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Happy Sunday everyone. I am at a bit of a loss with how to go about potentially upgrading my desktop PC.
There is a well-established culture & system around upgrading phones every 2-3 years. Companies make it enticingly easy with trade-ins that reduce cost and waste. Same system exists for cars.
But not for PCs.
I have an HP Omen desktop that I bought for $1700 before tax in Nov 2020. It was on sale and had/s excellent specs: i7-10700K, RTX 3080, 32gb ram, 500gb SSD. I'm pretty sure it still sells for $1700+ today, at least in nominal dollars, which is bonkers for what should be fast depreciating. Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.
I don't game much, maybe a little bit of StarCraft 2 and RimWorld every now and then. So the graphics card was an overkill from the start and meant to be future-proof. The 3080 will easily suffice for at least another 2-3 years, I'm sure.
But I'm tempted by a new CPU. UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed. By the time the 14000 series comes out next year, perhaps it'll get to +50% effective speed and +80% single core. At some point, the $600 or however much the next-gen costs will be is worth it to me if my computer runs 50-80% faster depending on the application (for example, RimWorld is mainly CPU limited and has no multithreading.
But it seems cumbersome to upgrade the CPU. I could watch a bunch of YT to learn how to swap out the CPU myself, but I'd rather not, in case I mess something up. I have no passion for tinkering, so the time I spend learning and failing would be stressful and a waste of time. I also understand that not all motherboards support newer CPUs, and the 13900K also draws double the power than the 10700K, so I may need to get both a new MOBO and a new PSU. All that feels like a tremendous headache to me if I were to DIY.
Alternatively, I could wait until the desktop is dying after 2-3 years, and then I toss/recycle it for a new one. But this seems suboptimal too, given I value and am willing to pay for a faster processor, but that's all that I care about. I don't want or need a brand new PC.
The third option is to find a pro to upgrade the CPU (and possibly the MOBO and PSU). Microcenter seems to have a CPU installation service for $80 (plus a $40 "recommended diagnostic"). I could also take it into a local repair shop, which I tend to think of as somewhat seedy and serving computer illiterate people at a premium, but that's probably just undue prejudice.
What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.
This isn't normal. Or rather, perhaps it's normal in the statistical sense that the average person's computer is an unreliable heap of junk, but it's not nominal, and you shouldn't put up with it. "It just does that sometimes," is a piss-poor way to relate to computers, and if a hardware problem is causing your machine to crash that hard, it might also be corrupting your data.
You can use a couple passes of memtest86+ to identify some problems with your memory. It's not great for overclocking-related instability, but if your memory chips are going bad it should be able to detect it. You can run prime95's blend test overnight to ferret out CPU/memory/motherboard problems.
In my experience, poor electrical connections are the cause of a significant fraction of weird computer problems, although this may depend on the humidity in your climate. You can try re-seating your RAM and graphics card, as long as you are careful to avoid ESD. (Touch your computer's metal chassis immediately before touching any components, and do not remove from the confines of the chassis. Pop it out of the slot and right back in again.)
If none of that fixes it or finds anything, your computer is probably still under warranty if you bought it new. BSoDs are not supposed to happen, and you should make them somebody else's problem. The ability to do that is the whole point of buying from an OEM.
First off, don't. In my opinion, your current machine will be fine for at least 5 years.
The newest CPUs that might be compatible with your motherboard are Intel 11th-gen, and those were widely panned for being an insignificant improvement over 10th gen. There are some workloads where they win, but some where they lose because the 11th gen i9 has only 8 cores compared to the 10th gen's 10 cores, and the power consumption is very high. That could be a problem for upgrading, because OEM (HP/Dell/Lenovo) motherboards are typically not designed to be capable of supplying significantly more power than needed by the CPU the PC comes with.
Furthermore, even if you replace your motherboard, published benchmark results for the 13th gen CPUs are usually using the newer DDR5 memory standard unless they say otherwise, so you'd have to replace your RAM too or else have slightly (only very slightly) less performance than the internet says.
Userbenchmark is notoriously terrible. The operator has a strong anti-AMD bias. That wasn't too much of a problem back when Intel had a solid lead in single-thread performance and he could just weight low-thread-count benchmarks heavily, but since they've caught up he has to put a heavier and heavier thumb on the scales. At this point it's practically an entire arm.
