10 Biggest Mistakes People Make When Designing a Gaming PC

[LordHood77]

2 minutes ago, turkey3_scratch said:

How does that make your computer any more reliable? That just means you'll save money on the electricity bill, strictly speaking. I can think of countless Bronze units that are more reliable than tons of Gold units.

What the fu...? What are you talking about? You do realize that being Gold means it's more efficient right? As in, it will use less power, and said power more efficiently. Also, most Gold units are fully modular, which, like SSD's, are not neccesary, but awesome to have if you can get them. 

[turkey3_scratch]

1 minute ago, LordHood77 said:

What the fu...? What are you talking about? You do realize that being Gold means it's more efficient right? As in, it will use less power, and said power more efficiently. Also, most Gold units are fully modular, which, like SSD's, are not neccesary, but awesome to have if you can get them. 

What do you think efficiency does - it saves money on the electricity bill. It's a higher DC/AC ratio. I can think of tons of crappy modular units.

[Trik'Stari]

24 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

Professional tasks and games aren't the only heavy tasks by even the most stringent of qualifications.

One very easy example is me: I am a coder, and I am not professional. I can't imagine using any IDE without a snappy file system and a fair amount of RAM.

I built my mom a work PC (real estate appraisal) with an I3, 8g of DDR3 (that I already had and wasn't using), an Samsung 850 Pro, and a 1tb WD Blue HDD.

 

She had it about a year before retiring (long story, not in the mood to talk about it). According to her, it DID increase her productivity by about 30%. Her old PC was just.....ugh. Horribly slow. When she had to create a PDF, she would have to wait a few minutes for it to complete the process. On the new machine it was almost instant.

 

Now I'm about to reformat and reinstall W7 on it, because she doesn't do anything besides check email or surf the web on it, install the OS on the HDD, and snag that 850 pro for my Fallout 4 install.

 

I have around 80+ mods installed in Fallout 4. Load times are becoming a problem.

[ybriK]

Getting an AMD card should be number 1.

[Dash Lambda]

3 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

I built my mom a work PC (real estate appraisal) with an I3, 8g of DDR3 (that I already had and wasn't using), an Samsung 850 Pro, and a 1tb WD Blue HDD.

 

She had it about a year before retiring (long story, not in the mood to talk about it). According to her, it DID increase her productivity by about 30%. Her old PC was just.....ugh. Horribly.

 

Now I'm about to reformat and reinstall W7 on it, because she doesn't do anything besides check email or surf the web on it, install the OS on the HDD, and snag that 850 pro for my Fallout 4 install.

 

I have around 80+ mods installed in Fallout 4. Load times are becoming a problem.

Were load times ever not a problem in Fallout 4?

[turkey3_scratch]

Just now, ybriK said:

Getting an AMD card should be number 1.

I'm sick of bias.

[Trik'Stari]

Just now, Dash Lambda said:

Were load times ever not a problem in Fallout 4?

Wasn't that big of an issue before I modded it to hell.

 

Mind you, I am having issues with mods remaining, even though I've supposedly uninstalled them. I need to nuke my Fallout 4 install and redo the entire thing all-together.

[Dash Lambda]

3 hours ago, ybriK said:

Getting an AMD card should be number 1.

CPUs? I absolutely agree, AMD has no place in a new PC. GPUs?... Poke your head up sometime.

[KuJoe]

2 hours ago, turkey3_scratch said:

But then you can wait for the next better component. You have to stop waiting at one point.

I agree but if they want a specific component but can't afford it now then don't cut corners elsewhere if all you need to do is wait a week for it (or maybe look for it used to save some money).

2 hours ago, NonaHexa said:

You also have to remember that when someone says they have a $1,000 budget, they have a $1,000 budget. You can't argue it, and you can't say "this is only $50 over." Because $1,000 is $1,000. Not $1,050. Perhaps it's all the cash they have, or perhaps they're charging a credit card. Who knows? With the "$50 over is nothing" logic, $50 is nothing, but what's $25 more? What's $25 more? What's $25 more? What's $25 more? Suddenly you're $200 over-budget.

