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>> No. 26960 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 1:54 pm
26960 Building a PC
Inspite of everything, I've given myself the medium term goal of building a decent PC, with a view to updrading it over time. I need to edit video and I'd like to play games on it, of course, so since Monday I've been doing some fairly basic research and making sure I wasn't playing myself by adding any daft components I don't need.

The following link is my basic idea that I'll be adding further SSDs and more RAM to over time, but I'd like to know if anyone has any advice, generally or specifically, about building a PC and possibly saving money while doing so. Video cards are still slightly mysterious to me right now.

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/Fv4LBb
Expand all images.
>> No. 26961 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 2:53 pm
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For video editing, you'll probably want some HDDs for bulk storage.

That, and make sure 450W is enough - I think you might be cutting it a bit close.
>> No. 26962 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 4:05 pm
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Are you editing 4k video? If so, 8GB of RAM might struggle on more complicated projects, and the 1050ti too. It'll work, it just might be a bit frustrating. I work with audio and I can push my 32GB, sometimes. Like you say though, you're leaving room for expansion there. That cooler also looks suspiciously small and cheap, so I'd keep an eye on your temperatures with that thing, though it's worth a shot for a fiver.

If it was me I'd spend the extra for a GTX 1060 6GB, my thinking is that it's significantly better for modern gaming, and it's not my area of expertise, but I have to assume that video rendering is significantly quicker also. The latter has the real world advantage of saving you money on the electricity if your render times are shorter. The 1050ti is still decent, but I suspect you'll find it lacking a year or so down the line.

As >>26961 says, 450 is probably "just" enough to run that system, but you'd be right out of luck if you wanted to add a better graphics card later. And you'll definitely want a couple of TB of HDD space for video projects.

I apologise for my suggestions basically just bumping up your budget in three or four different ways, though.
>> No. 26963 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 4:59 pm
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>>26962>>26961
RAM and SSDs are there just to get me going, yeah, and I've got plenty of external storage devices knocking out of at least 500GB in size. I've already ordered that cooler too, but it only cost me what was left of a soon-to-expire gift voucher.

For the relatively minor additional cost of a GTX 1060 it seems like a good idea, and I was completely ignorant about what I was looking for in a power supply before your posts so thanks for the heads up.
>> No. 26964 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 5:37 pm
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The CPU cooler is unnecessary, because Ryzen processors come with a very good stock cooler.

There are a variety of GTX 1050 Ti cards available for under £150, which should perform almost identically to your chosen card.

https://www.ebuyer.com/780605-msi-geforce-gtx-1050-ti-4gt-oc-graphics-card-gtx-1050-ti-4gt-oc

Your choice of motherboard is probably overkill; a B350 board will get the job done just as well for about £30 less. You could get away with an A320 board costing less than £50 if you don't mind losing overclocking. Ryzen processors have very little overclocking capability, so this isn't a great tragedy.

These savings combined should give enough room in your budget for a hard drive.

I'd give some thought to your peripherals, because a decent keyboard and mouse make a world of difference. I'd suggest a Logitech G203 and an Aukey KM-G9, which should set you back about £47 for the pair via Amazon.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Logitech-Gaming-Optical-Colour-Customising/dp/B01MYQ4HJD/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/AUKEY-Mechanical-Ten-Keyless-Anti-Ghosting-Resistant/dp/B0716DYCGQ/

>That, and make sure 450W is enough - I think you might be cutting it a bit close.

There's at least 100W of headroom with that spec. A bigger PSU might make sense if OP has definite plans to upgrade to a much more powerful GPU at some point.

https://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator
>> No. 26965 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 6:13 pm
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>>26962
As an aside, the PCIE powered version of the 1060 is shit. Get the PSU model, if anything.
>> No. 26966 Anonymous
21st December 2018
Friday 10:19 pm
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eBuyer have got the 8GB RX570 for £150. It's roughly equal in performance to the GTX 1060 6GB, so it's a steal at that price.

https://www.ebuyer.com/869314-gigabyte-radeon-rx-570-gaming-8gb-graphics-card-gv-rx570gaming-8gd

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-GTX-1060-6GB-vs-AMD-RX-580/3639vs3923
>> No. 26967 Anonymous
22nd December 2018
Saturday 2:09 am
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>>26960
I like your setup - the Samsung SSDs are really good, have loads of them. Agree with others that you need more RAM and you should think about a bigger PSU. Really like ASUS motherboards and have used them a lot.

