My 5 year old, high end-ish rig is still quite relevant today. WTH, manufacturers ?!?

[Dr. FunFrock]

Hi guys,

So, I really need your opinion about this. It is my understanding that Linus often says that it is better to buy decent hardware rather than cheap crap because it will stay relevant for longer. And, we also all know that hardware isn't getting better as fast as it used to. But somehow, Intel, NVIDIA and more recently AMD have managed to maintain at least an illusion of progress, keeping us hardware enthusiats somewhat excited for their new stuff. So I'm having mixed feelings about the current "era" of hardware... On the one hand, it feels like the new Zen 3 CPUs are really bringing competition back to the market and that it's overall a really good time to build a new rig ; but on the other hand, looking at what I already have, I don't feel like upgrading like at all... It feels like I'd be throwing crazy amounts of money at it for just a tiny performance upgrade in most real-life tasks.

 

I bought my rig about 5 years ago, and made a couple upgrades since then, but the thing is, I kind of expected it to be somewhat outdated by now, and it doesn't feel like it is at all. I'm wondering how I can even get excited about Ryzen 3 and stuff when it feels like for the most part, Intel have been sitting on their asses for 5 years and AMD is just barely catching up right now... 

 

So this brings me to three questions : 

-I'll put the specs of my rig below, and I'd like to know how you guys think it would fare against a more modern, similarly priced rig.

-If you want, you can share your opinion on the current state of the market, and innovation in the PC hardware domain. I know there is new stuff, but does any of it really matter ?

-Most importantly, and what I'd really like to see a LTT video about : In the end is it definitely, scientifically, benchmarkably, completely worth it to spend the extra few bucks to get a high end gaming rig since it will last for years without going really outdated ? I'd happily send my rig for Linus to benchmark it against a more recent one, but they are about a third of a world away...

 

My current specs : 

-Core i7 5820k (The main reason of this whole rant. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but I bought it for 450€ at the time, I run it at a smooth 4.2GHz sustained without even increasing the voltage. It trashed the similarly priced 6700k and 7700k on most tasks, 8700k was barely better and the 9700k still isn't worth the upgrade, with the 9900k being considerably more expansive than what I paid at the time. WTF Intel ?!?)

-Asus X99-A motherboard. Not exactly top of the line, but very decent. I don't have thunderbolt, or USB type C, only USB 3.1 gen 1 or whatever it's called. But what I did get with a super-easy-to-do BIOS upgrade, is my PCIE NVMe M.2 SSD running with absolutely no issue. So I don't think thunderbolt alone is worth buying a new system.

-GTX 1080. Obviously an upgrade, since it wasn't released 5 years ago. But. An RTX 2080 non-SUPER is currently priced at about 750€ and for half that price, I could get a second hand GTX 1080 and run SLI, trashing even the RTX 2080Ti at the cost of a lot of power... I don't really feel the need to though, I get satisfying framerates in all of my games.

-24GBs of DDR4 RAM. That was new at the time, it's only becoming standard now (and I bought it before the memory crisis where prices skyrocketed so in the end it was about as expansive as it would be today). By the way I can run quad-channel, I have 8 memory slots, and I also have 28 PCIe lanes which is slightly better than 16. 450€, 5yo CPU guys.

 

BTW you can roughly convert 1€ to $1 (USD) when talking about computer hardware because euros are actually worth a bit more but since we get fckd by taxes you guys pay roughly the same amount but in dollars instead of euros. That's just a general rule of thumb and only applicable to computer hardware.

[Jurrunio]

It's still HEDT stuff at the end of the day, it'd better be relevant for just 5 years

 

says 8 y/o i7 user

[Mira Yurizaki]

Performance in your use cases isn't simply based on hardware, but software as well. If software isn't catching up to using the newfangled things hardware can provide, then "progress" appears to stagnate. Case in point, currently no computer setup in the world can run Crysis to 100 FPS on maximum settings, despite being a 12 year old game because the game was designed in a way that isn't scalable at all with current technology.

