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PC builds and such

If you can find one the land of nonsense speakers, an RX 6950 XT makes an excellent alternative that'll cost significantly less, you'd be able to afford a 7800X3D which would probably last you much longer than a 7600X would.

I can find them for around €800, which yeah would offset the jump up to the 7800X3D.

The only high end stuff that I do these days is gaming. Is it worth upping the processor for that at the expense of a graphics card generation?

At least one website also has a 7800X3D coming on sale in a few days, so perhaps that will make both affordable...

(This is my weak heel when it comes to computer builds. "But just a little more here and...". It adds up.)
 
I would absolutely not spend more money on the processor. That 7800X3D costs quite a lot more for a couple of extra cores and a slightly lower clock speed - tasks where that's going to be faster are few and far between, never mind worth the extra money faster. Personally I'd be inclined to consider spending less, but YMMV - an Intel 12600KF will cost you less all in (with motherboard, RAM and cooler) for basically the same performance. But the end of life socket means you're not going to be able to upgrade just the CPU in a couple of years. Personally I decided that wasn't worth it as year on year CPU improvements have been weak for a long time now and so little is really CPU bound anyway (I honestly noticed ~zero impact upgrading to that from a 2018 Ryzen, retaining the same GPU), but you wouldn't be wrong to pick otherwise.

On graphics, Nvidia's upscaling, frame generation and raytracing performance is definitely better than AMD's. Again, up to you how much you care about that - I've found that a slight DLSS upscale gets a lot of extra frame rate for no obvious visual fidelity hit, and extra raytracing performance is glorious in some games. YMMV whether that's better than just extra general rendering power.
 
I'm not that fussed about ray tracing and all of the "lots of little details" graphical updates. My biggest concern is being able to run an ultrawide monitor at a smooth and reliable framerate for the next five plus years.
 
It's hard to predict five years into the future, I think. Nvidia have shipped updates to DLSS for older cards and it's definitely better than alternative upscalers at the moment, and that's absolutely helped keep my card (early-pandemic purchase of a 2070, with an ultrawide monitor) performant enough two generations later. But other upscaling technologies have come along as well, and maybe in five years a bit more rendering power and an improved FSR upscaling model will beat slightly less rendering power and DLSS. Or maybe not. I definitely get the impression that upscaling tricks are going to be a big part of real-world GPU performance from now on.
 
I'm still running a Ryzen 5 3600 and my CPU is never strained. Definitely spend the money on the GPU.

If you're future proofing, back into the Nvidia camp with DLSS support. DLSS drastically reduces hardware requirements.
 
Ended up buying pretty much exactly that build as above. Unfortunately, the big sales launched tonight and were very meh, so (once I added a new case) I was still hovering around the €2000 price. So, basically, I bought the computer as above and got the case for free.

But I got a significantly better computer than any of the comparably-priced prebuilts (including the ones on sale), with a significantly better case and a more appropriate PSU, so I'm still happy.
 
Assuming it isn't too far off topic for this thread, does anyone have a recommendation for an Android phone? My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy J7, more of an economy phone compared to the mainline phones that carriers usually market. But I've had it for going on six years and the displays has some black bars from two drops too many so I am considering a replacement.
 
For Android, Pixel is the best. They are supported for a really long time, they don't have a bunch of third party bullshit, and everything works because the software dev is also the hardware dev. I have the 7 and it rocks.

I forget where you live but ATT usually has them on sale for like... Dollars a month. I think I'm paying $4 a month for mine.

I just wish they came in orange.

Edit: oh also, if you want mid tier, their a (6a, 7a, etc) versions are pretty good.
 
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Assuming it isn't too far off topic for this thread, does anyone have a recommendation for an Android phone? My current phone is a Samsung Galaxy J7, more of an economy phone compared to the mainline phones that carriers usually market. But I've had it for going on six years and the displays has some black bars from two drops too many so I am considering a replacement.
Yeah if you want a good phone with a long support life for not a huge amount of money, a Pixel 7a is the way to go. Google's UK store is selling them for £329 at the moment, which is just hilariously cheap, so I assume there's a similar deal on the US store.
 
