Be Excellent To Each Other

As usual, looks very tidy and neat, nicely done. What do you mean by 'wall of water' though?

https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/ps5-c ... r-gamepads

Steam have added support for the PS5 controller.

Mmm. That's a big gap from "Steam can support the controller" to "lots of games use the controller's unique features."

'allowing players to enjoy games like Death Stranding or Horizon: Zero Dawn with the full range of PS5 DualSense controls.' >> that sounds like bullshit. Why would the PC versions of these games have DualSense support? Reading other sites, I suspect it just means that the games work the same as they do with a DualShock 4. So you get basic rumble, but not the fancy new haptics.

That's disappointing, but understandable. Although if Sony are licensing the tech from a third party, it's not beyond possibility that support could show up in the PC realm.

As long as Sony haven't locked that shit down tight. Which they probably have.

Decided I needed yet another PC.

I've been running my new HIFI stuff with an Amazon Fire cube thing. It's great for videos, netflix and so on but didn't really sound all that great with music. So I bagged one of these for £42 on Amazon.



I then dug out my old collection of PCIE sound cards, deciding on the Xonar STX. Bought a PSU for £14 on Ebay (SFX)



And then all I needed was an ITX board and some RAM. I started the hunt for a Ryzen 3200g. None. Moved onto the 3400g. None. OK, I will settle for an Athlon G. Will I fuck. Again, there just aren't any any where. Beginning to get a bit desperate I said "OK fuck it, let's just get a Celeron" and that seemed an impossible task also. I guess people gobbled them all up for cheap at home office PCs and thus there are none left. Beginning to despair I finally stumbled across this very strange beast.



Which is basically a SOC quad core Celeron. That has laptop RAM banks. So I got some RAM.



And build.



Board went in later. Looks pretty damn good atop the hifi.



Managed to find the badge on Ebay. Now all I need to do is replace the annoying and ultra bright white LED with a blue one to match everything else.

The AV32 can do 96khz, but what has made the biggest difference is the DAC onboard the sound card. Tried a few "Hi resolution" audio CD rips, pah can't tell the difference there but man it makes that Fire Cube sound like poo with music.

Just got a logi Mx Keys keyboard.

It allows me to swap between pcs without needing 2 keyboards.

The Mx master mouse is great as I can swap between pcs easily (ok lift up press button put down)

Trying mouse without borders so allow my mouse to use both screens and pcs at the same time etc. Not a perfect app but it is ok.

I am just trying to have less on my desk. Well when I declutter the stuff on there.

Going to keep one of my Mx master and k360 keyboard for my travels with work. As the keyboard is small enough to keep in my laptop bag.

Grim...! It's upside down!

Upgraded mine the other day. To 32gb, and a Der8auer bracket (that moves the cold plate on the cooler in line with the cores).





Within about a minute of cleaning out the dust filters the fluff starts to settle again *sigh*

What the shit

[edit] Turns out it literally is upside down. Nothing the forum can do about that

Amazing!

KOV! This is why we can't have nice things!

How is it upside down, it is ok on my phone?

Took a landscape pic

We’re not going to acknowledge the weird psychopath glove?

I bought a Logitech G613 wireless mechanical keyboard the other week to declutter the desk in the new office. And an MX Master 3, because my attempt at replacing the battery in my MX Master 1 broke the scroll wheel and made the gesture button hyper-sensitive.

Trying not to

Thanks to the help and generosity of John Coffey and Hearthly I dragged my pc into the last decade a couple of years ago, but now I think it's time to drag it a bit further forwards (still firmly in the 2010's though).

My arbitrary budget is around £300, as in my head, that's what I've always spent on a new cpu/mobo/ram combination. This is flexible though.

From what I can see, ddr4 3200 ram is about £20 per 4GB. I was thinking 8, but maybe 16 (I've only got 4 at the moment). Would there be a difference if I went for 2x8GB over 4x4GB, or an I better off just getting 16 now?

The cpu sweet spot appears to be a Ryzen 5 3600 for about £190. Let's assume I'm going to spend £40 on ram for now (even though I think I've already talked myself into £80), that leaves me with about £70 for a motherboard. I'm working on the assumption that I won't upgrade again for a long time, so I'm not really fussed about paying extra to support something that there's a small chance I might use.

Is there anything I should particularly be looking out for? At the moment I'm using the HDMI out from the gfx card (I have to admit I don't actually know if that has its own inbuilt sound or it's using my soundcard), so don't care about video outputs from the board. My soundcard is PCI, so that will have to go, but all boards I see have built in sound anyway.
Main variation seems to be quantities/varieties of usb outputs.