Also, as this is your first ever build, I would start with a bigger case - you'll just find it easier to work with.
>> No. 26988 Anonymous
27th December 2018
Thursday 7:42 pm
26988 Hijacking this thread
I'm building a new PC too, can some of you chaps look over my parts list and give me any comments?

For the amount of gaming I actually do nowadays, it's probably a bit over the top, but I've got the money sitting in my bank and it's hard to compromise. I think I'm at the best point in terms of bang-for-buck with this list.

A few general points I should make:
My monitor is a 1080p main display, plus a lower resolution display. At some point in the future I'll probably retire the smaller one and move to a QHD main + a 1080 second display, so I want a graphics card with enough headroom for that.
RAM, I really wanted 32GB, but prices are astronomical and depending who you listen to, 16GB is enough to run any modern game and leave a million tabs open in chrome in the background.
CPU, I'm not sure if this is really the best option, considering that the next step down is the -probablygoodenough- 6 core i5 and it's over £100 cheaper.
PSU, eh... I'm always lost here. 550W should be enough according to partpicker but I'm never confident about the PSU choice.
CPU cooler, probably going to spend a bit extra and go for one of the sealed water cooling systems.


CPU: Intel - Core i7-9700K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor (£380.07 @ CCL Computers)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (£23.00 @ PC World Business)
Motherboard: Asus - ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£224.02 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (£136.85 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung - 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive (£105.18 @ Aria PC)
Storage: Seagate - Barracuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£54.97 @ CCL Computers)
Video Card: MSI - GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8 GB Video Card (£414.98 @ Ebuyer)
Case: Phanteks - Enthoo Pro M Tempered Glass (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case (£84.93 @ Ebuyer)
Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA G2 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£94.97 @ Amazon UK)
Optical Drive: Asus - DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer (£22.21 @ Amazon UK)
Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit (£93.18 @ Aria PC)
Total: £1634.36
>> No. 26989 Anonymous
27th December 2018
Thursday 9:47 pm
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>>26988

Your spec list is sufficient bordering on overkill, even for 1440p gaming.

You can't go wrong with a 9700K, but an i7-8700 or an i5-9600K should be within a couple of FPS on most games. A Ryzen R7 2700X might be a slightly better choice if you plan on doing video editing or 3d rendering, at the cost of some gaming performance.

If you're not planning on running aggressive overclocks on your graphics card, OcUK have a Zotac 1070 Ti on offer for £347.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/zotac-geforce-gtx-1070ti-mini-8192mb-gddr5-pci-express-graphics-card-zt-p10710g-10p-gx-10s-zt.html

The ROG STRIX Z390-E is an excellent motherboard, but you could probably save a few quid without really noticing the difference.

If you're considering an AIO water cooler, the CoolerMaster Masterliquid Lite 240 is an excellent value option at £50. The Hyper 212 Evo will be more than sufficient if you're not overclocking. The Deepcool Gammaxx 400 is a marginally better cooler than the Hyper 212 Evo for about the same price.

PSU recommendations are generally over-inflated, because a lot of cheap off-brand PSUs massively overstate their actual wattage capacity. That rig will realistically draw about 420W under full synthetic loads and something like 340W in actual gaming use, so a good quality 550W PSU will be perfectly sufficient even with decent overclocks. You'd still have a reasonable amount of headroom if you later upgraded to an RTX 2080 Ti.

You can get OEM Windows 10 license keys for about £30 from various third-party resellers. It's a tiny bit shady and the license will be locked to that PC, but it's a worthwhile saving IMO.

https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/feature/windows/cheap-windows-keys-3665849/
>> No. 27001 Anonymous
10th January 2019
Thursday 10:53 pm
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Hello, Computer Friends. There's a SSD M.2 going for £15 and while it's only 32GB would that make a decent boot drive? Or is that cutting a bit fine for an OS and used SSDs are garbage and I'm a dumb dumb who just needs to stop.
>> No. 27002 Anonymous
10th January 2019
Thursday 11:01 pm
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>>27001
For just the OS that is fine.
>> No. 27003 Anonymous
10th January 2019
Thursday 11:35 pm
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>>27002
Alright, now all I need is a case, a CPU, a GPU, a power supply and a motherboard.
>> No. 27004 Anonymous
10th January 2019
Thursday 11:38 pm
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>>27001

In terms of capacity, it's tight but useable. I can't speak to the performance, but any 32GB drive is probably slow by modern standards but lightning fast compared to a hard drive. SSDs are very durable for most consumer workloads - the scratch SSD in my current machine has been absolutely thrashed and reports as 88% remaining life.

