Columbo

The secret to gaming PC's. Buy cheap and upgrade often. The latest and greatest is only fun for up to 6 months. Than buyers regret kicks in. If you buy cheap and upgrade often. Old components go into a backup build or a secondary PC.

If you want a gaming CPU, 8 cores. If you plan on doing a lot of video editing. You may as well go for 16 cores instead of a 12 core CPU.

A RX 6600xt could run 1440p no problem with low to medium settings. You do not need high settings when you upgrade from 1080P to 1440P. The image is much better @ 1440p no matter the settings. The review sites focus on 1080P because that is what shows differences that are trivial at best. Today a 27" monitor is too big for 1080P gaming according to most gamers. The big jump in GPU needed for displaying an image or gaming is 4K. A 1660 Super can run 1440p with low settings. A 3060 can run 1440p with medium settings 80+ fps on most games. Only the newest games would you want something like a 4070 or a 7800xt type card. Are you one of those people who would go out and buy a 4090 or the upcoming 5090 and play @ 1080p in 2025? I hope not.

I think it will take Intel 3 or 4 months of driver updates to fix the driver overhead issue. People should not base their GPU purchase on 1080P benchmarks. Who plays games in 2025 @ 1080P? 1440P is what people should be gaming at. Prices for Intel will come down a lot after AMD and Nvidia release their new GPU's.

For Nvidia it's going to be MSI or ASUS. For AMD GPU's, it's Power Color. I will say the value play would be AsRock. Not all of their offerings are good but they are making some nice looking, functional high quality cards. Most of the Intel GPU partner cards are really well built cards.

Unplug the monitor from the power for 2 minutes. While powered off unplug the DP cable from the monitor. Power up the monitor, plug the DP cable back into the monitor. This is assuming you are now using a traditional DP cable and not a HDMI-Display Port or DVI to Display Port cable.

There is no point arguing over a 3 year old card. RDNA2 is outdated technology today. The 7800xt is current generation AMD (RDNA3) offering in the same performance tier.

Air coolers use conduction with heatsinks and heat pipes filled with a gases for cooling. That is why the ends of the heat pipes are sealed. If you cut a heat pipe, you essentially brick your air cooler. The more heat pipes an air cooler has the better it coolers. When you have more surface area like a double 120mm air cooler, the better the cooling. An AIO has a pump and a radiator to dissipate the heat that is pumped from the CPU pump to the radiator. In theory an AIO should be on top simply because all the heat rises and the radiator is placed at an exit point for heat to escape. There is still conductive heat from the liquid moving around the cooling solution through the metal grates that disperse the heat. An air cooler uses conduction to dissipate the heat. All that heat stays in the case but with good airflow blows it out the back with the exhaust fan. An AIO uses conduction and a sealed liquid cooling solution to offset the heat energy. The custom loop liquid cooling solutions have radiators but they also have big liquid reservoirs which make them superior to AIO liquid coolers. They definitely have the cool factor to them but the price of admission is not worth it unless you have money to burn or want to make a statement PC. The original air cooler that everything is based off of was the Thermalright Ultra 120. The Tuniq Tower 120 and the Cooler Master 212 and others came after that. Then they had air coolers that added double 120mm heatsinks and more heat pipes. Typically 5 or 6 heat pipes are becoming standard. I have a Cooler Master 212+ (4x heat pipes) in the garage running an old 7600K. I have a i5 10400 running with a Vetroo V5 (5 heat pipes) which gives it better cooling. The Thermalright Peerless Assassin has 6x heat pipes and a double 120mm heatsink fan setup.

I still have a working Radeon 7950 in a PC. That is from 2012/13. I had the original Geforce 256 back in 2000. The RX 6800 was supposed to be equal to the 3070. After more than two years it pretty much is equal to the 3070. That is how long it takes AMD to optimize their drivers. The RDNA 1 5700 and 5700xt were great cards when you considered the price. AMD is not equal to Nvidia. I agree Nvidia is greedy, that is why people look to AMD. Intel is building their driver library. Once complete they can update drivers based on an established database of all the games. That is why AMD and Nvidia are ahead of Intel. People repeat lip service they heard from youtubers. When you enter a new market you undercut your competition with price and performance. AMD has the RX 7600xt with 16GB of Vram coming at the end of the month. It would make sense for Intel to release an ARC A750 with 16GB of Vram and high frequency GDDR6. A lot of you do not realize much of the performance in low to mid tier cards comes from the GDDR6 memory. The super cards and the XT AMD cards simply have higher voltage on the GPU and supercharged GDDR6 memory.