It's an ATX case, so I can use an mATX board, right? Shall I just pretty much go for the cheapest? I guess my existing board is a Gigabyte, which has been churning away for over 12 years now, so I'm perhaps tempted by another one of those (unless they've gone shit in the last 12 years, and that was an Intel board, if that makes a difference)?

I think the only other consideration is psu. No idea what's in there at the moment, but I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Finally, and I think this is important. LEDs aren't required.

If you can stretch the budget, I upgraded recently (well, around 8 months back) to the following combo and I've got zero complaints:

- MSI MPG Gaming Plus X570 motherboard (I seem to remember I had to do a motherboard BIOS update to enable the 3000 series CPUs, though - but it's entirely plausible that any newly manufactured boards would already have the latest BIOS)
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600(K I think)

I'd definitely go for 16GB over 8GB these days.

You won't need to keep your soundcard, I suspect even your current motherboard has on-board sound but you'd be hard pressed to find one that doesn't these days.

Cheers Gaz, my question would be what does that board (or the x570 chipset in general) offer over the cheapo b450 boards that are about half the price?

B450 chipset mobo is fine for what you're doing, onboard sound (even on cheap mobos) is now of a standard whereby it'll do for most people, most of the time. (I retired my (very expensive!) soundcard when I moved to my current PC, and switched to onboard sound.) Might be worth checking that you're getting one that supports the CPU you decide on out of the box, it should do, but it's possible there's some old stock knocking around.

Deffo go for 16GB of RAM, it's not that difficult to max out 8GB these days.

Ryzen 3600 is a nice sweet spot for price/performance.

My understanding is that they've got better expansion options for things like on-board SSDs and stuff, and PCI-Express 4 - although granted, I don't really know for sure.

For me it'd future-proof the machine a bit better than the B450s, but I don't really know enough about it to speak with any authority - I'd listen to Hearthly's recommendation there.

Yeah B450 offers ample.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-B450M-PRO- ... 171&sr=8-3

Is a nice board. The Max is indicative of the fact it has a bigger BIOS ROM and thus will work with the 5000 series also.

However for the first time in many, many years I would advise against AMD. Intel have slashed their prices, and there is hardly anything between the 3600 and this.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/intel-co ... 80-in.html

Board

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/asrock-b ... 7j-ak.html

Ram

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team-gro ... af-tg.html

Would be what I would go for right now. AMD are pushing their prices up since their "win" recently and are being a bit greedy.

B550 won't future proof anything. The next gen Ryzen will be using DDR5, so nothing right now is future proof dude. All you get is PCIE gen 4, which if you are into rubbing yourself off over SSD benchmarks (and want to pay the premium for a PCIE gen 4 SSD) will get you nothing and nowhere. Sure, some of the AMD GPUs are gen 4 also, but that makes no difference and you would need a head examination to be buying any GPU right now unless you have an honest and sympathetic friend selling you one for what it was worth pre Covid.

B550 was just a way for AMD to charge more for the chipset IMO, and offers very little to nothing over B450 if you really want to go the AMD route. However, as I say, Intel have very quietly slashed their prices, so the parts above I listed will save you at least £50 over going AMD. Mostly because with Ryzen you really want either 3200 with CL15 (or even better, 14) which will cost you out the ass, or 3600 at 17 (or even better, 16 or 15). Now I will admit I went bonkers on my last build (4133 RAM I can get down to 3633 CL 15) but other than an AIDA benchmark it really offers little in the real world.

And again, in the very same real world the 10400f is every bit as good as an all rounder as the 3600.

I mean, even *I* don't have a PCIE gen 4 SSD or GPU. It just wasn't worth it. I could buy two gen 3 for the same price and nearly double the storage capacity.


Ah, that. Yeah, I was a psycho alright thinking that buying a near completely glass case was a good idea. One touch and it looks like poo. If you dare to handle the glass when going inside you will be treated to lots of your fingerprints being lit up when you close it again, and of course they are inside so you can't just rub them off. What a stupid bloody idea it was.

I've got this lying around, if you want it. Yours for the price of a pint next we meet.

I appreciate that benchmarks should be taken with a pinch of salt, but that was one of the first CPUs I looked at and it comes in at around 12,600 on passmark compared to about 17,800 for the 3600. Fair enough, that's about 2/3 the score for 2/3 of the price, but I couldn't see a comparable Intel for around £200.

That would be ridiculously kind Dave, thank you. I don't keep turning up in this thread to blag free stuff though, honestly.

