It's time I built a new PC.

[djsb]

So I last built my own desktop PC in 2006. It was using an Intel Core 2 duo CPU on a EVGA 122-CK-NF68 motherboard (https://www.evga.com/support/manuals/files/122-CK-NF68.pdf), a Corsair HX620W power supply and a Geforce GTX750TI graphics card. I thought it was about time I built a new one.

So, I've just bought a Gigabyte B550 Aorus Elite ax v2 motherboard with an AMD 5600X CPU and Corsair CMK16GX4M2B3200C16 Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz C16 XMP 2.0 memory. I'm just wondering if I can still safely reuse the existing PSU and graphics card at least temporarily? I will upgrade when finances allow. I next have to buy a case and 2TB SSD. I'm looking at a fractal Design or Corsair 4000D case (budget £50 to £80) and will probably go with a Crucial 2TB SSD. Is it possible to upgrade Windows 7 to Windows 10 and then Windows 11 for free? I have Windows 7 with a product key and I have the Windows 10 Pro ISO on DVD that I downloaded. I have heard that Windows 10 will no longer be available beyond the end of January. Will this affect me? Can Windows 10 be upgraded to Windows 11 for free on compatible hardware. Thanks.

[Jackster]

Your old PSU and GPU will be fine.

Windows upgrade still works even though it officially ended like 5 years ago. But could stop any day so there is no guarantee. Windows 10 runs quite well on old hardware so you could upgrade now, get your new Windows 10 key (you can extract the key from the OS with some tools) and then install fresh onto your new SSD.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong on that. It has been a while.

The 4000D is a nice case. Lots of airflow and good cable management.

Your CPU and RAM choice is also good. I just upgraded my work PC with the 5600G and the same RAM.
Testing out the 5600G to see if the graphics are enough to save me from upgrading a GPU. They are so expensive still 😖

[mariush]

Yeah, you can reuse PSU and GPU.

The 5600x consumes up to around 80-100 watts, from the 12v output of the power supply, so it's not like you'd overload the power supply.
The GTX750ti consumes maybe up to 60 watts when you're gaming on it.
Ram will consume 2-3w per stick, usually from 5v,  motherboard (chipset, onboard audio, network, usb etc) around 10-15w again mostly from 5v and 3.3v
SSD will consume around 1-2w idle or reading, up to 5-10w when writing a lot of data ... and that's from 3.3v or 5v of your power supply (M.2 connectors are 3.3v only but some motherboards have dc-dc converters producing 3.3v from 5v, for voltage stability and other reasons)


For SSD, I would suggest picking a drive that uses TLC memory (ex Samsung 970 Evo plus, Samsung 980, WD SN570, WD SN770, WD SN850x etc).

Drives with QLC have much lower endurance, and the write speeds decrease if you transfer a lot and fill the write cache -  there are some QLC SSDs with very large pseudo-SLC cache  like for example Crucial P3 Plus, but most have only up to around 50-100 GB (depending on how much free disk space is

[Ian.M]

IIRC, until Microsoft eventually get around to turning off the Win7/Win8 upgrade option, you can simply activate Win10 1909 or later with a Win7/Win8 product key that hasn't been blacklisted, without having to do an upgrade install of Win10. 

[mapleLC]

I am struggling to understand how anyone would use a Microsoft OS by choice today.

You either get the data whore modern OS or you get to put up with one of their old OSs.  We used to run Windows NT back when because Windows Vista sucked, then we'd Windows 2000 server at home until Windows 7 was passable.

The best OS Microsoft did was probably Windows 10, as Windows 11 crossed the line on data whoring.  In the end, its a not very good company which has never really innovated much, its just one Zune after another and nobody wakes up to it.  The only thing that kept many programmers in their net was C# which is a pretty usable language.  And how its taught and used as part of the H1B tunnel, the cheapest programmers out there are usually C# and maybe some web crap I am not aware of.  Oh sharepoint, there is development 1 step up from QA.

Microsoft is expert at making themselves consumer friendly, otherwise it's not a very good platform.  I guess with computers it will take much longer for us to learn the lessons of proprietary technology and Betamax again.  I would suggest a different OS.

[aeberbach]

Your CPU and RAM choice is also good. I just upgraded my work PC with the 5600G and the same RAM.
Testing out the 5600G to see if the graphics are enough to save me from upgrading a GPU. They are so expensive still 😖

It's kind of infuriating. I want a discrete graphics card but the 5600G is so good. The only thing it doesn't handle well are games and I don't need smoother games for $1000. Anything past a 20x0 card seems artificially expensive and I don't really understand how since most of the 30x0 series are low hash rate, supposedly crippled for crypto. Can they be un-crippled with firmware perhaps?

[Jackster]

Your CPU and RAM choice is also good. I just upgraded my work PC with the 5600G and the same RAM.
Testing out the 5600G to see if the graphics are enough to save me from upgrading a GPU. They are so expensive still 😖

It's kind of infuriating. I want a discrete graphics card but the 5600G is so good. The only thing it doesn't handle well are games and I don't need smoother games for $1000. Anything past a 20x0 card seems artificially expensive and I don't really understand how since most of the 30x0 series are low hash rate, supposedly crippled for crypto. Can they be un-crippled with firmware perhaps?

It has been pretty solid for general use, multiple videos and CAD/CAM work so far.
Does not touch my 5950x at home but general use and PCB software it works great without a dedicated GPU.

I have only tried a couple games so far.
WOW MOP runs pretty bad conpared to my old ATI 5000 series card with 2GB of vRAM which is disappointing.
Sons of the Forest runs at 10fps top.
Need to test some more but it is not for gaming...

