An alternate to buying the newest and yes fastest PC hardware, you could probably bag a bargain for the current high spec PC hardware CPU & GPU.
PC Upgrade (Motherboard & CPU)
- Thread starter Riverside
- Start date
Definitely for graphics cards right now. For over a year there were too few, now they have way too many and need to clear inventories before the next gen launches.
Hi Everybody 
Well that settles it!
I'll also wait on my upgrade (at least on a motherboard, cpu and ram) mainly because some MB's I've looked at are out of stock at the moment and I'm thinking (and hoping!) prices in general will also go down a smidge. Still can't decide on whether to go for a DDR 4 board or DDR5 or even perhaps a B660 board (1700 socket) with DDR4 or DDR5 memory slots.
Anyway, to get the ball rolling I've ordered a new psu today, a Seasonic Gold 1000 watt fully modular (probably overkill but future proofing in mind), and a SSD drive Crucial M 500GB. So Ill start by stripping out one of my cases (Coolermaster Haf X), and give it a good clean.
I'm ashamed to say it's rather dusty.
Side note...I'm bit confused I'm embarrassed to say as to what benefits / differences there are between M.2 ssd's?, PCiE slot solid state drives and msata drives?
Any explanations, or information obviously welcome!
Jack
Well that settles it!
I'll also wait on my upgrade (at least on a motherboard, cpu and ram) mainly because some MB's I've looked at are out of stock at the moment and I'm thinking (and hoping!) prices in general will also go down a smidge. Still can't decide on whether to go for a DDR 4 board or DDR5 or even perhaps a B660 board (1700 socket) with DDR4 or DDR5 memory slots.
Anyway, to get the ball rolling I've ordered a new psu today, a Seasonic Gold 1000 watt fully modular (probably overkill but future proofing in mind), and a SSD drive Crucial M 500GB. So Ill start by stripping out one of my cases (Coolermaster Haf X), and give it a good clean.
I'm ashamed to say it's rather dusty.Side note...I'm bit confused I'm embarrassed to say as to what benefits / differences there are between M.2 ssd's?, PCiE slot solid state drives and msata drives?
Any explanations, or information obviously welcome!
Jack
There are two types of M.2 drive that can be put into an M.2 slot. Some M.2 slots only support one or the other, some support both types. They attach directly to the motherboard & are about the size of a stick of chewing gum.
An M.2 SSD performs the same as a SATA SSD (2.5" drive), they are cheap and take up less room inside the PC case than a 2.5" SSD & requires no power or data cable but otherwise there is no advantage to these, they are just SSDs in a different form factor.
An NVMe drive is considerably faster, more expensive but well worth the extra cash. Instead of the SATA interface they use PCIe lanes (typically 4x lanes). Those lanes can communicate directly with the CPU, or via the motherboard chipset. Newer & future NVMe drives will be able to take advantage of newer generations of PCIe lanes, each generation is typically double the bandwidth of the previous generation.
AFAIK an mSATA drive is a form factor designed for laptops, I assume with similar or otherwise identical technology to M.2.
My PC (before the upgrade) had a mechanical HDD, an M.2 SSD and an NVMe (4x gen3) drive. Broadly the SSD was 4-6x faster than the mechanical HDD, but the NVMe drive was 5-10x faster than the SDD - it made a massive difference to large file access speeds.
So if your motherboard supports an NVMe (4x gen 3 or better) drive is it definitely something you want to take advantage of.
My new PC has no SSD but here's the benchmark results from Samsung Magician:
WDC 1TB mechanical HDD:
Sequential read 150MB/s
Sequential write 157MB/s
Random read 244 IOPS
RAndom write 132 IOPS
Samsung 970 EVO+ 1TB NVMe:
Sequential read 3,539MB/s
Sequential write 3,291MB/s
Random read 439,208 IOPS
RAndom write 458,740 IOPS
IIRC an SSD is around 500-600 MB/s.
TL;DR get an NVMe drive.
An M.2 SSD performs the same as a SATA SSD (2.5" drive), they are cheap and take up less room inside the PC case than a 2.5" SSD & requires no power or data cable but otherwise there is no advantage to these, they are just SSDs in a different form factor.
