Need a new PC

71ChargerRT

71ChargerRT

Well-known member
I looked at the thread TC posted for ideas, then looked at the date, 2009, and figured a 12 year old PC thread is irrelevant as a 1960 Chevy’s fuel injection.

Using it for work bookkeeping, general online use and videos, maybe a little gaming, if I get around to it.
 
I still have the hard drive PC sitting beside me.. 😄 ..I have a very old Mac I inherited and use now, but would prefer a new(er) windows PC again, maybe just a laptop?

Same uses as you, but no gaming.
 
Coincidentally, my tower PC committed hara-kiri Monday night. However, I build my own so I really don't have a suggestion on what a fella might buy. I don't pay attention to what's available in terms of assembled units. The laptop on which I'm writing this dates from 2008, my EFI laptop is an '05 Toughbook, and my music laptop in the garage is a 1998 IBM ThinkPad. The '98 IBM probably wasn't worth the cost of a new CMOS battery ($5) back in 2018, but that's the only issue it's really given me, other than a couple of dead keys (which I don't need) and both hinges breaking back around '05. All three do exactly what I need them to do; asking more is asking too much. 😁

All I bought to revive my dead PC was a new motherboard, RAM, and processor since I'm sure it was either the processor or the motherboard that tanked (and I'm 85% sure it was the latter). I don't do any gaming or anything particularly taxing (occasional video editing), so I ended up with an AMD 3.5GHz dual-core processor, an Asus motherboard on which it'll run mildly overclocked on the bus speed, and 32GB of RAM because I've always overkilled when it comes to RAM. Everything I bought dates back to about 2019, so the RAM was actually the most-expensive bit. I dropped a total of $345; the processor was $90. The next processor on the ladder was nearly $400. I would not attempt gaming on my system-to-be.

If you're just looking for specs, I'd say minimum of 3GHz dual-core processor and 16GB of RAM. A 1TB hard drive would be tough to fill unless you have a zillion pictures, songs, and videos. I get by on this laptop for internet stuff and mild photo editing, but it's a 2.4GHz dual-core processor with 8GB of RAM and it can be trying at times, even with a solid-state hard drive (SSD--faster and quieter). If you're going to do gaming, I'd up that to at least a quad-core processor of 4GHz or more, 32GB RAM, and a separate video card. On-board graphics (built into the motherboard) can really tax the processor, which has a lot to do already just running the software of the game. That much computer could set you back a pretty penny: my video card alone was ~$450 when new; I bought it used from a gamer for less than $100 when it was 10 months old. Ultimately, gaming leads to more gaming, which is fine but as the games upgrade the need for more computer can ramp pretty quickly. If you want to sneak up on it, so to speak, get the latest-greatest motherboard with the newest socket design used by your processor manufacturer of choice--at least that way you can expand it later if the need arises.
 
i to build me own, and to be of any help would need a budget then i could toss a build list around that

the biggest issue right now tho is prices are jacked to shit due to supply issues
 
"some" of the out of date shit that you shouldnt probably even be looking at can be had at a marked up price..but you have to seriously doubt check availibility on everything right now

i have a bought n paid for build that hit a brick wall when all this shit hit the fan..and simply cant be built right now save for trippling the cost and only getting 3/4 the parts...im just lucky the trigger wasnt fully pulled so i dont have parts "aging" while not in use

to anyone wanting to build something..id seriously wait till the chip shortage is over....and if your seriously desperate find something used that you can live with "for now"
 
That's one of the reasons I bought the components I did. They were still relatively inexpensive, though nearly twice what they cost when they were new two years ago. I might've gone a little crazier on processor technology and speed, including a better motherboard, had the prices been saner. I can overclock the parts I bought easily (and safely) enough, but I probably won't see the need.
 
I usually build my own and have upgraded my current rig piece meal as needed.

However, I recently priced out components for a new build, checked a few different sources for the best deals and ended up just ordering a Dell. I should see it the first week of January. Here’s hoping.

Of course, as soon as I get it and clean out the bloatware, it’s getting opened up. I will likely pull the graphics card and give it to my grandson. He’ll get more use out of it than I will. I’ll either use my current card or get his. Then, swap in a bunch of drives from my current build - at least long enough to consolidate and transfer files.

If it gets delayed, I can cancel anytime before it goes into production. So, worst case, I chug along with what I have. I mostly use it for music production these days and it’s fine for that.
 
