John King

Member of SOFA
Location
Beaumaris, Melbourne, Australia
Name
John ...
My PC is now over a decade old. Nothing is compatible with it these days. Even the RAM chips are worth a fortune, as nothing compatible is made now. Same goes for a more modern graphics card.

My existing big internal HDDs will all go into the new box, which has 6x SATA3 headers, as well as dedicated NVMe slots.

Something along these lines:

Seagate ST4000NE001 IronWolf Pro NAS HDD 3.5" 4TB SATA 7200RPM
(Replaces existing DEAD 3TB HDD)

Gigabyte Z690 AORUS PRO DDR4 LGA 1700 Motherboard

Intel BX8071512700 Core i7-12700 3.6GHz (4.9Ghz Turbo) LGA 1700 12 Cores 20 Threads Processor

Kingston KF432C16BBK2/32 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 CL16 DIMM (Kit of 2) FURY Beast Memory Kit Black

ASUS TUF-GTX1660TI-O6G-EVO-GAMING TUF Gaming GeForce GTX 1660 Ti EVO OC Edition 6GB GDDR6

Kingston SFYRS/1000G FURY Renegade 1000GB M.2 2280 PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD

Cooler Master MPX-7501-AMAAB-AU MasterWatt Semi-Modular 750W Power Supply

Cooler Master RC-593-KWN2 CASE CM 590 III C VENTANA

My preferred supplier will have to cast their eagle eyes over this to ensure that I haven't missed anything important, or incompatibilities.

I will get my preferred supplier to build this, then clone my existing boot SSD to the new NVME SSD. All the bending over is just too much for my back now. I will get the new HDD tomorrow and format it and start copying all my image files back onto it

While it's not the absolute top end of town, it should do everything I want it to do for the foreseeable future. Considering that I might not be here in "the foreseeable future", this should be more than good enough for my purposes.

I will transfer all my current HDDs (3TB, 2TB and 500GB) and the new 4TB HDD into the new case, and clone my existing W7 Pro 64 and programs onto the new NVMe SSD before upgrading it to W10 Pro 64. I intend to put my Bridge cache on the new NVMe SSD, as it has something like 3,000 7,000 MB/s transfer/write speed, unlike my current SSD which is running at SATA2 speeds (3 Mb/s ... ). It is a SATA3 SSD.

Maybe this should be in a new thread (done ... ).

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.
 
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I'd put my 2 cents on the Ryzen-series as well. For a time Intel had an edge - it's been a back and forth between the two since my childhood days - but now it seems with the 3rd gen Ryzens AMD took a big stick and bonked Intel senseless. At least on paper the AMD processors have lots more power for the same amount of money, like 2-3 times the power at times. Now this is benchmark numbers, so real world might not show such a dramatic difference. But still a difference.

But as I've learned, nothing is enough with Adobe. Even though my Ryzen 7 laptop might run Lightroom and other stuff just fine and dandy, the Creative Cloud background app can at times take over 40% of total available processor power... Oh, how I love IT and competently made software.
 
I suggest you to build an alternative Ryzen3 setup just to see what it might cost.

I'd personally look into 64G memory kits and maybe 2 TB m.2 system storage. Software's only going to get more bloated down the way, Win11 and latest Adobe crap included.
Thanks for the suggestion, Mike and Squirrel. I'm not after the fastest PC on the planet, although I priced one in that league too. Costs about 50% more!

I'm familiar with Intel stuff, and trust it. Most development occurs on Intel boxes, and I'm not really worried about getting the last ounce of speed.
I've never had an Intel designed motherboard or CPU fail on me (or any of my clients). Reliability is key, as is industry wide compatibility.

AMD have always had a following because of cost/speed (think gamers). I place reliability and compatibility way above both, and have always been prepared to pay a premium for those things. I expect 10-15 years out of the basic components. I should be so lucky as to live that long!

Almost anything will be hugely faster than what I'm currently using.

