pritch

I'm inclined to agree with you. I take Levent's point, but a quick synthetic test won't tell me about the long-term implications of the component change. There may not be any implications, but the company is clearly cost-cutting, so I'll always feel like I'm taking a chance on it, something I wouldn't have done had I seen this revelation before purchase. Still interested to hear from anyone else who might have bought one of these or has an opinion in general on this debacle.

Like many I bought the 1TB SN550 in the Amazon sale, and then Linus' clip about it came up on my TV literally as I was installing it... I'm on a tight budget atm. I bought this for extra storage for games in my current machine, possibly primary storage for games over my 860 QVO, and I also bought it as a possible OS drive in my next machine, which will be at least a year, probably more down the line, sometime when I can afford it and DDR5 is established. I don't do many if any big writes outside of game installs. But will the nerfing WD has done to the SN550 impact on it as on OS drive immediately or over time? Leaving aside the crappy behaviour from WD, I could return it and get a 980 which is about £15 more but if it's apples for apples, I dunno

Thanks both but out of my price range for this, my main rig card is a 1070 and I kept my back-up R9 270 I'm looking to do this for £20 or less or it probably isn't worth it Interestingly enough, I tried my back-up rig which has my old Radeon R9 270 in it and that is only putting out 4k at 30Hz via the DP to HDMI adapter. Neither Windows nor Radeon settings offer 60Hz as an option, and the latter says the display won't support it when I tried to make a custom res. The TV does of course support 4k at 60Hz, so unless there's an HDMI port limitation I haven't uncovered or something, I'm not confident this will work. At this stage I think I may plonk a R5 240 in the old Dell (only £14) and just go for as smooth a FHD output as possible.

I had a look - think the 460 is a bit OP for what I'm looking for, and I couldn't find a low profile variant on ebay. It's also just about modern enough to be caught up in the current derp pricing, it seems Whoa, no no, not 4K gaming, just video - I say again, Kodi with Ubuntu. Yeah, a more recent iGPU can do that but a i5 2400 is what I got Sorry if that wasn't clear - I'm looking to make a 4k theatre out of this at hobo levels of investment - cheapest 4k card for video possible, and if I can do that and find a very cheap blu-ray internal drive I might put that in too.

Please can I invite you to cast your minds back to the simpler times of the early 10s.. A neighbour recently handed me a small form factor Dell Optiplex 990 of 2011 vintage to dispose of. Being unwilling to get rid of any hardware atm due to precarious finances and The State of Tech I've put Ubuntu on it and want to play around a bit with Kodi as it has a 1TB hdd so could store a bit of content. I've currently got it hooked up to my LG 4K TV via a Displayport to HDMI "4K" adapter. 1080p output is ok-ish but occasionally choppy from the integrated graphics on the i5-2400; 4K is not supported. If I could find a cheap used discrete card that could push out 4k at 60hz and make other content smoother I would consider it. It has to be a low profile card powered by the slot. I've identified the Radeon R5 240 as possibly the way to go on this.. avoiding HDMI models as they seem to be pre-2.0 and therefore lacking 4K 60 capability, but there's a steady supply of cards with Displayport 1.2 which I *hope* might play ball with my 4K ebay adapter special en route to the TV. I would prefer a passive card but not sure that's an option. Can anyone comment on the viability of this or done anything similar? I need to put a card in it either way if I'm ever to put Win 10 on it again as the Intel display driver - which I cannot seem to stop Windows installing - is only offering up 1366x768 and I cannot be doing with that.

I built my current primary machine in 2016 and running a 6600k @ 4.4, it's almost exclusively for gaming and I tend to wait for discounts on Steam etc. I feel I can go another year or two before needing more cores and threads, and I have never bought AMD for one of my primary machines before, but I just can't envisage buying anything other than a Zen 3/4 Ryzen 5 at this stage. I know Intel have managed to rice the pants off of 14nm but it comes at a cost - both at purchase time and in watts from the wall. I'd have a hard time paying the same or more for an outdated process. AMD is going to be first to 5nm and the value, socket compatibility, everything looks like it's just going to be more appealing to someone on a bit of a budget. I'm starting to think about this build even though it's a way off, am I missing something or for my usage case can anyone make a case for future Intel at this stage?

Ah ok I had another look, just doesn't have direct air intake over the fans. But that's definitely better than nothing. You would probably be fine with 1 front intake and 1 rear exhaust. But if you want 2 at the front, you might want to run another at the top to exhaust as well. These should all be at relatively low speeds.

It's best to have balanced intake and exhaust of airflow through a case for equal pressure esp. when running a graphics card that dissipates heat into the case. But sometimes differences aren't as great vs. negative pressure as some make out. If running at stock clocks and correctly applied thermal paste, it may not be too bad. If you don't want to return the case right away, build it up, take your time if it's your first build and don't be hard on yourself. You will make some mistakes, I still do after 15 years. When you get it all together see how it runs under load. You may be fine at stock after all. Does the case any provision for front fans at all?

Oh, ok all good then. As to your question, you could almost go to the 3700X. It's a tough call. The extra cores and threads may make a bit of a difference in editing and future proofing in some games. But it's a big % jump up in price right now. Maybe think about how long this config needs to last you for before you can upgrade. I'm not sure what your current RAM speed is, but the new Ryzens are well paired with DDR4 at at least 3000Mhz, so at least 16GB of that should be an equal priority, if not already factored.

Wait, are you factoring the motherboard into this? I assumed you already had leaving this budget available but perhaps not?

