Time to upgrade the parents PCs...

[Krom]

So lately I've been noticing that my dads second generation i3 has to do a noticeable amount of "thinking about it" before it does something, significantly more than my i7-7700k does at any rate. My dads PC is an i3-2100 with 8 GB of RAM and it has a Samsung 840 EVO SSD, its on the same gigabit internet so I know that isn't what's slowing it down.

I decided the best course of action would be to upgrade MY machine, thus freeing the 7700k for my dads use.
So here's what showed up at the door this week:

That's an i9-9900k, Z390 motherboard, 32GB DDR4 @ 3200 MHz, a 1 TB Samsung 970 Pro SSD and a Seasonic 850w PSU.

Of course now would be a good time to cut the 5.25" optical drive bay out of my case because I will never use it and I've been wanting to get it out of the way for a long time. So after I removed all the hardware from the case I took it down to the basement and carved it away with a Dremel, then used a grinding wheel and sanding block to deburr the edges, result:


Put it all together and its a PC!


(for reference here's a before image of the old PC:)

[woodchip]

So where are all the wires like power to the vid card or wire from the HD to the MB?. Going to have to redo mine some time soon.

[Krom]

So where are all the wires like power to the vid card or wire from the HD to the MB?. Going to have to redo mine some time soon.

That is what all the space behind the motherboard is for. Right now they are just all stuffed back there and not tied down, but I've got some additional work/components to do this weekend so I'll be cleaning that up too.
Edit, it is easier to explain with pictures:

[Tunnelcat]

What did all that cost you?

[Krom]

What did all that cost you?

A little over $2000.

[Tunnelcat]

Ouch. At least you got upgraded. I need a whole new system because my Bloomfield CPU is really starting to show it's age. I could save some money by transferring my GTX 1070 into the new build for the time being. At least until Nvidia works out the overheating issues with some of their newer GTX 2080's.

[Krom]

Skip the 2000 series cards, too expensive for not enough performance boost over the 1000 series. I suspect there will be a 3000 series dropping towards the end of 2019 on a new process node that should actually be far enough ahead on performance to make it worth while.

Upgrading your CPU is a better plan for now, although there is some excitement building around AMD and the upcoming Ryzen 3000 series of CPUs which might be worth waiting for. The Ryzen 2000 series already deliver 95% of the gaming performance of Intels top of the line CPUs for half the price, and if AMD delivers on some of these rumors that could change to delivering 110% of the gaming performance still at half the price.

I saw some benchmarks where a 9900k was limited to 95w which translated to roughly 4.3 GHz and it was practically a dead heat with a Ryzen 2700x which was running around 4.1 GHz (admittedly at like 130w), clock for clock they are right on top of each other.

[Tunnelcat]

Good to know about the Ryzen. Yeah, I'm going to skip the 2000 series of Nvidia cards for right now as well. Say, would you use an SSD for game installations, or stick with an HHD?

[Krom]

I run all my games from my SSD. It doesn't improve the framerate, but it does reduce loading times just like it would for any other application.

Generally games are big sequential workloads so they work well with mechanical hard drives, but they can still benefit from a SSD. For instance Doom 2016 does a 5 GB sequential read every time you launch it:
On my hard drives that would take 25 seconds. (Seagate Iron Wolf Pro = 200 MB/sec)
On my old SSD it took 10 seconds every time. (Samsung 850 Pro = 500 MB/sec)
On my current SSD it takes less than 2 seconds. (Samsung 970 Pro = 3000 MB/sec)

The most common issue is games are big and SSDs typically aren't. My internet is fast enough that I can uninstall large games to free up space as I need so I can deal with that, but otherwise steam has built in backup functionality and support for installing games on different drives when you go to download one. It is also fairly trivial to move games between the steam folders on different drives if needed.

[Tunnelcat]

Yeah, capacity is the only issue. SSD's are still more expensive per terabyte. I like the idea of the faster load times, but is it worth the higher cost, especially if I have a lot of games I like to keep on my drives?

[Krom]

It depends on the game and the SSD. Older games usually barely load more than a couple hundred megabytes at a time off the drive, so they aren't going to benefit that much (since a good modern hard drive can read that much in only a couple seconds). However modern games that can be reading gigabytes of data off the disk will show a reasonable benefit, a good SATA SSD can cut loading times by ~60% in those cases as long as the CPU can keep up. A high performance NVMe drive could potentially reduce loading times by as much as 90% which you would immediately notice if it was taking 30 seconds before. It also depends on how optimized the game is, some old games take ~15-20 seconds to load even on modern hardware because it is just how that game initializes.

Generally speaking the larger the games data is, the more likely it will benefit from loading off a SSD, unfortunately that means it also costs more.

Also SSD prices are dropping like a brick right now, so at some point it won't even be a question anymore; just get one and run with it.