The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

I thought about B550 boards. But it sounded like PCIe 4.0 was the way to go for a more future proof board. Now, the difference could be negligible. Impatience certainly played a small role here. I chose the board I did, ALSO, because it was one of few options when I purchased. Though I still have time to cancel, as it's a back-order item. But they should ship any day as it's over two weeks now.
I chose the 3900x for both horsepower, and resale value(theoretically). It's my hopes that it holds a little resale value anyway lol
Chances are I'll be content with this upgrade. But If I like the numbers I see from 4000 series, or the price drops significantly on 3950x, I MIGHT consider a switch.

Still shopping NVME drives. I definitely want one, as my current 2.5" SSD will migrate to my laptop, where it can do some serious good

 

B550 includes PCIe 4.0 and is a brand new release within the last few weeks - it's B450 that didn't have it.

Resale value is in my opinion a bit of a waste of time with PC hardware - I did nearly purchase a 3900X when I saw what they were going for on Amazon but then realised it was a questionable seller who only had 1 in stock and delivery would take several days. The price of the same CPU anywhere else was a bit beyond what I was prepared to pay - given most of the time I won't see any gain from it, I decided against it.

 

This is the link/page that ultimately convinced me to go with X570. Not sure if it's 100% correct, but it was what tipped the scales for me.

 

What you're seeing there is the chipset downlink to run all the other devices, the NVMe, SATA ports and so on. That remains PCIe 3 with B550 versus PCIe 4 with X570 but due to the lesser extent of the anciliary devices on B550 boards, that should not be an issue - notice the x4 rather than x16 - the x16 PCIe 4.0 comes straight off the CPU in either case, if the board has a PCIe 4.0 slot, which B550 boards often do.

 

Ah ok. well put!
The 1090t held a reasonable resale value (imo) for a time. That's what I'm hoping for with the 3900x. I don't mind burning a little cash lol Again, impatience played a role here. Despite having an abundant supply lol
Having a decade old machine (minus the 1070ti), it was definitely time, and I had the funds.

 

I was initially holding out to see what Zen 3 had to offer but given my general apathy for going inside the case these days, I preferred to get it all done in one hit as it looked like the Zen 3 based parts might be a way off and with no real competition from Intel, I was a little sceptical they'd provide any huge gains at the same price point. At least with B550 here that's one thing I could partake in and if the next generation of CPUs does turn out to be transformative, I still have the option of upgrading for a time. A big song and dance is made about VRMs for high-TDP CPUs these days, and rightly so, but given I ran a CPU that drew more power than most of AMD's lineup outside Threadripper back when I had my overclocked i5 750, that was back when boards had a fair bit less in the way of VRM cooling than they do now. I'm not intending to run one of the 300W chips in my machine on air cooling as I frankly don't want to deal with that much heat output from my PC any more, it really isn't necessary just to make encodes a little faster and applications like Handbrake really can't deal with many more than 16-24 threads anyway.

 

Mmm, I knew I would get performance gains through my video encoding apps. Heard of Handbrake, but use a few others. HEVC/X265 is a strong reason for upgrading. Even under fastest settings for 1090t, a ~90 minute movie takes around 4hrs to complete. I prefer a slower higher quality means, but don't want it taking half a day either lol

But I also want to experiment with rendering in Blender. I doubt I'll become some blender guru, but If I can learn a few tricks and have fun with it. That was my main reason for the Ram, and horsepower though. I'm sure the 8 core ryzen would have stomped on my 1090t in regards to Hevc encodes. But, a little more $$$, and I may just be good for 3 - 5 yrs. Who knows. Ugh... I haven't even considered my power supply. But I don't believe it's older than 4yrs. And I do have a backup that'll at least get me running.

 

Congrats Sam! Good luck on the new AMD build! Looks solid! X570 and B550 have much better VRMs to begin with so you shouldn't have any issues with a stock clock 3700X. It was a serious issue for B450 though. Many B450 boards will throttle the 3700X.

