Let's make a gaming PC - The Bear and Badger

isanbard

Trying to find anyone prepared to sell a GPU is a bit of a punt at the minute but ta for the heads up Voices.

Frosty

@isanbard A 2060 will be great for 1080p gaming so you don't need to worry on that front.

Edit: had a look at the digital foundry review to get an idea of the cards 1080p performance and they got average fps of 140 on wolfenstein 2 and 115 on Witcher 3 at 1080. Both games a few years old but I don't think that matters too much.

So it'll be grand for your nephew.

isanbard

Seems like it might be ok for some light Raymona Tracey as well at 1080? Nae bad for the little fella..

voices

Probably not very usefully with the 2060. You get the super Nvidia ai upscaling though.

SpaceGazelle

DLSS is great.

Little Franklin

I'm determined to get a 3080 but it seems like I might be waiting into next year.

voices

Me too. Thought I'd have one by March last September,.

GurtTractor

isanbard wrote:

Another one to send up the Gurt flare.. Just about to put the order in for this AWD jobbie. AWD MB520 RGB AMD Ryzen 5 5600X Six Core Liquid Cooled RTX 2060 6GB Desktop PC for Gaming Pimped up some extras like 16gig RAM, 480gig SSD, 1tb HDD. The question really is how will a trusty old 2060 do for 1080 gaming? It's for a nephew who's been saving for about a year and now the bastard prices are still all blown to buggery. I was thinking of getting that and it should be more than fine for 1080 starter but have the bones to take a beefier GPU if they ever come back to normality at some future point if he wants. Seems ok?

Yeah this seems fine, 2060 should be plenty for 1080p 60FPS. There is this one for about the same price with a 3060, but has a slightly lower end CPU and mobo so I dunno really. You can choose the better mobo upgrade on the 3060 one though, and CPU upgrades will be easy if needed later on. Kinda depends on what kind of games your nephew likes to play, and if the extra CPU oomph would be really useful for sim type games and for productivity. Both solid choices.

Blue Swirl

Random question. Can you get, for want of a better word, air conditioning units for your PC? I just had a thought recently, why not actively cool the air being pushed through your machine? Could be a nice middle ground between air and liquid cooling.

Surely someone has thought of this already?

Kow

Air conditioning uses a lot of power. If you have your pc on for a lot of the day you'd drive you electricity bill through the roof.

GurtTractor

There's various things that people have done like that, like hanging a radiator out your window in the winter, or dunking it in an ice bath. Condensation becomes a problem, and it's generally quite impractical.

There's also things like peltier thermoelectric coolers, though I'm not sure if there's a decent product for that available currently. IIRC the TLDR for those is; they suck.

hunk

I'd luv me some server climate controls in the home.

Blue Swirl

Kow wrote:

Air conditioning uses a lot of power.

That's a fair point.

GurtTractor wrote:

Condensation becomes a problem, and it's generally quite impractical.

A good air conditioning system removes moisture from the air, but I take the point - if you got things wrong, your cooled components could start getting condensation on them. A cold drink on a hot day problem.

I'm also guessing that an air conditioning unit small enough for PC use isn't a thing either.

voices

I've seen a few videos on actively cooled set ups - I think the general conclusion is that without something impractical, the heat generated by the power used to cool the system overwhelms the reduction in heat. As Gurt says - peltier coolers were a thing for PCs c10 years ago, and the consensus is they make things worse rather than better.

Making your heatsink bigger, or getting faster/bigger fans to move more air would probably have a much bigger impact than slightly cooler air, so there's not much point in putting a whole AC setup in a PC.

davyK

Not 100% on topic as it's more for a Pi or that nifty new FPGA/Mister thingy - but I like the looks of this:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/jlafleur/ready-model-100-portable-computer-kit

GurtTractor

This is a great breakdown of the various potential pitfalls that can occur when buying prebuilt systems, and why I'm generally a bit wary of recommending such machines over a proper DIY route. That said with the current silicon shortage and intense difficulty in buying some parts for a fair price right now, prebuilts are perhaps the only good way to get into PC gaming if you don't already have a good rig.

Kow

I built in mine in January and I have to say it was a really easy process. Up and running flawlessly in a few hours.

GurtTractor

Blue Swirl

voices wrote:

I've seen a few videos on actively cooled set ups - I think the general conclusion is that without something impractical, the heat generated by the power used to cool the system overwhelms the reduction in heat.

Reminds me of the "cooling" stands you can buy for the PS4 and such. As they draw power from the system via USB, they make it hotter than it would be if you didn't bother strapping some fans to the outside.

GurtTractor

This is a proper horrorshow of a prebuilt, an example of how bad it can get -

Subbax

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/Subbax/saved/k3pK4D

First thoughts were a Ryzen 7 5800X and an MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk but it mentions that the motherboard may need an upgrade before it'll work with the CPU and to do that I might need a separate CPU. Is there a better motherboard I should be using instead?

GurtTractor

You can update the BIOS with a USB stick with the BIOS file on it, so you should be fine - https://glennsqlperformance.com/2021/03/11/updating-the-bios-on-an-msi-mag-b550-tomahawk-with-m-flash/

Subbax

Turns out that AMD also send you CPUs to do it if you need. How handy! I'll go with the stick though as that sounds way more sensible.

I've got the cash laying around so I'm going to start buying parts. So excited!

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/xH3cnL

GurtTractor

Noice. What are you going to do for the GPU?

b0r1s

Pray

superflyninja

Apologies for hijacking the thread. Possibly one for @GurtTractor My MyBookLive 2TB Nas fucked up in the last few days, in short the network component failed. I shucked the drive last night and popped it into my pc. Its linux format but I had a free copy of DiskGenius installed. In short, the data looks to be all there in a hidden partition. I can even preview all the photos. However, Disk Genius wont let me copy the data off, gives an error. Though it could be because im not on the paid version.
In short can any of you recommend software so I can grab my files off the drive before I reformat as a windows drive?
PRETTY PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! There are literally 1000s of unbackedup family photos. I know, I know Im going to look at backup drives today.

GurtTractor

Probably another Linux OS will be able to do it. Install some version of Linux onto a USB stick and boot into that, then hopefully you can see everything.

Also I've used Clonezilla before to backup a whole disk image before, quite handy.

superflyninja

When in Linux though, how would I copy the data off the drive? Can Linux read windows formatted partitions?

GurtTractor

I recommend having two OSes in your PC for this reason, like I have a main Windows 10 one, then a smaller Linux partition that I can boot into if needed. It can be a bit of a faff to setup though, easiest and best if you did that on the initial install of everything.

GurtTractor

superflyninja wrote:

When in Linux though, how would I copy the data off the drive? Can Linux read windows formatted partitions?

Hmm it depends on if the data was encrypted, give it a try anyway. Linux can read Windows partitions yeah. Was it a failure of the physical hardware in some way or the OS on the device?

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