How do you balance building a pc against the anxiety it comes with?

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The title is a bit tongue and cheek, i’m fine, it’s just cold and dark out here so it’s natural and a bit fun to play into being maudlin. Cheerful people in the winter give me the creeps, like clowns with too much face paint.

Getting on subject, I built my last PC 7 years ago and recently I have anxiety that things could be slightly better and so i’m looking to another build. Hopefully this forum is a good place to ask this question.

This feeling, that i need something new, is also probably also driven by winter blues, but let’s ignore the psychological minefield that is me.

I use my computer for my software job, where i use some variant of Linux to program using clojure via emacs, but have hopes of doing some machine learning. I would love to do some high end gaming once and a while.

I spent all yesterday in a sick haze putting together a build which i can share if you like. My budget was “what ever it takes” and my goal is “to be happy”.

And I believe it’s likely way more then I need, but i’m not sure how to get a better feel for “whats enough”.

The reality is that my 7 year old computer might be “as good as it gets” and if you secretly swapped it out for this new build i would never even notice.

Putting that aside, my gut tells me that just like everything else in my life, i should be gradually updating or at least replacing parts as they ware and tear. But how do you learn where that sweet spot is?

I want to equivalent of a computer dealership where i go and drive a computer around for a couple hours. Does such a thing exist? How does everyone understand how all these numbers on the spec sheets translate to real life differences? I’m i just living in a simulation?

How do you keep your workstation up to date?

Thanks for listening to me rant. Cheers and merry christmas!

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I guess if compile times are needed then pretty much anything recent will do for you needs.

Basically I’m somewhat of a hardware whore so I like to upgrade pretty much every year or two, not everything but a lot of components like the CPU + RAM + Storage, sometimes the GPU too but it depends on what the pricing is and if the current GPU is fine for my needs, both gaming and work related.

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What are your current system specs?

Whether you should upgrade or not will come down to your financial position. As far as keeping everything updated due to age its really not much of a concern anymore im still using the same 800 watt 80 plus platinum PSU I installed 10yrs ago.

The only part I would worry about dying due to age is a SSD or HDD and you shouldn’t worry about that because you make regular off site backups of all the important things right?( Backblaze B2 is $5/TB/month if you have more than 1TB of IMPORTANT things you might want to scale down what you consider important )

For the average consumer only gaming pushes the limits and thats more of a GPU problem than a CPU problem. In my opinion gaming at over 1440p is left for people that don’t understand what resolution is. ( i personally sit 2.5’ away from my 27" 1440p monitor which makes it retina, for anyone with 20/20 vision 4k would be a waste of resources at this size and distance )

CPU wise anything Mid-high end from the last 8yrs and GPU anything Mid-High end from the last 4yrs will get you 120+ FPS in anything assuming you are ok with medium settings for some of the more demanding things(keep in mind medium is often only 5-10% subjectively worse looking than ultra )

So to give real world specs the above theorhetical system would have a Intel i5-6600, 8gb ram, and a GeForce RTX 2060. Even one of the most demanding new releases such as Spiderman Re-Mastered on Medium settings with a few things tweaked towards High would get 120fps at 1080p and 100fps at 1440p.

This is a complicated topic so sorry for the wordy response…

I used to subscribe to the build the best and update every 2years way of thinking however computers have out paced the need for that level of upgrading.

My System is now going on 5yrs old and earlier this year I thought about replacing it, after looking into my options I decided to stick with it a few more years as not enough has changed.

The main issue is while systems do indeed get faster and faster they accomplish this via more cores. In a lot of cases the newer processors are slower on a per core basis. Which for most consumer desktop focused tasks actually makes them slower than the older stuff because the main issue is programming for Multi threaded processing is hard. Fortunately the difficulty of that task is being dealt with behind the scenes and things are getting easier so we should see huge improvments in the future.

But today is not the future and the only things that I can think of off the top of my head that utilize all the cores on your computer efficiently is video and image rendering suites and syntehtic benchmarks. Everything else typically using 1-4 cores and not very efficiently.

So someone like a youtube streamer might want to have a processor with lots of cores so they can run 3 different video encoding processes and a demanding game and some sort of poorly optimizxd chat integration tool all at the same time.

For example I am running a i7-9700k, which passmark gives a per core speed of 2892. Now if I go with a equivalent modern processor like the i7-11700k its per core rating is 3425. Making it only 15% faster depsite being 5yrs newer.

So since it would cost $1200 or so just to upgrade the motherboard, CPU and ram to what I would want for specs I feel that 15% theorehetical gain is not worth it to me.

However, his year both AMD and Intel made a decent jump in performance, so I am thinking next year when DDR5 becomes more common place and prices settle a bit will be the time for my upgrade.

