Jump to content

New Gaming Rig - Thoughts?


Lt DeFault

Recommended Posts

My wife wants a new gaming rig to replace the one she currently has: an HP Blackbird. The Blackbird is about 10 years old now and - although we've been upgrading the graphics cards, RAM and power supply - it's starting to really show its age. So, I did some research and I'm thinking of pulling the trigger on an MSI Trident X 9th. Here's the basic rundown:

 

  • 3.6 GHz Intel Core i9-9900K Eight-Core
  • Z370I Gaming Pro Carbon AC Mini ITX Motherboard
  • 32GB DDR4 | 512GB NVMe SSD + 2TB HDD
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti (11GB GDDR6)
  • 650W 80 Plus Gold Certified PSU
  • USB 3.1 Type-A & Type-C | HDMI 1.4| DisplayPort 1.2
  • Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac) | Bluetooth 5.0
  • Windows 10 Pro (64-Bit)

 

The only downside I can see right now is that the case is kind of small (15.6 x 15.1 x 5.1 inches [129.7 x 382.7 x 396.4mm]) and the hardware seems crammed into it with little extra space - potentially making future upgrades difficult if not impossible. (I'm thinking about graphics card replacement, mostly. I could put the 1200W power supply I have outside the case if I needed to.) I'm not fond of Windows 10, but it's her computer, so I guess that doesn't matter much. And with 10 Pro the RAM limit is a whopping 2TB!

 

So, what do you guys think? Is it worth the $3,000 asking price? Are there any other rigs you would buy instead of this one? NB: Her budget is $3,000, so this [just] fits the bill. She might be convinced to spend a little more, if there's good reason to. It's her money, but it still makes me nervous spending that much. I know a little bit about computers, but I'm no guru.

 

Any input would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Personally, I think that machine is overspecced. Even though the single thread performance is lower than the i9's, I think you're better off with a Ryzen or Threadripper if you want to go all out. Likewise, if you don't plan for playing with a 4K monitor the RTX 2080 Ti is a waste of money:

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-buying-guide,5844.html
 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

22 minutes ago, CalAB said:

This may or may not matter to yourself or your spouse but you may want to consider VR. I’m not certain on the Nvidia card that your specs are listing. 

 

Although ProPE doesn’t support VR, there are other softwares that do. 

What? There is other software the SB pro PE...nonsense ;-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members
3 hours ago, CalAB said:

 you may want to consider VR. I’m not certain on the Nvidia card that your specs are listing.

The RTX 2080 Ti is already overkill for VR sets.

 

But, if you have the money, I'm sure it'll be a damn fine gaming machine for quite a while.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

41 minutes ago, Lt DeFault said:

 We'd like it to be as "future proof" as possible.

cannot be done, you lose that game every time chasing a phantom. 'the future' is not a perceptible experience, there is only now- you could be enjoying your computer if you bought it now, or not enjoying it now.

 

if the idea is to stretch your budget as far as possible into the future with buying the most expensive you could afford now, you could have bought something cheaper and invested the difference and then you would probably have more money to show for it over the long run (then eventaully upgrade again later).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

That's something to think about, thanks.

 

More info: WRT her "budget", that's just how much she is willing to pay right now, we're not quite maxing out. And we do have some investments.

 

We know we will have to upgrade at some point if we want this PC to last as long as the previous one. Our line of thinking is that if we go for some "overkill" now, we won't have to upgrade as soon. It seemed to work last time. Does that make sense? Or do you think the technology (hardware and software) is still advancing at such a rate that it won't make that much of a difference?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

i think the difficult matter is i could tell you how i would do it based on how i primarily use my computer, but i don't really know what you want to do with yours

 

the only other reason we need to upgrade to run spreadsheets and word processors is because microsoft is imposing compatibility problems with new operating systems that they roll out, so let's get down to brass tacks- besides that you are upgrading to play computer games. my nine year old computer was top of the line offered as a dell gaming machine in 2010, notwithstanding the fact it was a single core cpu, didn't have dual or quadruple graphics cards, and it still works quite well for my purposes (i don't own dcs or arma 3, if those are meaningful indicators).