I finally got my new(to me anyway) RAM working, and took care of some other stuff. Also added the new SSD to my main PC. Quickly returned the 500GB WD Blue, when I realized it wasn't going to be large enough, in favor of a 1Tb Samsung 860 QVO. $109 Amazon Warehouse Deals with a slightly wrinkled corner on the box. Can't beat that. The I/O on this board is currently maxed. Every single lane of bandwidth of any type is being utilized fully, haha. My poor case has a rat's nest in the PSU cove, haha. Clean up front, dirty in back.



The FireCuda never handles synthetic benchmarks well, though it handily stomps the 2TB WD Black drive in IRL usage. The 2TB Black is way more consistent with benchmarks.

The 950 Pro is being severely limited as it's only on a PCIe 2.0 bus. It'd probably be nearly twice as fast on PCIe 3.0. That said it's still WAY faster than the brand new 860 QVO on SATA. The 860 does the intended job well, and is a fantastic scratch drive for my modding projects. Fast enough to be a huge boost in performance, but not so much that little touches like custom loading screens are totally passed over. A much faster NVMe drive would be somewhat problematic in that regard, so the modest QVO is a great fit for the job.

Now to get my pair of 4TB Blue drives and replace those 2TB Greens. I want my little storage array to be stout and reasonably reliable, hence avoiding larger drives with their possibly higher failure chance. However I want it to fit in one chassis, and disciplining myself on data has improved my housekeeping habits. I store and handle files much more efficiently than I used to. It will help on larger drives in the future. It's not as massive as your array Sam, but in the last year or so I have nearly doubled my capacity. For me, it's a LOT of data.

 

I find it amazing that throttling occurs on any non-budget basic board with a CPU like the 3700X, unless you're referring to overclocking? Using the stock boost behaviour it tops out around 90W, less than many quad core CPUs of old.

My case is absolutely filthy inside, going to need a vac when I take the old board out for sure, but when stuff doesn't go wrong there's little reason to touch it really. The old HAF isn't ideal for cable management but I'll try and make a bit more of an effort this time round.

As for long-term longevity of bigger hard disks, now that many smaller drives (especially WDs) come with SMR, I'm not necessarily sure that's true any more. I'm keen to avoid SMR in any of my disks as I'm not comfortable with it (nothing much to do with performance concerns as anything performance-centric really ought to be solid state these days). That said, WD drives are also considerably more expensive than the competition in the high capacity sector. 10% was worth paying back when they were the best manufacturer, but now it's 40%+ in many cases, it isn't justifiable.

For me the discipline needed is more in file organisation than it is total usage. My storage usage doesn't grow anything like it was doing in the mid 2010s. Go back to try and find a file that predates a decent filing system, however, and it's a real pain when you have lots of data. Bigger disks just help keep everything more neat and tidy. I'm not replacing all my 2-4TB drives with 12/14/16s any time soon due to the cost, but using a single 14TB disk to refactor all my miscellaneous content and retire a 6TB drive that's had some errors in the past just in case seems a fair shout.

With a much faster CPU I can also get round to transcoding / merging a load of old content that's in lots of smaller files.

 

Sam, that's exactly what I'm trying to tell you. Yes, many B450 boards and even some X470 boards have such terrible VRMs that they are throttling 8 core CPUs at stock settings or severely hampering their turbo ability depending on the board. It's a very serious issue.

https://www.amazon.com/GIGABYTE-X470-AORUS-ULTRA-GAMING/dp/B07BZ239Z2

This board right here being a prime example. It is literally inadequate to handle an 8 core CPU at stock settings. It will throttle a 3700X. Yes. I really mean it. The 8+3 being advertised for this board is false as it's a 4 phase design in reality. It can barely handle a 6 core CPU. MSI's 4+3 phase design in their B450 boards is the real deal and is much better than the VRMs on this Gigabyte X470 board. Many entry-level, mid-range, and mid-to-high end Asus and Gigabyte boards among others have the issue.

