Jon Jon

Hopefully US prices stay near MSRP. I will not spend that kind of money on Vega 64. $500 I think is a fair price if the performance is there with the 1080, but I wouldn't spend over $600. I might as well get a 1080TI and use fast sync.

I am hoping miners don't get in the way!

It would be noted in the specs, but I would be in shock if a 1000W+ 80+ Platinum PSU didn't have even more than 2 of those.

Honestly, I stick with ASUS and ASRock for everything now. I used Gigabyte for a few builds in the passed and felt meh about that. My first gaming PC ran on a high end MSI board that started giving me grief after a while. Granted, those instances are from 5-10 years ago, including the Biostar issue I had. I can say that my ASRock board has been rock solid for the last 5 years, and that's with me maxing out the RAM slots and using 3 of the expansion ports (my R9 380, a PCI ASUS Xonar Essense ST Sound Card, and an Elgato HD60Pro in the PCI-E 1x slot).

Honestly, for an HEDT machine, because of the massive expandibility, I would invest in a 1000W minimum 80+ Platinum PSU. It's pricey, but you are talking about a machine that's designed for expand-ability and high cost parts. I wouldn't play around.

Biostar burned me years ago with my old AMD Phenom II X4 965 build. It started corrupting any data coming in via network. Even with an expansion NIC installed, even with a Windows reinstall, for whatever reason I could NOT write data to my HDDs without it being instantly corrupted. I had never seen that issue before, or since. That's actually what prompted me to migrate to my current Core i5 3570 build on an AsRock motherboard. Same hardware on the new board, no issues since. I'll never buy Biostar again

Always go for what you need and what's within your budget. Benchmarks are great, but at the end of the day, you should target what resolution and frame rate you plan to go after to maximize on your $$$$

If you are shooting for that 144fps cap, you should get the 1080ti. Vega64 is not going to get anywhere near 1080ti performance. I would also argue that the Ryzen CPU will be a bottleneck here as well, as Intel is the better choice currently if you are shooting for 144fps gaming. EDIT: I am personally looking to pick up Vega64, but I also just invested in my 75hz freesync UHD monitor, so my goal is to be able to run at that frame rate minimum for the next few years at high settings.

That shelf makes me so nervous lol. As your problem, are your monitors set for fast response? I know with my gaming monitor, I need to set it to fast response to capitalize on the low response time. Or do you mean overall system lag? Can you explain the problem more? Thanks!

I would love for the pre-orders to be up here in the US. I am still poking around and can't find it on either Amazon or Newegg

Since you had the cash, you are getting the better experience with that combo anyway! I am excited to hear about it!

That's my plan. Worst case, if it's trash, just return it Newegg Premiere!

I would argue no. Personally, I don't believe in upgrading your graphics card every generation. I would wait for Volta at the minimum to maximize on your money.

I'm probably getting a reference 64 just because I got burned last year waiting for Polaris. I am really due for an upgrade, so I don't want to wait forever. Plus, can always upgrade the reference cooler! Who typically makes good after market coolers for AMD?

What do you guys think about these packs? I am curious about them, as I am definitely not skilled enough to make my own custom loop. When I eventually upgrade to Threadripper, I could see myself wanting to run this along with liquid cooling whatever graphics card I am running at the time together.

As someone who went through an engineering program at multiple schools during my undergraduate, there just aren't that many females that enter those programs. The ones that do, however, normally get a bit of favoritism, because the faculty really wants them to succeed to add more females to the engineering work force. Now that I work in the field, I can see that there are not that many women in it. However, most of the ones I work with are EXTREMELY SKILLED at what they do. They are also typically much older. I encounter next to none in my age group (<35). That's a small sample size, but I don't think the industry itself is against female workers. They actually seem to promote it.

That is just an endless cycle of waiting. Just enjoy your 1080.