If you're still booting from a hard drive, any old SSD will be a huge improvement.
>> No. 27005 Anonymous
11th January 2019
Friday 1:39 am
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>>27002

I wouldn't count on it, the update process on Windows these days is ridiculously inefficient and need unpacking space etc, so the reality is you need way more space than you really should.

I had a netbook with a 32gb SSD, I had literally the OS and OpenOffice and perhaps like... Quake on it and I couldn't make enough space to complete a windows update. So it was stuck in a permanent hell cycle of that annoying pop-up reminded coming up every time you turn it on, trying to force the download through, and fucking it up.

If you have another HDD it wouldn't be a problem I suppose but keep in mind the short sighted idiocy of modern tech conventions.
>> No. 27006 Anonymous
11th January 2019
Friday 1:41 am
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>>27001
What >>27004 said. Also, M.2 is the form factor. The interface will be either SATA or NVMe, and if your machine supports it the latter is considerably faster.
>> No. 27007 Anonymous
11th January 2019
Friday 4:40 am
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>>27001

Don't even think about buying that. Although M.2 has the option of a faster connection...you can get 120GB SATA SSDs for close to £20 these days.
>> No. 27008 Anonymous
11th January 2019
Friday 10:44 am
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I decided against the cheapo SSD in the end, for the size it's not great value, nor is it really worth shaving a couple of seconds off the boot time over the SSD I'm hoping to get anyway. Thanks for all your help.
>> No. 27010 Anonymous
12th January 2019
Saturday 5:38 pm
27010 spacer
>>26988 back again.

Here's my final list. I've now got everything except the motherboard and windows which I haven't ordered yet because I'm smart like that.

CPU: Intel - Core i5-9600K 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: be quiet! - Silent Loop 280 94.2 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler (overkill but for reasons I'm sticking on the front intake so I want more and cooler air, plus it's not that much more than the 240 really)
Motherboard: Gigabyte - Z390 AORUS PRO ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
Memory: Kingston - Predator 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (DDR prices should be falling this year, and DDR4 will probably come down even more when DDR5 starts hitting the market next year, so at some point I intend to replace this with 32GB of memory so I can leave a ton of tabs open in chrome all the time.)
Storage: Samsung - 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
Storage: Seagate - Barracuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1070 Ti 8 GB FTW ULTRA SILENT GAMING Video Card (got super lucky here and ordered this when it was £400 and now it's £460 pretty much everywhere) (The RTX2060 is apparently a good competitor, but I think I'm better off waiting at least for the second generation ray-tracing capable boards before upgrading if I ever do.)
Case: be quiet! - SILENT BASE 801 | ORANGE ATX Mid Tower Case
Power Supply: SeaSonic - FOCUS Plus Gold 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
(& a set of orange braided PSU cable extensions because OCD)
Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit
Total: £1600 ish I lost count
>> No. 27011 Anonymous
12th January 2019
Saturday 7:12 pm
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>>27010
Can't vouch for it but I've known people to save a few quid by getting their Windows key off a CD key website.
>> No. 27012 Anonymous
12th January 2019
Saturday 7:42 pm
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>>27011

I think you can use Windows 10 for free now.

Still, at £1600 I'm not sure costs are that much of an issue here. Think that's more than I've spent in total on my PC since I built it in 2010.

(I really just want to say how much I appreciate my i5 750, what a champion CPU)
>> No. 27018 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 6:19 pm
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>>27012


Let's just say, you don't pay with money...
>> No. 27019 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 6:44 pm
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>>27018
Does it count as making a reference if you include an image to make sure everyone knows what you're on about?
>> No. 27020 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 7:21 pm
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>>27018
You also don't pay with data if you know what you're doing.
>> No. 27021 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 8:00 pm
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>>27019
I think it is required to imply the software is cursed otherwise I'd assume the payment was sexual favours. That's what it is 9 time out of 10 when that line is in something.
>> No. 27022 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 8:20 pm
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>>27020

Let's imagine a world where there are laws in place protecting an individual's right to the control of their personal information. None of this shady "by using our service you implicitly agree to let us harvest your data" bullshit, let's imagine companies had to explicitly buy your data from you personally, like paying you to use your likeness or what have you.