Don’t get me wrong though I do a few things to keep it up to date, I upgraded the GFX card last year to a 3080.

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Thanks for the well-thought-out response. First, let me get you the information you asked for.

Current computer from 11/25/2016:

  • 2x SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 500GB SATA III 32 layer 3D V-NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-75E500B/AM

  • ASUS Z170I PRO GAMING LGA 1151 Intel Z170 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.1 USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard

  • GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 SLI Support ATX Video Card GV-N1070G1 GAMING-8GD R2

  • Intel Core i7 6th Gen - Core i7-6700K 8M Skylake Quad-Core 4.0 GHz LGA 1151 91W BX80662I76700K Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 530

  • G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 2400 (PC4 19200) Desktop Memory Model F4-2400C15D-32GVR

What I thinking about jumping to:

Type Item
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7900X 4.7 GHz 12-Core Processor
CPU Cooler Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard Asus TUF GAMING X670E-PLUS WIFI ATX AM5 Motherboard
Memory G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-5600 CL28 Memory
Storage Seagate FireCuda 520 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive]
Video Card Gigabyte GAMING OC GeForce RTX 4080 16 GB Video Card
Case Phanteks Enthoo Pro ATX Full Tower Case
Power Supply EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 G3 1000 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

thoughts on your post

Which for most consumer desktop focused tasks actually makes them slower than the older stuff because the main issue is programming for Multi threaded processing is hard.

I was slightly worried about this, i tried to look for one of the faster CPU speeds. It happened to be one of the latest by AMD, that prompted me to get a lof of the latest stuff, it also felt easier then trying to mix and match older (even last year) parts.

efficiently is video and image rendering suites and syntehtic benchmarks.

I’m not currently doing this. At best, i hope to live stream some software coding on discord. :slight_smile:

However, his year both AMD and Intel made a decent jump in performance, so I am thinking next year when DDR5 becomes more common place and prices settle a bit will be the time for my upgrade.

I was wondering about this too, but i’m not sure history has shown me that things come down in price like i would expect. Basically, i feel like i have sunk costs into thinking about this now and i would be ok with a 5% $500 upcharge.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it helps to know how other people approach these issues.

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Thans for sharing Big

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If you’re talking gaming, what kinda resolution / fps / detail are you chasing down?
Are you looking to run more current era games? Or exploiting past older titles?

As-is, the 4080, really comes off horrifically overly priced, where it should be
imho, the 4070Ti looking whole lot worse, if they’re looking to downgrade its bus int. and such

To-date, AMD isn’t being able to exploit usage, of higher speed DDR5 kits
AMD is still having their CPUs punching up, from otherwise lower specc’d kits
May very well be able to get a faster kit, and save those higher speeds whenever accepted

And would also help, in seeing the pricing fall some, to reduce pain for aspiring audience
… Which that also include Intel, for those willingly chase down faster/newer RAM

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Well I’ll add my 2 cents - for me upgrades typically come from hard limits, not scalar performance. For example platform doesn’t support more RAM and I need it, I run out of pci-e slots, my mobo is missing some feature that I need. I’m also typically “maxing out” all my builds - using all expansion slots, all SATA drives, as much RAM as I can, highest CPU available for platform etc. And then I’m just waiting until I severely lack something. Because I can’t upgrade anything anyways since it’s already maxed out so when I need to upgrade I have to switch entire platform.

In addition to that I have extremely quirky requirements so I’m waiting until there’s motherboard that suits all my requirements and well - tbh there’s not many. Literally two in last 3 years - ASRock WRX80 Creator and ASRock X399 Fatal1ty. I did not pull trigger on x399 since I was waiting for platform maturity so long that TR 5000 has already been rumored (have I known those rumors will take so long to arrive I’d definitely go x399 but oh well).

So now with WRX80 platform I’m hoping for it to suit my needs for at very least 5 years. My previous platform was P67 and I used it with 2600k for like idk… almost 10 years xD

I mostly switched because I suffered from lack of pci-e slots and no VT-d support. Other machines (laptops, HTPCs etc) mostly got eliminated due to RAM support limitations and storage support limitations. GPU - I was using GTX580 until RTX came out, then decided to pull the trigger on 2000 series (well Quadro RTX 4000 precisely)

Elimination by features makes your build quite long-term because really if you look at it big picture - breakthrough technologies are rare. In last 10 years I’d name:

  • NVME
  • RTX
  • AMD Zen chiplets architecture
  • Optane (maybe)
  • usb-c (especially TB3)
  • ECC on consumer motherboards
    …
    tbh that would be it for me… Can’t think of anything else that was significant to me.
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Hi Welcome.

