My new desktop. PC. The last one died a few months ago and I’ve spent the intervening time saving up to buy the parts for the new one.
The old one’s motherboard partially died and it no longer properly communicated with the PCIe 16 slot. Everything else on it worked fine so I would have been happy just to replace the motherboard but that was not an option as motherboards for the CPU were no longer available. A sad consequence of choosing the wrong CPU socket in the Intel 2011 (I can only find four motherboards that were made with that CPU socket and none are still in production) which forced an entirely new rebuild.
I’ve gone for the 2nd generation AMD Ryzen 7 2700X with eight physical cores and 16 logical. It’s not the bleeding edge of a Gen 3 Ryzen which is now available but it feels a lot faster than the old Intel 3820 of my previous machine despite running only a few hundred megahertz faster. That’s would be due to a more advanced architecture and the extra cores.
I’ve gone for 16GB of TUF Gaming Alliance DDR4 RAM in a matched pair which runs at 3200MHz. Reviews online indicated that it was good solid RAM using Samsung chips which could easily be over-clocked to 3600MHz at an excellent price. I may, in the future, expand the RAM to 32GB but as I’ve never needed 16GB even in my most demanding CGI render that really is only a maybe.
I’ve gone for a nVidia GTX 750Ti as a stop-gap measure until I can afford an RTX20XX series. The 750Ti is a good solid graphics card that’s quite capable of running the games that I presently play and the helping with the CGI as the software I use (Vue by E-On Software) utilises the power of the graphics card to help with the rendering.
Unfortunately, the graphics card was damaged in the post with the box being seriously crushed. This seems to have caused a dry joint on the card itself which is causing intermittent faults. It works well enough to run Windows and some older games but newer games gets artefacts on screen and, in most cases, the game outright crashing. It’s not something that I’ve ever encountered before on a graphics card but experience with intermittent faults elsewhere does suggest a dry joint which could have been caused by crushing.
