The 'Build Me A PC' Thread

[Trippy]

I have no plans on ever buying an Intel chip for a personal PC purchase again. AMD has their shit together on both price and performance while Intel is just playing the equivalent of the "no one ever got fired for buying Cisco" card to keep themselves profitable.

It’s not like Intel hasn’t been trying but they lost their engineering focus and have botched multiple chip fabrication process node transitions (from 14nm to 10nm and 10nm to 7nm). Intel still has the manufacturing volume advantage which is why they haven’t lost even more market share — AMD’s manufacturing partners can’t make AMD CPUs fast enough to meet demand.

[Trippy]

The first batch of Intel's new 12th gen Alder Lake architecture CPUs have been announced and priced (in 1K quantities). The Alder Lake design is a significant departure from previous generations in that it has two types of cores -- performance cores and efficiency cores -- rather than a single (performance) type. This is similar to how some of the ARM CPUs have high-performance and high-efficiency cores. Release date is November 4th. The new CPUs also support PCIe 5.0 (Gen5) and DDR5.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/16959/intel-innovation-alder-lake-november-4th

It's going to be tricky to benchmark these things but Intel is claiming faster performance and / or lower power usage compared to 11th gen Rocket Lake CPUs, which wouldn't be hard given how bad Rocket Lake is in terms of performance to power.

Based on the 1K pricing it looks like the i5-12600KF ($264 for 1K pricing) with 6 perf & 4 eff cores (16 threads) will be competing against the AMD 5600X with 6 cores / 12 threads (~$299) while the i7-12700KF ($384 for 1K pricing) with 8 perf & 4 eff cores (20 threads) will be competing again the AMD 5800X with 8 cores / 16 threads (~399).

Edit: added AMD core counts

Review embargo has lifted. Check your favorite CPU / hardware review site or channel for details. tl;dr/w from what I’ve read and watched so far is performance is once again competitive with AMD but with a power draw similar to 11th high end CPUs — I.e. extremely high and much higher than AMD. Pricing is very competitive at the top end as well assuming you can find any of the out-of-stock CPUs for their non-marked up prices. Newegg has the 12900k listed at $649.00USD which is $100 less than the current price of the 5950X on Newegg. I wouldn’t be surprised to see AMD lower the prices of some of their CPUs in the near future. Amazon US already has scalpers selling the 12900K for more than double that $649 price.

[Sky]

I was excited to try Fan Control after hearing about it from Jay (2¢) https://github.com/Rem0o/FanControl.Releases Simple but oh man. The ability to tie case fan control to the thermistors on the gpu!? My CPU has never for a second been a problem with temps (it's water cooled), which means the case fans don't spin up nearly as much as they need to under heavy gpu load (esp with gddr6x). Doesn't support my shit motherboard, heh. It was always the intention to get a new case and mobo for these parts from my pandemic/supply shortage purchase, so that hasn 't changed, heh.

Playing RDR2 on ultra does get things a bit toasty, so while I was thinking about thermals I decided to finally get around to undervolting the 3090. Didn't push it too hard, but I dropped it to 900mV (from the previous 1081mV), kept my overall power limit to keep wattage low. Fans spin less, clock speeds are full bore (I had also been underclocking the memory by 500MHz, gpu was running at 1920MHz and is now 1950MHz). Thermals didn't drop much but 1C drop given faster clocks and quieter pc is pretty nice. Also less artifacting in RDR2 (my previous setup had an 80% power limit that led to some grass artifacts at the left and right edges of the screen, not too noticeable in gameplay, but still).

Still mostly the memory heat, and honestly at 89C for gddr6x under full load, that's not too shab. The gpu itself is running in the mid-70s, fans are maxing out around 60% (80% is where they get distractingly loud, about 3200rpm).

Anyway, HIGHLY recommend checking out that Fan Control software if you've ever dreamed of tying case fan rpm to gpu temps! Or more granular control, like the upper intake connected to the cpu temps and lower intake connected to the gpu, etc. Really cool. Har har.

[lamaros]

Ok, so I'm thinking it's time to update my PC again.

Assuming the last time I did this was around 2015, what would I likely be able to keep? I got a monitor, some more ram, and a SSD recently, otherwise I've not updated much.

MB is a Z97-PRO, Processor an i5-4690, and video card is a GTX 970.

Start from scratch other than the ram and SSD?

[Velorath]

Ok, so I'm thinking it's time to update my PC again.