An NVMe drive is considerably faster, more expensive but well worth the extra cash. Instead of the SATA interface they use PCIe lanes (typically 4x lanes). Those lanes can communicate directly with the CPU, or via the motherboard chipset. Newer & future NVMe drives will be able to take advantage of newer generations of PCIe lanes, each generation is typically double the bandwidth of the previous generation.
AFAIK an mSATA drive is a form factor designed for laptops, I assume with similar or otherwise identical technology to M.2.
My PC (before the upgrade) had a mechanical HDD, an M.2 SSD and an NVMe (4x gen3) drive. Broadly the SSD was 4-6x faster than the mechanical HDD, but the NVMe drive was 5-10x faster than the SDD - it made a massive difference to large file access speeds.
So if your motherboard supports an NVMe (4x gen 3 or better) drive is it definitely something you want to take advantage of.
My new PC has no SSD but here's the benchmark results from Samsung Magician:
WDC 1TB mechanical HDD:
Sequential read 150MB/s
Sequential write 157MB/s
Random read 244 IOPS
RAndom write 132 IOPS
Samsung 970 EVO+ 1TB NVMe:
Sequential read 3,539MB/s
Sequential write 3,291MB/s
Random read 439,208 IOPS
RAndom write 458,740 IOPS
IIRC an SSD is around 500-600 MB/s.
TL;DR get an NVMe drive.
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For the fastest drives cooling also becomes a factor. If the shiny PCIe gen 5 SSD slows down due to thermal throttling, it's being wasted. So a heatsink and a location where airflow can actually reach is important. Some mainboards are set up in a way where the M.2 sits under the graphics card, behind the PCIe slot of the card. That can kill cooling if the card is a 2-3 slot 30cm behemoth.
Re: dusty cases ... set a reminder to open and dust your computers every 3 months. They might not have acculumated much each time, but this means they won't. It also helps to choose a good case that has dust filters on all routes of air ingress, and if they're removable that makes them all the easier to clean as a part of this maintenance.
Although I'll be -ahem- skipping my 1st Sep reminder for this, given the plan to be reshuffling hardware completely before the end of the year anyway.
Now I need to go check if my old Z97 motherboard's "m.2 SSD" slot is at all compatible with the m.2 drive I have in the current-desktop Z270 motherboard. There's a good chance it isn't. In which case it'll definitely move with the motherboard into the current-desktop/will-be-server, with new drive (anyway) in the new desktop.
Although I'll be -ahem- skipping my 1st Sep reminder for this, given the plan to be reshuffling hardware completely before the end of the year anyway.
Now I need to go check if my old Z97 motherboard's "m.2 SSD" slot is at all compatible with the m.2 drive I have in the current-desktop Z270 motherboard. There's a good chance it isn't. In which case it'll definitely move with the motherboard into the current-desktop/will-be-server, with new drive (anyway) in the new desktop.
Heat dissipation is an issue with lots of components, my old mobo didn't come with an M.2 heatsink or cover & I used stick-on heatsinks (IIRC £1 each off ebay) more for piece of mind than any actual performance or longevity concerns. It sat between the CPU & PSU in quite a hot area as you say.
My new mobo has a screw on metal cover with a thermal pad that acts as a heatsink, a neater solution for sure.
I have found M.2 compatibility to be a bit hit & miss in my limited experience. In theory if it fits it should just work, the different types have slots in different places on the connector but on my old z270 board I was never able to get the NVMe drive to work in the M.2 slot (it did physically fit but the BIOS wouldn't detect it) so I used a PCIe 4x riser card. Worked fine in that but it meant I had to run my GPU on only 8x lanes instead of 16x & I was never completely happy with the solution. No such issues with the new mobo.
I tried putting my old M.2 SSD on the riser card & using it in another PC but again, the BIOS just wouldn't detect it even though windows device manager did. So YMMV, good luck
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My Samsung 970 EVO Plus works fine in my Gigabyte GA-Z270P-D3 motherboard's m.2 slot, both are only PCI-E 3.0.
