PC Building Guide and Discussion #13

[Osprey]

Anyone have any recommendations for a 24" gaming monitor? Price point hopefully around $200. I currently have three IPS panels, 5ms, and 60hz so I'm hoping to upgrade one of them. Any suggestions for ones you have or have used would be welcomed. I trust the opinions of people here more than random reviews on Newegg or Amazon.

I bought the Pixio PX247 a couple of months ago and really like it. It's a 24" 1080p 144Hz 1ms IPS panel with FreeSync and Gsync compatibility that was only $169.99 USD on Amazon. I haven't noticed any ghosting or other visual artifacts, so it's lived up to the 1ms response rate. Also, there isn't a single dead pixel anywhere on it. The only thing that's not so hot is the "IPS glow" in the corners. IPS panels already render blacks as looking dark grey, so the glow makes the corners even lighter still. It's really only noticeable, though, when the monitor is switching on/off, if I play strategy games and there's fog of war in the corners or if I play letterboxed movies (i.e. movies so wide that there are black "bars" on the top and bottom). I don't watch movies on it, so I rarely notice it and can easily live with it, especially because everything else is so nice about the monitor and the price was so good. I would buy it again and another Pixio in the future.

Edit: Oh, it looks like the PX247 has already been replaced by the PX248. It looks like it's the same panel, just in a housing with thinner bezels, which is even better for multi-monitor setups like yours.

https://www.amazon.com/Pixio-Radeon-FreeSync-Esports-Monitor/dp/B08GYFQD6L

 

[aleshemsky83]

I don't know if they have it in the states but I can vouch for the acer xv240y. It normally $250 us but is often on sale, was recently on sale for $200 ($180 US), and has decent features. G-SYNC and freesync compatiblity, a nice sharpening mode for gaming, 165 Hz, gets pretty bright.

The panel is pretty much identical to all the 1080p IPS panels from acer, so if you've seen one you know what you'll be getting from this one. Theres not really backlight bleed on it during normal gameplay on the brightest setting but id need to do a test on it.

edit: I underestimated the exchange rate, its a $200 monitor in the US, I also forgot to mention it has HDR, but Ive used the HDR and its pretty much identical to SDR, its not a real feature.

edit 2: oh, one final thing I noticed about this monitor. Turning on G-Sync seems to force the overdrive setting to extreme (can't be changed), which causes some ghosting on the ufo test. So its probably not the best monitor if you want really good g-sync.

 

[PK Cronin]

I bought the Pixio PX247 a couple of months ago and really like it. It's a 24" 1080p 144Hz 1ms IPS panel with FreeSync and Gsync compatibility that was only $169.99 USD on Amazon. I haven't noticed any ghosting or other visual artifacts, so it's lived up to the 1ms response rate. Also, there isn't a single dead pixel anywhere on it. The only thing that's not so hot is the "IPS glow" in the corners. IPS panels already render blacks as looking dark grey, so the glow makes the corners even lighter still. It's really only noticeable, though, when the monitor is switching on/off, if I play strategy games and there's fog of war in the corners or if I play letterboxed movies (i.e. movies so wide that there are black "bars" on the top and bottom). I don't watch movies on it, so I rarely notice it and can easily live with it, especially because everything else is so nice about the monitor and the price was so good. I would buy it again and another Pixio in the future.

Edit: Oh, it looks like the PX247 has already been replaced by the PX248. It looks like it's the same panel, just in a housing with thinner bezels, which is even better for multi-monitor setups like yours.

https://www.amazon.com/Pixio-Radeon-FreeSync-Esports-Monitor/dp/B08GYFQD6L

The price and the review looks good but I've never heard of Pixio so I passed on this one. Definitely something I'll keep an eye on moving forward though, so thank you for your insight.

I don't know if they have it in the states but I can vouch for the acer xv240y. It normally $250 us but is often on sale, was recently on sale for $200 ($180 US), and has decent features. G-SYNC and freesync compatiblity, a nice sharpening mode for gaming, 165 Hz, gets pretty bright.

The panel is pretty much identical to all the 1080p IPS panels from acer, so if you've seen one you know what you'll be getting from this one. Theres not really backlight bleed on it during normal gameplay on the brightest setting but id need to do a test on it.

edit: I underestimated the exchange rate, its a $200 monitor in the US, I also forgot to mention it has HDR, but Ive used the HDR and its pretty much identical to SDR, its not a real feature.

edit 2: oh, one final thing I noticed about this monitor. Turning on G-Sync seems to force the overdrive setting to extreme (can't be changed), which causes some ghosting on the ufo test. So its probably not the best monitor if you want really good g-sync.

