The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Oh yeah definitely, the 8-series was a fairly substantial leap over the 7 and not one I've really seen replicated at Intel's end yet. To be quite honest, the Ryzen 7 I upgraded to runs rings around my 8400, but given the price of Intel CPUs seemed to jump when the almost identical 9400 was released, it was quite a while before you could get a deal as good as I had from my 8400 three years ago (where does the time go?)
I don't have any real benches to compare the CPUs with other than handbrake video encodes, which I've run on many of my machines, mostly for processing dashcam footage and the likes. The 7600 in my main PC would process at about 0.9x realtime, the 8400 in the LAN PC about 1.5x realtime, and the 3700X about 3x. Games-wise there was noticeable difference between the 7600 and 3700X as well, but as I've not run the 8400 in tandem with a capable GPU it's not easy to say how that would compare. Probably quite well.

 

Were I to acquire an 8700K or 9900K I could ideally overclock that to 4.8-5GHz all cores. There aren't really any Ryzen chips that can manage that on air. A huge number of 8700Ks and 9900Ks can. And do it well. Considering the similar IPC of the architectures, I daresay that matches or beats any 6c12t or 8c16t Ryzen respectively. The 8700K would at least be significantly better than a 3600X. And considering current prices stateside it's actually an okay value as well. The 9900K currently isn't a whole lot more expensive new than a 3800X. And good boards are equivalent. The i7 8700K can already be had for a reasonable ~$250 on ebay as we speak.

The i5s are indeed pretty humble though. This 6c6t doesn't hold a candle to any modern 8c16t chip in raw power. Luckily clockspeed is still king for my needs. I intend to overclock this 8600K as high as I can manage. That should close a lot of the performance gaps, at least with some CPUs, lol. 6 threads isn't a lot. However that makes this a cheap entry to a better platform for me. I had a chance at a 9600K for slightly more but everything I've found says the 8600K is a better chip for overclocking, haha. Architecturally they are identical. Only difference is a soldered IHS and clockspeed on 9th gen. And the solder job isn't amazing either. The TIM on the 8600K is still fine. It hasn't been a big issue since Ivy Bridge and Haswell. I looked at a 7700K based setup, but 4c4t or 4c8t seems so limited to me and the platform is entirely defunct and expensive like Haswell. I want at least 12 threads in the future. Coffee Lake does this cheaply.

The good deal on the board and CPU were what compelled this move. ~$120 for the board and ~$170 for the CPU. Much less than what I paid for my current setup, with equivalent board capability to handle the CPUs it was designed for, with similar build quality. The RAM was cheaper than my current 16GB(2x8GB) DDR3-2400 kit at $140 as well. Not counting the used price of the additional 8GB(2x4GB) kit. So I get more and faster RAM for cheaper as well. With less slots used and the option for more. With less overall power usage and heat output in my poor house assaulting my poor AC unit and budget. With PCIe 3.0 4x for my NVMe drive.

A lot of stuff had to fall into place to compel me to do this. It had to be a solid true upgrade and it had to be cheap enough. Ryzen never really offered that to me. I do not like the lack of clockspeed and crappy overclocking. I never moved on a cheap 2600X to step into the architecture, and now Coffee Lake 8th gen is just as cheap. With the current Ryzen CPU prices, I might as well go used Intel.

 

It's been several years since I last posted anything but I'm suprised to see the last post here has been on June 8th of last year, come on guys wake up.

 

Not much has changed in the last year or so. I finally dumped my old Haswell based setup and moved to Coffee Lake. It's a nice step up but not mind-bendingly huge like Haswell was for me. The 8600K evened out to 4.6ghz. It's fine. It runs and feels like more of the same but in a good way. It's faster than my 4.6GHz 4790K was. Six cores beats 4c8t with hyperthreading easily. Very likely to get an 8700K or 9900K in the future.

In regards to video cards my friend helped me out with a 1070Ti last year and I traded him my old regular 1070 for it. The 1070Ti is a great card and when OC'd is outright as good as a reference GTX1080. Cut down 1080 dies on cards otherwise built for the 1070 GPU. The PCB and build on my 1070Ti Gaming OC is nearly identical to that of my older 1070 G1. Really really nice. Gigabyte nailed it with GeForce 10.

I would have definitely moved onto a used 2070 Super by now but prices have been prohibitive. Since shortly after the beginning of 2020 I haven't been able to buy a card. At the time I was looking at used 1080s on Ebay for $300. 1070s and 1070Tis were $~200-300 as well. My friend got the 1070Ti used for $450 early last year before they started spiking up in price really bad. He just wanted to add it to a small mining rig so he got a 1070Ti on purpose to trade and help me out. The price difference was small and his custom changes make the difference in performance nearly meaningless. The 1070Ti continues to suffice for the games I play regularly, but there are a few that the 1070 struggled with and adding a "Ti" to the model name didn't change the overall performance picture much. I like this card but a better one is warranted in newer titles. A 2070 Super for ~$350 wouldn't be crazy right now if Covid and the events coinciding with it had not happened. Prices have come WAY down though, so here's hoping that trend continues.

 

The prices of high end graphics card should start tumbling since China has pretty much banned mining and, as I understand it, the Chinese are/were one of the biggest miners in the world. In addition, NVIDIA is changing it's cards' software to more or less prevent the use of them for mining.