I'm upgrading my 10 year old i7-2700k build.
I've ordered the following:
Asus rog strix B660-F Gaming WIFI
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR-5 (PC 5600) (2x32GB)
i9-12900K
Thermalright pressure plate
Noctua NH-D15 air cooler
Corsair HX Series 1200W PS
Samsung 980 pro 2TB NVMe m.2 PCIe 4 SSD
I'll be keeping my nvidia gtx 1660ti for the moment. Maybe some choices are hard to understand but I wanted a fast CPU for EDO, don't expect to overclock and don't really need all the IO that a z690 board would have given (also a price consideration). My old Enermax power supply seemed underpowered at 500W and I wanted something that can support a beefy nvidia in the future. Hopefully it won't be too inefficient even though it's clearly oversized.
I would probably have preferred some other ram brand like maybe g.skill, but chose these as they seem pretty small in comparison with many other ram modules. What I do worry about a bit is will the ram fit under the huge noctua cooler...
Anyone see any showstoppers or something overly stupid in my decision?
I've ordered the following:
Asus rog strix B660-F Gaming WIFI
64GB Corsair Vengeance DDR-5 (PC 5600) (2x32GB)
i9-12900K
Thermalright pressure plate
Noctua NH-D15 air cooler
Corsair HX Series 1200W PS
Samsung 980 pro 2TB NVMe m.2 PCIe 4 SSD
I'll be keeping my nvidia gtx 1660ti for the moment. Maybe some choices are hard to understand but I wanted a fast CPU for EDO, don't expect to overclock and don't really need all the IO that a z690 board would have given (also a price consideration). My old Enermax power supply seemed underpowered at 500W and I wanted something that can support a beefy nvidia in the future. Hopefully it won't be too inefficient even though it's clearly oversized.
I would probably have preferred some other ram brand like maybe g.skill, but chose these as they seem pretty small in comparison with many other ram modules. What I do worry about a bit is will the ram fit under the huge noctua cooler...
Anyone see any showstoppers or something overly stupid in my decision?
Won't comment on the rest of the config (although it does look nice and dandy on screen), but this
i'd say it's cleverMyself im quite curious how gfx market will evolve when RTX4000 series hits the stores and how AMD will respond.
Maybe some really nice deals will pop in for RTX3080TI as they exit the market to make way for the 4000 series
Yes, I'm curious to see what effect this upgrade will have on running EDO, and I can always upgrade the GPU later. I want to see what new nvidia cards will come and what performance / TDP they will have. Hopefully one of outgoing 30 series will do well enough and be available for a more affordable price this winter.
The RAM fitting under the D-15 cooler shouldn't be an issue, the second fan fits over the RAM slots, completely covering all four slots but is held on with sprung straps that will allow you to put it at whatever height you need for clearance. The cooler stack itself has a generous cutout too.
I commented on cooling performance earlier in the thread with my 12700k & I can only imagine a 12900k would be capable of creating even more heat under max load (benchmarking not real world). For EDO mine is already overkill so yours should give you plenty of headroom for years to come which I assume is what you are aiming for.
As far as the spec is concerned RAM can be upgraded or replaced easily, the motherboard is not so easy to upgrade. Personally I'd spend a bit more on the mobo & less on the RAM, you'll be very happy with the upgrade either way though
A point to note on the wifi - online gaming greatly prefers a physical cable connection if that's practical for your location.
I don't have all that much headroom in the case, so not sure I can move the fan up. But I suppose I could always fit a smaller fan if it turns out to be a problem. In the worst case I'll have to find another air cooler or maybe even a water one.
Yes I wanted the CPU headroom both for EDO as well as for video editing, so went for one of the fastests CPUs.
I was somewhat torn at getting less/cheaper RAM or a better motherboard, but I think / hope this will work out fine.
The WIFI is not something I intend to use... It just came with the board!
Yes I wanted the CPU headroom both for EDO as well as for video editing, so went for one of the fastests CPUs.
I was somewhat torn at getting less/cheaper RAM or a better motherboard, but I think / hope this will work out fine.
The WIFI is not something I intend to use... It just came with the board!