[Doctorandus_P]

It is of course your choice, but I do find the "upgrade" a bit strange.
I have been living with "old PC's" I got for free for quite a while. I worked with a "dual core" (I thinkt that's older then the "core 2 duo") for about 10 years (it had a passmark rating of around 1500). Then someone gave me another PC which had a passmark rating of just over 3000 and I used that too for a few years.

Then I decided I wanted a big 4K monitor (107cm diagonal) and I finally decided to buy a new PC. That was just over a year ago, and I bought an 5600G. And that PC is plenty fast for me. Inclusive calculating all the pixels for my new monitor. Back then it was also one of the very few options. external graphic cards were 3x or more the MSRP if you could get them at all. I paid EUR1000 for the monitor, and the rest, Including Mobo, SSD, 16GB RAM, power supply and some other small stuff, cost me around EUR650. The processor was EUR250,  And it's a quite decent performer for a small price. Now you can buy the 5600G for as low as EUR135.

The thing I don't understand, is if you can live that long with such an old PC, then why buy that processor? The price difference is too big to justify the small performance difference. (and I like the "G" of the 5600G )
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

[sokoloff]

It's kind of infuriating. I want a discrete graphics card but the 5600G is so good. The only thing it doesn't handle well are games and I don't need smoother games for $1000. Anything past a 20x0 card seems artificially expensive and I don't really understand how since most of the 30x0 series are low hash rate, supposedly crippled for crypto. Can they be un-crippled with firmware perhaps?

I just got an RX6650 XT (a 6600 XT with slightly faster memory) and it's pretty damned good for $275-ish. If you're not stuck on needing to run Cuda, I'd have a look at team red GPUs.

[SiliconWizard]

The 6650 XT seems to be very good value for your money right now indeed. Since support is also better on Linux, it looks like the way to go if you don't need the most powerful GPU on the market. And sure if you don't need Cuda.

As to CPUs, right now with the 13rd gen, the ratio performance/cost is in favor of Intel - unless maybe you target the low end of CPUs, for which AMD has a slight edge.
Be aware that the 13rd gen tends to be pretty power hungry though.

[rdl]

I'm still hobbling along on an i5-3570, but the release of the 7000 series Ryzen has me tempted. However, when I go shopping I see some really good prices on the 5000 series and the frugal side of me kicks in saying things like "you don't need DDR-5", "you don't need PCIe 5, nothing even uses it and probably won't for a while". So I end up buying nothing. It is getting harder and harder to resist though.

[Doctorandus_P]

As to CPUs, right now with the 13rd gen, the ratio performance/cost is in favor of Intel - unless maybe you target the low end of CPUs, for which AMD has a slight edge.
Be aware that the 13rd gen tends to be pretty power hungry though.

For this, I like the XY scatter diagram on:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_scatter_graph
This gives you a very quick overview of the relative price to performance ratio of quite a lot of processors.

I'm still hobbling along on an i5-3570, but the release of the 7000 series Ryzen has me tempted.

Why tempted? The i5-3570 has a PM rating of 4670. That is plenty for mail, internet, office and most other day to day applications.
The Dualcore I used for about 12 years had a PM of only 1500 and that was getting a bit sluggish in the en. After that, I used a machine with a PM of around 3000 for about a year, but only because someone gave me one for free. I would still be using that one, if it was not for a combination of two factors. 1). I had been longing for a 107cm 4k monitor for several years, and those PC's were too old for that. 2). The root partition of the Linux I was running back then was installed on the last partition of an SSD, and it ran out of space. Increasing the last partition in size is a bit troublesome, so I was thinking about wiping the SSD and re-installing everything. But I do not like PC maintenance and I did not want to spend a day to do this on that old hardware. That was the final nail.

Re-installing everything on my new PC was a breeze though. I thought it would take about a day, but in the end it just took a few hours. Installing Linux Mint was maybe 10 minutes, and because I use Open Source software exclusively, installing all my other software also was quick. No messing with license files, entering long weird numbers, online activation or all the other mess that some people are apparently willing to put up with.

Some time ago a brother of mine was visiting, and he wanted to show me something with a gadget (with ESP32) he made. He wanted putty to put in the network credentials and he asked me if I had putty installed. I said "yes", he said "start it then", and I did a "sudo apt install putty", and had it running about 10 seconds later. He thought it was not fair, but I just shrugged my shoulders. The important thing is that we could just continue with more interesting things after an very minimal delay / interruption.

[Zucca]

Don't buy ASUS MB

[rdl]

Why tempted?

Games.

I need something for Windows 10 fast enough to run recent games. But you're right, other than that it's plenty good enough.

Asus got on my "never again" list about 10 years ago when they required me to return a defective monitor for repair. Four times. And they never did manage to actually fix it. I finally gave up and threw it in the trash.

[sokoloff]

I ended up getting my kid a new PC to play modern games. (He wanted to play a game that his old computer didn't support the TPM 2.0 module required by the anti-cheat subsystem in the game.)

I got him a $750-ish gaming PC, i5-12400, 16 GB DDR4, and 6650XT. As I was setting it up, I immediately decided to upgrade the other kid's PC to the same and my own PC from the i7-4790 Dells to an i7-13700 for me. (I figured I'd gotten my 4 years and money's worth out of the $150 cheap, used 4th gen equipment.) That's 3 modern PCs, likely to be worth using for 8+ years, for either side of $10/mo in hardware costs.

NVMe is a bigger deal than I gave it credit for. I had SATA SSDs in all the Dells, but the new PCs are ridiculously more snappy for daily use.