I ended up going with this one from that series because of your recommendation and also because it was on my list of ones to potentially buy. Thank you!

 

[Osprey]

The price and the review looks good but I've never heard of Pixio so I passed on this one. Definitely something I'll keep an eye on moving forward though, so thank you for your insight.



I ended up going with this one from that series because of your recommendation and also because it was on my list of ones to potentially buy. Thank you!

I don't blame you because... 1) I was hesitant to buy an unknown brand, as well, and read and watched a lot of reviews first, and 2) I most likely would've bought that Acer, myself, if it had been that price and available a couple of months ago. The Summer wasn't a great time to buy a monitor because lots of monitors were out of stock or marked up, but I had no choice because that's when my previous monitor (an Acer, in fact) died after 10 years of service.

 

[mouser]

So it sounds like the bearing are starting to go bad in my old Corsair H50 hydro cooler. This is an old PC, though it's still doing quite fine, first gen Core i7 950.

The obvious replacement looks like a Corsair H60. Hydro Series™ H60 (2018) 120mm Liquid CPU Cooler

Some of the websites like Amazon don't mention support for the old LGA 1366 socket, but the specs on Corsair's website seem to say it's compatible.

 

[aleshemsky83]

The price and the review looks good but I've never heard of Pixio so I passed on this one. Definitely something I'll keep an eye on moving forward though, so thank you for your insight.



I ended up going with this one from that series because of your recommendation and also because it was on my list of ones to potentially buy. Thank you!

Yeah this is the one I own. It's got an incredibly good stand.

 

[PK Cronin]

Yeah this is the one I own. It's got an incredibly good stand.

I already have a stand for all three monitors so I'm not going to be using it.

 

[aleshemsky83]

So if this is legit, the 5600X is 30% better single threaded than the 3600X, thats a pretty significant upgrage

 

[Osprey]

Here's an article that I read earlier today that, I think, is about the same thing:

AMD's $299 5600X Spotted Flying Past All Intel CPUs in Single-Threaded Performance | Tom's Hardware

The score could be inflated, as the tweet mentions, but there are also these single-core Cinebench results, which appear to corroborate that even AMD's slowest Zen 3 processor may be faster than Intel's fastest processor.

Cinebench R20 (Single-Core) CPU benchmark list

 

[Osprey]

I also read this article about the Radeon 6800 XT:

AMD Radeon RX 6800XT alleged 3DMark scores hit the web - VideoCardz.com

Allegedly, in 3DMark's Extreme 4K tests, the 6800 XT is 18% faster than the RTX 3080 in one test and 3% faster in another, but 20% slower in the one raytracing test. What's most interesting about that is that that's the 6800 XT, not the flagship 6900 XT. If these results are true and translate to the real world, which are both big "if"s, RDNA2 may go toe to toe with and even beat Ampere with raytracing off while falling behind with raytracing on. If so, that wouldn't be too much of a surprise, since this generation saw AMD focus on overall performance just to catch up and Nvidia focus on raytracing performance.

 

[Gonzothe7thDman]

I also read this article about the Radeon 6800 XT:

AMD Radeon RX 6800XT alleged 3DMark scores hit the web - VideoCardz.com

Allegedly, in 3DMark's Extreme 4K tests, the 6800 XT is 18% faster than the RTX 3080 in one test and 3% faster in another, but 20% slower in the one raytracing test. What's most interesting about that is that that's the 6800 XT, not the flagship 6900 XT. If these results are true and translate to the real world, which are both big "if"s, RDNA2 may go toe to toe with and even beat Ampere with raytracing off while falling behind with raytracing on. If so, that wouldn't be too much of a surprise, since this generation saw AMD focus on overall performance just to catch up and Nvidia focus on improving raytracing performance.

I happened to snag an EVGA 3080 XC3 Ultra but I have been hoping that AMD can compete this time around.

I would go full AMD in my PC if that's the case.

 

[Dick Sledge]

Just got to order an EVGA 3080 after being on there notification system. Coming next tuesday!

Edit: their*. I was too excited

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

Just got to order an EVGA 3080 after being on there notification system. Coming next tuesday!

f***ing lucky. I haven't gotten shit yet. When did you put in the notification?

