PC Building Survey

[Amaranth]

Yes many times over, but, that said, I think that you should make sure to clarify in your analysis that you derived your data from a subset of the population that would not be representative of the general public (unless you were planning on doing so already).

[Bombastinator]

2 minutes ago, Kisai said:

I've alternated between things so :

 

The present PC is an i7-4770, 32GB DDR3 on a AsRock Z87, Geforce 1080, Crucial CT500MX200 SSD, and some other things (eg there's 6 hard drives and two optical drives, a SA7160 FPGA capture card and a Sound Blaster X-Fi) , The Geforce 1080 required a newer case because the ASUS card was too long without removing the entire 3.5" drive cage.

 

The immediately previous PC was originally a Xeon 3220, but the CPU would keep failing so it got replaced with an C2D part, it had the maximum DDR2 memory available which I believe was 8GB at the time. Some of the hard drives, and the optical drives and chasis were reused for the PC above.

 

Due to how unreliable external hard drives are, when an external chassis fails, I pull the drive and put it inside the desktop. The present desktop has one hard drive that came from a external drive (the 2TB drive). The internal drives are presently a 6TB Segate, 2TB Wd and 6TB WD and the Crucial SSD. The external drives are a WD parts as well 3 and 4TB drives, which the serials indicate they are WD green's. The internal Desktop drives are WD Black's and a Segate Barracuda Pro.

 

When upgrading a system, I replace parts incrementally. In the case of the above 2 and a half systems (the X3220 had most parts replaced at some point, utterly cursed.) At present only the DVD-ROM is actually a part from the original system. Even the primary monitor I had for that one got retired. The secondary monitor was also replaced much earlier because it (proview) blew up.

 

I have Mac Mini's and two Laptops over the same time frame from 2004 to present. The mini's were more of a backup system than a primary use system. The first laptop was a primary use device when I was moving around, and I moved three times before I built the desktop in the second paragraph. Up to that point, the last PC I built as a PIII, when the laptop was a P4. I did buy a open-box P4 desktop from Futureshop (BestBuy) before the laptop. 

 

Overall, my recommendation really is that you're better off buying a pre-built system if it does EVERYTHING you want it to do out of the box, otherwise you're going to throw half of it away, thus wasting money. If you're buying a gift for someone, don't build it yourself, because you want the warranty on the entire-machine to apply in case they have to get it repaired. If you build a system for your friends/family, you're going to be the one supporting it.

 

I plan to build a new system at some point soon, but am kinda waiting on DDR5/PCIe5 news.

This might be considered a thread jack, in which case I apologize, but I am still very curious;

Your system is quite similar to mine except you’ve got more memory and I have a slightly newer mobo.  You almost certainly also get a better clock out of your 4770. Mine will only hit 4.0.  As such I have a few possibly dumb questions:
 

-what clock did you manage? (Mostly so I can get a view of relative performance)

-Does your cpu bottleneck that 1080 on brand new highly threaded games?

- pcie5 seems a ways out as intel hasn’t even picked up 4.0 yet.  What kind of timeline are you thinking for that one?

-same question but DDR5

[Kisai]

4 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

This might be considered a thread jack, in which case I apologize, but I am still very curious;

Your system is quite similar to mine except you’ve got more memory and I have a slightly newer mobo.  You almost certainly also get a better clock out of your 4770. Mine will only hit 4.0.  As such I have a few possibly dumb questions:
 

-what clock did you manage? (Mostly so I can get a view of relative performance)

-Does your cpu bottleneck that 1080 on brand new highly threaded games?

- pcie5 seems a ways out as intel hasn’t even picked up 4.0 yet.  What kind of timeline are you thinking for that one?

-same question but DDR5

 

3827.9Mhz is what cpu-z reports all cores operate at with x39 multiplier, but if I turn the stress test on it drops to 3623Mhz and stays at x37. The CPU is an i7-4770 (non-k) @3.4Ghz. RAM is Mushkin 992069S (PC3-12800,9-9-9-24), with 4 slots filled (4x8GB), the system BIOS is meltdown/spectre patched.

 

The GPU is running at x8, so yes, technically it's being bottlenecked a bit.

 

I'm waiting for news, because like when I bought the parts for this system, I opted to buy the most stable high performance parts, which tend to be closer to the End-of-Production than the beginning . I could have opted for PC2400 instead of PC1600, but the CPU wasn't going to be overclocked, and only supports 1333/1600 so I didn't see much benefit to buying faster memory (I bought faster memory on the DDR2 system and wound up having to replace it with the CPU, so I wasn't going to repeat that again.)

