Okenchi

Nitpick, the 1100t was released in DEC 2010. But yeah I think pushing 10 years is way long enough for someone working in development. Don't get me wrong, it's still working surprisingly well, and updating the vid card twice made a big difference each time, but it has reached its limit.

Ah sorry I got the impression you were suggesting a prebuild for some reason. You gonna WTF at this- AMD Phenom 2 1100 Black MSI 890FXA-GD70 Gigabyte Nvidia 1650 Super 16GB (4x4) DDR3 1600 Ram Power is a bit on the middling end at 650W My storage is all over the place: Samsung SATA 500GB SSD (older, I forget the model) for the OS Hitachi 3TB HD for the steam library m.2 PCI card with a Inland 256 just cuz I wanted to see if it would work (it does for everything but the OS). The original 500 WD HD is still in the system.... for some reason. My original plan was to reuse the 1650, M.2 and Hitachi in whatever I put together. I still have an older vid card so I'll end up with 2 working systems. I'm not sure I'll "stay" happy with the 1650 since I don't really get the impression it will keep up if I get something like a 3900X. I also need to cram a high refresh monitor in this mix somewhere. Personally I don't mind doing upgrades in a "stepping" manner since throwing out 2k at once is a bit rough these days. But you really can't upgrade ram+cpu+motherboard in anything but one huge enchilada.

I'll have to see if I want to do the vid card at that point. I'm only running a Nvidia 1650 super right now, which definitely tends towards 'value', but I'm not opposed to buying a prebuilt if it's a good value (hard to compete with volume discounts).

Oh RMA that's a real good point. I'll just hit the uber'ing hard to get my budget up then.

I plan on having a medium range overall budget (1k-2k) for an AMD build, only reusing peripherals, storage and graphics card from my existing build. What I'm toying with is, to slightly soften the massive payout for parts is buying the case. fans and power supply first and then saving up for the rest. My reasoning is these items tend to be consistent in performance/price right? It's not like Noctua fans or your basic ATX case aren't suddenly going to tank in price in two months? The only counter I can think of to this is the pandemic+tariffs are inflating power supply costs to my understanding, also black Friday might have some deals so I might be best saving up until I can buy the rig at once.

Wish if all places popped up an advertisement for a 4 dollar pcie nvme card. I figured at that cost what the hell, why not? Fwiw the cheap drive and paired with the 4x addin perform well- by far faster than the old sata Samsung SSD I also have installed. Kisai is correct and I can't boot off it. My understanding is that my motherboard has 42 lanes to divide between my graphics card (Nvidia 1650 super) and the 4x card, and as far as I can tell I didn't take a graphics performance hit although I neglected to take all the benchmarks I could before hand. HWInfi64 confirms the graphics card is still at 16x lanes. Shadow of the tomb raider's score after install it's 47, which is a bit lower than the 60 a review site rates the card at but my system is likely processor bound. (6 cores at 99% utilization for the duration of the bench more or less). Can I definitely say this was worthwhile? No. I probably would have been far better off saving the 45 dollars I spent for a new mobo+chip+etc upgrade that I much now desperately need. But it was a bit interesting to try at least I'll have a m.2 drive to throw in the rig when I do update.

Trying to push a 890fxa-gd70 a bit further- the last upgrade question I have is whether a pcie m.2 adapter is a good idea. From what I'm reading it should not pull lanes from the video card- but I'm not sure I read that right. I have no other cards except the graphics card in the system not any intent to add any for now (wifi would be nice to have but I'm hard-line right now). My real intent is I'd like to look into adding an m.2 cache drive over a larger 3-4 TB hdd. I'll keep my existing hdd or sata SSD* as the boot drive. TLDR questions- Will a pcie m.2 card affect the video card at all? Running a cache drive worthwhile? Linus demoed some cache software in a video that seemed to indicate so. Any guesses why my existing Samsung SSD blows up the bootability? I feel like it's a power issue but that's a hunch based on USB glitches. *My existing SSD keeps having glitches that ruin the bootability if it. I *think* that's fixed but I don't trust it enough to switch from the safer HDD just yet.

Thanks, in that case I may keep my mistaken ram and just focus on saving for a laptop or monitor. I'm not going to dump more money on my desktop until I can go for the mobo+chip+etc swap. Wonder if the power supply will hold up or if I'm going to need to swap that too.

@5x5 how do you mean "not as vital" out of curiosity?

I'm trying to stave off a major update and I've made some point budget upgrades. I'm wondering how much difference ram speed and timings really make: AMD Phenom II 1100T Black MSI 890FXA-GD70 Motherboard Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B Vengeance Desktop Memory Kit - 8GB (2x 4GB), PC3-12800, DDR3-1600MHz Gigabyte nvidia 1650 super Thermaltake TRX-650M TR2 RX 650-Watt Modular I *meant* to buy a 2133mhz set of 4x4gb ram, somehow screwed up and bought 4x4gb of 1600mhz. While the extra 8gb might be nice I'm wondering if I should go after the 2133. Will I see a benefit of 2133? Will the 12-12-12 timings most Ram at 2133 seems to have actually be a problem? I'm seeing that while the board supports 2133 it's effectively OC and I might not be able to use all 4 slots. Since this was a popular board for it's era I'm hoping a few people have hands on experience. I did pop the 4 sticks in just to bench with cinebench 20 and got no difference. I might be splitting hairs at this point since 8 should be enough for most games to run comfortably at 1080/60. Most of the load is the graphics card.