PianoPlayer88Key

That's just on Steam (and only the first screenful of it, sorted by playtime in descending order) ... doesn't include the countless hours of games I played back in the 1990s (maybe as early as 1989) before I had steam, or the few games I've more recently played that aren't on Steam either. (I don't, for the most part, have other launchers either.) Nor does it include mobile (Android) or browser games. BTW the 309 hours in 3DMark is in large part due to an issue my PC had last month for a couple weeks, where 3DMark hung and wouldn't shut down. (It even resurrected itself after a reboot ... I forget now how I solved the issue but I think it may have involved some "drastic measures".)

Ahh is there a reason you can't link it? (forum rules maybe, or something else?) Is it the one on Tom's Hardware in the thread you started there (unless that's someone else with your name lol), or does it have "cultists" and "140" and "work" in the URL, and say cultists network est 2020 at the top of the page? ... looks like there's quite a few changes there (also was looking at the spreadsheet a bit)

Ah hmm... I saw the Seasonic Core GM as tier B (not LP) ... so seeing it on sale for $45, I ordered one, hope I didn't get a bomb I've also ordered some other parts, and bought a 5950X at Micro Center. No, I'm not gonna power the 5950X with the Core! I'll be repurposing my Corsair AX760 for that. The Core GM is so that I can plug it into my existing ASRock Z97 Extreme6 mobo, with an i7-4790K, and still be able to power that on, using just the iGPU. For graphics on the 5950X, I have a 1060 3GB that's currently sitting on the table near my PC. (There's been various reasons I don't have it installed in my 4790K setup that I won't get into here...) I'm not a super hard-core gamer, most things I play run fine on the HD 4600.... Also ... thread outdated... I saw that in the tier list itself ... is there an update somewhere that I'm missing, or a new thread or something?

They may not be available on keyboards directly, but last I checked, it's still possible to type them? ≥ = alt+242 (on Windows) ≤ = alt+243 (on Windows) Some alt-codes date back to the 1980s / 1990s in MS-DOS .... (although idk how to type them in Linux, or on Android...) Back to PSUs ... I've sometimes been trying to make sense myself of what some of the tiers mean. For example, I presume Tier A means totally fine for anything but .... okay as I was about to type for the next couple tiers, I came to realize something ... one, that I'm confused on some things and trying to figure out how to type it out but ... .... well .... there are some higher-wattage PSUs in the lower tiers (like Tier D), and some lower-wattage PSUs in higher tiers (A for example) ... I would think that you couldn't run a high-end system off a low-wattage PSU, even if it was high quality... (For example, something with 8-way Xeon Platinum CPUs, 7-way NVLink Quadro A6000s (although I'd think with 8 CPUs you should be able to have a lot more than 7 PCIe x16 slots), etc ... on a 500W PSU (there's one at Tier A - Chieftec GPS-500C Fanless) ... yeah I don't think that's happening even with a VERY high-end PSU - I doubt even some of the 1600W units could handle that.) Also I'd figure that if a PSU can't be maxed out 24/7 at least for the duration of the warranty, it's a tier PSU ... (example of maxed out: let's say it's a 850W PSU... you'd be able to run 850W of components (whether it's GPUs, RAM, HDDs, SSDs, etc, wouldn't matter whether it's drawing from 12V, 5V, 3.3V, etc) in a room that's 50°C ambient temperature (measured with the computer shut off, for a PSU that's rated at 50°C), for at least, say, 10 years (or whatever the warranty is)....) Anyway it's quite easy for me to get confused on some things... Another example ... Tier D, iGPU only... That would seem to imply that as long as I'm running an iGPU or equivalent (or would a GT 710 require Tier C - low-end?) ... I could still run high-power-draw CPUs (like Threadripper/Epyc/Xeon/etc), lots of HDDs (a few dozen, perhaps?) and be fine with a PSU rated for iGPU only since I'm using a very low-end GPU? (some server motherboards do have integrated graphics, on sockets that don't support APUs.... and btw that's an example, I'm not actually running a setup like that, at least not right now...) Anyway I was starting to say something about .... thinking tier D would be for iGPU only, tier C might be for GPUs that don't require any PCIe power connector, tier B for GPUs that require up to, but not exceeding a single 6-pin or maybe a single 8-pin PCIe connector, and tier A being for everything above that.... but then the other things came to mind, like the apparent (in my mind) confusion between tiers, wattage, etc. Yes, I'm aware of some things regarding different wattage PSUs, different construction ... but I would think that PSU wattage would in some cases be taken into account when tiering a PSU? (For example, if it's low enough wattage to not be able to handle a high-end GPU, then it wouldn't be recommended in a high tier .... but.... yeah, I'm teh confuzzled.......)

Okay I ordered a few things, and went and picked up a couple others. Hope I didn't end up buying Scheiße... Just so you all aren't alarmed, the 500W Seasonic Core GM PSU isn't for the new platform, it's so I can still power up the older board+CPU+RAM. (4790K, Z97 Extreme6, 32GB DDR3-1600) I'll be re-using my Corsair AX760 for the new setup, in the existing FD Define R5 case, and pilfering a 1TB P34A80 SSD from my laptop that was a data / game storage drive but has pretty much been emptied. Also I'm reusing an EVGA SC GTX 1060 3GB.

Okay, so I originally wanted to wait until DDR5 was more mature, and 2nd generation HEDT/server was available (like TR Pro / Epyc), but it's looking like that'll be more likely around 2024-2025 or so, rather than 2021-22 that I had thought (around 2017-18) it would be, so.... I'm planning on doing an upgrade from a 4790K + 32GB RAM desktop. I don't do a lot of gaming, and many games I do play run just fine on the Intel HD 4600. I do a lot of multitasking, though, VMs, some may think I have a browser tab addiction, want to do more 4K video editing/production, audio/photo editing, etc. Okay what I'm looking at right now is: CPU: Ryzen 9 5950X - $700 from Micro Center. (It's about an hour and a half drive each way to Tustin, and I typically get in the low 20s MPG on average in my 2004 Camry. I probably won't be heading up there before about 2 or 3 pm PST.) CPU Cooler: Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360 - $118 from Amazon (An alternate option would be the NH-U12A) Motherboard: ASRock B550 Taichi - $220 from Amazon or Newegg RAM: not totally decided yet, but it will be using 32GB low-profile DIMMs, so either 64GB or 128GB. Looking at Team Vulcan or Expert, 3200 CL16 or 3600 CL18. Amazon has 2x32 3600 Expert for $250, Newegg has 2x32 3200 Vulcan Z for $257, 2x32 3600 Vulcan Z for $256, and Microcenter has 2x32 3200 Vulcan Z for 257. You all think those parts are okay? I plan to re-use other parts I already have, including: Boot SSD: 1TB Silicon Power P34A80 - currently in my laptop, was a storage / game drive but has been pretty much emptied in anticipation of its new purpose in life mass storage: 2x 8TB HGST Deskstar NAS, 10TB HGST Deskstar NAS, plus a still-empty 14TB Toshiba MG07ACA14TE (and a few other drives) GPU: EVGA SC GTX 1060 3GB Case: Fractal Design Define R5 (the plain / basic version) PSU: Corsair AX760 Also I'd like to still be able to power on my 4790K platform now and then, so I'm thinking of getting a: Seasonic Core GM 500W PSU (CORE-GM-500 / SSR-500LM) - $45 at Newegg, on sale through today. (There's a MIR too but I don't do those.) to allow it to power up. The current system has: CPU: Core i7-4790K Cooler: CM Hyper 212 Evo Motherboard: ASRock Z97 Extreme6 RAM: 4x32 G.Skill Ares DDR3-1600 CL9 Boot SSD: 1TB Samsung 970 Evo for Windows 10, 256GB Crucial M550 (2.5" SATA) for Linux I'm also considering making the 4790K setup into a NAS, although I really would have liked support for ECC RAM. If I did that, though, I'd need a case ... and I'd want one that's as compact as possible, yet still supports a full ATX board, the Hyper 212 Evo (which is already attached) and several 3.5" bays. (One case I might consider is the Cooler Master N400, but I'd like to find something a lot smaller ... although I may not have space for a second case for a while. Maybe I should consider getting a lower-profile CPU cooler, like a downdraft type? I really wasn't wanting to take the 212 off though cause it was a gigantic pain in the gluteus maximus to install.) I already have several HDDs that are currently backups of existing drives, including a third 8TB HGST Deskstar NAS, an 8TB Toshiba N300, and an extra 10TB HGST and 14TB Toshiba of the same ones mentioned earlier. I need to find a way to back up several SSDs, though, including: 2TB Silicon Power P34A80 (in laptop, data/game storage, pagefile) 2TB Seagate Barracuda 120 (in laptop, data/game storage, etc) 1050GB Crucial MX300 (was data storage in laptop, not sure what's on it now, sitting on a table near the current desktop) 1TB Silicon Power P34A80 (in laptop now, will be boot drive in new platform) 1TB Samsung 970 Evo (in 4790K desktop, boot, Windows) 2x 1TB WD Blue 3D 2.5" (#1 in laptop as a boot drive, #2 on table near desktop, has several Linux VMs on it afaik that I was testing with the desktop a while ago) 2x 500GB Team Vulcan (both are backups/clones of the desktop boot drive, when Windows was on the 256GB Crucial M550, with the backups being in the interim on a couple 750GB-1TB HDDs I no longer have) 256GB Crucial M550 (Linux boot for 4790K desktop) 250GB Crucial MX200 M.2-2260 SATA (was Windows boot in laptop, now sitting somewhere on the desk, idk what's on it right now.) 240GB Crucial BX300 (in my dad's old Dell D830 laptop, Windows 10, experimental) So that's a total of about 10.8 TB or so. (I'm not sure if I'm missing a drive or two ... I did get rid of a few SSDs a while ago that were starting to show signs of being close to EOL, and a couple had 2 feet in the grave on a banana peel already.) So I'm looking at getting a 12TB HDD to back them up. Current drive of choice is the Toshiba MG07ACA12TE ($263.50 at Amazon or $266 at Newegg), and I missed a sale the other day on a 12TB WD Red Plus. My current idea is to create one big partition on the 12TB HDD, then copy everything over ... but I have my doubts as to whether that'll work for restoration, especially for boot drives. I really don't want to have several partitions on that drive - been there done that, with another HDD (had like 25 or 30 partitions on an 8TB drive), it was an absolute mess! (I also don't want to buy multiple separate smaller drives.) Also I'm missing some USB flash drives (and might have a dead one or two somewhere), so I might need to pick up a few for loading OS images, etc. Any suggestions on what to look for? (I want ones that have good write performance (including random) and endurance ... and for now I'm thinking around 16 or 32GB size mostly cause I'd like to maintain compatibility with older setups that don't support >32GB.) Speaking of the OS ... I'm inclined to have Linux as my main boot OS for the new platform, with Windows 10 in a VM for the occasions that I need to do something that requires it. Small possible issue, though ... last I checked, it's not possible to split the GTX 1060's resources up between multiple OS's ... and I only have one discrete GPU and wasn't planning on upgrading, at least not in the current market. Hey ... I remember seeing a video Linus did a while back of running Crysis on *just* a 64-core Threadripper or Epyc CPU in "software" mode ... that gets me thinking, might it be possible to run my Linux desktop off the 5950X in "software" mode as well, and use the 1060 as passthrough for a Windows VM? Or if that wouldn't work (either at all, or be too resource intensive on the 5950X), anyone know where I could find a good deal on a lower-end PCIe x1 GPU that I could use for display out? I see a Zotac GT 710 for $60 at Amazon, that's a bit more than I'd like to pay for that caliber card though. I've seen an Asus x1 710 going for around $100 which is WAY too much IMO. If there was a GT 1010 or 1030 available in PCIe x1 form for around $40-50 (1010) or $80-100 (1030) that would be really nice, but i don't know of any. Another option might be getting an older GPU, like a 970 or 980 or another 1060, or 1070 or 1080, depending on what I could get for around $100-200. But, I was thinking of using that for a 2nd VM ... but, maybe I really only need 1 VM for gaming? (I do plan to run several other VMs though for other non-gaming workloads though.) At any rate, if I have 3 GPUs in the system, at least one would need to be a PCIe x1 GPU, cause I want to leave the 3rd x16 slot open for a possible future SAS/SATA HBA (like an LSI 9211-8i or something) for storage expansion.