That isn't to say there NO good X470 boards. The ASRock Taichi X470, Aorus X470 Gaming 7, Asus Strix X470-F, MSI X470 Gaming Pro Carbon are all very solid boards. However, anything lesser than those models from those brands, ANYTHING, is going to have pretty bad VRMs. It's pretty black and white. Likewise, pretty much all of MSI's B450 boards save the cheapest are pretty solid. I wouldn't even bother with a B450 board from other brands. They are terrible. The real shame is, the B450 and X470 chipsets themselves are quite good. Something weird happened with board manufacturers, and they were not adequately informed about the power characteristics of these chips.

X570 and B550 are an insanely vast improvement in build quality. Most of the X570 and almost all of the B550 boards have wonderful VRMs. They're simply much, MUCH better boards. I know, I'm harping on it, lol. But it really is a bad issue that lots of people aren't noticing because they simply have nothing better in their possession to compare.

All that mouthful being said, I will leave the subject there. I have made my point known and it doesn't bear repeating again. Everyone gets the point
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Point taken on HDD longevity. Old habits die hard. 8TB enterprise class drives are supposed to be pretty reliable. I will definitely look into some larger disks in the future as my storage needs grow steadily. Not by leaps and bounds, but I'm always approaching full on at least one drive. It's a slow build up.

My discipline is as much about organization as it is space usage. Extremely meticulous metadata, track info, mastering provenance, artwork, etc. I'm very choosy about what I consider to be worth saving and putting time into. I use the space constriction as a measuring tool to determine what I consider worth keeping. I use kind of a tiered system of elimination. Once every possible option to squeeze more files into the space has been exhausted, only then do I upgrade a drive. Good way to keep the scope of my projects within reach for how meticulously they are assembled. And also a great way to keep my tiny array of disks rotated and fresh.

I have set my organizational system up around minimizing file nesting/layering. No more embedded folders than necessary. My film collection is very much so organized, and I think anyone would be surprised at the sheer quality of my encodes and the polish with which they are presented. I'm very proud of them, and am very critical of my results. I usually have to make two or more tries to get the results I want. My OCD has gotten the best of me, but it's made for a very refined collection... at least in the way that a big drive full of backed up films can be refined, lol.

As far as pricing, even if WD drives are only a few percent more reliable, I consider it worth every penny. Every little bit counts when it comes to data integrity. Of course if I really cared I'd be running a mirrored array. Alas, I run single drives. So a little bit of extra assurance doesn't hurt.

Encoding is a long process for me. I just accept that when I start encoding, it's an overnight project or something to leave running while I'm at work. I do a very slow 2-pass encode, with absolutely zero consideration for time spent. I don't remember how long the last one took, but suffice to say it is definitely not encoding in real time.

 

The B550 Aorus Elite I ordered advertises itself as having '12+2' phase VRMs, so presumably by the logic above that's 6+2. I've honestly not read up on the difference in capabilities between 4+3 and 6+2.

I don't think I've seen any solid evidence yet about SMR having a handicap on reliability but to me it seems only natural that it could be a risk and I'm not keen on the risks about what happens if a machine shuts down unexpectedly during disk housekeeping activity since you don't necessarily know when it's taking place.

For the same reason as you I've run WD almost across the board here at home, with 50 something drives from them. As you say, a small increase in reliability is worth a much bigger financial outlay, but with disks larger than 6TB all coming in 7200rpm variety only (do not believe WD's spec page for their 8TB+ drives being 5400rpm, it is a lie) none of them are perfect.

As far as encoding is concerned I'm only really encoding stuff that either came from sites like youtube, or from a dashcam, so the quality isn't great to begin with, thus only content that's in 4k tends to encode slower than realtime, at least on current CPUs, with the 3700X hopefully that will no longer be the case either.

