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

I don't care about showroom cases because the window is on the wrong side for it to matter, with how my desk is designed (My tower is to my lower left)

Mine just has glass on both sides and a horizontal board so it just has a full view of the triple slot Vega

https://youtu.be/pgEI4tzh0dc Better look at the 20xx than most right now. Looks like DLSS can bring a ton more performance to the 2080 and set it way over the 1080ti - so whenever the DLSS comes into play these we might see a ton more performance boosts.

The FFXV demo has been completely broken in the past so I really wouldn't trust any results coming out of it. In February it wasn't culling objects properly and it was running Hairworks at full precision on every character all the time regardless of visibility. There's some speculation the DLSS performance could be fudged a bit, or over-optimized specifically to the benchmark.

Okay, might be kinda tangential to PC building itself, but thank christ there are decent visual tweak tools for W10 Three years in and I'm finally happy enough with how it looks to stop fiddling with it for five minutes https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/228820/c358a50b-b6b1-4d8c-bc91-4c53ce05dca4/desktop.png

Samsung Slows Memory Chip Production to Keep Prices High RAM's never getting cheaper, boyos.

Good thing DDR3 can only get cheaper! Although I kinda regret not picking up some 4gb sticks while they were $12. https://www.ebay.com/itm/Micron-12GB-3x-4GB-PC3-14900E-1866MHz-DDR3-ECC-Memory-Modules-MT9JSF51272AZ/183227467819 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Samsung-12GB-3x4GB-M391B5273CH0-CH9-Ram-Memory-PC3-10600U/283109878264 https://www.ebay.com/itm/Apple-Mac-Pro-12GB-RAM-DIMM-PC3-10600E-1333-MHZ-DR3-1333-ECC-240-Pin-Hynix/283108240592 Maybe I'll just skip DDR4 entirely Can you AM4 guys not use ECC Unbuffered like the AM3 platforms can? I mean you can stuff ECC Unbuffered into practically anything but Intel mainstream platforms so X58, X79, X99 and X299 will take them too.

I guess you can but DDR4 ECC sticks are just as expensive refurbished as non ECC sticks are new.

Good thing that once NVMe SSDs get fast enough, their latency sinks low enough, and their longevity climbs high enough, you might just be able to page to a partition of that and get very similar performance That's still a ways off, but even now, Optane drives as RAM overflow work wonders for scientific applications, getting nearly 2/3 the performance of the equivalent amount of real RAM

Y'all seeing that new AMD Athlon 200GE based on Ryzen and Vega? What you get for only $55 USD is insane: Full playlist of 18 games tested here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL_sfYUCEg8OhaSHtZhVR8mfmlNC0BdIiU The rise in entry-level performance leaves me very enthusiastic.

No kidding. Huh. Yeah it's surprisingly easy to get decent performance out of budget hardware these days, as long as you don't cheap out too hard on your storage and manage your expectations.

Just won an auction for an eVGA GTX1080Ti 11GB. Only had to bid $585, but shipping is roughly $19.

My brother wants me to help build a $800-1000 PC. I made one in 2016 but I don't remember too much of the specifics Should we just follow a build someone else made on pcpartpicker?

Gaming: GPU > CPU > RAM > Storage Rendering: CPU > RAM > Storage > GPU Productivity: Storage > CPU > RAM > GPU Most important to least important for each task, keep this in mind when deciding how best to meet your budget.

A lot of entry-level SSDs will still be an enormous upgrade over the fastest mechanical HDD. 480GB Kingston A400 is 75€ here

should I nab a 1tb SSD right away? Is it a good idea to consider replacing my HDD completely with an SSD ?

If you can get the G4560 at MSRP. Intel has been having supply issues recently. Probably not aided by the fact their consumer dies have gained significant area, and they're pushing their Xeons are large as they can.

Why would you want to do that? Keep your media files on a HDD, it's fast enough for playing back pretty much anything or to serve as the location for your downloads. You'll rarely need to copy that stuff around, so there's not much use for the higher speeds. Unless you're doing some heavy editing any copying files around all day long, then you would benefit from an SSD. That being said, now or in the following months would be the best time to buy an SSD so don't wait too long to make the decision. The prices have been tanking due to the oversupply, so you want to get one before the entire industry decides to "fix" the problem.