Assuming the last time I did this was around 2015, what would I likely be able to keep? I got a monitor, some more ram, and a SSD recently, otherwise I've not updated much.

MB is a Z97-PRO, Processor an i5-4690, and video card is a GTX 970.

Start from scratch other than the ram and SSD?

Nvidia was originally rumored to release their 40 series towards the end of the year, although there's now been rumors of a delay as the 30 series went from retailers being unable to keep them in stock, to now stuck with a glut of inventory they want to move before the 40s arrive.

I'm in a similar boat to you as I built my last PC back in 2016 and also haven't updated much aside from the CPU once. I figure if I hold out for the 40s even if they're a bit hard to find at launch, I might just go with some sort of prebuilt pc as that seemed to be one of the easier ways to get a GPU at the height of crypto miners fucking up the market.

[Trippy]

If the SSD is an M.2 PCIe SSD that's all* you are going to be able to keep. Current gen MBs use DDR5 or DDR4 (a limited selection) and the last few gens all use DDR4. Another option is to just upgrade the GPU and wait for DDR5 to drop in price.

* If it's a SATA M.2 drive you *could* reuse it but you are missing out on the dramatic increase in performance PCIe provides

Edit: that's the Intel current gen that uses mainly DDR5. AMD's current gen still uses DDR4 but their next gen that also uses either DDR5 & DDR4 should be out in a couple of months

[lamaros]

Thanks, I think I will try and hold out for a bit longer then.

[Sky]

I'd get a 30 series card. Power draw is already high, and I throttle mine to 300W (it will pull close to 400 if I leave it uncapped). 40 series is higher, and then I saw this: https://www.techradar.com/news/new-nvidia-lovelace-spec-leak-is-downright-scandalous

EIGHT HUNDRED WATTS

We're going to be in Doc Brown territory by the 70 series.

[Velorath]

To the best of my understanding, that leak is discussing what would essentially be something along the lines of a 4090 Ti which I don't think is what anyone here would be upgrading to.

[Trippy]

The 4070 - 4090 will still likely require at least 80W - 100W more than their 30 series counterparts so a build with a 40 series will likely be more expensive than a 30 series counterpart build given the need for a bigger power supply and more/better cooling.

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/nvidia-rtx-4000-gets-updated-specifications/

Lastly, the leaker delivered an update on the power requirements of the GPUs, which have certainly been the subject of much speculation over the last few months. The predicted TBP for the RTX 4090 is 450 watts. It’s 420 watts for the RTX 4080 and 300 watts for the RTX 4070. Those numbers are a lot more conservative than the 600 watts (and above) that we’ve seen floating around.

Scroll about halfway down for the 30 series power specs:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/compare/?section=compare-specs

[Velorath]

Months back I saw people in forums freaking out that all the 40 series cards were going to be 800W. I'm ok with 420 or so. Aside from maybe one of my hard drives I don't think I'm carrying anything over from my current PC. Raptor Lake CPUs should be out by the end of the year also.

[Sky]

Anyone who didn't know the general specs of the 40 series months ago isn't even paying as much attention as I do (which is not a lot). I guess one could dig up an opinion on anything online, but my point is that it's still roughly 100W more peak and current speculation is ~500W over the 30 series. If it's not a big deal for you, that's fine. But it's not an insignificant number and carries a lot of real-world consequences (my only complaint about my pc is how hot the 3090 is, even throttled to 300W).

Anyway, I guess now nvidia can forget about thermals as a bottleneck. Maybe we can ram a couple thousand watts through and combine our pcs with a pizza oven. https://www.techradar.com/news/this-major-breakthrough-could-end-pc-overheating-worries-for-good

[Velorath]

The 30 series finally settling back down to around MSRP isn't a compelling enough reason for me to pick one up now, two years after launch.

[Samwise]

I've got a GTX 1070, and if I got a newer video card in the mail for zero dollars due to a shipping mixup, I don't know that I'd even bother with the minor hassle of installing it.  The only thing that might've been a motivator for me to do a hardware upgrade was HL:Alyx, and that ran flawlessly even with its 70GB of textures.  

[Velorath]

I've got a 1070 also, and not in any dramatic hurry to upgrade, which is why I'm not worried if the 40 series gets delayed until sometime next year. I think the stuff I do ripping my movie collection to my PC is probably more hardware intensive than most of the games I'm playing currently, and even that is largely a CPU thing.