Got the Pixel 6 on release, which is now... *checks Wikipedia*... two and a half years already? Geez.

But yeah, I'm still very happy. I don't even do much system maintenance and it still works like a charm, the battery still outclasses friends' newer phones' batteries despite me playing Pokemon Go which is usually a death sentence for phone batteries. They really did a good one there with their Tensor chip and overall device design, and the longevity of the device speaks for itself.
 
Can anyone recommend me a decent computer monitor for ~£150? I need a second one for my setup (it's just unsustainable to stream without one at this point), and my current one's pretty long in the tooth anyway (it's a pretty weathered Samsung SyncMaster T200HD).

My computer has a RTX 3060 ti, if that makes a difference.
 
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I don't know the current currency exchange but this is a 1440p with 180hz refresh from Acer for $180 USD. Tell me how much that is/if you want 1440p or 4k (probably not 4k with a 3060 and two monitors, but it'd be good for future proofing I spose) and I can go from there.

Acer Nitro 27" WQHD 2560 x 1440 PC Gaming IPS Monitor | AMD FreeSync Premium Up to 180Hz Refresh 0.5ms DCI-P3 95% 1 Display Port 1.2 & 2 HDMI 2.0 XV271U M3bmiiprx,Black

 
That's about £140 in local currency (likely more if I look up the same monitor). I'd say I don't need 4k (I don't really have the money to sink into my computer, so it'll be a long time before I get a card that'll make that worth worrying about).
 
That's about £140 in local currency (likely more if I look up the same monitor). I'd say I don't need 4k (I don't really have the money to sink into my computer, so it'll be a long time before I get a card that'll make that worth worrying about).
So you're saying I got it in one? Nice.
 
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Those two are 1080p vs 1440p, your graphics card should be able to drive that without issue, especially as a secondary display. That said, if there's availability issues (or you don't want to buy from Amazon which is understandable) then yeah get what you can get. Of those two, get the LG, it has a slightly slower refresh rate however its not enough to make a difference but it does come with Freesync which absolutely could, if you ended up gaming on it, and it's somewhat cheaper :smile:
 
Lol, .5ms vs 1ms. That's ridiculous.

I remember when 5ms was the best you could get. 1ms is fantastic.
 
Lol, .5ms vs 1ms. That's ridiculous.

I remember when 5ms was the best you could get. 1ms is fantastic.
Refresh rate not response times, 180hz vs 165hz, just as meaningless really :smile:
 
Refresh rate not response times, 180hz vs 165hz, just as meaningless really :smile:
Whoops, yeah I misread your comment.

No one is getting 165fps. Anything over 120hz is fine.
 
The fuck game are you playing where you're getting 165fps? Original doom?

Fun fact, Doom was effectively locked to 35 fps as that’s the tick rate the game operates at. If you speed up the frame rate you speed up gameplay.

As for 165hz, we’re talking 1080p, lots of graphics cards can do that on modern games. Doom Eternal regularly gets up into the 200s.
 
Fun fact, Doom was effectively locked to 35 fps as that’s the tick rate the game operates at. If you speed up the frame rate you speed up gameplay.

As for 165hz, we’re talking 1080p, lots of graphics cards can do that on modern games. Doom Eternal regularly gets up into the 200s.
Doom Guy intensifies
 
I got the majority of the money back from when I had to bail my Dad out last year which is great but now I'm stuck thinking on what to spend the funds on because there are a number of things that I have been putting off. I've probably settled on PC parts which is why I'm in this thread but it hurts so much knowing that £500 does not go as far as it used to and there are just so many things that need upgrading thanks to FFXIV and the fact that this PC is now 11 years old (although I have upgraded the graphics card once already).