I think the build you are looking at is pretty good already.
I suppose you are a person who likes to stick to the hardware,
as long as possible to get the most out of it.
i would suggest to maybe think about spending just a “little” bit more,
to get a more feature rich motherboard.
Of course the Asus X670E Tuf Gaming plus already covers,
most base features you would need.
So that is basically totally fine as well.
But there are kinda nicer options out there.
However you should not really spend more then $500,- on a motherboard.
Because that does not really make much sense in my opinion.
At least not in regards to a main stream system.

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your gut is right… upgrading is something you do with your pc. typically 3 years you replace the gpu, 5 years the motherboard cpu and ram. likely the psu 2.
sure enthusiasts with upgrade there entire builds in half that. but the typical user will get about 6-8 years use out of a pc case.

thats pretty unlikely mate.
for one nvme has become commonplace so no real need for a new build to be slowed by sata speeds
cpu cores have typically quadrupled in count and about x2 more performative per clock.
ram speeds havent changed much, but you now get way more bandwidth per dim.
performance per watt. your looking at x8 on the graphics side with a mid range x16 at the high end.

so unless all your doing is playing old games that your old rig could max out. you will see and feel the difference.
as to whether that performance gain is worth the fiscal outlay… only you can decide that :wink:

regardless though… thats a nice build… a bit expensive on the gpu (they really are over priced)… but on the whole… NICE!.

so enjoy it you worked hard for it… no guilt no shame, earned clear and free :wink:

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I think your chosen system looks good, lets be honest anything this spec range is just to say you have it so the only thing to be said is that everything looks like a reasonable choice( reasonable being relative here ).

The only thing I might consider if I was you unless you are trying to do 4k gaming is perhaps buying a 3080 or even a 3090 right now and waiting for the 5000 series to upgrade. The 4000 series is so overpriced its ridiculous. Double the price of a 3080 for little real world benfit(unless at 4k).

The sane person in me as someone that has similar needs as yourself( programming and some gaming) says that if I was buying a new system I would go with something along the lines of…

except with a 3080, honestly I seriously doubt anyone would notice a difference between a 5800x and a 7900x in real world use aside from them there video rendering people as previously mentioned, and perhaps someone who really likes building firefox from source everyday.

Also never did answer your original question of how do you keep up with the numbers etc, the answer is you don’t.

Myself I use passmark for CPUs AMD Ryzen 7 5800X vs AMD Ryzen 9 7900X vs Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz [cpubenchmark.net] by PassMark Software

Some youtuber such as LTT or Gamers Nexus for GPU benchmarks.

and for motherboard chipsets once you decide on a CPU you look at what chipsets are availiable and it will come down to 3-4 options, from those you narrow down the features you need such as WiFi etc, long gone are the days of one manufacturers use of X chipset being better than another manufacturers.

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Well, certainly not a bad build. Except…

Which means you really want to run an AMD GPU in this use case, since you run primarily Linux. So I would switch the 4080 to a 7900 XTX. See also relevant Phoronix benchmarks, which place the 7900 XTX on par with a 3090 Ti in Raytracing and ~50% better than a 3090 Ti, extrapolating from the Windows numbers that places it around 15-20% better performance than the 4080 on Linux:

As for Machine Learning… Most of the hype is over and done with. You can easily keep your old GTX 1070 for learning ML and CUDA, that 1000W supply would support both GPUs easily, as would that motherboard. Then when you feel comfortable with the concepts, then might be an idea to invest in a 5080 or whatever is available at that time. Not to mention ML on the 7900 XTX is doable too, though not exactly stellar - but hey, does it really have to be if you just want to dabble a bit in it, as a hobby?

I would also switch the Storage to a TLC drive, too. Would recommend either the Kingston KC3000 2TB or trusted old Samsung.

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this is a good point, I just re-installed my OS(Manjaro) for the first time in 3yrs and I forgot the ridiculous NVIDIA hoops I had to jump through, even after getting it all working well I still have weirdly sized Dolphin windows where all the menus etc are giant text and all the file listings are normal sized.

This is the first time in a long time an AMD GPU is actual competition for Nvidia, and $/frame way way ahead.

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Performance monitoring and logging apps exist. Either leave one running and peek over at it throughout your day, or go through the logs after a couple weeks. If it shows your CPU, disk, RAM, etc., is periodically maxed-out, then your system is a bottleneck slowing you down. If it does not, you won’t see a performance improvement from an upgrade.

On Windows, the Task Manager Performance tab is a start. For Linux sar -A will give you everything.

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To add to some already great suggestions, for the power supply I would seriously consider a Platinum rated rather than a Gold. Newegg currently has an EVGA Supernova P3 1000 watt for $250USD or a Seasonic Prime PX-1000 for $280USD plus a $15 rebate for the next 16 hours. Either brand is excellent, so you can’t go wrong with either option. Availability may differ in another region.

