End of Year PC Build

I"ve never had the money to burn  spend on an EVGA Motherboard though I hear they are of excellent quality (and I can attest to the Customer Service and Warranty being best of the best)....Though honestly, aside from the top-tier Quality of their Boards- I don't, at least on paper- like their Feature set or they way they do things. For example, as far as I can tell they do not use USB 3.0 or 3.1 anywhere on their boards....Only 2.0

Proof:  www.evga.com/products/productlist.aspx?type=1&family=Motherboard+Family&chipset=Intel+Z790

And that is on their 800.00 USD Kingpin Board!   Why still no 3.0 at least...?!

OK, Self-Correction Time:  If only glancing at the page and the features listed there, you see only 2.0 listed (which in my defense is what I was always basing my opinion on) BUT this time I looked at the Specs Sheet (it opens up a separate file/page) and actually lists at least 5x  3.0 and/or 3.1 ports on both the Classified (699.99 US) and the KingPin (799.99 USD), so I have to correct myself on the specs and retract my second comment about "not liking how they do their boards" because obviously my previously held assumption has proven to be incorrect.   

Having said that..... My first point still stands:  I just don't have, and never have had the money to justify a $925 to $1100 CAD purchase for a motherboard.

Gigabyte/Aorus' 600 to 700 CAD Master line-up is rich enough for my blood and I like the feature set and how they do everything else (ie power delivery, BUS layout etc)

Oh, sorry BMW....I didn't see a post if you made one and I missed it I apologize.

Welp, I bought the Palit GameRock 4090 last night for 1569€, plus the Seasonic Focus Gold 850w for 128€. Ahhhhhh... I feel so dirty and ripped off. Nobody should pay such prices but alas I can't wait for 2025, I expect prices to not improve at all next generation. And the 4070 feels even more like a rip-off for 600€. I hope I won't regret it and can play everything maxed out for 6 years or so and not miss out on some new amazing feature in the future that makes the 4090 look bad in 2 years like what happened with the 3090.

Prices have not improved the past 2 months, in fact the ZOTAC was on sale for 40€ less a month ago. So all this waiting for the summer slump has not paid off.

And now I'm running out of time to get the card delivered and installed by Thursday when BG3 releases. AND I don't have a new monitor either yet. So I might push back playing the game until I do.

Anybody here use an OLED monitor (or TV)? I kind of want to and looking at how expensive good nano IPS panels are, I don't think going IPS again makes sense. The IPS glow really sucks. I of course missed a bunch of "sales" on monitors too like the Alienware. Even if I were to not take the gamble with burn-in I need to replace my 60hz monitor, otherwise what is the point of getting a 4090, you know. Ultra wide also makes sense. I would prefer 32 inch 4K to ultra wide 3440x1440 because of better PPI but the only one of those right now when it comes to OLED is a very expensive LG with only 60hz. Nope on that for the price of like 2 grand... I want to spend 900 tops.

Even then I'm looking at a crazy system upgrade of about 4000€... Twice as expensive as 8 years ago. Granted with a better GPU but still. Insane.
But well, right now my mood is the world is going to shit and I'll probably have to work until I drop dead or live on government welfare because my pension will be a joke. So might as well spend some of my savings and enjoy this new computer while life is still good.

Difficult to say really.
IDK, possibly? I'm not being helpful, I know.

Yes, the DWF can be had for 900€ on sale but I just missed it. The Philips Evnia was 900€ a few days ago but is now out of stock it seems because earliest delivery is in a month. Only the Alienware has a burn in warranty. 3 years is still nothing for a monitor imo but better than nothing. Since I will only game on it plus some rare video editing I hope it won't burn in too quickly. The forced pixel refresh is no big deal since I don't game more than 3h before taking a longer break on the weekends. OLEDs will burn out much quicker than LED though so I have no idea how long it will last even under the best circumstances. At least I still have my trusted IPS as a replacement. I guess there's a huge difference in degradation of any monitor when not used as a workstation for 10+ hours a day. When I'm obsessively playing a game it's still about 25h a week max, usually half that. So that's maybe why I haven't had any hardware failure in 8 years and no perceived wear on my IPS.

Card got delivered to a neighbor this morning. I'll have my PC guy install it tomorrow evening. I'm far too worried about breaking something off trying to mount that monstrosity of a card, and plugging the cables wrong setting the whole thing on fire. Also I probably wouldn't shove the cable far enough in and get the melting cable situation on the 4090...

