martin.dutton

Thank you. Mine is the 100Hz model, but I think I got unlucky and got one that had a strobing/flickering issue at 100Hz, and 95Hz, but at 90Hz I've never seen it... but that was some time ago, so you prompted me to push it back to 100Hz and see what happens. My position is that I'm going to be coming into 'some' money and am allowed to treat myself, so I could spring for a motherboard, CPU and RAM, or a GPU, but not both. I feel from my own research, and what everyone has said here, that I should wait another generation before upping the GPU, so I'm wondering whether it makes sense to take the opportunity to upgrade the core now, and tackle the GPU next year. Or spend the money on some powertools instead (there's no way I'm disciplined enough to save it), keep the core and do the GPU next year, then upgrade the rest in 2021 or something. Will see what Black Friday/Cyber Monday bring. First world problems eh.

Gotcha. Right, I know that technically this isn't the correct sub-forum for this question, but it does belong in this thread and is tangentially related - can I expect much of an increase in gaming performance going from my i7 4790k to to say a Ryzen 9? My system currently crushes most things I throw at it, but I may be coming into some cash for an upgrade, so am considering my options. It seems pretty clear that I need to wait a generation for the GPU... hence wondering whether to update the core. To be clear, I realise that a Ryzen 7 will likely do the job (it's the whole i5 vs i7 thing from back in the day); I know that I've said I'm mainly gaming focused these days, but I do like having a high-sec system, and there's nothing to say that I won't pick back up some of the multi-threaded tasks/jobs/workflows that had me buy the i7 4790k back in the day.

Thank you all - this largely confirms my suspicions, I've been pricing up a new core (Ryzen 9 with decent CPU and a hunk of RAM) anyway and was wondering whether I'd be good sticking with my GTX 1080 for a spell, or if I should really be considering a GPU upgrade too. It's all about the monies though, and kids are the gift that keep on taking ;-). Based on this I'll likely upgrade the core and keep the GTX 1080, and then see what the next tier of GPU's bring. Like I said, at the moment I can run most games I want to play on high/max settings at playable framerates. Thanks all. M

The tl;dr is that I have a GTX 1080 driving 3440x1440 @ 90Hz - is a RTX 2070/2080 Super a worthwhile upgrade? ### I've been out of the PC building game for a while (having kids) so am looking for some general advice on the current landscape. The key components of my system are: Intel i7 4790k Asus Z97 Deluxe 16GB RAM MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Samsung 950 PRO NVMe M.2 512GB (Windows 10 drive) - this is mounted on a PCIe card so I do get the full performance Samsung 840 EVO 250GB SSD x2 (storage) Lots of other irrelevant bits as far as this question is concerned. My display is an Acer X34 Predator (3440x1440 @ 90Hz) - I'm not looking to upgrade this any time soon. This question is purely in the context of gaming - I used to use my system for a lot more, but these days it's internets, email and gaming. Generally speaking I've found this system to still have plenty of performance, capable of handling everything I've thrown at it on either high or max settings. I've started to notice some performance issues/lower framerates on newer titles (not that I've been able to play many) and I suspect that with the next crop of AAA titles that trend will continue. So I guess my question is - what do people recommend? I've been looking at the new RTX lineup but I simply don't know enough about the tech landscape to understand what (if anything) would be a good buy, or if I'm going to find myself bottlenecked by my CPU or some other component - I have been considering replacing the core at some point (mobo, CPU and RAM), but that's further down the line and for another thread. From what I've been able to read, the 2070 Super seems ahead of the GTX 1080 (though not leagues ahead), but is it enough to be worth the money? What does a 2080 or 2080 Super bring to the table? Or if I don't care about ray-tracing all that much, would a second GTX 1080 be a better buy right now? I play a wide variety of games/genres, ARMA3 will be a constant, and there's typically at least one latest-and-greatest AAA title installed. I'd appreciate some suggestions/recommendations... and if you need any more detail about what I have then please ask. Thanks. M

