PC building guide 2021 fall. WIP

Discussion in 'Tech Discussion' started by xiazixin, Sep 24, 2021.

  1. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    Honestly, I would have wrote this quite some times by now, but with the coming ETH, buying guide became useless, who are about brand, product quality and warranty, price and performance? just buy anything you can get your hands on it. with graphic card OUT OF STOCK the minute it hit the shelves.

    And 3080 from a MSRP of $699 to as high as $4000. Things are nuts.


    Don't look for getting always for cheap, even cards like GTX660 and GTX750ti cost close to 100 dollars now. I know it's stupid.



    Currently how to buy it cheap and when to buy a GPU have becoming a financial question than a tech questions.

    when to buy? when bit coins drops. No one ever knows when will bit coins drops.



    <break row>


    So lets, make a guide on Other components first before jumping on Graphic card.


    Casing, What decide the limiting factor of you build is usually not motherboard, as there are plenty of expansion cards, but casings.


    Best casing to keep at home, none moving, good airflow and expandability.

    full tower.
    • Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2,
      Phanteks is well know for charging extra for their super expensive hard disk mounting brackets. with up to 23 3.5" hard disk, perfect for people who watch's anime and movies.
      [​IMG]
    Other case is just purely on the looks, and your own preference and the availability. but if you do need the expandability there is always the Enthoo pro 2 (Aka: PK620).

    <break row>

    Choosing platforms.
    Platforms are important. Be it AM4, C621, C622 or old C612, Lga1200. usually you chose the platform first.
    Usually intel chipsets are better, in consumer PC. M.2 SSD's on intel are more likely to run faster than M.2 SSDs running though amd chip sets.

    Other than that just focused on the pcie and expendability of the motherboard first.
    for the best expandability and the value for money C612 is the best currently

    upload_2021-9-24_12-26-44.png
    ouch, the price on eBay is about 100 dollars or more expensive. this though should cost about 300 or even lesser some times. It's wise to use aliexpress or taobao.

    make sure to buy E5 2600 series if you buy dual cpu boards.

    upload_2021-9-24_12-32-49.png
    2690v3 cost about 90 USD.
    it's normal, not exactly cheap not exactly expansive too. what kind of New CPU can you buy with 90 USD? ;D though keep in mind that you need a graphic card, there is no igpu in server boards or CPU

    what about mutated CPU on 1151 platform, those motherboard are just too expansive. those mother board go as high as nearing 100USD. it's just cheaper and easier to get a 10th gen intel or with a low-end board if it saves the hassle for flashing bios and troubleshooting hassles.

    For AM4 motherboard, there is a recommendation. x570 tomahawk for about 260 usd. It have amazing VRM for almost any Ryzen CPU. 12 + 2 phrase VRM. it's is enough to even overclock 5950x on LN,
    upload_2021-9-24_12-43-25.png

    well for current motherboards https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...kdDcQt8ID7vH52-lKzaaXUUQx8/edit#gid=741394377 there is a list here.
    As for CPU, buy what you needs. With all kinds of bench marks online and media, i don't think anyone have the trouble in choosing those.

    <break row>

    PSU, for 30 series 3080, even 800w PSU will encounter power tripping.
    It's recommend getting 1000w PSU. As the next generation of graphic card will take about 500W rumor's, it's safe to buy PSU close to 1200watss.
    note, you don't need the best or fancy PSU, in fact many people who do tech even some of the people who wrote PSU reviews cheap out on PSU.
    https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet...SvH1_juom7SMG5SCNzP2Uov8w/edit#gid=1719706335
    https://forums.tomshardware.com/threads/psucultists-psu-tier-list-rev-14-8-12-07-2021.3624094/
    just get one that is not horrible and decent on the list will do.
    Honestly, Even i my self cheap out some times, when total power is lesser than 300watts.
    Power supply have been the same for 20 years it will likely stay the same, whatever it work it will be fine, no need to get fancy unless it power tripped when workload spikes.

    SSD
    Just avoid Western Digital, especially if your using AMD CPU, if your using intel, just avoid SN550.
     
    Last edited: Sep 24, 2021
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  2. Kaminomikan

    Kaminomikan 神のみ感

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    nice guide, but damn... that board ate all my budget...
     
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  3. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    True, eBay's are just ripping off people, Aliexpress are better.
    but hey at least, the CPU and memory are cheap.
     