Looking ahead to stuff I'd potentially play next year... Diablo IV, Starfield (although not hugely excited for it), Stalker 2, Skate 4, Street Fighter 6, Final Fantasy XVI (maybe it will release on PC at the same time as console?), Resident Evil 4 Remake, it's maybe still a little debatable how worthwhile a largely new PC might be. We'll see I guess.

[Miguel]

It's interesting that when you look at 'dollars per frame', a GTX 1070 and an RTX 3060 Ti are almost exactly equal (especially at typical 1080P resolutions):

1070: $380, average of 116 FPS across major titles = $3.25 dollars/frame
3060TI: $559, average of 174FPS across major titles = $3.21 dollars/frame

[Rasix]

I mostly play graphically unimpressive games. I imagine my 1070 ti will die before I replace it or before I get the spousal approval to do so.

I'd honestly rather get a PS5 or Steam deck.

[Samwise]

1070: $380, average of 116 FPS across major titles = $3.25 dollars/frame
3060TI: $559, average of 174FPS across major titles = $3.21 dollars/frame

And the human brain caps out somewhere around 75 FPS, so... 

[Trippy]

That's not how it works in games because of blurring ghosting and strobing, among other artifacts. If you have a high refresh rate monitor you can test it yourself here:

https://www.testufo.com

Also higher refresh rate (usually) means lower input lag. Which is a huge benefit if you are sweaty try-hard gamer.

[Hoax]

going to 144 monitor/fps is like going from platter to SSD, you won't ever go back

[schild]

Wouldn't have a new card but the 3070Ti was practically free from Costco w/ Computer Purchase. I was happy with my 980Ti until the whole computer shit the bed.

[Velorath]

Anyone who didn't know the general specs of the 40 series months ago isn't even paying as much attention as I do (which is not a lot). I guess one could dig up an opinion on anything online, but my point is that it's still roughly 100W more peak and current speculation is ~500W over the 30 series. If it's not a big deal for you, that's fine. But it's not an insignificant number and carries a lot of real-world consequences (my only complaint about my pc is how hot the 3090 is, even throttled to 300W).

Anyway, I guess now nvidia can forget about thermals as a bottleneck. Maybe we can ram a couple thousand watts through and combine our pcs with a pizza oven. https://www.techradar.com/news/this-major-breakthrough-could-end-pc-overheating-worries-for-good

Power consumption now possibly a good bit lower than previously rumored.

[lamaros]

So is the consensus now that you're not going to save much money building your own PC these days and better off just buying something line Alienware?

[Chimpy]

So is the consensus now that you're not going to save much money building your own PC these days and better off just buying something line Alienware?

If you aren't set on very specific components and just want "X gpu" and "some level of Y CPU" and "Z much RAM" the prices from prebuilts are usually going to be better, yes.

You'll pay about the same or slightly less getting a pre-built Alienware, Lenovo Legion, HP Omen, Dell XPS, etc. gaming machine from Costco or wherever rather than building yourself.

[Salamok]

So is the consensus now that you're not going to save much money building your own PC these days and better off just buying something line Alienware?

Looking at the Alienware builds on Dell website and most of the "configurability" of the systems comes down to what malware you want pre-installed.  Max memory config is 64gb, Max SSD is 1TB and they don't seem to offer the latest X3d Ryzen's (which offer a significant drop in power consumption and likely run cooler as well).  So it is back to the new Dell model of pick 1 of these 5 systems we built for you, unlike the Dell of 20 years ago where you could actually change more of the hardware specifics.  That said the new model meets the needs of almost everybody and likely provides more bang for the buck.  For myself though i'm not looking to build a high end gaming rig but do want the best processor + 128gb of ram + 2tb Samsung SSD w/o the $1500 graphics card.

[Hoax]

I'm not sure if the big brands let you config stuff anymore. That said please don't buy anything Alienware with some obviously non standard as fuck case and probably custom parts.

Legion Tower 7i Gen 8 (Intel) with RTX 4070 Ti
Part Number 90V7003JUS

At least this looks to be using a normal sized case and relatively stock parts so you might be able to swap/upgrade things down the line. I did zero googling to come up with that but just do not ever buy anything prebuilt that comes in a non-standard ATX case. Its a fucking nightmare unless your plan is literally to just never once open the rig run it for 2-3 years and then throw it out.

[Chimpy]

Lenovo Legions are pretty much just a stock ATX case and fixins. A friend of mine has one and likes it a lot.