How much would a company have to pay an individual for their data?
>> No. 27023 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 9:20 pm
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>>27022
Based on a principle of reciprocity, I'd be expecting at a 30% royalty.
>> No. 27024 Anonymous
14th January 2019
Monday 10:00 pm
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>>27022
There's an XKCD for everything!
>> No. 27025 Anonymous
16th January 2019
Wednesday 9:07 am
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>>27022
That kind of fantasy world actually gets me a bit hard.
>> No. 27026 Anonymous
16th January 2019
Wednesday 2:34 pm
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>>27025

GDPR m8. Your consent is revocable at any time. If you've ticked a box saying "you can do what you like with my data", you've got the right to change your mind.

https://gdpr-info.eu/art-7-gdpr/
>> No. 27027 Anonymous
17th January 2019
Thursday 12:56 pm
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>>27019
Would you kindly explain what's going on on this picture?
Also the bloody bottle is half-empty.
>> No. 27028 Anonymous
17th January 2019
Thursday 9:21 pm
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>>27027
I believe it is something to do with a show called Rick and Morty.
>> No. 27037 Anonymous
8th February 2019
Friday 10:40 pm
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Let's say I had a very slim case, that likely couldn't fit a desired graphics card into it, is there any reason, beyond the surely awful aesthetics, not to just cut a hole in the side of the case for the card to poke out of?
>> No. 27039 Anonymous
8th February 2019
Friday 10:59 pm
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>>27037
Airflow, for one. It no longer being a faraday cage is another. Dist and static become an issue, as does accidental damage and exposure to moisture.

Just buy a bigger case. If you can afford a card that big, you can afford a £50 case.
>> No. 27040 Anonymous
8th February 2019
Friday 11:13 pm
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>>27039
>If you can afford a card that big, you can afford a £50 case.

I'm trying to fit a Radeon HD7770 1GB into a OptiPlex 3020, so, no I can't. It might fit anyway, but it's difficult to say. The case I'm looking at seems quite large, and I think the one being talked about online is a slimmer model.
>> No. 27041 Anonymous
9th February 2019
Saturday 1:40 am
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>>27040

It'll work fine with the side panel off. You'll need to pay attention to dust and the whole assembly will be a bit rickety, but it'll work. You might need to trim a bit of the metal around the expansion card slots to make it fit. You'll need a Molex to 6-pin power adapter to power the card.

If you're planning to transplant the innards of a Dell Small Form Factor computer into a standard ATX case, don't - the motherboard and PSU are non-standard and won't fit without extensive modification.
>> No. 27042 Anonymous
9th February 2019
Saturday 10:28 am
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>>27041
Yeah agreed - repurposing any bits of Dell kit is a lottery, that hardly ever works as they don't stick to standard size anything. I have found it is generally false economy to try and recycle or repurpose Dells into anything else.
>> No. 27043 Anonymous
9th February 2019
Saturday 12:19 pm
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>>27041>>27042
This is what I'm looking at. The CPU alone seems to be worth the asking price, Maybe if everything comes up Anon I could spring for a GTX 750, which is both smaller and less power hungry than a HD7770.
>> No. 27044 Anonymous
9th February 2019
Saturday 4:22 pm
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>>27043

That's a normal mid-tower and it'll take full-size video cards without modification. It's the small form factor PCs with half-height card slots that are a problem, although you can buy half-height GTX 750 and 1050 cards.
>> No. 27045 Anonymous
11th February 2019
Monday 11:02 am
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Are there any YouTube channels who focus on computer hardware performance in things that aren't games? I'm really not arsed about 144FPS in Battlefield Nine.2 Redux, but not being able shift a timeline around would be a genuine ballache. If it's there it's buried, because I've been looking.
>> No. 27046 Anonymous
11th February 2019
Monday 12:11 pm
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>>27045

Not really. Non-gaming tasks are so diverse that it's really hard to capture performance in a video. Fortunately, if you understand the dimensions of performance you can make a reasonable guesstimate about how much an upgrade will benefit you.