These are the FFXIV recommended specs:

Minimum System Requirements:
OS: Windows® 10 64 bit, Windows® 11 64 bit
Memory: 8GB
Available HDD/SSD space: 140GB or more on HDD
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or higher, AMD Radeon RX 480 or higher
CPU: Intel® Core™i7-6700 or higher
Screen Resolution: 1280x720

Recommended System Requirements:
OS: Windows® 10 64 bit, Windows® 11 64 bit
CPU: Intel® Core™i7-9700 or higher
Memory: 16GB
Available HDD/SSD space: 140GB or more on SSD
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or higher, AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT or higher
Screen Resolution: 1920x1080

And I'm guessing that this means I'll need to upgrade my CPU and GPU. For reference my CPU is a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.4GHz and my GPU is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

I know that replacing these with something more up to speed and with a little future proofing is going to eat up more than the £500 surplus I was given but I wanted to check with you more knowledgeable folk for ideas because I am not totally conversant on the minutia of PC part specifics.
 
CPU don't really provide as much of a performance jump these days. Upgrading to a 4000 series will likely give you a bunch more life. How much RAM do you have?
 
I got the majority of the money back from when I had to bail my Dad out last year which is great but now I'm stuck thinking on what to spend the funds on because there are a number of things that I have been putting off. I've probably settled on PC parts which is why I'm in this thread but it hurts so much knowing that £500 does not go as far as it used to and there are just so many things that need upgrading thanks to FFXIV and the fact that this PC is now 11 years old (although I have upgraded the graphics card once already).

These are the FFXIV recommended specs:

Minimum System Requirements:
OS: Windows® 10 64 bit, Windows® 11 64 bit
Memory: 8GB
Available HDD/SSD space: 140GB or more on HDD
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 or higher, AMD Radeon RX 480 or higher
CPU: Intel® Core™i7-6700 or higher
Screen Resolution: 1280x720

Recommended System Requirements:
OS: Windows® 10 64 bit, Windows® 11 64 bit
CPU: Intel® Core™i7-9700 or higher
Memory: 16GB
Available HDD/SSD space: 140GB or more on SSD
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or higher, AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT or higher
Screen Resolution: 1920x1080

And I'm guessing that this means I'll need to upgrade my CPU and GPU. For reference my CPU is a Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4670K CPU @ 3.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~3.4GHz and my GPU is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB.

I know that replacing these with something more up to speed and with a little future proofing is going to eat up more than the £500 surplus I was given but I wanted to check with you more knowledgeable folk for ideas because I am not totally conversant on the minutia of PC part specifics.

So the gpu upgrade is "easy" in that you don't have to worry much about compatibility.

CPU is harder because you will probably have to change your motherboard as well.

How do you feel about second-hand hardware?
 
CPU don't really provide as much of a performance jump these days. Upgrading to a 4000 series will likely give you a bunch more life. How much RAM do you have?

I'm sitting at 16gb of RAM so there's no major worry there.

So the gpu upgrade is "easy" in that you don't have to worry much about compatibility.

CPU is harder because you will probably have to change your motherboard as well.

How do you feel about second-hand hardware?

Yeah that's the part that I was afraid of, part of me wishes that I had to money to buy a new PC from scratch but that's a laughable prospect. Motherboards aren't too much but it's all extra cost.

Ideally if I'm paying this much for something I would rather it be new. Even if I buy from Scan who I find to be trustworthy I don't really relish the thought of getting a GPU that someone ran to death previously to mine bitcoin.
 
I'm sitting at 16gb of RAM so there's no major worry there.



Yeah that's the part that I was afraid of, part of me wishes that I had to money to buy a new PC from scratch but that's a laughable prospect. Motherboards aren't too much but it's all extra cost.

Ideally if I'm paying this much for something I would rather it be new. Even if I buy from Scan who I find to be trustworthy I don't really relish the thought of getting a GPU that someone ran to death previously to mine bitcoin.

Then probably I'd recommend an AM4 motherboard (doesn't really matter what, as long as it supports your minimum needs) and maybe a 5600X?

--edit--

I haven't checked, but you'll probably have to get new RAM, too, but that's relatively cheap. You're probably looking at £250/£300 all in for that CPU plus motherboard plus memory.
 
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Plus about £400 for a GPU...

Urgh. And I'll probably need a new monitor in the near future as well.
 
Well you at least hit the minimum GPU specs so you could do that incrementally.
 
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