Thinking PC market again …

Every so often, the thought hits me that I need to be checking out the PC market again to see what’s available and how much it would be. I don’t think I’ve done that for a little while, so here goes !

I’ve just done some overdue upgrades to Meltdown, my desktop, and they’ve turned out pretty good. Tuesday saw a rather traumatic upgrading of the cpu cooler from the cheap stock one to a top end air cooler. More on that in a bit although I did write something on the results the other day. I also upgraded the data hard drive from 1.5TB to 3TB and did the copy overnight, so I now have 1.2TB available on that drive up from 150GB.

Yesterday saw a new graphics card arrive, a 3060Ti. Graphics cards are still very pricey but I spotted a good enough deal when I was finishing up my lunch break on Tuesday. So that went in yesterday and there was a little shakedown run in Elite happening.

That’s before changes happened …

One thing you always end up doing when doing upgrades is think : Was it worth it ? Did it improve pictures ? I’m not so sure in Elite to be honest. I’ve turned the detail up much higher so the shadows and textures should be much sharper and it’s creating the image at 1.5x what my display can do which has been making the lines look better. The landing I did yesterday was much smoother than it has been before but the real test there will be when I get back to a planetary base … that’s not going to happen for months on my current course :-D.

So. PC building ? The first thing I always say is that if you’re confident enough to pick your own bits and put them together, always do that. Pre-built PCs always tend to come with compromises that bite later. Like shaving £20-£30 off the price by putting in a substandard power supply. If you’re running a system like Meltdown is now, anything less than a 600W power supply (mine is 750W) will start getting strained. If it’s not a brand named supply with protections built in, it WILL damage components when it WILL stop working. My previous desktop, Pumpkin, had a power supply fail (it was in service for 8 years, so that’s ok) but it happily didn’t break anything.

It’s worth sacrificing something like the cpu down a step or two in order to get the foundations right. Yes. I said that :-D. And I meant it too. Graphics is a bit more of a thing there though. Previously, when cards were £200, I’d get that certain price point. Lower would mean losing too much performance, higher was too expensive. That’s out of the window these days and you’re lucky to find graphics cards, let alone having them at an acceptable price.

The second thing I’ll be saying about PC building at the moment is – Don’t. The supply situation has been daft for almost a year now. It’s gone to the point where you have to ignore that advice about pre-builds because the vendor builders have better access to the parts.

So … foundations. I learned something with Meltdown … don’t buy a Bitfenix case (build quality). Case first as that’s what everything goes into. Bigger is better because that means more access and you’ll probably hide it somewhere out of the way. Budget £50 for a case but … you go for your preference because it’s something where looks count, just make sure it’s got room for what you want. Drive bays are irrelevant now as it’s ok to go to dvd or bluray drives that you plug in. You’ll want front panel access for USB sockets though so you can plug in the drives.

Processor and board drive a lot of the build. I’ve been impressed with my AMD Ryzen 5 3600. It’s a good processor. I was about to say that AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600G was a good buy here but it’s out of stock (oh well 😀 ). It’s a bit expensive at £240 but it does come with graphics hardware inside which is important in these days of scarce graphics cards.

This goes in a motherboard and the cheapest suitable X570 (the processor expects certain chipsets of which X570 is one) board is an Asrock at £160. This is an example of being sure what you’re getting, there are a couple of cheaper MSI boards but they don’t have a graphics output. Oops.

Memory goes in pairs and the thing to look for is the telltale “DDR4-3600 support”. The DDR stands for Double Data Rate and the code says how fast it can push the data out. Faster is better … There’s a certain break point though. When I built Meltdown, the advice was that 3200 was good enough, lower was bad. I went for a future proofed 32GB on Meltdown. 32GB of DDR4-3200 is £140 from Crucial (cheaper available but I recognise and trust Crucial) or £180 for 32GB of DDR-3600 from Kingston, as per what’s in Meltdown. One trick here is that you need to buy the memory in pairs as the systems are designed to take in data from both sticks of memory at the same time.