 

Nope, B550 and X570 advertise their VRMs honestly. It's a real 12+2 board. They're just that much better. And yes it's better than MSI's 4+3 phase. It's not that the 4+3 is so fantastic, but it's the only adequate solution anyone came up with for B450. That it turned out to perform so well, is just a bonus. MSI just happened to come up with a really nice design. Current boards are much better thought out. Also especially for I/O. X370 and X470 have some limitations that make them not a whole lot better than say my Haswell setup. X570 and B550 provide more lanes of bandwidth somewhat akin to the PCIe 2.0 Plex controller on my Z97. Hence your board having some lanes of PCIe 3.0 despite being a PCIe 4.0 board(afaik the extra lanes are 4.0 on X570).

Basically, your board should be very good for you. It could handle a 3900X no problem.

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The Xbox One S is doing its job quite well. I have both PCs set up as Plex servers, and when transcoding the living room PC struggles sometimes due to its ancient CPU. The Xbox One S has so far been capable of Direct Play for every single format I have tried, eliminating the need for transcoding altogether. x265 4K is no match for it. Flawless playback even via Wi-Fi. Some of my ~14Mbps average 1080p encodes spike well over 20Mbps and it doesn't even flinch. It even handles all the fancy lossless sound formats in their raw form, and all the funny obscure formats I've thrown at it. Even Opus audio which is an especially uncommon distant relative of Ogg Vorbis. It totally destroys the PS3 in format support. I know huge difference in technology, but the PS3 was unnecessarily limited by its 256+256 memory layout. Both the PS3 and 360 needed a full gig of memory to really be proper multimedia platforms. They just didn't have enough to do all the really good stuff.

Very nice video quality and built in DXVA scaling as well. Super nice! Its 5Ghz wireless manages a solid ~100Mbps from the other side of the house(thanks in part to my nice triple antenna router) so it has easily enough network bandwidth available to it. It's a really powerful video player that does all the right video acceleration tricks to really give it some oomph.

It can also use its DXVA abilities for Blurays as well! It's a great Bluray player, and easily equal to or better than Sony's monumental efforts with the PS3. Still having the option of optical out, it also allows me to bypass my receiver for video and get the most out of my 4K TV. The lossy surround it sends through the optical cable is just fine, and I really can't tell a difference. It does a great job with sound over optical and I'm not missing the bitstreaming abilities of the PS3 via HDMI at all. My receiver is pretty dang good but it can only handle 4K 24Hz and even then it has issues despite actually displaying an image. Simply put, it's really a 1080p receiver. Being from 2008 it has limits to its abilities nowadays. That said it does an amazing job for sound, with awesome power for films, and isn't going anywhere.

That takes the living room PC from barely adequate for the task, to totally overpowered now. It used to have to work very hard to produce results suitable for playback on the PS3. Barely any CPU usage at all now, and the little bit of transcoding it has to do for the audio and subtitles, is hardly a task for it. Maybe spikes to 20% CPU usage once in a while. Most of the time it will even hover around in a downclocked state while streaming. MUCH better all around, and I get way better final video quality on my display to boot. Really cuts down on my power usage as well. No more heavily loading my PCs just to stream a Bluray to the living room or bedroom. The Q9650 continues to amaze. I just wish the board could take more than 8GB of memory.

I have my old 43" TV on a VESA mount on the bedroom wall with a Roku Ultra velcro'd to the back. It can do ~95% of my 1080p encodes via Plex without transcoding as well(the ones that do transcode are on the main PC so not an issue), and just has much smoother video playback and Plex navigation than the PS3. It makes for a highly convenient stealth install in my bedroom that only requires some neatly routed power cables. Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, and my entire digital film collection accessible with the touch of a button anywhere in the house. I'm pretty proud of that. Been working my way through the Star Trek Voyager DVD box set my dad got me for Christmas last year. It was a monumental task to encode, about a week long project, but totally worth it. I can start an episode in the living room, then later resume it from where I left off in the bedroom. I haven't had cable for a long time. Not since I started buying and borrowing stuff and encoding my own copies. A good half of my content is from my own hard copy collection. I have a nice little Bluray collection. The rest is acquired privately from a friend. No need for torrents for a while. I'm trying to stay legit.