Airflow is key.
For example my fractal meshify C case doesn't have alot of room for a triple slot card like my 3090fe.
But the fe has a completely different exaust system than other 3090s.
It has just 2 fans the lower one drawing cool air from just above the psu cover and blowing it over the sinks. The other fan just aids it by drawing the air upwards.. net result is lots of heat heading straight for my cpu.
A huge cpu heatsink fan would aggravate the situation so l opted for a single aio which has a much lower profile allowing that hot air to flow over it and upwards out the top of the case aided by fans both top rear and topmost.
3 fans at the front draw filtered air in. The psu opening at the bottom has a fan on the base drawing air in too.
But the big thing is the 3090fe's massive exaust which is blown straight out of the back of the pc. I've no idea why the other cards just have 3 fans in line...daft. this method is much much cooler ambient temp. When stressed it's about 71°C. Idles at 48.
For example my fractal meshify C case doesn't have alot of room for a triple slot card like my 3090fe.
But the fe has a completely different exaust system than other 3090s.
It has just 2 fans the lower one drawing cool air from just above the psu cover and blowing it over the sinks. The other fan just aids it by drawing the air upwards.. net result is lots of heat heading straight for my cpu.
A huge cpu heatsink fan would aggravate the situation so l opted for a single aio which has a much lower profile allowing that hot air to flow over it and upwards out the top of the case aided by fans both top rear and topmost.
3 fans at the front draw filtered air in. The psu opening at the bottom has a fan on the base drawing air in too.
But the big thing is the 3090fe's massive exaust which is blown straight out of the back of the pc. I've no idea why the other cards just have 3 fans in line...daft. this method is much much cooler ambient temp. When stressed it's about 71°C. Idles at 48.
I had a 1660 Super until I recently upgraded to an Rx 6800. Good video cards, and your new pc setup looks great. As far as that new PSU, it may not feel all that oversized for long. My new pc 'only' has a 750w power supply for a 5900x, Rx 6800, 32 gigs of ram and 2 nvme drives and 2 sata ssd's. I wish I had gotten a bigger psu, because the next gen cpu's and gpu's are rumored to use way more power.
No M.2 device needs to dissipate more than 8-10w of power (and aren't allowed to draw much more...an M.2 slot only has five tiny 3.3v supply pins), and this is a load that the motherboard itself can easily handle, if you can get the heat to it.
A ball of thermal putty, or thick (and sufficiently soft) thermal pad, placed under the controller and voltage regulator area of an M.2 SSD (the NAND itself doesn't really benefit from cooling...warm NAND is actually easier to write to) to sink heat to the motherboard will keep even the hottest M.2 drives from throttling, even if there is zero airflow over the top of the board. Thermal conductivity doesn't need to be particularly good because the thermal density of these parts is low. In general, performance of this method rivals comically large M.2 heatsinks, except on extremely crowded boards. Even my ITX setup, which has the chipset sandwiched between NVMe SSDs (M.2 slots on opposite sides of the same area of the board) and a much smaller, already warm running, motherboard to sink heat into, still can't be throttled during stress testing, because I can't get them hot enough.
Three.
As you've mentioned both SATA and PCI-E NVMe drives in the M.2 form factor, but there are also non-NVMe AHCI PCI-E M.2 SSDs. These predate NVMe and aren't common any more, but some are still in circulation (and should be avoided on modern systems...their only advantage is being faster than SATA while not needing OS NVMe support). My remaining X99 system has one as it's OS drive.
Honestly though, most people will be very hard pressed to tell any SSD from another, in normal use. I recommend fast NVMe drives because prices are such that there is little reason to recommend less, but replace 90% of users top-end NVMe drives with some crappy 2.5" SATA QLC SSD and they wouldn't even notice.
There is a bigger difference between the fastest mechanical HDD in the world and the 96GB SATA-II second gen SSD that lacks TRIM in my 15 year old laptop than there is between that SSD and the fastest PCI-E 4.0 NVMe SSD on the planet, in general use performance. Outside of simply moving large files, it's low queue-depth random read speed is what's generally most noticeable. Average performance here has maybe tripled over the entire history of consumer SSDs, but it went up 10-20 fold from a fast mechanical drive to a slow SSD.