Dr.Jass said:
If you're just looking for specs, I'd say minimum of 3GHz dual-core processor and 16GB of RAM. A 1TB hard drive would be tough to fill unless you have a zillion pictures, songs, and videos. I get by on this laptop for internet stuff and mild photo editing, but it's a 2.4GHz dual-core processor with 8GB of RAM and it can be trying at times, even with a solid-state hard drive (SSD--faster and quieter). If you're going to do gaming, I'd up that to at least a quad-core processor of 4GHz or more, 32GB RAM, and a separate video card. On-board graphics (built into the motherboard) can really tax the processor, which has a lot to do already just running the software of the game. That much computer could set you back a pretty penny: my video card alone was ~$450 when new; I bought it used from a gamer for less than $100 when it was 10 months old. Ultimately, gaming leads to more gaming, which is fine but as the games upgrade the need for more computer can ramp pretty quickly. If you want to sneak up on it, so to speak, get the latest-greatest motherboard with the newest socket design used by your processor manufacturer of choice--at least that way you can expand it later if the need arises.
Click to expand...

Solid advice.
My new rig has 32GB RAM for exactly the same reason Doc mentions. Because.

Seriously though, besides a rockin graphics card for gaming, RAM is the best bang for the buck in terms of performance improvement.
Solid State Drives give that statement a bit of a run for the money, but it really depends on how much your programs use disk once they are up and running. I mean, they all do, but some are going to do it more than others.
I like to have multiple drives. SSD for operating system. SSD for programs. HDDs for data.
 
SSD's make everything snapier for load times thats for sure...the price has kept me out of anything....substantial
 
I just received a newer laptop for work, I'll start looking for parts to assemble my own. Thanks for the tips. I'll update as I go along.
 
As an addition to above:

My old processor was a 4-core. The newer one, while "faster" in overall speed (3.5GHz v. 3-ish) is only a 2-core. There is noticeable lag when loading video or switching applications in the newer CPU. That may be a setup issue or a missing/wrong driver, but it's worth mentioning. Thus far, in my own version of benchmarking--running tasks I run often--it's a tick slower overall. Overclocking to 3.7GHz did not make a marked improvement; I don't expect miracles by jumping to 4GHz. More cores = more threads = more speed, even at a lower overall CPU speed.

As such, I'd recommend 4 or more cores based on that observation alone. That being said, it's not a pig by any means and I've no desire to upgrade at the moment. It does what's needed, and does it well.
 
Wife wanted a new Mac, since her barely used, 3 year old laptop was "slow". Rather than blow 3 grand on a fancy Apple symbol, I ordered another 8gb of Ram, and a 750gb SSD drive, then cloned her old hard drive. Cost me around a hundred bucks

Runs 5 times as fast now.
 
rm will almost always buy you a considerable amount of time...im on a 6 or so year old build and still gaming mildly..and yes i had to stack the ram..runnin 12 or so in both me n my wifes beasts

i am NOT sold on the whole SSD thing tho, did a 250g in my wifes rig and boy was it snappy as fuck...but..it slowly started having more n more issues, tryed fresh 150 just as a test...and ended up with similar issues

imo if you just have a couple of "primary functions" on an SSD its great, once you seem to get outside of that is when the issues come up

me ima wait a few more years to when the 1tb ssd's come down to a "sane" level of price ..i figure the tech at that point will be up to the task
 
I've been running SSDs in my laptops for several years without issue. The big no-no with a solid-state drive is running your paging file on it. For those unfamiliar, the page or paging file is a chunk of your hard disk (be it solid-state or rotating) that the operating system uses as fast-access RAM rather than for storage (the filename in Windows was "PAGEFILE.SYS" forever; it probably still is). SSDs have a limited, but undefined, number of write/rewrite operations for each location "on the disk" so to speak. As the operation count racks up, the drive will eventually get slower and more unreliable.

Anyhow, since the page file is used as RAM, the operating system is continuously reading, writing, and rewriting to the drive. The page file is dynamic: If you have it set to 50MB it will always use 50MB of drive space, but it doesn't use the same physical location of those 50MB. It writes in whichever location is most quickly accessed, so that 50MB can be spread out anywhere in the drive. That wears out the entire SSD much more quickly, rather than just beating the same 50MB of drive into oblivion. It does not care about partitions, either--it's going to use space wherever it wants. Partitions are not a physical location boundary in the disk, they're simply a digital allocation of space. Think of a partition as a law defining a country's border. The words on the paper have no idea where the physical location of said border is, they're just a bunch of ink that defines its location. A partition is just a group of digital 1s and 0s that define how much space is consumed a drive partition.

The recommendation for SSDs in a single physical drive application like a laptop is to completely disable the page file. That kind of sucks, because SSD page files are truly fast--for a short period of time. Instead, you should bulk up on RAM--max it out, in fact. In multiple-drive applications, the page file should be on a spinning disk, which has a much-longer lifespan in terms of writes/rewrites (the higher RPM the better, from a performance standpoint).

