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

CPU: Cinebench GPU: Unigine Superposition Mixed: 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme

3DMark's Fire Strike is still a pretty accurate representation of high-end games in 2018 The score itself is only relevant if you want to compare with others, just pay attention to your scene-by-scene performance, and make note of which scenes run the slowest

God dammit, the new case arrived but it's clearly used. Called amazon support, they are sending me a new one for Wednesday.

oh christ four thousand pounds I'm pretty sure there's no reason to get SLI

okay gonna be honest at the rate technology advances there's no point to spending 5k USD on a computer

our morals cannot allow such waste

Raytracing doesn't seem like the future for a good while, it's more of a gimmick for now at that price point... I'd suggest going with 1080Ti instead if you want to max out on grafics. And I haven't upgraded any major part in three years either. It runs games fine at 1080p60. More often than not there's diminishing returns with higher settings anyway so I can squeeze 120/144 out in many games.

PCPartpickers, Amazon, Scan and your own two hands. That's the most price efficient option anyway. Otherwise, Overclockers, I guess.

Whilst I would reccomend at building a PC yourself and not using a PC builder. I'll list a few that I know of that are available in the UK. Although, I have no experience using PC builders in general. PC Specialist- https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/ Box.co.uk- https://www.box.co.uk/custom-built-pcs Cyberpower- https://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/category/pc-builder-uk/ Box.co.uk also sell individual PC parts, so you can build a PC yourself. I've bought PC components from them before, but had a few issues regarding delivery and overall customer service.

Water cooling and SLI are two very, very effective ways to throw money away.

It's almost certainly better price/performance than the RTX series and prices are lower than they've ever been. Of course if you want all the performance you can get and money is no object, waiting for RTX makes sense but if you're happy with the performance a 1080Ti would give you, there's no reason not to snag one right now.

Maybe if you're overpaying for it, I've seen them as low as $549.99 and they've surely been lower. While dropping $700+ on one is silly, buying a 8gb card for $799.99 or higher is really stupid and even more so if you're planning on using it for VR or 4K. Saving $250+ and getting the extra 3gb of the older ram with a higher end would be a safer bet today. By the time the 1080Ti starts to age and RTX/ray tracing games even begin to roll out, AMD and Nvidia will have released new cards which will out perform first gen "RTX" hardware or even may possibly have major flaws or complete redesigns making this first gen hardware obsolete. Now if you wanted to buy a year down the road, I'd say definitely buy Turing as the prices will come down and it would be equivalent to buying Maxwell over Pascal today. Although, I'd say if you're in the market now for a 1060 or lower just go buy a used 970 for $120-150 since everything overpriced as hell still. I've seen some really awesome high end used 970's at $150 cleared out recently. RTX stock is going to be low for quite a while, there's still like hundreds of thousands of Pascal gpus floating around and Nvidia hasn't even thought about stopping production of them yet. Unless you need or want the new tech, they're not very compelling since they are priced outrageously. Buy cheap, don't overpay for old cards and you'll be fine. If you have a ton of disposable income or upgrade every couple years anyways it's not like it really even matters since unless you get a really good deal on something and use it for a much longer time, it will never be an "investment" in the future. If you're looking for absolute best bang for your buck, used is the way to go anyways provided the used market isn't broken like it has been for a while. Oh and I'm not sure I'd wait if you're in the US either, I have no idea how or when the tariffs will affect prices but I highly doubt it will cause them to go down. Does anyone actually know how they are going to affect hardware prices?

Looking at the past few gens, new software tech notwithstanding, the X80 and X80ti cards tend to stay perfectly relevant for at least one, if not two generations after their initial release. Generally contemporary games aren't demanding enough to benefit from those two tiers, so the only advantages the generation after them can have will be power efficiency (which RTX doesn't have) or new technology (which RTX does have, but adoption may be slow)

Scan. Don't get SLI, get the highest card (2080 Ti) and then replace it in 2-3 years with the latest top-end card.

Not even on the same level though. There are tons of verifiable benefits of watercooling in many scenarios. SLI... not so much.

Don't go SLI simply because Nvidia barely supports it anymore. Nvidia dropping 3 and 4 way is a sign it became a big niche. You just can't utilize two of those cards well.

We'll see. Most of the nvlink push I've seen seems to be for high bandwidth compute cards over gaming cards. Nice to see they're integrating the tech into their consumer lineup but I'm going to have to see benchmarks before I count it as anything more than SLI in this application.

If NVLink behaves and identifies to the system as a single GPU (which might be how it's finally able to use 100% of the combined VRAM), then one enormous advantage it has over SLI right away would be software support.

In games that choose to support it, which is only future titles.

just upgraded from an intel 2500k to a ryzen 2600 and now I get coil whine from my power supply whenever my gpu is rendering any amount of 3d polygons. how could this be? it's the same GPU and PSU, the whine even happens when my new cpu is at 0% usage. it's a corsair 650 watt from 2010: http://extreme.outervision.com/img/psu/corsair/tx650/img4.jpg I'm gonna try overclocking my gpu and cpu to see if the changes in power draw make the parts vibrate in an audio range I can't hear. if that doesn't work then does this mean it's time to replace it? what do I need to look for in a new psu to make sure it doesnt fucking scream?

Exactly. You're making a long term investment on the assumption that developers will embrace this new tech in the span of less than a hardware generation. The 2070 is impractical from this perspective, as it will be markedly weaker at doing these new things than options that will be much cheaper, once mass adoption of the tech they're pioneering now finally kicks in. The 2080 and 2080ti are a safer bet long term, but they're still a first generation product, and may even be superceded by next gen's X70 when it comes to RT and ML ops. If you're okay with that, then sure, go nuts, but to those people I'd recommend the 2080ti over the regular 2080, just to ensure they'll get to enjoy their investment as long as possible.

Are you sure it's from the powersupply? Motherboards have coil inductors as well.

i shoved my ears all around the interior of my pc. it is clearly from the psu

Maybe the PSU has decided, coincidentally, to start dying? If you put the old stuff back in does the whine stop? Thing almost 9 years old, it's ancient, I'd say it's time for a new one. Get a nice fully modular Corsair 850W PSU.

Who makes the best thermal paste these days? GPU (GTX 980 Ti) is running at 70-80C even though I specifically opened up the side panel on my Fractal Define Mini.

There aren't a whole lot of corsair units that are great for the money anymore tbh

when does the embargo lift on the 20xx reviews?

Are people actually starting to call them 20XX I'm ok with this

Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut and Noctua NT-H1 are both very good options.

Some people still recommend older, worse thermal pastes. Don't buy Arctic Silver, it's obsolete. IC Diamond performs pretty well but it can cause microscratches on the IHS which can cause issues down the line if you ever reapply paste.