 

the question is what type of performance do you intend to get out of what specific games you think you'll be playing- maybe specifically ask others what their machines subjectively feel like with arma 3 or dcs loaded as a comparison and then go from there.

Edited by Captain_Colossus
Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Members

Well the GTX for example - buying it banks on the idea that the real-time raytracing will actually take off and be one of the next big "things" in gaming. Some games will probably go fo it, but NVidia has also shown that they can ruin a great concept like PhysX by reducing it to a mere visual effect. Likewise, the i9 processor is about the most godawful expensive CPU for consumers that is floating around. It offers some extra performance in the single thread department but whether that's worth the significantly higher price is a question that everybody has to answer for himself; personally, I remain somewhat skeptical on the following grounds:

  • Single thread performance has largely tapered off over the past five if not ten years. The times where significant raises in CPU clock were following Moore's law are long over, and they won't be coming back anytime soon (if ever), simply because we're approaching the limitations of the laws of physics themselves.
  • Therefore, future gains in CPU performance can only be found in parallelization. It is true that many programmers still haven't well adapted to multithreaded programming; especially rewriting legacy code to utilize multi-core CPUs is quite a task (believe me). But even if software is somewhat slow to pick up this trend, it is unavoidable in the field of high performance computing (and that's what top of the line computer games and simulations are)
  • Therefore, programmers don't really have much of a choice.
  • Intel has held back larger numbers of cores in their CPUs simply because they could, and to protect the pricing of their server CPUs. As soon as AMD came around the corner with Threadrippers' 16 cores, all of a sudden Intel releases the i9. They could have done that years ago, but nobody threatened their monopoly, so why would they? "You don't need more than four cores (plus hyperthreading)", they said.

While I agree that "futureproofing" a PC is an elusive goal, I'd still go for a 12 or 16 core CPU that is a bit slower in single thread performance these days but costs half the money and offers more PCI-E lanes for I/O for much less money than the i9. But that's just my personal point of view. Another factor to consider is power consumption and cooling. Raw computing power is less appealing it if comes with the howling of a battery of fans at max speed. A $2,000 gaming computer may only last for the next six years rather than the eight years that you might squeeze from the $3,000 machine but the saved $1,000 will buy you more computing power in six years than they do today.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 7 months later...

Well, we finally pulled the trigger on this rig. I think the only differences from the specs I listed in the first post is that this build has:

  • 1TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 VENTUS OC 8GB GDDR6
  • Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

I will probably end up taking over the old HP Blackbird and installing SB on that. But I will likely also install SB on the MSI for grins.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 1 month later...
  • Members

I'd expect that machine to perform at least as good as my new notebook, and that ran the 4.0 benchmark scenario (converted to 4.1) with no less than 55 fps, so it qualified as the first computer that I could test as "great" for SB Pro PE 4.1.  Maybe I should install 4.0 on it and compare the framerates, so we have a baseline how much the engine efficiency was improved from 4.0 to 4.1...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

my old computer kicked the bucket the same week the new sb engine was made public. i have a similarly brand new setup, all the best and fastest components available (attractive light show display emitted by the case, including the mouse and keyboard emitting rainbow colors- though I generally don't care about frills, they came with it and they are a nice surprise). as for steel beasts, I can get high frame rates with shadows set at least 7, map distances from 8 - 10km. the real frame rate killer seems to be when there are relatively high numbers of infantry present, which means lots of los calculations, in other words the bottleneck is the cpu rather than graphics card, typically. i plan to get red dead redemption and see how that performs 

 

Edited by Captain_Colossus
Link to comment
Share on other sites

8 hours ago, Hedgehog said:

And?

 

What's the verdict?