Personally, I despise the 3000 series FE coolers. They do exhaust about half of their airflow out the back of the case, which is nice, but the rest is, as you note blown directly into the intake of any tower CPU cooler that may exist, which is worse for most of my setups than exhausting all of the air along the top edge of the card.
Bigger issues are poor GDDR6X cooling (check your memory junction temps) and, for me, both the complexity involved in dismantling the cooler, as well as the lack of ability to reduce the thickness of the cooler by dispensing with the stock fans. Had to watercool the 3080 FE I was using to get memory temps under control (it was ramping up to 100% fan speed and throttling down because the memory was hitting 110C while the core was at 60C...puting a block on it knocked 45C off the memory and 10C off the core with only a single 240 rad), while my non-reference Gigabyte 3080 could achive temps that were only 10C off the watercooled FE, just by replacing the all the TIM (which was much easier to do on this cooler than with an FE).
This also depends on configuration, the router/AP involved, and local congestion. I have about a dozen wireless devices connected at any given time (though I keep most of them off the 5Ghz band I use on my main system), an average bandwidth utilization of about 20-40 megabit (my seed box is also connected wirelessly), and have to go through three walls a floor and a finished basement ceiling in a 70 year old house. Disabling wireless entirely (at the router), taking my system downstairs, and plugging it directly into the router as the only device on the network reduces jitter by maybe 2-3ms and does almost nothing to average latency. It's completely imperceptible to me, and I'm pretty fussy.
Just leaving the front fan off a D-15 will barely hurt temperatures, if clearance is a real issue.
That said, most giant memory heatsinks are there for aesthetic, rather than functional reasons, and I try to avoid them. Not that overclocked memory can't get hot when one starts pushing extra voltage, but garish RGB heatspreaders won't help.
Take it off. The middle fan does most of the work.
The board is plenty good enough. About the only meaningful improvement to be made would be to get one that only has two-DIMM slots (shorter traces and cleaner routing make for better memory overclocking, in general), and only if you plan on hand tuning the memory extensively. The B660 has plenty of I/O for most uses and the inability to increase the multiplier on K-series Alder Lake parts is much less of an issue than one may think (and a complete non-issue on air cooling or most any AIO cooler, because the parts are too hot at higher speeds for the feature to be useful anyway). VRM, board PCB (number of layers and memory slots), and firmware are the main factors of note. You could easily spend a lot more on board and not get much of anything meaningful for it. If anything, even this B660 board is significant overkill for air cooling.
As for the memory, 2x32GiB was wise. Anything smaller than that on current DDR5 is going to be single-rank, which costs performance. DDR5-5600 is also generally the sweet spot for price vs. performance. I would check to see what ICs are used if you intend to do any manual tuning. Hynix ICs are currently the most well regarded, Micron the least, with Samsung in the middle, for now at least.
Regarding the Zen4/AM5/Ryzen 7000 announcement/presentation, I thought it was all pretty lackluster.
We got the entirely expected efficiency and clock speed improvements from the new manufacturing process and TSMC-sourced IOD, but IPC gains were marginal, especially given the doubling of the L2 cache. It's also clear that temperature is going to be an even bigger issue this time around, with higher thermal density CCDs, that are even further from the center of the chip, under a thicker IHS.
The relative lack of gaming comparisons and the modest gains where gaming performance was shown suggests to me that they haven't improved the underlying Fabric significantly and that DDR5 might not be helping Raphael as much as we'd have hoped. AMD may be reliant on any future v-cache parts to remain competitive with Raptor Lake (Intel's 13th gen).
I also expect the 7000 series to be the last homogeneous consumer parts from AMD. Past 6-8 P-cores for those tasks that cannot be easily parallelized and thus rely on clock speed and ILP, rather than TLP, P-cores are not efficient (and in this sense, all Zen cores are P-cores). Intel is likely going to retake the performance crown from AMD immediately with Raptor Lake, mostly because they are throwing more E-cores at the problem. This is a smart move, because one P-core costs the same number of transistors as for or five E-cores, but is only about twice as fast as an E-core. Intel still needs to get the power consumption of their P-cores in check, but in the meantime, having a lead in heterogeneous CPUs is going to give them a performance edge. People like to rail on E-cores, but all the issues with them are down to OS schedulers not knowing how to handle them...this is rapidly changing.