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Benchmarks are made exactly for this purpose. You can’t really test drive a configuration so looking at benchmarks from reputable sources (like Pudget Systems or Anandtech for workstations) is gonna give you the best idea of the performance you’re gonna get with the parts you chose, albeit most likely in their ideal configurations with no bottlenecks whatsoever.

My humble opinion of human being with no qualification in the psychological field is to work first on your “fear of missing out”. That’s most likely linked to

Depends on your needs really. I updated literally two weeks ago my 4790K machine that had an R9 285 on it’s way out with an RX6650XT and now games fly on it. That upgrade alone made a huge difference for games and for 90% of other tasks I do with computers peforms just as well as my 3700x machine does. So if you’re interested in updates to your hardware you should find the first bottleneck that stops you from enjoying your time at the PC.

So you’ll understand how to find…

If your compiling time are good enough and you want to dabble in high end gaming and ML a GPU is what you need, for sure. A platform update can realistically wait, depending on the games you want to get into. And if you want to play at high resolutions (2560x1440 or above) the CPU is gonna matter even less.

I’m just starting to do that. But it’s usually just flat out “out with the old, in with the new” because I tend to find myself near the end of the cycle for everything I buy so I get the top of the line for not too much money and it lasts for 10 or 12 years, catastrophic failures aside. GPUs are usually the thing that gets changed once during the long run of the platform.

With those parts, if you’re not happy with the performance, you could really benefit from a reasonable overclock on the CPU and RAM if there’s the cooling that can support it.
But surely the new build is high end and gonna serve you well for a really long time. Maybe the old one could become a compute node to aid your work, could be used to compile lower priority projects while you work on new ones.

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I’ll check again, but when i looked the 3080’s weren’t that much less and it was harder to find variety within them. But your right i would be happer spending less given i won’t be likely using all of the 3080 even!

Thanks for the rest of the advice.

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I orginally had a AMD GPU because i heard i was better on linux, then i talked to someone how makes ML and DL libaries and they told me that while it was possible (easy even) to get nvidia GPU drivers to work on linux, getting AMD GPU’s were nearly useless for ML and DL.

So i switched back. i’m still tossing and turning on this and which chip to get (apprently intel is better for ml to, who knew?)

As to ML hype being over, i’m not sure what to make of that. I feel like the hype over webdeveloment is “over”. Why have a website clumsly direct you to what you need when a trained and customize bulter can have a real time conversation about your needs and generate on the fly visual feedback to accomdate it?

Nothing every falls off a cliff, but AI assisted everything is defintly here to stay. Just my two cents :slight_smile:

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I’ll look into this, the issue is translating a benchmark into noticable difference in day to day stuff. But i take your point, its the best we have.

Sweet, i love that feeling :slight_smile:

yep yep

Yeah, it will probably get used to try new operating systems or maybe i should keep one computer for ML and one for Work?
That would probably require a slight update to the CPU on the old computer and the GPU, but maybe not.

Mostly my last attempt at ML failed because of some driver issues, and because i was stubborn and because i wasn’t really that motivated. I need an actual problem to solve i don’t just want to play number games anymore.

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Yes, no, kind of, sort of.

Nvidia GPUs are quite a bit ahead of AMD in ML and computer on Linux, in some cases AMD is 50%+ behind.

At the same time AMD GPUs have much more mature support for things like Wayland and DXVK.

Ultimately it is your decision. If you want to dabble with ML then it will take you a while to reach the limits of AMD cards, but it is all up to you. :slightly_smiling_face:

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How do you balance building a pc against the anxiety it comes with?

Easy, you tell yourself that anxiety is just some random weird primal made up feeling in your head.

I’ve built near a thousand or so PCs and then stopped about 15y ago when I got a decent job. Pretty sure every single component would give me pause if I were to do it these days, but despite that I still wouldn’t trust someone else to apply thermal paste, or not put screws into a radiator, or not grind the bottom of the motherboard over standoffs while trying to align it with the standoffs (thank you integrated Io shields).

… or how do you balance the anxiety of building it vs anxiety of someone else building it carelessly.

Once you build it, run burnin tests. There’s always a small possibility some of the hardware you get is wonky coming out of the factory, and it’s easy easier to RMA something you just got than something you’ve grown to rely on. Additionally, you’ll get to validate noise and airflow in the case is within what you expect.

Speaking of heat and toys, if you want to get fancy, try getting one of those phone attached flir cams (good if you’re a homeowner for checking insulation or finding studs or even cooking if you have issues guessing the temperature right while making a perfect carbonara, or one of those point and measure IR temp sensors).

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