That board looks to be juust a wee bit weak on the VRMs.... (I wonder what Buildzoid would say about that config...) I wonder how well that 11600K would do with undervolting? I have the i7-6700K in my Clevo (P750DM-G) laptop undervolted by about -140 mV, it brings it down to about 65-75°C or so temps (I think) & 65-70W power consumption under normal (non-AVX) loads, at least if I've cleaned the dust out fairly recently. Right now it's running a bit higher on the temps, since I haven't cleaned it out in a little while. A quick "dirty" (didn't close other things) Cinebench R23 run had it peak at about 96°C and 65.882 watts, with PCH temp at 73.5°C according to HWInfo64. It didn't thermal throttle, but the 3547 score is much lower than normal for this CPU cause I already had a lot of other things running. I'm sure if I cleaned it out it'd probably drop the temps significantly. I had it at -150mV, but there were a couple issues where it would totally freeze and I had to hard reboot, but I still had the same issue after backing off on the undervolt so that may not have been the cause of that issue.

Be careful with that. I tried something similar (had a drive I was using, needed to repartition so I could back up another drive, didn't have a spare to back up the existing data on the drive I was wanting to clone to), ended up screwing the partitions. Didn't have a way to recover then, so I had to shelve the drive for a few years until I got a new PC and extra drives, then went through some data recovery process. It was ... involved, and while I did get alot of it back, some things were corrupted, like metadata, filenames, etc (although most of the raw photo / audio / video / other data was recognizable).

I've used TestDisk. You will need another equal size (or space on a larger) drive to write the recovered data too. Hopefully someone can chime in with more, I'm terrible at explaining how in detail to do things.

Based on my limited personal experience, I would not recommend running multiple VMs off the same physical hard drive. (Now I'm running a few VMs off a couple SSDs, and I'm limited more by only having 64GB RAM and a 4c/8t Skylake CPU.)

When I've been looking at building a NAS, the oldest platforms I was looking at were LGA 771 (the server contemporary to 775) and PGA 604, because those still supported PCI Express slots. (I would use those for a SAS/SATA HBA.) I still haven't done one yet, for various reasons outside the scope of this post, but for now the oldest I'm looking at is LGA 2011 (Sandy Bridge), with LGA 1366 maybe still under consideration.

I remember a while ago I was thinking about using SL to delid my 4790K in my desktop, but I was waiting for Intel's warranty to expire (just in case something went wrong, I was guessing that if something did go awry, Intel wouldn't honor the warranty if their CPU had been "tampered with".) But, when I saw that SL wasn't binning older CPUs like they did with newer ones, that put the kibosh on that plan. Hey I wonder if Herr Hartung has a delidding / binning service..... (and how much it would cost, although I'm guessing shipping my CPU to Deutschland would be both expensive and take quite a while.) Also yeah, it's looking like there isn't as much overclocking headroom these days as there used to be a long time ago (although I wasn't really into it much if at all before 2015 when I got my 4790K - that's the first CPU I tried to overclock). Yes, sometimes things can be helped with undervolting - for example I have my laptop's 6700K undervolted with an offset of about -140 or -150 mV or so, brings the power consumption down to about 65-70 W and temps down to about 65-70° under load. BTW I don't start counting overclock percentage / headroom based on how far above base clock you're pushing it (which, for example, on an 11900K would be 3.5 GHz, and on a Ryzen 9 5950X would be 3.4 GHz). For me, overclocking percentage STARTS once you've gotten the all-core frequency past where the official / automatic turbo modes max out the single-core frequency, when you're running an AVX load on the FPU, like Prime95. So using the two aforementioned recent CPUs as an example, I don't consider an 11900K to be overclocked unless it's at 5.4 GHz with AVX on all cores (which would be a ~1.9% OC, and the 5950X needs to be 5.0 GHz with AVX on all cores to be any overclock at all, which is about 2% or so. (Or does AMD allow internals smaller than 100 MHz - I thought I saw something like 25 MHz increments, in which case the threshold would be 4925 MHz or about 0.5% or so.) As I hinted earlier, I wasn't involved with overclocking back in the Sandy Bridge / Core 2 Duo/Quad / Pentium 4 / III / Celeron 300A / 486 DX2 / earlier days, but... I think I have the idea based on stories I've heard, that many CPUs then could do what we today would call absolutely insane overclocks even for LN2, but for those were totally routine? For example, I'm thinking that about 90-95% of samples of "good overclocker SKU CPUs" could push all cores (for CPUs that had more than 1 core) at least 100% above the maximum single-core frequency (for example if a chip ran at 2.2 GHz it could be pushed to 4.4 GHz) using only the stock cooler (or none at all if it was back in the 486 and earlier days when it didn't need one) without raising the voltage at all above stock (which I think would be 1.2V on a modern CPU, not sure what it was before Sandy Bridge; and btw if auto voltage was used, I'm thinking capping it at an absolute maximum of 1.2V or whatever was considered normal/stock for its generation) And even the absolute worst duds could still push over 50% above stock. But for those of you who actually did OC back then, what was it actually like? (And especially if any of you helped your children or grandchildren with overclocking around the 486 DX2 (or were there also pencil overclocking or other mods before that?) to Celeron 300A or Core 2 Duo days ... what were things like when YOU got started? )

This. I'd actually strictly enforce PL1 - treating it like PL3 or even PL4, which couldn't be exceeded for >10 ms (Intel spec afaik), or ever. And if it was allowed to be exceeded at all, it would be limited to something like <~0.01 zW (zepto, not Zetta) or so, for zs / (max single-core speed in Hz * thread count). Basically, the CPU would NEVER be allowed to exceed the prominently-advertised 125W (or 65W or 35W) TDP. If I had my way, though, I'd revise the TDP spec to show the maximum possible power consumption in a worst-case scenario, like for a CPU that's at the absolute bottom of the silicon lottery barrel (for example, either couldn't at all, or requires > 1.4V to boost just one core even 1 multiplier above base clock), on a very low-end motherboard (only 3 or 4 VRM chokes maximum or whatever those larger often dark grey boxes are near the socket, with no VRM heatsinks at all), paired with a low-tier PSU (that is nowhere near meeting 80+ White, has <~70% of its total capacity on 12V, barely meets ATX spec, etc). My "TDP" figure would be for all cores running at the single-core turbo frequency with AVX on the FPU (or whatever makes Prime95 small FFT or Aida64 FPU test run modern Intel CPUs hot, like my 4790K at 100°C at <4.0 GHz with a Hyper 212 Evo), with the above parts.

This, this, this and this. Basically when you have a light source directly in the frame, those lights would blow out the picture. (An example would be your RGB lights, or sometimes in my case my computer monitor or phone screen.) This is exacerbated when the rest of the room is relatively dark (like some pictures of people's setups I've seen, although I prefer a well-lit environment). When you lower the exposure compensation (that's the term I learned, idk if there's a more n00b-friendly term) to make the exposure darker, the lights might look nicer, but you might not be able to see much else depending on your camera. You might have to experiment with various lighting settings, like dropping the brightess on the RGB lights, turning the room lights up, or some combination of that. Also if your phone / camera has an HDR mode you could try that as well.

