Thinking techie thoughts tonight

I've been thinking about techie purchases again ...

Well, it's actually been sparked off by seeing comments about really (daftly) expensive gaming PCs and I thought I'd check the market again. One thing about getting techie stuff, it's good for the mind to just completely ignore the market for at least 3 months, preferably 6, after acquiring upgrades. Because if you'd just held on a few more weeks, you could have picked up something cheaper and better.

Personally, I think I did ok because I pulled the upgrade trigger for Meltdown (this PC) a couple of weeks after AMDs excellent new Ryzen 3000s came out. I'd had enough time to see if they were any good for performance and heating but managed to get bits before the stock ran out. Don't be an early adopter if you can help it, let someone else beta test the stuff first.

This post has two parts to it though ... There's a few items I'm looking into acquiring relatively soon, although not while we're in lockdown conditions. The items can wait and it's not fair on an already overloaded postal service.

Before I go diving in to naming companies though - disclosure note : I've never had anything provided by a hardware manufacturer, this is all stuff I've bought.

The bits I want are keyboard, flightstick and a graphics card.
Keyboard - this one is double bouncing more and more. I should really take the case off to see how much of a clean it needs (probably a lot). I'm looking at Logitech, Corsair and the own brand one from the local computer store (you know, the big one that shall not be named) actually feels good too. The own brand one is around £50, the Logitech and Corsair mechanical keyboards are around £100. It's worth it to go up the scale to mechanical because they feel really nice to type on.

Flightstick - probably more Logitech, with the X52 that they inherited from Saitek :

It has many buttons. This is a bit unnecessary though because my Thrustmaster Hotas X is still pretty strong and my hands mostly get on well with it. That's the real issue, the tendons that control the outside of my right hand are getting sore more and more lately.

And the last one is a graphics card. I have a nVidia 1060 3GB which was still offering great performance with Mass Effect Andromeda (probably my most stressing game) and it makes Elite Dangerous look amazing. But it's 3 year old technology in an area where performance is still improving fast. The issue here is that I look at £180-£220 graphics cards, think anything more than that is overpriced and there is nothing interesting in that range. The 1650 cards are typically £170, these would be a step backwards. The 1660 cards start at £210, this isn't an upgrade worth the money. The potential card is the 2060, at £310. I think not.

The 1060, 1650, 1660 and 2060 numbers there are all for the generation of cards and how high up the range they are. The 16x0 cards came after the 10x0 cards and the 2060 has extra performance bits included.

I'll be holding on to my cash for now. Everything else is just fine. Monitor's great, the Ryzen chip powering the desktop is excellent, I have future proofing for years and the (Logitech) mouse does me great too.

New techie stuff is always nice though.

But how about if we go money no object ... What would I actually get ? This won't be the absolute max components though. There are things I wouldn't go up to for reasons. For comparison purposes, Meltdown ended up costing about £900, not including the graphics card.

The core of all machines is the processor, motherboard and memory. With the benefit of knowing how good the AMD chips are now, it has to be :
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32 core (64 thread) at £1,957. Yep. Bit daft and not actually the best chip. There's a 64 core chip as well, the big difference is speed. The 32 core chip goes at 3.7GHz, the 64 core chip goes at 2.9GHz (it's also £3,700). Considering that most applications will see most of those cores being idle, go for the higher GHz.
This has a TRX40 socket which tells you which motherboard you need. In this case, I'm looking at the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme costing £770. This is "E-ATX", which determines what cases you can look at.
Memory - the specs tell you what to get as well here, in this case the cpu page says it wants DDR4-3200. (Double Data Rate 4x running at 3.2GHz). You could get faster ... but you wouldn't get much benefit from that. Systems aren't held up by memory, they're held up by hard discs although if you buy silly amounts of memory, the spare will be used to hold info instead of going to the slow hard discs all the time. Memory comes in sticks and it's best to get matched pairs (they work in parallel). I'm kinda surprised that the 32GB I got from Kingston last year is still £180.