Personally, I only buy SSD's. I'll never buy another mechanical drive unless I'm building something that needs an insane level of storage for cheap.

Anybody selling their 1060s? Just seeing what's out there

As far as SSDs as storage drives go, my NAS obviously has HDDs in it, and my computer has two mechanical 1tb HDDs (one intended for storage and one the boot drive from my old PC) and the majority of my games go on the storage mechanical drive, but I also have a 500GB SSD specifically for fast game storage for hefty loading games like GTA V and such. I think that currently (assuming no external storage) that a boot SSD of 120-240gb plus a big mechanical drive is the way to go, but if you have an extra hundred bucks or so, a 500gb SATA SSD is a great place to put games.

I'm able to pick up one of these brand new tomorrow for £550. Good buy?

Very. Besides the special features you’re getting the same performance as an RTX 2080 with less power consumption.

Perf-wise I know it'll be great, but I'm worried about some of the cooling aspects of it. Has anyone used one of these cards?

Back on the note of RTX, here's where I'm expecting the next few years to go: 2018 - First wave of RTX games are released, they all run like crap, are extremely buggy, and don't look noticeably better to the average consumer 2019 - Second wave of RTX-enhanced titles release early summer, third wave early winter, and while they run much better, developers are noticing the low install base due to high cost and bad early-life PR, and start clamoring for alternatives Late 2019 or early 2020 - Competing company (likely AMD) allies with open source community to craft an OpenRT standard, which winds up far less polished and detailed, but runs on significantly more hardware; devs start supporting both, and notice via collected metrics that more people are using OpenRT than RTX Late 2020 or early 2021 - A new console is announced, and boasts itself as the first ever with raytracing, achieved via modifying OpenRT instead of working with Nvidia; raytraced games get a sudden resurgence in coverage, and Nvidia is too slow to respond with a major update to the RTX technology before this console's hype hits critical mass Late 2021 - Said console is released, and although its RT method is noticeably lower quality than RTX (or even PC OpenRT), every game for this system must support it, and ports from this system to PC already support OpenRT, leading to raytracing finally going mainstream; Nvidia announces a successor to the 20-series is in development, and hastily releases software to help developers switch their game's RT from OpenRT to RTX, hoping to recapture support for the technology by marketing it as the "premium quality" choice

Fate never bends to AMD's benefit. AMD won't have a reasonable response to RTX until too late, probably via a Vulkan standard. Nvidia will release the 30XX series as soon as mass-7nm manufacturing comes around (2H 2019) and will be cheaper for RTX 2080 performance.

Sods law, somebody is going to find this post in 5 years time when we're all wearing RT hats and drinking RT coffee on the way to our RT jobs. But I don't think RT will become the next big thing. It's entirely possible that Sony and Microsoft will use it to peddle the Xbox One Two and the PS5 but it won't actually matter to the quality of games on the system. It's unlikely we'll see RT technology used in indie games or even AA, which is artistically where most of the good stuff is anyway. Use on consoles will be simple box ticking, if that. The hardware tax of using it will probably fall quite heavily, but still I doubt it'll make anything close to a splash in gaming. It's honestly a workstation research style technology marketed at gaming for some reason*. *where "some reason" is Nvidia's hubris and gaming's unhealthy obsession with the biggest graphix and highest quality pixels.

Why would AMD make their own standard, when RTX is freely available in Vulkan and DX12? It's not some proprietary nvidia API.

RTX is an Nvidia proprietary API. DXR is a DirectX extension for ray-tracing, based off of RTX. Vulkan doesn't have any RT extensions (Aside from RTX API plugging), AMD has slightly hinted they're working on a Vulkan RT standard (through Radeon Rays / Fire Rays / ProRender), but nothing official has been seen yet.

At work we do literally everything in browser (specifically chrome) and all our systems are 4GB 3040s, meaning I spend like 50% of my day just going round installing sticks of 4GB. It's funny how poorly prioritised machines and workload are in most environments. At my work productivity heavily favors RAM, but that's just because our infrastructure is completely broken and I suspect it's like that in a lot of mid-sized businesses. That said, in our setting storage is damn near useless since we pretty much use network drives and browsers. Honestly, I think most businesses should probably just use thin clients. Considering that most PCs here are used for browsers, word processing and spreadsheets.