The 13900K has as many P-cores as the 10700K, and 16 extra E-cores on top. Therefore, it makes no sense for the "effective speed" difference to be less than the single core speed.
The tricks, in this case, are:
The "effective speed" does not account for workloads using >8 threads at all.
The "effective speed" includes memory latency in the average. Memory latency contributes to the performance of a computer, but it isn't independently observable outside of its effect on any particular benchmark. It's an implementation detail. Picking a CPU based on memory latency makes about as much sense as picking them them by clock frequency or die size (i.e., none, unless you are designing a chip).
Unfortunately, unless the application you care about (Rimworld) is directly benchmarked, reading benchmarks properly is very difficult without a decent understanding of the characteristics of your application -- how threaded it is, how big its memory working set is (this is not the memory usage task manager shows you), etc.
Also, a lot of the published benchmarks really suck. Examples include single-thread cinebench (completely fits in cache on modern CPUs, and real users don't use Cinema 4D that way), Factorio benchmarks with small factories that run way over 200 UPS (broken by large L3 cache, which won't happen for factories that struggle to maintain 60), benchmarking Civilization games for frame rate instead of turn time, benchmarking frame rate in games that aren't CPU-limited in typical play (400 FPS 720p is benchmarking the graphics driver, not the game), etc.
What I would suggest is to find the openbenchmarking.org link from a recent CPU comparison article on phoronix.com, and filter the results to show only benchmarks that have similar characteristics to your application. For example,
Web browser tests: lightly threaded with small-ish cache footprint (based on 5800X vs 5800X3D.
Compiler benchmarks: heavily threaded with moderate cache footprint.
Google Draco: lightly threaded with large cache footprint. Most CPU-bound games are likely to fall in this category.
First, I respect your expertise and appreciate your willingness to educate the noobs.
About the lifetime of BSOD, I think I've mentally resigned to suffering from monthly strokes because basically every PC I've ever owned has suffered from it. They ranged in manufacturers: Dell, Lenovo, HP, Asus, they're laptops and desktops, they ran various versions of Windows. I am a very respectable average user, I swear. I don't subject my machines to harsh physical conditions, never spill anything on them, don't live in filth where dust covers everything, don't live with electrical surges, don't have little cousins borrowing it, don't mine crypto, don't pirate or visit sketchy sites with viruses, don't open phishing emails, don't leave it on 24/7, don't unplug USBs until I'm told it's safe to do so, I update fairly frequently, etc. The machines I buy new directly from manufacturers or Amazon/Best Buy. Anyways, you get the point. And yet I've literally never owned a single fully stable machine. Whenever I feel frustrated by a sudden crash, I remind myself that engineering is already a marvel, that these extremely complex machines can handle so much abuse and still have 99.99% uptime. The occasional hiccups do make me perpetually a little paranoid about losing data, though thankfully most applications are very good with real-time saves.
I will share one suspicion I've had about the cause of the BSODs, in case it provides any obvious clues to you as to what's the main culprit. I use a browser plugin called video speed controller to speed up all kinds of media that are too slowly paced. I think my freezes have semi-frequently coincided with when playing a video at higher speeds (say, maybe 2.5x or even 3x). Do you suspect that to be a RAM-related issue?
At any rate, you provide interesting resources that I will be sure to check out. I guess it'll take a couple of months to know for sure if anything changed, and it'd be a shock to me if it does (but I look forward to that)!
I love your optimism. I can tell you that none of the machines I've owned lasted 7+ years. It's not that they always become inoperable at that point, but that they seem obsolete by the 5 year mark at the latest. I don't mean to sound like a snob. It's just that a computer is what I interact with the most both professionally and leisurely, so I think it's worthwhile to invest good money in it. Like, if I drove 8 hours a day for work and for fun, you bet I wouldn't be trying to extract every last bit of value until it qualifies for cash for clunkers. Plus, I really don't think it's that wasteful; people replace their thousand dollar smart phones every 2-3 years, so going all the way to 7 years for a $1700 computer seems comparatively overly conservative.
There's probably some common factor, although we can only guess at what it is. Whenever I've seen a machine behave like that it's been some combination of
Installed in a shed with no climate control and free access to outside air.
Over a decade old (chips and capacitors do degrade).
Manufactured during the early 2000s "capacitor plague" (rumor says one capacitor maker tried to steal a formula from another and didn't get it quite right).
