New PC Time

[CDN_Merlin]

So it's been 4 years since I bought my current PC and this is what I'm thinking of buying. Any thoughts on if I could change something? This ends up being about $2100+ taxes CDN and I'd like to not go to much higher.

Asus ROG STRIX Z490-G GAMING Intel Z490 LGA1200 mATX Mainboard
Intel Core i7-10700 2.9GHz 16MB 8-Core S1200 Processor
Asus GF RTX 2060 Phoenix 6GB PCI-E Video Card
Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB 2x16 3600 CL18 DDR4 Memory Kit
Antec High Current Gamer Gold 750 Watt Power Supply
WD HGST Ultrastar 7K2 2TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA3 HDD
Samsung 870 QVO 1TB 2.5" SATA3 SSD
Asus DRW-24F1ST 24X DVD-RW Drive
RbR - Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM
Fractal Design Define 7 Compact Mid Tower Clear TG Window ATX Case Black

[Krom]

My first suggestion would be to just not build a new PC right now because it is not a good time in the market. Industry wide supply chains are severely strained under higher than usual demand (more people working from home and building PCs to do it) combined with covid-19 problems. Unless there is a piece of software that is not performing as you would like on your existing machine right now I would postpone any upgrade for at least the next 6 months.

Now on to the hardware choices, I would highly discourage spending that much on a relatively high end Z490 motherboard and then put a CPU that cannot be tweaked or overclocked into it and won't run the RAM faster than JEDEC 2666 MHz. The CPU is rated 65w, which is entirely unrealistic because the defaults of that motherboard will probably allow the CPU to pull close to 200w forever and it will do so without hesitation (or at least a K series would). I would pair that CPU with a less expensive system board, or perhaps switch entirely to a AMD Ryzen 3000 based system (3700x if you really want 8 cores/16 threads) which are totally respectable in gaming and often outright superior in productivity for a modest savings.

I would also recommend against getting a RTX 2060 card, I routinely play games that consume more than 6 GB of VRAM these days and the 2060 being limited to 6 GB is already a problem in lots of games. At the very least the 2060 Super with its 8 GB of RAM should be the consideration. But credible information is out there that Nvidia's release of Ampere (Probably RTX 3000 series) is imminent, likely the launch will be no later than September. The mid range xx60 card will probably be a few months later, but definitely worth waiting and seeing what the launch looks like and or grabbing a 2060 Super after the launch for a significant discount.

The Samsung QVO drives are QLC flash, the slowest and least reliable flash and that is a SATA SSD, you would be better served by a midrange NVMe M.2 SSD in that motherboard (just look for one with a DRAM Cache if you want max performance). Samsung still has the best quality if money is no object, but there are plenty of perfectly competitive drives out there in the 1 TB size without having to pay the Samsung tax. If you are looking to not burn up a lot of cash in the SSD, I would definitely shop around for like a Western Digital SN750 or Adata XPG SX8200 Pro which are totally competitive with the best Samsung drives in most usage modes for less cost. But even a Western Digital SN550 is going to run circles around a SATA drive. Although I personally have a Samsung 970 Pro 1 TB drive which is practically the most expensive SSD in its class so you can take that with a grain of salt, but I've had mine for a couple years already before the other drives were around.

[TigerRaptor]

I'm little behind times in the hardware area. Wouldn't AMD be a better choice over Intel right now?

[CDN_Merlin]

Krom,

Which would you take for a MB?

https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards ... -PLUS-CSM/

https://www.asus.com/ca-en/Motherboards ... -I-GAMING/

Here's the new list.


Intel 665p 1TB NVMe M.2 2280 SSD
Intel Core i7-10700 2.9GHz 16MB 8-Core S1200 Processor
Gigabyte GF RTX 2070 WINDFORCE 2X 8GB PCI-E Video Card
Asus DRW-24F1ST 24X DVD-RW Drive
Antec High Current Gamer Bronze 750 Watt Power Supply
Fractal Design Define 7 Compact Mid Tower Clear TG Window ATX Case Black
WD HGST Ultrastar 7K2 2TB 7200RPM 3.5" SATA3 HDD
Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 32GB 2x16 3600 CL18 DDR4 Memory Kit

With the STRIX MB, this comes up to 2400+taxes. I'd be selling my current PC to my son for 400 so that would alleviate some of the cost.

[Krom]

The Intel 665p is also a QLC flash based drive.

Either motherboard should be adequate for that CPU. Do keep in mind you will probably need/want a decent cooler to go with that CPU. It might not even come with a reference cooler, or at best it comes with one of Intel's dinky little spiral coolers that only work because they are designed for the reference power constraints (~30 seconds of turbo at most and then the CPU drops back to its 2.9 GHz reference frequency). If the motherboards allow the CPU to boost all the time, it will quickly overwhelm a reference cooler and thermal throttle. So you probably want to look at a larger 120mm tower cooler, there are plenty of good ones out there and at this point it is hard to screw one up so just pick one that is affordable and you like the aesthetics of.

Also a note on the memory/chipset/cpu choice:
H470 motherboards do not support memory overclocking at all so the memory will run at its whatever the JEDEC speed in its SPD is. This *might* only be 2133 MHz depending on the DIMMs, which would be a significant performance limitation on an 8 core CPU. Regardless, the highest speed memory will run at with that CPU/motherboard combination is 2933 MHz, so there is no reason to go all the way up to 3600 MHz memory if there is some cheaper JEDEC 2933 MHz rated memory available.

