Gaming Rigs / PC Specs

[Art Blade]

Maybe they can turn that mercury problem into a profit.

"Buy our special Heavy Metal hard core tuna and collect all the mercury you find in your cans. If you send in at least 100 labels picked off your tuna cans, and your mercury, we'll create for you a special large fish-shaped thermometer filled with your mercury and engraved with your initials."

[Dweller_Benthos]

When we were kids, if we found an old thermometer in one of my Grandad's barns or someplace, it wasn't long before it was cracked open and the mercury dumped out so we could play with it. Little balls of fluid metal was big fun. It can be absorbed through the skin, so who knows how much we got? Most thermometers nowadays have alcohol in them so they are no fun at all. Now that I think of it, it's been ages since I've even seen an analog thermometer like that, most have springs with dials or are digital.

[Art Blade]

At least I saw a broken thermometer once with those liquid metal balls rolling around. However, I had been warned about how poisonous it was and never touched mercury. A good thing they found other means now, the one I like the most is a device you stick into someone's ear and instantly get the temperature. When I was a kid and had a fever, I didn't like the waiting for the mercury to come to a halt and there was this other aspect that I can describe best with this joke, although it only makes sense if you're about to use that thing orally.

"How can you tell an oral from an anal thermometer?"
"By its taste."

I'm quite glad we don't have to worry about any of that anymore

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yuck. Yeah whenever we were sick, it was sit quietly with that thing under our tongue for five minutes. Agony when you had a cough or sneeze to go along with the fever. But now, you just point a digital laser thing at their forehead and get an instant reading.

[Art Blade]

I want to play Cyberpunk2077 with that new RayTracing (RTX) and I want to marvel at RDR2 in all its beauty, and I want to be amazed by Outer Worlds.. and I want to play my beloved Hitman2 without stutters when looking at mirrors or huge glass windows, I want to see what my beloved KCD looks like with that nice Hi-Res Texture Pack DLC.. I want to play all the nice stuff with ULTRA settings, completely maxed out, while running smooth as silk and silent as a whisper. Sigh.. I never had a PC capable of running everything on ultra. I always had "upper middle class" PCs but never a Hi-End PC.

Time to change that.

So today I fired up my new PC which I had custom-built by a nearby PC shop.

* CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900x (12 cores 24 threads) <-- will allow me to edit videos a tad faster than before
* AIO: NZXT Kraken x62 280mm (water-cooling the CPU)
* RAM: 32 GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC 3000 CL 15 CORSAIR Kit Vengeance LPX
* MoBo: Asus Strix X570-E
* GPU: Asus ROG Strix RTX 2080TI-O11G (11GB VRAM)
* SSD: 1 TB ADATA M.2 PCI-E NVMe XPG S50
* HDD: 2 TB WD SATA3 WD20EZRZ 5400 64MB Blue
* PSU: be quiet! Straight Power 11 850W 80+ Gold Modular
* Case: be quiet! Pure Base 500 White <-- looks nice on my white desk
* OS: W10 home 64bit

The stuff above cost me €3,500 but well, it is my first Hi-End PC.

I'm reusing:
32" Monitor 1080/60
Logitech G19 keyboard new 07/2020: Corsair Strafe RGB Mk2
Logitech G500S mouse new 09/2020: Corsair Ironclaw RGB
CREATIVE 2.1 speakers (that's stereo with a sub-woofer)

The old PC is still up and running, with a 27" monitor and some simple Asus KB and Asus mouse, and a headset for sound. Both PCs are connected to the internet. All that required all my power cords and all those cables and wires and whatnot, everything, to be completely rearranged. Lots of w0#k but now it's neat and tidy.

The new PC is so quiet I can't believe I thought the old one was quiet It sounds a bit as if in an adjacent room some kind of AC was running. And to be fair, my old rig isn't very loud, either. It's water-cooled, too.

I'm running this new monster on purpose at 1080 res because that's what most games are designed for, that's the native resolution of my monitor, and that's what will give me the highest FPS. I don't care about 4k. All it does is leave me with about 1/3 of the FPS I get at 1080 I don't care about all those LEDs, either, that are flashing and dimming like crazy.. locked up inside my opaque white metal case without any showcase glass panels.

I don't want a bloody light show in my room as if it was a discotheque, I want pure performance while gaming.

[LowPolyOWG]

 

Congrats on the new rig. I guess you could say you have Ryzen from your old system

[Art Blade]

ta. And yes

[Dweller_Benthos]

Nice. I'm thinking on doing some kind of upgrade, either a whole new system or swap out some parts in the current system. An RTX 2080ti last I checked was close to $1500 here but that was several months ago. The local best buy got a couple in stock and when those were gone they were on back order. I haven't checked lately if they have any more.

I also have no interest in anything lighting up inside my case, what a waste of power, how did that even become a thing? My computer sits under the desk on a stand built into the desk made for a computer case. Even if it did have lights inside it, you wouldn't see them, as that side is against the desk, so pointless.