The problem with those cheaper Intel CPUs is they use the shittest of the shit silicon, note the massive gulf between the base clock (i.e. what Intel guarantee they will run at) and the boost clock. The last time I looked into it they throttled like bastards under load and spent an alarming amount of time in the region of the base clock frequency when pushed, whereas the Ryzens have base and boost clocks that are much closer together in speed.

You can definitely make a case for some Intel CPUs at the moment, but IMO that wouldn't really be one of them.

There's a couple of channels on YT that suit the budget gamer. Random Gaming In HD and Tech Yes City. Both of these have benched the two to death, and there's practically nothing in it in gaming.

You'll get a better upgrade path from AMD, but only if you are going to end up fitting something like a 3900x or above.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/I ... 4079vs4040

That covers all of the Esports titles people play, which is pretty sensible IMO. Those are the ones where FPS really like, super matter.

I was about to order this https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/b450-gaming-plus-max as it's currently going for the cheaps at Curry's, along with the Ryzen 5 3600.

If it makes any difference, I am highly unlikely to play any of those games, I am more interested in upscaling emulators to they look nicer.

Looks like that board will do the job. Just don't install MSI's Mystic Light. It will kill your Windows install, as I found out the hard way.

Just sold an RX570 I paid £80 for two years ago for £300 on ebay. Prices are nuts on there. Listed and sold in ten minutes, buyer seems legit.

‘Kin ‘ell! Result mate!

That sounds awesome for you Mark. What's so special about that card though, like why is it in such high demand that it'd command a price like that?

Nothing special really, just GPU prices are through the roof. Worth a look if you have anything laying about unused.

It's crypto mining that has made it borderline impossible to buy new graphics cards, and that has fed into demand outstripping supply right across the spectrum, including on the used market, some older cards are still viable for mining too, not sure if the RX570 is one of them.

When the Bitcoin bubble bursts again (which it will), there'll be a glut of used cards onto the market.

As it stands if you go to somewhere like Overclockers, Ebuyer, Scan etc, there are damn near literally no graphics card actually for sale, nearly everything is on pre-order. (Or not even on pre-order, just stuff like 'available soon'.)

There's also massive issues with PCBs and shipping problems from China at present.

Yeah, it's affecting all sorts, not just GPUs. I think one of the things Biden's trying to do is set up more manufacturing in the US but that won't happen next week.

Is memory expensive these days then? I think I need to upgrade my PC but if it's going to be spendy, I might wait a bit.

Judging by twitter, every GPU is being used to process Non-Fungible Tokens of cat gifs.

Memory prices have been pretty stable tbh.

Switch-like PC handheld by Steam? Yes please.

This could be a gamechanger in terms of getting me to actually play PC games. Depending on how they solve the games that need a mouse.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2021-05-25-valve-reportedly-working-on-a-switch-like-handheld-gaming-pc

Already a thing

$1600? Also, too much like a PC. I don't want to be dumped into Windows when I fire the thing up, I want to be in my Steam library, firing up American Trucker or whatever.

Which may well not be what Steam are proposing. It's just how I see it in my head.

That's fairly trivial to set as a startup thing, though.

Can anyone tell me about NVME SSD hard drives? I have a slot on my motherboard for one and they look like they could be useful for storing videos on while I edit them.

Has anyone got or used one? Anything I should be aware of before I buy one?

Should give much faster read speeds (probably write speeds also) than a regular SATA SSD, and definitely over a normal hard disk.

I think they're still a little bit more expensive per GB than normal SSDs though.

I moved my Premiere Pro scratch disk onto one and it made quite a difference. I suspect my source videos are smaller than yours though - what file sizes are you normally dealing with?

Have you tried the STANVMESSDHD forum?

From yesterday, I've just had a look and it ranges from 700mb up to about 10gb. So yeah, pretty big.

They're mega-fast, and when working with large video files you'll notice a massive difference over traditional hard drives, and even over SATA SSDs. (In simple terms SATA SSDs max out at about 600MB/s depending on what they're doing, NVMe SSDs can do about 3000-3500MB/s - both have very similar seek times.)

I had a dabble editing 4K videos together and using an NVMe SSD for that was nicer than using a SATA SSD.

Just be aware that M2 is a form factor and NVMe is the type of drive, it's possible to get SATA SSDs in the M2 form factor (M2 is the socket on your motherboard), so make sure you're getting an NVMe M2 drive.

Don't shell out extra for a PCIe4 NVMe drive, the PCIe3 NVMe drives are more than capable of maxing out the rest of your system. (i.e. Other things in your PC will bottleneck a PCIe3 drive, let alone a PCIe4 drive which can cost quite a bit more.)