So that is beneficial, since if it supports Quick Sync, then that implies that Kaby Lake should be able to natively transcode 4K video that are using the new codecs (HVEC and H.265). Digging deeper into the Plex forums, there are guys there that are basically serving up to TONS of devices all at once, with old re-certified, multi-CPU XEON builds, and that just isn't necessary for someone like me that will serve up maybe 1 or 2 streams at a time. I am thinking an i3 Kaby Lake is plenty for this task, and an i7-7700K being the higher end alternative to serving multiple streams in the home, with Quick Sync enabled. Remember that transcoding isn't necessary unless the device doesn't support the original file format, or if you are looking to compress. For me, it's a matter of serving it up, but in the event that, say, I had ripped a 4K bluray, and I needed to be able to transcode to H.264 1080P for a non-4K streaming device in the house, I imagine that could handle the job using Quick Sync. What do you guys think?

I have to agree. After reading through everyone's statements and comments for both sides, from a consumer standpoint, it isn't worth it. I don't know how long a lot of you have been into this hobby, but I first got back into it as a teenager when SLI was first revived again from NVidia for the Geforce 6800 series cards in 2004. Then, ATI followed suit a generation later with Crossfire. I have seen, year after year, the promise of "better support" by both companies. It's now 2017, 13 years later, and support still has not been perfected. Especially back then, when support was spotty, and for a period, the next generation of GPUs typically were faster than the previous two in SLI/Crossfire. To us, it isn't worth it. Your money is better served going to a high powered single GPU, unless you need the extra horsepower for non-gaming workloads. That is, of course, unless the specific games you want to play have AMAZING support for it. DX12 is pushing multi-gpu in the right direction, both making it easier for developers since it is baked into the API, as well as for us as we aren't locked to having to buy the same GPU, but support isn't there yet either. TL;DR, save yourself the headache and go single GPU cards.

I will be watching for the limited edition air cooled 64s like a hawk. Last year, I made the mistake of sitting on Polaris. Next thing I know, I couldn't even buy them. I am not making that same mistake twice.

I found this great Reddit post from a few days ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/6rf9v0/plex_server_build_recommendation_470_16core_32/ I am reading through it now.

I am looking deeper, as I would imagine Plex would allow you to offload the transcoding to a dedicated video card, if needed. Kaby Lake, with its iGPU having native H.265 and HVEC support, may prove to be a better candidate.

Interesting.... If that logic holds, then I imagine people could get away with a Kaby Lake i3 and run it with a silent cooler as well. TBH, I am more concerned with temps from my HDDs than anything else. EDIT: I found this thread over on Plex's forums regarding this as well: https://forums.plex.tv/discussion/209432/transcoding-4k-requirements They discuss the actual Passmark score requirement depending on the bitrate!

This should be a fun one, and informative for the future. I am considering doing a fresh new build come tax season, and I am thinking of going threadripper for my new platform. However, I still have this little engine that could machine that I don't want to just toss in the garbage. I do plan to turn this into a Plex server. As I already use it to serve up data today, I want to be able to do 4K tomorrow. I think the hardware is overkill, but I would love to talk about what is really required. I will probably down clock my Core i5 3570 back to stock (3.4ghz), keep the 12GB DDR3 1600 memory in here, and probably keep Windows 10 on it along with Plex Server installed, and just turn the whole drive into a file share with local credential requirements to keep it securish. I will leave my 120mm AIO on this thing, and just have a single 140MM fan in the front to help push air over my HDDs that will be in here to keep it both quiet and sufficiently cooled. However, serving up and transcoding 4K is a totally different beast. I wonder if it has the CPU to handle, or if quick-sync will technically be able to help serve that up if needed. Today, I backup my Blurays 1:1 into MKVs, but with the move to 4K, those will be massive as well. What are your thoughts on this, and what the actual requirements are? Thanks!

You can overclock. You just can't overclock passed the boost frequency. I have my i5-3570 non k OC'ed to 4ghz across all four cores no problem.