Zando_

If you find a $200 OLED 1440p, do please let us know.
 
 

That's because it's not a good deal. 
$450 is the most you should probably pay for used 3080.
 
They were never supposed to be $1200...

Yep. Mainstream just does not have enough PCIe lanes. Sounds like you're simply bouncing off the bandwidth limits of the lanes you have available. You have an x8 DMI 4.0 uplink from the chipset to the CPU. That's equivalent bandwidth to x8 PCIe 4.0 IIRC, and all drives in chipset slots + lots of your other I/O (USBs, NIC, etc) also go through this. Only takes 2 fast PCIe 4.0 drives running full bore to hit that limit or get very close to it. Thus why it's ok with 2 of them, but once you add a 3rd drive of any kind and load them all, it goes over the bandwidth limit and chokes.

I am in agreement with @da na and @Zando_, but I will also mention that a rackmounted system probably isn't the best first server around.
 
A tower server like a Dell PrecisionTower, Lenovo ThinkStation, some of the tower-style HP ProLiants, or even building your own server in a standard ATX case would be a more user-friendly route.

^^^ For most home NAS/VM use a simple modern 4c/8t chip is plenty, NAS duties are single-threaded and many VMs can even share a single core, depending on the hypervisor you use and what they're doing. Or obviously you can run containers in the host OS or a VM and they'll share whatever resources are available.
 
If you do think you'll use all those threads, it is a solid machine, just keep in mind that it will pull a good chunk of power, and servers can be incredibly loud. Usually you can spin the fans down a lot though, without running into thermal issues.

Sure you're not just seeing new-old-stock TN panels at inflated prices?

**M.2_1 is PCIe 5.0 and 4.0 to the CPU
M.2_2 is PCIe 4.0 to the CPU.
M.2_3 is PCIe 4.0 through the Z690 chipset of which bandwidth is shared along the DMI link back to the CPU.

**When M.2_1 is occupied with SSD, PCIe X16 PCIe 5.0 will run in x8 mode only.

The Samsung 990 Pro is only PCIe 4.0, so that means you can place it into either M.2_1 or M.2_2 without losing lanes to the x16 PCIe 5.0 slot. However (if I'm reading this correctly), if you populate the M.2_1 slot with a future PCIe 5.0 NVMe SSD, then that x16 will drop down to a x8 PCIe 5.0 slot.

So if you have a PCIe 5.0 NVMe in the future, and you don't want to split lanes on the x16 slot, put it into an M.2_2 slot to force it into PCIe 4.0 x4 mode.

TN is often the best option when response time is the main feature you need, as its typically better than IPS or VA here. You really only see TN in those super high refresh rate monitors, and esports games don't typically care about things like HDR, Contrast, Color accuracy, vieing angles and other aspects of the displays.
 
I'm guessing OLED is going to replace these pretty soon as it should be better with responce time, and 480hz and other very high refresh rate OLEDs are starting to come out.

Sure you're not just seeing new-old-stock TN panels at inflated prices?

Sure you're not just seeing new-old-stock TN panels at inflated prices?

When the actual f*ck did TN become desirable?!?!?! I've always known TN panels as the, "Hey, we had to cut costs everywhere," of the laptop display world.

990 in the CPU lanes slot, 980 in the chipset lanes. So 990 in M.2_1 and the 980 in M.2_3. M.2_2 is PCIe 4.0 through the CPU as well, but the motherboard manual is not clear on how this is accomplished and whether it'll cause the GPU slot to drop to x8.
 
The chipset has an x8 DMI 4.0 (equivalent bandwidth to PCIe 4.0 IIRC) uplink to the CPU so with OP's setup there shouldn't be any noticeable speed drop with the 980 in chipset lanes anyways.
 
 
 

Right now it has a very dense radiator, 34 FPI I think. I'll have to get new rads I guess. so you think a dual 240 and a dual 360 don't make a lot of difference? not even in fan speed?
 
The very definition of SFF.
 
as promised, here is my build.
 
something I really like about it, is the airflow it has. sucking in cool air cooling everything inside, and spewing out the hot air from the top. It's like a wind tunnel and it performs really well. I'm not sure yet how to overcome this with a dual rad setup.
 
I edited my original post with a bit more detail. I must be a bit more clear what I want now.
 
 

Do not waste space on the 990 Pro installing your OS. The big gains on NVMe drives are for large file transfers, the OS loads a ton of tiny files. The OS doesn't boot any faster off the latest NVMe drives than it does off a decent SATA SSD. Heck on my stuff with a bunch of PCIe lanes/devices (older HEDT), it's actually slower to boot off NVMe (as that uses PCIe) than a SATA SSD. I only have my OS on an NVMe drive for convenience sake.

^^^ For most home NAS/VM use a simple modern 4c/8t chip is plenty, NAS duties are single-threaded and many VMs can even share a single core, depending on the hypervisor you use and what they're doing. Or obviously you can run containers in the host OS or a VM and they'll share whatever resources are available.
 
If you do think you'll use all those threads, it is a solid machine, just keep in mind that it will pull a good chunk of power, and servers can be incredibly loud. Usually you can spin the fans down a lot though, without running into thermal issues.

