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PC Pc Gaming/building thread

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So this will be "new pc attempt #35374398437598347398570349834"

But after seeing various pre-builds on the market I've been inspired to once again iron out what my ideal dream pc would look like. Over the years I've had the dream of getting a shoebox (or as near of a shoebox size as possible) style system. I've bounced between wanting all the trimmings (internal bluray drive as I still buy and rip discs + as good of a video card as I can cram into such a confined space lol). As I've been using external drives with my laptops over the last 3 years I'm more comfortable with just having the "shoebox" + video card and can continue using the external bluray drives.

Anyhoo I've got a suggested list of parts (motherboard, cpu, video card etc) and have an idea of what every dream component would cost ($4,300 basically - YIKES lol). I still want it all, but I can make it cheaper by not buying everything in one hit and just doing it in stages, then upgrading as I go along. Did something similar with my last desktop pc 12 years ago (picked the perfect motherboard, cpu at the time.... but gradually swapped out the video card, added another hdd and also replaced the o/s hdd, tripled the ram etc etc).

Doing it that way I can reduce the initial cost by nearly half the price ($1,699 for the video card, and $300+ on the additional ssd etc).

I'm hoping that this will be a Christmas present for myelf, or at worst get my act together and officially pull the trigger by March next year :p
 
Xtreme said:
but I can make it cheaper by not buying everything in one hit and just doing it in stages, then upgrading as I go along. Did something similar with my last desktop pc 12 years ago (picked the perfect motherboard, cpu at the time.... but gradually swapped out the video card, added another hdd and also replaced the o/s hdd, tripled the ram etc etc).
Click to expand...

This is what I'm currently doing but with a full build. I've already got the CPU and RAM and will probably grab case and fans next weekend. The PSU and CPU cooler I wanted both just had revisions that are arriving in store the next few weeks and since they'll unlikely receive a discount anytime soon I'll grab those in the next few weeks. Same with the motherboard. Only thing I'm holding out on for black friday sales are the SSDs. For total price I think I'm looking at around $6k but buying it over time breaking it up and grabbing sales shaves a bit off and doesn't make it seem so bad. If I get it all this year and only have the graphics card to go then there will be less bill shock when they launch lol.

As for GPU you're in a tricky spot. A lot of NVIDIA cards have either been discontinued or about to be discontinued due to the launch of the next gen in January. While prices of current stock should drop so they clear it, supply and demand has caused price increases. So either grab what you want right now or keep your pennies for early next year. Even AMD will be releasing new graphics cards early next year but a little after NVIDIA.
 
dwwaino said:
As for GPU you're in a tricky spot. A lot of NVIDIA cards have either been discontinued or about to be discontinued due to the launch of the next gen in January. While prices of current stock should drop so they clear it, supply and demand has caused price increases. So either grab what you want right now or keep your pennies for early next year. Even AMD will be releasing new graphics cards early next year but a little after NVIDIA.
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I'm (probably) ignorantly confident that I won't have an issue unless they all just vanish into the ether, which is possible I guess.

That said I was planning on buying the video card first getting the most expensive item out of the way, then the rest later on :p lol.

I'm confident that what I have in mind as a setup will work - have seen it executed (without having to mod/cut out parts of the case) by several people on pcpartpicker.
 
I’m worried my 6900xt is on its way out.

Started getting black screen flickering this morning and then restarting.

Updated to latest drivers and it was worse.

Will try DDU in safe mode and see if that works but I’m not feeling good about it.
 
It’s got worse.

I’d gone out and turned computer off.

When I got home and turned it on got a blue screen of death.

Auto repair didn’t work.

Currently running system restore.

🤞
 
Windows repair, DDU uninstall and new drivers seems to have done the trick.
 
blackshadow said:
Windows repair, DDU uninstall and new drivers seems to have done the trick.
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What's strange is the symptoms sounded like a hardware fault (even the monitor or cable), but great news that a fresh driver install worked. Windows has had some major cumulative updates recently so maybe Windows just borked something.
 

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dwwaino said:
What's strange is the symptoms sounded like a hardware fault (even the monitor or cable), but great news that a fresh driver install worked. Windows has had some major cumulative updates recently so maybe Windows just borked something.
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I was resigned to a major hardware issue.
I’m thankful that doing the whole proper troubleshooting showed it wasn’t.
May have been a corrupt windows or driver file that caused the issue.
 
blackshadow said:
I was resigned to a major hardware issue.
I’m thankful that doing the whole proper troubleshooting showed it wasn’t.
May have been a corrupt windows or driver file that caused the issue.
Click to expand...

Presumably one of the recent Windows updates has stuffed my wireless Xbox controller adaptor. I don't mind so much because I can just use a cable since I'm at my desk anyway but some of these updates get screwy.
 
I'm so out of date I didn't even realise Intel had had all these stability issues etc over the last few years 👀

Can't remember the last time I had an AMD processor, and the last time I had an AMD graphics card, they were still ATI. In my main gaming PC anyway.

Makes the research process more interesting! I'm still leaning towards Intel/NVIDIA, but that's mainly because my current PC has be so rock solid over many, many years. But always open to something new if Intel shit the bed again and/or NVIDIA 5000 range are way too expensive compared to AMD's offering. I'll have a pretty good budget to play with, but that doesn't mean I'll do something crazy like spend an extra $1k for like 2% performance improvement or something.
 
