bionicgeekgrrl

Looks a good call on the Pro Max. I've no particular brand loyalty however, so it doesn't have to be an MSI board (though I've been pretty happy with the Z170A Gaming M7 I currently have). RAM pricing is so volatile that it is probably a little bit likely that pricing will be very different when ordering happens (probably in a week or two depending upon when other half gets paid and how much gets paid off the credit card for next month), so I'll compare sets/speeds then and go from there with a min. of 3200, but ideal of 3600. RGB isn't important (the Define R5 has no window, so RGB won't be seen, though I do have an airbrush and do have plans to mod the panels a bit at some stage when the current situation has calmed down again). Obviously, ideally I'd love a 3950X, but it isn't viable atm, but it could be in the future when 4xxx chips start appearing and prices of 3xxx chips fall, so the VRMs should be capable of handling it ideally. One thing I'm wondering about is B550 boards and whether they'd be worth waiting for over 450.

Yes, everything is in flux with new products most likely. The monitors will need upgrading at some point as well really, especially mine as I have a rather assorted collection connected (as well as gaming I do video editing and DTP for a magazine), with 3 monitors (1 is very old that I had laying around, the other two one is fairly old now, but has decent colour reproduction so is good for the DTP work, the other is 60Hz, but is decent enough at present for gaming (obviously it could be a lot better). Ideally, going to 1440P is the plan, but again it depends upon budgets and how finances hold up with the aftermath of the current situation, etc. The Plex/NAS systems are the most desperate for needing upgrades, but it makes more sense to me to upgrade the gaming/workstation desktops to give them the ryzen platform rather than spending that money on a system that won't make much use of it. The jump from Q9550 to i7-6700K should be pretty significant however I am suspecting (especially as it will also have 4x the memory), the Q9550 really struggles if it is asked to transcode video!, the 4460 copes with transcoding a lot better (plus it has 24Gb of RAM vs 8Gb). Budgeting means about £500 a time can be spent, and then repeat for each step. Less ideal than doing it in one go, but it is what it is. (it should be noted that the Q9550 and i5-4460 are in two separate locations as are the two desktops) Thanks for the advice.

The HDD is one of those things where it would be useful to have, but not essential. The 3xxx series nvidia cards and RDNA2 card from AMD will probably be out by the time the graphics cards get upgraded (atm the monitors are 1080P, so for most titles, except the most recent the 970 can cope well enough for now).

That matches what I was looking at for the most part, the Seagate HDD aside.

Country is UK, budget is around £500 (give or take a bit) per system initially, the likelihood is one system will get done then the other a bit later to let the credit card recover a bit first. Then the same again for upgrading the graphics cards later. (looking on pcpartspicker shows the 1600AF out of stock most places now however, so some rethinking might have to happen!)

So, it has finally come time to think about upgrading from the i7 6700K system(s)1 I have. The current specs are Intel i7-6700K 16Gb DDR4@2400Mhz Gigabyte GeForce 970 4Gb 500-600W PSU (forget which is in which system at present)2 4Tb WD Black HDD 480Gb SSD SATA Define R5 Case My thinking is the following to upgrade both systems: AMD Ryzen 5 1600 AF 16Gb 3200Mhz/3600Mhz Trident Z depending upon final budget MSI B450 Tomahawk Max 1Tb NVMe SSD 4Tb/6Tb HDD 1x 550W-600W PSU (might decide to just replace both PSUs however, again this depends upon the final budgets) The following will carry over: Gigabyte 970GTX PSU in one system as it is newer Cases 4Tb HDDs (plus a couple of 2Tb HDDS in my system, which will be retired by the new HDD) 480Gb SSD The thinking above is to get a slightly weaker CPU for a great price (£88 atm iirc) and upgrade to a Ryzen 3xxx CPU at a later time and spend the budget on the NVMe SSD and faster memory instead. The graphics cards do need upgrading, but there is currently not the budget for doing those at the same time as the base system. The i7 6700Ks will be repurposed for replacing a couple of Q9550 and i5-4460 systems which currently act as Plex/NAS servers. 1 There are two gaming desktops, one for me, one for my other half, my system has more HDDs for extra storage and an older PSU however, otherwise they're currently identical. 2 My other halfs desktop has a 550W EVGA PSU iirc (without taking the side panel off to double check) and my system has an older Antec 600W PSU. The PSU in my system will be replaced.

Not so enamoured by the shape, but once it is in place you tend to forget they are there until you need to put a disc in anyway. The fact Xone controllers (including the rather expensive Elite ones and racing wheels) will carry over is a big plus, saves buying new controllers and adding extra ones is fairly affordable as a result. The backwards compatibility and the scaling support is nice (ie, games will work on Xbox One S/X, Longhorn and Anaconda and graphics detail will scale according to one statement from Spencer). I'll probably hold off for a while getting one, the original Xone I have does well enough for now for what it gets used for (light gaming and Plex most of the time) and my partner has a XoneX as well. As is usual it is not financially best to be early adopters of consoles IME.

This is our Poppy. A 3something year old English Staffordshire Bull Terrier cross (crossed with American Staffordshire Bull Terrier and Greyhound!). She is a beautiful soul, with a lot of excitement. She came from a rescue place near by to where we live. Prior to coming to us just over 2 years ago, she had had 2 failed rehoming attempts, and 3 prior homes before that. She came to us with some behavioural problems, mainly the excitement and a propensity to use her teeth at times, especially when over excited. As she has settled the excitement has settled down to being in bursts and we've worked on ways to contain her excitement and stop her getting too hyper and reverting back to using her teeth. Patience and perseverance has paid off though.

IIRC NVENC and QuickSync mainly boost h.264 rather than h.265, so starting with 264 content will be a likely better option for transcoding (some nvidia cards can do 265, but not many iirc). The other option of course is to make optimised versions so transcoding is negated to some extent, but at the expense of storage space.