Its that time again, Calavera computer upgrade advice thread!

[ian]

Just put all your components in an old junker you find aesthetically pleasing.

My daily PC is in an original Antec Sonata.

[Calavera]

I took you up on your case-hunting challenge and you don’t even have the decency to respond? How rude.

Sorry, I somehow didn't see it until just over 2 months later! Well I just checked your link to the Antec 302 and I do recall looking at it. It looks good but I thought it looked too much like my current case. If I get a new case I want it to be exciting and different, well not with lights and everything but you know what I mean. I looked through many cases and decided I really don't need a new one. My current one is doing its job just fine. A new case isn't going to give me any kind of improvement.

So instead of spending $100 on a new case I spent a $100 on this Team Group MP33 M.2 2280 1TB PCIe 3.0 x4 with NVMe 1.3 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive] This is my first M2 drive so my first impressions were that it is amazing that we can fit 1TB of data on a little card about the size of a stick of gum. And not only can it store data but it can access it super fast! It won't be that much longer before these types of drives completely replace mechanical drives. Already 1TB is under $100 and really for your average user 1TB is more than enough. They are fairly affordable up to 4TB. You can pick up a 4TB NVME for between $500-$600.

Here are my CrystalMark results from my NVME drive.

This drive was $94.99. Now I could have got a drive for around $140 that would have probably gave me faster results, but I think these speeds are great for a 1TB NVME under $100. Also I was using a 120GB SSD from many years ago (2012ish?) and for some reason it never seemed to get the speeds it was supposed to. Here is a benchmark I did with CrystalMark just now with that SSD.



So even though I'm not getting the maximum speeds possible from an NVME drive it is still quite a leap in speed for me. I haven't switch to using it as my boot drive yet. So far the only thing I've done is copy Red Dead Redemption 2 onto it. I'm going to load it up after posting this and see if it is much faster loading.

[Calavera]

She is still running fine! I should probably have a look inside and clean it out though. I haven't really had it open since I put it together over a year ago. I am just glad I built it when I did. I can't believe the prices of GPUs are still through the roof. The 1660 Super that I paid $250 for still goes for over $500. That really sucks for people wanting a gaming PC. I'm still hoping bitcoin will crash and the market will be flooded with GPUs.

[Calavera]

She is still running fine! I should probably have a look inside and clean it out though. I haven't really had it open since I put it together over a year ago. I am just glad I built it when I did. I can't believe the prices of GPUs are still through the roof. The 1660 Super that I paid $250 for still goes for over $500. That really sucks for people wanting a gaming PC. I'm still hoping bitcoin will crash and the market will be flooded with GPUs.

It is 5 months later. The 1660 Super still goes for commonly goes for $500+. Bitcoin was 42,869 when I made that post. It is currently 42,099. So everything is still pretty much the same. Hopefully one day soon I can return to this thread and be amazed how fast GPU prices came down.

RTX 3090s are selling for $2,500 to $3,000! Everyone says there is a shortage but looking on Ebay sold listings there are around 4,000 sold listings for RTX 3090s. There are 872 active listings for 3090s which isn't a ton but I'm just saying what everyone is saying which is that scalpers are the only ones who end up with them.

Realistically is there was a shortage and the only people that got cards were ones that were actually going to use the cards then there would be next to none for sale on the second hand market. There are probably people out there who make their living flipping video cards right now. If they are able to score a 3090 for even $2,000 then they are guaranteed an immediate profit of $500-$1000! Imagine they spent 10k for 5 3090s. They get a guaranteed profit of anywhere of $2,500 at the lowest and $5,000 if they can get top dollar. It is much better than going to a casino with 10k! This was just a ramble.

[Calavera]

Well what do you think?

It looks good. You should be gaming well on it for years to come.

It will also be good for PS3 & Wii U emulation.

Almost 2 years later and I just tried out PS3 emulation for the first time. I couldn't think of a PS3 exclusive game that I really wanted to play so I ended up trying Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time. It seems like a pretty good game and the emulation has been pretty much perfect so far. I did have the emulator crash once but progress is saved frequently enough that it wasn't really a big deal.

Maybe next I'll try out Xbox 360 emulation.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

I couldn't think of a PS3 exclusive game that I really wanted to play

Play 3D Dot Game Heroes.

[Calavera]

I can't believe the prices of GPUs are still through the roof. The 1660 Super that I paid $250 for still goes for over $500. That really sucks for people wanting a gaming PC. I'm still hoping bitcoin will crash and the market will be flooded with GPUs.

