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Good time for a new build? For no good reason..

D

Dave v

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xentr_thread_starter
Odd question in these times, I know.
My story:
Bought a prebuilt a couple years ago for a good price, 14th gen Intel with 4070super, 16gb ram. Bought a 32gb ram kit to upgrade it immediately. Right now I'm running all 48gb , not sure if that actually hurts performance so I effectively have an extra set of ram. I also have an extra 2tb SSD lying around bought at a good price, it's 2.5" SATA though.
I have "the Itch" to build that my prebuilt didn't satisfy, but it runs everything I want fine. The last PC I built was in 2011 and I still use it for some games. An i5 2500k with dual Radeon 7850 in crossfire.
Looking at hardware prices still going up in general and the components I would need are still reasonable, except for GPU.

What would you do?

I'm contemplating a ryzen 9600, b650 motherboard, 850w PSU and whatever case. That's about $750 right now. I would move over one of my old Radeon GPUs until a good deal on a used GPU comes around. I'm also considering an integrated graphics ryzen 8600 or 8700.
If the market keeps going this way I might be able to resell in a year or two and not lose much money.
My first post here, thanks for reading!
 
Mixing different ram capacities and such does effect some things but not sure how noticable it always is. Will depend on timings and such since all the ram will run at the slowest shared speed and timings.

Considering current market and prices I'd keep using what you have. 4070 super isn't drastically outshined by anything but 5080/5090 and 14th gen Intel unfortunately doesn't mean anything since that's like a dozen different possible CPUs but fairly decent chance that the upgrades just are not worth it at these prices.
 
Personally if you are just gamin I wouldn't upgrade as for the ram I agree with I zerous
post mixing ram isn't a good thing also honestly 16 GB ram should be good enough for most things, but people like myself I got 32 gb because when I got he ram it was cheap and only used two slots instead of all four . Then also most people just install the ram with out actually making sure they are getting the ram speeds which is easily set in the bios .
Again those myself I wouldn't bother upgrading, but I do pretty much every year like a fool because of that build bug I get every year then after I upgrade I either dont notice any difference or very little difference at all except I use more electricity gos up loll
 
To confirm, your setup is currently: 14th gen Intel with 4070super, and 32gb ram?

If so and with current prices I wouldn’t change the motherboard/graphics card/ram right now.

What cpu is it? What pre-built is it? A standard form factor motherboard? If so, you could consider just getting a new case to mix it up…
 
xentr_thread_starter
Hmm, you guys are all making sense.
My system is an HP Omen with a pretty basic 14400f CPU, with 6 performance cores it doesn't seem to be limiting the GPU but I guess that could be possible at some point. It also avoided the degredation issues with higher wattage Intel CPUs.
I would have gone AMD with a custom build, but for what I paid the 4070s was effectively free.
The motherboard is Omen branded, but appears to be standard matx form factor, same with the power supply.
Switching cases might be the way to go, I get to do something with little cost incurred. Maybe I should just sell the 16gb of ram.
The omen case is kinda ugly, and it's very tall and narrow with extra slots below the matx motherboard. Looks pretty restrictive for cooling too.
 
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I don't personally think a Ryzen 9600 is much of an upgrade (10-15%), you'd want to at least move up to an 8 core model.

Depending how customized the HP motherboard is, you might be able to drop in a 14700(F)(K) to gain around 40% performance. And if it's mostly standard mATX, case swap should be feasible too.

You could also just tear it all apart, clean it, apply new thermal paste, and put it all back together too. Same experience, effectively no cost :)
 
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