 

Also the next gen of high end cards are slated for September 22 so there is that.. I'm expecting a glut of decent cards to appear just after that for us people who don't care about running the latest gear but want reasonable performance. If it will do a decent job of Dyson Sphere Program or Factorio I'm happy.. Nvidia K4000 for the win there currently.. decent performance at a pocket smile price.

 

Finally went ahead and got myself an 8700K. The 8600K was able to do 4.6GHz core 4.3GHz uncore but needed an extra push to 1.28v to get there. Too much voltage for a little gain. It did however do "all cores turbo" 4.3GHz core 4GHz uncore with very little effort. This 8700K manages "all cores turbo" at the turbo speed of 4.7GHz which is pretty decent. But it also manages 4.4GHz uncore, which is a slight bump over the rated uncore turbo of 4.3Ghz. It does this with 1.26v, Less than the 8600K needed for 4.6GHz, and it was a gentler voltage curve to get there. It gave me 4.7 pretty easily

4.8 is a pretty hard brick wall right now. Temps might be as much of an issue as voltage but only for stressing. I use IBT for testing as nothing else seems to give me truly stable results on these Coffeelake chips. However it pushes temps much harder than other stress tests. I've never seen temps go as high under real stresses. For example during encoding at 4.7GHz it maybe hits 70 for short durations and normally hovers in the mid 60s which is fine. I have plenty of breathing room. In IBT, it will peg to the mid to high 70s and stay there. It's a very extreme load.

The LLC voltage spikes also need to be managed. Normally not an issue at factory voltages, but it can really be problematic when you start to push higher as it can spike into uncomfortable territory. At 4.7 with 1.26v set in BIOS it's fine. It sometimes spikes to ~1.32v which is a little high but not anything worth worrying about. When I start pushing higher it starts spiking to 1.36-ish and I'm not comfortable going that far over 1.3v, even for short bursts. The 8600K acted similarly. 4.7GHz at 1.26v is still a very happy result for me. Clearly a better binned chip than my previous one. I still might adjust my LLC settings and see if I can tame this chip a bit and push higher. Or just to make it more efficient.

In the future I intend to grab a 9900K to really update this behind-the-curve PC. I got this 8700K for about $150 and I'd like to find a 9900K that cheap in a few years. Other life priorities have taken precedence over my PC for now though. The 8700K was cheap enough and does the job I needed it for. Encoding is vastly improved The 1070Ti continues to be mostly adequate for my needs. I still do a ton of retro gaming and it's basically nothing for that card. The most demanding games are very hard for it, but the large majority of even newer releases I can just max and run.

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However, if I am to spend any more money on my PC, it will probably be to update my storage first. Though most of my HDDs are only a year to a few years old max, some old standbys like my 2TB Green scratch drive are very old. I think 5 or 6 years of constant use now and it still benches well, is quiet, and has clean SMART readings. I intend to buy my first pair of 8TB drives, and do a full trickle down in my storage array to eliminate the oldest drives. The mentioned 2TB and a 4TB Green respectively need to be replaced eventually here. Then a larger HDD for game installs. My 2TB Seagate Firecuda SSHD is still running strong, performs really well, and really isn't that old. It's been a really great gaming HDD with real world advantages. However, 2TB isn't enough for the installed library I want available. I need 4TB minimum for the future. Too bad Seagate never made them bigger as I had explored that option at the time of purchase. 4TB SSDs are still pretty expensive, way beyond what I want to spend. So I'll likely be looking into a 4TB WD Black drive or Barracuda Pro or Ironwolf alongside that pair of 8TB drives.

 

Additional news: Aorus GTX1080Ti Xtreme Edition ordered in very nice condition from ebay $450 shipped. Pulled from an office workstation and very clean. Not all video cards have come down in price yet but the GeForce 10 series certainly has. I need a more powerful card pretty badly and $450 to me is actually a pretty fair price for the relative performance. It's in the ballpark of what I'd expect to pay for this kind of capability in a pre-shortage market. It's faster and cheaper than a lot of newer cards. 2070S, 2080/S and 3060Ti were on my short list and are worse values even used.

So as far as value AND raw performance are concerned, I did pretty well. I expect driver support to remain longer than usual for this series as well due to the unique circumstances. I shouldn't have a problem keeping it useful for a few more years anyway.

Also, it has 11GB of memory all of which I can definitely use. Modded games alone will justify it. It's actually a fairly important feature for me, and is what has kept the 1080Ti on my radar all these years. That it happened to be SO powerful that it's STILL a totally capable card is a bonus. On userbenchmark it's something like 41% faster than my 1070Ti, and 69% faster than my base 1070. In short, it should very thoroughly solve my performance woes. Most of the games I have issues with are borderline with the 1070Ti. It and the original 1070 have done very well for me over the years. That my next step in 2022 is to buy another GeForce 10 feels weird. But the numbers are right where I need them to be. It WILL perform at the level I need.

I've always bought my hardware a bit behind the curve but now I am VERY behind the curve, and still getting satisfying results(at least with the CPU so far). It wasn't that long ago a PC this old would basically be junk. Think the jump from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Quad. Nowadays I would consider this to be actually a pretty stout PC.

So now I got my CPU and video card, I can focus on storage. Will be looking into a pair of large drives in the coming months to initiate the trickle-down.