It is 5 months later. The 1660 Super still goes for commonly goes for $500+. Bitcoin was 42,869 when I made that post. It is currently 42,099. So everything is still pretty much the same. Hopefully one day soon I can return to this thread and be amazed how fast GPU prices came down.

It is now another 5 months later and the 1660 Super can finally be had for around $200. Bitcoin is down to $31,568. An RTX 3090 can be had for around $1,000-$1,500. So it seems video card prices are finally somewhat normal. The only problem is that everything else in the world has raised in price! Gas is $4.59-$4.89 a gallon where I'm at. It is fucking ridiculous!

I posted this picture to Facebook on April 7th 2020. Just a bit over 2 years ago.



$1.29 per gallon. 30 gallons for under $40. It is nearly FOUR TIMES MORE EXPENSIVE now!!! That $38 worth of gas would now cost $146. It is terrible. $10 just to go 50-60 miles. Not only gas but food prices are soaring. It isn't a good time.

[Calavera]

It is now another 5 months later and the 1660 Super can finally be had for around $200. Bitcoin is down to $31,568.

Just 23 days later and Bitcoin is down another almost $11K to $20,739 and a card just like mine sold for $160 on July 19th. Pretty good price considering it was $500+ around 5 months ago!

[Calavera]

It has been almost 3 years since I put together this PC and she is stilling running great. Any new game I try still runs excellent in 1080p. So far there has been no need to upgrade. The 3600X is still plenty powerful for anything I run on it. Hopefully it will still hold up in another 3 years or more!

I was looking at my order history on Newegg and the 16GB(8GBx2) of RAM was $72.49. Now almost 3 years later for the same RAM it is now $72.99 for 32GB(16GBx2). Double the amount for the same price. The 16GB I bought is now $44.99. So if I wanted for just $45 I could upgrade to 32GB of RAM! The only problem with that is there is absolutely no reason to do so. When I only had 8GB of RAM I was commonly maxing it out. With 16GB I don't think I really ever come close to maxing it out. So if I put in another 16GB it would mostly just sit there not being utilized.

I've never really seen a point for going higher than 16GB for a gaming rig. Then again I game at 1080p. Maybe with 4K gaming 32GB could be necessary. Still any higher than 32GB for any kind of gaming machine seems pointless to me. I know there are some people out there who will have something insane like 128GB of RAM in a gaming rig. Why? Unless you are doing video editing or something I just don't see the point in so much RAM.

[Dr. Zoidberg]

With 128GB of RAM you can have 3 tabs open in Chrome, that's why!

[Calavera]

A big post a made on Page 4 of this thread talking about all the different GPUs I've owned over the years complete with old 3DMark screenshots.

I'm glad I posted all this information. I've come back to reference several times over the years. I'll even add some more bonus information to it!

The PC with the Athlon XP 2800+ and ATI 9850 (unlocked to a 9870!) was the first PC I ever built. Before that my family always bought pre-built machines. Starting with an IBM PS/1 around 1993-1994. Then an Acer followed by Hewlett-Packard(the worst PC I've ever used) after that a Gateway family computer and my own Gateway PC with a 1GHZ AMD with 384MB of ram and a Geforce 2 GTS 32MB.

It was either late 2002 or early 2003 when I built my first PC so I would have been 14 years old. Man those were the good old days. I remember how awesome it was that I was able to unlock my ATI 9850 into an ATI 9870.

*UPDATE
For years I've been posting different places about how I unlocked my 9850 to a 9870 and it appears that neither of those cards even exist! I looked into it and it apparently was a Radeon 9500 to a Radeon 9700. I must have been mixing it up with when I had an HD3850 AGP and upgraded to an HD3870 PCI-E. Either way I remember how awesome it was to be able to unlock the 9500 to a 9700. I can't remember the price difference but I think it was a pretty decent amount. Looking at the MSRP of the cards on Google it is saying $100 difference which very well could be correct. When looking at old websites about unlocking the 9500 it apparently gets you a 33 percent performance increase. Which is pretty damn good! I recall the 3DMark2001 score increased by quite a bit when unlocked. I can't remember what site I ordered the card from but I remember specifically getting the Sapphire version as those were said to have better luck with unlocking to a 9700. Not all 9500 would unlock properly. Some would have a checkerboard effect when unlocking or might just crash. You could either unlock it with a BIOS mod or just do it by using the custom Omega drivers. Anybody remember Omega drivers for ATI cards? I did it using the driver method as I was afraid of bricking my new card using the BIOS method.

Those were the good old days. I remember how blown away I was when I was able to run Mafia with maxed out graphics on that machine. I remember loading up Mafia on the family PC and driving to a certain spot then loading it up on my PC and driving to the same spot and showing my brother how amazing the graphical difference was. I recall before I showed him he said something like oh I doubt it is even that much of a difference. Then when he saw it he was like oh damn that does look good. ha ha.