Been AFK for some time so only just picked these back up. Thanks for clarifying things brighttail - I couldn't get any combination of things to work with any form of reliability or consistency so in the end I gave up on the HDD RAID setup and switched it off. With the 950 Pro in the Hyper M.2 x4 adaptor from ASUS I'm getting full performance from the dirve, and then for a redundancy solution for the WD Red's I use for video capture I decided to use Windows Storage Spaces - had never heard of it before, but it came up in all my investigation into this issue - I think it'll do just fine for my needs and means I can move on to being productive, rather than fighting with my BOIS. Thanks both for your input - has been a fun challenge to get this working in one form or another.

Thank you brighttail, however I think you may have misread everything - I'm not looking to use the 950 Pro in RAID itself, it is never intended to be part of a RAID array - I know that is for the SATA drives, and two of the SATA drives (the WD Red's) are set up as RAID 1. I was expecting to be able to have the 950 Pro as the boot drive (instead of one of the 840 Evo's) and to be able to keep both the WD Red's in RAID 1 as they had been previously... but it seems that if RAID is enabled and the WD Red's are connected, the BOIS cannot see the 950 Pro and boot from it - disconnect the WD Red's or disable the RAID in the BIOS and the 950 Pro can be seen and booted from.

The 950 Pro is the boot device. Regarding the WD Green and the SATAEXPRESS_1 conflict - it's important to disentangle that from the RAID issue - it explains why I couldn't see that drive in Windows when connected to either SATA6G_5, and SATA6G_6, and why it's fine when moved the one of the ASMedia connectors. The RAID issue as described happens whether that WD Green is connected to the ASMedia connector, or just unplugged - the BOIS will not see the 950 Pro if RAID is enabled in the BOIS and the WD Red's are connected. Disable RAID, or leave it enabled but unplug the WD Red's and the BOIS then sees the 950 Pro and boots just fine. Seems to be a Thing™... even if it isn't officially documented. In other news - performance isn't all that for the 950 Pro; it's better than the 840 EVO's, but way down on what it could be - this is just down to the performance on the motherboard it turns out, the M.2 slot is PCIe 2.0 and to get the best performance it looks like I need a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot... handily Asus do a Hyper M.2 x4 adaptor expressly for this purpose, so I have one of those on order (only £25) - found out about that here: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/answers/id-2911013/samsung-950-pro-slow-read-write-speeds.html I love building/updating computers - every day's a school day... a lot of this information is out there in one form or another, it's just a case of understanding the new technologies/protocols and how they all come together (or not as the case may be), especially when it comes to things like early adoption/support of new tech like M.2 on Z97 boards.

Thanks AlphaPolak - that explains the WD Green then needing to be moved. No, there's nothing in the manual about RAID and M.2 - have read and re-read it a number of times. Since my post though I was able to find a couple of posts on Tom's Hardware appearing to experience the same issue - BOIS dropping the M.2 if RAID was enabled, this is on both Z97 and X99 boards. Seems really odd if it's 'normal' behaviour and I would have expected it to be more up-front if truly a thing - M.2 and RAID are both quite prosumer/enthusiast setups, so I would have thought this outcome quite common.