 

2 hours ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Depends on their situation. If it's being bought by someone who's been given money for their birthday/Christmas/whatever and they don't have a job (or can't get a job), then saving up may be a matter of another year, rather than a month. 

Hardware goes down in price pretty quickly. Somebody willing to wait a month or two can get a lot more for their $1000 so even if you can't increase your budget, cutting corners now could be avoided if you just wait a few months or wait for sales.

 

A good example is me with SSDs. I use SSDs in my servers for my company but whenever there is a sale on SSDs there's usually a limit of 3 per customer so I'll order 3 of them now, wait for the next sale and order 3 more (usually in 3-5 weeks), and so on. Sure, it takes me a few months to build another server but if I were to build the whole server in one week it would cost me almost double what I spend waiting for sales.

[Trik'Stari]

1 minute ago, turkey3_scratch said:

I'm sick of bias.

It's not really bias at this point. AMD CPU's just aren't worth it right now. Hopefully they catch up with Zen.

[KuJoe]

1 minute ago, Dash Lambda said:

CPUs? I absolutely agree, AMD has no place in a new PC.

Why is that?

[Dash Lambda]

3 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Wasn't that big of an issue before I modded it to hell.

 

Mind you, I am having issues with mods remaining, even though I've supposedly uninstalled them. I need to nuke my Fallout 4 install and redo the entire thing all-together.

"Nuke" it...

 

Pretty much the only mods I bothered with are any-weapon-any-mod and the "realistic facial expressions mod", the latter of which I have no idea why...

[KuJoe]

6 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

Were load times ever not a problem in Fallout 4?

I've never had a problem with load times, I think I had to wait almost a minute one time to load a saved game but that was because my VMs were syncing up a lot of data.

[Trik'Stari]

1 minute ago, Dash Lambda said:

"Nuke" it...

 

Pretty much the only mods I bothered with are any-weapon-any-mod and the "realistic facial expressions mod", the latter of which I have no idea why...

I have around 86. Most of which are to do with weapons, or settlement crap. I can't wait till the GECK comes out so the game can actually be made whole.

 

And of course the obligatory nude mods (just for the hell of it), and the ridiculous spawn mod that makes large groups of enemies spawn every hundred yards or so.

[Dash Lambda]

3 hours ago, KuJoe said:

Why is that?

Single-core performance is abominable, and that drags down multi-core performance.

Their architecture is years old, they've tried to sell "new" chips by doing little more than overclocking old ones and raising the model number for several generations now.

Their top-of-the-line 9590 only beats an i3-6100 in heavily multi-threaded tasks, and just barely at that.

[Trik'Stari]

2 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

Single-core performance is abominable, and that drags down multi-core performance.

Their architecture is years old, they've tried to sell "new" chips by doing little more than overclocking old ones and raising the model number for several generations now.

Their top-of-the-line 9590 only beats an i3-6100 in heavily multi-threaded tasks, and just barely at that.

Not to mention the old-as-dirt platform its on.

 

They just need to stop going 800 directions at once, and stop with the APU focus. No one cares about APU's except HTPC builders, and the console manufacturers.

Edited March 7, 2016 by Trik'Stari

[KuJoe]

Just now, Dash Lambda said:

Single-core performance is abominable, and that drags down multi-core performance.

Their architecture is years old, they've tried to sell "new" chips by doing little more than overclocking old ones and raising the model number for several generations now.

Their top-of-the-line 9590 only beats an i3-6100 in heavily multi-threaded tasks, and just barely at that.

I don't get it, if their CPUs work properly then why does it matter if people use them or not? I see a lot of people hating on AMD but I can't figure out why because I'm definitely not seeing it.

[Dash Lambda]

3 hours ago, Trik'Stari said:

Not to mention the old-as-dirt platform its on.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the effects of that as well.

 

No PCIe 3.0, no DDR4, terrible NVMe support, etc...

[Trik'Stari]

2 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

Oh yeah, forgot to mention the effects of that as well.

 

No PCIe 3.0, no DDR4, terrible NVMe support, etc...

No M.2 (as far as I know), old looking heat sinks, etc.