 

[Bombastinator]

15 minutes ago, Kisai said:

 

3827.9Mhz is what cpu-z reports all cores operate at with x39 multiplier, but if I turn the stress test on it drops to 3623Mhz and stays at x37. The CPU is an i7-4770 (non-k) @3.4Ghz. RAM is Mushkin 992069S (PC3-12800,9-9-9-24), with 4 slots filled (4x8GB), the system BIOS is meltdown/spectre patched.

 

The GPU is running at x8, so yes, technically it's being bottlenecked a bit.

 

I'm waiting for news, because like when I bought the parts for this system, I opted to buy the most stable high performance parts, which tend to be closer to the End-of-Production than the beginning . I could have opted for PC2400 instead of PC1600, but the CPU wasn't going to be overclocked, and only supports 1333/1600 so I didn't see much benefit to buying faster memory (I bought faster memory on the DDR2 system and wound up having to replace it with the CPU, so I wasn't going to repeat that again.)

 

The 1080 near bottleneck at x8 bodes Ill for any hopes I have.  Good to know though.  Thanks

[Reytime]

Always built my own rigs. Specs are below in my signature.

[Retro_R]

CPU:Ryzen 3800x

CPU Cooler:Deepcool Gammaxx gt bk

Motherboard:ROG Crosshair VI Hero

RAM:Corsair Vengenge LPX 16gb (2x8gb) ddr4-3200 (clocked to 3000 for stability)

GPU:Gigabyte Windforce OC 1660ti

Case:Zalman Z9 Neo (White)

SSD:WD Blue 250GB Sata

HDD:WD Black 1TB 7200rpm

PSU:Corsair RM850x

[Drak3]

My current builds:

 

Project Enza:

Spoiler

 

i7-5930K

Corsair H100i V2

64GB of DDR4-2400

MSI X99A Gaming Pro Carbon

MSI GTX 1080 Armor OC

Sapphire Nitro+ RX 580

RM1000x

256GB 950 Pro

120GB 850 Evo

960GB Sandisk Ultra II

2TB WD Green

Praxis Wetbench

 

Kahza (or EmuBox)

Spoiler

i5-4460

16GB DDR3

Gigabyte H97N Wifi

Gigabyte G1 Gaming 1070

240GB 850 Evo

Node 202

 

[BigRom]

My job is literally maintaining PCs so I frequently teardown and rebuilt office PCs

 

My own rig is in my sig below. Nothing too crazy, though I have my suspicions the GPU might be on its last legs

[rabbitanarchy14]

yea i have built many the one personal rig i built long time ago was

i54670k OC all core 4ghz

gtx 770

ssd's and hdds galore

[Mark Kaine]

Yes. See sig. 

 

The worst part: definitely cables! Might be due to the fact I chose about the worst possible case for a first build... but I'm happy I did because I love this case,  it defines my computer and it's very sturdy (seriously the metal is very thick as is the tempered glass window) and rather silent due to its sturdiness and build quality  (also see profile pic ) 

 

I've kinda build PCs before but never from scratch so that doesn't really count for me, although it certainly helped not to be a complete "noob" about those things. 

 

 

 

[flashiling]

i built my own pc with help from my older brother

Ryzen 7 2700x + Cryorig h7

Msi 450m gaming pro

Gskill ripjaws v 16 Gb 3200Mhz

Rtx2080 Gigabyte windforce

I've built a lot of computers at my school and i've repaired and assembled/disassembled many individual parts.

i've never put thermal paste on a cooler or personally put the cooler on the mobo in a build so that's gotta be the scariest part for me.

[xHashii]

I've built many PCs for me and my friends.

 

The one i'm using atm is

FX-8370

16GB DDR3 Ram

r9 390

735W Raidmax thunder v2

 

The one that i will build really soon is

 

i3-9100f

16GB DDR4 HyperX Ram

gtx 1060 6GB Asus OC edition

B365M PRO-VDH

730W Njoy 80+ Silver Power supply

Zalman S3 Case

[Devryd]

2 hours ago, xHashii said:

i3-9100f

16GB DDR4 HyperX Ram

gtx 1060 6GB Asus OC edition

B365M PRO-VDH

730W Njoy 80+ Silver Power supply

Zalman S3 Case

can you explain, why you want to build exactly this build, I don't really understand it

[xHashii]

Tight budget and it was a deal on Black Friday.

[strat guy]

Yep, just 3 but I did good research around them, parts, and on how to best mix/match, fit and fix together.

 

i5 2500k / gtx 970 / 16 gig DDR3  that's the old boy, with a few upgrades over the years, still good.