Open the Performance tab in Task Manager and see where you're getting bottlenecked. Boot times and application loading are severely bottlenecked by the random I/O performance of a hard drive, which will be indicated by 100% utilisation of the main drive. For general responsiveness, it's overwhelmingly important to get a decent SSD. If you're running out of RAM, that's your bottleneck (bearing in mind that an SSD substantially mitigates the performance impact of running out of RAM).

The CPU graphs show utilisation on each core, which will indicate whether you're bottlenecked on a single core or all cores; looking up the single and multithreaded performance scores on cpubenchmark.net will give you a good idea of the performance difference between your current CPU and your prospective choice of CPU. For example, an i5-3570K scores 2028 single and 7172 multi, versus an i7-7700k's scores of 2583 and 12037, giving us a performance increase of 27% and 68% respectively.
>> No. 27869 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 1:58 am
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I've had my current desktop PC for over 10 years, and it still works but I think now is the time to replace it. It cost around £1000 when I bought it, and I've been looking around the £1000 budget mark on Logical Increments to get an idea of what I should be replacing it with. However, I am likely to go over this budget.

Are video cards or anything bigger than they were ten years ago? I naturally decided I wanted the biggest case I could get, for 1337 pwnage of n00bs, but some cases nowadays are a foot wide. A "full tower" case, which I assumed was what I have now, is actually far bigger and my current case is a mid-tower case. Why would a case need to be bigger than the one I have now?

I want my new computer to last for a decade and do basically everything. I don't want there to be things it cannot do. However, in practice, it will be 95% used for shitposting and YouTube. One thing I would like to attempt, however, is setting up multiple virtual machines on this PC. I want to have the option to play modern games, but the highest graphics aren't that important, and to be honest, the most recent game I have ever played in my life has been Bioshock 2. Mostly, I play the Age of Empires games and other games released around 2000-2005. Would it be possible to set up a VM to run Windows XP, say, and just play those games still? Or would gaming on a virtualised machine be horrific and nasty?

Because I'm more interested in doing lots of things than in doing any one specific thing, my CPU should have lots of cores and the speed doesn't matter so much, right? One VM for playing Age of Empires, one to learn about Gentoo Linux, one for clicking on spam links that will give me viruses, and one for Windows 98 when I really want to regress into my childhood. An AMD Ryzen with six cores would be great for that, wouldn't it?

Can I have both an SSD and a regular hard drive, mirrored in RAID-1? Or would the slower HDD then remove all the speed benefits of an SSD? My current machine has a 1TB hard drive and I haven't filled that.

Also, because I like old games, an optical drive is vitally important for me. Lots of cases I look at now don't seem to have any option for optical drives at all. Do they really just not bother, or are the drive bays still there but hidden behind the rainbow-LED fans and water pipes that modern cases love so much?

Pic unrelated; I saved it onto this machine many years ago, to show that I keep things for a long time.
>> No. 27870 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 2:12 am
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>>27869
> Are video cards or anything bigger than they were ten years ago?

Depends, of course, but potentially yes. Some of the higher end graphics cards are beastly huge so check their dimensions, particularly the length and to a lesser extent their width. Everything else is still pretty much the same size, give or take some fancy cooling setups.

> Can I have both an SSD and a regular hard drive, mirrored in RAID-1? Or would the slower HDD then remove all the speed benefits of an SSD?

Since its mirrored, yes, you're bottlenecking the SSD. It is, generally speaking, a terrible idea to RAID-1 with two dissimilar devices. What're you hoping to gain from this, out of interest? "RAID is not backup" is as true now as it was 20 years ago.

> Do they really just not bother, or are the drive bays still there but hidden behind the rainbow-LED fans and water pipes that modern cases love so much?

Many genuinely don't bother so if you definitely want an integrated drive make check twice to make sure. Using a USB attached optical drive works quite well, though, so unless your games have very weird and wonderful anti-copying mechanisms that might be an option to consider.
>> No. 27871 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 12:51 pm
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>>27869

Important warning: The video card market is catastrophically fucked at the moment due to ethereum mining. Anything new is either out of stock, selling at a huge mark-up or both; even two-generation-old cards on eBay are selling for twice what they did a year ago. If you don't plan on playing modern AAA games, I'd recommend buying an older card or even relying on an integrated GPU until the market normalises.