We need a cooler to go on top and I always go for Big Coolers. The idea is that they give better performance and because they’re massive, the fans are barely turning so they’re very quiet. I can barely hear Meltdown’s coolers at the moment. Crikey, looks like they’ve gone up … I have a Coolermaster MA610P and the nearest looking equivalent I can see on Da Vendor Site is the MA620M at £90. I didn’t pay that much 2 years ago. Budget £50 for a cooler and always remember that bigger is way better because a bigger fan pushes way more cooling air with less noise.

Water cooling ? Don’t do it. It has advantages but it also has huge potential of mixing Water and Electronics, which never ends well. You also need fans to get rid of the heat anyway, I just don’t see the benefit of it in the domestic environment.

We need a power supply to drive all that and I’ve been happy with the Corsair supplies I’ve been using for many years. You don’t need modular (you plug in the power cords separately) so you can save cash there. A 750W supply from Corsair starts at £65. Shaving £20 off that for the no-name brands is a false economy.

Graphics is the really frustrating thing at the moment … Between covid hitting manufacturing and cryptominers and scalpers gobbling up the supply, it’s been really tough to acquire a new graphics card. My 3060Ti was an opportunity buy at £470 and the cheapest one at Overclockers is currently £650 or £670 for the one in stock where I bought mine, which was Scan. Which card ? Much of a muchness at the moment but I wouldn’t go beyond the 3060 or 3060Ti cards, or the equivalent from AMD. However, going for a processor with graphics built in means it isn’t crucial that you have a graphics card.

Rounding out the thing is the things you put the data on …

You want two hard discs to run a Windows PC. You need a Solid State Device drive for Windows and hard disc heavy applications. They’re lightning fast at finding the data on the disc because there are no mechanical moving parts involved. I’ve been using Crucial’s SSDs for years and I think the one to go for here would be the 1TB NVME P2 drive at £90. The “NVME” part is important because it means faster access. Numpty here didn’t know that when I built Meltdown, so I have a slower one. A keyword here is “M2”, as these fit into a slot on the motherboard and can go faster. There’s a 500GB drive for £60, that’s the size of the one in Meltdown.

But … speed costs money which is why you need a data drive as well, especially if you’re gaming. When I acquire Horizon Zero Dawn, that’ll take up 100GB of space … Some games would go on the SSD though if they’re cursed with slow loading times (Battletech had to go on my SSD) but most of the time, you’re ok with a big normal hard drive. These are the classic spinning platters things with a reader arm that finds the data. It takes time for the arm to move around, which is why these drives are sloooow. Looks like my “new” drive is still on the market. It’s the Toshiba HDWD130 3TB drive available for £60 now. The keyword here is “7200rpm” as these pull the data off faster than the normal 5400rpm drives can.

And that’s the lot ! You need a bit more to build the PC. Windows 10 costs £100 at the moment for the OEM box. You will need a keyboard and mouse as well, these are very much personal preference. Oh and a monitor so you can see the shiny pictures. The keyword to look for in monitors is “IPS” or In-Plane Switching and it gives you far better picture quality and viewing angles. If you’re off the straight viewing angles on other screens, the filtering starts to have a massive effect. IPS is mostly immune to that.

Oh, speakers as well. Monitors tend to have speakers but they’re really, really bad. Get some powered speakers for your ears.

All the bits pretty much go together as It Can Only Fit In This Hole type things but it pays to read the Stuff through before putting everything together. Things like memory being best in some of the slots and working less well in others. And it’s definitely a Very Good Idea to test fit everything first.

Last bit of advice – electronics are less susceptible now to shocks but it’s very wise to earth everything before opening bags. What I’ll do is install the power supply in the case first, plug it in and very definitely leave it turned off … at the wall. Our UK 3 pin sockets give an earth connection through and with the power supply earthed, it earths the case. You then open the bags when they’re in contact with the case and make sure you have something fleshy (arms will do) in contact with the case as well. Everything’s earthed, no sparks should happen.

Woolly jumpers are not advised :-D.

I think that’s it for me for today. PC building isn’t scary but it definitely pays to research with sites like Tomshardware to see what the optimal bits are going to be. Bear in mind whether they’re trying to sell you something too.

Good night everyone;

Hope nothing breaks. (Although I had Chrome crashing earlier while I was editing this post while a Tashnarr stream was on in another Chrome window). Stay safe, be well !