Fixed by spraying contact cleaner in the memory slots and re-seating.
Showing messages in the log that match a common complaint on the bugtracker for the Linux kernel or graphics driver, and the problem goes away when that bug is reported fixed.
My own damn fault for overclocking/undervolting something.
Things that might be different between us:
We have different electrical grids.
We have different levels of background radiation. (EPA says gamma cross count rate in my location is ~3000/min.)
Almost none of my machines run Windows (only the one in the shed). But people on the internet say Windows BSoD-ing all the time is supposed to be a thing of the past.
All of my machines are either home-built or business grade.
I run one pass of memtest86 whenever I get a new machine or replace RAM. Only time this found something though, was when I was buying dodgy RAM from eBay.
If your electrical supply is spotty, you might be able to fix it with an uninterruptible power supply that has the "AVR" (automatic voltage regulation) feature. Unfortunately they're kind of expensive and the batteries usually have to be replaced every few years.
Playing back video at high speed is obviously a heavier load than 1x, but it could be any of CPU, RAM, power supply, or even the graphics card, assuming your browser uses hardware video decode (probably does).
The first thing you might try is to see if you can reliably reproduce the problem by cranking the video playback speed to the moon. I use a similar extension, "Enhancer for YouTube", which has no upper speed limit AFAICT. Use youtube's "stats for nerds" to detect dropped frames, which means you have reached the limits of your computer (or internet connection). This probably works best with a short video that you can re-play without having to re-download.
If you can reproduce the problem, you have a very good "my computer crashes when I do this" story to tell the warranty people.
If that didn't work, to try to differentiate between causes and maybe find a better reproducer, I would suggest...
First, install hwinfo64. This will show you a bunch of things, but the important ones are the Windows hardware error log counts and the CPU temperature and package power. Here's an example of it in use.
Then download prime95. Run the "small FFT" test for at least an hour. If your computer crashes, any of the threads crash, any of the self tests fail, or hwinfo shows any errors in the Windows log, it is probably a CPU or power supply problem. If the CPU package power is not near or above 125W while the all-thread test is running, and the CPU temperature is at or very close to 100°C, it's a cooling problem (heatsink detached in shipping?). If "small FFT" doesn't find anything, you might try blend. Keep in mind "CPU problems" are likely to be "motherboard power delivery to the CPU" problems, so replacing the CPU might not fix it.
For the graphics card, you can use any of the unigine benchmarks. Superposition is the most similar to modern AAA games, but also a large download. You have a monster graphics card with a much higher peak power draw than the CPU, but if you only play games like Rimworld and SC2 with vsync on, it's probably not being pushed close to full power. Unigine will do that. Unfortunately, I don't know any GPU tests that check their own results and are easy to run. But if it crashes, that's a fail obviously.
For the memory, memtest86+ is probably easiest. There are better tests that the overclockers use, which you can find here.
To really put the hurt on your power supply and cooling, you can run 7 threads of prime95 and unigine at the same time. This will draw more power than pretty much any real workload other than folding@home, crypto mining, or things involving custom job schedulers, but a proper computer should be able to take it.
Unfortunately, there's no guarantee that you will be able to identify the problem. But the good news is that you only need to find a reproducer, to use as ammunition against the customer service line. That's part of what you're paying for when you buy OEM computers and replace them before the warranty runs out.
No doubt. But security update stoppage and battery degradation are big drivers of phone replacements, and neither is a problem for desktop computers. I am using a $200 phone, a CPU launched in 2013, and a graphics card from 2016, and they do what I need them to do.
Thanks, I definitely plan to run your recommendations the next time the PC crashes for no apparent reason. Until then, there is still hopium that somehow the problem goes away all by itself...
Different usage levels and/or preferences, I suppose. What you describe sounds a bit too ascetic for the vast majority of people, at least those in middle class. Unless you never dine out or order delivery, food has gotten so expensive that $200 lasts like two restaurant dinners for two in a big city, at which point I'd much rather skip those two dinners and save toward say a $400 rather than $200 phone or upgrade to a $200 CPU from this year, and either would deliver much more utility.
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Yeah, and that's idiotic. I haven't needed a smartphone upgrade in probably 5+ years. The only reason I've gotten a new one is hardware failure (one I dropped and the screen cracked, one stopped taking a charge).
Don't upgrade your PC because people upgrade their smartphones for no reason every couple of years. That's like saying "well Bob down the street gets a new car every year so I do too".