Polish that core off with a nVidia 2080 Ti card costing ... £1,100 and you've got the core of an incredibly fast machine that costs over 4x what mine did and it's not complete yet.

Keeping the budget honest means you have cash left over for other things, like Lego Star Destroyers (got my eye on the new A-Wing), movies, going out to catch up with lovely people (hopefully soon although +3weeks from now at least) and marshmallows from the internet people. Budgeting well means you can enjoy more stuff, rather than looking at just one megashiny thing.

I digress ... Every PC needs a case to go in, plus a few more things :

This looks all right and it doesn't have stuff I'm not interested in like flashy distracting lights. That's an E-ATX box from Phanteks and apparently has 5/5 for its review score. The case was the only thing I got burned on for Meltdown and that was from lack of research. £95 for this case and it looks like it's got the necessary like fans front and back and drive bays that I haven't used in Meltdown's box.
A computer needs a power supply and it's Essential that you get a decent quality one. Power supplies do implode and the budget ones will damage components as they go bang. This system will likely gobble the power more too, so it's a 1200W unit from Corsair costing £240. In comparison, Meltdown has I think 750W costing £75.
Cooling is important too, we want something big and metally to keep this cool. I'm looking at the Noctua NH-D14 dual 140mm fan cooler costing £75. The bigger the fans, the more diameter they have and the better the cooling. They can spin slower as well, which means you don't hear them and that's really important. (Normally, I'd look at £40 on a cooler).

Notice a lack of water cooling ... Cooling with water came back into fashion when kits appeared which made it very easy to implement. But. You still have fans on a radiator that make noise, you have a pump which makes noise and the fluid is subject to biogrowth which can gum up the works if the biocidal additives degrade and become ineffective. Having a water cooling system go wrong is an incredibly expensive disaster. If air cooling goes wrong, you'll see it on the monitoring applications first and it'll fail just as crashes that shouldn't get as far as physical damage.

Air cooling is maintenance free (outside of occasional dusting), water cooling is not.

Storage is next and I'm going to go for a slightly Mad Scientist solution ... I only use 1 set of drives in my machines because I like to live dangerously with reliability but there is a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) which lets you duplicate data across multiple drives so if one goes bang, the data is available on the other one. But ... there's a catch. If the drives all come from the same batch and are used the same way, they're likely to fail at the same time. So :

SSDs (need these for speed) : Crucial 1TB M2 drive costing £110, plus a backup from Kingston costing £171.
Conventional (slower but masses of data space) : 6TB drives from Toshiba (£200) and Western Digital (£270). These are more expensive than most 6TB because they spin faster, which means less time to get to the data and it's quicker to read it off the disc. (This might be a moot point due to the electronics)

What's left ?

Keyboards and mice are heavily up to the individual preference but I'd steer people towards mechanical keyboards and gaming mice with reviews that say they stay reliable. Around £150. That sounds a huge amount ... but they're how you interact with the machine, which is the most important aspect of all. It's worth it to spend more here.
Flightstick depends on what you want to use it for. There's loads of toys and addons you can get if you're into flight sims but I'd be happy with the £50 Hotas X or the £130ish X52s.
Monitor is a key one too. The things to look for here are "IPS Panel", which makes the monitor have a crisper image that can be seen from more angles. I'm very happy with my 24" 1440p monitor from AOC, if they're any bigger than that physically, I struggle to see the sides of them. Yep, I think a monitor can be Too Big :-D. It would probably cost around £200 to replace mine. Again, it's worth spending extra here because it's how you interact with the machine. I'd actually look at having two screens here, one for game, one for everything else although I'd need a bigger desk too.
You'll want speakers or a headset as well, again this one's up to the reader. Personally, I have a cheap set of desk speakers that do a great job. Headsets are definitely and literally what fits on your head !

It's good to look after your hands and eyes.

And the last bit is that you will need a Windows 10 licence ... as it's a pain to try and play games on Linux. This is £110.

And that all adds up to ...

Way too much. Don't spend that much on a computer ! Spend only to what you need, save money for more important things.

Stay safe, be well !