 

i7 7700k / gtx 1070 / 16 gig DDR4 (works great but somewhat salty about this because cores became a thing right after lol)

 

R5 3600 / gtx 2060 / 16 gig DDR4

 

 

[Adorable Cat]

Yeah I've got a i7 3770, 16GB of DDR3 laptop RAM in weird adapters, Asus B75 micro ATX mobo, a Sapphire R9 Fury 4GB (or my gigabyte 580 8GB, i might switch back to that if the 4GB VRAM becomes an issue), 1.5TB of SSD storage, an EVGA B3 550 watt PSU, all in a Thermaltake Core V21 case. 

[thedangerine]

At this point I have built 5 different computers for myself, and 2 for other people, with some more to come soon

[av28]

Yup, I have built a PC, which is the current rig I am using.

 

CPU: Intel™ Core i7 2600
GPU: Sapphire™ Radeon R9 290 Tri-X OC 4GB
Motherboard: ASUS P8H61 R2.0 LGA 1155 Motherboard
Case: DeepCool Tesseract
RAM: Mushkin 8x2 16GB kit 1333Mhz
Strorage: Samsung 840 Evo SSD & Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB HDD
PSU: Cooler Master MWE 750w 80+ White

 

[drk]

Yes, I have built many computers. Probably in the mid 100s as far as quantity. 

 

My main computer (in its current iteration):

Intel 8700K @ 5.1GHz

ASUS Maximus Code Motherboard

32GB (4x8GB) Trident Z @ 3466GHz

NZXT X62 Kraken AIO

2TB Nvme

3TB (3X1TB) SSD in Raid 0

ASUS STRIX 1080 Ti in SLI

EVGA P2 1200W PSU

Fractal Design R6 Case

Plus a lot of LL120/140 fans. 

 

[Anch0rDrop]

I did a similar assignment this semester. I asked a Facebook group (using the poll feature) what state they were born in. Its amazing the number of people who feel compelled to leave a comment with there life story. I am glad they contributed to the poll but the comments are of much less value.

[Gegger]

I'm one of the few that are a no, unless you count partially disassembling a prebuilt and putting it back together

[Ithanul]

Built several over the years.

 

Still remember my first one.  An AMD Black Edition Duo that was unlockable to Quad core with the right motherboard (can't remember the exact model number).     The CPU was like 50-70 bucks back than for it and that was a cheap way to get a quad core.

 

Now I got several computers that I built.

If curious, just look at my sig for all the CPUs I run (well, some, I'm still got some builds I need to finish putting together).

 

List of a list what is currently in running status:

Spoiler

Main:

1950X

ASUS ROG STRIX X399-E

G. Skill 32GB 3200MHz RAM

Samsung 960 Pro 512GB NVMe

Intel 660p 2TB NVMe

Crucial 512GB SSD

8TB WD Purple HDD

2TB External HDD

1080Ti FTW3

EVGA 1300W PSU

OS: W10 LTSB

Older model Corsair K70

Logitech G500s or Logitech G603 used at times

Wacom Tablet

Acer Predator X27

Overlord 1440p 27"

Dell Ultrasharp 1200p 30"

 

 

Secondary:

1900X

X399 ASUS Prime-A

Corsair Dominators 3200MHz 16GB RAM

Intel 330 Series 180GB SSD

960 FTW w/ AIO attach

1070 Hybrid

Corsair AX1200i PSU

OS: Mint Mate 19.2

 

Third/Tinker/Server duty (temp rework atm)

E5-2670V3

X99 ASUS

G. Skill Ripjaws 32GB 3000MHz RAM

ADATA 128GB SSD

Corsair AX1200 PSU

OS: CentOS 7

 

 

 

 

[Bombastinator]

48 minutes ago, Anch0rDrop said:

I did a similar assignment this semester. I asked a Facebook group (using the poll feature) what state they were born in. Its amazing the number of people who feel compelled to leave a comment with there life story. I am glad they contributed to the poll but the comments are of much less value.

Lol.  To you anyway.  Old people like to tell boring stories.  Wages of sin.

[seagate_surfer]

9 hours ago, Gegger said:

I'm one of the few that are a no, unless you count partially disassembling a prebuilt and putting it back together

Are you telling me that this doesn't count as building your own computer! 

[Jarsky]

Main gaming PC:

AMD Ryzen 2700x

Corsair H105i Cooler

Gigabyte Aorus X470 Ultra Gaming Motherboard

4 x 16GB 3200Mhz Corsair Vengeance Pro

EVGA GTX 2080 Super

1 x Crucial P1 1TB NVMe

1 x 4TB WD Black

Phanteks Enthoo Pro M Case

Corsair RM650x V2 PSU