Yeah... "unless you use some ridiculously high sticks" ... that still means it blocks RAM slots. For me, ANYTHING above the RAM slots, no matter how high, especially if it's attached to the motherboard, would be considered to "block RAM slots". (Exceptions of course can be allowed for the case itself, and where applicable, any fan / AIO mounted there, within reason.) When I built my desktop, I originally got G.Skill Sniper DDR3 RAM. Turned out that was too high: So I exchanged the 32GB of Sniper (the above pic was taken during the brief time I only had 16GB) for Ares, which was lower profile, AND was cheaper to boot. ($200 for Ares vs $260 for Sniper, thanks to a sale on the Ares.) The fan still blocks the first slot though, but it's "functional", in that the slot can be populated. I can't remove RAM from the first slot though, without first taking off the fan, even with those DIMMs. Imagine if I had higher profile sticks, like some of the taller ones in the spoiler... Basically I'd want a cooler such that, if I used those high-profile sticks, I'd still be able to remove and reinstall RAM from the first slot, with the second slot populated (with the tall stick), and without having to do anything to get a fan (or heatsink - I saw some coolers where the finstack itself overhung the slots and had a cutaway!) out of the way. I'd actually, though, prefer RAM sticks that are no higher profile that the G.Skill Aegis RAM pictured in several places in the spoiler, or better yet, low profile like the Crucial Ballistix DDR3 in the first pic. Or, for standard height, something like the Samsung RAM sticks on the right in most of the comparisons, but I don't think Ryzen / AM4 supports those. (However, support for RDIMMs and/or LRDIMMS will be a requirement with my next upgrade after this one - Threadripper / Epyc, around 2024-2028 or so.) I was wondering.... while I may not be looking at this motherboard right now (although it was briefly under consideration - would have been possible to get 512GB RAM and 24 cores / 48 threads for about the same cost that I'd pay for 128GB RAM and 12 cores on AM4, but it would have been an older architecture, lacking security patches, poor single-threaded performance and laggy in general responsiveness, etc), ... What decent-quality CPU coolers would be used on something like that, so they wouldn't block any RAM slots or the other socket, at all? (No cheating by using the passive heatsinks I've seen sometimes, that use fans mounted elsewhere for airflow, also it has to be much quieter than those rack server configurations.) (Also for an extra challenge, imagine you're height limited, and the tops of the RAM sticks or back panel ports are touching the top of the case, which also of course would necessitate using riser cables for the expansion slots.) ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- (hey does anyone know a ubb/html code / whatever works on the forum for inserting a horizontal line that's automatically the screen width, depending on what you're viewing with?) @chebsy & @Chris Pratt (don't feel like embedding all your quotes, but it's commenting on your discussing the NH-D12A...) About the link to the NSPR info ... I also like to tables from the CPU compatibility page, like this one, sorted by NSPR, descending. https://ncc.noctua.at/cpus/model/AMD-Ryzen-9-5900X-1045 I also, out of curiosity, looked up their estimated performance for some higher TDP CPUs, like some LGA2011-3, LGA2066, and the FX-9590 on AM3+, as well as a few others. Understandably, some of the lesser-tier coolers would have trouble with some of the HEDT CPUs, although in general the U12A and D15s (that's plural, not the specific model, hence the lower case "s" ... quick grammar question... when you have an "s" in the end of a model number, what, if anyone knows, is the correct way to state that you're talking about multiple, and not possessive, like could be a cause for confusion by using 's?) The FX-9590 showed the D15s, U12A, etc, as having low turbo/OC headroom, maybe a couple others as barely working, and most of the rest as "cooler cannot handle base clock". (Of course I don't plan on building around the FX-9590 was just curious how the different Noctua coolers would be expected to perform with it, and compare to more modern, less hot CPUs.) For me, while a chromax black version might be nice ... I don't think it'd be absolutely necessary in my case, idk if pun needed. Speaking of which, I use the Define R5, with the front door removed as I said earlier. The side panels are of the solid variety, although for now I have them removed for easier swapping of HDDs. (When I get another case, I'll want easier access for hot-swapping 3.5" SATA devices, among other things.) Hey there's another thing I may have forgotten to ask, too... How easy (or challenging) is it to install / uninstall the Noctua coolers, compared to others, like be quiet! and other common brands? (Also, vs. the stock Intel and AMD coolers, also comparing coolers that need backplates vs those that don't.) And what about migrating the cooler to another platform? For example I'm looking at AM4 now, but once we get to the 2nd or 3rd generation on DDR5-compatible sockets (I prefer letting other people be the beta testers for the 1st gen), I might be looking at TR5 or SP5 (whichever supports RDIMMs/LRDIMMs), which I hear rumors is a bigger socket than TR4/SP3/etc, with about 2K more pins. I still remember how much of a pain in the gluteus maximus it was to install my Hyper 212 Evo in 2015, although I don't specifically remember WHAT was a pain about it, whether it was installing the backplate while holding something on the front side, or some difficulty with access to screwing the heatsink down, or something else. For all the issues I hear people complaining about stock heatsinks, I think I remember installing the stock AMD heatsink in 2008 was a lot easier. (I haven't had experience yet with installing a stock Intel heatsink though.) Ideally I'd like it to be as easy to work with the CPU cooler, as it is plugging in RAM in the slot farthest from the socket, or plugging/unplugging a USB device. (I almost mentioned storage devices, like M.2 and 3.5" devices, but in my current system, the M.2 slot sits under where a GPU would go if I had it installed, and requires a screw, and my 3.5" drives require the use of screws in the drive bay, adding extra steps. Also the use / application / cleanup of TIM counts toward the complexity of installing / uninstalling the cooler.) Speaking of thermal paste application, I probably need to learn a better way of applying the stuff. I wanted to apply in the X style on my laptop's CPU and GPU, but maybe squeezed the plunger from the tube of of NT-H1 a bit hard ... I think I was having trouble with getting consistently even thinner lines, so they ended up being a bit thicker. The laptop runs pretty much fine, of course, and my CPU temps stay down in the upper 60s to low/mid 70s C or so under non-AVX load on all cores, and my GPU stays reasonably cool too (I think in the upper 60s last I remember, don't feel like opening Furmark right now to confirm).

Ahh, yeah, I'm starting to consider the U12A a bit more than I had been. Do you mean single-drive eSATA enclosures, or single USB / SATA enclosures, or something else? I actually used to have a Rosewill SATA to eSATA / USB (2.0 I think) enclosure several years ago, but I found out it only supported drives up to 2 TB, so I no longer have it anymore. Also I think my current motherboard (ASRock Z97 Extreme6) does have an eSATA port, but I don't think it supports hot swap. (Having an eSATA port isn't a requirement for my next motherboard - chances are it won't have one.) I haven't found one yet, but I've wanted to get some kind of external enclosure that would support several HDDs, and preferably use a connection that's not limited to USB bandwidth. One idea I had was inspired when I saw some cheap HBAs with external SAS ports - a couple years ago or so I was seeing the LSI 9200-16e for like $20-30 on eBay. (That has four SFF8088 ports, each of which can use breakout cables to go to 4 SATA devices.) And yes, I've wanted an actual main case that supports chocking it that full of hard drives ... although I've also thought of another option - a dual-chamber cube case, kind-of like if you doubled the width of the Define 7 XL or Enthoo Pro 2 or something like that. Have the mobo & its components on one side, and the HDDs on the other side, kind-of like this extremely rough (IRL, not in software) mockup of approximate parts placement... You may ask "why don't you go rackmount"? Well, I don't even have a place to PUT a rack cabinet. (That could change when I move, which had been planned for last month but it's been delayed for multiple reasons, one being that I couldn't find places that would rent to me due to my low income; they apparently don't like to use savings as proof that I'd be able to make payments, among other things.) Also I've heard that they're not exactly the best solution if you're also looking for silence. Hmm, cause on the various retail sites I've seen (and AMD's own site) it mentions it coming with that cooler. And sure, I would imagine the Prism couldn't push it to, say, 4.8 or 5 GHz on all cores, but I'd guess it could at least keep it from thermal throttling in non-AVX workloads at stock? Ahh, so maybe the U12A would be a good idea. (I wonder how it would compare to similarly-priced AIOs...) What was the U12S like, more specifically on the 5900X? What temps at what frequencies? I'm still undecided on the board right now (although I'm now considering 5900X and a better board & cooler, instead of 5950X and a cheap board & cooler, in the same budget, went into more detail in a reply in new builds and planning forum); as for the case I have a Fractal Design Define R5 - the standard black with white accents, no window version. I removed the front door so that 1 - I wouldn't break it in the process of opening it (or leaving it open & bumping into it), and 2 - I'd get more airflow. Ahh hmm ... a D15 would be too big I think, I really don't want a cooler for which any part of it (fins or fans) overhangs RAM slots or other ports. Hence one of the reasons I'm looking at AIO. (But I also want to, if possible, avoid the possible pitfalls of AIOs, like leaks, not having something physical on the CPU to keep it from burning up in case of fan / pump failure, etc.) Hopefully the Define R5 I have, with its door removed, has at least not terrible front air flow. (I wonder how much it is affected when I have the HDD cages fully populated....) I hadn't really considered replacing the fans with Noctuas, but hadn't ruled it out either. Speaking of fans ... one thing I might want in my next case / build after this one, is a way to use like 250mm or larger fans, so hopefully they could run even quieter. And I mean better than the large fans in my previous Rosewill Thor V2 case -- the 120s / 140s or whatever are in my Define R5 are actually, I think, a bit quieter. (The R5 doesn't support larger fans, and I'm not planning on replacing the case now, but when I do for a possible TR/Epyc build around 2024Q4-2028, support for SSI EEB or larger motherboards and well over 12-15+ HDDs will be a couple requirements.)