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  4. aegis062

    aegis062 Chaotic Demon Emperor

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    Honestly I was building a pc for my nephew and he doesn't play anything that needs a rig, but I was able to find an xps 8500 on craigslist for $80 which was really cheap and it had I7 3770k and it had 8gig of ram so I had to upgrade it to 16 which cost me another $65 and didn't even need to switch out the PSU and I got GPU which was the most expensive apart from the ssd cost me $265 on an MSI 1050ti 4g gddr5 the ssd was 1tb $140 samsung ssd. I can say at the current moment these are pretty cheap, but if it was 2018-2019 I could have easily gotten them for at least $40-50$ cheaper the GPU.

    I ran a few games in max setting and they worked great including Arkham knight I could get it to over 60fps easy and I ran crisis 3 pretty well too along with a few other games.

    It was his 13th birthday so I wanted to welcome him into the world of PC gaming so I opened a steam account for him and put $80 into his account so he can buy any game he likes.
     
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  5. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    not sure, just last year September a rx 590 go as low as 90USD? and a 1060 6G cost about 100USD locally in china.
    SSD wise, recently I bought a SM2262ENG with 2TB of micron B27 nand and 2 GB of DRAM cost 201 usd (1300rmb).
    The price is just expensive now, especially the Graphic card and SSD.

    RAM should be the cheaper as compared to last year. but maybe slightly more expansive as compared to December 2019. but it's cheap enough that you can get lower than $65 for 2*8Gb. but I doubt you can get a cheaper price last year.
     

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  6. aegis062

    aegis062 Chaotic Demon Emperor

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    Did I forget that this was last year? I bought most of it during july of last year. I know there was huge price hike during pandemic of last year, but I think for the time it was pretty cheap compare to now there has been few thing that have gotten more expensive.

    The reason I got him the xps 8500 was because I had one back in 2013 it was what I could afford at the time and upgrading it is really simple and If in a few years it becomes obsolete I can easily fit a better motherboard into it and I know a place that sell cpu for really good prices.

    China prices are really cheap. I wish I could order from china at RMB prices.
     
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  7. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    wow, then you get a pretty good deal with $65 on 16GB of ram. Last year july I think it's pretty expensive not at 2018 level but should be 20% more than now.
    you could, all you need is to be able to read Chinese really. Taobao and Tmall ships international too.

    Though, some times it's never about the Price, it's about the stock and availability. I planned to get the 2TB of SSD with SM2262en with Micron TLC B17 nand instead for about 25rmb more, but it's just unavailable. about 4USD more for a 2TB disk is not much honestly. This kind's of thing is quite common in not just consumers also OEMs. Some times a specific solution is just not available even form OEM manufacturer. that's why many SSD brand change their solutions over the years.
     
  8. aegis062

    aegis062 Chaotic Demon Emperor

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    I did get it pretty cheap. I started looking at prices again and everything was much more expensive.

    While there isn't much available at the moment. I usually find treasure on a few sites like craigslist, offer up etc. It's usually ppl who don't know much about computers that buy rigs or OEM like dell and HP with AMD or intel cpu that could easily be overclocked and they sell them for cheap back in 2015 when I was replacing my pc I looked for part on these sites and I spent less than $150 since the man who sold me the rig didn't know what he was selling. and just the gtx 970 could be sold and it would have given me enough to buy 3 more custom desktops.
     
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  9. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    In China its the opposite, usually server racks are the ones sold at the incredible low price. Like a racks with dual 1200w platinum PSU, a super micro x10 and 2 2670 with all the fans, rams and cooler and 12 hard disk brackets (no disk) some time can go lower than 500 usd.
    Well, they most likely know computers.
     
  10. aegis062

    aegis062 Chaotic Demon Emperor

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    that's ruff.
    I actually paid for most of my uni while living in my dorm. most ppl either needed their computer fixed or wanted to pay someone to build one for them. I did more than that I would also DL movies of all kinds and sell them for $5.
    back then I would charge $120 for formatting and installing everything on a computer. If it was hardware problem I would charge $20 to diagnose and if I had to go buy parts I would charge the cost +20% + labor. Of course I just showed them what I charge up front since it was still cheaper than going to a repair store that would end up being $250 and that was the cheapest back then I had seen some ppl with $500 bill because the customer had no idea they were being cheated.
     
  11. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    LOL, average Chinese universities students can probably repair their smart phones in their own, or solder more ram on to their Mac book. It's mostly the elderly that needed helps.
     
