polycrac
Super Star
Hi all,
I finally got my new PC and she's lovely!
Previously I was using a PCS build from three years ago: I5-4590 (quadcore, no hyperthreading), locked, so no overclocking and the motherboard would only take that generation, so no way to upgrade. I had a SSD, but a fairly early and slow one, at 120GB it was so full of my OS and other bits that I couldn't fit large games (e.g. TWW2) onto it and ran then from my 1TB hybrid SSHD instead. I had 8Gb of RAM (again fairly slow) and found that I would sometimes get memory warnings if I ran Perfmon reports during stress points (like having a few chrome tabs open, streaming a podcast and going through the end-of-turn AI moves on TWW2). My main bugbear was loading times and SSD space but also I had the offer of borrowing a 2080ti from my employer to work from home on (running neural networks mainly) but had to turn it down because I couldn't power it with my 550W PSU (only 6 pin power leads)!
My new PC is awesome - R2700x, with a Corsair H100i cooler (I've yet to fully road test this and see how fast I can get it) on an Ultragaming X470. RGB fans all synced with ICUE, a 500GB Samsung evo M.2 NVMe as the main drive and a 2Tb Hard drive for storage. All housed in the 500D SE, with the lovely easy-access doors. I was already using a 1440p 165Hz GSync monitor and gaming at that resolution I wasn't expecting much in the way of fps differences from a new CPU.
Production:
Excellent - almost exactly the time quoted, the only delay being waiting a day or two for new RAM to come in (which was well communicated by PCS), this meant that although I selected 2933 MHz, I got 3000MHz so I'm very pleased.
Delivery:
Great - I was able to delay the delivery until I could be in for it and it arrived at 9am that day.
Unboxing:
Perfect condition and I'm not surprised, it was very well wrapped and packaged securely. All the extra pieces were included for the different components. The only thing that was 'sort-of' missing was the Wraith cooler. I didn't really expect it to be there but given it comes free with the cooler and has some actual value for selling on, it would have been nice to get it, even if you order a different cooler. That said, the price of the CPU was good, so perhaps PCS use some of the spare coolers to recoup their costs on this, or get to buy at a discount by getting some CPUs without the coolers? If it matters to anyone, then you could always order with the stock cooler and then fit your own (up to you if the tame and hassle of doing this is worth having a second hand cooler to sell!)
Performance:
It just EATS benchmarks, everything I throw at it it just shrugs off. I have the fan LEDs matched to temp readings from the CPU and am struggling to raise the temp enough to change their colours!
I checked fps in Total War Warhammer 2, both when scrolling around and during the end-turn phase, when the game resolves all the AI faction moves.
I saw modest gains in fps (going from 40-50 fps on the old PC to 55-65 on the new) when scrolling around the TWW2 map, though less gain for the end-turn phase (from 0-10 fps for the old PC to 10-20 for the new) - I was hoping for more but I think that is just down to the game being a bit rubbish - not sure any processor could boost that part (The GPU for these comparisons was the same, so any boost is welcome and down to the CPU)!
Loading speed and turn ends in games are fantastically fast now - I see loading bars marching across the screen when they used to crawl.
I fitted the 2080ti today and tried again with checking my fps - now up to 70-80 for scrolling across the map but no difference in the end-turn section. PUBG benefits more from the new, 2080ti GPU but the new CPU made no difference to fps.
Aesthetics:
Absolutely awesome - I love the brushed metal top, such a great contrast with the smoked glass sides. The only negative here is that I also ordered an exhaust fan and the PCS sticker on it is not dead-centre, causing it to wobble as it rotates which is bloody annoying. Still, that has to be the very definition of a minor moan and I'm going to fit a LED fan in its place tomorrow! It is a little louder than my old PC, but it has many more fans and I'm still playing with fan curves etc.
Overall:
I'm extremely happy with it. The gains in performance were relatively minor (in terms of frame rates) from the CPU and Oussebon was right that I could have carried on with my old processor for a while yet, fitting more RAM and a new SSD to boost performance. That said, Need and Want are very different things and I'm over the moon with the new set up. Until recently I was gaming on a 970, then a month or two ago I got a 1080ti. With the new PC I started with the 1080ti and then put in the 2080ti, (I have pics of both but am struggling to upload them - perhaps the file size is too large - so they may come as an edit to this post.) in terms of the things that have really improved my gaming experience:
Moving from a 970 to a 1080ti: Big change, made a big difference at 1080p and a huge difference at 1440p
Moving from a 1080ti to a 2080ti: Small change, made little difference at 1440p
Moving from a 720p 60 Hz screen to a 1440p 144Hz Gsync: Absolutely massive change - the single biggest boost to my gaming experience (though needed the 1080ti to achieve this)
Moving from a 15-4590 to a 2700X: Small difference, my old cpu was working hard and coming to the point where it could struggle but there was no real need to upgrade (except that I'm rubbish at saving and would have frittered away the cash on other stuff if I hadn't spent it on this!)
Moving from a KINGSTON V300 2.5" SSD (450MB/R, 450MB/W) to a Samsung 970 Evo (3400MB/R, 2300MB/W): medium change, lots more room and so much faster for loading/saving
My advice to gamers with a similar age machine, looking to upgrade:
Prioritise your screen and GPU combo, but don't go over the top on the gpu, you won't see the benefits. Look to boost the speed of your gaming drive - any time spent waiting for stuff to load is time that could be better spent killing orcs/aliens etc. Believe the people on the forum telling you that your RAM and CPU are fine for the games you play!
No GPU:
with a 1080ti:
With a 2080ti:
Wasting the 2080ti by playing Rimworld:
I finally got my new PC and she's lovely!
