End of Year PC Build

No, it won't. Haha.

The current gaming PC will just become my next home theater PC. It will replace the current one which is still using an ancient i7 2600K.

The 2600K is getting a bit long in the tooth for 4K content, so the 5950X will be the perfect upgrade. I'll take out the 4TB Samsung 870 Evo drives and toss in a couple 20TB HDDs for my movies and anime.

I wish I could do that but unfortunately even current gen CPUs are too slow for newer games.

The RTX 4090 is actually way too fast for even 7950X3D and 13900K. We're already hitting the CPU bottleneck with the fastest CPUs.

I definitely need to upgrade the entire platform for upcoming games like the new Phantom Liberty DLC for Cyberpunk 2077. It actually lists the 7900X/12900 as the requirements for ray-tracing settings.

On the other hand, you have actually killed a bunch of Intel CPUs according to you. I don't have had any Intel or AMD CPUs die on me yet. Even the 1.2ghz Pentium 3 that I dug out from my storage room still works in my Windows 98 PC.

It depends on the game and what resolution you play these games on.

Games like A Plague Tale: Requiem, Cyberpunk 2077, Dead Island 2, Last of Us Part 1, Star Wars Survivor, Spider-Man Remastered, and even Hogwarts Legacy have some levels that are very CPU demanding. It's even more noticeable if you play these games on a lower resolution like 1440p instead of 4K. You can tell from the low GPU utilization and the high CPU usage on a few cores. Most of these low GPU utilization issues are caused by bad optimizations. Hopefully developers spend more time and properly optimize their games, but I suspect these CPU-related performance issues will become more common in future titles.

The upcoming Immortals of Aveum has 5700X/12700 listed as the recommended system requirements. Last of Us Part 1 has 5900X/12600K recommended for ultra settings. Dead Island 2 has 7900X/13700K for 4K ultra settings, and Phantom Libery has 7900X/12900 for ultra ray-tracing settings even at 1080p.

On top of that, Nvidia have raised the bar with the RTX 4090 and it is clearly that modern CPUs are struggling to keep up with it. It is also unfortunate that Nvidia drivers require more CPU overhead compared to AMD. You probably need a 14th-gen Intel or a Zen 5 CPU to fully unlock the potential of the 4090.

To be fair, right now is probably the better time to build a new gaming PC. You've made the right decision.

Fast DDR5 and SSDs are dirt cheap right now. We're also seeing CPUs being heavily discounted. You can now buy a 7950X3D for only $557 in the US and the 13900K was being sold for as little as $490 at one point. Only the RTX 40-series GPUs are still overpriced and being sold close to MSRPs.

As someone who also has a Playstation 5, I also agree that you'll have better experience gaming on the current gen consoles especially on newer titles. Mainly because a Playstation 5 or an Xbox Series X costs so much less than a powerful gaming PC.

Almost all AAA titles on PC are console ports. They are usually rather poorly optimized compared to their console counterparts. However, you still get better performance and better framerates on a powerful PC.

I say user-made mods, mouse aim, virtual reality, and the ability to push the performance way beyond the standard 60 FPS are the main reasons I still spend more time on my gaming PCs than consoles.

Hi Kappa.


23 seconds is quite fast, in my opinion.   For reference and comparison....My PC is running on a Samsung 970 EVO Plus (1TB), and I just timed my system for the sake of curiosity.  From the instant I push the POWER Button on my case, to the Windows Login Screeen it takes 28.3 seconds.  Then from the time I enter in my password until Windows is totally loaded and ready to use with as many as 18 Services loaded into the System Tray and and equal number of Quick Launch Icons loaded into the Task Bar it is an additional 1 minute.   

Total Time from the push of the POWER Button until I am ready to use my PC is 1m 28.3s.   NOTE:  I do not have FAST Boot enabled.

I'm not entirely sure if other so-called slower drives would impact total boot time, unless they have services stored on them that need to be loaded into Windows even running in the background.  Because I am running an additional M.2 for Game Storage and a 2.5 inch Crucial SSD for actual storage, and neither of those impact boot time.   If you want to decrease boot time, you can initialize Fast Boot, OR you can limit the number of programs/services that load into the System Tray, and only 'activate' those specific programs when you are going to be using them.

A note about FAST Boot:  While it can decrease you waiting time considerably (by not loading all the programs/services into the System Tray, only those actually require by Windows) and by compiling your User info and various other Settings into one profile that can be launched quickly......Similar to what a Shared PC does for User Profiles in an Office, or how it handles waking from Sleep Mode.....It shuts down all the power to everything unnecessary and stores your credentials in a profile before it goes into a sorted of 'suspended animation'.  Then when you 'wake up' your PC....It retrieves all those files very quickly and restores normal power to your system.  Fast Boot works in a very similar fashion.

www.howtogeek.com/243901/the-pros-and-cons-of-windows-10s-fast-startup-mode/


While this process can seem handy.....how it functions often can lead to various problems because certain Services that Windows requires won't be loaded properly.  In a sense, Windows can sometimes trip over itself while in a rush to get itself in order, and thus create stumbling blocks and run into problems down the road.   More over if you have any type of Liquid Cooler....I have found that it is best for your hardware to activate from a Cold Boot one at a time rather than instantaneously all at the same time, all at once.  For example....On my system, first thing to light up is my Motherboard then my RAM, then my GPU....last the pump head on my Cooler.   If I see things light up in this sequence during the boot process....I know that generally, things are okay (at least strictly from a hardware perspective).