Those CPUs are 14 cores 28 threads each, so together you'll get 56 threads 64GB RAM for $450. Really great price there - just unless you're running very specific applications that actually use 56 threads, if you need just a server in general you could probably find a cheaper one. Single-core performance on these Xeons is not great - my 72-thread E5-2697v4 system has similar single core performance to a 2nd gen Core i5 chip - but all of those cores combined will still blow away a brand new CPU if used right. 
So, in short, good price but just make sure you really need all those cores before committing. 

Pretty solid chips. Used to have a dual e5-2697v1 workstation and they really deliver on multi-core performance. I'd say $450 is a pretty fair price for that but maybe offer em 380-400$ first.

If you know what you're doing, and will keep yourself solely to using tensorflow and pytorch, then you can go by with an A770, and it actually manages to provide nice results. Take a look at this blog series:
https://christianjmills.com/series/notes/arc-a770-testing.html
 
However, I'd still recommend going with nvidia for the sake of out of the box compatibility. A used 3090 is a great option too, if you can afford it in your region.
 

I play Helldivers 2 at 4K with a 2060 Super, I have everything on med/low and resolution scaling down a couple notches, it still looks great and runs very well. If it's a laptop 3060 then I'm not sure how it compares to the desktop 2060 Super.

Is the squiggly line in the bottom left hand corner where the lines switch from vertical to horizontal always there? I replace Macbook(and Windows laptops) screens all the time and typically this is a broken display panel. The glass may not be broken but the display panel underneath is. If you gently but firmly push on the squiggly line it will affect the other straight lines coming off of it, that's a surefire way to tell if it's physically broken.
 
If it was a software issue or bad cable the artifacts and glitches are usually uniform, not both horizontal and vertical, they'll only be one or the other. Since it's both, plus the squiggly line, I'm fairly sure it's a physically broken panel. I've seen this on Macbooks more often than I'd like, as they are usually not cheap to replace.

I don't mind paying I spent I think around 10 000 on games so far. bought most at 40-50. Thanks for all the input its really overwhelming, I'll check out old republic I'm into the starwars esque games, I tried fallen order it was impressive but it didn't draw me in to get more than my feet wet. I was thinking of buying hell diver but with my 3060 it might struggle on my 4k tv. I have a pretty wonky setup using my gaming laptop as a desktop and my tv as a monitor, it all feels and is an afterthought. Im going to check out a few of your recommendations and play around with them for a bit and if you have any others let me know, thanks again. 🙂

I tried Fortnite once 5+ years ago, I think it's changed too much for me to have any useful info on it. Some friends play it together and they seem to have fun, so it's worth a shot. They have a no-build mode too, so you don't have to compete with an 8-year old building the Taj Mahal right in front of you the moment you fire in their direction. Overwatch ehh... the whole Overwatch 2 thing seems horrible from what I've seen. The game was bleeding players before, and 2 added more problems AFAIK so I don't think it's doing so hot. A couple coworkers play Warzone 2.0 (its F2P) and they keep trying to get me into it, but battle royales aren't really my thing so I just mucked around in normal PvP because I got the Modern Warfare 2019 and 2022 games for free (one with a code from a friend who got it with their GPU IIRC, the other I got when I bought my ARC card).
 
Poking through my steam library, if you're at all interested in RPG/MMO games, Star Wars: The Old Republic is F2P. I believe you need to pay to really enjoy the MMO bit, but I've always played it as a singleplayer RPG, the stories are quite good (It's by Bioware, before their goofy stuff with Andromeda/Anthem). I believe I did pay for the premium sub for a bit because I wanted some of the perks, but it's not required to enjoy the story bits, it was just a nice-to-have. The Imperial Agent storyline is especially lauded as a really good one. I had fun with the Agent, my regular good-guy Jedi, and playing a morally grey-ish Sith (not downright "kill people for the fun of it" evil but still a Sith). Poked around as a Republic trooper too. Apparently they just moved to a new developer though: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775530/star-wars-the-old-republic-broadsword-bioware. I haven't been on in a while so I don't know if anything changed vs when Bioware was running it. Last I was on they had just updated a bunch of the class system to make it easier to pick and choose what you wanted for your character IIRC.
 
I don't really play many other F2P games, I mostly like open/semi-open world RPG or sandbox games, those are usually too expensive to develop to hand 'em out for free. I get lots of them on sale for very cheap, as I noted above I'm late to the party so they're "old" games now and thus get discounted deeply. I did play Genshin Impact for a bit, it's a pretty nice game but it very, very much wants to get money out of you as it is a gacha game (basically play the lottery for new characters, you can get some for free but most are locked behind the gacha system).
 