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

AMD conference for RX 6000 cards at noon Eastern today.

 

[Dick Sledge]

f***ing lucky. I haven't gotten shit yet. When did you put in the notification?

So about a week ago I finally logged on to check the status of all the cards for the dates I put notifications in for.

I did it for 4 out of the 5 cards. They all were 10/6 except randomly the xc3 ultra was 9/16. The day before release. That’s the card I got. So I suspect they’re still way behind.

 

[Commander Clueless]

I'm very interested in the Founders Edition of the 3070, although I know I'll never get my hands on one....

 

[Dick Sledge]

Have faith Trust the process You can do it too!

 

[Knave]

I know some won't be a fan but I do like they talk about automatically enabling boosts if you pair the GPU with Ryzen and a 500 series board. I don't know enough about overclocking to do too much messing around. The most I've done is increase RAM speeds and change timings to try and make my current Ryzen processor run better.

I might look into how feasible a dual graphics card setup is (6900XT for gaming, 3090 for video enhance software I use that requires CUDA and Nvidia for now).

 

[Osprey]

Radeon RX 6800 (16GB), $579, avail. Nov 18th
Radeon RX 6800 XT (16GB), $649, avail. Nov 18th
Radeon RX 6900 XT (16GB), $999, avail. Dec 8th

According to AMD, the 6800 XT trades blows with the 3080 and the 6800 trades blows with the 2080 Ti. That makes the 6800 XT good value, but I'm not sure about the 6800, since the 3070 is supposed to be roughly equivalent to the 2080 Ti and will be $80 cheaper.

Though it's good to see AMD competing at the higher end, I'm a little disappointed that a 6700 series wasn't announced to compete in the mid-range (<$500) space. I was hoping to upgrade to AMD's entry Zen 3 and RDNA2 models next month, but it looks like that won't be happening until early 2021 now. It's not that I can't afford a $600 GPU, but that I refuse to pay that much, especially since I'm in no hurry to game at 4K.

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

AMD really hit it out of the park though. Actually went at Nvidia and that's great.

 

[Commander Clueless]

AMD dropping bombs!

I wasn't expecting something that could even come close to the 3090. That's impressive.

They definitely came to play!

I normally expect Radeon rumours to be overhyped, but somehow they actually outdid them this time.

I also hope they release a 6600XT/6700XT at some point with similar price-to-performance jumps. It would definitely give me something to think about....

 

[SolidSnakeUS]

I'm betting the 6700 will be the 2080 Ti performance and probably $450.

 

[Dick Sledge]

That seems like a really good presentation. I’ll have to watch it when I get home from work.

No matter I still would have went with Nvidia because my monitor is gsync and I’m excited to finally use dlss.

 

[Osprey]

I'm betting the 6700 will be the 2080 Ti performance and probably $450.

I'm a little confused because they compared the 6800 to the 2080 Ti. If the 6800 is comparable to the 2080 Ti, and so is the 3070, except that the 3070 has much improved ray tracing performance, then the 6800 is at least $100 overpriced. It seems like the 6800 should cost $450. I suspect that AMD may drop the price between now and release day, similar to what they did last year with the 5000 series, with the amount of drop determined by how it performs against the 3070 once it goes on sale tomorrow. Perhaps that's also partly why they didn't reveal a 6700 XT today, since that might've boxed them in, price-wise, and left the 6800 in no man's land.

 

[Commander Clueless]

I'm a little confused because they compared the 6800 to the 2080 Ti. If the 6800 is comparable to the 2080 Ti, and so is the 3070, except that the 3070 has much improved ray tracing performance, then the 6800 is well over $100 overpriced. It seems like the 6800 should cost $450. I suspect that AMD may drop the price between now and launch, similar to what they did last year with the 5000 series, the amount determined by how it performs against the 3070 once it goes on sale tomorrow. Perhaps that's also partly why they didn't reveal a 6700 XT, since that might've boxed them in, price-wise, and left the 6800 in no man's land.

The 6800 is a little oddly positioned, but according to AMD's chart (grain of salt of course) it seems to beat the 2080 Ti while having 16GB of VRAM (double the 8GB of the 3070)....so there is that.

Likely not ideal, but probably the result of binning chips that couldn't quite hit 6900XT/6800XT levels. Wouldn't be surprised to see a price drop on 6800 non-XTs fairly shortly though.