New PC Acquired

"CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever" (carsoffortlangley)
03/20/2020 at 14:25 • Filed to: None

If I’m gonna be stuck inside over summer, I might as well have a nice rig. Dell G5, good price and customized with the top specs.

DISCUSSION (52)

DucST3-Red-1Liter-Standing-By > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:31

Beastly!

E90M3 > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:31

I thought you were worried about going bankrupt?

jminer > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:31

That’s sweet looking - you can probably build a Ryzen system that’ll beat it in most workloads for less.

**I’m a huge AMD fan**

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > DucST3-Red-1Liter-Standing-By
03/20/2020 at 14:31

I mean, if all my cars are gonna be dormant this spring.... I am gonna indulge my other hobbies

imadick > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:32

WHY give Dell your money? Should have built it.

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > jminer
03/20/2020 at 14:32

I priced out an AMD machine, but this one had some sales that made it cheaper

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > E90M3
03/20/2020 at 14:33

My new employer confirmed today that I would indeed be starting with them. Before...it was up in the air.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:34

Nice! Although that 460w power supply seems a bit minimal for the rig. If it is anything like the one in my former Dell gamig rig, the OEM supply primarily f unctioned to serve as a space heater inside the chassis with no efficiency rating of any kind. The good news is that most modern Dell towers will take a standard ATX power supply with little or no modification.

E90M3 > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:34

Ah, well sounds like you’re celebrating correctly then.

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > E90M3
03/20/2020 at 14:35

Yeah. Plus, we are likely going to keep costs down with the cars this spring/summer. 0% financing over 12 months helps too

benjrblant > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:36

Nice! That case isn’t too bad either.

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:37

now i want a new pc...it can wait tho.. mines getting on a bit but still good enough for all the games i play

(well...all the games i still have backlogged coz i dont get around to playing them)

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > farscythe - makin da cawfee!
03/20/2020 at 14:38

Mine is 9 years old, I bought it prior to my marriage. It’s served me well, but has been failing a bit recently

Nibby > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:40

ah man i would’ve just bought the drives and RAM myself for much cheaper

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Nibby
03/20/2020 at 14:41

I guess I could have, but meh.

imadick > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
03/20/2020 at 14:43

Plus it’s probably a cheap psu that will fry the system... Never skimp out on your psu

farscythe - makin da cawfee! > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:46

i think mines 8 now... i7-4770

Nibby > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:51

are you putting windows 95 on it

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Nibby
03/20/2020 at 14:52

probably not

Nom De Plume > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:57

I’m with the rest in the neutral to slightly negative camp here. Consider the ideas being shared and whether you can cancel the order. Prebuilt machines can be good, but I don’t feel you have taken that path here.

jminer > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 14:58

Gotcha - I would build one. But I’m in IT and have a ton of experience doing this .

Wheelerguy > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 15:17

As soon as you got the thing set up, get RaceRoom IMMEDIATELY while it’s still free. Yes, it’s free. Yes, it’s amazing.

Pickup_man > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 15:20

I just spent days, literal days, of research, troubleshooting, and trial and error repairs to finally be able to do a clean wipe and system restore on my wife’s 11 year old college laptop*. Mostly because I thought I could fix it and became obsessive about it until I did (as I do), but also mostly because Le wife is using the new laptop for some online schooling and I really wanted to get Minecraft fired up again, what with not being able to go out and all.

Buying a new computer would have been the easiest option by far, but any attempts at even inexpensive computers were shot down for various reasons, plus I’m a cheap bastard.

*Suck it Geek Squad, I knew the hard drive wasn’t bad**

**Too be fair the computer was showing hard drive errors on startup and I told my wife not to leave the laptop with Geek Squad because I can fix it myself dammit . Only took a couple of months to get it done.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > farscythe - makin da cawfee!
03/20/2020 at 15:25

So new! I’m still running a 3770K. It gets the job done, though. I just put Prepar3d on it yesterday and was amazed at how well it ran.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 15:29

My G5 is just sitting around in the basement doing nothing. Mind you, it’s a little bit older than yours...

Kinja'd!!!