I had a similar thing happen with Grand Theft Auto Vice City. I had the PS2 version when it first came out but also ended up getting the PC version later on. My friend had the PS2 version and I kept telling him how it looked insanely better on PC. He wasn't hearing it, insisting that it couldn't look that much better. The next time he was over I fired up Vice City on my Gateway VX1120 22" CRT monitor running at 2048x1536. He took a look at it and was like oh holy shit that does look wayyyy better. I miss those days

[Calavera]

So I first started using this computer on May 1st 2020 which is 3 years 6 months and 14 days ago. If you don't remember I went with the Ryzen 5 3600X which came with the Wraith Spiral Cooler that had the thermal paste pre-applied. It has been running fine and hasn't been overheating at all but I knew it was getting pretty dusty so I decided to clean it out and apply new thermal paste.





As you can see it was a bit dirty. I always have Core Temp running and it really wasn't getting too hot at all. After cleaning it and applying new thermal it does seem to be running a bit cooler, especially under something like a benchmark max load. Right now the room temperature is 71F(22C) and the idle temp is at 94F(35C). I did a Prime95 test and after about 4 minutes it was at 185F(85C). It went to 179F(82F) and then slowly went up one degree at a time after that. But obviously in real world use it isn't going to be maxed out like that. Apparently the max temp for the 3600X is around 212F-221F (100C-105C). So I'm still a good bit below that even at a non-realistic maxed out load. Under real use I don't imagine it will even get to 176F(80c). It is crazy to me that the max temp is 100c-105c. That is insane! That is higher than the boiling point of water! If I'm doing a test and my temps go about 190F(88C) I shut it down.

One other thing I did while cleaning was add another fan. A one point a had a front,back, and two side fans. But I've just had two side fans for quite awhile now so I added a rear fan back in. I'm not sure which direction they need to be pointing. My guess would be the two side panel fans should suck air in and the rear should blow it out. Do you agree or should I switch them up?

I haven't messed around with overclocking it at all. I've looked into it but it just doesn't seem worth the hassle. Maybe I'm just getting old but overclocking now doesn't seem as fun or even useful as it used to be. Tweaking all the settings to get a Phenom II X4 955 from 3.2ghz stock to 4ghz+ was fun. But messing around to get the 3600X to go from 3.8ghz to 4.3ghz when it already boosts to 4.2ghz most of the time anyways just isn't worth it to me. Plus I'm not going to notice any improvement from an overclock like that. In the old days when you'd overclock a chip you could actually tell it was faster.

The 1660 Super on the other hand I've had overclocked for years. I had to open Afterburner to see what my settings even are. I've been running at +180 on the core and +600 on the memory pretty much the whole time I've had it. It is much easier to overclock the GPU and sure you're not going to notice much of a difference but with the GPU being so easy to I figure why not squeeze out a few more FPS if it can do it.

Both the 3600X and 1660 Super are still working great for me. I really don't game a ton anymore but when I do it always runs them just fine at 1080p. By the time I need to upgrade maybe I can get a several years old Ryzen 7 5800X3D and an RTX 4090 for cheap. But with how much CPU and GPU technology has slowed down those parts will probably still be expensive 5 years from now. Computer parts stay usable for far longer nowadays then they used to. I know I've said this many times before. Now you can still play new games on an 8 year i7-5960x with an also 8 year old GTX 970. But in let's say 2003 there was no way you were playing anything remotely new on a 1995 computer.

There is one part of my PC that is fairly old. I bought it in April 2013 for a total of $41.97 and have been using it for over a decade now! And it still works just fine. What part is that? The case of course!


I have thought about getting a new one over the years but it is still doing it's job just fine so why fix what ain't broken? I feel like I'm one of the only people who does this but I don't cable manage at all. I see on Linus Tech Tips how they extensivly cable manage every PC so there are basically no wires seen either through the side window or when the side panel is off. I have those things running all over the place right out in the open! My PC is for using not for looking at! Who cares what the cables look like as long as they are out of the way. Sure they say it improves airflow but I really doubt I'd notice much of any temperature difference with cable management vs none. I also have NO RGB AT ALL! I really don't get the point of it. Sure all those flashing lights might look cool at first but they'd get old real fast, and like I said my PC is for using not for just looking at! My two side fans are blue and my rear fan is white but they are pretty dim now so you barely even notice them. The only reason I have them instead of non lighted fans is because even years ago when I bought them lighted fans were pretty much all that was available. I see those PC with the 3 big rainbow fans on the front and all the RGB inside and just think if I had one of those the first thing I'd do is shut all of that off.

