New The PC Build Thread

wizardofid said:
7.5k. Not really with the exception of the die shrinking, the 88XX series cards had cuda and DX10 support. 88xx series cards were the first to add DX10 support. New cards today has more or less the same DNA, with the exception of the RT cores and more cuda cores. I would argue it has gotten more complex. There is only 10 generational upgrades between the 88xx and current 50 series.

If you ignore the refreshes, laptop versions ect.
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So a 10k machine was still expensive :-). I remember after my house got robbed I did a tally my machine was about R14k.
It had a Black Edition 7750 in it, 1tb normal and 2tb normal, 8800gtx, 8gb of RAM and the monitors. But that today is my gpu
 
Lupus said:
So a 10k machine was still expensive :-). I remember after my house got robbed I did a tally my machine was about R14k.
It had a Black Edition 7750 in it, 1tb normal and 2tb normal, 8800gtx, 8gb of RAM and the monitors. But that today is my gpu
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You can just about build a working system these days for around R10k — and that’s without a GPU. But that’s assuming you’re reusing old parts from a previous build (case, PSU, drives, maybe even RAM if you’re lucky). If you’re going from scratch, a full new setup easily starts at around R22k, and that’s still middle-of-the-road stuff.

It’s wild how things have shifted. Not long ago, you could still game decently on an i3 or Ryzen 3, but both AMD and Intel have more or less ditched that lower-end segment for gaming. Sure, they still have Celeron and Pentium chips floating around, but those are strictly for office PCs or basic home setups. These days, Ryzen 5 and Core i5 are the bare minimum for gaming if you don’t want your GPU to choke.

The move toward multi-core performance has really changed the landscape ,and not in a budget-friendly way. I wouldn’t even recommend going below 6 cores now. It’s kind of crazy to think that what used to be mid-range is now marketed as budget gaming.

And yeah, things have definitely gotten more expensive. You’re getting less value per rand than before. There’s even been a price flip between CPUs and GPUs. A few years back, the CPU was often the priciest part of the build, now the GPU can easily cost 2–3× the CPU, even on mid-tier setups.

Then there’s the motherboard pricing, which has gone off the rails. You used to get a decent entry-level board for around R700–R900. These days, anything half-decent from a known brand is R1,500 to R2,000, and higher-end boards are pushing R4,000+.

My current board was only R800 cheaper than the CPU (R3k CPU vs. R2.2k board). That’s a huge disparity compared to a few years ago, when your CPU would’ve easily cost double your board. Add in RAM prices creeping up again and PSUs costing R1k+ for anything reliable, and it’s no wonder even a “budget” build costs so much more now.

Even without accounting for inflation and shitty exchange rate, you could get away with far less than now.
 
@Lupus
I see the case includes 3 x Pre-Installed Antec Rainbow RGB Fixed-Mode Molex 120mm Fans.

What type of molex is it, the old fat molex ? If it is I am going to take the fans for my system, use them on the CPU cooler, and move the old fans for intake on the front. Then I can finally join the rainbow vomit club.
 
wizardofid said:
@Lupus
I see the case includes 3 x Pre-Installed Antec Rainbow RGB Fixed-Mode Molex 120mm Fans.

What type of molex is it, the old fat molex ? If it is I am going to take the fans for my system, use them on the CPU cooler, and move the old fans for intake on the front. Then I can finally join the rainbow vomit club.
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Molex is molex :-) so yeah it's the old fat one but it is black.
 
wizardofid said:
Well I have a black and white aesthetic already lol.... It should look fine with the white cooler......
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Should be fine, they'll just be the rainbox colours, so not really RGB crowd, but late 2000s LED crowd.
 
Lupus said:
Should be fine, they'll just be the rainbox colours, so not really RGB crowd, but late 2000s LED crowd.
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Either way should have the case tomorrow. And the HDDs early next week, hdds shipped out this morning no idea what courier they are using, didn't get a tracking number.

I got the hdds from partserve, read some bad reviews about, them. Willing to give them a shot at least once, would only be 1.2k in school fees if it goes south.
 
wizardofid said:
Either way should have the case tomorrow. And the HDDs early next week, hdds shipped out this morning no idea what courier they are using, didn't get a tracking number.

I got the hdds from partserve, read some bad reviews about, them. Willing to give them a shot at least once, would only be 1.2k in school fees if it goes south.
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Partserv normally did repairs on PS3s and various other things like Wiis and such, never really had issues with them, but they are not quick.
 