[Art Blade]

mine literally is a desk top PC and the room is usually completely dark. I wouldn't want that to turn into a disco  The fact that everything glows nowadays is probably related to the ever growing case modding scene and kids wanting to show off their "cool stuff" so the industry happily feeds them.

[Art Blade]

right. I managed to get the rig up and running.. no, that sounds bad. I mean, it took some time to configure stuff, download stuff like browsers, steam client, newest gfx driver and all that.

Then I had a 3-hour marathon of network shenanigans with those two PCs. I couldn't for the life of me get them to transfer files from the old to the new PC. Wasn't the firewall, wasn't the router, I didn't forget to "share" folders, I could even see the one I shared but the new PC, despite of seeing it, wasn't allowed access. Yeah, sure. Stupid windows. I remember the times of Duke Nukem 3D some 20 years ago when we set up a LAN and played it. It was already difficult to get a LAN to w0#k and it hasn't changed a bit, only that it's different now. The PCs were both connected via router and when that didn't w0#k, I disconnected them from the internet and created a good old-fashioned P2P connection over Ethernet. Same result. I gave up.

I then "just" downloaded a couple of games and quickly tested them

* Ride2. Motorcycle race, not so impressive as it's from 2015 and doesn't offer much in the gfx department

* NMS. I can flick the mouse around and the world around me spins just as quickly, it's just so fluid. Smooth as silk.

* Hitman 2. First surprise: it was "only" a 95GB download, but after decompression indeed 149GB. I used its benchmark to find the best gfx driver setup but now I just set the driver manually, every possible entry, to be on maximum quality. And I was using the absolute maximum gfx game settings including supersampling and all there is. Turns out that V-Sync needs to be disabled to unleash the gfx card to an average of 98FPS on a heavy benchmark. I played a quick mission and it's bloody smooth as silk. Oh man

* KCD. Only 60GB download (stays that way on disk) and another 6GB for the hi-res texture pack. In-game, I cranked up the gfx to a whopping "experimental - for future hardware" ultra high setting AND had the hi-res textures installed.. I copied savegame files to a USB stick and that to the new PC so I could test the game where I had left it on my old rig. There is one region (a town) with notoriously low FPS which I visited: lowest was 47 fps but it jumps around between 50 to 80 fps there. Other parts showed over 100 fps, with all those insane settings. NICE!

And all the time, the PC stayed as quiet as when idling. Unbelievable. I know it can go louder, happens when I start up the rig and it ramps up all fans before slowing down to what's needed. And then it stays that way! Craaaazy.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Networking can be a real pain to figure out. We have a new computer here at w0#k that's still sitting on the shelf as it refuses to allow any other computers to connect to it, no matter what. The tech guy we bought it from was here two separate times so far for a couple of days, yes, DAYS, trying to get it to w0#k, being online with tech support from the company doing live support that lets the tech on their end have control of the computer remotely, and still it doesn't w0#k. As it is, they essentially did everything I already did in the networks settings, security, passwords, etc, it just refuses to allow any other computer to connect to it. I've looked online and from what I've seen is that windows 10 had an issue where one of the updates messed up networking if you applied the update before changing a setting in the network access and after that the only thing that can fix it is a complete windows reinstall on a blank drive. Go figure that one. They still haven't fixed that computer yet, the guy is supposed to be up in the next few days to try again, or I think he is just going to bring a new computer and take that one back.

But the latest computer we bought here worked just fine, maybe because as soon as I turned it on, the first thing that came up was a dialog that asked about the detected network and do I want to connect to it? I said yes of course, and it worked. Thing is, any of the other computers can copy to it's shared folders, but it can't copy to any of the shared folders on the other computers, but I believe that's an issue on the other computers, not the new one.

OK network rant over lol. The results you see in KCD in that town are probably due to the geometry being processed on the CPU, though your new one is a beast too, so that just shows how much horsepower you need for stuff like that. I never have vsync on, as that locks the game to the refresh of the monitor and I guess has some advantages, but for the most part you'd want higher if you can get it.

[Art Blade]

nice rant

I just managed to crank up the settings for KCD even more by maxing out the object distance (how far you can see), the vegetation draw distance and LOD distance. Now I get down to 40+ fps in some select corners of Rattay, mostly around 50-60 in the town main street and 70-80 in other areas. Indoor I get up to over 100.

We're talking insane gfx settings here.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Is that what the settings slider says, "Low-Medium-High-Ultra-Insane" ? lol

[Art Blade]

kinda.

Oh and RDR2 is too powerful even for this monster PC to run at absolute ULTRA settings. You can find my rant in the RDR2 topic or simply click HERE.

[Dweller_Benthos]

Yep there's always a game that will make even a really good PC drop to it's knees. Can you imagine trying to run at 4K?