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Also got all 24GB of RAM working fine at 2400Mhz. Found out which kit had the looser timings and made that Channel A so one kit is running looser timings than stock vs one trying to run tighter timings. The looser timed kit turned out to be the original 16GB Team Xtreem LV with the larger 8GB modules. It also includes a built-in XMP profile in the case of 4 sticks(it has a lot of well behaved presets and excellent auto timings), which the G.Skill Trident X kit does not. That was the cause of my failure to boot. The leading kit of G.Skill RAM had only one profile which was too tight for both the 16GB kit AND too tight for four sticks at the same time. With the Team Xtreem LV taking the lead, I can simply set XMP and away it goes. No modifications. Happy about that.

24GB makes a difference, and my memory performance remains mostly the same for benchmarks. 2400Mhz is a sweet spot for the Haswell architecture and makes a really noticeable difference over the recommended stock of 1600MHz. Haswell really loves memory speed, and gains almost as much benefit from it as Ryzen does. 2400Mhz is the equivalent of a few hundred extra MHz of core clock in performance gains versus say 1333 or 1600. Also my CPU will do 4.3GHz just fine but puts out a lot less heat at 4.2GHz and seems more than adequate for anything I throw at it. I can transcode 4K in real time just fine with performance to spare via Plex Media Server at nearly the highest quality settings. Looks great on my TV. That's pretty satisfying. I've done my best to squeeze every drop of everything from Z97. I can't believe how potent this PC has remained after all this time. Haswell and Z87/Z97 are truly a great platform. The only shame is a lack of 6 core CPUs. I would definitely have bought one by now. Suffice to say I have totally maxed the capabilities of the board, and it performs with gusto!

 

Bump updated my post with more.

 

The performance of my 7600 was largely fine to be honest, it was perfectly adequate for games and general desktop use - the main reason for replacing it was the pretty sorry state of the board it was installed in, the fact that the cooler had become rather inadequate, and that I wanted better encoding performance. The 3700X has certainly handsomely resolved those issues, the 7600 transcoded 1080p dashcam footage at around 25fps, the 8400 around 40-45, the 3700X achieves 90+. The NH-U15 cooler is not as noisy as I feared two 140mm fans would be as their acoustic profile is excellent, considerably better than the old Noctua fans I tried when they first started out as a brand.
32GB of RAM up from 16 is also useful, as is finally having an NVME SSD in my main machine. Nothing puts any stress on the machine in normal work other than encoding and even then the CPU tops out in the high 60s with the fans at full speed and the air coming out of the case is barely perceptibly warm to the touch, probably still <30C. It's amazing to see how far AMD have come.
The previously "I thought it was almost silent" GTX1080 Founders Edition is definitely the most noticeably noisy component in the system now. Cleaning it out during the rebuild has brought the load temperatures back down to 83-85 from 87 previously, but the fan speed is still fairly high at over 3000rpm in games like Overwatch. Not enough to warrant me doing anything about it yet but nonetheless with the case cooling I have available in the HAF 932 I might be less hesitant about going axial for my next GPU, whenever that may be.

The disappointment of the build was the Corsair Commander Pro, which blew a channel within 5 minutes after connecting two of my Slipstream fans to one of its outputs. Rated at 0.535A each that sums 1.07A on a channel rated for 1A - should not be an issue for 5 minutes, I suspect perhaps the actual capabilities of the unit are far less than 1A. The unit also crashes every time a fan is commanded to spin at any great speed, and the rpm readings in the CUE utility are all over the place. Fortunately the fan controller on the motherboard itself is excellent, and although I don't want to run more than one fan off each header, it does at least have 5 outputs which are customisable using a sensor-based graph node interface in the BIOS. To see a better UI for fan control in the BIOS than you get with third party tools in Windows is a bit odd, but there you go!
Long term, if I can justify the price, I may end up going with an Aquaero solution, though I wish they had slightly more convenient mounting mechanisms.

