That didn't take long! It's technically not an upgrade though, when it's all new. :)
In case it isn't clear, this is a follow up from this post about upgrading my video card. This isn't a matter of 'you could read the old post and get some context', it's a matter of 'this post does not make sense if you do not read the previous post'.
I left off with an update after watching a youtube video that showed the NZXT case (similar but tot the same) and a new motherboard. I followed up that update by sending an email into their pre-sales service asking two things:
- Do they offer that motherboard?
- Do they actually have the 3090 in stock, ready to build and ship, within a month?
I figured if they answered yes to both of those, it would be an easy decision. Buy it. I'd deal with the repercussions of the purchase later. The answer came back the next day (it was late Sunday night when I sent the email, so the turn around wasn't bad). The answer was no, yes. No, they did not offer that motherboard in the BLD service. He actually joked that they couldn't keep up with production and meet the demand to retailers, let alone put it into their own service. And yes, whatever I ordered would be in stock and ready to ship within a month, including the 3090.
I love A and B situations. 1 and 0. On and off. Buy and Don't Buy. If he'd said yes,yes, I'd be in that Buy situation. If he said no,no, I'd be in a Don't Buy scenario. But no,yes? Damn it! So I went back to look at their offerings. Window shop. That's when I saw it. They were offering an RTX 3080 card. And not just any run of the mill 3080. An EVGA FTW3 Ultra Gaming RTX 3080! For those not aware:
- EVGA is the brand. The company. I've liked/loved their products for a long long time.
- RTX 3080 is the Nvidia chipset. The 'level' of the card. The 3080 is the second highest tier and half the price of the top tier 3090 for 80% of the gaming experience.
- FTW3 Ultra Gaming is the level. Not including water cooled cards, EVGA makes 5 different RTX 3080 cards. The FTW3 is the upper tier (vs XC) and the Ultra Gaming is the higher binned, faster FTW edition.
So they now have the card that I honestly prefer, at a reasonable price, that's the highest tiered version. OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG!!!!
I built the system up with the intent of gutting mine, but looking back I realized 'gutting' my system really only involved taking out the hard drives and the RAM. The RAM was easy enough... AMD Ryzen processors take advantage of higher speed RAM more than Intel does, so I could add the 3600 speed RAM and notice a difference. No brainer. The hard drives were the same. On paper.
See, PCIe Gen 4 lets hard drives run faster. My boot drive is currently have a Samsung 970 EVO 500 GB M.2. It's fast. 3,500 MB/s read and 2,500 MB/s write. For comparison, my Samsung 860 EVO SSD drive through SATA has 550 MB/s read and 520 MB/s write. The fast drive they have on the NZXT BLD service is the Seagate FireCuda 520. I haven't used Seagate drives before, but I understand they're a high quality brand. The FireCuda 520 has a 5,000 MB/s read and 4,400 MB/s write. And for the ultimate comparison, a current generation 7200 rpm hard drive has about a 156 MB/s read and write speed. Lets look at that data in a time line fashion.
2014 was the big year. I went from a hard drive to an SSD. It was a night and day type of comparison. Seriously. The metric I used back then was the boot time. It took me like 10 seconds from hitting the power button to getting logged into the computer. Before that was measured in minutes. And that makes sense as hard drives have the data written on physical platters. Their read/write speeds are measured at sustained speeds, but most of the time the read head has to stop reading/writing and move to another part of the platter. That slows it down further. But even just the pure numbers... 156 MB/s compared to 550 MB/s a three and a half times increase.