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Hard agre with the other posters, BSOD is not normal, and shouldn't really ever happen during normal use, much less a couple of times a month. For comparison, i have not BSOD'd for years outside of deliberate overclocking-to-failure tests.
This is your problem. All "manufacturers" (they arent the ones actually building your system) are going to ship your PC with reams of shitty, unstable bloatware. Bloatware and its associated background processes is probably the #1 source of BSOD for normal users. Even doing a "fresh install" of windows is not usually sufficient to get rid of it, as the bloatware is now being hidden on separate partitions of the hard drives (you can thank Dell for starting this practice). So unless you installed your own freshly downloaded copy of windows (from MS only, not the computer seller), on a freshly wiped and single-paritioned hard drive, you probably have bloatware.
So either go with a PC building service that is just compiling parts and lets you do the windows install, or build a PC yourself, its really quite easy these days.
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Man, I love this community. Hope it doesn't die from the break from Reddit.
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I would do nothing if I were you. The CPU upgrade process isn't that complex (but I have been upgrading my PCs since my dad let the magic smoke out of the floppy drive and hung up his hat):
pick the CPU you like
find out the socket
check that your cooler can mount on the socket
you might have to order a new mounting bracket for it
or you might need a new cooler
check that your mobo has the same socket and its chipset supports your chosen CPU
if you need a new mobo, pick one that has the same form factor as your current one and that has enough expansion slots for your devices (not a problem for most modern PCs)
if you need a new mobo, check that it will work with that GPU or SSD you might want to buy next year (PCIe version)
if you need a new mobo, check that your RAM is compatible (DDR4 vs DDR5 in 2022)
if you need a new mobo, check that your PSU is compatible (no new connectors)
just in case, check that the new wattage won't overload your CPU (there are websites for that)
if you need a new PSU, check that it will work with that GPU you might want to buy next year (power and connectors)
order your new CPU, cooler, mobo, RAM and PSU
disassemble your PC
assemble you new PC
lol
I really appreciate your taking the time to write out the detailed steps, but I have to ask, you do realize what you wrote out does not mesh with "isn't that complex", right? I'm stereotyping here, but maybe forward the list to someone who is not your dad and isn't a DIY tinkerer, and ask them if they think it's a stroll or a massive undertaking. Just a few examples:
I mean I would just go by userbenchmarks but as another poster nearby commented, you can't necessarily even trust that because of its anti-AMD bias, and the "effective speed" metric isn't as straightforward as it sounds like. Now I have to go down another rabbit hole to understand what's best.
I have no idea how many types of sockets there are and the pros and cons of each.
There's another hour at least of research to understand what's going on
This reminds me of the draw-the-rest-of-the-owl meme.
Honestly you see willing to make some non-optimal choices and maybe give up some money or porformance for ease. if you just buy a new motherboard and cpu bundled you can just follow the lego like instructions that come with the motherboard. You will probably spend some two digit number of dollars more and have slightly worse performance but it's probably the middle ground you're looking for.
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I did expect this reaction, but it's honestly not that bad. Building a shed or changing a tire is harder, because you actually require some manual dexterity to turn your knowledge into practical results. Learning how to upgrade a PC takes a few evenings of scrolling and the parts actually slot together with minimal effort.
For example, if you search for 13900K on Wikipedia, you get to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raptor_Lake, where it says in plain text it uses socket LGA1700. Then you click through to the page about the socket itself and see the list of chipsets that work with Raptor Lake, of which there's just one, the most expensive Z790.
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Unless you're regularly running CPU-heavy applications, there's no reason to upgrade unless you're actively seeing detrimental performance. A few years ago my MB crapped out and I decided to upgrade my CPU and RAM because it was Black Friday and everywhere was running deals. So I upgraded to a six0core Ryzen with hyperthreading and saw fuck all of a performance increase except certain processes (like converting large files between formats) ran faster. Interestingly enough, it was useless for the one area where I did need increased CPU performance; at the time my job required me (or at least it was easier) to OCR 1000+ page documents, which took a substantial amount of time on my work laptop and locked me out of doing any other work since I needed Acrobat to accomplish pretty much anything. The new CPU certainly made the process a little faster, but Adobe doesn't support hyperthreading so it was still running one page at a time (albeit at faster speed) rather than the 12 pages at a time it could theoretically handle. I was super pissed that a pro-grade product that costs a decent amount of money didn't have such an essential feature. The punchline is that even in cases where you would see a difference software limitations may prevent you from seeing it. Like you, I'm not much of a gamer so I have no idea how it will effect that end of things, but for most everyday tasks you should be fine with what you have unless you're performance is lagging.
