Cheap Gaming Desktop

[Beany]

Power supply will arrive by 8pm tonight.

It was in Ballymena in NI at 1405hrs so that seems.... unlikely.

[Beany]

Modern computers are bonkers.

PSU obviously isn't going to arrive today, so slung my old PSU - which has grumbly fan bearings but otherwise works - in there.

Did some further minor tweakery and have now pushed it to 5340mhz on all cores, sustained for as long as I can cool it, which is basically forever. And the CPU has still not gone above 66DegC/59w

Modern computers are fucking ludicrous.

I do think that PSU is on the way out though, so best power the thing off before I acci-fry something....

[DeskJockey]

I like the idea of building a desktop, but I don't need one. Might buy something old and take it apart to teach the kids about computers.

[Beany]

Worth it.

For reference, the guts of the 5600 system were £400

My system was....er...a bit more. The decent chassis and AM5 mobo were a major part of that. Total cost was knocking on £900, and that doesn't even include a chunky GPU, but I intend to stuck a Ryzen 9000 or something in here in a few years time and get a bit more value out of it, so I figure better that, than an AM4 system that won't get any new CPUs on it now.

[RobYob]

Apparently my six year old motherboard with a Ryzen 1600 can cope with a 5600X...

I don't neeed it, but I do want it

I'd get work done so much more efficiently wouldn't I...?

[DeskJockey]

I got a little fix of IT "building" today. Synology started yesterday with a lot of panicked beeping, turns out one of the drives had failed (took me a couple of minutes to figure out what was beeping, it is normally just doing its own thing without fuss).

Ordered a replacement drive from eBuyer yesterday, delivered by 3pm today, so I started the surgery immediately. Well, almost immediately, needed to get the hoover out first as it was rather dusty. One latch, four screws undone, four screws done back up, one click, two cables, one button press and things were humming along. Set the rebuild process going and that was about it.

[Beany]

Yeah, the synology setup is why I use it at home - I get enough shit with disk failures at work, I don't want to be hand-rebuilding a disk array in my downtime too. Synos aren't as fast as a raw linux server, but they also don't need as much fiddling and tweaking....

Apparently my six year old motherboard with a Ryzen 1600 can cope with a 5600X...

I don't neeed it, but I do want it

I'd get work done so much more efficiently wouldn't I...?

I bet it'd need a BIOS update, but yeah, the AM4 platform has been very well supported. Do check the details though, sometimes you'll get a decent performance boost by getting newer/faster RAM too. And see if the mobo will support PBO (that thing that lets it overboost) as that is the real kicker for these chips.

Also get a bigger cooler, etc.

It's a rabbit hole

Still waiting for my fucking power supply. Was 'out for delivery' on monday - in NI - then returned, then sent back out, has now reached the Pudsey delivery offce and is out for delivery. "We normally deliver to you by 1130"

Currently 1330....and Amazon says 'by 8pm' so, in short, fucking sigh.

[DeskJockey]

I keep pondering about getting something like a Lenovo M900 to run VMs off: PiHole (although I've got a Pi running that), PfSense, some kind of monitoring etc. But then I remember that I just can't be bothered, and that once built it wouldn't be maintained except when I remember.

My Synology is too old to run containers, so would need another machine. Maybe when the kids are older...

[Beany]

Sigh, Royal Mail have deivered it to <stevens> Street in Farsley again, the useless fucking cunts.

[Beany]

Collected PSU on an extended lunch break, thankfully the people at the other place are still there (they're moving soon).

PSU now in my PC, nice and quiet. Doing (another....) burn in test, and it's a bit whooshy but not aggravatingly whiny or owt; it's a fairly chill sound. And when it's idling it's near silent. Which is nice.

Stroppy email sent to Royal Mail, and I let the vendor know about the situation, should they wish to reconsider their choice of courier, given that RM *sent it back to them* rather than sending it to my local delivery office, costing them £8 for a next day delivery that RM still fucked up by just not looking at the postcode.

£8 is probably more then the margin they make on a £60 PSU, he says, having bought stuff like this at wholesale costs in the past....

[Beany]

Got everything buttoned up, cable tidied, etc.

Tweeked the fan curves a bit so that it basically doesn't really move the fans above idle unless it hits about 75degrees, which it has done *once* when compiling Vulkan shaders for BeamNG, which is a mixed all-cores + IGP workload. The fans whooshed up for about twenty seconds then the work was done and the box is totally silent again.

Really rather pleased with this, should last me a minimum of five years, and probably longer if AMDs history is anything to go by - modern stuff like PCIe 5 and DDR5 should help, too. A bit pricey now, but two or three generations down the line I can just buy, say, an AMD Ryzen 9000 series for an instant upgrade and still be mostly in line with modern stuff.