Lupus said:
Partserv normally did repairs on PS3s and various other things like Wiis and such, never really had issues with them, but they are not quick.
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It is more the warranty claim and DOA, it is Seagate Constellation drives, so they should be pretty good considering these are enterprise drives not the cheaper variants, I think the exos replaced them as a spiritual successor.

PartServe Shop | Seagate 2TB Constellation 35 HDSATA2TB35R

Seagate 2TB Constellation 3.5 - 3.5'' SATA
shop.partserve.co.za shop.partserve.co.za

IDK really good price all things considered, they are however old drives considering this line was from 2012, worth the risk. Plus they have a 6 month warranty. There were some 2 TB hdds on carb for 350 odd a drive, but that is a massive risk. Figured I pay bit more and get these, I see the SAS versions of these drives are almost double in price secondhand.

Really curious to see what the Smart information is on these drives, going in blind here, could either be good or bad, so worth a shot.
 
wizardofid said:
It is more the warranty claim and DOA, it is Seagate Constellation drives, so they should be pretty good considering these are enterprise drives not the cheaper variants, I think the exos replaced them as a spiritual successor.

PartServe Shop | Seagate 2TB Constellation 35 HDSATA2TB35R

Seagate 2TB Constellation 3.5 - 3.5'' SATA
shop.partserve.co.za shop.partserve.co.za

IDK really good price all things considered, they are however old drives considering this line was from 2012, worth the risk. Plus they have a 6 month warranty. There were some 2 TB hdds on carb for 350 odd a drive, but that is a massive risk. Figured I pay bit more and get these, I see the SAS versions of these drives are almost double in price secondhand.

Really curious to see what the Smart information is on these drives, going in blind here, could either be good or bad, so worth a shot.
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If they've been refurbed, it hopefully should be the things more likely to fail, the actual head that stores the data is not going to frag itself, generally.
 
wizardofid said:
Yeah it's the heads flying hours (I think that is what they are called)
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I've had some spinny discs last 7 years and be in use for that entire time with constant read/writes. But I've also had some that disintegrated after a month. 2020 was probably the worst, we lost 18 in a 990 disk array across the three clusters. This was just getting close to it's threshold for discs being down.
Why did this happen, supplier was doing upgrades on the nodes, but the upgrade failed so we were going to do it again in two weeks time, but this thing called covid happened. Turned out the node that was down now was the monitoring node, took 6 months for us to get a rollback done so we could monitor and bam 18 discs down.
 
Lupus said:
I've had some spinny discs last 7 years and be in use for that entire time with constant read/writes. But I've also had some that disintegrated after a month. 2020 was probably the worst, we lost 18 in a 990 disk array across the three clusters. This was just getting close to it's threshold for discs being down.
Why did this happen, supplier was doing upgrades on the nodes, but the upgrade failed so we were going to do it again in two weeks time, but this thing called covid happened. Turned out the node that was down now was the monitoring node, took 6 months for us to get a rollback done so we could monitor and bam 18 discs down.
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lol, That sounds like fun. I have only experienced 3 hard drive failures in my life. a 2.5 external, a 1tb and a 320gig. Had a few with reallocated sector count, which I kept on using for years and years. It just depends where the bad sectors were, if they are spread over the platters, you are mostly fcked, close by, you could usually figure where they were, and partition off those sectors if you diskpart them. Got lucky a few times, but still slowed down the drive a lot.

The current drive, that is failing has 4 sectors, they haven't climbed. But if it tries and reads from that sector, I get command timeouts, so yeah time to replace. But I am getting load clicking when the drive switch on, can only guess the reading heads are own their last legs at this point

have two drives I need to destroy, with just drill a few holes, if I had a shotgun they might have been fine for target practice. Use to just take the drives and smash with a 5 pound hammer a few times, usually good enough.....
 
wizardofid said:
lol, That sounds like fun. I have only experienced 3 hard drive failures in my life. a 2.5 external, a 1tb and a 320gig. Had a few with reallocated sector count, which I kept on using for years and years. It just depends where the bad sectors were, if they are spread over the platters, you are mostly fcked, close by, you could usually figure where they were, and partition off those sectors if you diskpart them. Got lucky a few times, but still slowed down the drive a lot.

The current drive, that is failing has 4 sectors, they haven't climbed. But if it tries and reads from that sector, I get command timeouts, so yeah time to replace. But I am getting load clicking when the drive switch on, can only guess the reading heads are own their last legs at this point

have two drives I need to destroy, with just drill a few holes, if I had a shotgun they might have been fine for target practice. Use to just take the drives and smash with a 5 pound hammer a few times, usually good enough.....
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Across 990 drive array, it could be anywhere but when the system unmounts them automatically, we need to replace them :-). Plus these were big 8tb drives.
I've not had any hdd fail since about the 90s, but it was in a top heavy old case that fell over.
 