 

The 4770K continues to surprise me and is easily adequate for my needs. It runs WiiU emulation with all the bells and whistles flawlessly and is more than enough for Gamecube and PS2 even in software mode. Those are historically very demanding tasks for a CPU, and the 4770K does a great job.

It would take a really fantastic deal to get me to switch platforms right now. This one works great and since I don't need anything more it lets me be economical. I've spent enough on hardware in the past few years. One of the only things that has made me consider it is that I would like to retire LGA775 eventually. It'd be nice for a change to have a PC that is overpowered in the living room instead of one that is only adequate.

 

It's been a bit since I've been on here and I always used this thread to pull down new budget builds for friends, but there hasn't been many posted. I am out of the loop and am using this retailer: https://www.memoryexpress.com/. This is my build for her child who wants to Game - not Cysis maxed, but newer games for sure. It doesn't have keyboard/mice/monitors nor extra fans (maybe we should get those for sure). Is there any build recommendations you can recommend - budget wise?

 

Recently did some horse trading and got myself a 4790K and a GTX1070Ti to replace my 4770K and 1070. No cash involved on my part, so while being a marginal upgrade, the time spent was worth it.

The 4790K was just what the doctor ordered. Much better voltage regulation and cooler running. The 4770K ran very hot and needed a de-lid badly. The 4790K can still benefit from a de-lid but the thermal paste under the IHS is just much better. Like ~10*C cooler at all times. The 4770K needed to be pushed to do 4.3GHz and needed a lot of voltage to do it. 4.4 was entirely out of the question. 4.2 was its happy medium before it started really sucking voltage. This 4790K's happy medium is 4.5GHz, and its top OC when pushed a bit is 4.6GHz. And it runs cooler at 4.6GHz than the 4770K did at 4.3Ghz.

Overall not a huge performance increase but the faster OC speeds, faster native uncore, and better overall behavior of the chip has cascaded down through my different software. In particular Gamecube emulation is much improved. You either hit the target framerate or it's stuttery and slow with bad sound. Some of the more challenging games were just above the 4770K's ability, and the 4790K now locks them to 60FPS. This makes them FAR more pleasant to play. So that's a disproportionately large improvement. Devils Canyon also has slightly better Hyperthreading behavior than Haswell among other small improvements. Many of the more challenging PC games I play have seen a nice increase in minimums. Really happy with that.

The Gigabyte 1070Ti Gaming OC is a good card. It uses the same PCB as my older Gigabyte 1070 G1 which means its pretty overbuilt. The big advantage is that it has more CUDA cores. It's much more in line specs-wise with a GTX1080. This one is also a decent overclocker, and I've gotten nice results out of it. It surpasses my 1070 G1 in base clock speed and matches it in turbo speed. This is a really nice increase. At stock it matches or beats my 1070 G1 when overclocked. When OC'd it totally demolishes the 1070 G1. Many games are greatly boosted by this. Ghost Recon Wildlands is much better now, and modded Skyrim got a big increase in overhead. Like certain scenes that got to around 99% GPU usage with framedrops are now locked 60 with about 85% GPU usage. Metro Exodus is likewise very much improved.

So neither upgrade is especially large. Combined however they result in a truly meaningful jump in performance for my needs. I finally maxed out this platform, and got a very solid result. It does what I need it to do

 

I certainly understand that - once you hit the frame rate you need, either for your visual sensitivity, display refresh rate, or just generally how a game behaves, anything further is needless.