I have yet to meet a person who builds custom water cooling who never had a leak. So go and spend $1000 for a custom solution. Then calculate how much liquid by volume they use. In my post I mentioned that in some cases air cooling makes sense. I could care less about the fan size going from 240mm to 280mm. It's the size of the radiator, surface area and more liquid to cool the AIO. Stepping up to 360mm or 420mm gives more surface area to the radiator and more liquid cooling. They have already had contests with fans on AIO running full blast with pumps at 100% vs Air cooling. Stock AIO's do not run the fans at 100%. I am not down voting Air Cooling. If someone runs air, they should be comfortable taking it out of the case at least once a year for cleaning. Dust and particles reduce efficiency on air cooling. That is something that does not affect AIO because they have radiators. Heat sinks on air get blocked by dust bunnies.

Before Intel entered the GPU market, people said AMD GPU's are not good. Now with Nvidia, AMD and Intel in the GPU space, everybody has forgot about what many said or believed about AMD GPU's. The defacto GPU was always Nvidia and nobody considered AMD GPU's. Their drivers are bad or their performance is nowhere close to Nvidia. Basically AMD always fixes their drivers, it just takes them a year or two. I have personal experience with the Intel ARC A750. They are updating their drivers like mad. If you have a single monitor, you should be ok. Multi monitor setups become a bit frustrating. They are not supported for OCing with MSI afterburner yet. They have GDDR6 and I am certain being able to OC the memory would yield 10-15% better performance. The ARC interface looks great but the functions and features do not all work. If you can get a new ARC A750 for $180, I would say go for it. I think having a backup GPU would be a good idea. Intel is spending a lot of time and effort updating the drivers almost weekly. By the time Battlemage is released, people will be questioning AMD GPU's. By that I mean AMD puts very little effort in trying to compete with Nvidia. Nvidia updates their drivers weekly or bi-weekly. I will say the Nvidia updates for the most part are worthless but updating your Nvidia drivers every 3-6 months provides some useful improvements. The AMD GPU's I like are the 6800XT and 7800XT. Any lower than that the 6650XT that did hit $209 a few months ago. The 4070 is the only Nvidia GPU for the mid range that is worth considering.

Water cooling is superior to air cooling. Some of these air craft carrier sized air coolers perform great but they give you little to no access to memory modules or anything in your case. That means if you want to adjust your memory kit or M.2 drive, you will have to remove your air cooler. I use both air and water depending on what I am looking for. An old PC build with a 7600k, that gets an air cooler. The air cooler fanboys do not want to go up against a 360mm or 420mm AIO. Air coolers can hold their own against 240mm AIO's. Once you get to 280mm AIO, it's a coin flip for the better Air coolers. The best selling point for AIO is the ability to make adjustments and modifications to your PC build without any obstructions. It makes the case wide open. Some motherboards have led's for trouble shooting or errors on the board. With an AIO, you can see those lights. With air cooling, being able to see or get to LED lights on the motherboard may be difficult to nearly impossible to see. If you are using the smaller 120mm air coolers like the Coolermaster 212+, those are easy to work on and around. Just make sure if you get air cooling, go with at least 5 heat pipes. Six heatpipes like on the peerless assassin would be ideal. If you go the AIO route 240mm will do just fine with 6-8 core CPU's. If you want to keep things cool 280mm or 360mm will do the job better. With AIO you can adjust the sound volume by turning the fan speeds down. The temps will go up a bit but AIO can give quiet to near silent operation.

120mm AIO is a waste of space. You need 240mm for an AIO to work as well or better than good air cooling. You want the fan blowing air out if mounted on the top of the case. You want the air blowing into the case if you mount the AIO on front.

You have to look on the bright side. By the end of 2023, Intel should have all the driver issues works out for the most part. On paper the A750 should be close to or equal to a 3060ti. That is a best case scenario. It should equal the 4060 and RX 7600. Arc has more upside potential. Look at the 3DMark results. Arc does well. I know the resizable bar works on the Zen 3 CPU's but I am not sure it works on Zen 2 CPU's. Arc A750 $200 or less makes it an interesting option.

The younger kids here all know the 212+. That is why I listed it. I still have a computer using the Ultra 120 on a kaby lake build. I bought an adapter kit for it for around $8 for it years ago. The Ventroo is a great little cooler. The 10400 never throttle and always runs at max speed and temps are under 70C under full load. I think in Prime 95 I got 75-76C on a max core after 40 minutes of testing. Here is the original 120mm. They still make the thermalright 120mm. This one has 6 heatpipes. It's hard to find. I am linking it just so that people can see what the original of the 120mm tower coolers looks like.