Buying a Gaming PC

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah it trashes the 3090 at that price point, tho a 3090 seems pointless for mere mortals anyway

 

Really need to see ray tracing performance though.

 

The 3070 comes out tomorrow. I'm going to try and get it but the ampere launch has been a complete disaster, apparently there's only a couple thousand of those 3080s out in the wild. Nvidia are a disaster.

[Sly Reflex]

The stocks were meant to stabilise around October as well at the forecast they were saying.

 

I'm going to either rebuild or build new next year. I might go all in since I think I'm pretty much done with consoles now. Chuck an extra £500 on the pile and see what gains I get from it in place of buying a PS5/wheteverthefuckthenextxboxiscalledbecausetheyhavenosensiblenamingconvention.

[one-armed dwarf]

I mean you make fun of xbox naming convention but I am already getting confused by rtx 3080, ryzen 5800x and now these rx 6000 xt and I consider myself pretty clued in lol

[Sly Reflex]

The numbers always follow on though from each brand. I have to say before I really looked into it I thought the numbers were random as well. How many times can I put numbers into this post? Numbers.

 

[Jimboxy]

Didn't Nvidia do a rx6000 series years ago?

I'm tempted to get one of the last year RX cards (5000?) And doubling the ram in my machine.

[DisturbedSwan]

Still not convinced by the AMD stuff, If I ever upgrade my GPU it'll be to a 3060/3070 I think.

 

I might sell my PC to be honest, I've barely used it this year and haven't even turned it on since July.

[Jimboxy]

AMD have been pretty rock solid for a few years now. Their GPUs seem to have some driver issues at launch (although I think that's also been the same for the 3xxx cards this time as well). IMO paying the extra for intel/Nvidia at this point seems like getting less for your money.

[spatular]

it's great that AMD are kicking ass again, intel/nvidia have had it too easy for too long. i'm not in a position to be upgrading for a few years now but still looking forward to the reviews of these new amd cards.

[one-armed dwarf]

1 hour ago, DisturbedSwan said:

Still not convinced by the AMD stuff

On GPU it's def a wait and see but Ryzen has definitely eclipsed Intel as the premium CPU brand. More cores for greater concurrency and passing out Intel's much lauded single threaded performance with their higher end models.

 

Previously it was always a choice between better per core speeds with Intel or more cores with AMD, but now AMD allegedly offer both.

 

 

[DisturbedSwan]

If I was to get a new PC built (or build it myself) I'd definitely consider a Ryzen CPU. 

[one-armed dwarf]

I placed a far too expensive order on a asus 3070 on OC, a few mins before everything was supposed to go live. 

 

Not sure I'll keep it, RRP is just horrendous but I really want one of these things. If they put me on a huge backlog like scan did then i will cancel

[Jimboxy]

@one-armed dwarf
what will you do with your current gpu if you get the new one?

[one-armed dwarf]

My current GPU has weird rattling fans at certain RPMs, I sent it to Gigabyte to have a look but they sent it back as is. So I will hold onto it as a spare I guess but I wouldn't be confident to sell it on cause of that. Really only became noticeable during the summer months (higher ambients higher RPMs)

 

Apparently a prevalent issue with gigabyte's 20xx gpus.  https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/gigabyte-gpu-fan-rattle-fix.3596708/

[one-armed dwarf]

I set up my 3070, it's really powerful. However in a game like The Witcher 3 which runs at 140fps now (!) it has really annoying coil whine. I had this with a 390 years and years ago but it's more noticeable here.

 

Looking online this just seems like a thing where you play the lottery with these high end parts, or it might lessen overtime. Pretty disappointing though so I hope it drops to a tolerable level.

 

I know it's not the fan cause I ramped them up in MSI afterburner and it was just normal loud fans.

 

It's really only in obscene framerate games it occurs, don't hear it at all on Control.

[spatular]

i had a 970 with coil whine for 4 years, limiting stuff to 60fps (which is all i can display) and wearing headphones it wasn't too bad...

 

used it in the new pc for a bit before i got a new gfx card and it turns out if i use 2 separate cables from the power supply to power it rather than one with a splitter - it no longer whines! so might be worth looking into that just in case yours is the same.

[one-armed dwarf]

Yeah I'm using two rather than doing the daisy chain, I think this card pulls too much power for me to not use two separate.

 

The PSU I have is a seasonic focus gx 750, which I understand to be pretty high quality (80 plus gold, tho I don't really know what that means). Could be wrong but I imagine the PSU isn't the cause. My brother has a PC I helped build recently so I might stick the card in that for a bit and see if he has the whine on his, maybe this weekend.

 

Plan is to use it for a month anyway and if the demons from hell don't quiet down a bit then I will likely RMA with overclockers, that way I can get some more haribo. Otherwise might look into undervolting, it's a mighty GPU in non ray traced stuff so that might just be a good idea in general.

[one-armed dwarf]

Stock speed zen 3 Ryzen beating an overclocked i9 10900k on Watch Dogs, a heavily CPU bound game (especially on a 3070 at 1080p)

 

 

 

I'm going to wait for zen 4 but yep AMD winning the CPU war. More coars? AMD. Better single thread speed? Inte.. no wait AMD also.

 

 

[Jimboxy]

Good ol' bitwit Kyle.

[one-armed dwarf]

A minor update on my 3070, the coil whine is way quieter, non existent on most titles. The Witcher still causes it a bit but it's definitely not in the realm of something where I'd be prepared to put up with annoying RMA, especially with the risk of damage to the GPU while sending it back and forth.

 

It's also surprisingly easy to get a decent overclock on, tho I might undervolt it instead tbh. I'd thought that ampere was supposed to be bad for OC.

 

Based on what I've seen perf wise in titles like Metro Exodus I'd say it's a great card for 1440 but wouldn't recommend it for 4K as you would have to make too many visual downgrades to preserve performance on visually demanding stuff (eg, anything with Ray tracing or games like RDRII). Wait for AMD or 3080 if you want 4K basically.

[Maf]

Tomorrow I will have finally hit a savings goals I’ve been aiming for and I think I’m going to spend some of it on a PC. If I can understand what to get and organise it I’m hoping to buy me it for Christmas.
 

Ideally I want a PC for gaming and streaming, but also something I could use for WFH situations, too (Not that I currently have any WFH things but maybe in future)

 

I have 2 problems, though.
 

Firstly, I’m not sure if I should buy a PC right now because all the prices are jacked up. I looked at a 3080 yesterday which, I assume it was the right thing, and it was £1400! For a part! That’s almost 3 PS5’s. I guess what I want to know because I have no reference is how OTT are the prices right now? If the current prices are considered extortionate then I’m prepared to wait 6 months-1 year. But if things are costing a little bit more than I might be willing to pay to have it this year.

 

The second problem is what should I get? I looked at one of those PC custom build websites the other day. The first question was Intel or AMD and I closed the browser I was like I dunno. 
 

So these are my two things. I welcome all comments, suggestions, ideas, everything if you want to tell me. Because I could do with advice when it comes to this. No matter how little you think someone can know about computers I promise you I know even less than that. So everything is welcome.