I was fortunate enough through using a hardware alerts discord to be able to grab an RTX 3080 founders edition a month or so back. It's transformative in bigger titles but in the other stuff I play, it isn't remotely stressed at all. Fundamentally, upgrading from the i5 7600 to the Ryzen 3700X (and from 16GB to 32GB of RAM while I was at it) actually provided a much larger tangible performance benefit across the entirety of what I use my PC for. When I load up more demanding titles such as Battlefront 2 or World War Z, the 3080 really shines, but in the rest of the games I've played lately - overwatch, golf with your friends, rivals of aether, duck game, etx. there's no noticeable difference as you might expect. Doom Eternal ran exceptionally well on the 3080, but I'm not exactly sure how the 1080 would have fared by comparison as I never tried it.

What it has got the horsepower to do however is mine cryptocurrency while playing those games. I'd never buy any hardware explicitly for the purpose of mining as then I'd only be contributing to the hardware supply crisis, but if I can make the hardware I purchased for better gameplay pay for itself? Why not? Currently I have resurrected the old NZXT Lexa and put the i5 7600 hardware in it, with the GTX1080, so unless I'm playing a demanding game, which is typically a handful of hours a week or less, both cards are mining Eth 24/7 at present. So far that's made me around £300, or a little under half the cost of the RTX3080. There will of course be some costs to consider from electricity used by the hardware as well as the A/C to keep the room from turning into a sauna, but last I checked, these worked out about 20%.

 

My hope was that maxing out this Z97 platform would get me the performance I need. So far it works. The amount of power I have feels like plenty, and not just barely enough. I can't justify the cost of a newer platform, but the extra 8GB of RAM for cheap, plus the CPU and GPU for almost free has really bumped up its longevity. All of my borderline games and software have moved to the better side of the borderline, so to speak lol. I'm so glad Gigabyte was forward-thinking enough to include 3rd party NVMe functionality or I'd have been looking to upgrade a long time ago.

The 1070Ti is an interesting card and has a disproportionate advantage in some of the more demanding games. Advantages in stuff you can't see but can feel like framespikes and the like. It's a much better card overall. Easily ~20% faster in a lot of stuff which is nothing to scoff at. I can max most things, and have more breathing room in the few most demanding games. I play a lot of older and indy titles so for those there is zero difference. Emulation and cutting edge games however, Kingdom Come, Metro, Ghost Recon, etc, yeah I'm totally satisfied for the effort.

I would imagine a 1080 would do okay with Doom Eternal at 4K. It's still a very potent card and current prices have made GTX3000 almost a non-factor. The market has kept GeForce 10 very relevant. My 1070Ti was purchased used for about $480 a few months ago. Too much for the card by far but for what I paid I'll not complain Lucky of you to get a 3080, though I hate the Founders Edition blower cards. The 3080 has plenty of power. More than I could really use in a lot of titles at 1440p. A 1080 or 1080Ti or 2070 Super or 2080, something in that neighborhood, would be spectacular for my needs. The 1070Ti however is far overpowered for the majority of what I play. I can flog it as hard as possible and lock 75 vsync, except for a small handful of games where that would be hard to achieve even with a more powerful card. The 1070/Ti is just such a well placed card in the performance spectrum. Even being $400 new vs $300 for the 970s, it's one of the best video card deals I've ever had. Still better than a majority of mid range card in newer generations. I'd have to spend a lot to replace the 1070Ti.

Speaking of which, I got sick of dealing with failing VA panels for 32" 1440p. I picked up a 32" LG 1440p in IPS instead. 75Hz, Freesync, and real HDR10. The HDR is of course crappy, but in some of the really nice quality proper HDR content it looks fantastic. Weaker HDR depends on display quality to even look right and this monitor isn't very suited for it. Far Cry 5 has amazingly good HDR which looks breathtaking on this display. Like absolutely using this weak 350nits HDR to its maximum ability. Beautiful color and brightness and contrast and the like. Just very well done. Missing the true inky blacks of VA but not missing the terrible grey to grey response. Not even counting raw response time the VA panels were not smooth for games and movies. IPS with 75Hz is so much better.