Makes sense. I do expect that everyday tasks will see virtually no difference, and that the upside comes from just a couple of CPU-heavy apps. But as you note, once you do have those use cases, it does feel a bit magical to just cut down the processing type by 30% from one day to the next (and hundreds of dollars later).
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Oh, good chance to ask, how good is acrobat OCR? I've been using the one built into Google drive, but it's not possible to batch it.
It's pretty good but it's time consuming for larger files. To provide some context, I was doing legal work for oil and gas and I had to determine if certain assignments pertained to certain leases (an assignment is when one company conveys lease rights to another; I'll include things like mortgages and financing statements in this category). They often do this in large documents conveying several thousands of interests at one time. It can be incredibly time consuming to do this by simply reading the document, especially since most of them are ordered by some kind of internal lease number rather than alphabetically or geographically or by some other parameter that I have access to. It gets even worse when they're conveying different interests for different leases and there are several exhibits to go through. After OCR I'd usually search by lessor name first. If I found what I was looking for, great, if not, I'd try parcel number, and if that failed, I'd search by the recording information for the original lease. These latter two parameters were kind of dicey because the information is often laid out in a table and the OCR occasionally has trouble determining where the line breaks are. With a name you at least have the security of knowing that the first few letters will be consecutive without a line break. If I got to this point and didn't find anything then I figured I could safely assume that the document didn't apply to the lease I was concerned about, unless, of course, there was some kind of blanket language, but that's usually easy to find. It wasn't 100% accurate, though, because there were some cases where I knew that what I was looking for was in there but it wasn't coming up because of a typo, or bad scanning, too-small printing, etc. at which point I'd have to search the whole document manually. My superiors didn't like relying on OCR because of this, but in my experience mindlessly scanning page after page was more likely to lead to an error than the OCR was. The advice I'd give to the client relied pretty heavily on the applicability of certain of these documents, so I'd say that it's probably good enough for whatever you plan on using it for, assuming that it isn't an application that could get you fired or cause some other kind of serious problem.
I never had to batch scan so I can't comment on how well this works. One final caution I'd give is that OCR info causes the file sizes to balloon considerably. The firm I worked at required us to eliminate all exhibit pages from these documents except the ones that were directly applicable to prevent the already-large size of the client's product to balloon to unmanageable levels and take up too much room on our cloud storage. This was followed by a prohibition on including OCR'd stuff in our final client PDFs for the same reason, as we saved copies of all our work and it was taking up entirely too much space. It wasn't uncommon for one of these large documents to take up in excess of 300 megs due to all the additional OCR data. So if you plan on saving all of these PDFs locally, it's something to be aware of.
Wow, thanks for the review. If you trusted it with that, it must be more than good enough for the stuff I was doing (casually browsing through old French books)
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Speaking as someone still running an I5 8400: if you upgrade, send me your old one?
I wouldn't say this upgrade is worth it unless lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills can't burn your loose change fast enough, but if you did the valuable part would be the learning process. Being able to pull out parts is important, and putting the actual CPU in is just a matter of slathering on paste and slotting it in. The most annoying part is ensuring all the mobo cables are plugged in firmly, but that's another useful experience. And you'll need a new mobo because 12th gen changed to a new socket, so you'd basically be building a new machine. Your PSU might be fine though.
Another thing to check out is your ram: HP prebuilds often use cheapo stuff to pad out the gigs. I salvaged 16Gb from one of their Envys to get my machine up to 32, and it slowed the XMP timings way down. Actually makes a 5-10fps difference on a 100% Factorio benchmark save. Or you could just wait for DDR5 prices to drop and upgrade to that later.
I would agree with your analogy if I were desperately looking for a scalper to sell me a RTX 4090 stat because my 3090 Ti is just not shiny enough. But come on, we're talking about 3-4 generations of CPU later. That's hardly cartoon billionaire status we're talking about. Plus, it's an asset! Would you think someone who spends $600 on round trip tickets to the Caribbean is lighting cigars with hundred dollar bills?