Anyway, some more information: https://www.angstronomics.com/p/ryzen-7000-desktop-preview
We got the entirely expected efficiency and clock speed improvements from the new manufacturing process and TSMC-sourced IOD, but IPC gains were marginal, especially given the doubling of the L2 cache. It's also clear that temperature is going to be an even bigger issue this time around, with higher thermal density CCDs, that are even further from the center of the chip, under a thicker IHS.
The relative lack of gaming comparisons and the modest gains where gaming performance was shown suggests to me that they haven't improved the underlying Fabric significantly and that DDR5 might not be helping Raphael as much as we'd have hoped. AMD may be reliant on any future v-cache parts to remain competitive with Raptor Lake (Intel's 13th gen).
I also expect the 7000 series to be the last homogeneous consumer parts from AMD. Past 6-8 P-cores for those tasks that cannot be easily parallelized and thus rely on clock speed and ILP, rather than TLP, P-cores are not efficient (and in this sense, all Zen cores are P-cores). Intel is likely going to retake the performance crown from AMD immediately with Raptor Lake, mostly because they are throwing more E-cores at the problem. This is a smart move, because one P-core costs the same number of transistors as for or five E-cores, but is only about twice as fast as an E-core. Intel still needs to get the power consumption of their P-cores in check, but in the meantime, having a lead in heterogeneous CPUs is going to give them a performance edge. People like to rail on E-cores, but all the issues with them are down to OS schedulers not knowing how to handle them...this is rapidly changing.
Anyway, some more information: https://www.angstronomics.com/p/ryzen-7000-desktop-preview
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Going on that click bait thumbnail text alone .... Eh, it's too early to tell yet. This is AMD leap-frogging over Intel 12th gen, but Intel have 13th gen coming in the next couple of months.
We'll only know for sure once we have independent third-party benchmarks comparing both new generations.
Now I'll go actually watch the video. @DeckerSolo , it would have helped to give some sort of summary as to why this video is useful, relevant, something ....
To reply to myself about that video, summary of main points I think are relevant:
- On the higher end AM5 CPUs the TDP is 170W, which is a lot higher than the prior generation, but a large reason for that is the increase of the boost clock to 5.7 GHz. That comparse to the Intel 12th Gen i9-12900K exceeding 230W at stock clocks. Keep in mind the TDP and boost clock is lower on the Ryzen 5 and 7 models.
- That boost clock is currently matching/exceeding what Intel has in 12th Gen. Speculation by me: And I guess Intel is highly unlikely to exceed this in 13th Gen.
- AM5 clock speed is maintained/higher as you go up through the 5, 7, 9 models - unlike in prior generations where clock speed went down for stability reasons.
- For some of the non-gaming computational loads, they compare to the i9-12900k, and see ~50% better performance using the Ryzen 9 7950X. Me: It does seem unlikely Intel would get that sort of improvement, outside of adding a lot more cores.
- Comparing the AM5 Ryzens to i9-12900K using Geekbench single-threaded performance test: the AM5 CPUs are 6.6%, 9.1%, 10.3%, 11.5% better performing respectively (5 7600X, 7 7700X, 9 7900X, 9 7950X). Me: There's surely room there for Intel's 13th gen to leapfrog over again. I do note the bar charts from AMD for this bit are a little disingenuous, easily making the difference look a LOT bigger than it is.
- i9-12900K versus Ryzen 5 7600X for gaming, a mixed bag, as low as 3% slower, but as high as 17% faster.
- AMD more efficient in terms of performance per power/heat, thanks to the 5nm process. Me: I need to go look up what Intel is meant to be using for 13th gen.
- AMD say they're actually not done with the AM4 socket at this point. That's well over the initially promised 5 years of support. No detail yet on how long they expect AM5 to last.