Just for the record Matrix recently built a Ryzen 3700x system with a GTX1080 video card which is the also the GPU I am using. We ran some benchmarks and his 3700x system is within like 5% of my i9-9900k system in basically every game we tested. 9 times out of 10 we are both hitting the same GPU limits except his 3700x system was around half the price of my 9900k system.

[fliptw]

I would too also suggest looking at a Ryzen 7 3700x.

and unless you are getting that 2070 for dirt cheap, I'd look at holding off till nvidia launches their new cards.

Also drop the DVD drive...

Adata has some nice nvme's

[CDN_Merlin]

I think I'll wait until Sept and see the prices drop on video cards. I priced a 3700 PC and it's about 50$ cheaper and I've always been an Intel guy.

Thanks for the info KROM.

[Krom]

Yeah, I honestly think it is better to wait and see how things shake out over the next ~6 months, especially if your existing system isn't causing any problems now. Between new stuff coming out and giving the supply chains time to recover there is a solid chance of significant pricing improvements towards later this year or early next year.

[CDN_Merlin]

Some of my games are slow on my current system and it's why I want to upgrade. I don't think I'll wait 6 months but maybe a couple. I finally got my promotion at work and should be getting a years back pay within the next month and then once our union contract is renewed, I'll have a few years back pay coming too.

[CDN_Merlin]

So i bit the bullet and ordered my system. Some changes from when I posted. It won't be ready until early Sept since the CPU is backordered and the video card and SSD are due in late August.

Gigabyte Z490 UD Intel Z490 S1200 ATX Ultra Durable Mainboard
Intel Core i7-10700K 3.8GHz 16MB 8-Core S1200 Processor
Gigabyte GF RTX 2070 WINDFORCE 2X 8GB PCI-E Video Card
SeaSonic FOCUS GX Series 750 Watt 80 Plus Gold Modular ATX Power Supply
A-Data XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB 3D NAND PCIe NVMe M.2 2280 SSD
WD Black 4TB 7200RPM 256MB 3.5" SATA3 HDD
Fractal Design Define 7 Compact Mid Tower Clear TG Window ATX Case Black
RbR - Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM
Asus SDRW-08D2S-U 8X Slim DVD-RW External Drive, Black
Corsair VENGEANCE LPX 32GB 2x16 3600 DDR4 C18 Memory Kit Black

[Krom]

Looks pretty good, just keep an eye on the memory speeds when you fire it up. Odds are it will default to 2133 MHz and its also moderately possible it won't work at the full 3600 MHz. Corsair memory is kind of a minefield of version numbers and not all versions are created equal, it never hurts to check your memory part number against the QVL list on the motherboard to know if they have a profile for getting it working full speed: https://download.gigabyte.com/FileList/ ... 200721.pdf If it is some version that doesn't work at 3600 on that motherboard, try 3200 at the same latency, the difference between the two speeds in final gaming performance is <1%.

Otherwise the build should be good for a few years with maybe only a video card upgrade around 2022 or so. Should be able to hold up well against the next generation consoles which are also 8 core / 16 thread CPU designs.

Good SSD, my only bit of advice is when you go to install windows have only that SSD in the system and don't plug in any other drives. That way all the boot and recovery partitions will be properly created on the SSD (windows likes to stick the boot loader on physical disk 0, which quite often is *not* the NVMe SSD when SATA drives are present in the system). For instance here is the layout of my system, note disk 0 is a SATA hard drive, and the NVMe SSD is disk 4.

Had I left all my other disks on and connected during windows setup, the efi and recovery partitions would have ended up on the RAID1...

Also save yourself some trouble by downloading the latest media creation tool from Microsoft and making a windows 10 bootable USB installer on a flash drive, a good one will greatly accelerate the install process.

[CDN_Merlin]

Ended up with this. my MB came in defective as well as my CPU fan. My WD 4TB became my 6TB WD instead.

I'm installed Crysis 3, Metro Exodus, Mechwarrior 5, TitalFall 2, Doom Eternal and waiting for Star Wars Sqaudron (ore-order) and so far this system kicks the ass of all those games.

Now, I'm back to having the same issue I had with my old system, my PC won't go to sleep. I've googled everything. Tried everything. My last system seemed to have fixed itself sort of but I'll keep plugging away at this one.

MSI MAG Z490 TOMAHAWK Z490 S1200 ATX Mainboard
Intel Core i7-10700K 3.8GHz 16MB 8-Core S1200 Processor
EVGA VCX 08G-P4-2072-KR GeForce RTX 2070 Super KO Gaming 8GB GDDR6 Dual Fans
SeaSonic FOCUS GX Series 750 Watt 80 Plus Gold Modular ATX Power Supply
A-Data XPG SX8200 Pro 1TB 3D NAND PCIe NVMe M.2 2280 SSD
WD Black 6TB 7200RPM 256MB 3.5" SATA3 HDD
Fractal Design Define 7 Compact Mid Tower Clear TG Window ATX Case Black
RbR - Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-bit OEM
Asus SDRW-08D2S-U 8X Slim DVD-RW External Drive, Black
Corsair VENGEANCE LPX 32GB 2x16 3600 DDR4 C18 Memory Kit Black

[fliptw]

you are at the point where there is no difference between power off and returning from sleep.

Do you mean when you go to the start menu, and select sleep and it doesn't sleep? or you select sleep, walk out of the room, come back in and its up and running?

[CDN_Merlin]

When it's idle for X number of minutes, I've set it to sleep alike after 15 min. But it doesn't go to sleep.