Ahh, I wish I could, but TR Pro is a bit high for me right now. Also I was planning on waiting to go to a platform like that until at least the 2nd, or maybe 3rd, generation on DDR5. (Also Epyc might be under consideration then as well.) I want to have a long-life socket (for example be able to upgrade several times, even with skipping a couple CPU generations each time or only upgrading when there's a 3x-8x performance / efficiency improvement for the same CPU price, without having to change the motherboard), while also letting the early adopters / "alpha/beta testers" work out the early bugs in the 1st (or 2nd) generation on the new platform. I originally thought the first DDR5 platform would launch at CES 2021 (cause AMD had originally said AM4 support through 2020), with 2nd-gen launching in 2022 and being on sale for Black Friday 2022 ... but for now, I'm tentatively thinking that upgrade (to 2nd or 3rd DDR5 gen TR Pro / Epyc) would be sometime between Q4 2024 and 2028 or so. I hope I'm able to save up enough $ by then (also will need a good job which I don't right now, just have had a few gifts and been able to save up some $), but in the meantime I was planning a socket AM4 platform as a stop-gap upgrade. Also, there, uh, was another option that I had considered at one point, that would have gotten me more RAM (like 512GB, although I had previously figured for 256GB with a lower budget), and more PCIe lanes for motherboard connectivity .... buuuutt... ... it would have actually been a regression in single-threaded performance, an older architecture that might not have security updates (and would probably be a laggy / stuttery mess with what I do), be much more of a power hog, I'd need a sound card and a few other things too, and so on. Yeah that's what I thought. And actually, that's what I was thinking of doing -- DDR4-3200 (or 3600) with swap / boot on a SP P34A80 1TB that I already have. Ahh, might be interesting, although for now I have virtually zero experience with proxmox. Ahh ... I haven't done much anything with BTRFS yet (or with ZFS, but I hear that one really loves lots of RAM, especially ECC.) Ah. Speaking of GPU passthrough / sharing ... while this probably wouldn't do anything for the sharing issue, there was something I thought of for passthrough, idk if it would work maybe?? .... Remember the video a while back where Linus played Crysis on a Threadripper - rendered on the CPU itself? (Yes he had a GPU of course cause it was required for video out.) I was thinking ... I'm fairly sure that a hypervisor would be much less graphically demanding than Crysis (okay maybe not quite as big of a difference as, say, Cyberpunk 2077, vs booting straight to a Linux terminal without GUI ) ... I wonder if there might be a way to render the hypervisor / base OS itself straight on the CPU, and use the GPU for VMs? Also maybe it works similarly, in reverse, with the VMs on my laptop. It has a GTX 970M, and the way the internals are wired, it's not possible to use the i7-6700K's iGPU at all. I can run VMs just fine, and even play video on youtube, etc, but I can't even run the most basic versions of 3DMark. I just did some tests in a Windows VM... GPU-Z doesn't recognize the GPU at all, and Windows display adapter settings says something about VIrtualbox adapter or something like that. I'm not sure how to download Ice Storm now that it's apparently not available on 3DMark's site. I installed the steam version of 3DMark, and it suggested the Wild Life benchmark, but the VM hung when I tried to launch it, forcing me to power off & restart. I also installed a few other games to test them - not because I'd be intending to game without a GPU (in software mode), but just to see what the performance of the graphics in the VM was. FIrst I ran a game that you probably haven't heard of (Super 3D Noah's Ark), but it looks like it uses an engine similar to the original Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. One common thread throughout the games, was mouse control was pretty messed up. (It was fairly laggy - like move or click, and it might obey your command if it felt like that about 1-2 seconds later; also in-game mouse movement was being interfered with by mouse movement in the OS.) Anyway that Wolf3D-engine game would...uh... run, but maybe at 10-15 fps or so at 640x480. Then I tried Total Annihilation (from 1997 I think). That kind-of ran, and was almost playable at maybe 10-15 fps or so, I'm not sure. Then, Team Fortress Classic (on the original Half Life (1) / GoldSrc engine, from 1999). In OpenGL mode at 640x480 with everything turned down, I was getting about 4 fps in the respawn on 2fort, and the mouse control was so bad I couldn't get out of spawn even on my own temp server. Tried to switch to software mode, and ... well, at the time of writing this, I'll need to restart the VM again. Anyway though .... I wouldn't need my hypervisor to be able to game or even run 3D graphics at all, as long as the VMs could use the GPU for gaming / rendering. Ahh.... well for some reason right now my Windows guest, at least on this PC, is performing quite poorly. (Okay I only gave it 2 cores at 100% load, but it used to be fine with 1 core at 100% load.) I haven't tried running Cinebench in the VM, but just the usability is quite laggy. (It may have something to do with the virtual graphics adapter I'm using, cause it is complaining that it's not the right one, but last time I had tried another one, some things were completely broken, like certain things in Windows wouldn't even render at all.) Ahh, I hope so. (Although you might see above about some issues I'm having with very laggy performance in a Windows VM or two, or things not rendering properly depending on my graphics adapter settings.) I just would hope that whatever I use as a hypervisor is light enough to totally run smoothly, at least when it's on its own. (And that's even if the hypervisor was run on a system that couldn't even run something like Wolfenstein 3D, Sopwith 2, Alleycat, Gapper, Captain Comic, 3-Demon, or other games from my early childhood. Of course as I said earlier, the VMs would have their own requirements that would have to be met.) As for installing a hypervisor on a USB stick ... that might be an idea, other than the concern that some USB sticks don't exactly have as good of a write endurance as, say, an enterprise MLC SSD, or a hard drive. (Also I think some motherboards, including the one in my desktop right now IIRC, have an on-board USB port that could be used without using one off the back or front.) Ahh I might have to look into that sometime. Also sometimes I'd like to be able to migrate an actual bare metal install to a VM, or go back and forth. Ahh, I thought those were for mining though. I don't know what I'd get for a 2nd GPU though if the software/CPU-rendering idea I mentioned earlier wouldn't work ... the GT 710 is way too expensive right now - cheapest I was seeing was around $60+ on the pcpartpicker vendors, cheapest PCIe 1x is about $120 (the newer Asus GT 710 with the 4 HDMI ports or whatever), and I wouldn't want to get something with higher power consumption like a 950-970 class card just for a hypervisor. Ah. I actually don't have an HBA yet, but have been off and on thinking about getting one. Some time ago I'd found a link with a lot of info on how well various HBAs work with freenas, but I'm not sure in which black hole I buried my bookmark for it. Anyway the main one I was thinking of was the LSI 9211-8i / SAS2008 or some variant of it; also I was considering the 9200-16e some time ago - cause I was seeing THOSE for like $20-30 or so on the Bay of Fleas. Also at one point I saw the Highpoint Rocket 750 (which supports 40(!) drives per card) listed for around $60-90 or so, but that deal is gone now. Yeah, I've noticed that. I found another spreadsheet that has a lot more extensive info on AMD AM4 boards, although it hasn't been updated with a lot of the X570S boards yet. It does mention a lot of other things, like VRM configuration, PCIe configuration, bandwidth sharing, BIOS flashback and a lot of other info. (I wish the creator allowed importing into my own spreadsheet so I could more easily filter / gray out certain things, although it is possible to create a temporary filter view on the shared sheet itself.) Ahh, I probably need to get more familiar with learning how to use dd. (Thing is, how to safely do it so that even if I make a mistake I won't eff up any critical data. I'm not sure if doing it in a VM is the best idea, and ... well there is my dad's old D830 laptop (C2D T7250, 2GB RAM, 240GB SSD), but it literally only supports one storage device and won't run VirtualBox / VMs. (I used to have a USB to SATA/IDE adapter but it passed away sometime a year or two ago.) Ahh.... I was thinking maxed out meant running it on LHe or LN2, and on top of that, pushing it so hard that it's still hitting TJMax on a single-core load. If I wasn't planning to manually OC though, but just allow PBO or MCE or whatever to do its thing, would that still be considered "maxed out"? Also .... there's been another option I've been thinking of recently. (But no, @igormp, I'm still not planning on resurrecting the idea of using dual-socket Ivy Bridge Xeons. ) Anyway, if I was to use a 5950X, I wouldn't have much budget left over for a motherboard or a cooler, so I'd have to use something fairly cheap - for example, the MSI B550-A Pro, and the be quiet! Shadow Rock 3. BUT.... if I was to downgrade the CPU to, say, a 5900X (or a 3900X if the 5900X is out of stock or over $500), then I could get a much better board and cooler - for example the ASRock B550/X570 Taichi, and the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 360. When I had looked up the prices on the 2 options a few days ago (before my latest BSOD "driver_irql_not_less_or_equal" "iastora.sys" that completely jumbled up a bunch of my tabs, windows, they're not in the proper "last accessed" order anymore, etc) .. Going with a 5900X ($500) + good mobo ($300) + good cooler ($125) would have cost the same ($925) as the 5950X ($750) + cheap mobo ($125) + cheap cooler ($50). My question now is ... How much would a cheap cooler and mobo hold back the 5950X's performance? Would the 5900X or 3900X, paired with better parts actually perform better in that case? Also, I've been thinking now about waiting for Black Friday to do the upgrade.... cause I've seen deep discounts on Taichi boards before, and I would be upset if I paid full price now and found it was on sale for almost half off on Black Friday. (I remember seeing the X370 and Z270 Taichi boards dropping to the low $100s or so when they were normally up around $200 or maybe more.) Also maybe the CPUs and RAM and CPU coolers might have some deals then? (I'm thinking, if I'm going to wait for BF, maybe I should have a preliminary list of parts to choose from, including some that would normally be out of the budget, then depending on what goes on sale, choose something then ... but have the list ready ahead of time so I'm not scrambling like "omg board ZYX is on sale and I have no idea if it's what I need!")

I thought the 3900X came with the Wraith Prism LED? The U12A made my initial list, but I'm not sure I'd want to pay upwards of $100+ for an air cooler. (What about the U12S though, or the Dark Rock Slim or Shadow Rock 3, or others?) You don't think a 240mm AIO would work? Technically a 280 or larger would fit my case, but it would require compromises: 280mm: maximum total/combined thickness = 55mm; can't use rear fan 360mm: can't use ODD cage (I do use a Pioneer BDR-209DBK once in a while.) 420mm: maximum thickness 55mm, can't use rear fan or ODD cage (I was looking up some of the Arctic coolers, and they're thicker than 55mm including the fans, so the 360 (or 240) would be my only options with those.) Also I'd have to mount it in the top of the case (which would prevent me being able to set things, like drinks for example, or other boxes of things, on top of the case). Anywhere else would require me to remove HDD cages, and I've already had occasions where I ran out of cages and had to run HARD DRIVES(!!) just sitting loose outside the case.

Ah. Looking at that VRM tier list... I'm pretty sure Tier S, and even S-, would be way overkill for me, as I don't plan on ever using LN2 on this setup. I'm not even sure if I'd need Tier A either, as I don't think I would max out a 5950X. (Although idk what is meant by maxing it out ... running it at high voltage like 1.45-1.5V? Running all cores at least 0.5 to 1+ GHz above the stock single-core boost? Achieving the "OC Madness" achievement on the Steam version of 3DMark? Some other OC on air or under dihydrogen monoxide that would have Pentium G3258, Sandy Bridge, Core 2 Duo, Celeron 300A, etc quaking in their boots? Some other criteria? ) What about Tier B, though? I probably wouldn't want to run much over 1.2 to 1.3 V, and I'd probably back off a bit from maxing out out if I ever did OC. I see Tier C mentions P95 ... I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that means the settings that makes Haswell cook -- as in versions of P95 newer than 26.6, using small FFT. (Running it on my 4790K with Hyper 212 Evo that's gotten a little dusty, I get results like this...) I don't expect I would be doing things like that on it (except for brief tests maybe). (I'm guessing most normal apps don't run AVX on the FPU, for example.... Handbrake, DaVinci Resolve, CInebench R23, VirtualBox, etc...) So I'm guessing if I'm not running the AVX versions of P95 24/7, I'd be okay with Tier C? Tier D, though... it does mention 105W TDP CPUs at stock, but with downdraft cooler... I guess none of the AIOs count for that, nor the Dark Rock Slim, Shadow Rock 3 or NH-U12S/A? (Most of the downdraft coolers I've seen that aren't the smaller ones with 95mm fans block RAM slots, which is a no go for me. If I wait for late November, I wonder what the chances would be of some B550 or X570 boards going on sale? (If I could get something compatible with the 5000 series that has the same # of PCIe slots & SATA ports as the Z270 or X370 Taichi for the prices they were around Black Friday a couple years ago (~$130-150 I think), that would be nice.) If I only had 2 PCIe x16 slots (plus a couple x1) and 6 SATA ports, then I'd need to figure out how to eventually run 2 GPUs (one for a host hypervisor, the other for everything else), AND a SAS/SATA HBA. (The only GPU I know of that plus into an x1 slot is I think a GT 710 from Zotac ... yeah that might work for a hypervisor but last I checked they were about $50 which is about $30 too high, and I'd prefer something that's at least not worse than a current-gen APU.) Yeah, I probably really need at least Threadripper Pro or Epyc, but I don't have the budget for that right now. (And continuing to use what I have for much longer is getting too painful. I think it's partly why my sleep schedule keeps getting £µ¢ked up -- I go to work on some tasks, expecting them to be done a lot sooner than they actually get done, and I keep at it until it's done or I almost fall asleep trying. (Some things, for example, take me hours or days to work on that I think I've seen other people do in a few minutes or so. ) Not to mention, if/when I do upgrade to a platform like that, I'd want to keep it through at least a few PSU swaps (because, for example, multiple Seasonic Primes died of old age). Ugh (And I'm still concerned that even with a 5950X and 128GB RAM, it won't be anywhere near the performance jump I'm looking for over what I have now. )