You have a decent budget so you have some choices here. It sounds like you are looking for a multipurpose machine, and everything we have seen in the last couple weeks says that should be pointing you in the direction of Ryzen 3xxx IMHO the answer really depends on what you will do with this machine the most. R5 3600 is a good performance for the price. That will give you plenty of change for gpu horsepower if AAA gaming on a high spec monitor or cuda aided editing is the bigger thing for you. If fast workloads that take advantage of more cores / threads is more of the priority, that points more to something like a 3900x and a tier down on the gpu. I always remind myself that upgrading the gpu is much easier than the cpu and possibly mobo in the medium-long term, too.

If you can get that for under 60, great. If you had a generic 500w supply that might be borderline, but an evga one should be ok.

Ah, scratch that, the 2TB QLC model has now come down under £200! It was a couple of weeks since I was looking at this. So I guess that takes care of that!

Thanks. I was thinking more about total storage capacity for the price, rather than ultimate speed. The Intel QLC NVMe are now just under £100 for 1TB model, but 2TB (my preferred capacity for my games library going forward) is still more than double that. Same is true for SATA drives, I could get two 1TB SATA drives for about the same, but if there's a faster / less bulky solution I'd probably favour it at the same price. The QLC limitations hopefully wouldn't show up on games library duty

I slightly agree with SolarNova, I think AMD are finally releasing competitive chips at a given pricepoint, rather than delivering any sort of deathblow. As Linus said, that competition is great in itself anyway, for us. The R5 is probably the most competitive? I'm a gamer so I guess that's my perspective, but looking at the Gamers Nexus benches it seems AMD is now killing it with the 3900 for those whose choice of software for work benefits from extra threads. This is tempered by the boards for me, I really don't like the small proprietary coolers either and that would make me think twice, also I've seen newish X470 boards fail on a couple of people now so even though that doesn't necessarily prove / mean anything, I have to admit it does affect my confidence. I wouldn't even be looking at 570 until it's bedded in though, so I guess I can wait and watch.

I have an Asus Z170-A that's now a few years old. When I built my current PC I could only afford conventional 250GB SATA SSD and 1TB HDD combination. My Steam games are on the HDD. With prices falling I would like to upgrade storage to move my games on to some combination of SSDs. I could easily add a single m2 SSD, but I also started to look at the possibility of a RAID 0 configuration making use of the dedicated m2 and also a vacant PCIe slot. I'm confused about PCIe lanes and if my board will support two new SSDs in this configuration? I have a GTX 1070 at 16x and from what I can see the Z170-A has 16+4 lanes. If I try to run an m2 at 4x and another in a PCIe slot at 4x, will I be over what's possible? Would I perhaps need to run the 1070 at 8x? Is this proposition even a good idea??

Thanks for the heads up. Ain't that always the way.. ?

Yeah I did take a look at X79, I just think it might be overkill at this time for what I'm doing here. It would be more future proof if I come to drop in a newer GPU or do something other than gaming with this theoretical build, but it's also quite a bit more money right now if I'm looking to individual parts, mobos are even more than X58 and they're already pricey. The CPUs are a lot more. There are one or two i7 bundles floating around, I wouldn't rule one out but I'd have to get a really good deal. Yeah again, an X5660 already represents a quantum leap over any Core 2 Quad, and can be had for £12. Oh yes, I do like to tinker. That's half the fun, right? I see you have a link to X58 info which I will check out, but can you recommend any boards?

I frequently stay at my folks' place on vacation and have a mATX tower there to pretty much keep me sane. It's a lot of bits from my 2009 main build, which was eventually killed off by mobo failure. I'd sold all the DDR2 but when I was resurrecting found an MSI mobo combo with an E8400, 8GB DDR3 @ 1333 for very cheap, like £35, so I took out the E8400, popped my old faithful Q6600 in, with an SSD, my old 640GB HDD for games lib, and my old R9 270. It's.. ok, surprisingly not too bad at low settings. I'm fairly certain the CPU is the bottleneck in anything remotely triple-Aish. It's G41 chipset, not so great (does anyone on here even remember Socket 775?!) - the only overclocking is the FSB and while the Q6600 gamely runs at 3GHz all day long (I had it at 3.2 back in the day on its proper board), it's hot (I admittedly should've changed the cooler anyway as I think it's 65w solution for that E8400) and quite noisy. At this point I'm thinking, nice as it's been to resurrect a great old chip, I may need to retire that mobo and CPU intact to a place of honour, and drop in a slightly newer replacement, reusing everything else - key word here is slightly, I don't want to pay much (not used too often) and yeah it's still only an R9 270, so. The sensible thing might be to find a circa i5 2500 bundle, but that's kinda boring. I looked into dropping a modded Xeon 5450 in to the existing mobo, but I've ruled that out due to breaking up the current board, bios and other issues with the 771 in 775 thing, and a 120w TDP for relatively marginal performance, so that's out. X58 and Socket 1366 just appeals somehow, I've never done a Xeon based build and I kinda like the irony of an old ghetto PC build having more cores and 3x the threads of any main PC I've had (upgrade path was/is Q6600 to i5 6600K). I say this because the X5660 can be had for real cheap, like much cheaper than a 2500 for similar perf, and is 6C/12T. The issue is definitely boards. There's a lot of Chinese X58 mATX boards on ebay but I really don't know about these. If anyone has any experience at all I'd be interested to know. I can find very little info. They're certainly cheap, I could pair it with a X5660 for like £50ish, but would I just have a £50 tea tray. So I'm also looking at old workstation boards like HP Z400. Can also be had cheap, quality should be good, only issue here is ATX not mATX and I don't really want to buy a new case, but *sigh* I might if I have to. Am I nuts? What would you do here. Let me know, and if you see any issues with this as I'm out of my comfort zone a bit here. But yeah, I kinda want to build a Xeon. Just because!!