Buy it now. Same reason i bought prebuilt. Id rather pay a little extra for ease of mind, but then im utterly rubbish at building anything.

You can get my PC for a few hundred more (even though they've changed the CPU since I complained to them).

Ha!

If you're going pre-built, then surely it has to be a Corsair One?

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/corsair-one-i200-compact-hydro-cooled-workstation-pc-i9-10940x-64gb-ddr4-2tb-nvme-ssd-11gb-rtx-2080

'No customer review.'

acemuzzy wrote:

How does this look to folk?? https://www.scan.co.uk/products/scan-gamer-rtx-amd-ryzen-7-3700x-16gb-ddr4-8gb-evga-rtx-2070-super-1tb-ssd-win-10

I'll explain the 4000 series issue in a moment, but first of all while that generally appears to be a good spec it uses an A320 motherboard which is the most basic and limited of the chipsets, and almost certainly won't see 4000 series CPU support.

Thread title change needed.

Welcome to the top peddle stool lad

Ok so with upgrading CPUs, first of all it's worth considering if your the sort of person that would ever really need or want to, it's fair to say that most people probably don't upgrade their systems with a more powerful compatible chip and end up just waiting until several gens later when they just upgrade the whole lot.

But then again many might buy a cheaper setup with the intention of upgrading later if necessary, like for myself I've been thinking about swapping in a higher core count CPU than my 8 core 2nd gen so I can get better performance in 3D, music production, and video applications, as well as for some benefits in gaming.

So you may or may not wish to upgrade but it's a nice option to have, and for the last 3 generations of Ryzen we've had great compatibility and options to do so. But with the next gen it looks like things might change due to some daft BIOS chip size limitations. Basically many boards' BIOS chips don't have enough capacity to contain all the necessary code to run the huge array of available AM4 socket CPUs now, AMD knew about this a while ago but neglected to update their marketing and communication leading to some annoyance and frustration from a lot of people and the tech press.

The thing is, if the board manufacturers were allowed to they could release updates that would bring support for 4000 on B450/X470 boards, by removing support for older chips like the first generation of Ryzen. This has been done before already on some X370 boards where in order to get 3rd gen you have to lose the 1st, so it's not unprecedented and could be done, but is just a bit of a faff for the board manufacturers to sort out. I think they would do it though given the huge demand, would make for great PR.

The possibly good news is that the boards that I have been recommending to you lot for your budget builds stand the best chance of seeing some kind of update to add the 4000 series as supported CPUs, they are the most popular and have the biggest userbase, and in many cases have the 32Mb BIOS chips to make adding the extra code no problem really. But at the moment AMD has just dropped this blanket sort of determination over which chipsets will and won't get support, so it's not clear what will happen closer to the launch of 4000 probably later this year.

For now if you want guaranteed next gen support the only option is a more fully specced X570 motherboard, which is not ideal for budget builders as they seem to start at £150 rather than £70-100ish. And unless you have some more serious requirements for productivity it's unlikely most people need all the I/O and features of X570, B450 is usually more than enough. There is B550 which was supposed to have released ages ago, but has yet to be released. This puts people like me and the tech press in an awkward postion when it comes to putting together builds for people, as we'd like to suggest stuff that offers the greatest performance and capability for the money, as well as offering plenty of future support for new tech, but there's this big price gap between B450 and X570.. Until like last week everone was under the impression that all these boards would be getting support for the 4th gen based on AMD's previous marketing and communication.

Despite that I think AMD are still better than Intel when it comes to this kind of stuff, you basically only ever get two CPU generations out of a socket with Intel, so we've had it pretty good considering. But still, unless there's some other technical reason why we couldn't have 4th gen Ryzen support on current lower end or older boards that AMD aren't telling us about it seems quite daft to be limited due to BIOS chip capacity, something the engineers should have ideally have thought of back at the start of Ryzen. But hey that's hindsight for you I guess, perhaps they never thought they would be so succesful with the new architectures.

Ever since I installed a new mobo my PC starts in hibernate mode and I have to turn it off and on again before it'll start normally. It won't wake up without depowering first. Any ideas?

I've got a very strange graphical glitch and I don't know how to fix it. It doesn't effect web browsers, or certain office apps, but does interfere with other apps, particularly GoG, Slack, atom text editor, Microsoft teams, and game loading/option menus that appear sometimes when you launch a game from steam.

Essentially the screens go grainy around text or areas of contrast until forced to refresh (mousing over, or clicking on etc). I've updated drivers and fiddled with settings but I can't seem to fix it. Anyone got any ideas?

Yeah it happens on a couple of my games if I ramp it up to like 100%

Dark Soldier wrote:

Yeah it happens on a couple of my games if I ramp it up to like 100%

Oof 100% is a bit much IMO, normally I find 5-30% more than enough depending on the game.

That seems to have fixed it for most things, thanks.

Ask their customer sevice for 50% off

I know that trick, we employ it at work. Just say you want another 16gig of ram as a compromise or get a refund.