Hi, I have a topic in New Builds & Planning that goes into more detail on some other aspects of an upgrade I'm considering, but I wanted to split discussion on a CPU cooler into its own topic. Basically, I'm looking at upgrading, possibly to an R9-5950X (from an i7-4790K). I haven't decided what motherboard I'm getting (other than it won't be smaller than µATX or larger than standard ATX), in case that makes a difference in what CPU cooler I should get. One under consideration is the MSI B550M Mortar, but I'm also considering other options. (I may also go for just a 5900X, or maybe a 3900X; in the latter's case I may just use the stock cooler.) I will be reusing some other parts - specifically (relevant to this topic) my Fractal Design Define R5 case, among other things. (It's the standard version with white fans, etc, and no side window.) One thought that came to mind early on was pilfering the Hyper 212 Evo off the 4790K and using that, while the 4790K gets its stock heatsink installed. (Yes, the K CPUs used to come with a heatsink - mine has the copper slug.) However, I would need to get an AM4 bracket for my 212 Evo (I bought it in January 2015, idk if AM4 existed in AMD's labs yet at that point). Also I still remember how much of a myalgia or sciatic neuralgia of the gluteus maximus it was trying to install the thing. I'm trying to figure out what CPU cooler I should get, if I go for the 5950X. I have a spreadsheet - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZt7896sKmYZwLsT201Gvgquo-gFTaXX1La2Z-pfUhE/edit?usp=sharing - which has some that I'm considering. (I was also trying to do some research / reading reviews, but quickly realized it would take a lot to look up reviews of every compatible CPU cooler that exists.) I also don't want to spend a huge chunk on the CPU cooler if I don't have to. (For example if I could keep it down to about $60-70, great, but even $100-120 is doable, maybe a bit more under the right circumstances. Also I'm debating between buying in the next few days / week, vs waiting for late November.) Some criteria I'm looking for include: If it's an air cooler, does not block any RAM slots, even if all possible fans are installed on the cooler. If it's a water cooler, it doesn't require removing any HDD bays. In either case, it's fairly quiet, at least at stock settings. (Would like the system to be quiet enough so that a spinning-but-idle hard drive is the loudest sound under load.) Also should be very easy to install and uninstall - preferably as easy as it is to swap DIMMs when using a stock Intel heatsink on one of those platforms. I keep going back and forth between wanting to try air cooling, vs wanting to imbibe the CPU with dihydrogen monoxide. With an AIO, there's the risk of having pump failures, or leakage, among other things; but it wouldn't block RAM slots. Also, with up to a 240mm AIO in the top, it would still let me use all other fan mounts, and the ODD cage. (I do still use that once in a while but not much anymore.) With a 280 or 420mm AIO, I'd be limited to 55mm thick including radiator and fans, and would have to forego either using the rear fan mount, or ODD cage, or both. A 360 isn't limited in thickness, but still prevents using the ODD bays. (I seldom use it anymore anyway - I could probably just plug it in outside the case with the side panel open, as needed.) With a HSF, I think it might still run (at reduced clocks) even if the fan failed; but if I got one that was too big it would block RAM slots, or, it might not be enough to cool a 5950X. I don't plan on doing much if any overclocking, but I would definitely consider undervolting to try to get lower temperatures or quieter operation. (Although my requirement above for quiet operation assumes everything is at full stock, but with PBO / MCE / etc enabled but no manual overclock.) I wonder how good the 5950X would be at undervolting, compared to the i7-6700K in my Clevo laptop ... I have that set at -140 mV, and under load it uses around 65-70 watts. (TDP is 91 watts for the 6700K.) Also, if I go with air cooling, I'd likely not reuse that cooler on my next upgrade, but if I went with water, I would consider it. (That next upgrade might be, budget permitting then, a 2nd or 3rd DDR5 generation Threadripper Pro or Epyc around late 2024 to 2028 or so, depending on when it's released plus how long I'd have to wait for it to be on fire sale for Black Friday. But then OTOH, if I did reuse the cooler on a TR/Epyc, I'd still need a cooler for the 5950X if I wanted to keep that running as a secondary / occasional-use PC at that time, like I plan to do with the 4790K this time.) (If I can think of more, I'll add it later; I feel like there's something I'm forgetting.)