Main criteria are:

* Minimum of 6 SATA slots.
* Ability to take 64 GB RAM without bankruptcy (while not lacking for cash, the reason we're not lacking for cash is that we're careful with it ... ). The specific motherboard I've chosen will take 128 GB of DDR4 ram. I know that DDR5 is available, but not with all the features listed here.
* Ability to fit more than one NVMe SSD. The one I have specified has 7,000 MB/s write speed, and I would rather have two than one bigger one.
* Decent graphics card that doesn't cost the earth.
* Ability to run Windows 11, once it works properly.
* Lots of fans and fan controllers.
* At least some other expansion slots.
* Box has to have plenty of room for drives and airflow.
I'd put my 2 cents on the Ryzen-series as well. For a time Intel had an edge - it's been a back and forth between the two since my childhood days - but now it seems with the 3rd gen Ryzens AMD took a big stick and bonked Intel senseless. At least on paper the AMD processors have lots more power for the same amount of money, like 2-3 times the power at times. Now this is benchmark numbers, so real world might not show such a dramatic difference. But still a difference.
Exactly. The I7 processor I've chosen balances high performance, reliability and compatibility. The last 5-10% of speed is all but irrelevant to me. Overclocking is for the intellectually challenged, IMNSHO ...
But as I've learned, nothing is enough with Adobe. Even though my Ryzen 7 laptop might run Lightroom and other stuff just fine and dandy, the Creative Cloud background app can at times take over 40% of total available processor power... Oh, how I love IT and competently made software.
Quite. So lots of cores, and a relatively powerful graphics card to take the load off the CPU. The graphics are where laptops fall down. Just not enough room for the required cooling fans and huge heatsink. They often use up to 8 GB of shared system RAM as well, so you need a minimum of 32 GB, and preferably 64 GB to slake Adobe's insatiable appetite for memory.
Hi John, what happened to the data on this drive? (Replaces existing DEAD 3TB HDD) Were you able to recover the files from it? What version of windoooze are you running now?

thanks,
Thanks for asking, Lucien. I now have multiple backups of all the critical files. The drive finally died yesterday after about 5 weeks of limping and running CHKDSK. I'm currently running Windows 7 Pro 64 on this workstation. Windows 10 Pro 64 on another, and Windows XP Pro on yet another. I will cannabilise the old box for RAM, graphics card, PSU and USB3 card. All the other internal HDDs will migrate to the new box.

The Bridge cache will live on the new NVMe SSD. Images on the new HDD (512 MB cache, 7200 RPM, SATA 3).
 
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Ryzen uses less power for the same or better performance, though this really only matters in high-load scenarios. The Intel 12-series CPUs will draw upwards of 220W if the motherboard is setup to allow it, and it has to be set that way to achieve the performance metrics you see in the benchmarks. A Ryzen caps out at something like 145W by comparison.

It’s quite a puzzling time in the PC space. Electricity is becoming harder to supply reliably due to a renewable push, yet you can theoretically build desktop machines that consume almost 1KW at full tilt. 350W GPUs and CPUs pegging 250W are next-gen premium performance. Intel and nVidia are the pioneers here on such power consumption in order to reach performance “wins,” and AMD is set to follow as increasing power consumption is the only way to provide competitive performance. It’s to the point that premium CPUs will not sustain full performance under an air cooler of any size.

Ryzen 7000 is around the corner, and it will be a significant boost over anything available today.
 
Randy, we have an 8 kW solar array on our roof. The pool heater alone can draw about 6+ kWs of that if running flat out. Of course, I never let it do that.

Why I specced this the way I did was:

a) money: the "ideal" PC would have cost another AUD$1,300 approx, and

b) the price performance ratio just didn't stack up. Huge increase in price for maybe 5-10% increase in performance, only noticeable in highly specific circumstances.

Bear in mind that I have around $1,000 worth of drives, and another $1,000 worth of peripherals to be plugged in. That starts to look like a $4,500 PC if starting from scratch already! That's quite a lot for a PC ...

I've paid for it, and the assembly should be done by week after next. We have two public holidays here next week.

My current main PC is a Core2Duo clocking at ~2.8 GHz running DDR2 RAM, SATA HDDs at SATA2 speeds, with a slow 2 GB graphics card.

Instead of running 2 cores, the I7 will be 12 cores running 20 threads.
The new graphics card has 1468 CUDA cores, with three times the on board RAM.

SATA3 doubles the speed of the existing HDDs. The NVMe SSD takes the speed of the boot and program SSD from SATA2 (3 MBps) to 7,000 MBps - 2,000 times faster.

The new RAM clocks at 3200 MHz vs 1600 MHz.

I reckon that I will be very happy without screwing the power drain through the roof!

Time will tell. The new 4 TB HDD is about 15% formatted.
 
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Format completed. It took around 4.5 hours for 4 TB.

Geez, the new HDD is fast! Specially after the pain and suffering of recovering a backup. 7200 rpm with a 512 MB cache. Took just on an hour to restore about 470 GB from my E-30 sub-folder.
This is even when running off a SATA2 port. SATA3 is twice as fast.

So far, so good.

More news tomorrow.
 