Just four years later in 2018 I got my current system. The SSD speeds hadn't changed (they still haven't changed), but the newest fad was F A S T fast! M.2. I went from 550 MB/s to 3,500 MB/s. That's six times faster!! And without a platter to move around, those are pretty sustained numbers, no matter what you're doing. But I barely noticed a speed bump. Yeah, the whole system was a little snappier, and the boot time was a bit faster but some of that was the increase in RAM speed and the processor upgrade. It took me awhile, but I think I got why I'm not feeling that this is six times faster. How much time is the hard drive actually getting used? Boot times sure. Loading a program. Opening/saving a file. Crawling through the file explorer or searching for a file. Really, that's about it. Compared to the tasks I actually 'do', that's not much. Out of a 3 hour gaming session, I might be using the SSD for like 10 minutes total?
It's kind of like Nina. My hour long drive hasn't changed to and from work, even though I accelerate a LOT faster from 0 to 60. I only do that twice on my commute though, with the rest of the driving being either put putting through town (no hard pulls there!) or cruising at 60 miles per hour.
So with that thought in mind, is upgrading from 3,500 MB/s read to 5,000 MB/s read going to matter? Probably not. Now, as long as it took you to read thorugh all that, it took me longer to think it through. I then shattered it when I figured the system required a hard drive and it was only a hundred bucks to upgrade from an equivalent to what I have to what I want. Sold!
The RAM was the same as it was only a $60 premium to go from an equivalent of what I have to what I want.
With those changes, I now had a complete system. As I was 'saving' $700 by not going with the 3090, I played around with some bells and whistles. RGB fans, bigger hard drives, more exotic cases, doubling the RAM. But something funny happened... a price caught my fancy. Normally when I'm going to be financing something like this, the end price doesn't matter much. $2500 is about the same as $4000. Yeah yeah, this isn't my financially responsible mind here, it's my "what does it matter for today or tomorrow" mind. But I saw that I could get a configuration right near $3000. So I made it my goal to get UNDER $3000.
The RGB fans? Gone. It's bling for bling's sake and no one really looks at my computer. Not even me as it sits at my feet (up off the floor of course, but still)!
Doubling the RAM? I barely ever touch my 16 Gigs. I've had more in the past and have never seen a speed bump from the amount of RAM. Sure, 32 Gigs would mean filling all 4 dim slots, but who really cares? So, I stayed at 16.
The hard drives? I knew I wanted the Firecuda as that's just a payment to keep in the current generation, but instead of going with a 2.0 TB drive, I went back down with a 1.0 TB Firecuda 520 and a 1.0 TB Barracuda 510. Both M.2, but the 510 is as fast as my current system. This would be an increase of 0.5 TB total in storage but its all on the boot drive which I've bumped up against before. And while 2/3 of my current storage is SSD and therefore 550 MB/s, now 1/2 of my storage will be 3,500 MB/s with the other half being 5,500 MB/s. Plenty of storage, plenty fast.
I ended up staying with the motherboard instead of backing down to a lower tier only because the current MB had Wifi and the lower tier didn't. I don't use Wifi much, but it makes it easier to hop onto the phone's hotspot if the cable modem goes down (again, not often, but nice).
All of those took me below $3,000 with enough room to add some custom sleeved cables. I do love the clean look of sleeved cables. For comparison:
 |
| Unsleeved Black Cables |
 |
| Sleeved White Cables |
I think the sleeved cables look MUCH cleaner. My current system has blue sleeved cables in a yellow case with a black motherboard, and this new system will have blue cables in a black case with a black and grey motherboard.
Oh, and while I'm avoiding bling for bling's sake, I should add that the RAM is particularly blingy. NOT because I wanted it to be pretty or nice or have 'dat bling', but because it was the only option at the 3600 speed. The RAM is the G.SKILL Trident Z Royal RGB. See below for the blingity bling bling that is this RAM.