>Are video cards or anything bigger than they were ten years ago?

Huge cases have been around for a while, but they're largely pointless. High-end GPUs have been getting bigger, but even the biggest are only about 320mm long which is no problem for most compact cases on the market. What you do want is airflow - modern components are more sensitive to temperature and will automatically boost or throttle to match the available thermal headroom. Cases with an open mesh front will run cooler and quieter than more restrictive cases, because the fans can move more air at lower RPMs.

>Would it be possible to set up a VM to run Windows XP, say, and just play those games still?

Yep, that's no problem. If you're planning on doing a lot of virtualisation, go for at least 16GB of RAM - VMs can't share memory, so you need enough RAM for all the VMs you'll be running simultaneously.

>An AMD Ryzen with six cores would be great for that, wouldn't it?

Ryzen is the current outright performance champion and you really can't go wrong with a 3600 or 5600. Bizarrely, Intel is now the value option - the i5 11400 isn't quite as good as the Ryzen 5 5600X, but it's a lot cheaper.

>Can I have both an SSD and a regular hard drive, mirrored in RAID-1?

Yes, but you wouldn't gain anything as modern SSDs are considerably more reliable than hard drives. Hard drives usually suffer irrevocable data loss when they fail, but SSDs usually fall back into read-only mode. Read speed of a RAID 1 array is the sum of all devices, but write speed is limited by the slowest device and there's a risk of weirdness due to the high seek latency of hard drives. For backup purposes, I'd recommend a USB hard drive or an entry-level NAS.

>an optical drive is vitally important for me... Do they really just not bother?

Yep, optical drives are now largely considered obsolete (except for in Germany, for some weird reason). I haven't had one for years. The Fractal Design Focus G still has ODD bays and the Cooler Master NR400/NR600 is available in a version with an ODD bay.
>> No. 27872 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 1:08 pm
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>>27869

The way the market is right now, you'll spend a grand on the video card alone, and it won't even be a good one. It'll just be the only one you could get hold of.

If I were you I'd wait on a bit if you possibly can, because the global supply chain really seems to be on it's arse right now.
>> No. 27873 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 1:27 pm
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>>27869

I'm in the same situation as you, but, as said, I'm just going to wait until graphics chips are more affordable, otherwise it's just a hideous waste of money.

You don't mention your current system, but frankly the only thing holding my rig back in modern times is the fact I cheaped out and bought a GTX1060, as it was originally built for music production and didn't even have a graphics card until about five years ago. The 4790K and 64GB of (admittedly only ddr3) RAM seems to still handle stuff quite well, and if in an alternate universe I could just shove an RTX card in there for a few hundred quid I feel like that's all I'd need.
>> No. 27874 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 1:48 pm
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>>27873

>if in an alternate universe I could just shove an RTX card in there for a few hundred quid I feel like that's all I'd need

You'd be severely CPU bottlenecked in most scenarios - if you don't want to upgrade your whole rig, you'd be better off with an AMD GPU.


>> No. 27875 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 2:20 pm
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Thanks for your assistance!
>>27870
I certainly won't be getting a giant top-end graphics card. I have never cared about graphics cards because I don't really care about graphics, but I know I do need one. If regular ones still fit in regular cases, I probably won't blow £100 on the mad giant one I was looking at. And yes, I was half-considering using my old hard drive, or a new replacement hard drive, as a backup, but also for additional storage if I ever need it. I hadn't really put much thought into it; it sounds pointless now.

>>27871
I did forget to mention memory. It's usually pretty cheap, so I would probably start out with 16GB and then bump myself up to 32GB, or maybe even 64GB if I'm feeling mad, in the future. I'll check out those cases, especially if the Logical Increments one I wanted (Phanteks Enthoo Pro) is massive for no practical benefit. I do like the look of having a huge fan on the front, though.

>>27873
>I'm just going to wait until graphics chips are more affordable
Out of curiosity, how long is this likely to take? People have been going mad for cryptocurrency for a couple of years now. I was under the impression that only big fancy cards were overpriced, but if they're all overpriced now, waiting seems like a brilliant idea.
>> No. 27876 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 3:28 pm
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>>27874

Interesting. I really don't want to upgrade my whole rig until I absolutely have to, I haven't even had to overclock my i7 yet so I feel like I'll run it as long as it survives, and any upgrade now would be a daisy chain effect that leads to replacing everything save for the case, and even then, probably the case.