Lupus said:
Across 990 drive array, it could be anywhere but when the system unmounts them automatically, we need to replace them :-). Plus these were big 8tb drives.
I've not had any hdd fail since about the 90s, but it was in a top heavy old case that fell over.
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The one drive that failed, had software that you can't get anymore and had all my activation keys and a bunch of work project files.
 
So... AMD's Redstone goes live tomorrow. Though I don't know whether it will be broadly accessible or activated per game. Yes, it is still exclusive to RDNA 4.

EDIT: It is also a single component that is releasing. Only Ray Regeneration. According to AMD, this has been co-developed with Activision?

ADDED:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1989001142588641427

See Every Reflection, Every Detail with FSR “Redstone”Through our deep co-engineering partnership with Activision, we’re excited to announce that the first feature of AMD FSR “Redstone” — Ray Regeneration — is now live in Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 for AMD Radeon RX 9000 Series GPUs.

Lighting and reflections are essential to creating an immersive gaming experience. Imagine spotting your opponent’s reflection rippling in a puddle beneath your feet as every ray of light is rendered with stunning precision.

Experience crystal-clear reflections and lifelike lighting that redefine immersion.
  • Neural network that transforms noisy ray-traced data into accurate lighting and reflections
  • Augments visual content before upscaling for sharper, more realistic gameplay
  • Optimized performance and realism to deliver a truly cinematic experience
This is just the beginning for FSR “Redstone.” More to come... can’t wait for you to see it in action.
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I am unsure what this will contribute, but still. Feature added. Also, now that Redstone will be an episodic drop, lol. FSR "Redstone" is 4 components:
  1. FSR Upscaling,
  2. FSR Frame Generation,
  3. FSR Ray Regeneration, and
  4. FSR Radiance Caching
1, 2, and 3 are now available. Technically, Redstone is an FSR 4 suite, though I think the FSR label is going to be dropped and named Redstone. It is also known as an ML suite, even though this is said to be ML2CODE, so it is still compute shader cores at work.

From AMD's own RDNA table. Only FSR 4 supports ML, and only RX 9000 and above are compatible. At this point in time, AMD is standing by this being exclusive to RDNA 4 and upcoming architectures.

Anyhow.

RDNA 3 is dead, unless you bake it. Still no word on DXR 1.2 and upcoming Vulkan tech???

EDIT: Allegedly, someone dug up INT8 strings in "Redstone".
 
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FCK me !!

My ram kit I got in august has gone up again, from R1099 in august R2399.00 now SSD is now double R1168. Paid R659 ( paid R459 with R200 discount) Even PSU has gone up with R450.00


Would be nearly R5000 now if you include shipping, for two 16gig sticks and that is for Cl46 ram.

Total cost now R16649
Total Cost August R12,272

That is including the refurb HDDs I got this week

That is R4377 more than 3 months ago


Only looked at the prices where I bought the stuff from, some other places still have cheaper price on one or two items like the PSU which else where went up with a R150 or so, but other places has some items at a considerably higher price. I feel sorry for the folks wanting to upgrade now or who didn't listen when told to upgrade NOW.

Apparently ram is going up again next month, CPU's Jan next year.

For price increase I could have gotten a Ryzen 5 4500 kit with 16gig ram and have change left.

nah that is just mental....:(
 
wizardofid said:
FCK me !!

My ram kit I got in august has gone up again, from R1099 in august R2399.00 now SSD is now double R1168. Paid R659 ( paid R459 with R200 discount) Even PSU has gone up with R450.00


Would be nearly R5000 now if you include shipping, for two 16gig sticks and that is for Cl46 ram.

Total cost now R16649
Total Cost August R12,272

That is including the refurb HDDs I got this week

That is R4377 more than 3 months ago


Only looked at the prices where I bought the stuff from, some other places still have cheaper price on one or two items like the PSU which else where went up with a R150 or so, but other places has some items at a considerably higher price. I feel sorry for the folks wanting to upgrade now or who didn't listen when told to upgrade NOW.

Apparently ram is going up again next month, CPU's Jan next year.

For price increase I could have gotten a Ryzen 5 4500 kit with 16gig ram and have change left.

nah that is just mental....:(
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Yup prices are skyrocketing, daily almost by the looks of it.
 
O man was waiting for some black friday deals should have pulled the trigger a month ago, any reason for the massive price inceases must be global as rand is strong...
 
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