Got an odd issue that I'm struggling to find an answer on, doesn't seem to tally with most M.2 boot issues people are reporting. I'll do my best to explain, but if needs be I'll just shoot a video of it. Firstly I'll cover the hardware in play: Operating System Windows 10 Home 64-bit CPU Intel Core i7 4790K @ 4.00GHz Haswell 22nm Technology RAM 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 Motherboard ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. Z97-DELUXE (SOCKET 1150) - BIOS fully updated Graphics Acer X34 (3440x1440@100Hz) NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 (MSI) Storage 476GB Samsung SSD 950 PRO 512GB (M.2) 232GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB (SSD) 232GB Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB (SSD) 1863GB Western Digital Red (SATA) 1863GB Western Digital Red (SATA) 1863GB Western Digital Green (SATA) Optical Drives No optical disk drives detected Audio Scarlett 2i2 USB Schiit Modi 2 USB A word on my setup prior to this issue: One of the Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB drives was my main Windows 10 OS drive, and the two Western Digital Red's were configured in RAID 1. All drives were connected to the Intel Z97 SATA 6Gb/s connectors (I was not using the ASMedia SATA connectors). In the BOIS RAID was enabled via Advanced > PHC Storage Configuration > SATA Mode Selection > [RAID] (as opposed to [AHCI], [IDE] or [Disabled]). All was well. Now on to what's happening: So I went and purchased a new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 and once all backup prep was complete I powered down the system, pulled the SATA cables from all drives and installed the Samsung 950 Pro M.2. I placed my Windows 10 USB stick in a front port, powered up the system and went into the BOIS to Advanced > PHC Storage Configuration > SATA Express(SATAEXPRESS_1) and M.2 Configuration and changed that from [Auto] to [M.2], then went to Boot and scrolled down to the boot drives section - the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 was showing as the primary boot device so I saved my settings and restarted. Windows installation picked up from the USB stick, saw the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 and everything went just fine - was installed and at my desktop in ~ 5 minutes. Applied Windows updates, installed a bunch of stuff - drivers, apps, utilities etc all requiring restarts... all was well. I then came to connecting my other drives - these were not hot-plugged, the system was shut down for this, drives connected and the powered up. Firstly the two 840 EVO's which came up just fine - they are connected to SATA6G_1 and SATA6G_2 on the Intel Z97 SATA 6Gb/s connectors. Then came the Western Digital Green - this is connected to SATA6G_5 - for some reason Windows couldn't see that drive, even after a couple of restarts. I did some Googling and couldn't really find anything about this - I have read that there will be conflicts if you are using SATAEXPRESS_1 and M.2, but I wasn't using that - I was using the SATA6G connectors next to that. I moved it to ASMedia connector SATA6G_E4 and Windows could see it. v0v - it was happy in SATA6G_5 before, but whatever. Time to move on. Finally I connected the two Western Digital Red's, these were connected to SATA6G_3 and SATA6G_4 on the Intel Z97 SATA 6Gb/s connectors and are the ones configured as RAID 1. On powering up the system the familiar Intel RAID config screen showed, and then the system started to POST before dumping me in the BOIS... thought it a bit odd, but hey - computers right? - I exited the BOIS and restarted, got into Windows and carried on... until the next restart, where I found myself in the BOIS again. Restarted and was dumped in the BOIS once more. Restarted again and made it to Windows. After some poking around I saw that my Samsung 950 Pro M.2 was no longer seen as a boot device within the BOIS, but seemingly at random Windows was able to boot after a restart. After a bit of trial and error and many many restarts I have it behaving consistently - the Samsung 950 Pro M.2 is seen in the BOIS, and Windows boots faultlessly if: Advanced > PHC Storage Configuration > SATA Mode Selection is set to [RAID MODE] but neither drive is connected (SATA cables unplugged) OR Advanced > PHC Storage Configuration > SATA Mode Selection is set to [AHCI MODE] thereby disabling RAID 1 on those drives So that's it. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to be sure I captured all the detail. I guess what I want to know is - is this a "Thing™" - can you not use RAID and have a M.2 drive running as well? Can't say I've seen anything to that effect, but it sure seems odd. Also - what's going on with Western Digital Green and SATA6G_5? Like I said, I thought the conflict was with SATAEXPRESS_1 which I'm not using. Thank you in advance to all who contribute. Martin

Good day to you all - I need PSU advice. I want to fit a modular PSU into my PC, I did my research and settled on the Corsair RM Series RM 650 '80+ Gold' 650W Power Supply (CP-9020054-UK) - http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-153-CS However I got it home to find that it doesn't fit my case. :angry: I have a LianLi PC-101 and although the PSU will fit in the designated place, there is no clearance to connect the cables. So I could do with advice on the best 650W modular PSU that is either 14cm or at a push 15cm front to back. Thank you in advance. Martin