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PC Builds Megathread

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Baughn said:
*: This includes windows actually, but for historical reasons it pretends otherwise.
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Here's a little blog post about that.
I think the only time I've seen this done was Storage Spaces on a Windows Hyper-V server.

The only times I've needed to do the drive-within-drive thing on my personal rig (for space reasons) I've either done a striped volume beforehand or copied the folder to a seperate drive and created a symlink.
 
I am looking to restore my roommate's old computers to maybe sell them for a little bit of money.
They are both FX 6300 CPU computers.

One of them was always complaining about how their computer was not working right.

Looking at their computer, they had the power to the video card (GTX 960) with a six pin plugged into an 8 pin connector, leaving two connectors open. I cannot see the video card operating correcting in such a case? As well, there was motherboard power but I found no CPU power. Not sure if the FX 6300 needs both but if it does, I am thinking problems could have simply have been not enough power?
 
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The FX-6300 was a pretty bad CPU when it first launched over 12 years ago. I would not bother investing any time or money into those PCs.

The GTX 960 could be sold individually for a bit of profit, but it's also well past its best-by date and doesn't even meet the minimum specs of many current games.
 
steamrick said:
The FX-6300 was a pretty bad CPU when it first launched over 12 years ago. I would not bother investing any time or money into those PCs.

The GTX 960 could be sold individually for a bit of profit, but it's also well past its best-by date and doesn't even meet the minimum specs of many current games.
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Money, not much, but I think I have an old PSU with the proper pins
Time is just time though
 
The 960 has 120-160 Watt power target depending on the model, so 75W mainboard + 75 Watt 6Pin (150Watt on a 8Pin) might work out, depending on the pin compatibility, quick google of 6pin to 8 pin adapters looks like there is no wire incompatibility. Might be a model with a factory overclock that needs more power, consult the GPU manual.

The answer is probably mainboard dependent on the cpu side if it works at all (all mainboards with non connected cpu power have refused to boot for me in the past, even with low 65 W TDP CPU), spec says 95 Watt TDP CPU, there is 300 Watt coming in via the 24 Pin for everything. I would say consult the manual of the mainboard if that's in spec or forced cpu clock downgrades/instabilities.

Would run a stress test on both with hw info open and watching the power consumption and test results, but might lead to overload damage somewhere in the system in the long run (fried a 600W power supply after 3 years with 400 W load by not splitting the load correctly on the rails, again reading the manual of the power supply would have helped. BeQuiet warrantied it anyway)
 
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The FX 6300 is a 95 watt CPU. I am thinking that the video card is EVGA but not 100% sure. Looked at it a few days ago.

A funny thing I noted is that I had a single tower heat sink with a single fan for my FX 8350. This is with a 125 watt TDP.. At the same time, my pretty new gaming desktop has a two tower heat sink with dual fans and it a Ryzen 7 5800x. The Ryzen 7 5800x is a 105 watt TDP. Far more cooling for what should be a less hot CPU.
 
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So coming up to black friday, if I wanted a solid upgrade from my 3070, what are my best options? I'm not particularly tied to brands so that's not a particular issue and I'm in the US as well if that helps. So far, my own research is showing either a 7900XT or 4070 Super?

Current setup is a 3070, an R9 5900x , and a 750 watt PSU
 
I dunno that I'd bother at this point, unless there was some pressing need to replace your current hardware. The cards you listed are only gonna be marginal upgrades.

You could jump up a price tier to something like a 4080 Super or 7900XTX, but the next gen of cards isn't too far away so it doesn't feel great to spend that much. Maybe there will be a steep black Friday sale ahead of new inventory, but with how the GPU market has been I wouldn't count on it.
 
Kitsune said:
The FX 6300 is a 95 watt CPU. I am thinking that the video card is EVGA but not 100% sure. Looked at it a few days ago.

A funny thing I noted is that I had a single tower heat sink with a single fan for my FX 8350. This is with a 125 watt TDP.. At the same time, my pretty new gaming desktop has a two tower heat sink with dual fans and it a Ryzen 7 5800x. The Ryzen 7 5800x is a 105 watt TDP. Far more cooling for what should be a less hot CPU.
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Sidetracking to just give a shout out to the FX 6300. I loved that fucking CPU. It was my first computer build ever - upgrading from a decent (if outdated) iMac that I was just tired of not being able to play games on as a teen.

Served me well for a long, long time. I miss that workhorse. I miss those simpler times.
 
DarthGamer said:
So coming up to black friday, if I wanted a solid upgrade from my 3070, what are my best options? I'm not particularly tied to brands so that's not a particular issue and I'm in the US as well if that helps. So far, my own research is showing either a 7900XT or 4070 Super?
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The 4070S ist about 44% faster than the 3070 in both raster and raytracing... it's not much of an upgrade.
The 7900XT is about 71% faster in raster and 32% faster in raytracing... it's much more of an upgrade outside of raytracing, but less so with.