I just keep getting super satisfying performance in games, which is my only really practical use-case. For all my work and home business stuff this is a super overkill PC. I can't really ask for more, especially considering the longevity of socket 1150 for me. Z97 is a really great platform that has almost all the modern bells and whistles. Only a shame there wasn't a 6 core CPU for this platform. I certainly would have bought one a long time ago. As it is I waited for the amazing trade for the 4790K because price wise it wasn't worth it. Totally worth the wait though. Doesn't hurt that it's not a dud OC'er either. 4.6 is a solid result Pretty over the moon at just how much better a CPU it is than the 4770K. My old 4690K wasn't a fluke and I'm not misremembering it. Devil's Canyon is definitely just better and even has some microscopic IPC improvements due to better use of Hyper Threading, better power handling and the like. It's Haswell with purely improvements.

I could cry it was just enough of an upgrade for everything.

 

i5 8600K, Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro, 32GB(2x16GB) Patriot Viper Steel DDR4-3600MHz CL18. Ordered and on the way. Kind of a quick jump from the 4790K but I really need an upgrade path and really need some extra CPU power.

My plan is to OC the 8600K for now and shoot for 4.8-5GHz. The 8700K isn't monstrously expensive used anymore, so I can jump on one of those or similar come tax return time. In the meantime at 4.8GHz the 6c6t 8600K will use significantly less wattage than my 4c8t 4790K at 4.6GHz, while being faster.

The tiny increases in IPC between generations, mean that Intel kind of plateaued with Coffee Lake for a while. The release of the 9th gen CPUs and now 10th gen(with 11th coming), made the 8th gen chips surplus without obsoleting them. The used/refurb prices made it feasible for me to get the parts for very cheap. This is much cheaper than an equivalent Ryzen platform. Used or no. This nets me a sweet little gain in IPC plus a gain in physical core count, plus a probable gain in raw clockspeed. Am I seeing this wrong? The IPC increases between generations have been small, but this is 4 full generations worth of those small improvements. Many are saying that Coffee Lake is the new Haswell in terms of how its longevity will pan out for users. The 9900K is still a very relevant CPU and I could drop one in right now and have an 8c16t powerhouse that matches or beats any 8c16t Ryzen when overclocked. Starting with this humble little 6 core.

The Z390 Aorus Pro is normally a ~$200+ board scored for $116 on Amazon warehouse. CPU and RAM were both ebay finds. The board is very well reviewed and is part of the second wave for Coffee Lake, intended for 9th gen CPUs. Kind of like the Z87/Z97 jump for Haswell and Devil's Canyon. It shares hardware with more expensive boards and replaces the Z390 Aorus Elite in Gigabyte's lineup, so should be very solid for my needs. The VRMs are solid enough and the cooling is pretty good. It should have zero issue overclocking the 8600K and likely would do just as well with an 8700K. It has been reviewed as working well and running quite cool when overclocking the 9900K. I/O, particularly SATA connectivity, on the board is just enough and I get a really nice upgrade for my NVMe drive.

RAM is just what was out there on ebay. That it's a decent kit for bottom dollar is just a bonus. Brand new in box for $50 off retail I'll take it. It should be more than enough and shouldn't be crazy hard to find another kit in a year or two. Both board and CPU should have no problem with 3600MHz RAM and it should net me a nice day one performance boost and get the most out of the chip. The performance benefit from faster RAM for Coffee Lake drops off sharply after 3000MHz. Most just settle at 3200MHz. 3600MHz is the extra inch. It's also a good sweet spot for Ryzen should one ever happen my way.

Just as well the 4790K, Z97X-UD5H, and 24GB of DDR3-2400 are still worth a pretty penny used, or can be utilized quite nicely in my living room PC. Both are options.