Help I'm a Noob

Iserick · June 17, 2021

Alright.. soooo. I ended up getting a digital storm prebuild right around the time that the whole pandemic situation started (I have never built a pc on my own) anyways I have an MSI MEG Z490 Godlike motherboard with an i9 10900k and I want to upgrade to 11th gen CPU but I have not seen anyone post anything about upgrading any z490 to 11th gen. I would really appreciate if someone could help me figure out if I just need ddr4 and bios update? or what else I might need to get going on rocket lake? I also would like to learn what I might need to get up and going with Optane or if that is even a feature that I should be interested in? (as mentioned above I have never built a pc on my own and I'm just a little lost.) I apologies if that is a handful of stupid questions...like I said I'm a noob PS.. my motherboard also came with M.2 XPANDER-Z GEN 4 S and I don't exactly know what it is for and if I should install it and some more m.2 or ?

Xaring · June 17, 2021

~~Im afraid you won't be able to do that, you need a socket LGA1700 for 11 Gen Intel CPUs, but Z490 is socket LGA1200.~~

Edit: You would be able to! My bad, I thought that 11th Gen was LGA 1700 for some reason, but thats for the upcomming gen!.

In any case, there's little reason to upgrade to 11th gen with your current CPU, in many workloads, the 10900k beats the 11900k.

If you want gaming performance, your current GPU is just as good as (or better than) the new one.
If you want productivity performance, you should be looking into AMD, Ryzen 9 5950X is the top of the consumer line and an absolute beast.

If you want a healthy mix of both, you can stick to your current offering or swap to AMD, but NOT upgrade to the 11900K.

Also, about the M.2 XPANDER-Z GEN 4 S will allow you to add more m.2 storage drives whenever you need. if you so choose to. No need to install it until you actually want to install more M.2 Drives though, you can safely keep it in a box.

AnotherGlenn · June 17, 2021

Well, going from 10900K to 11900K is not that much of an upgrade. Basically, it's not worth it to spend that much money for a very small increase.

But yes, if you do go ahead with the "upgrade", the Z490 Godlike is compatible. You might need to check your BIOS version and make it's the newest one, or you might need to flash your BIOS. Sorry, don't have time to do the research.

Optane - depends on your use case, but I don't think you need to be interested in this.

The XPANDER-Z is a PCI card in which you install M.2 drives. Basically, you can increase your storage size with more m.2 drives.

jaslion · June 17, 2021

1 hour ago, AnotherGlenn said:

Well, going from 10900K to 11900K is not that much of an upgrade. Basically, it's not worth it to spend that much money for a very small increase.

But yes, if you do go ahead with the "upgrade", the Z490 Godlike is compatible. You might need to check your BIOS version and make it's the newest one, or you might need to flash your BIOS. Sorry, don't have time to do the research.

Optane - depends on your use case, but I don't think you need to be interested in this.

The XPANDER-Z is a PCI card in which you install M.2 drives. Basically, you can increase your storage size with more m.2 drives.

It's a downgrade basically.

You LOSE 2 cores for barely any single core performance gain. So yeah don't get it it's basically a downgrade.

AnotherGlenn · June 17, 2021

2 hours ago, jaslion said:

It's a downgrade basically.

You LOSE 2 cores for barely any single core performance gain. So yeah don't get it it's basically a downgrade.

Well, yeah - completely agree. But there are a few situations where the 11900K is a bit better (very small improvement, not worth it). But as the OP has not mentioned what the PC is used for, I went for the "conservative" approach in my initial response

Iserick · June 18, 2021

The reason I started looking into it is because I was looking in to the mystic light feature or whatever light controller for my motherboard. (I still have not been able to figure that all out) and when I tried to download MSI dragon center or whatever I think I downloaded the wrong version or something because my pc crashed and I could not get out of bios until I reset my pc. it might have been trying to overclock or whatever to work with the new CPU? idk! as soon as I opened the installer that I got off of the MSI support page for my motherboard (it download some sdk files and such) it then booted me into bios where I remained until I reset.. I kinda gave up on all that to be honest lol anyways I might be wrong here but I just figured that being on the latest bios and such would be a good thing? I also haven't seen anyone trying to run 11th gen on any z490 and thought it would be a pretty cool build. thank you to all who replied I appreciate the help!