

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Feb 18, 2005
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To play well at 4K? Yeah, you'd definitely need to upgrade your GPU. To take full advantage of 4K, you'd probably need a 2080 Super or 2080 Ti to really do some good stuff with it. The other thing to remember is that almost all TVs do not have the low response times that monitors usually have.

It's worth pointing out that most TVs have a "game mode" that disables image processing to improve the response times, but, yeah, but it probably still doesn't get as low as a decent monitor.



Our family's first hard drive was 10MB, I believe. The IBM PC XT included it standard starting in 1983, and that's what my dad and I used in the mid-80s until he got an AT, which boosted the capacity to a whopping 20MB. Even with all of that space, most games still ran from floppies. I remember when my dad finally upgraded to a 100MB drive and apportioned 20MB for me and my games. It felt like I had so much space... until games started coming on 5, 10, 15 floppies and requiring larger hard drive installations.
 
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SniperHF

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Our family's first hard drive was 10MB. The IBM PC XT included it standard starting in 1983, and that's what my dad and I used for most of the 80s. Even with all of that space, most games still ran from floppies. I remember when my dad finally upgraded to a 100MB drive and apportioned 20MB for me and my games. It felt like I had so much space... until games started coming on 5, 10, 15 floppies and requiring hard drive installation and it didn't seem so luxurious any more.

We had a Radioshack Tandy with an 8086 in the early 90's(well used by that point). I'd guess it didn't have a HDD though but I wasn't exactly old enough to know.
Also had an Atari 130XE, no HDD for sure on that one.

But we skipped all the MB sized drives. First one I remember was a 1 GB. Then I had a 4GB drive in an IBM Aptiva. I remember being irritated because I couldn't do the full discless loading install of Fallout so it was time to upgrade :laugh:
 

Osprey

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Feb 18, 2005
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We had a Radioshack Tandy with an 8086 in the early 90's(well used by that point). I'd guess it didn't have a HDD though but I wasn't exactly old enough to know.
Also had an Atari 130XE, no HDD for sure on that one.

Yikes. That would've been about a 10-year-old computer at point. The IBM PC XT that debuted in 1983 was an 8088 and the successor to the 8086.

But we skipped all the MB sized drives. First one I remember was a 1 GB. Then I had a 4GB drive in an IBM Aptiva. I remember being irritated because I couldn't do the full discless loading install of Fallout so it was time to upgrade :laugh:

My friend in high school paid $1000 for one of the earlier 1GB drives. I didn't get one until years later. It was a Micropolis, a hard drive brand that I don't think made it out of the 90s before going bankrupt. It's the first hard drive from the first computer that was all mine, so I've held onto it and still have it stored somewhere.
 

SniperHF

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Yikes. That would've been about a 10-year-old computer at point. The IBM PC XT that debuted in 1983 was an 8088 and the successor to the 8086.

It was pretty common to have older systems in service in those days, before the price drops really started coming in.

The IBM Aptiva was like 3 grand and that's in 90's dollars. It did have a swanky ATI 3d Rage though and came with a special edition of Mechwarrior II.
 

Osprey

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It was pretty common to have older systems in service in those days, before the price drops really started coming in.

It was. In the early 90s, before I got my own computer, I had my dad's 10-year-old Eagle II in my room. That was an 8080 system, so even older than your Tandy, and really only good as a word processor and typing teacher. I used it for that when my dad was on the much newer computer downstairs that I ordinarily gamed on.

A disk-less 8086 would've been really slow and not able to handle newer games in the early 90s. Heck, my dad had a 286 (two generations up from the 8086) until 1991 and I remember that one 1991 game, Wing Commander II, was glacially slow on it. I think that it actually listed the newer 386 as its minimum requirement. Obviously, you weren't playing games like that and were probably mostly using the 8086 as a word processor and much older, simpler games, which it probably did OK with.
 

Kairi Zaide

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Aug 11, 2009
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Alright got my pc yesterday. Everything appears to work fine for now.

Now time to set everything up. Thankfully Teamviewer exists and works well nowadays so I don't have to switch between my two PCs (I only have one keyboard and one mouse) or even use a screen for my new one :laugh:
 

Caeldan

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Decided to take advantage of the free xbox live game pass live for pc thing... Found out that MS is pulling the same crap for game installs that they did recently for their other installers, where you can't actually specify where you want to install things ><
Seriously, why such a backwards step in the PC world?
 

SolidSnakeUS

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Decided to take advantage of the free xbox live game pass live for pc thing... Found out that MS is pulling the same crap for game installs that they did recently for their other installers, where you can't actually specify where you want to install things ><
Seriously, why such a backwards step in the PC world?

Not only that, games have more issues on there than on Steam or other versions. Metro Exodus is a piece of shit on Gamepass for PC compared to the Steam or EGS version.
 

aleshemsky83

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Apr 8, 2008
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Decided to take advantage of the free xbox live game pass live for pc thing... Found out that MS is pulling the same crap for game installs that they did recently for their other installers, where you can't actually specify where you want to install things ><
Seriously, why such a backwards step in the PC world?
You can specify what drive if that's what you mean, as long as you create a program files folder for the drive. But yeah no specific folder.

Not only that, games have more issues on there than on Steam or other versions. Metro Exodus is a piece of **** on Gamepass for PC compared to the Steam or EGS version.

The Xbox app for PC while pretty smooth in snappy, is 99% just a fancy front end for the windows store. When you download a game off gamepass you can actually open the windows store and see that it's in reality downloading through the windows store.
 

SolidSnakeUS

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The Xbox app for PC while pretty smooth in snappy, is 99% just a fancy front end for the windows store. When you download a game off gamepass you can actually open the windows store and see that it's in reality downloading through the windows store.

Basically yeah. I don't trust every piece of software on there to run correctly.
 

Smash88

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Mar 15, 2012
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Your CPU is fine.

IMO you don't need to go all the way up to the 2080+ level if you are okay with not playing at "ultra" settings. More like high.


5700, 2070, can handle 4k 60FPS @ high (as opposed to ultra)
XFX Radeon RX 5700 XT THICC III Ultra Review

It also certainly depends on what you want to play.

Ok cool, yeah I think I'd be fine at high instead of Ultra.

I'll look into the 5700, I'd like to keep the cost below $500 but I can live with paying a bit more than that.
 
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