[KarathKasun]

Because we hit a plateau of "feels faster" for daily tasks around 2012.

 

If you do any compute intensive work, there have been pretty massive increases in performance.

 

Games do not really count as intense work for a CPU anymore.

[AntiTrust]

I still think that games are pandering to the old outdated consoles ps4 and xbox one that were underpowered even when they released 5 years ago. A decent rig like this should be good for the forseeable future as well. If you're happy you might as well try to stretch it a few more years. I upgraded from a 4690k with a gtx 970 and my brother is running a similar rig still and is quite happy. 

 

the only major change for cpu's  is the release of hyperthreaded 6 and 8 core chips that are approaching 5ghz which is pretty rad. The GPU market is kind of meh right now imo, the performance on my rtx 2080 is good (not quite 144hz QHD ultra in every game) but the card runs pretty hot and was incredibly expensive... a 970 is still probably the best bang for your buck and it was released in 2014

 

[TacoSenpai]

I don't see the GTX 1080 or i7 5820K going totally obsolete anytime soon.  Ryzen was a big jump and shakeup and we're beginning to see the results of that but even for video editing an R5 or 6 core intel are plenty enough. 

[Majinhoju]

I'm running a 4670k with a gtx 1080.  The only major upgrade in the time since I built this thing was replacing my 780 with the 1080.  This thing is still going strong and will likely not be getting replaced anytime soon.

[Sauron]

31 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

says 8 y/o i7 user

IKR

[flibberdipper]

37 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

says 8 y/o i7 user

I would say "you've got balls of steel" but then I looked in your sig at the clock speed and immediately got sad.

 

I may have a 3770 which is plenty capable today, but the 3700x is lookin' mighty tasty. More cores that are also faster has me feeling some sort of way. The biggest downgrade for me going from my old rig to my current is going from a 4.6GHz G3258 to the 3770, the single core asspounding the ol' dually had was great.

[Blze001]

It's kind of odd being in a situation where my GPU is gonna stay on-par with the new versions for a good 3 generations or so. I remember when you practically had to upgrade every other gen.

[Nena Trinity]

I am happy with my FX-8370 and just slapped on a Vega 56... :3

[dizmo]

I think your view is a little off here. While yes, Linus doesn't say go for the cheapest stuff, IIRC he says go mid-tier and upgrade after a few years, as you'll see the most benefit at a better cost. You've not done that. You went for the extreme high end, and that's why your hardware is still relevant today. You also have upgraded the video card to something that's only a generation old, so one of the things that's going to be the main bottleneck is already taken care of.

 

If you take a look at your build, what exactly did you figure would be considerably out of date? It won't be the motherboard, RAM doesn't really change, and you upgraded the video card. That just leaves the CPU; something that you got high end, with a decent core count and clock. CPUs generally improve the slowest.

 

Saying you can buy a second hand card and crush what's out today is kind of a no brainer, and honestly, irrelevant. I built my PC, with a little work and planning, for $350. For everything. That doesn't in anyway shape or form matters if I was looking to build something with brand new parts today. Also, SLI very rarely works in all titles, so while yes you might see better performance here and there, it's not a constant.

 

Here's a better way to look at it. You spent say 1,900 Euro on the parts you listed, yes? I'm going to assume 250 for the motherboard because you didn't provide a price. What would it cost to build something like that today? Less than half that, for better parts. For 975 Euro, you can get:

 

R5 3600

X470 motherboard

32GB 3333mhz RAM

RTX 2070

 

So, not only are you getting better performance, it costs less...and I didn't even pick the cheapest parts.

 

 

[Nena Trinity]

17 minutes ago, dizmo said:

I think your view is a little off here. While yes, Linus doesn't say go for the cheapest stuff, IIRC he says go mid-tier and upgrade after a few years, as you'll see the most benefit at a better cost. You've not done that. You went for the extreme high end, and that's why your hardware is still relevant today. You also have upgraded the video card to something that's only a generation old, so one of the things that's going to be the main bottleneck is already taken care of.