The 7900XT has also got 20GB of VRAM to the 4070S's 12GB. Given that 12GB is starting to be problematic in some new titles (at max settings, at least), that's another reason for the 7900XT.

If this is what your budget allows for I'd get the 7900XT and skip raytracing in titles where performance is problematic or alternatively wait for the next gen.
 
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Yeah, as someone who's 3080 broke and had to replace it with a 4070 super I do not feel any generational gains, only incremental.
 
Simple question for people who have build full desktops
How does it take to build a computer from parts?
I was in a mock interview and said a couple of hours.
The woman, who kept calling a whole computer a "CPU" said she build one in half an hour.
 
Kitsune said:
Simple question for people who have build full desktops
How does it take to build a computer from parts?
I was in a mock interview and said a couple of hours.
The woman, who kept calling a whole computer a "CPU" said she build one in half an hour.
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I mean, with a decent/user friendly case under an hour isn't unreasonable. Cases fans, drives, motherboard, CPU and cooler, ram, and then gpu. All the software not included.

But if you want to do nice cable management and ziptie things down it can take a lot longer. Water-cooling also takes a long while to install and test of if custom.
 
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Wootius said:
I mean, with a decent/user friendly case under an hour isn't unreasonable. Cases fans, drives, motherboard, CPU and cooler, ram, and then gpu. All the software not included.

But if you want to do nice cable management and ziptie things down it can take a lot longer. Water-cooling also takes a long while to install and rest of its custom.
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Likely the things that take a while for me is making sure the CPU tower fan is on properly and the pin outs. Mine has kind of tricky clip on fans on the tower cooler and pin outs can be quite a bear for me. Even if you don't want to get all the cable management perfect, running everything through the back can be tricky as well. My cable management I would call "so-so" but everything runs through the back.
 
yeah, once you do it regularly and have an electric screwdriver that's possible. I always screw up the memory channels, have to fiddle with the XMP profile, bend the LED pins and screw up the front IO headers, so takes 1-3 hours every two years.
 
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It really depends on the parts, case, and care you put in. Well, that and equipment.

Personally, unless the person is a professional PC builder who does nothing but building PC, I'd probably be a lot more comfortable with someone who said they took a couple of hours to built it, then someone who said it took them 30 minutes.

There are just way too many things that could go catastrophically wrong if you make a mistake and 30 minutes definitely feels like to be in the "no time to double check anything"-zone.

With a well lit roomy workspace and the right tools, I'd probably say that about an hour is a good time to build it and make some effort with cable management. Of course, with more drives, more fans, and especially aRGB fans, I'd expect the necessary time to make it look good to go up quite a bit.

I'm usually lacking the well lit roomy workspace and the right tools, so it'll always take me a lot longer to finish my builds than I think I'll need 😅
 
I recently happened to get this number from someone who builds servers for (part of) a living... "Ten minutes".

However, those blade servers are far easier to put together than a desktop PC. They're designed to minimise the time needed for repairs.
 
If I'm picturing a server blade correctly there'd be almost no cables and zero screws except maybe for the CPU cooler if the CPU can even be changed.

So unpack the blades and the parts, plug in RAM and storage and shove the blades into the back plane, then the rest is bios settings and hooking up power and networking?
 
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BIOS settings and such is done automatically, through the network. So it's basically just plugging things together, yeah.
 
Okay, at least that tells me that telling her "a couple of hours" is not a crazy number.
She seemed to think it was a crazy number.
 
If the setting is a job interview, it was probably just mindgames. No right answer, only too slow or too fast.

I'm looking forward to building a new computer as soon as AMD comes out with their new RDNA 4 cards. My 1080 has lasted a long time, but it's finally starting to show its age.

I've a pretty good idea what parts I'd like, but I'm a bit indecisive which distro of Linux to move to. About six months ago I formatted and moved off Windows, to Nobara, a gaming-focused Fedora fork. Overall it's worked very well, but twice in that time the developer has silently made breaking changes that gave me an unexpected morning of troubleshooting. To some extent that's probably unavoidable on any distro close enough to the bleeding edge to get the latest graphics drivers, but I'd rather it happen because of real issues, not the distro's maintainer changing things to better align with his own use case.

On one hand, I could stay close to what I know and just do Fedora. But if I'm particular enough about my own computer to not just take the easy road with something immutable like Bazzite, maybe I should jump in the deep end and try out Arch? I'm not a particularly tech savvy person, but I've learned enough about the console to get by. I don't really enjoy messing with my OS, but I'll spend hours doing it anyway to make it act exactly the way I want.
 
Baughn said:
Try NixOS.
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You know what? I like some of these ideas it has. If further research doesn't push me away, maybe I will.

Edit: I like the idea of everything being reproducible from config files, and what the tutorial man is able to do in the tutorial videos is very cool, but as someone who has never done any coding I'm not sure this is the OS for me. I might try to play around with it in a VM, though, and follow along with the tutorials.
 
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Honestly after distro hopping for a while, I recommend base Fedora/it's spins.

It doesn't have that much upkeep and it hasn't broken on me yet.
 
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