 

 

Well, when we got the computer and I set it all up - there was no video going to the monitor. Tried it on another monitor (which I had just bought specifically for this PC) and our TV and with multiple cables on every HDMI and Display Port on the PC ... still no video. I tried to troubleshoot as much as I could and searched the web for suggestions. The only thing that made sense to me was that possibly Windows was not set up correctly to use the DP or HDMI as the primary video output. But that didn't help, because without any display I couldn't make any changes to Windows. 😡

 

So, I called the seller (EXCaliberPC out of California) and asked them what might be wrong. They had no idea and suggested I send the PC back to them for testing. They emailed me a return label and I sent it off. When they received it, they said they hooked it up and everything worked fine. They stress tested it for 48 hours and were unable to cause any kind of failure. They even sent me multiple pictures of the machine running a benchmarking program. Still, they offered me the choice of a refund or getting the PC back. I told them that my wife still wanted the Trident - but only if we could get it to work, of course. Since it appeared to be working just fine for them, I told them to send it back and we would try everything we could to get it to work with our monitors. The tech offered to set up Windows with an account for my wife and I asked if they could also make sure that HDMI was set to the primary video out. They agreed.

 

They shipped the PC back to us with 2 day service and even included the HDMI cable they had used during testing at no extra charge. When I got the PC back and hooked it up - everything worked perfectly. 🥳 So I installed my wife's favorite game and she's been playing that since we got it running just a few days ago. I have not yet gotten around to installing SB on it (even though she has suggested I go ahead and do it). I will probably install it in the next few days and when I do I will run the benchmarking scenario and post the results in the appropriate thread. I will probably also set all of the graphics settings to their highest levels and test it again just out of curiosity.

 

For now though, my wife says it runs ESO with all the settings maxed just fine. I haven't checked the frame rates, but she says it looks great.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

13 hours ago, Lt DeFault said:

 

Well, when we got the computer and I set it all up - there was no video going to the monitor. Tried it on another monitor (which I had just bought specifically for this PC) and our TV and with multiple cables on every HDMI and Display Port on the PC ... still no video. I tried to troubleshoot as much as I could and searched the web for suggestions. The only thing that made sense to me was that possibly Windows was not set up correctly to use the DP or HDMI as the primary video output. But that didn't help, because without any display I couldn't make any changes to Windows. 😡

 

So, I called the seller (EXCaliberPC out of California) and asked them what might be wrong. They had no idea and suggested I send the PC back to them for testing. They emailed me a return label and I sent it off. When they received it, they said they hooked it up and everything worked fine. They stress tested it for 48 hours and were unable to cause any kind of failure. They even sent me multiple pictures of the machine running a benchmarking program. Still, they offered me the choice of a refund or getting the PC back. I told them that my wife still wanted the Trident - but only if we could get it to work, of course. Since it appeared to be working just fine for them, I told them to send it back and we would try everything we could to get it to work with our monitors. The tech offered to set up Windows with an account for my wife and I asked if they could also make sure that HDMI was set to the primary video out. They agreed.

 

They shipped the PC back to us with 2 day service and even included the HDMI cable they had used during testing at no extra charge. When I got the PC back and hooked it up - everything worked perfectly. 🥳 So I installed my wife's favorite game and she's been playing that since we got it running just a few days ago. I have not yet gotten around to installing SB on it (even though she has suggested I go ahead and do it). I will probably install it in the next few days and when I do I will run the benchmarking scenario and post the results in the appropriate thread. I will probably also set all of the graphics settings to their highest levels and test it again just out of curiosity.

 

For now though, my wife says it runs ESO with all the settings maxed just fine. I haven't checked the frame rates, but she says it looks great.

Happy Wife, Happy Life!

 

The boy done good :)

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

33 minutes ago, Hedgehog said:

Happy Wife, Happy Life!

 

The boy done good :)

 

bzzzt. a fundamental paradox of human psychology explains that treating someone like royalty tends to earn contempt because they view you as fans or subjects. put yourself and your happiness first, put your mission first, and not only will your partner appreciate you more, but other wimins take notice of you too. men have been brainwashed into believing that making themselves ready servants is endearing, which is a disaster in the making. very difficult to increase your own net worth when you exist to please and appease others 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...