I have "HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 XMP SDRAM (2 x 16 GB)". Is that el cheapo ship? Should I upgrade those instead? I believe I can handle pulling out and inserting memory sticks... I hope.
Aha! As Herr Bernd says below, that's decently fast memory, if HP enabled the XMP preset. But also, if they enabled the XMP preset, that's technically an overclock of your processor's memory controller, which is spec'd at 2933 MT/s max. XMP almost always works, even when it's out of spec, but... sometimes it doesn't. That might be the cause of your instability.
Unfortunately, memtest86+, which I suggested before, is more aimed at finding problems with the memory itself, rather than problems with the communication between the CPU and the memory. For that you'll want one of the overclocker-preferred stress tests that I linked before.
You can poke around in the BIOS setup options and try to find out if XMP is enabled, if so disable it, and see if that makes a difference to stability tests (assuming you find a test that reliably reproduces a problem). Turning off XMP will make your computer slower, and how much slower depends on what non-XMP settings are burned into the memory sticks.
If you're up for a challenge, you can try to stabilize the XMP profile with extra voltage, or find a stable intermediate speed between XMP and default non-XMP. If you try, the rest of that DDR4 OC guide will be helpful. But I do mean challenge. Memory is kind of the last bastion of "real" overclocking, in that every other part of a modern desktop has self-test circuits to characterize its own timing margin, and is able to run near maximum performance out of the box (if only for a short turbo boost time window). And unless you have error-correcting RAM like on a server or workstation, a memory overclock is the most difficult kind of overclock to validate, and the most likely to persistently corrupt your data.
It's so unexpected for someone who is clearly highly knowledgeable about this to go with a 2013 CPU and 2016 GPU. It's like the cliche that you never trust a skinny chef. I'm sure your choices work for you, but unless you're rarely on your computer for work/fun, I wonder if in 20 years you'll look back and think that the savings just wasn't worth the last-last-last-last-last-gen performance or experience.
Where'd you see a 2013 CPU?
Remember he's repurposing all these as Linux machines for specific roles, where using old hardware literally doesn't matter in the same way that smoke alarms don't need 5nm process chips.
I still use 4th and 6th gen i7s picked up from the dump, and for the jobs I use them for there's no difference in user experience. The 4th gen was thrown away weeks after someone tried to "upgrade" it to win10, turning it overnight into a laggy piece of shit with broken Bluetooth and GPU drivers lol.
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Hang on, can't he just set it to 2933 in bios?
Probably? I don't know if that would pick JEDEC timings, re-use the XMP timings in cycles directly, or adapt the XMP timings in nanoseconds.
I think he should try it and see, but I don't think he's reported back about whether he's found any test that reliably produces a crash.
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Oh, no, that's pretty good. The last hp i7 prebuilt I saw had ddr4-2133 4x8.
Honestly it might be worth it considering you'd probably have to recheck all your mobo connections as part of the bsod troubleshooting anyway, if you spend a lot of time in RimWorld lategame.
I'm in a similar situation with Factorio, but had to force myself to admit that I'm not CPU-bound in any actual work process, and any upgrade was only for a fraction of the ~2hrs of game time a week.
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Building consumer desktops is more tedious and time consuming than it is a tremendous headache. If you can't figure out how to put together silicon LEGO then you're the perfect market for the local computer shop's services. They're not seedy but they are more or less charging an idiot tax. If your ego or wallet can't handle paying that then spend a few hours on /r/buildapc to figure it out.
Also it doesn't even sound like you have any reason to upgrade. Is any game you're playing not running at smooth 60fps?
Some CPU cooling systems really are a pain to mount.
That's why you watch a video review of the cooler you want to buy to see how much of a PitA it is to mount.
I bought one, took great pains to mount it and now I can't get it off. :S
Please, there may be children reading this.
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Eh, idiot taxes are charged to everything. I don't think the world is better off if everyone changed their own oil, raised their own chicken, filed paper taxes, or drafted divorce paperwork.
I think my interest in upgrading the CPU is not dissimilar to people who buy the latest iPhone Pro Max Supreme every year. No one really needs that camera upgrade, but it's nice. And the out of pocket cost isn't too different either. To answer your question, there are a few applications that noticeably chugs due to CPU limitations. RimWorld (in late game) is one, and Excel (large data sets) another.