[RobYob]

I bet it'd need a BIOS update, but yeah, the AM4 platform has been very well supported. Do check the details though, sometimes you'll get a decent performance boost by getting newer/faster RAM too. And see if the mobo will support PBO (that thing that lets it overboost) as that is the real kicker for these chips.

Also get a bigger cooler, etc.

It's a rabbit hole

Like, Who doesn't keep their bios up to date?

It's an ASUS TUF B350 so was a little surprised to see 5600X supported but hopefully it'll work whenever I get around to the hideous reality of spending money.

CPU has an AIO so is pretty sorted for cooling, 5600X runs cooler than 1600X iirc?

Have replaced the RAM twice in 6 years as it seems I got slightly iffy sticks or controllers, it's practically a SFF case so gets quite hot too. Now 32 GB of Corsair revengence 2133MHz so not super quick but as long as it's stable I'm fine with that.

RX580 could do with an update too...

Rabbit holes within whole rabbits.

[Beany]

Unless you're running greater than 1080p then an R580 would be fine, although something of similar performance but on a more modern node process (IE 5nm rather than 12nm) would probably run coolers, which in something SFF would be relevant so might be worth a look.

I'm currently thinking about RX6600 - my needs are light, but that would cover them for a good long time, at least until 4k gaming capable GPUs are a bit more mainstream and don't cost more than this entire PC - or a car with an MOT - as they currently do

Edit: Snagged a 6650Xt for £290 on Amazon. They were considered bad value when up against the 3060 at launch because of close pricing, but now the 3060 I can't find anywhere less than £350, and the 6650XT is faster.

So no brainer really.

That should be my last computer related purchase for a while, I reckon.

[RobYob]

Games I usually run at 1440p with some form of upscaling. Mainly to keep frames stable and the GPU fans from sounding like a turbine.

The exception was Control where I think I ended at something like 720p upscaled (so quite chunky on a 32" monitor) but that game is so chaotic and stylised (and really good!) That I didn't mind.

At one point years ago i tried water cooling the GPU but I very nearly knackered the PC entirely, had to do the super advanced version of turning it off and on again by disassembling the whole PC...

[integrale_evo]

I keep thinking I should upgrade my graphics, but I really don’t use it enough to be worth it. I just like researching and buying new shiny things.

Current setup would probably be fine for most things ( excluding ray tracing ) if developers hadn’t pretty much abandoned multi-card support ( 2x1070Ti in there at the moment )

[Beany]

BeamNg at 120fps at 1080p is nice

[Beany]

Thought I was done with tech stuff, but my broadband (FTTC) is shitting itself, after it was repaired last week at the telephone pole - now getting interference on the line as well as scratchy/static noises.

I've given up on FTTC and have ordered FTTP, costs the same as my current lot, so should be going from 80/20 (currently 40/2) to 550/550 once all the bits are in place, for the same cost.

It. Never. Ends.

Edit: Booked for April 20th, I've booked the whole day off as I don't remotely trust anything to do with the internet any more

[Beany]

Minor update - fibre being installed today, engineers currently collecting some equipment they left at a house yesterday (whoops ) and of course my VDSL is putting out a clean 80/20 with good tone mapping today.

Too late, PSTN based garbage - I suspect by this afternoon you'll be getting a cease on you....

Edit: 400mb up and down is nice

[Beany]

Further minor updates - got a decent desk, set it up and my goodness does it feel better than the argos special I've been working at for the last year.

I can now actually install monitor mounts to the desk because it's stable enough, so got a dual head pair of monitor arms and just umming and aahing over two of these.

https://www.ebuyer.com/1540880-aoc-27-q ... -q27g2e-bk

So that I can have decent refresh rates, and use them for both work and the big PC (work on HDMI inputs, PC on DP inputs.

If I order within a few hours I can get them tomorrow...

edit: Ordered. Should be the last major purchase I need to make for a while.

[NGRhodes]

Minor update - fibre being installed today, engineers currently collecting some equipment they left at a house yesterday (whoops ) and of course my VDSL is putting out a clean 80/20 with good tone mapping today.

Too late, PSTN based garbage - I suspect by this afternoon you'll be getting a cease on you....

Edit: 400mb up and down is nice

Is BT FTTP PSTN , I always thought it was seperate to VDSL/ADSL/twisted pair lines ?

I've got 100/100 FTTP, so much better than the BT FTTC I had before.
I've had zero need to go faster, even though its only £8 more a month to go to 500/500, especially as the latencies do not go up much when the connection is loaded.