 

If you take a look at your build, what exactly did you figure would be considerably out of date? It won't be the motherboard, RAM doesn't really change, and you upgraded the video card. That just leaves the CPU; something that you got high end, with a decent core count and clock. CPUs generally improve the slowest.

 

Saying you can buy a second hand card and crush what's out today is kind of a no brainer, and honestly, irrelevant. I built my PC, with a little work and planning, for $350. For everything. That doesn't in anyway shape or form matters if I was looking to build something with brand new parts today. Also, SLI very rarely works in all titles, so while yes you might see better performance here and there, it's not a constant.

 

Here's a better way to look at it. You spent say 1,900 Euro on the parts you listed, yes? I'm going to assume 250 for the motherboard because you didn't provide a price. What would it cost to build something like that today? Less than half that, for better parts. For 975 Euro, you can get:

 

R5 3600

X470 motherboard

32GB 3333mhz RAM

RTX 2070

 

So, not only are you getting better performance, it costs less...and I didn't even pick the cheapest parts.

 

 

Well I picked the Athlon x4 860k then upgraded to 880k and had regrets later on my secondary rig, may upgrade it to Ryzen 3000 x-x

[KarathKasun]

Just now, Nena360 said:

Well I picked the Athlon x4 860k then upgraded to 880k and had regrets later on my secondary rig, may upgrade it to Ryzen 3000 x-x

FX was a bad investment at any point in its lifetime.  The sockets were already old and dated and DDR3 was already getting pretty long in the tooth.

[Dr. FunFrock]

4 minutes ago, dizmo said:

I think your view is a little off here. While yes, Linus doesn't say go for the cheapest stuff, IIRC he says go mid-tier and upgrade after a few years, as you'll see the most benefit at a better cost. You've not done that. You went for the extreme high end, and that's why your hardware is still relevant today. You also have upgraded the video card to something that's only a generation old, so one of the things that's going to be the main bottleneck is already taken care of.

 

Well I kinda did. Calling the 5820k mid-tier is kind of an understatement, but calling it extreme high end is definitely too much. You could already spend more than twice the money at that time for the very top of the line core i7. The 5820k, 5930k and 5960x were a bit special in that they shared the lga 2011-v3 socket with the current gen Xeons, which intel doesn't do anymore. So yeah the motherboards were kind of expansive, but they also packed quite a lot more features than the boards that were available for 4xxx series CPUs.

 

When I initially my reasonning was that GTX 900 series were going to get replaced so I'd better go for a cheap one and replace it later, which I did. That allowed me to save a bit of money for the CPU and MoBo, which in the end I definitely don't regret. I think the initial cost was about 1100Eur for the complete system, CPU + Mobo + HDD (I bought the ssd later) + AiO 120*240mm watercooling + PSU + Case + 16GB RAM (threw in an extra stick later) and a GTX 960 2GB. The specs you gave me would cost about the same where I live, without any of all that extra stuff, and except for the GPU which would be about infinitely better even if downgraded to a 2060 it doesn't look like much of an upgrade to me...

[Zando_]

 

-I'll put the specs of my rig below, and I'd like to know how you guys think it would fare against a more modern, similarly priced rig.

 

Similarly priced? Pretty bad tbh, high end stuff at the same price point is a lot faster. Similarly specced? (something like an R5 2600 and such) pretty well, it's on par with that at least, with a bit more OC it'll be slightly faster, I run my 5820K at 4.4Ghz most of the time. 

 

-If you want, you can share your opinion on the current state of the market, and innovation in the PC hardware domain. I know there is new stuff, but does any of it really matter ?

 

I'd say it's pretty awesome that current midrange stuff is competing with older HEDT offerings. More performance per dollar is better than just more performance overall for a lot of people, not everyone can afford HEDT in the first place or needs/wants the features. 