Hope you enjoyed my 3 and a half years later PC update post!

[ian]

Normally I'd read that whole lot with glee, but I saw how dirty your CPU cooler was and I can't.

How does shit get that dusty? Was the PC outside during 3 years of daily dust storms and when you went to clean it you accidentally emptied a vacuum cleaner cannister on it, and then dropped it in some more dust right before you took a picture?

I can't even fathom letting anything I own ever get that dusty and I park cars on the street and store computers under the house on actual dusty soil.

I've seen servers with 10 years uptime with no filters in filthy homes of pet owners have less dusty coolers than that. (Although you aren't ever winning the dustiest ever power supply)

I'll read your post when I'm calmed down.

[melancholy]

One other thing I did while cleaning was add another fan. A one point a had a front,back, and two side fans. But I've just had two side fans for quite awhile now so I added a rear fan back in. I'm not sure which direction they need to be pointing. My guess would be the two side panel fans should suck air in and the rear should blow it out. Do you agree or should I switch them up?

Your setup is correct. Rear fan blow out, all others blow in.

How does shit get that dusty? Was the PC outside during 3 years of daily dust storms and when you went to clean it you accidentally emptied a vacuum cleaner cannister on it, and then dropped it in some more dust right before you took a picture?

That’s not dust. It’s tobacco tar. I’m guessing he smokes heavily around his computer.

Word of caution, Cal. That smoke weakens the plastic on fan blades and makes them more brittle. I’ve seen a good deal of computer fans looking like that where the fan would seize up or the blades would break when trying to clean them.

[Calavera]

That’s not dust. It’s tobacco tar. I’m guessing he smokes heavily around his computer.

Word of caution, Cal. That smoke weakens the plastic on fan blades and makes them more brittle. I’ve seen a good deal of computer fans looking like that where the fan would seize up or the blades would break when trying to clean them.

Like a fookin' chimney! Like a freight train! Whoo whoo lung cancer express pulling into the station! But yes I do smoke a lot. lol
Honestly that is the only reason I'd want to quit. Not for health reasons but for everything getting smoked out reasons. At least with cigarettes if the item isn't in my room it will be mostly alright. It was worse when we were running a wood stove for heat. Everything smelled horribly of that wood stove smell. The worse part was I couldn't smell it since I was so used to it but if I went anywhere people could immediately smell it.

And thanks for the fan info. I didn't know that could make them brittle. You know years ago I did have my cpu fan crack on an old Zalman cooler. I wonder if the tar contributed to that?

Your setup is correct. Rear fan blow out, all others blow in.

Good to know except I double checked and I've actually got them all backwards. Rear is sucking in and sides are blowing out! Maybe I should set them all to blow out to help keep out the cig smoke lol

[Calavera]

It has now been a little over 4 years and 3 months since I got this PC. Still running everything fine. I still game at 1080p 60hz so the 1660 Super is still working just fine for the few new games I play here and there.

[Calavera]

Finally bought a new trackball mouse. I had been using a Logitech M570 for the past several years.



I'm not even for sure how long I've had it. Probably around 6+ years. It was a fine trackball but it was showing it's age. Several times throughout the years it would develop an issue where the left button would double click when you single clicked. You can imagine how annoying that would be. I usually fixed it by taking it apart and cleaning the switches with some isopropyl alcohol which would fix the issue for awhile. However the most recent time after cleaning it started double clicking again within a day. I was tired of messing with it. Besides that the Logitech Unifying Receiver for it stopped working and the only way I was able to get it to work was this really jerry rigged way of dissembling the receiver and a USB extension cable and clamping it to the cable with a big metal clamp. I know I know but hey it worked and I didn't want to buy a new receiver! It worked well for a number of years but it was time for a new one.

I could have went with basically the same mouse and bought a Logitech M575 but those are around $40. I checked Newegg and they had a pretty nice looking trackball the EM04 by Protoarc. It was $25.99, it looked good but I thought "eh I don't really want to spend the money on it right now" then one night the Logitech was driving me crazy with the double clicking so I was like screw it I'm going to Newegg to order it right now. I picked a good time to do that because it was on sale for $17.99 and also had a $1 off promo code. It ended up costing me $18.18 and it was well worth it.



It is so much smoother and the buttons click so much better than the well worn Logitech. When I first plugged it in it was really sensitive so my first thought was to lower the cursor speed in the control panel mouse settings. That worked but then I realized I just needed to change the DPI setting. Believe it or not this is the first mouse I've had that has different DPI settings. It has 200,400,800,1200 and 1600. 800 seems to be fine for normal use. I'm not really sure why you'd want the lowest or highest settings. Maybe if you are really into FPS a high DPI setting would be good to use?