Previously I was using a PCS build from three years ago: I5-4590 (quadcore, no hyperthreading), locked, so no overclocking and the motherboard would only take that generation, so no way to upgrade. I had a SSD, but a fairly early and slow one, at 120GB it was so full of my OS and other bits that I couldn't fit large games (e.g. TWW2) onto it and ran then from my 1TB hybrid SSHD instead. I had 8Gb of RAM (again fairly slow) and found that I would sometimes get memory warnings if I ran Perfmon reports during stress points (like having a few chrome tabs open, streaming a podcast and going through the end-of-turn AI moves on TWW2). My main bugbear was loading times and SSD space but also I had the offer of borrowing a 2080ti from my employer to work from home on (running neural networks mainly) but had to turn it down because I couldn't power it with my 550W PSU (only 6 pin power leads)!
My new PC is awesome - R2700x, with a Corsair H100i cooler (I've yet to fully road test this and see how fast I can get it) on an Ultragaming X470. RGB fans all synced with ICUE, a 500GB Samsung evo M.2 NVMe as the main drive and a 2Tb Hard drive for storage. All housed in the 500D SE, with the lovely easy-access doors. I was already using a 1440p 165Hz GSync monitor and gaming at that resolution I wasn't expecting much in the way of fps differences from a new CPU.
Production:
Excellent - almost exactly the time quoted, the only delay being waiting a day or two for new RAM to come in (which was well communicated by PCS), this meant that although I selected 2933 MHz, I got 3000MHz so I'm very pleased.
Delivery:
Great - I was able to delay the delivery until I could be in for it and it arrived at 9am that day.
Unboxing:
Perfect condition and I'm not surprised, it was very well wrapped and packaged securely. All the extra pieces were included for the different components. The only thing that was 'sort-of' missing was the Wraith cooler. I didn't really expect it to be there but given it comes free with the cooler and has some actual value for selling on, it would have been nice to get it, even if you order a different cooler. That said, the price of the CPU was good, so perhaps PCS use some of the spare coolers to recoup their costs on this, or get to buy at a discount by getting some CPUs without the coolers? If it matters to anyone, then you could always order with the stock cooler and then fit your own (up to you if the tame and hassle of doing this is worth having a second hand cooler to sell!)
Performance:
It just EATS benchmarks, everything I throw at it it just shrugs off. I have the fan LEDs matched to temp readings from the CPU and am struggling to raise the temp enough to change their colours!
I checked fps in Total War Warhammer 2, both when scrolling around and during the end-turn phase, when the game resolves all the AI faction moves.
I saw modest gains in fps (going from 40-50 fps on the old PC to 55-65 on the new) when scrolling around the TWW2 map, though less gain for the end-turn phase (from 0-10 fps for the old PC to 10-20 for the new) - I was hoping for more but I think that is just down to the game being a bit rubbish - not sure any processor could boost that part (The GPU for these comparisons was the same, so any boost is welcome and down to the CPU)!
Loading speed and turn ends in games are fantastically fast now - I see loading bars marching across the screen when they used to crawl.
I fitted the 2080ti today and tried again with checking my fps - now up to 70-80 for scrolling across the map but no difference in the end-turn section. PUBG benefits more from the new, 2080ti GPU but the new CPU made no difference to fps.
Aesthetics:
Absolutely awesome - I love the brushed metal top, such a great contrast with the smoked glass sides. The only negative here is that I also ordered an exhaust fan and the PCS sticker on it is not dead-centre, causing it to wobble as it rotates which is bloody annoying. Still, that has to be the very definition of a minor moan and I'm going to fit a LED fan in its place tomorrow! It is a little louder than my old PC, but it has many more fans and I'm still playing with fan curves etc.
Overall:
I'm extremely happy with it. The gains in performance were relatively minor (in terms of frame rates) from the CPU and Oussebon was right that I could have carried on with my old processor for a while yet, fitting more RAM and a new SSD to boost performance. That said, Need and Want are very different things and I'm over the moon with the new set up. Until recently I was gaming on a 970, then a month or two ago I got a 1080ti. With the new PC I started with the 1080ti and then put in the 2080ti, (I have pics of both but am struggling to upload them - perhaps the file size is too large - so they may come as an edit to this post.) in terms of the things that have really improved my gaming experience:
Moving from a 970 to a 1080ti: Big change, made a big difference at 1080p and a huge difference at 1440p
Moving from a 1080ti to a 2080ti: Small change, made little difference at 1440p
Moving from a 720p 60 Hz screen to a 1440p 144Hz Gsync: Absolutely massive change - the single biggest boost to my gaming experience (though needed the 1080ti to achieve this)
Moving from a 15-4590 to a 2700X: Small difference, my old cpu was working hard and coming to the point where it could struggle but there was no real need to upgrade (except that I'm rubbish at saving and would have frittered away the cash on other stuff if I hadn't spent it on this!)
Moving from a KINGSTON V300 2.5" SSD (450MB/R, 450MB/W) to a Samsung 970 Evo (3400MB/R, 2300MB/W): medium change, lots more room and so much faster for loading/saving
My advice to gamers with a similar age machine, looking to upgrade:
Prioritise your screen and GPU combo, but don't go over the top on the gpu, you won't see the benefits. Look to boost the speed of your gaming drive - any time spent waiting for stuff to load is time that could be better spent killing orcs/aliens etc. Believe the people on the forum telling you that your RAM and CPU are fine for the games you play!
No GPU:
with a 1080ti:
With a 2080ti:
Wasting the 2080ti by playing Rimworld:
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