Ah, well some of that I'm still figuring out, but I've been dabbling some with Handbrake and DaVinci Resolve. I used to use Avidemux and Virtualdub some time ago but haven't used them recently (except Avidemux for a little bit of transcoding to formats that Handbrake doesn't support, although I've had issues sometimes with videos over 4 GB. I haven't done much with Openshot, Kdenlive or others that I forget at the moment. (And I don't feel like booting up the Ubuntu Studio SSD on my desktop right now, it's not a VM, it's dual boot.) Yeah I'm aware of that. I don't want to get the first generation of a product; and I understand it's the first generation of DDR5. I also want to see what AMD has up their sleeve, then hopefully I'd have $ for TR Pro or Epyc. Right now I'm anticipating 2024 or 2025 at the earliest, possibly not until 2027 or 2028 that I might jump to that platform. Ah yeah true ... I was mostly trying to keep the board down to the low/mid $100 range or so, while still maintaining at least 6 SATA ports, preferably 2 PCIe slots (1 for GPU, 1 for a possible future SAS HBA for extra drive support), preferably 2 M.2 ports which wouldn't take bandwidth away from SATA ports. I may have thought of that but had figured on keeping the AX760 paired with the Z97 Extreme 6, cause of the mobo having 10 SATA ports and the PSU having 12 SATA power connectors ... but then I got to thinking again.... Maybe I should just get a cheaper PSU to pair with the 4790K and do what you suggest - use the AX760 with the AM4 system, for a couple reasons: One, being the AX760 would still have some extra SATA power connectors that I could use if I add an HBA later, and two, If I'd be running the 4790K on the motherboard box which I think I still have somewhere (or at least not in a case), I'm probably not all that likely to be hooking up ten 3.5" hard drives to it. (Also the thought has come to mind in the past of repurposing that system as a NAS / backup appliance, but one of my requirements for something like that is ECC RAM which that platform doesn't support... and I'd also need to get another case, which right now isn't a possibility but might be under consideration when I'm living somewhere else.) So originally / previously I was thinking of getting a Tier B or better PSU for the new mobo+etc that's at least 80+ Gold, with at least 6 or 8 SATA power connectors, semi-modular .... but... Instead, do you think it might be okay to go with a Tier C (or even Tier D since I won't be pairing the 4790K with a dGPU, will just use the iGPU) PSU that's maybe 80+ White or Bronze, with 6 SATA power, non- or semi-modular? Or what should be the minimum I should go with? (I'm kind-of guessing maybe C at the minimum cause a group-regulated unit might have issues with Haswell....) Ah. I wonder what would be some examples of boards you might suggest, then, and why? Any decent ones in the $130-150 range, or would I be better off spending upwards of $160-180? (Although I was hoping to not spend much if any more for this board than the $165 I spent on the Z97 Extreme6, which I think was maybe a step or 2 down from the top available at the time. There was the Extreme9, but idk where the other lineups lined up, so to speak.) Ah. Yeah... I'm leaning toward the 5950X but have been split between that and the 3900X. (It's quite a bit cheaper than the 5900X, and comes with a CPU cooler that I was thinking might be "good enough" for my use.) Early on in my figuring this build out I was also considering other options like the 3300X, 3600, or Intel parts... and was actually briefly considering dual socket Sandy or Ivy Bridge Xeon so I could get like 256 GB RAM and like 24 cores (2 sockets, 12 cores each) but ... I figured that older architecture wouldn't help me hardly at all (and maybe make things worse), even with the increased cores and RAM. Also if something happened to further delay my next upgrade, I feel like having a 5950X might give me a little more breathing room. (OTOH if things went well and I was able to buy a 2nd/3rd-DDR5-gen TR or Epyc in 2024 (which looks unlikely at this point), I'd be like "now why did I spend so much on that other upgrade when i'm so quickly upgrading again" but then again... "augh why didn't I buy the better CPU in 2021!" if it turns out to be, say, 2031 or 2036 or whatever before I could upgrade again...) "Still live with 32GB"? B--but, what about.... (Look at the "committed" memory ... also the 3rd screenshot below is the full-screen version, expanding it should show the size of the pagefiles on the SSDs in file explorer.) BTW those screenshots are from my laptop which has an i7-6700K and 64GB RAM. Yes I know things are a bit complicated, but it's actually my desktop that I'm upgrading. Ahh, I was looking at that, or maybe 3600 cause I've been seeing those sometimes on sale for the same or lower price. (Specifically, Team Vulcan 3200, or Team Expert 3600.) I also looked a bit at some cheaper ones like 2400/16 or 2666/18 (cause they were the cheapest per GB by a not small margin) but then was thinking it's better to spend a bit extra on the faster RAM. OTOH if I'm always running out of the stuff, then how much of a difference does it make with faster RAM? (For example, neither of these configs are what I'm considering, but ... between, for example, DDR4-4800+ with pagefile on a spinning SMR hard drive, vs single-channel DDR4-2133 with pagefile on a Gen4 NVMe SSD, if you're using at least 3x-4x your RAM or more, which would be more responsive? ) That's good to know. I wish Windows behaved the same....and better yet, would let me hibernate (or even hot unplug the boot drive), move it over to another PC, and let me continue whatever I was working on with that PC hardware. (Also it would be nice to be able to dynamically allocate CPU and GPU resources between VMs, like RAM can be allocated between programs dynamically.) I saved this in draft mode in test posts, and while I was AFK, I remembered something I had thought of previously. I would actuallyt like to be able to do EVERYTHING in VMs. I hear it's a lot easier to migrate them to other PCs, vs. actual installs, as well as take snapshots at any given time and then if something messes up you can just roll back. (Also if I had a BSOD or something maybe I could just roll back to a snapshot in that situation as well.) So I'd want some kind of base hypervisor / OS that uses very little resources, so it can leave pretty much everything available for whatever VMs I might be running. (Basically there should be no measurable / detectable performance / resource difference when running in a VM (if I give it all resources) vs. running natively. If I could find some hypervisor/OS that only requires the equivalent of 286 or 8086 level performance (or even 386 cause that's the minimum Linux has traditionally required), a few tens of K of RAM and a few hundred KB of disk space to install, that would be nice. (Of course Windows 10, modern Linux that I'd run in a VM on top of it, etc, have their own much higher requirements, but I want the hypervisor to be fairly lightweight so as to have no negative performance impact.) Yeah, that's something I've been thinking about, is trying a few various Linux distros. I think one thing I did a while back on my current setup was running several in a VM, observing how much RAM and storage they use with a fresh install and boot, and how easy (or not) it is to do various tasks, techniques to do them, etc. I've ran various releases of Ubuntu Studio on my desktop as a dual-boot now and then since I got the desktop - mostly picked that OS because it comes with a lot of multimedia / production tools / software included in the distro. As for the VMs (for my extra Discord accounts, etc) on my laptop, I've used Xubuntu for those. I originally started with 17.10, which was good enough to play video without stuttering and have several chrome tabs open, even with only 2.75GB RAM and 1 CPU thread. Since I upgraded to 20.04 LTS though, it chugs quite badly; although with lighter usage (like if I only have Discord, maybe a few tabs, not trying to play video) it's "usable". Yeah ... hey I wonder how Intel Arc dGPUs will be for that (I don't plan on buying one anytime soon though.) Also I use VirtualBox for my VMs... I wonder how hard it would be to move them back and forth between other VM software... (also I'm hoping to migrate some to the new setup.) Another thing I've maybe considered ... is getting second dGPU, but it'd have to be a lower end one or an older used one for various reasons. If I went with a board with two x16 slots, the 2nd GPU would have to be an x1, so I could leave the 2nd slot open for a future HBA. (But, the only x1 GPU I know of on the market is a Zotac GT 710 ... idk if there's a GT 1010 like that but it's probably not the best performer.) If I went with a bit more expensive board with three x16 slots that would make things a bit easier. There's still no possible way I'd be buying modern midrange to higher-end GPUs at their current prices of course, though. So, I'd probably be limited to maybe a GT 1030, or idk if I could get a 1050/Ti, 1060 or possibly a 1070 for under $100-150 or so, I'm guessing not especially for the 1070. What about, say, a 980 (not Ti cause I don't want a 180-250+ watt card), 970, 960, 950, 750 Ti or 750 though? (Maxwell would be the oldest I would consider.) Or maybe the 4GB or less VRAM versions of the RX 400 or 500 series, or are those spiked in price right now? (I haven't been looking closely.) Also I'd prefer not buying used if I could avoid it, unless it was from a reputable seller, among other factors. (I would want some kind of a warranty.) If I had 2 x16 slots, then if I wanted a 2nd GPU and still leave room for a future HBA (which would use an x8 connector) I'd have to get a PCIe 1x GPU - the only semi-modern one I know of is a Zotac GT 710 and I think we all know how good those are for games. With 3 x16 slots, I could get a second GPU for VM pass through. There's no possible way I'd pay scalper prices for anything higher than, say, an RTX 2060 or even GTX 1660, but... well I was thinking maybe a 900 or 10 series up to a 980 or 1070, but it doesn't look like I'd be able to find one for anywhere close to the ~$100-150 I was hoping. (There is also the GT 1030....or with my idea of using a hypervisor / base OS solely for hosting other VMs, maybe a GT 710 would be good enough for that but I don't think it's worth $50+...) Yeah, true. I'm not putting an RTX 3090 in there though and I imagine my GTX 1060 3GB (or if I got a second GPU, a GT 710, 1030, 970, etc.) wouldn't be bottlenecked too much with an 8x slot. I'm thinking if I get a lower tier PSU (see farther up, but basically 80+ white/bronze, Tier C/D, non/semi-modular) to have available to use with the 4790K, and re-use my AX760 with the new platform, it might give a little more wiggle room in the budget for a better motherboard and/or CPU cooler. I've been looking at motherboards a fair bit, and having trouble finding what I really want at a price I'd be willing to pay. I remember some time ago the ASRock X370 Taichi, as well as the (LGA1151) Z270 Taichi, were both around the $140-160 range at times. Both those boards have 10 SATA ports, and the X370 has 3 PCIe x16 slots while the Z270 has 4. If only the X370 Taichi supported 32GB DIMMs and Ryzen 5000 series / Zen 3 with a BIOS update... (although another reason I haven't considered a board like that one (especially when I was looking at building a NAS a few years ago but still haven't yet) is because it has no on-board video outputs so I wouldn't be able to use an APU even if I wanted to.) Also I wonder if I might get some better deals if I wait for late November - because Alder Lake is supposed to be launching then, and maybe some parts I'm looking at will be on sale, or ones I'm not considering because of being too expensive would be on sale putting them within reach? (That is if I can still limp along the 2 1/2 months or so until then....) I made up a spreadsheet of some motherboards I've been looking at. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FgXSIGktbNEEo8b1P5_E8VqBhDxT4cKShkN5kL2EsU4/edit?usp=sharing (There's also a couple tabs with PSUs there as well; also a separate spreadsheet with cpu coolers that have been under consideration is here. Also btw, I really don't want to buy from a 3rd-party seller on Newegg or Amazon or other sites, and as of this writing the only non-scalper-priced (actually I correct myself, it is still scalper priced, because I've seen other boards with similar features & chipset levels - 2 PCIe x16 slots, 2 M.2 slots, 6 SATA ports, B-series chipset, etc, for around $80-100) MSI B550M Mortar is only available that way.) One common thing about all those boards is, at least according to pcpartpicker's compatibility checker, they don't share bandwidth between M.2 slots and SATA ports. (So I can use them all simultaneously, although what I still don't know is if I could hook up, say, two PCIe Gen 3 (or 1 Gen 4, 1 Gen 3, plus 6 or 8 SATA SSDs, and have them max out their bandwidth simultaneously - 7 GB/s on Gen 4, 3.5 GB/s on Gen 3, ~500 MB/s on SATA - for example with a Gen4, two Gen 3, and 8 SATA, that would be (7+3.5*2+0.5*8=) 18 GB/s, or 11 GB/s if you take off the first M.2 slot. OTOH, I think my Z97 Extreme6 was limited to a total of 1 GB/s on everything connected to the chipset.) It was quite tedious researching that, though - I had to open the tab for just about every motherboard (several times causing pcpartpicker to think I wasn't human - I wonder how they'd have to change that so that even if Jesus Christ did it at His fastest it still wouldn't think he's a bot ), then one by one add them to my parts list, scroll down, and see what it said about Speaking of which, I have a preliminary parts list at.... https://pcpartpicker.com/list/xdNNrr The parts marked $0 and purchased are ones I already have, and the ones marked $0 but not purchased are either placeholders (to make sure all slots/ports are populated even on higher-end boards, and force any triggers of complaints about not being able to plug in certain M.2 and SATA configurations simultaneously among other things, or are maybe under consideration, like the CPU coolers and the 12TB Toshiba HDD. The custom section has parts I actually have that weren't available in the other sections.) BTW that 12TB Toshiba HDD is under consideration as a drive on which to back up my several SSDs. (A few of which themselves are backups.) Those SSDs are: 2TB M.2-2280 NVMe Silicon Power P34A80 - in laptop, data storage 2TB 2.5" SATA Seagate Barracuda 120 - in laptop, data storage 1.05TB 2.5" SATA Crucial MX300 - not installed, was data storage in laptop, has various files still on it from that. 1TB M.2-2280 NVMe SP P34A80 - currently in laptop, was data storage, now almost empty, will be moved to new desktop platform as boot drive. 1TB M.2-2280 NVMe Samsung 970 Evo - currently in 4790K system as boot drive, missing M.2 screw. 1TB 2.5" SATA WD Blue 3D #1 - in laptop, boot drive 1TB 2.5" SATA WD Blue 3D #2 - (normally) uninstalled, has Linux VMs that had been on other storage in 4790K, not currently "attached" to Virtualbox (although the drive is plugged in right now). 500GB 2.5" SATA Team Vulcan #1 - GPT clone of past Win10 install from 256GB Crucial M550 500GB 2.5" SATA Team Vulcan #2 - MBR clone of past Win10 install from 256GB Crucial M550 256GB 2.5" SATA Crucial M550 - currently Linux for 4790K, formally Win10/Linux dual boot 250GB M.2-2260 Crucial MX200 - was boot drive in laptop, I think I was trying to make it a Linux boot for the laptop but something went wrong there, related to the hassle of swapping drives out, among other things.) 240GB 2.5" SATA Crucial BX200 - currently (experimental) Win10 boot drive in my dad's old Dell D830 laptop (Core 2 Duo T7250, 2GB RAM, Intel GMA X3100 GPU) That's a total of 10,796 GB, so a 12TB HDD should be able to hold it all. Thing is though, how to back it up in such a way so that if needed, I can restore from an OS install and boot from it, and also be able to access the filesystems to pull individual / few files off as needed... Generally for OS backups / restores / clones, the only way I've had success is by using the "dd" command in Linux to clone the entire drive to another one, then plug the clone in. (Using other methods, like Clonezilla I think failed, as well as GParted, etc, fail to copy certain hidden portions which are required for booting.) I haven't learned how to "dd" from a drive to a partition, and if I dd to a file it would be just one big file (or split into several smaller ones) and I couldn't read it with file explorers in Windows or Linux. (Come to think of it I think I did try Clonezilla to clone various drives to one, but I've had a lot of trouble with that.) Bonus points for being able to plug the drive in, boot from it and choose from a bootup menu (like grub or whatever) which one I want to boot. (Yes of course there would be a huge performance hit booting from a spinning HDD vs an NVMe SSD, but if I could at least get it to work., for backup/restore purposes...) Which reminds me of another thing I'd like to see ... you ever seen situations where you're working on something, the PC is sluggish, not responding, etc, but it won't tell you why? Often I think it's because the program expects to be used in RAM and have that speed available, but sometimes it spills over into storage. I'd like to see it say things like "This program runs best when you have enough RAM available, but because of insufficient resources, it has to use swap file on (whatever storage you have - NVMe, SATA SSD or HDD). Performance *IS* greatly reduced because accessing your (hard drive) is much slower. If you're the patient type of person, we can continue with the task, and provide progress along the way (like a progress bar, transfer rate, etc), or if you want we can abort the task and roll back to before you started it."

Ah @Spotty ... I did want it to retain some of the formatting (like bold, font sizes, etc) but for "automatic" color I wanted it to use this forum's theme as a guide/template. Guess not that's how it works here That's interesting though ... when I was editing before I posted (in new builds & planning btw) in one of the text boxes (in a copy-paste into a spoiler), highlighted text, clicked "automatic" ... it set it as almost white on here even though I'm using day theme. Were you using night theme? And yeah, I was trying to fix it myself. (Reminds me, some time ago I had taken screenshots of text & background on here with both day & night theme, looked at their color codes, then figured out one that was right in the middle between them, some shade of gray or something like that, and tried to use it. Maybe I should look it up again, find out what it was, and suggest it as a selectable text color in the color box?) And do you just mean the text in that quote, or the text in the entire post? (There was some other text elsewhere that was pasted that had red or blue or something, I forget now, I wanted to retain that as well.)

Budget (including currency): US$ - originally hoping around $730 (same $ as parts I'm replacing), prefer about $1100, realize I may have to go to around $1500. Country: USA - near San Diego, CA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: posted some screenshots/pics at https://photos.app.goo.gl/Pvq5h4wxAiUQyX2J8 - basically not much gaming, but a lot of multitasking, VMs, video / photo / audio editing, etc. Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): More details below, but I have a Define R5, several HDDs, a 1TB Silicon Power P34A80 that I plan to boot from, a Hyper 212 Evo (but prefer to get a better cooler), Corsair AX760 (but prefer another PSU so I can keep my old system usable in "open air / test bench" mode); have monitor, keyboard, mouse, upgrading from 4790K + 32GB RAM + ASRock Z97 Extreme6, buying as soon as later this week or next week (but debating waiting for Black Friday, or a compromise: buy CPU & Mobo & some RAM now & get rest of RAM later), I don't game much right now (games I play run fine on my iGPU, also I mostly game at 720p 60fps) but I do a lot of multitasking, VMs, etc. ----------------------------- Hi, I'll try to make this fairly brief although I may leave a lot of things out. (I'll try to cover the points in the stickied topic though.) .... Well that didn't go as planned (I wonder if I will EVER be able to make a good post that can fit entirely within a single tweet under Twitter's original tweet size rule, without using shorthand like emojis, abbreviations, improper sentence structure/spelling, etc? ) I bolded some points throughout the post as a pseudo-TL;DR. Basically I've been hitting the non-gaming (most of my gaming is fairly light) limits of my current daily driver system for a while now, and... well, I was originally planning to upgrade to Zen 5 (or whatever the 2nd-generation after DDR5 launches).... but that was back when I had the idea that 1st-gen DDR5 AM5/TR5/SP5 would launch at CES 2021 (cause AMD originally said AM4 socket compatibility through 2020, I guess they and others expected DDR5 to be ready in time for a 2021 launch), then 2nd-gen at CES/Computex 2022 and be on sale Black Friday 2022. Well here it is delayed more than I thought it would be, and I imagine it could be 2024 or 2025 before Zen 5 or 6 or whatever comes out ... so I think it's about time to do a stop-gap upgrade. (BTW, my daily driver is actually a laptop with a Clevo P750DM-G and 64GB RAM, but I'm already planning on upgrading a desktop with an i7-4790K and 32GB RAM, even though I just built it in January 2015..) Anyway ... this has been in draft mode for a few days now. I keep thinking of little things to add or clarify, but if I keep doing that I'll never get it done, so, I think I'm just going to go ahead and post it. Hopefully the bold points throughout are enough of a TL;DR. 1. Budget & Location I've been looking up some parts, a few benchmarks, youtube videos, etc. here and there and ... well I was originally hoping to keep the total cost to about the same as the sum of what I originally paid in January 2015 for the parts I'm replacing. (4790K = $330, Hyper 212 Evo (small possibility of reusing it) = $35, ASRock Z97 Extreme6 = $165, 32GB RAM = $200 - total = $730 USD w/cooler or $695 without) But I'm willing to increase the budget some for more headroom for extensive multitasking, better performance in video rendering, etc. If I can keep it down around $1000-1100 or so that would be nice, but I may have to go up around $1400-1500 or so to get what I want for now .... well not exactly what I want (for example I hear the next Epyc top CPU might be over $10K by itself, and 256GB+ LRDIMMs aren't exactly cheap either), but what I think I could reasonably afford. I hinted at it farther down, but I'll say here that I'm just east of the San Diego, CA area. Micro Center is about an hour and a half drive away. (I'm looking at moving soon, but likely still in San Diego area, although moving to somewhere in Riverside or San Bernardino counties, or Arizona may also be a possibility, idk yet. Most likely stay in San Diego area for now, but I would like to move out of the area, or even to Texas like west or a bit southwest of DFW area, sometime later.) For those of you who skim the post then scream "There's no possible way you're getting a 5950X AND 128GB RAM with just $730 or $1100 or $1500!" ... I'm not getting ALL parts to build a system, I'm reusing some I already have. Basically all I need at minimum is a CPU, motherboard and RAM, and maybe also a CPU cooler (if I don't reuse the Hyper 212 Evo I have which is probably inadequate for the 5950X) and PSU (if I want to still have the 4790K be bootable in "test bench" mode). The $730 budget tier would basically have limited me to about a 6-core CPU and 64GB RAM and a fairly cheap motherboard. $1100 or so would get me either the 5950X and 64GB or 3900X and 128GB, plus the MSI board I mention elsewhere. $1500 (or maybe stretch to 1600? idk?) would get me the 5950X *AND* 128GB RAM, that MSI board, and maybe a decent cooler and PSU. (I don't yet need a case, GPU, storage, peripherals, etc.) I'm basically trying to justify / figure out how much I should spend. I'm anticipating upgrading in another few years or so (late 2024 to 2028?) to Threadripper (Pro?) or Epyc, if I can earn enough $ to afford it by then. (That's another challenge itself, but I got some ideas running through my head.) On one hand, I feel like if I only go to the 3900X it won't be much of an upgrade over my 4790K, which is one reason I'm considering the 5950X ... but on the other hand, idk if a high-end TR or Epyc Zen 5 or Zen 6 would be a massive upgrade over the 5950X. (To me, an incremental upgrade isn't like 10-15%, it's like 4X, and a good / bigger upgrade isn't 4-5X, it's more like 100X or something like that.) Also if I did get the 5950X, hopefully it might last at least a little while, in case I'm not able to afford TR/Epyc by Black Friday 2028, or we're by then on the cusp of DDR6 or even DDR7(?) so I'd have to delay that upgrade even more, to maybe 2030 or 2032 or something like that. (Also when or if I eventually do a high end upgrade like that future one, I'd like to get a platform that would last quite a while - for example through at least 2 or 3, maybe 4 replacements of a Seasonic Prime PSU that died of old age. (BTW death during warranty is, in my book, "infant mortality".) Bonus points for outlasting the warranty of some RAM, or being able to keep case & motherboard longer than the QWERTY (or 12-note-per-octave music) keyboard standards have existed. Basically I wish I could upgrade my system in place perpetually, not have to replace / reinstall a lot of things every several years.) 2. Aim I'll be using it for quite a few things, but actually gaming will be pretty far down the list as it's not that important to me right now. (The majority of games I do spend any time playing will actually run just fine on the integrated graphics on my 4790K.) I likely will be doing a lot of web browsing (I've seen my pagefile usage up in the 300s GB a couple times just from that), and would like to do more video and photo editing & rendering than I'm able to do now. I have a camera that shoots 4K video (Panasonic FZ1000), and it takes my current setup forever to work with those files, to the point that I generally don't even bother with it. Also I do a lot of multitasking, and will be running several virtual machines as well. I compiled some screenshots / pics of just a few of the things I've done on my PCs / laptop over the years, or tried to do: https://photos.app.goo.gl/Pvq5h4wxAiUQyX2J8 3. Monitors Right now I have 2 monitors - one for each PC. My 24" 1080p Dell U2414H is hooked up to the desktop, and my 28" 4K Asus VG289Q is hooked up to the laptop. I may likely move the Asus to the new PC (and go back to using the built-in laptop for that display). As for the Dell, I'm not sure what I'll do exactly yet. I may use it as a secondary monitor on the new config, or may keep it available for occasional usage on the 4790K platform, but I don't plan on getting rid of it yet. I don't currently have plans to add more monitors as I don't have a place for them, but I am planning on moving soon. (I won't know what space I'll have available until I actually make the move though.) I originally thought I would have moved by the middle of this month (August 2021) but various factors outside the scope of this thread / forum (or too complicated to discuss here) have delayed that a bit. (I was going to wait until after I move to do the upgrade but I'm prepared to do it sooner.) 4. Peripherals I already have a couple adequate enough Logitech keyboards and mice. No they're not gamer types but they get the job done for me for the most part. Keyboard: K200 (cat partially chewed the cord but it was still working last time I used it), K270 (currently being used with the 4790K desktop) and K360 (being used with the laptop). : M185 being used with the desktop, G602 being used with the laptop. Current plan is to use the K270 and G602 with the new setup, and have the K360 and M185 be used with the laptop. (The built-in keyboard has seen better days - some things don't even hardly work at all on it anymore.) I do sometimes have issues with the G602 though, mostly with the scroll wheel - sometimes it won't register my clicks even if I mash on it, and sometimes if a fly breathes on it, it clicks twice. (I wonder if the G604 would be improved, if I was looking for a new mouse it's one I would probably consider.) I already touched on monitors in point 3. If I was to get a mechanical keyboard later, I'd want something quiet. The K360 I'm typing this on right now (editing from my laptop) sounds about like close-by thunderclaps or earthquakes in my ears, so it needs to be a lot quieter than that. (I do bottom out pretty hard on the keys - sometimes if I type for too long my fingers start hurting a bit.) OS ... I'm still debating. I would really like to try to use Linux as my daily driver (cause I hate how Windows tries to get me to restart so bleeping frequently; longest I've been able to go without a restart was about 5 months, and that was cut short because of either a BSOD or a complete freezeup - mouse disappeared, cursor did nothing, clock froze, screen froze, I didn't have sound on but I guess that would have been constantly repeating / stuttering a 1/30th second clip or something, etc), but it's possible there are some things I do that may still need (or at least benefit from) Windows. If I do get Windows, I want it to be a more flexible license - not one that's tied to this PC and can't be moved around. (Also I would go with at least Pro, not Home, and I'm not eager to jump on 11 anytime soon.) Also I prefer a legitimate license; I'm wary of the cheap (< ~$30-50) keys. Another option would be running Linux as my main OS and unactivated Windows in VMs as needed, but then that could pose an issue for gaming in a Windows VM. Basically, I'm not planning to buy another GPU (and if I did, not spend more than about $100 or so on one - yes that means in the current market), and with the platform I'm strongly considering, and the fact that I only have one dGPU ... I've heard that there isn't really a way to split up a GPU's resources between VMs like you can do with a CPU, at least not with consumer GeForce/Radeon GPUs. Also if possible, I would love to be able, if I can get things actually set up the way I want them (and a reasonable backup of my OS in that state), to migrate or clone that install to a future PC I might get. (For example, if I was to upgrade in another 3-7 years or so to Threadripper or Epyc, pending being able to afford it then.) I'm pretty sure Windows doesn't like doing that, but I think I've heard Linux can be a bit more forgiving there? If I do dual boot or more (rather than or in addition to just one main OS + VMs), I'll want to put each OS on a separate drive. (I may have a couple SSDs laying around that I could repurpose, or I could buy another one sometime.) Speaking of dual boot ... it would be nice if I could set up the OS's so that they could be both booted as a main OS when I start the PC, *AND* booted as a VM when I've already started another OS. 5. Why are you upgrading? Well, I'd like more room for extensive multitasking, running VMs, and be able to have a chance of being able to transcode high-quality 4K H.265 videos at a reasonable pace without it taking half a day to transcode a few minutes or something like that, among other things. If I still ran just one task at a time I probably wouldn't be in such urgent / dire need of a CPU and RAM upgrade, but my days of doing only one thing at a time ended sometime around 1995 or so. Also I want my system to actually be immediately responsive to what I try to do when generally using the PC, even with heavy multitasking, not have to wait for sometimes several minutes or so after I click before something actually happens. Just now / today, for example ... between various things I've been doing on my 2 PCs (including a bit of researching for this topic, forgetting / losing some tabs, having to redo things, etc) ... it has taken me a lot longer than I would have liked to get things done. I started this current session around 8-10pm or so last night. It is now a bit after 6am (as I'm typing this on 2021-08-29 although this is a draft right now so will actually get posted much later), and I don't have even a quarter to half of the things done that I had hoped I'd get accomplished on my PC early enough to be in bed by about midnight or 1am. 6+. Other points, like existing parts, possible planned new parts, etc. Existing parts that I plan to reuse (or may reuse): CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo (maybe, but leaning toward not repurposing it. If I did though, I'd pull it off the 4790K and use it on the new CPU, and put the stock cooler on the 4790K.) Storage: Crucial MX200 250 GB M.2-2260 Solid State Drive (maybe, not sure. Was in the pcpartpicker list to make sure I picked a motherboard that was compatible with it, in case I wanted to plug it in for whatever reason.) Storage: Silicon Power A80 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (This is planned to be my boot drive.) Storage: 3x Hitachi Deskstar NAS 8 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive Storage: Toshiba N300 8TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 256 MB Cache - HDWG180XZSTA Storage: 2x Hitachi Deskstar NAS 10 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive Storage: 2x Toshiba 14 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (on the storage, I basically have 4x 8TB, 2x 10TB and 2x 14TB. I use 2x 8TB and a 10TB for data storage, and the remaining ones of those as offline backups, but I need a better backup system, and I don't have sufficient upload bandwidth for Backblaze to be a viable option. The 14TB aren't being used yet, but one will be for storage, the other for backup.) Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB 3 GB SC GAMING Video Card Case: Fractal Design Define R5 ATX Mid Tower Case Power Supply: Corsair AX 760 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (There's a chance I might consider not repurposing this even though it's working fine.) edit: decided I really should get a second one. Also the peripherals mentioned above, like keyboard, mouse, monitor, etc. Parts / categories I'm looking at: CPU: Currently looking at Ryzen 9 3900X or 5950X. (Was also considering i7-10700F or i9-10900F, but I couldn't find any motherboards that met a requirement I have. Btw I'm about an hour and a half from Micro Center, I drive a 2004 Toyota Camry which gets in the low 20s mpg or so at a SoCal typical highway cruising speed of about 80 mph / 128 kph (yes even in some urban areas that's the flow of traffic especially San Diego, CA, USA), and last I checked gas was around the mid $4 range per gallon or so. (I see the 3900X is fairly deeply discounted at MC, but the 5950X is about the same as everywhere else.) CPU Cooler (in the likely/probable event I don't reuse the 212 Evo): Not sure yet, if I get the 5950X. (If I do 3900X I'll probably use the stock cooler.) If I go air, I don't want it to block any RAM slots even with fans installed. If I go water, I don't want to have to remove any HDD cages. A link on FD's site says that if I install an AIO in the top, I can use up to a 240mm without issues. If I use a 280 it's limited to 55mm thick including fans, and I'd have to remove the rear exhaust fan (although if the proximity of the AIO fans to the VRMs/etc would be sufficient for exhaust I hope that would be alright), using a 360 prevents using the ODD bay (I use it occasionally, but it's seldom enough that I could just have the drive outside the case - that's how I have it now actually, my ODD cage isn't even in the case, and my HDD stack is moved up a bit - I would move that back down), and a 420, besides being limited to 55mm thick including fans, also means I couldn't use the ODD bay or rear fan but I think I could work around those. (That's if I go for the 5950X ... but if I go for the 3900X I'd probably just use the stock cooler that comes with it.) Motherboard: Current choice is the MSI B550M Mortar which I see for about $130 on Amazon. I picked this one because it, for the most part, doesn't use shared bandwidth between SATA and M.2 / PCIe devices. (I can have both M.2 ports and all 6 SATA ports populated simultaneously, for example. I did recently learn that I can't have the 2nd M.2 and 2nd PCIe x16/x4 slot populated simultaneously but I think I could probably work around that.) Also if its BIOS doesn't support the 5000 series out of the box, this board has BIOS flashback so I wouldn't need to have another compatible CPU on hand. (I couldn't find any LGA1200 boards that didn't disable SATA ports when M.2 slots were used. There were a few other AM4 boards that also didn't share bandwidth for the most part, but they were more expensive or otherwise not worth it for me.) RAM: Looking at either 64GB or 128GB - probably DDR4-3200 or 3600 depending on prices. (I did see a kit or two of 128GB 2400 CL16 or 2666 CL18 that are quite a bit cheaper per GB than the better units, but from what I hear about Ryzen liking faster RAM, I'm leaning more toward that instead.) PSU: (maybe actually yes) It's a somewhat small possibility that I may consider getting another PSU, so I could still have my 4790K booted up once in a while. (If I do, I'd probably look for something at least Tier B or so (unless C is okay for a 1060 and 5950X), 80+ Gold or better, semi/fully-modular, with enough connectors (especially SATA - absolute minimum 6) for what I'd be doing.) Edit: I would for sure be getting another PSU. A few more thoughts on the proposed parts, as I edit this draft (at 2021-08-31 15;57;12 UTC-7)... For the CPU cooler, I'd like to get one around $50-75 or so, but if it's justified might consider spending around $100 or so, but I really don't want to spend $135-150 or more. Would there be good reasons for spending a bit more than I'd like, though? I don't care too much about OC headroom, but I do care about temps (as long as it's under about 80°C under load), noise (would like my HDDs to be louder when it's under load) and compatibility / clearance (no blocking HDD bays or RAM slots). A few under consideration include ¡cállate! Shadow Rock 3, (maybe) Cryorig A40/A80, halte den Mund! Dark Rock Slim, Noctua NH-U12S/DXi4/black/A, Enermax Liqmax III 240 RGB (which doesn't matter cause my case has solid panels), ... well, there's several under consideration, too many to list here - look at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1wZt7896sKmYZwLsT201Gvgquo-gFTaXX1La2Z-pfUhE/edit?usp=sharing for some ideas. (The ones I listed here are mostly listed by price, not preference.) Motherboard - I'm considering buying at Micro Center, which I don't think they have the B550M Mortar, but they have the WiFi version, and a few other boards. I'd prefer not to spend more than about $115-130 or so, and would like at least 6 SATA ports, support for 128GB RAM, 2 PCIe x16 slots (one for GPU, one for a future HBA), 2 M.2 slots (at least one compatible with a SATA 60mm length SSD), and either not need a BIOS update for my CPU, or have BIOS flashback. Some I'm looking at include MSI B550-A Pro (also @ MC), B550M Mortar, B550 Gaming Plus (MC?), ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 (MC?), MSI X570 Gaming Plus, ASRock X570 Pro4, MSI B550M Mortar WiFi. PSU - PCPartpicker estimates an example of my proposed system's power draw (with 6 HDDs, 2 SSDs, GTX 1060 3GB, 4x32GB DDR4-3200, 5950X) at about 551 watts, but it doesn't take into account the possibility of CPU and GPU boosting significantly past their "TDP". Some I'm considering include EVGA G3 650W, EVGA GA 650W, MSI MPG A750GF, Seasonic Focus PX 650, or maybe (but a bit expensive) EVGA P2 750W. A note on noise... I'd like the system as quiet as reasonably possible, because I may have it in the same room where I would plan to record or stream piano music. (And I may even have it right under the piano too.) So if at all possible, I'd like any fans and AIO pump (if used) to be quieter, combined, than a (preferably 2.5" 5400rpm) hard drive that's spinning (and maybe sequentially, but not randomly, accessing data). BTW if I did leave the 4790K still bootable (it does have a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo as a boot drive - btw I need to buy some M.2 screws & standoffs, it's just hanging in the slot right now as I'm typing this on that PC, it would be just on a box or table, not in a case. (I'll be reusing my Define R5 for the new setup.) BTW ... between the CPU and RAM ... I'm leaning toward getting the better CPU and skimping on the RAM for now, rather than maxing out the RAM and skimping on the CPU -- because it would be *MUCH* easier to add RAM than to swap out a CPU. (For example, go with the 5950X plus 64GB RAM now, then add the other 64GB RAM around Black Friday, or sooner if I run out of RAM before then, which is quite likely. (hence why I'm trying to mentally prepare myself to just go straight for the 5950X and 128GB.) Another thing I just thought of that I might consider getting is a KVM switch. I don't need anything super fancy or with a lot of ports, but beyond that I don't know much at all. I also looked on several other forums at their PC build templates, to see if those might remind me of some things that I may have missed here. I'll drop them in spoilers below.