  12. aegis062

    aegis062 Chaotic Demon Emperor

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    I think that's cool that most kids in china can do that, but at least when I was in uni most kids were busy trying to have fun instead of having to worry about money my parent could not afford sending me to uni and even getting a car took me 3 years of saving money at the time.

    I did have several part time jobs at the time, but I had to quit them when the managers or supervisors became unreasonable. I would state that I had classes to go to, but a lot of the time they didn't care and I had clearly told them that I had classes.

    Fixing computers and selling burned DVD was probably the most money I had made during uni. most of these kids had parents paying for everything while they stayed in their dorms.

    The amount of free stuff I got from most of those kids was ridiculous. free monitors, free PC, free shoes, free tickets, free Pc hardware mouse/keyboard etc.

    most of these kids grew up with everything and something as simple as a scratch and they would want to throw things away or if they got a new pc or hardware even if the old one wasn't broken they would want to throw it away.
     
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  13. phobos

    phobos Well-Known Member

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    somehow these days best recommandations could be : wait for later
    on 1 hand the gpu prices might drop (about 3060 is down by a bit)
    on the other hand there will come the stacked CPUs/GPUs boosting the performance quite a bit or drop the old gen prices
    that is if you can wait for 1-2 years

    as for your recommandations i just dont see any use in going server style
    for your everyday surfing its just overkill and for gaming its suboptimal at best (slow ram, missing single core performance, hows compatibility ? ) while you would hardly make use of its strongpoints 100+ GB RAM for your home PC ?
     
  14. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    Those depending on your needs. If you go to Mangadex, discord and ask now may scanlators have a server at home, probably most of them will say they do. As image is larger than text files opposed to what Novelupdates translators do.

    I was shock with the amount of scanlators owning a Nas or a media servers two years ago. Almost everyone owns one.

    Video endcoding, audio, image all of them bite file size like crazy. Especially when your torrenting.
    If you want to game when torrenting on background, a FTP server in background, and other workloads. Some people simply need it for expandability.
     
  15. phobos

    phobos Well-Known Member

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    if you want to game for example an online game you wouldnt want to torrent in the background anyway

    also wasnt this about PC building not server or workstation building ? sure you might meet scanlators here but arent about 80% of the ppl here rather "normal" consumers ?
     
  16. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    I did recommend motherboards and other platforms.
    other existing CPU it's just anything that match your price and bench marks really. Though Get a cooler that make sense to both case and temperature.

    I'm still thinking on how to write my GPU.
    This is hard, best is to look at amazon for every country.

    The only one that I think worth mentioning and buying in AM4 is x570 tomahawk only really.
    no point choosing other boards. other than special niche in itx.
    lga1200 don't bother, 10 and 11 gen is only good at low end i3 or i5 and with non-k and low-end builds and boards, just buy what ever is cheaper.

    upload_2021-9-27_0-22-54.png
    top rank board vrm with mid range price, one of my friends even got it with a 5600x really, it run cool and tons of power.
    Sure, you may say it's over deal, and you can get a low-end cheap board, but 260usd for this form is really good deal isn't it?

    Even cheaper x570 is not much cheaper and will probably have horrible VRM compare to the tomahawk.

    240usd with a older and smaller bios, just solder a Winbond chip and you get to save 20usd in amazon.
    upload_2021-9-27_0-28-56.png
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2021
  17. phobos

    phobos Well-Known Member

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    i like the special feature of the asus dark hero board , no active cooling, and 8 instead of 6 SATA whats quite usefull when you need 8 SATA slots ;)

    downside: price and you cant fit next gen cpus on it (thought thats a matter for all other actual chipsets too and for intel is another standard every 1-2 years rather normal )
     
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  18. xiazixin

    xiazixin Well-Known Member

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    wait, C8H have a dark version? C8DH? though it's a waste of money. Agree, I see no point in that.
    It's better to invest in SAS at that point, get a SAS card. And I recommend superMicro X10 motherboard if anyone dose that, the case above will make it run quiet, ;D

    Though it's surprisingly easy to recommend motherboard this time, either x570 tomahawk or other quirks like ITX.

    Usually it takes surprising long times and effort to explain to other people about what each of the motherboard do.
     
    Last edited: Sep 26, 2021
  19. phobos

    phobos Well-Known Member

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    dark version comes with OC stuff unique feature should be that you can OC and keep your single core boosts at least if i got it right about 1 year ago
     
  20. lnv

    lnv ✪ Well-Known Hypocrite

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    Personally, I would wait.

    My computer has a AMD CPU and an SN550 :p

    Though I got it before WD nerfed them.
     
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