Any PC Builders Out There?

That may be my next route too. PowerColor Red Devil 6700xt for $449. Huge step up from my rx580

 

Gigabyte Eagle 6700xt is $415 from Newegg right now with a promo code. I don't know the in's and out's of the different brands yet, and its my first build, so I expect I'll learn a few things about where I did well, and where I messed up lol. Hopefully this GPU serves me well.

 

Well, my first build went just about exactly how I expected it to; mostly stressful, 80% boost of confidence that I could do it by myself, and only a few issues I knew Google/Youtube could handle. I definitely realize that my build isn't very balanced price wise; I understand I could've saved plenty of money on the cooler/ram/case/psu, or invested that unneeded money spent on better performing GPU/CPU, BUT...its my first build. I'll sleep okay knowing I overspent for looks/RGB everything, because its what I wanted. That being said, here's everything I landed on, plus some thoughts and struggles I had along the way:

CPU - Intel i5 12600k
Motherboard - Gigabyte z690 Aorus Elite AX DDR4
GPU - Gigabyte Eagle 6700 XT
CPU Cooler - Corsair H150i Elite Capellix (non LCD)
RAM - Corsair Dominator 3600 CL16 32GB
Storage- 1TB Samsung 970 Evo Plus
PSU - Corsair RMx 1000w
Case - Phanteks Evolv X
OS- Windows 11 Home

First on the agenda, unbox and "organize" everything as best I could, to make the build process as smooth as possible. This was pure excitement, followed by an extreme sense of overwhelming fear.. I got as organized as I could, and started with the MB. Placing the CPU in its socket was super straight forward, but having zero experience, I had no reference of the pressure it required to seat the little pressure latch to hold it in place; broken pins and money down the drain was all I could think, but after triple checking it was properly seated in the socket, I locked her in place. Next up was ram; couldn't have been easier. Next, SSD; again pretty easy, and watched enough youtube videos to engrain in memory to remove the plastic from the heat shield/paste material! Next up, transition to case and move rear exhaust fan to become 3rd front intake fan/install new Corsair ML140 in rear exhaust orientation - easy enough. Then mounted MB in case; everything has been straight forward so far. Moved on to PSU in case, and this is where things started getting confusing for me. Figuring out which cables I needed to go ahead and preinstall was a process; looking back, its where I should've spent more time researching; all in all, got it figured out, and mounted the PSU, and roughly ran wires to their general area. Moved on to CPU cooler, and hit my first real snag. Still in its protective wrapper, I noticed the factory thermal paste was all over the inside of the bag.. With a little inspection, it appeared the plastic cover was never placed over the thermal paste, or it came off somewhere along the way in production/packaging. So, a trip to Best Buy for a tube of paste, cleaned it up, and got it all mounted up. Installed the GPU, did alot of rough wire running, and then got ready for first boot up. This is where true panic really began. Hooked mouse/kb/monitor up, and flipped the PSU switch. Fans and LEDs came on (and I thought that was strange). Anyways, hit the power button on the case, and it booted into BIOS flawlessly. Checked that everything looked "normal" and then booted into windows setup. Got that all squared away, downloaded some drivers, and everything was working awesome! Successful first build!

After some piddling, I called it a night and shut her down. I noticed all of my iCUE devices were still powered (fans spinning/LEDs on/fans jiggle after stopping spinning); again, thought that was weird, but just hit the PSU rocker switch to cut all power for the night. Next day, I piddled some more, worked through some hiccups with iCUE/LED controls not playing nice, and finally got everything up to date. The fans still spinning/LEDs on after shut down still had me stumped; after some research/google, I came across a couple others that found an ERP setting in BIOS, and toggling it on/off seemed to fix it. From what I understand the ERP function allows the PSU to still feed power to MB USB header after shut down, for functions like charging USB devices while off (keyboard/mouse/headset/etc). Toggling that setting fixed my problem.

My only current "issue" (and this may be normal, I just don't know), is that when I put my PC to "sleep", all iCUE LED devices (fans/cooler/ram) still remain lit, and the fans seem to "jiggle" every couple seconds. I did figure out that configuring "hardware lighting" for each device in iCUE, I could delete any lighting profiles or turn LED's to black, and that would turn all LED's off while in Sleep Mode/not connected to iCUE; however, the fans still "jiggle" or "pulse" while in sleep. I don't know if its normal, but I'm led to believe that while in sleep, the fans are still receiving power, just not enough to actually spin them. Its almost like they're trying to spin, but not receiving sufficient power to actually get them going. Any thoughts on this? This may be a super basic principle, but I truly just don't even know if fans are supposed to be on or off while in sleep; there seems to be alot of conflicting info out there.

 

If you go amd, the 5000 series are great processors. If you dont do any stuff that requires lots of cores, go for the 5600. The x version squeaks out a little more boost clock, so if you see it on sale for similar price, might as well go with the x variant. All amd processors are unlocked, so based off what mobo you get, that (and how far you can push your cpu) will be the limit. The G versions have integrated graphics, probably not really useful with a dedicated gpu.

AMD just announced the 7000 series cpus last night. This is a new socket AM5. They had been on AM4 since 2017, so a hell of a ride for that socket. The 7000 series will support pci-e gen 5 and ddr5. From what i hear, ddr5 is still very expensive compared to ddr4. But i guess if you wanted to future proof your build for as long as possible, that would be a good way to go. I believe 7000 series goes on sale end of sept. And if power consumption (and heat) are a concern, the ryzen cpus have had intel beat for quite a while on performance per watt.

If you were to pair that cpu with a radeon gpu of current gen, it uses some sort of magic to give better performance in gaming. Not sure what it is they do.