Browser, version and OS: FireFox 91.0.2, Windows 10 1909 Build 18363.1256) Steps to reproduce/what were you doing before it happened? Editing a topic (in Test Posts - mods: it's my one that talks about a stop-gap upgrade from a 4790K). Had copied/pasted some text from another forum into a spoiler, then was going to insert some of my comments in there. What happened? When I went to set the text color to "automatic" in one of the text boxes I was editing (in a sub-spoiler, below "r/buildapcforme - from https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/comments/p629bi/meta_a_guide_on_how_to_post_a_build_request_so/ " in the main spoiler at the bottom of my draft post), it set it to nearly white, instead of black even though I'm using the day theme here. What did you expect to happen? I expected it to use the LTT forum theme to determine whether "automatic" means white or black, not the place from which I copied/pasted the text. (Reddit for me, at least on that sub, is set to dark theme.) Link to a page where it happened, if applicable: This link may only be viewable by mods - Screenshots of the issue, if applicable: Any other relevant details: BTW, it does properly set the "automatic" color as black (because I use day theme on LTT forum) in the other spoilers as well as the main body. (I just didn't expect it to use the source-from-copy/paste's theme to determine what that color would be.) I can't think of any others at the moment, but feel free to try to ask or prod my brain in case something might come up. If it's a cloudflare error, what was the ray ID from the bottom of the error page? (N/A)

So does anyone have any ideas what FF extension I should use? I tried Session Sync in a VM on my other PC that I set up for testing, but I don't think it'll work for me. It does apparently save all the windows and tabs, but each window is its own session. It looks like it doesn't group a bunch of windows into one session, nor does it have a list (or a grid/spreadsheet would be okay too) of ALL tabs in ALL windows for a given session, like Session Buddy has. I also tried Tabby, but that's just a little popup in the corner, not a full window / full screen view, so that won't work either. Doing a Google Search for "Session Buddy Firefox" brings up Tab Session Manager... I might try that in the VM, but anyone have other ideas? EDIT: Okay, Tab Session Manager has been eliminated from contention -- it doesn't save the back/forward history in tabs.