End of Year PC Build

I agree that PC ports have greatly suffered in favour of Consoles, and I dont think that is fair to the PC Gaming market. PC, especially Gaming PCs have always been superior in terms of hardware and performance capabilities to Consoles....But since the PS4 and Xbox One releases, companies have put more energy, effort, focus, time and resources into designing and optimizing Console games...and the PC ports are often lazy attempts at transfering.

And while PC hardware has become more demanding and advanced in even the last 5 to 10 years, and games have also become more demanding in terms of pushing the hardware....I do feel that a balance could be better struck if a better effort was made to optimize the game for PC.

Yet strangely, I can run even Jedi Survivor on my 2080 Super at 4K....and I honestly dont see any issues with performance that would lead me to think "I defonitely need a 16 to 24 GB GPU"

I mean, I remember days not long ago when PC games were developed for PCs by a dedicated team of Devs who understood the inner workings of a PC and how to make their game perform its best on that system.

Now....The entire Studio is full-speed for Consoles, and the PC port is a dwindling after thought.

Honestly, I dont see the hype about Consoles. Ive always preferred PC.

That... that game, and MANY other games would have benefitted of moving the launch date a lot oh well, such is the industry.

They did move the date- from March 17th to April 28th...and in Stig's own words those six weeks would be enough to optimize the game, polish it and make sure it's as good as they possibly could make it for its initial release.

So the delay was exactly for those reasons....and yet on April 28th we got what we got.

So my question is: what exactly did they do with the game during the delay from March 17th and April 28th?

Another question I have is why is the game so GPU heavy?

Ive never had any game I play, instantly push my GPU to 66 C just by initializing it. My GPU reaches and holds 68 C while playing.

Thankfully, it cools right down to idle at 30 within less than 5 minutes. But I dont see any graphical reason why my GPU edges 70 C when a game like Shadows of the Tomb Raider implements RTX far better, has equally impressive graphics on a whole....and only pushes my GPU to 45C even in hot summer weather.


So PC build question is....Would I need to upgrade to a 13th or (rumored) 14th Gen CPU and a 4080 with a HAF 700 series Case from CoolerMaster to bring my hardware temps back to 30 to 40 C as a whole?

Like when big pharma corps CEOs put drugs out on the market when the egineers, scientists and researchers warn of a laundry list of serious complications...and the CEOs say "who cares about the heart failure, liver failure or brain damage...? We need more money! Because share holders hate having a bad quarterly report!"

Big Pharma may be greedy, but otherwise that analogy doesn't work, sorry.

It kinda does in the sense that Big Pharma pushes drugs out onto the market when they know there is a laundry list of side effects and it may not work as intended, or when the side effects are worse than what the drug is actually for treating. 

 Likewise, Game Devs and Studios/Publishers push out games that are littered with bugs (ie ME Andromeda, Jedi Survivor) then spend weeks and months pushing out patches (band aids) to fix the issues they knew were there....When they could have just spent a little more time on the game to make sure it was solid, or (like in the case ANTHEM) made heaps of promises that the game is gonna do this or be that or have this kind of content......And in the end what the Players/Consumers get is nothing of the sort.  The Devs simply just did not deliver or came up way short on promise and players expectations based on said promises (ie ANTHEM).   Just look at ANTHEM:  All the Dev Diary Videos that Mike Gamble did where he said (basically) This is going to be a long term commitment and we are going to roll out content on a 10 year platform with story content/missions, levels, characters, DLCs and Cosmetics.  ANTHEM represents our standard for the next 10 years on what games can be and what players can expect.


And then in the end....look at what we got.  It was so bad, the game barely made it through its first year and was completely dead after 2 years.   I haven't touched it since late 2020; I would be very, very surprised if anyone even plays it anymore.

And then most recently there is Jedi Survivor.   A six week delay meant to polish the game and make it the best it can be, as per Stig's own words.......And well, it was shipped with all kinds  of issues.... because EA needed its dollars.

AND in the end....Just like BIG Pharma, it's all about the Almight Dollar.

Unless you actually need more than 32GB of RAM, I don't recommend mixing and matching RAM with different speeds. Because if you mix them, they will run at the speed of the slowest RAM (2400mhz in your case).

You can try to overclock your DDR4 2400 to 3600 and match the timings as well, but it all depends on how good those memory modules are. It's just silicon lottery. If you win it, they can all run at 3600 with the same low latency timings. If you lose, you get instability and crashes.

Personally, I don't want to deal with all the headache from memory compatibility issues. Modern memory controllers are very picky. So rather than saving a few bucks, I prefer using identical RAM.

YES, it is entirely possible to mix DDR4 or different speeds/timings etc, there is nothing stoping you from doing that.  Your PC will still run-- not like it won't boot or post, or anything.

The only 'problem' would be that all RAM would then default to the speed/timing settings of your lowest performing module.  So if you want to take the two remaining 8GB modules to recover a total of 16 GB in your current system to get back to the total of 32GB, OR even increase to 64GB.....That's totally fine.   But your two sticks that that presently run at 3600Mhz.....Would then scale down to match the speeds of the lesser-performing 8GB sticks, so they too, would now run at 2400 instead of 3600.

Even if you had one pair of Quad Channel DDR4 and one matching pair of Dual Channel....you can still mix them, but the Quad Channel will now operate as Dual Channel and just not be used to its optimal capacity.


So yeah, you can mix RAM......But it won't result in the best performance.    It shouldn't cause any stability issues, it just won't perform as well as it could if you matched everything.


 

And I asked what I thought was a simple question,

I like getting educated, live and learn.

Meh, it isn't that difficult to remove a video card. After you unscrew everything, just make sure you push down the tab/lever on the x16 PCIe slot first before pulling out the card. Do it very gently because you don't want to break the PCIe slot or the card.

It's also pretty easy to install an M.2 drive. Your motherboard should come with extra tiny screws and standoffs for the M.2 slots. You'll need one of each to install the drive. Don't lose them.

Nvme or Sata SSD?

If you have many SATA SSD/HDD and no more connections but have another NVME/M.2 slot you could use this: 


If the oppoisite is true and you have many Nvme/M.2 and no connections. 
Then this is probably better suited for you: 

Motherboard needs PCIe bifurcation though to use the other 3 Nvme slots. 
If not then only get the one which just makes it ridiculous in hindsight.