Ambrose Burnside said:
I'm so out of date I didn't even realise Intel had had all these stability issues etc over the last few years 👀

Can't remember the last time I had an AMD processor, and the last time I had an AMD graphics card, they were still ATI. In my main gaming PC anyway.

Makes the research process more interesting! I'm still leaning towards Intel/NVIDIA, but that's mainly because my current PC has be so rock solid over many, many years. But always open to something new if Intel shit the bed again and/or NVIDIA 5000 range are way too expensive compared to AMD's offering. I'll have a pretty good budget to play with, but that doesn't mean I'll do something crazy like spend an extra $1k for like 2% performance improvement or something.
Click to expand...

It's swings and roundabouts. Unfortunately we haven't had too many times when the competitors were at their peaks at the same time. Zen 3 was my first AMD CPU since Athlon on AM2 but it was an easy switch. AMD's latest Zen 5 aren't that exciting over Zen 4 but Intel's Arrow Lake that has just dropped looks like a flop. I know for anyone who has been out of the loop for a bit Intel would have the mind share and confidence to stick with, but I would still strongly recommend to anyone to look at any Ryzen 7000 inside their budget (unfortunately many Ryzen 5000 lines are starting to be discontinued. RIP to the king). The only places Intel have still been a consideration at is the extreme budget low end and the bleeding edge high end but the entire mid stack is AMD dominated.

As for graphics card all info is pointing to RTX 5000 is going to be similarly priced to 4000. Good news that we probably won't see a price increase but bad news is that price to performance still has never been at an all time high. If you're shopping at the upper mid range I expect you're going to be doing a fair bit of homework lol. Radeon has come a long way and unless you're looking at the highest tier where AMD can't compete then there is nothing wrong with Radeon anymore besides occasionally their drivers still but that seems to vary from game to game and community to community. I personally still lean towards NVIDIA despite the premium fee because I see that as paying for their hardware features while still being able to take advantage of any AMD software based technology. NVIDIA are solid when it comes to drivers too. Only time I had an issue was when a major Destiny update dropped once and it was causing hard crashes on many systems with RTX cards. Within a week NVIDIA acknowledged the issue and issued a beta driver. NVIDIA gets a lot of hate but that's still some legendary support.
 
I foresee a lot of research in my future haha

Yep I've experienced AMD driver issues. My wife's old PC had nothing but trouble with drivers and my HTPC (which is old but still going strong) had driver support dropped within months of me getting it. Meanwhile the NVIDIA card in my PC is still being supported with drivers 9 years later.
 

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Ambrose Burnside said:
I'm so out of date I didn't even realise Intel had had all these stability issues etc over the last few years 👀

Can't remember the last time I had an AMD processor, and the last time I had an AMD graphics card, they were still ATI. In my main gaming PC anyway.

Makes the research process more interesting! I'm still leaning towards Intel/NVIDIA, but that's mainly because my current PC has be so rock solid over many, many years. But always open to something new if Intel shit the bed again and/or NVIDIA 5000 range are way too expensive compared to AMD's offering. I'll have a pretty good budget to play with, but that doesn't mean I'll do something crazy like spend an extra $1k for like 2% performance improvement or something.
Click to expand...
It's only the 13th and 14th gen K series CPUs that had the voltage issues, and assuming the microcode patches fix the root cause getting a brand new one now should be fine.

Personally if I was doing a major rebuild soon I'd be going AMD CPU and Nvidia GPU. Sounds like both AMD and Intel have hit a wall when it comes to getting performance out of their current architecture, I'm kind of hoping Intel went conservative with their performance on release of Arrow Lake and some speed gets unlocked down the road. Nvidia look like the only realistic option for anything either than the low-mid end cards, but it'll be interesting to see the RTX 5000 series in January (maybe)
 
PC has carked it now. It has not been great for months. I haven't been able to game, the thing runs slow, and videos are buffery and stuttering with the sound dropping in and out. It stopped recognising my speakers about 4-5 months ago and now it has stopped recognising my headphones so I have no audio at all. It is telling me no audio device output is installed despite my headphones still showing in device manager. No fixes I can find have fixed the issue.

I was leaning towards the issue being the CPU cooler since it gets quite a bit of a rattle and at times a loud constant whine which forces me to shut down to stop. That hasn't happened nearly as much since I turned the fans down in the BIOS so the longer the issue has gone on the more I have leaned towards the issue being with the motherboard due to audio problems but I am not that knowledgeable when it comes to PC issues so who knows.

I am hoping the issue isn't going to cost a lot to fix since money is tight at the moment.
 
gaskin said:
PC has carked it now. It has not been great for months. I haven't been able to game, the thing runs slow, and videos are buffery and stuttering with the sound dropping in and out. It stopped recognising my speakers about 4-5 months ago and now it has stopped recognising my headphones so I have no audio at all. It is telling me no audio device output is installed despite my headphones still showing in device manager. No fixes I can find have fixed the issue.

I was leaning towards the issue being the CPU cooler since it gets quite a bit of a rattle and at times a loud constant whine which forces me to shut down to stop. That hasn't happened nearly as much since I turned the fans down in the BIOS so the longer the issue has gone on the more I have leaned towards the issue being with the motherboard due to audio problems but I am not that knowledgeable when it comes to PC issues so who knows.

I am hoping the issue isn't going to cost a lot to fix since money is tight at the moment.
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After checking anything software/OS related my first guess would be motherboard as well. Other hardware has more specific symptoms (drives will freeze, RAM and CPU will often blue screen or fail to post) when they fail but the motherboard controls everything so it can have a wide range of things happening.
 

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