I hope 850w is OK, Palit actually recommends 1000w I saw after I already ordered it, but most discussion threads say 850 is fine, some people even run it on 750. I can also always undervolt, I guess or limit the frame rate.

I just launched Jedi Survivor for a test to see how much my system pulls under load....and it tops out at 380 watts (from 900 total capacity). My UPS is the APC BR1500 MS2. 1500VA (900 W) True Sine Wave w/ 10 Outlets. I often wondered if 1500 VA was enough (if I ever upgraded to a 40 series) but I can't find anything larger (in the neighbourhood of 2000 VA). 1500 seems to be the max output on any unit.

Not sure about the solar panels but spec-wise it does seem like a nice unit for sure

The computer drama continued last night.

Guy came over to put in the new card and PSU. I thought this was a 20min job. Well, we put it all in and then the screen would not turn on. Said the GPU could be defective. I said, no fucking way do I get unlucky twice.
We put the old GPU back in, screen still wouldn't turn on. Now we were really confused. Plugged the old PSU in, still dead screen. WTF.
Checked the cables several times. They were all correctly plugged. It made no sense. A red light on the board was on.
Just as the guy was about to take the whole computer and test the parts tomorrow in a different system he noticed that one of the RAM sticks got loose and THAT was the issue!!!

Omfg, this whole thing took 2h! I can't believe it was something so stupid. Goddamned RAM again, lol. Sometimes it feels like life is just one giant parody...

One potential issue remains though: upon putting the GPU back in he decided to put it in the upper PCIe 5.0 slot, the old card was on the lower one. I said I think the card is 4.0. He still put it in the slot close to the cooler even though he said he didn't like that and it might cause heat issues. Apparently he did not know that it makes no difference. He thought faster slot is better. Told me to watch the temps and see what happens. Hmmmm. :/

OK, the whole drama is NOT over yet. Well, the hardware side is. But when I turned on FO4 to test the card it kept crashing. What now?! At first it crashed on reloading a save, something that never happened before. Was worried at first that my saves got corrupted which can happen with a bugged base building item. I had this before. But it would have been one hell of a coincidence. Eventually I discovered that ALL RTX cards cause crashing because of a different way weapon debris is handled on newer cards. They basically don't support the old feature anymore used in FO4.

WTF

OK, there's a mod that fixes it. And it seems to work. BUT... now I have horrible screen tearing!!! How is that possible, I'm still on a 60hz monitor that is vsync. So the frames were never above 60. It makes no sense. So I went to bed with nothing working properly. Great.

Today I'll have to figure out how to fix the screen tearing. I'm also not sure if the mod fix did it. I didn't have time to check the behavior before the fix because the game would crash within a minute.

I have the latest GPU drivers installed. I'll need to double check vsync. But if it got disabled somehow I'd have higher fps in game though, no?

FO4 is the only game I have installed. Last night I finished downloading Baldur's Gate 3 just in time to go to bed. I'll check if this game runs fine at least tonight.

Goshhh... I cannot believe how much grief this new PC is giving me. I'm not used to this sort of stuff that all. I never had any issues runny any game before, new or old. But I guess more and more older games might have issues with newer cards. I kept reading about people with shiny new cards having issues. And now I'm one of them.

Btw, of course I still have 37 frames in my large settlement. The game just can't handle such extremely modded games. Doesn't matter what hardware you throw at it. I was expecting it but feels like cherry on top. Zero upsides to the new GPU for my most played game, just stuff breaking. Nice! >_<

Thanks, the hardware issue was just the RAM stick getting loose. That was also the reason for the red light. So mystery solved on that one.

I know what causes screen tearing but as I said, I'm still using vsync and don't get more than the 60fps my monitor can do at 60hz. So nothing changed there. I have no idea what's going on. If the new card somehow reset stuff to not use vsync anymore, I'd get more than 60fps in the game, right?

I hope I can figure this out soon. I want to finish my settlement and then not touch FO4 for a good long while and play NEW games that hopefully don't have issues.

OK, so I think it's a modding issue that I just happened to notice after I got the new GPU. I usually don't believe in coincidence with computer issues but... the glitch only happens when I'm standing in one specific spot overlooking my entire huge settlement. I don't think that's screen tearing after all. I never actually had screen tearing so I don't actually know what it looks like. I tried forcing vsync in the Nvidia control panel. Didn't do anything. Adaptive vsync is what caused ACTUAL screen tearing I think. Transparent horizontal shifting of sorts? I've been playing BG3 for 2 hours and no issues.

Here's a phone video of the glitch: