PC Building V4 - "ok SSDs got cheap, now do RAM next" - Hardware & Software

Do be cautious when looking at external drives as a cheaper avenue for new system drives Many HDD makers use externals as a way to sell sub-optimal drives, which were found to have quirks that may affect their longevity

But the entire line of 8tb+ of easystores are 8tb+ high end WD Red enterprise drives. It's really hit or miss.

Except the ones that aren't.

oh fuck I can finally access the download page. Looks like flashing to the latest available BIOS (31aug18) may have fixed my issue!

What do you guys think as Dell S2716DG for a monitor? I have a Viewsonic VX2239WM from 7 years ago and I think I am due for an upgrade. Honestly I have been torn betwen 24in and 27in but I think I can have the space and bigger screen seems to make more sense. Now I have been thinking about IPS panels but 1- cannot be bothered with what seems to be an increased lottery and 2- cannot justify spending £140-200 extra on the screen. I think this will be a huge upgrade in terms of brightness and colours no matter what but please correct me if I am wrong. I rather feel like saving the extra savings and going for 1080 in the very near future as an upgrade from my 970. Any thoughts or comments?

Oh nice. Today I learned about generations, as if sorting by sockets wasn't enough. There goes the cheaper alternative. (And buying a new motherboard would sting, but even more having to spend even more on DDR4) Current mobo supports 6th gen, (1151), would a(n used) i7-6700 be an OK choice (at an affordable price, ofc)? Or is there anything else to take into account? (Currently using a i3-6100, if that matters)

Shit yeah, forgot they started subbing other drives out in those.

Not sure how much they do it these days, but back when 1TB externals were just hitting the mainstream, some of the cheaper ones were just a pair of 500GB drives in a one box, logically identified as a single 1TB. Not even proper RAID, they used some weird proprietary chipset to map drive 1 as the front half and drive 2 as the back half of the 1TB, leading to really, really awful long term reliability; it would always have to spin up drive 1 to see if it was full before writing anything at all, sharply reducing the lifespan of a drive that already didn't have an amazing lifespan.

RED's are still consumer aimed drives though.

They're marketed as business drives, not consumer.

WD is pretty ambiguous, they're just listed on their "Personal" internal storage page, but so are Golds. WD just doesn't give a fuck.

Generally if you can buy it off store shelves, it's still the consumer-facing version of the "business" product. The actual business-tier IT gear is the stuff you see on sites like Newegg when looking for something similar, that have a price tag ten times higher than everything else and support features you might not have even heard of, but tend to also have long-term or lifetime warranties with real, managed support.

There are plenty of business applications that don't warrant the price of SAS or even NLSAS. While obviously that higher end stuff is purely business geared its not like Reds can't be considered. Also Reds and golds are listed both under business and personal, I think they just want all their drives to show up everywhere.

WD doesn't really sell like, "hardcore" enterprise drives under their brand anymore, you have to go with HGST for the super cutting edge capacities, or SAS interfaces. WD Golds are basically really nice prosumer/SMB drives, with enterprise quality and support. Black drives are pointless (imo), and WD Reds are great bull slow cheap storage (though arguably for the price, and assuming you have a good RAID setup, the Seagate Ironwolf drives are really good price/gb lately). HGST has all the big boys, 10K RPM drives, 14TB, SAS.

Most current tech companies could really do with having clearer product tiers. Right now, for the average person, it's very difficult to know what's best for what task. At my work I have to explain to people all the time what the difference between Atom, Celeron, Pentium, Core M, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7 and Xeon are. It's tedious and dumb.

I ended up paying 320USD for i5-3470, 16GB RAM, H61M-S1 mobo, 500W Thermaltake Litepower, 500GB 7200RPM Seagate (about 110MB/s read), and 3-fan Windforce GTX760, and some okay-ish full-size case with "Molten" written on it. Good purchase or not?

By itself that could be quite a nice Adobe box, but if you switch up your platform to get either a 1st gen Ryzen 3 or 7th gen Core i3, pick up a used GTX1060 3GB, and move your Windows installation to a 128GB M.2/NVMe drive with your HDD as bulk, you'd have a great daily driver that can game, and you will have spent less than $700 altogether, even less if you sell the parts you're swapping. Actually, you could even migrate said parts to a new box and have yourself an excellent HTPC along with your primary one.