I will bear this in mind for after the graphicspocalypse. Are AMD cards any less like hen's teeth at the moment?
>> No. 27877 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 3:36 pm
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>>27875

>Out of curiosity, how long is this likely to take?

I don't think anyone knows. There are a lot of factors, though I think the shortage of silicon chips has mostly been solved, the problem now is the sheer increase in tech purchases due to the pandemic and so on. So until the world is going outdoors again, we may not see supply catch up with demand.

There's also the problem that if enough people are willing to pay £800 for a bottom end card, then there's no reason for them ever to come back down to a reasonable price. Perhaps that's too simplistic, but until there's an abundance of cards gathering dust on shelves like the good old days, cards won't be priced in our favour.
>> No. 27878 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 4:37 pm
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Lancool_215_RGB.jpg
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>>27875

How about two humongous fans?

https://lian-li.com/product/lancool-215/

>I was under the impression that only big fancy cards were overpriced

If all you need is an HDMI output, you can pick up something like a GT 710 for about £30 on eBay, but it'll be basically useless for anything 3D. Any card capable of running current-generation games is somewhere between "overpriced" and "absolutely fucking insane". Even semi-obsolete cards from the GTX 600/700 series are selling at a premium. I think your least-worst option right now is probably a GTX 960 off eBay, but you'll still be paying well over the odds.

>>27876

Everything is like hen's teeth. People are paying £300 for RX470s that were £180 new in 2016. Totally fucking mental.

>>27877

>until there's an abundance of cards gathering dust on shelves

The hope is that when the latest Ethereum bubble bursts, the used market will be flooded with current-gen cards and new cards will return to MSRP. Biden is threatening to hike the capital gains tax on cryptocurrencies and Ethereum will switch to proof-of-stake soon, so with any luck there should be a big sell-off of mining cards before the end of the year.
>> No. 27879 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 4:46 pm
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>>26960
I'll sell you my old Sapphire VapourX 290X 4GB for a £100.

It's a silicon lottery card, and can be overclocked to 1650mem/1325core which makes it only a very slightly under powered vs the like of the 580.

It's also been refurbished with new thermal paste recently as I was bored after I got a new rig and wanted to see how high I could push it. Turns out quite high.
>> No. 27880 Anonymous
24th April 2021
Saturday 7:30 pm
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>>27878
>two humongous fans?
I love it! But it doesn't have room for an optical drive, so it's a forbidden love.

Also, I invested £3,000 in cryptocurrency approximately a week ago, taking my total pretend-money assets to £3,600, and it's down to £2,900 now. If the bubble is going to burst, it's doing it now.
>> No. 27881 Anonymous
25th April 2021
Sunday 6:26 am
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Aw yiss. Motha. Fuckin. ASICs.


>> No. 27882 Anonymous
27th April 2021
Tuesday 11:07 am
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>>27039
A computer case is not a Faraday cage. Having an exterior shell that's grounded is what removes the risk of static shock.
>> No. 27883 Anonymous
27th April 2021
Tuesday 1:28 pm
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>>27880
If you're prepared to just chuck that much money away, I could do some serious good for my local community with that.
>> No. 27884 Anonymous
27th April 2021
Tuesday 7:43 pm
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>>27883
I'd be genuinely interested in hearing what you think can be done with three or four grand, because to me it seems like nothing. Maybe pay for groceries for a few families for a month or two?
>> No. 27886 Anonymous
27th April 2021
Tuesday 8:52 pm
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>>27884
It's enough to build and secure* a decent size and quality material greenhouse which I could use as a nursery to supply people with lots of free food plants every year, indefinitely. Myself and various charity/local-NGOs would foot the ongoing bill for the soil/compost and pots. Two and a half grand would be plenty, I can do the installation/labour myself.

*move fences around for protection.
>> No. 27889 Anonymous
28th April 2021
Wednesday 6:13 am
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>>27886

Where are you? I have an 18m sq glass one I was planning to give away for free.

Though saying that what's wrong with just paying a few hundred quid for a similar sized polytunnel?
>> No. 27892 Anonymous
28th April 2021
Wednesday 1:21 pm
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>>27889
London. Polytunnel degrades quite rapidly though that's an option.

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