>My current main PC is a Core2Duo clocking at ~2.8 GHz running DDR2 RAM, SATA HDDs at SATA2 speeds, with a slow 2 GB graphics card.
Load DOS on this one, it will outrun the new one.
I write code for embedded processors on a setup like this. It is fast, uses 4GBytes of RAM under DOS.

The AMD processors: Tend to run hotter than the Intel CPU, we had some "burn out". I tend to stick with Intel these days.
 
I had to replace mine about 6 months ago. AMD 12 core / 24 thread/12 Gig gpu and most importantly besides a big SSD boot drive was memory. 64 Gig's of 3600 memory. I do a lot of 4K and 6k video and so far I am loving this computer. Over spec for me was a good (but expensive) decision (even had a separate line put in for it. Oh, and do't forget not only liquid cooling but lots of big fans. I run my computer 8 to 12 hours a day (stills/video/music) and so far so good. Good luck, its a headache making a computer decision now-a-days.
 
Got some ad from Lenovo, this one looks neat
 
Got some ad from Lenovo, this one looks neat
The 32 core version is over $13K in Canada :censored:
 
I would never trust a Lenova computer.




 
@Brian Brian, I learned well over 30 years ago never to buy 'brand name' boxes. They tend to be full of gotchas. e.g. HP made 32 different servers, not one single one of which was upgradeable to another level!

The hardest part of specifying any new computer is working out what will need to be added in 5 year's time to keep it up to date, then allowing for that now.

e.g. My old main workstation started life in 2010 with 2 GB RAM, no SSD, one 500 GB HDD, and an office level graphics card ... And lots of SATA ports and expansion slots.

At its end of life, it has 6x SATA devices, 16 GB RAM, a far better graphics card, a USB3 card and plugged into a very different monitor. It still works very well.
 
At work my Pentium Pro finally went out. 1996. The "Big Boss" asked why I still used it. "If I can make timing on that, my code will run on anything"
I still have one here at home. I have a lot of computers. My first computer for home is a Xerox 820-II with 64K ram and two 320KByte floppy drives. I processed Landsat 4 Satellite imagery on it. 4MHz processor. Also wrote code on it that went up on a P3A Orion. I had to disassemble a lot of BIOS code to discover why some code just would not work. With Lenova- it's because the company cannot be trusted to keep back doors out of the computer. They have been caught many times, I do not trust them.
 
At work my Pentium Pro finally went out. 1996. The "Big Boss" asked why I still used it. "If I can make timing on that, my code will run on anything"
I still have one here at home. I have a lot of computers. My first computer for home is a Xerox 820-II with 64K ram and two 320KByte floppy drives. I processed Landsat 4 Satellite imagery on it. 4MHz processor. Also wrote code on it that went up on a P3A Orion. I had to disassemble a lot of BIOS code to discover why some code just would not work. With Lenova- it's because the company cannot be trusted to keep back doors out of the computer. They have been caught many times, I do not trust them.
Brian, I consider it a great problem that many (most?) modern programmers couldn't write tight, fast code to save their lives. Do any of them even know what a two pass compiler is? Let alone what it does ...

Sloppy, bloated code that needs a supercomputer to run it. That's effectively what my new computer is. Unbelievably fast compared with even my current main workstation, let alone the one running XP Pro 32 (Pentium) that drives my slide/film scanner. It dates from 2007.

Maybe I should clone its boot drive onto my spare SSD and reuse my old box for that purpose. I don't think that the current XP box motherboard has SATA ports on it, unfortunately.
 
I have a version of XP that supports SATA drives. The original releases did not, had to be added. DOS does not have a problem with them, goes through the BIOS.

At work I've mentored Students for 20 years, mostly during the Summer. Taught 16yo students to write assembly language for 8-bit microcontrollers. I've been asked to continue doing this after retiring.
 
I have a version of XP that supports SATA drives. The original releases did not, had to be added. DOS does not have a problem with them, goes through the BIOS.

At work I've mentored Students for 20 years, mostly during the Summer. Taught 16yo students to write assembly language for 8-bit microcontrollers. I've been asked to continue doing this after retiring.
Ha. Pulled the side off the XP box this morning, and it has 6 SATA ports and its boot HDD is plugged into one of them.

The version of XP Pro I'm running has SP3 and all the minor post SP3 updates installed.

So I have just found a new home for my existing SSD.

The new Seagate Ironwolf 4 TB has a sustained write speed of about 130 MBps over 5 hours, which is really pretty good considering the age of the other hardware in the box.
 
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