 

-Most importantly, and what I'd really like to see a LTT video about : In the end is it definitely, scientifically, benchmarkably, completely worth it to spend the extra few bucks to get a high end gaming rig since it will last for years without going really outdated ? I'd happily send my rig for Linus to benchmark it against a more recent one, but they are about a third of a world away...

 

I think that's too subjective tbh. Who is supposed to decide for everyone what performance is acceptable for what increase in price? Or what level of performance is low enough that you need an upgrade? If your rig still kicks ass in all the ways you want it to then you have no reason to upgrade, even if someone else wouldn't be happy with that. 

[Nena Trinity]

Just now, KarathKasun said:

FX was a bad investment at any point in its lifetime.  The sockets were already old and dated and DDR3 was already getting pretty long in the tooth.

No the FX-8370 was good priced when I bought it and is still holding up today...

[KarathKasun]

1 minute ago, Nena360 said:

No the FX-8370 was good priced when I bought it and is still holding up today...

Oof, no.  I have an FX 8300 @ 4.7ghz, its outperformed by some used ebay parts I got about a year later for the price of the CPU alone.

[Nena Trinity]

Just now, KarathKasun said:

Oof, no.  I have an FX 8300 @ 4.7ghz, its outperformed by some used ebay parts I got about a year later for the price of the CPU alone.

Per-core or multi-core? Also buying used is always a risk! XD

[majin_sam]

You could stand a CPU upgrade but it really depends on what your personal standards and uses are. 5820k is the weaker aspect but even it still has life on it. You might want to rethink your definition of "barely" is though. 8700k doesn't "barely" beat it, it crushes it, and the 6700k beats it pretty handily in everything outside of multithread...so I dunno where you got that from. That said, 12 Haswell threads at those clocks is still a solid performer. 

[KarathKasun]

Just now, Nena360 said:

Per-core or multi-core? Also buying used is always a risk! XD

Same multicore, 50% better single core.  For the price, the risk is acceptable.  $50 E3 Xeon CPU and $35 H61 motherboard, stole the ram from the FX rig and mothballed it.

[Dr. FunFrock]

And when I say that I expected my rig to be kind of outdated, I mean that as a hardware enthusiast I think I should start to feel an itch to upgrade by now, and I don't.

I'll admit that my expectations are kind of based on a bygone era, when I grew up in the nineties your 5 year old PC would suddenly look like an antique when trying to run a new game on it...

[Nena Trinity]

1 minute ago, KarathKasun said:

Same multicore, 50% better single core.  For the price, the risk is acceptable.  $50 E3 Xeon CPU and $35 H61 motherboard, stole the ram from the FX rig and mothballed it.

Well that would be nice to avoid the shitty Killer Ethernet... OwO

[KarathKasun]

8 minutes ago, Nena360 said:

Well that would be nice to avoid the shitty Killer Ethernet... OwO

I came from a Gigabyte 990FX-UD7, a $300 board when it was new.  The CPU choked with SLI/Crossfire so bad it wasnt even funny.  FX would have been fine if Intel had just released a clock boosted Core 2 type of chip, but by the time FX launched 2nd gen i7s were available.  It was two years too late for what it was.

 

If FX launched in place of the Phenom II x6, it wouldnt look so bad.  But that is not what happened.

[Nena Trinity]

3 minutes ago, KarathKasun said:

I came from a Gigabyte 990FX-UD7, a $300 board when it was new.  The CPU choked with SLI/Crossfire so bad it wasnt even funny.  FX would have been fine if Intel had just released a clock boosted Core 2 type of chip, but by the time FX launched 2nd gen i7s were available.  It was two years too late for what it was.

 

If FX launched in place of the Phenom II x6, it wouldnt look so bad.  But that is not what happened.

I barely paid anything for my MSI 970 Gaming board... XD