Another long post by Calavera. Three paragraphs about me buying a new mouse.

[ian]

I'm not really sure why you'd want the lowest or highest settings. Maybe if you are really into FPS a high DPI setting would be good to use?

Can confirm having a stupidly insanely high DPS is useful for certain games.. mainly any game that features guns and also flying vehicles.

Battlefield was the best and first selling case for mouse adjustable DPI for me, because for anything on land (be it on foot or vehicle) you'd like a nice 400-800, but if you tried to make a slight 0.005 degree turn piloting a plane or god forbid a helicopter, you would get RSI from lifting your mouse and moving your arm across the entire length of your desk 17 times. It was ok as a gunner. But if you were a pilot, every 60 seconds of flight was equivalent to 4 hours running on a treadmill unless you had a mouse that could go up to like 200,000 DPI.

Looking back, battlefield games would all be considered unfuckingplayable if I didn't get a G mouse in about 2006.

and as for stupidly low DPI? It's also useful if you're suffering from some sort of sugar high, or panic attack, or some sort of drug and or alcohol impairment, or you've stayed up for 27 hours and are having trouble clicking things at a normal speed... It's also useful if you need to edit an image to perfection so have to zoom in on a 50 megapixel image to 10,000x magnification and don't want to hit undo 365,490 times when you move a fraction of a billionth of a micron and go 1 pixel too far.
These days, that sort of image work can be done without a human even touching it, but in 2005 it made it so much easier.

In my mouse news, my daily G700s is on the way out, and I only have a single new G500s left in case it dies.
Mouse is unplugging itself all the time and it's the MICRO USB port on the mouse itself. It is wireless so wouldn't be a big issue, but there's like a second of pause when it goes from wired mode to wireless mode.

I really, REALLY don't want to get a new mouse when the G700s does eventually piss me off to the point I can't use it anymore.

Unfortunately Logitech don't make good mice anymore... Between their laser sensors that die in the ass after 4 months, wobbly buttons that double click and ram into each other if you press them hard enough to make them click, the worst fucking software computers have ever seen outside of legitimate actual viruses and features on mice that should be standard reserved for the models that cost $250. I can't see myself buying a Logitech product again. The problem is, they are the leaders in mice, and if the leader in something is making it dogshit, what hope does everyone else have?
Pretty much keyboards have stayed identical since 1985 (a good keyboard in 1985 is still a good keyboard today) but mice, they've come too far to go back to what companies other than Logitech deem acceptable.

I need 2-4 side buttons.
I need DPI SHIFT and adjust.
I need a 5 way dual mode scroll wheel.
I need to be able to use it without garbage software.
I need it to last 10 years, not 4 months.
And even if they priced them even more stupidly high than they already do, if I thought they'd make a product last half a lifetime like they used to, I'd have no problem paying.

[Calavera]

I'm not really sure why you'd want the lowest or highest settings. Maybe if you are really into FPS a high DPI setting would be good to use?

Can confirm having a stupidly insanely high DPS is useful for certain games.. mainly any game that features guns and also flying vehicles.

Battlefield was the best and first selling case for mouse adjustable DPI for me, because for anything on land (be it on foot or vehicle) you'd like a nice 400-800, but if you tried to make a slight 0.005 degree turn piloting a plane or god forbid a helicopter, you would get RSI from lifting your mouse and moving your arm across the entire length of your desk 17 times. It was ok as a gunner. But if you were a pilot, every 60 seconds of flight was equivalent to 4 hours running on a treadmill unless you had a mouse that could go up to like 200,000 DPI.

That's a good point, I could see that being useful on a regular mouse but on a trackball there is no lifting and moving your arm across the desk. I totally can see the reason for wanting very high or even very low on a standard mouse but on a trackball I don't see the benefit.

A couple of other things improved over the Logitech I forgot to mention is that the Protoarc can be used either with it's 2.4ghz wireless adapter or with bluetooth. I'm using it with Bluetooth which is nice as it frees up a USB port on the front of my case. The other is that this mouse is rechargeable via USB-C instead of running on a AA battery. Not that big of a deal since the Logitech would last for months on a single AA. At least with this one if it does run flat I can use it while it is being charged unlike those ridiculous apple mice everyone makes fun of.

Also I tried the blue ball from the Logitech in the Protoarc and I kind of like it! I'm keeping the black one for now but the blue looks pretty good.

[ian]

So with no DPI adjust you'll just get RSI in your thumb with a trackball and not elbow in the examples I mentioned.