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Nom De Plume
03/20/2020 at 15:30

What would you have recommended? They were offering $1500 off this one as spec'd above. I felt like, for the money, it was the best buy

TheTurbochargedSquirrel > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
03/20/2020 at 15:37

460 isn’t nearly enough for a 9900k and 2080 combo. The 9900k will pull 200W on its own, the GPU another 250W, and then you still have RAM, storage, motherboard, and efficiency losses to account for. This system will easily pull 500W under full load, a 650w supply would be bare minimum for a system like this in my opinion.

facw > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
03/20/2020 at 15:43

I’m normally on team “you don’t need that silly huge power supply!”, but 460W does seem light. I think a 600W unit would be fine (even a 550W would likely be ok, that’s Nvidia’s official recommendation for the 2080) . I’m surprised Dell lets them ship this configuration.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > TheTurbochargedSquirrel
03/20/2020 at 15:45

Indeed. I’d spec this system with no less than a 750w, and ideally a 1000w psu. Peak capacity aside, power supplies are most efficient around 50% of their rated capacity.

facw > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 15:51

Fancy! I always build my own, but if you got a good price, you got a good price, and it will definitely be a mighty box. I don’t think Dell would ship you a box that doesn’t work, but I’d expect to upgrade that processor if you plan on overclocking. The 9900k is a 95W TDP part, and the 2080 is 215W. I think both may be able to draw more than that if they are within their thermal envelopes, and the PSU won’t supply all of its power on the rails they need, and there are other components to power. If you overclock though that 9900k will really get hungry and you might over-stress things.

Regardless, I foresee some good gaming coming your way!

PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/20/2020 at 15:51

I’m also making due with an 3770k..... albeit overclocking to a very mild 4.2 from 3.5....looking at building a ryzen 3700x sometime over summer.

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > facw
03/20/2020 at 15:55

I just looked at the Dell configurator and they don't even offer the option of a larger psu on this model. That's surprising.

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120
03/20/2020 at 16:14

Same here on the OC; it gets a little above 5GHz on turbo. With a 1080, 32GB of RAM and 4TB of SSD this machine is faster than it has a right to be. And when I do decide to upgrade a good portion of those components can move to the next build.

Nom De Plume > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 16:17

In case you weren’t aware of it let me introduce you to PC Part Picker . This lets you sort through all the possible permutations and do a virtual build with some oversight on parts that won’t work together. Listed under each part is not only the current price from multiple retailers but a graph showing historical changes. Building a PC yourself from parts is incredibly simple and comes with much less uncertainty than in years past. Stay grounded to the case while working and map out cable runs before binding everything together.

I’ll put together something after I hit publish and link it here. You may feel free to do the same.

Manwich - now Keto-Friendly > Nibby
03/20/2020 at 16:26

Nah... he needs to install Windows NT 3.1!!!

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-nt-3x/31

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Nom De Plume
03/20/2020 at 16:27

Nice! Thanks!

PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120 > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/20/2020 at 16:35

Nice, your 1080 will run circles around my lowly 780 to. What CPU cooler are you running?

I did perform a nice hack with my Asus z77 motherboard, modifying my BIOS , allowing me to boot to a PCIe NVMe SSD....

Manwich - now Keto-Friendly > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 16:43

The guts o y home desktop PC will be 11 years old this December ... an Athlon II X4 630.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/2836

The case it’s in is an ugly old beige thing that dates back to the 1990s... still have the Windows 2000 Pro license sticker on it.

I have Ubuntu running on it now.

The only upgrades I’ve done to it over the past 10 years was install a discreet NVidia graphics card when the not-too-bad-for-the-time onboard video became inadequate for my purposes.

And I’ve recently added some RAM I got for free... bumping it from 4GB to 6GB.

The biggest limiting factor on the system right now is the RAM. I would like to bump it up to 12-16GB of RAM.

But I’m a cheapskate and am waiting to get some RAM for free or next to nothing.

Nom De Plume > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 16:51

Could you give me a rough figure in CA dollars what the $1500 landed it near.

Almost done putting something together quick. Case and what not can be modified easily towards something you can live with. Just giving you a rough idea of what I, or possibly Nibby, would put together as a template using reasonably good parts.

Nom De Plume > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 17:00

I think this will work if you click on “System Builder” after loading it. Just in case I’m posting screenshots below.

Kinja'd!!!

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com
03/20/2020 at 17:00

Should I be concerned?

CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever > Nom De Plume
03/20/2020 at 17:01

$2700

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > PyroHoltz f@h Oppo 261120
03/20/2020 at 17:14

I’m running a Hyper 212 LED; I don’t like all the lights and stuff (no RGB for me, thankyouverymuch), but it was the one that was on sale at Microcenter on the day that I was there . I did make a little mod to it by reversing the fan so it draws air up through it and out of the top of the case which has a 140mm (I think...) exhaust fan. I figure that hot air rises, so why bother trying to blow it out the sides or the back. That big fan is nice and quiet, unless I crank it up manually, but I haven’t had any heat issues to the best of my knowledge.

Nice hack with the BIOS mod. I’m just running standard 2.5" SSDs, with six of them connected to a PCIe SATA III card. I recently moved the 1080 to a different slot. I don’t know if you saw my posts last month, but for some reason it was only running at 4x in a 16x slot and I couldn’t get it to go any faster there. I popped it into the 8x slot and now it runs at 8x; I don’t know if it makes a difference, but I feel better about it. That change did cover up my one PCI slot so I’m now running a SoundBlaster PCIe audio card instead of my trusty M-Audio Audiophile 2496. However, whilst going through my collection of pieces and partses I found a board that gives me two PCI slots via an adapter that plugs into one of the PCIe x1 slots. I might give that a try and see if I can get the old 2496 going again.

I did take out the BD burner and mount it in an external box/power center that sits under my main monitor. It’s on a USB3 adapter board and can easily be connected to any of my systems (at the same desk I have an HP 8300 as a Hackintosh and an 8-core/16-thread HP Z420). Funny thing is that in the 2 years I’ve owned that drive I have yet to burn a single Blu-ray disc. I have the media, but I just don’t burn stuff anymore. I tend to use hard drives for offline storage these days ; I pick up old DVRs at the Goodwill Outlet for a couple of bucks, yank them open and then have cheap 500GB and 1TB drives that I can toss into a dock. Most of the drives work fine, although I have a handful that have the firmware intentionally buggered up for DVR use. I need to get into that firmware and make these things spin up when I want them to. I’ve done it before, but I’ll have to research the name of the program that allows me to do that.

Nom De Plume > Nom De Plume
03/20/2020 at 17:27

Woah, just noticed I accidentally got lost in the RAM options and chose DDR4-2400. Go for 3000 or 3200 instead. We can give you a short course on latency etc or just help pick it out.

imadick > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 17:48

You could have built a comparable system (I’d go with a 2070 super vs the 2080, slight performance reduction but cheaper) for $1700-1800 CAD. I would have also dropped the 9900k for a Ryzen 3700x because same performance for less money. Do you need 64 GB of RAM? Could save a bit there too if you don’t.

Edit: Sorry, cost would be $2200, forgot about the Canada Tax. https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/zsgY27

BaconSandwich is tasty. > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/20/2020 at 17:53

I wonder if it would be possible to reuse the case...

MM54 > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 17:53

That’s a serious machine!

I still haven’t gotten around to buying a video card for the desktop I built in 2017...

Nibby > Manwich - now Keto-Friendly
03/20/2020 at 18:00

have NT 3.51 in a VM somewhere

Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing. > BaconSandwich is tasty.
03/20/2020 at 18:08

Kinja'd!!!

Lots of people have done it, and I was thinking of doing the same. However, I like lots of 5.25" bays, so it wouldn’t be ideal for me.

SmugAardvark > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 19:33

But can it run Crysis?

ITA97, now with more Jag @ opposite-lock.com > CarsofFortLangley - Oppo Forever
03/20/2020 at 19:46

Eh, that 460 watt psu seems pretty under powered. That an OEM is selling it that way suggests it might work, but if it’s anything like the 460 watt psu (that was also similarly under powered ) in my former Dell gaming system, that thing is going to get roasting hot when the system runs under load for any period of time.

That said, it is easy enough to swap in a good psu (just watch the depth dimension you’ll have to live within . Dell should be using all standard atx pin outs these days , so there shouldn’t be any proprietary connectors. On my system, the only modification required was some minor trimming of the back of the case to accommodate the power switch on the new psu. It was a super minor thing, but both the small case modification and the non-OEM power supply probably void the warranty , if you care about that.

BaconSandwich is tasty. > Full of the sound of the Gran Fury, signifying nothing.
03/20/2020 at 20:13

Even with the extra drive bays, it’s still a decent looking piece of kit. I’ll hand it to Apple - they do have nice looking hardware.