I hope this has helped to answer  your question and alleviate some confusion.

So just an update on my new PC I have so far played AC Odyssey and Mass Effect Andromeda, both older games and MEA is a poorly optimised game if ever there was one.

Odyssey and MEA look beautiful with the 4070Ti using DSR 2.25 to upscale the resolutions look of my 1920x1080p 165Hz 0.5Ms ASUS VG278QR monitor to 2880x1620 with 33% Smoothness.

I have:

AMD 7 5700 8 core AM4 3.4GHz processor (16 cores I think)
850W 80+ Gold PSU
An ASUS TUF GAMING B550M-PLUS WIFI II AM4 Micro-ATX Motherboard,
a Kingston NV2 2TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 2280 SSD
Team T-Force Delta RGB Series 32GB (2x 16GB) DDR4 3600MHz Memory - Black

I don't MOD Odyssey but MEA I use about 20+ different mods and both games I have played on all Ultra settings where available.

Both games I have been able to run without any issues at 165 FPS with some in games fluctuations down to 60FPS forced by the game or 100FPS due to what is happening in the game. The GPU is frequently at 100% but the CPU is rarely above 75% and temperatures have not been above 80c except when I used MEA's in game resolution scaling to push the resolution to 3500x1850+

Re start up times the PC boots in less than 20 seconds and after login in less than 10 seconds.

Pretty happy overall.

EDIT 15/07/23: So I just actually timed my start up rather than a guess.

From when I press the start button it is less than 9 seconds till the login screen, once I have entered my password and hit enter it takes 1 second to bring up the desktop.

Nope, I have never touched the BIOS, too scared of breaking something, lol.

It's 23 seconds with automatic login. Definitely slower than my old PC. I was expecting almost instantly at 6 times as fast, in theory.

Passing on a 4090 deal for 1599€ for a good model. I hope for a little better still within the next two weeks. Running out of time though for BG3 on August 3...

Hmmmm. I played some more tonight and even got my FO4 backup running again. Miasma Chronicles was running fine for several hours. Then I had the CTD again with kernal32 and ntdll right after a cutscene. Repeatedly. Couldn't get past it. I did have a CTD on my old system once. So I HOPE it doesn't mean there is still something wrong with my system (aside from running only one RAM stick at the moment). I hope it's just the game.

I hope it's an overheating issue.

I was so happy today with no blue screens and getting FO4 running again. Haven't actually played it though. So I cannot tell if this crash happens with other games as well. I never had crashes like that on my old system. This is all making me nervous again.

This ntdll error seems widespread. Which isn't really comforting. Nobody can pinpoint what causes it.

OK, the crashes were due to a corrupted auto save!
It took me 2.5h of researching the error messages on the internet and deeming the solutions complicated and probably doing more harm than good until it dawned on me that I should load a previous save and check if I can get past it this way...... and it worked! Good grief!

This should have been the first thing to check. Since it 100% crashes after the cutscene. Must have glitched and then saved the glitch. I had a save from before the battle leading up to the cutscene. Didn't take long to replay either. Cutscene triggered, I skipped it and the game now runs fine again. Omfg...

Also, I found my games drive again!!! LOL
For some reason I overlooked it, assuming the deleted G: drive was the old G: drive but it's not. I could have sworn I checked all drives repeatedly and it was all gone. WEIRD.
So now I can start Miasma Chronicles from two different drives, lol... My modded FO4 is there too. So I DID have two 500GB SSDs. I thought one was 250GB and it's where I have ANOTHER old version of FO4 on from 2017 I should have deleted ages ago. That must have been when I bought the new SSD and stuff was shifted around and back by my old PC guy.

Complete mess my drives!
But OK. I still need to redownload games either way it seems. But both my modded Oldrim and Skyrim SE are on it too. Maybe I can salvage stuff there too.
I have enough space now for games in any case, lol. I'll keep using those SSDs until they die. I'll probably leave my duplicate FO4 on the other SSD as a second backup, just in case.

I guess I'm so paranoid about missing DLL and RAM issues that ANY crash that is most likely unrelated makes me freak out now. Miasma Chronicles seems an unstable game. My coworker had several crashes too but nothing game breaking at least. I don't know if these crash reports are a new Steam feature because in the past on the rare occasion a game CTD I got no notification what it was.

I really hope no more weird shit now!

Edit: OK, Hard Disk Sentinel shows which drives are on the same disk. Ah, now I get it. One of the HDDs is split for whatever weird reason into my data dump for video recording and whatnot, and an old games drive where I had FO4, Skyrim and Witcher 3 on in the past briefly. Huh. So I have 5 disks and 7 drives... Glad I finally understand. *g*

While for me just looking at the temp number alone, 80C does sound a tad concerning....It may not be for the 13 series CPU you have.  As for the GPU temp....my 2080 hits 70C just by loading Jedi Survivor, so it's not far off.   As for the Drives.....30 is just fine.

Speaking of Fans my new PC has 2 120mm ARGB SickleFlow fans, all I can find is a Max. RPM of 1,800 yet when the GPU and/or CPU hit around 80c they can be doing 2,400 is that OK or a problem for longevity or is the Max. RPM wrong?