 

It seems like AMD just stopped trying when it comes to motherboard platforms and CPU's. I think they overestimated HSA adoption.

[Dash Lambda]

47 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

I don't get it, if their CPUs work properly then why does it matter if people use them or not? I see a lot of people hating on AMD but I can't figure out why because I'm definitely not seeing it.

"Working properly" doesn't make a CPU. Even their top of the line chip bottlenecks a mid-range GPU, AMD themselves don't use their CPUs.

 

43 minutes ago, Trik'Stari said:

No M.2 (as far as I know), old looking heat sinks, etc.

 

It seems like AMD just stopped trying when it comes to motherboard platforms and CPU's. I think they overestimated HSA adoption.

Probably would have been more widespread if they offered good hardware for it.

[LordHood77]

40 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

"Working properly" doesn't make a CPU. Even their top of the line chip bottlenecks a mid-range GPU, AMD themselves don't use their CPUs.

AMD's just backed themselves into a corner by going with more cores and APU. It hasn't worked out for them which is sad, because Intel, great as they are, need some actual competition. Also, they need to get back to making their chips in house again. 

 

1 hour ago, turkey3_scratch said:

What do you think efficiency does - it saves money on the electricity bill. It's a higher DC/AC ratio. I can think of tons of crappy modular units.

My apologies, read your post wrong. I thought you said it's cost more on your power bill. 

[Dash Lambda]

3 hours ago, LordHood77 said:

AMD's just backed themselves into a corner by going with more cores and APU. It hasn't worked out for them which is sad, because Intel, great as they are, need some actual competition. Also, they need to get back to making their chips in house again. 

I think the APUs are the bigger nail in the coffin. They had great iGPUs, but were almost immediately destroyed by Broadwell.

[KuJoe]

Just now, Dash Lambda said:

"Working properly" doesn't make a CPU. Even their top of the line chip bottlenecks a mid-range GPU, AMD themselves don't use their CPUs.

Can you give me more details? I'm genuinely interested in what I can do to make my CPU bottleneck. I was originally told if I ran CS:GO at full settings and recorded at 1080p 60 FPS it would bog down my CPU but it didn't. Then I was told if I ran Fallout 4 with max settings while recording it would bog down my CPU but it didn't. I don't play a lot of other games (mostly HoTS and Far Cry 3 these days) and I don't run more than 3 VMs at a time so I always have plenty of CPU available but when people tell me an Intel CPU would be better for me I don't see the point because if I don't have performance issues now then why spend money to still not have performance issues?

 

Telling people not to buy AMD without having any real concrete reasons doesn't help the community at all. Your comment about new tech they don't support are good reasons, but only for people who need that type of tech (and the reason of "old looking heatsinks" is a good example of a bad reason).

[ybriK]

24 minutes ago, Dash Lambda said:

CPUs? I absolutely agree, AMD has no place in a new PC. GPUs?... Poke your head up sometime.

Oh I'm sorry I forgot to add /s to my previous comment. Sorry I hurt your feelings. Feel better now?

[Trik'Stari]

1 minute ago, KuJoe said:

Can you give me more details? I'm genuinely interested in what I can do to make my CPU bottleneck. I was originally told if I ran CS:GO at full settings and recorded at 1080p 60 FPS it would bog down my CPU but it didn't. Then I was told if I ran Fallout 4 with max settings while recording it would bog down my CPU but it didn't. I don't play a lot of other games (mostly HoTS and Far Cry 3 these days) and I don't run more than 3 VMs at a time so I always have plenty of CPU available but when people tell me an Intel CPU would be better for me I don't see the point because if I don't have performance issues now then why spend money to still not have performance issues?

 

Telling people not to buy AMD without having any real concrete reasons doesn't help the community at all. Your comment about new tech they don't support are good reasons, but only for people who need that type of tech (and the reason of "old looking heatsinks" is a good example of a bad reason).

Battlefield 4. If that doesn't do it, Star Citizen or Minecraft will.

 

AMD CPU's have fewer Instructions-per-clock. Meaning that each core can carry out fewer taskers per clock cycle. Meaning that they are less powerful, core to core with Intel CPU's