SSDs shouldn't be defragmented, either. It's pointless, since it does not speed the drive up a'tall--you're not moving data from far-flung reaches of spinning media, so there's no performance improvement. In fact, it's detrimental since defragging simply raises the write/rewrite count on every bit it handles--ultimately slowing down the drive long-term.

I replace my SSD after three years*, when the performance has diminshed to the point where my laptop seems like it's got a standard physical disk drive in it. The old drive gets wiped and stockpiled, since there's no bringing them back to their original performance level of which I'm aware. I have two old ones now: one is a backup of my current "working" drive and the other is disconnected but filled with "archive" material: important photos, tech info, videos, and music files that I absolutely do not want to lose. Each time I replace I go to a larger drive so that I can archive more to a known-good (if no longer fast) drive. I'm currently on a 250GB drive; prices have dropped below the "century mark" for 1TB SSDs, so the next one will be that large. I don't need one that big on this machine, but when the time comes it'll make a nice archive drive.

If Bullitt Beanie (@dodgechargerfan) has contradictory or additional advice on this, listen to him rather than me. This sort of thing is his living; my finger ain't on the pulse like it once was.

* I have not yet replaced the SSD in my Toughbook. After 5 years, that PC still only has about two hours' use on it (setup time only) and hasn't been on since. That's my "EFI only" PC, which is why it's a Toughbook: If I get frustrated and throw it, it will survive. 😁
 
The only thing I would re-word is the bit about the page file being a RAM disk of sorts and it being fast-access.

It's more accurate to say that it's a slower (than RAM) place to swap running code and/or data to when the actual RAM is exhausted. It's a temporary scratchpad for stuff that's already in RAM.
Chunks of RAM get swapped to disk to make room to load/run other stuff.
That's why adding more RAM, when the system supports it, is the best bang-for-the-buck upgrade in terms of performance for most use cases. The less often you have to swap to pagefile, the better the performance.

The key concept of not using SSD for swap space is absolutely correct.
I mean, you can do it, but it's not a good idea unless you like losing data and replacing drives more often than necessary.

As a rule, I use SSDs for stuff that I can reinstall - OS, programs, some downloads like driver files.
Everything else goes onto spinning magnetic disc and gets backed up over the network to other spinning magnetic disk. Some stuff goes up to the cloud, too.
Pagefile always goes to spinning magnetic disk, but I try as much as possible to avoid needing that by loading up as much RAM as possible.


Also, my new PC has been delayed... I might cancel and grab something else. I need to do some shopping and see what available locally.
 
dodgechargerfan said:
The only thing I would re-word is the bit about the page file being a RAM disk of sorts and it being fast-access.

It's more accurate to say that it's a slower (than RAM) place to swap running code and/or data to when the actual RAM is exhausted. It's a temporary scratchpad for stuff that's already in RAM.
Chunks of RAM get swapped to disk to make room to load/run other stuff.
Click to expand...
Somewhere in my brain I knew I was wrong on that, but for some reason ran with it anyhow... but halfway through the second sentence you confirmed my suspicion. Thank you for the clarification.

I also probably should've mentioned that the only reason I use my old SSDs as archives is because they're 100% out of use. They're not connected to any PC; they're sitting on a bookshelf in case I need them. No more writes/rewrites are happening on them to jeopardize the contents. I replace SSDs before I start noticing any serious performance issues--I've never lost data--so they're OK to just sit in storage with files on 'em that I might want later.
 
Dr.Jass said:
I also probably should've mentioned that the only reason I use my old SSDs as archives is because they're 100% out of use. They're not connected to any PC; they're sitting on a bookshelf in case I need them. No more writes/rewrites are happening on them to jeopardize the contents. I replace SSDs before I start noticing any serious performance issues--I've never lost data--so they're OK to just sit in storage with files on 'em that I might want later.
Click to expand...
Solid plan!
 
The future looks interesting.

UltraRAM Breakthrough Brings New Memory and Storage Tech to Silicon

”Some extrapolated numbers for UltraRAM are that it will offer "data storage times of at least 1,000 years," and its fast switching speed and program-erase cycling endurance is "one hundred to one thousand times better than flash." Add these qualities to the DRAM-like speed, energy efficiency, and endurance, and this novel memory type sounds hard for tech companies to ignore.

If you read between the lines above, you can see that UltraRAM is envisioned to break the divide between RAM and storage. So, in theory, you could use it as a one-shot solution to fill these currently separate requirements. In a PC system, that would mean you would get a chunk of UltraRAM, say 2TB, and that would cover both your RAM and storage needs.”
 
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