In my business, having more power available is [del]almost[/del] always a good thing, so I figured I’d get a slightly larger power supply than needed, in case a later audio card or something required more power.
I see now that the mobo itself supports 5.1 sound, so I doubt I’d even need an audio card; I’ve been recording, mixing and mastering for more than a decade on a machine without one. If, as jacobsta says, it is extremely unlikely to be the case where i am adding things that need that much power (and indeed, I can foresee no circumstance that would necessitate a 2nd powerful video card, for example), then I’m happy to benefit and learn from y’all’s expertise and switch it out to a more appropriate one. I’m sure the 650w version will be awesome, and hey, it saves me $40.
ETA: So tell me why I’m a fool for paying $524 for the i9 9900K as opposed to $389 for the i7 9700K. I’m thinking that a $150 investment in future viability for the machine sounds like a good idea; is that wrong?
I discovered that you have to check and make sure the RAM is compatible with the mobo, of course. Took me a while to find the chart online but it turns out the RAM I had picked out won’t work. The Corsair 64GB that will work is slightly cheaper (saved $30) and runs for .2v less power, so there’s that.
Also, this one is 8x8 and the incompatible one was 2x32. A lot of what I’m reading says that having many smaller RAM modules is faster and more efficient than fewer larger ones. Is that correct? Or is correct but so insignificant that it only matters for benchmarking purposes?
Faster, no. More efficient, yes. But marginally. RAM can get warm and smaller chips will be a bit cooler and draw less power. But in a desktop machine neither of those things will matter much. In that environment it’s like a cup of water in a swimming pool. So yes, pretty insignificant.
Here’s a little discussion on Tom’s Hardware (I too am a fan of them and use them as a resource personally and professionally).
It is way overkill for that one game, I think. The i9 9900K is pretty much the best CPU you can buy for gaming (and video editing) unless you go to workstation chips. But unless you are doing multiple layers of 4K video for professional-level editing, it’s more than you need. Maybe the AMD 3600x or 3700x or an i7 would do it for you.
I don’t know much about computer building and parts but it seems to me you’re not going to be able to upgrade any higher from the 9900K (except 9900KS at $980) without getting a new mobo. Maybe start with an i7 (or Ryzen 3600x, say) and see if that holds you for a while. Those would seem a more appropriate match for your GTX 1660 GPU.
I’m actually in the process of building a video editing rig myself. I’m especially having problems choosing a case and PSU. I’d love advice on my build but right now I can’t get all my info so Ill just go with this post for now.
RE: storage: if you are video editing you might want to have more than one SSD or SDD+HDD. Your best (or only) SDD would hold your OS and programs and in your case (with only one drive) also you video editing media. It’s usually better to have at least two SSD drives for serious editing so you can put audio and video on different drives.
Then you might choose a bigger 7200 RPM HDD for archive and backup purposes.
I’ve been building boxes since I was 15 or so. It’s just LEGO :), and everything is designed more or less foolproof (although of course, a dedicated idiot can force things).
That being said, I’m now a lot older than 15 and my lazyness has grown exponentially. I think when I replace my last LEGO project, I’ll just get it ready-made. The thought of spending another weekend backuping, partitioning, installing windows, going apeshit because I forgot to backup something very important and getting depressed because I lost 20 year old chat logs with a girl I’ve never seen is too much right now.
Around the beginning of 2018 the prices of video cards had ballooned due to bitcoin mining. By mid 2018 the prices had slid as manufacturers upped the supply and by the end of 2018 things were pretty much back to normal. Here’s an article from December 2018 showing charts of GPU prices that peaked in early 2018:
Another article from that time:
So yes, GPUs have been back to normal for about a year. (Late 2018 was also when I finally upgraded my video card after waiting a good year and a half for prices to normalize.)
Yeah, they stabilized a good while ago now although they never really returned to the same price per tier. But that’s AMD/Nvidia taking advantage, not scarcity. I believe the real crypto mining is done with ASICs these days, not consumer GPUs.
Here’s a review of the two benchmarking them on applications like Blender, Cinebench and Handbrake. While the 9900k outperforms the 9700k, sometimes with numbers impressive on the surface (18% faster!), in real life that might mean your video processing taking an extra couple of minutes. It’s up to you to decide how often you’ll be using that stuff and if $150 is worth being done a few minutes earlier or if you’ll likely be off doing other things while the video processes anyway.
I don’t think the 9900k will really “futureproof” past the 9700k since they’re pretty similar. More likely, we’ll hit a point where you need to upgrade your chipset and motherboard to take advantage of a new RAM (DDR5, DDR6, etc) or USB4.0 or some other new technology and both the 9900 and 9700 will be equally obsolete by those metrics. Or you stick with them and they both continue to work pretty much the same for the next seven years.
The i7 Might be a bit of overkill - you can get an i5 9600kf for around 200 (without cooler) and overclock it with a decent cooler. I ran an i5 2500k for 8 years this way - I overclocked to 4.5 from the base 3.3 on a bigger aluminum air system - it ran me another $40 for that, I think.
I only just upgraded that CPU this month with a ryzen 3600 - I decided not to overclock this time and I still got a decent performance boost that way. I run more serious games than you at 4k, and the new cpu only hits 50-60% in those games now. Should be a good bit of room with any modern chip you get as long as it’s not the lowest specs of their production line.
I’d look at the AMD Ryzen series of chips; AMD seems to be playing to win with this generation of chips, unlike the FX-xxxx series.
The Ryzen chips are comparably fast, and for a LOT less cash. For example, the 3rd gen Ryzen 5 3600X is priced right around $200, but is comparable performance-wise with the Intel i7-9700k, which is priced around $400.
Biggest advantage is that the efficiency curve for power supplies is not even - at a low percentage of usage they are less efficient. So if you overspec too much, you actually use slightly more power at the outlet because you don’t get into the highest efficiency part of the curve. That only applies if they are similar efficiency - an 400w silver might use more power than a 850W platinum even at 250W.
The cost savings in the initial purchase matters more than the minor power savings though.
Edit and the only parts of your system that draw significant power are the Video Card and CPU - everything else is all but a rounding error well under 100 watts total probably.
It really wasn’t Bitcoin that was the problem. At that point Bitcoin had pretty much moved entirely to ASICs rigs, because they were cheaper and faster for mining than video cards were (even at MSRP).
It was Ethereum mining that mostly drove the inflation. At the time, the best way to mine Ethereum was using video cards, particularly ones with AMD GPUs, which was why AMD-based cards saw a bigger price jump than NVIDIA ones, but because those two manufacturers are pretty much it for GPUs, the market overall saw a huge upswing in prices where at it’s peak some cards were going for four times MSRP from retailers.
Last time we built a rig (c. spring 2018), the manufacturer of our RAM had a compatibility listing for various motherboards and our motherboard manufacturer had a listing for various compatible RAM. At least one of these methods should give you the information you need without having to search everywhere (and hope the third-party information is accurate).
You can typically go right to the website of the motherboard and/or RAM manufacturer and get the info.
Bear in mind, though, that just because it doesn’t list it as compatible doesn’t mean it’s necessarily not compatible. Our RAM manufacturer did not list it as being compatible with the motherboard, but our motherboard manufacturer listed the RAM as compatible, and we’ve had no problems.
However, if neither lists it, I’d just look for a different set.