If you have a bunch of storage space and want to sink a bit of time into learning how to get mods to work together properly, there's always the ole Bethesda games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 especially) that you can get on sale for extremely cheap, and fix them up into... really anything you want at this point. Some madmen even got cars working in Fallout New Vegas.

awesome stuff, I have rdr2 just havent dipped in the water yet. I will check out hell divers thanks a million. also thought about assassins creed series, I might check that out with ubisoft game pass. and code masters rally games because it would be pretty rad if I could do 4k/120 with my rtx 3060 in any of those games, funny thing is I have grid and forza and love them but never gave rally games a go. thanks again, also would you recommend anything like fortnite or blizzards overwatch? are they any good and out of the 4 main f2p fps ones which is the best in your humble opinion?

Never switched. Games were originally made for mass appeal. We got more niche games thanks to that casual consumer success making games a viable industry.
They do. I assume you're not hanging out with kids all day, they very much do still play barbie and legos (I have a bunch of younger siblings and a niece and nephew).
Windows 10 will run on the same hardware as Windows 7, and it'll bring DX12 compatibility with it which depending on implementation, may help your hardware run games better. It can be run unlicensed if they killed the W7 keys working for W10 thing.
Yep. I get the MTX for live-service/online titles that have constant server/content dev costs. But most companies get far too greedy with MTX. The MSRP increase for new AAA titles is silly too, they complain about development costs, but they're the ones making the budget for games so massive to begin with. And the ones firing loads of devs every few years (think of the added cost of bringing on new people and training them to do the thing you already had someone for, just because you wanted this quarterly report to look good).
Yeah. CDPR CEO admitted the execs made the choice to push it out when they knew it was not ready. I assume you mean EA's Battlefront reboots, the 2nd one did get the MTX toned down after launch and a lot of work was done, so it's a very good game now, but as you said that's after many folks moved on. Starfield seems to be more a case of over-ambition rather than corporate greed. They really cooked themselves trying to go for the massive planet count, instead of a nice well-sized hand-crafted world which is what they excel at. I'm waiting for mod support so they can fix the issues I have with the game 😂.
 
Elden Ring. I adore it, and I don't like overly hard games. It gives you a ton of tools to scale difficulty for yourself (summons, OP weapons, leveling up a bunch, summoning another player and laying on the ground while they 1v1 the boss for you) and a horse to just run away and come back later if something's too tough.
 
Helldivers 2. Phenomenal 3rd person co-op PvE shooter. The developers seem to have their heads screwed on right. There is MTX but it's fair (stuff doesn't go away to try and scare you into buying quick), and you can find the premium currency in missions so if you wanted to you can just play the game enough to afford all the stuff you want. Tis how I have the armor bits I liked, haven't spent a dime on the game above the $40 entry price (also very nice vs the new $70 standard).
 
For racing, if you haven't tried them already, any of the Codemasters Rally games. I would recommend a wheel though, I don't have one so I didn't get as much fun out of it as I would have. They are very, very well crafted games in terms of vehicle handling, and they'll run (or at least Dirty Rally did, Dirt 4 should as well) on a Dell business laptop with a dual-core low power i5, so their "Codemasters" name seems well earned.
 
Spintires (the original one) if you want to poke about driving heavy trucks through mud. I tried Snowrunner on gamepass and its fun too so worth a look at. Apparently the mud physics and truck details are worse in it, but I didn't play long enough to notice stuff like that.
 
Red Dead Redemption 2 if you haven't played it already. Very good cowboy game, the best parts are actually the character interactions, not the shooty shooty. Online is barely even on life support, but I hop on every now and then just to poke around.
 
Ubisoft games 😂. They're bloated and can be eh quality, but you can get them on sale pretty often for like $5 or less each. I've enjoyed Ghost Recon Wildlands and Breakpoint (after turning the silly rpg stuff off in Breakpoint). And I had fun in the newer AC games (Origins, Odyssey, Valhalla). They're less assassins creed, more adventures in X or Y historical period, but I like 'em. Haven't finished Origins but it seems the best crafted so far, Odyssey gets a little too big, and Valhalla is comically large. I got tired of playing it and still had multiple DLCs left barely touched (a roguelike mode, 2 new country dlcs, one where you play some entire storyline as Odin, etc). The best AC game I've played so far is Unity though, I actually got that free when the Notre Dame burned down (AFAIK the most realistic model of the Notre Dame is the one in AC Unity, so Ubi gave it out for free in memory of it). I've had fun in the Far Cry games too, though 3 was my favorite of those.
 
The Metro series if you haven't played that already. I like post-apoc stuff a lot and it's done very well.
 
I don't have a ton of really new games to suggest other than Helldivers as I did above. I don't play many indie titles, and I got into PC gaming in 2017 or so, so I've mostly gone back and played older AAA titles.

A lot of really big titles are live-service now, so they continually update the game instead of releasing a new title in the series. If you want more traditional AAA games, FromSoftware still makes those. Their current titles are Elden Ring and Armored Core 6, Elden Ring is getting its first DLC this June. I haven't gotten into AC yet so I don't know too much about that.
 
Also lots of AAA titles are absolutely massive now, taking years upon years to create, and given current corporate/management behavior they often flop on release, or just don't live up to their massive expectations (Starfield did this, it's not bad it's just... not great either, and it was expected to be so). So you've likely ignored the ones with a bad reputation, thus it feels like there's less games coming out.