Hopefully that helps a bit on amd stuff. I have a few amd systems in the house, and an old i7 7700 (non k), and prefer the amd based systems. I dont game though, so the best gpu i currently have is a 1060.

 

That hurts, I game on a GTX1060.....

As far as cores go I don't really know what requires multi-core multi-threading but more cores and threads equal more processes yeah? That's why the multi-core chipsets beat out higher core-clock lower core-count cpus in speed comparisons from what I've observed. I'm just trying to figure out why my CPU will max out on some games and stutter. For example: I can run Cyberpunk 2077 on high settings (with low reflections/shadows) at ~140FPS all day long, but load up 7 Days to Die and my CPU is maxed out constantly and I go from 70FPS down to 1 or 2 while the game saves. Just an optimization issue or is my CPU starting to bottleneck? Or is my GPU so ass it's offloading to my CPU? Idk. 7DTD is physics heavy so maybe that's just the nature of the beast. Guess I could do a light OC.

 

I specced out a 5950x build for my wife after her old i5 bit the bullet a few days ago. We went higher end on everything since she want to get into Blender, and I have to admit, it makes my i7-8700k feel tame by comparison. We also found a decent deal on a 3080 for a GPU, though the Ti would have been nice to have.

I maybe looking into the 7000 series when they come out.

 

Yes.

Using the X690 Intel platform on an Asus ROG Hero MB. It came with a two slot PCI-E add in card that connects to a low MB slot which is linked to the X670 chipset, not the CPU directly, and can be bifurcated to two NVMe drives held within the card. Basically to get the Raid setup I had to install the Intel Management Engine drivers in Windows, enable the slot to bifurcation mode in the Bios, enable Intel RST in the Bios, and walk through the steps in Bios to setup hardware Raid. Then Windows could see the hardware Raid properly even after Bios updates.

I know that AMD no longer supports true hardware Raid. They do support a version of software Raid that is handled by the Bios though. Everything I've read shows similar performance to Intel hardware Raid, so it's fine that way but you might lose the array if you update the Bios. Honestly hardware Raid is dying. Next time I'll probably just build a software Raid array within Windows, especially if I go AMD again.

 

My son plays fortnite and roblox on the 1060. It still does a good job on a 1080p 144hz monitor.

Not sure why the wild framerate changes. But yeah, i would guess that slower game is running something that is not optimized to run on the older processor.

 

Thats interesting, and pretty cheap. As long as your mobo has two pci-e x16 that can both run at full x16 speeds. If you populate all 4 of the nvme, i would probably rig up a small fan to keep them cool.

 

I haven't messed with Windows in a while, but can you do software RAID with ReFS?

 

7 days is an early access game still in alpha development and its performance is absolute ass. Don't lose a wink of sleep over how it runs on your system. I will say that GTX1060 is holding you wayyyyyyy back on any games made since like 2019ish. As a point of reference a ~$250 RX6600 would give you roughly double the performance these days.

The 9700k should still be hanging in there fine despite the lack of hyperthreading. I don't even think an upgrade to a 9900k would be worth it in the current market. You can currently get a AMD 5700x 8C/16T CPU + a B550 mobo for $300 combined and you'll be up to date with the latest and greatest(subjectively) at this time. Heck I spotted a 5600 CPU for $99 on a flash sale the other day. This is the best market I've seen in a while with AM4 on the way out. Dealers are unloading mobo/CPU stock like crazy right now.

 

If money was no issue, I'd just wait and build something stupid with an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and a 4000 series nvidia card or AMD equivalent. But I'm just a poor boy.
That DDR5 6000MHz RAM though...

I'll have to see what's good on the AMD side of GPUs. I know in the past AMD drivers were behind Nvidia in terms of compatibility/issues out the gate with new games. I know nothing of the current.

 

I wonder if 3000/6000 gpu's are going to drop even more in price when new generation drops. 3080ti founders edition $899 at best buy and even an evga ftw3 3090 is $999 and no shortage of stock.

 

It'll also be interesting as they're re-releasing some 30 series with upgraded vram (GDDR6X?) which will make the old versions even older. I feel like there's going to be a lot of options that are all within $50 of each other soon..

 

I can't see GDDR6X on anything below a 80 series refresh card. It's expensive, hard to cool, and provides a minimum bump. I'm pretty sure the refresh 30 series will just be a memory speed bump if GDDR6. Faster GDDR6 is available than came with the cards stock.

 

Looks like 3060ti and 3070ti are getting it, along with a lower memory 3060 with 8gb ram instead of 12 at gddr6, and the 3070ti is stepping up a die to ga102

https://www.techspot.com/news/95939-refreshed-nvidia-rtx-3060-3060-ti-3070-ti.html

 

Interesting, though that's just a leak without any real firm evidence behind it. The reason I don't think nVidia would go that way is that it's challenging compared to a simple refresh with faster versions of GDDR6 like what AMD did with the 6X50 cards. Plus GDDR6X has only one source, though that might be why they do it. Micron (IIRC, might be someone else) is the only company that makes it because it's not a JDEC standard which has made it effectively an nVidia exclusive. It's possible nVidia doesn't have a home for their GDDR6X orders now that the market for high end cards has died and is simply looking for a route to get rid of it.

 

Just relaying what I saw, who knows what'll happen.

 

I guess I never did post any pics of my first build recently. Absolutely love this incredibly overkill expensive case (phanteks evolv x). Wire management was way better than I had anticipated, and having glass on both sides is a really pleasing aesthetic since the boring side of the case is exposed to the rest of my room.

 

No more Nvidia EVGA gpus. Wow