I got it because it was cheap. Buying the same build new would cost at least twice as much. It seems to play Fallout 4 at high 1080p without any lag whatsoever so I guess there's really not much need to upgrade other than maybe getting some cheap SSD. It seems like in this country all the electronic imports are controlled by a single person so they can easily mark things up by 50%. Only competition to their monopoly is the individual travelers sneaking in few components in their tourist bags to re-sell for 30% mark-up, lol

So my current PC is this: Windows 10 H81M-P33 Intel i3 4160 3.60GHz MSi GeForce GTX1060 3GB 1600MHz 16GB of RAM 2TB 7200rpm HDD and my new build I want this: Windows 10 MSI B360M PRO-VH Intel i5 8400 MSi GeForce GTX1060 3GB (from my old PC) Kingston FURY 8GB 2400MHz RAM 2TB 7200rpm HDD (from my old PC) I want to migrate my HDD to the new computer so what do I have to do or uninstall if I want the transit to be successful?

My WD shill-cheque arrived I guess. https://s.gvid.me/s/2018/09/03/2rH399.png But why it's in Spanish, or how they got my e-mail is still unknown.

My CPU has been out for delivery since 9am. It's now 2pm and I'm ready to go find the mailman and mug him.

So, with the 1070 installed, I'm now sitting on an unused RX570, and am left with two options... On one hand, I could sell it to effectively reduce the price of the 1070 even further, but on the other... The Core X. I'm starting to do a lot more photo and video stuff on my MacBook Pro, and MacOS has native support for the RX570 via TB3 eGPU. With that, I could actually start working on 1440p/4K content instead of sticking to 1080p on the Iris Pro GPU. But the Core X by itself is like $300... I could buy a way better monitor for my desktop for that kinda money. This is a genuinely tough choice for me.

Here I am with my 1600 and a b350 board that I got for like $240... then this pops up. Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, LED LCD TV, Dig.. FUCK.

I'd recommend sticking everything you want to keep onto an external drive, then building the new system and putting a fresh build of Windows on the old HDD with a Windows boot drive. You'll want fresh drivers to get the new system working optimally anyway, and it never hurts having a clean build of Windows. That said, if your budget allows it I'd recommend getting an SSD for your OS on top of the 2TB HDD. Get your Windows key then use a tool to grab your current one, then if once you build it says hardware changes make it non legit just call up MS support and say "hey, I changed my hard drive and now windows says it's not valid anymore" they'll reset it and you'll be good to go.

https://www.amazon.com/Akitio-Node-Thunderbolt3-Windows-Compatible/dp/B06XKKSNTS Save yourself $50 at least.

I would have to check if I'd get a discount on either through work, at this point. From what I can tell the main difference between the Razer and Akitio is the wattage for both the GPU and the host device. Both would be fine with my current MBP, but a little extra overhead might be nice later, just in case.

So I just replaced my power supply and also got a new case to go along with it. The old one was a real cramped piece of shit with no space for cable management whatsoever. It made every part replacement into a real chore as you had to navigate through the tangled mess of cables. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/209687/3246fb87-44e8-4a7e-aedd-0c570591ef31/oldcase.jpg After pulling everything apart, a thorough cleaning and rebuilding everything in the new case: https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/209687/022ba9b3-c0cf-45f3-9fb6-056073ee99c7/newcase.jpg Much better. It's so clean now, not to mention the improvement in airflow. Finally looks like something that belongs in 2018.

What case is it?

so pissed off atm, preordered a monitor on amazon got told the morning it was going to be dispatched they didnt have stock amazon had little info but some people on reddit were told it wouldnt be available until october, yesterday decided to cancel and get the older model because it had freesync2 and hdr for a extra £90 got an email this afternoon it was going to take an extra day or two, come the fuck on dont promise next day if you cant do it

Phanteks Enthoo Pro M. I picked it specifically because it has a nice cable management layout in the back, a mesh front and removable filters on all intakes. Really airflow focused instead of the trendy "let's encase everything in glass/other flat surfaces and put tons of RGB in it" style that seems to be popular nowadays. But there's a twist, it turns out they've updated the model by adding a basic RGB controller that turns your power button into rainbow puke and proprietary LED strip connectors if you want even more of that. And the cost of this is that they removed the reset button (it now controls the rgb shit), which isn't mentioned anywhere in the manual. I spent a good couple hours scratching my head trying to figure out where the hell the reset button and power LED connectors were only to find out there actually aren't any.