The final specs:
- NZXT H510 Case in black
- MSI MPG X570 Gaming Edge Wifi Motherboard
- AMD Ryzen 7 5800X processor
- NZXT Kraken Z63 AIO CPU Cooler with LCD Display
- NZXT C1000 80 Plus Gold power supply
- G.Skill Trident Z Royal RGB 3600MHz 16 GB RAM
- Seagate FireCuda 520 1.0 TB M.2 Drive
- Seagate Barracuda 510 1.0 TB M.2 Drive
- EVGA FTW3 Ultra Gaming RTX 3080
All of that for $2993.89 shipped (Tax unfortunatly took me over the $3000 line, but taxes are there to screw us all). I know that's only $238.01 less than the 3090 system I speced out in the other post, but that didn't include the faster RAM or the faster and increased capacity drives. And one big reason to get all of that, in addition to it being a better system, is that my current rig remains whole. I don't have to remove a thing.
I should add that the timing couldn't have been better. I went back the next day, less than 12 hours later, to just double check and see if I could have saved more and maybe done a better job specing out the computer. I didn't have that opportunity. The video card was no longer offered. That's a good company that doesn't leave a product up, hoping that they'll get more in stock! So if I'd have hesitated, my system would have been much more (had I gone down this 'total perfect system' route). In fact... going back and specing out the exact same system with a 3090... that would have cost $3783. Timing was perfect!
According to the email I got, the estimated ship date is June 2nd. That gives me about a month. I want to do two things in that time. Benchmark my current system and figure out what to do with it.
I want to benchmark my current system as I've never done a true A to B, empirical number, comparison between my computers. In all honesty, I don't expect this to feel faster in anything but games. There, the 3080 will get me the highest quality at a lot more frames per second than my 2080. But just how much of a boost am I getting out of this overclocked Intel Core i5? I mean, I've seen it stay at 5.0 GHz for long periods. The AMD Ryzen 7 5800X's core clock is 3.8 GHz with a boost clock of 4.7 GHz. From what I understand, it will boost up to that 4.7 for short periods and will constantly change its speed depending on it's temp. Also, from what I've seen, there's no reason to overclock it. There's almost no boost to gain as it does a better job than getting in and manually tinkering. My intel only has 6 cores vs the AMD with it's 8 cores and 16 threads. That's gotta be an advantage for team red, right? So, to benchmark I have several programs to use. I'll go further into this later when I figure out all the different ones I'm going to use.
As for what I'm going to do with my system. That became tough when I realized I don't have a nephew. I have two nephewS. They each have their own computer. J, the older of the two, has their older system but it has the better video card. Z just built his system, but has the lesser video card. They both game, but I'm honestly not sure how much value my system would get them, outside of the video card. In other words, it's probably not much use to pull the card and give it to Z then give the rest of it to J. And, while that Judgement of Solomon moment played through my head, I glanced at the current value of components.
Umm... yeah. Looking at Ebay, looking ONLY at my video card (Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition), and ONLY at cards sold in the last month (April 8 to May 8), there have been 40 sales. The low was $713 with a high of $1500. The average sale in that month is $954.07! And in the last week there have been 15 sales, low of $803, high of $1500, and an average of $933.20!
Lets say I sell it at the low of $800. JUST THE VIDEO CARD!!!! I should easily be able to sell the whole computer for around $1500. Now, I'm generous, and I love my nephews, but that is a damned fine gift. And it's not like I could 'offer' it to them at a vastly reduced price. They just don't have anywhere near the money for it. It would be like someone offering me a Ferrari LaFerrari for $200,000. That's an amazing price for a car selling for over one point five million dollars... but I can't afford two hundred grand. Equivalently, my nephews probably couldn't even afford a couple hundred bucks. And even if I was that generous and I figured out a way to give it to both of them... what does that say to my niece? I give my nephews a computer worth $750 each, and don't give her anything? That's rough.
So, I have a month to think about it, but I'm probably going to sell my computer. Let's guess low and say I sell the whole shebang for $1000. I can still put $1500 down, add the $1000, and I'm honestly only financing a little over $500. For a brand new system with a 2 year parts and labor warranty.
I don't know, I'm starting to circle the drain on what to do so I'll stop. I'm sure I'll post more about this in the days/weeks to come. In the meantime.... NEW COMPUTER!!!!
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