My RimWorld doubled in TPS going from a Ryzen 1700 to a 5600x. That felt nice, it meant I could play a single save game for like 30 hours before it became unbearably slow as opposed to 15 hours haha.
This is exactly what I'm talking about! I wish they had multithreading but people say that'd require the code be rewritten from scratch, so only recourse is to brute force it with better hardware.
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Specialization is of course good, but all the things you've listed (except changing oil) are much more complicated and take longer to learn than building a PC.
If you're so rich that you can call it a convenience tax rather than an idiot tax, then sure call it that instead. But if your time really is that valuable one wonders why you asked here in the first place.
Eh, Elon Musk still shitposts all day when his time is worth like a million an hour (if you divide his 189B net worth by the number of hours in 33 years between his age and when he turned 18, you get 0.65m per hour). I think we mortals should be allowed to complain about complexity even if we can afford to have a pro take care of it.
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No it isn't.
A bsod isn't normal, there is something wrong maybe in the OS level, maybe with drivers, maybe hardware, but its more than a mere warning that can be ignored most of the time.
Fix the bsod issue, then literally nothing.
Your setup is so hilariously overpowered (in all aspects) for StarCraft2 and Rimworld that you are doing this for no reason other than to please your lizard brain that just wants to buy shit.
You are asking "I drive my Ferrari to the grocery store all the time, should I buy a Lamborghini?" WHY WOULD YOU??
I play similar old school games like you and I'm using a Ryzen 5 2600 and a GTX 1070 setup I bough 5 years ago. Still running strong.
I would have fixed the BSOD if it just required the latest drivers and updates. It's probably something at the hardware level, which sort of goes back to my lack of interest in DIYing diagnostics.
My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld. This is too much detail, but once you get to 50+ colonists the game barely runs on 1x, let alone 3 or 5x speed.
Also, my setup hardly compares to a Ferrari. It's a $1700 machine. 14'' MacBook Pros start at $2k, and I know the average startup doesn't issue its developers a Ferrari on day one. It's more like a base model 2020 BMW 5 series, with me asking the best way to swap the engine for the 2023 model.
If your main goal is Rimworld performance, AMD's 5800x3D CPU is going to be the best value you can buy (or the 7800x3D when it comes out next year) because its huge cache makes a big difference (up to 40%) for complex sim games with lots of entities.
I've been drooling over these for Factorio, but similar sort of position where I can't justify it for the ~2hrs a week I spend using the PC that way.
CPU sim games are such an upgrade trap: "yesss, now I can simulate seven million pieces of iron moving down a belt! Progress!"
The widely-touted Factorio benchmarks run at well over 200+ UPS. The outsized gains from the big cache don't hold up as well with larger factories that struggle to maintain 60, presumably because they overflow it. Something that does help Factorio run faster on pretty much any computer is forcing it to use a larger page size with mimalloc.
Even in that case it's going toe to toe against a CPU twice its price with vastly higher single core speed, which is pretty amazing!
Thanks for the tip. If my business programs were available on Linux I'd switch over entirely at this point.
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Interesting. Never thought about the cache mattering. Thanks for the tip.
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Your CPU is in fact overpowered for Rimworld. Having 50+ colonists is an extreme outlier case, like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.
Is there any point to factorio other than building mega factories? It's not called Cottagecorio, and only like 25% of the content is really involved in a playthrough that just "beats the game."
There are factories and factories. I've had a lot of fun building (quite large) factories in that game, but I have no desire whatever to try to get into the megabase game. Building a factory to produce thousands of science packs per minute is not my idea of fun.
Regardless, though, people who do that in Factorio are at the extreme edge of pushing the game. The hardware they need to sustain that is far greater than what the average Factorio player needs. Similarly, if one has a Rimworld colony with 50+ colonists that's outside the norm, and it means they're going to have higher hardware requirements.
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I do not know the particulars of RimWorld.
But exotic usecases are insatiable. You can make any CPU in the world struggle if you just spawn an arbitrarily large number of bots in games made in the 90's.
If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played, then I suppose just do whatever you want. (Do it regardless, but you asked for suggestions).
The point I was aiming to get across is that a Ferrari is far far far too overspecced to drive to the grocery as is a a high end CPU is for running games that were modestly intensive from half to 3/2 a decade ago.
Not about the expense of it.
It is way outside the bounds of how Rimworld is normally played, for what it's worth. So a CPU upgrade may help, but it's hardly required by the game.
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