Okay, we’ll try that next time she’s on her computer.
Indie game marketplace Itch has a $10 charity bundle for Ukraine relief with around 1,000 titles in it. Not all are video games, you’ll find a number of indie TTRPG stuff, some game assets & music bundles, etc but the majority (at least 523 if you filter by Windows platform) are video games and there’s some nice ones right off the bat such as Baba is You, Skatebird, SuperHOT, 2064, Celeste, etc. I’ve bought previous bundles for BLM and Palestinian Aid and been more than happy with what I got (plus, you know, the charity thing).
Note that you do not get Steam keys; you download DRM-free files direct from Itch. Even if a game page says you get a Steam key for buying, you will not get one from this bundle. My understanding is that the massive number of titles in the bundle and the huge amount they sell just make it impossible for them to work out with Valve.
Edit: Apparently you can use this list and then Sort By Steam Rating if you want to see some of the cream in the bundle. Again, you won’t get Steam keys but many of the games are also sold on Steam
Thanks for the heads up. Indie games can be a tossup, but there tend to be more gems than not, IME. But for a sawbuck, even if only a tenth of them are decent, that’s still a hell of a deal.
Looking over that list, of the games I recognize, yes, SUPERHOT is an excellent title. Hidden Folks is a cute hand-drawn search-and-find type game. And Yet It Moves is a cool, unorthodox platform-type game.
I think my favorite sleeper from the previous bundles (and in this one) is Plunge, a turn-based puzzle roguelike. Not a game I see in the “Get these amazing games in this bundle” articles but well worth trying.
Pretty much the only direction they can go.
Quick hardware question.
My PC which I have built up and changed over many years has a Z77X ud 3h motherboard ( the box which I still have as its my spare bits box says it is ready for windows 8!l)
I have an intel i7 3770k processor in there, I think I
put it together with 16gig ram back in 2013/14 although the mobo may be a little newer as I effed up the mobo when swapping a graphics card once.
Anyway it was a pretty decent machine back in the day but I feel it is time for a processor upgrade.
Any idea what the latest processor that mother board is compatible with? I am assuming the latest greatest intel processors need a new mother board and I’d rather not change that unless I have to)
( 1060 graphics card, a solid corsair dual fan , SSD system hard drive and countless other hard drives accumulated over time, the case is a Antec soundproofed beast, weighs a ton, but really nice cable routing, lots of air movement , and super quiet)
You already have the fastest CPU that motherboard can support, and yes, you definitely need a new motherboard. Not only because of various new features on motherboards, but you may find that newer OSes don’t have drivers for some of the components for the board.
You’re basically capped out. The board supports 2nd & 3rd gen chips and you have a 3rd gen i7 in there. A slightly better 3rd gen i7 (if there is one) won’t give a large enough performance upgrade to be worth the time or effort.
You’ll need to move to a new board and processor to upgrade. That will also likely mean upgrading your RAM if you buy new components of the shelf since you’ll be going at least from DDR3 to DDR4. Otherwise you can try to find a used 4/5th gen but, again, hardly worth it
If you’re looking for a similarly high-tier build, you’ll want to replace most of that. The case sounds solid – though you might want a newer one with a USB-C front port – but maybe not even the drives unless they’re ginormous for back in the day.
Intel motherboards only support two generations, so realistically, unless you’re upgrading every year, each chip needs its own motherboard. You would definitely need a new motherboard.
Modern chips are way hotter so you need a new CPU cooler. Also any modern video card will likely require an upgrade to your PSU. And for sure you’d want new RAM.
You definitely want an M.2 drive for Windows. You could probably settle for 500 gigs for the C: drive if you got two of them, with the second one being a terabyte for games. Or just get a single terabyte for your C: drive and games. My ideal setup would be two M.2 drives: 1 TB system drive and a 2 TB games drive. That ended up being way out of my budget, so I settled for just a single 1 terabyte C drive. It handles both windows and games just fine, though of course it will suck hard if I ever have to wipe the C: drive and reinstall the OS. I can always add a 2 terabyte down the line if I want. (Still too pricey for me, with nice ones approaching $300. A nice 1 terabyte is a little over $100. Tempting!)
You could probably reuse your old SSDs for data drives, but other than a 500 gig system drive, a terabyte is really the smallest drive you want. I’m guessing the ones you have are probably smaller.
You wouldn’t have to upgrade the video card immediately, but with prices appearing to come down to a new normal so far this spring, now isn’t a terrible time to buy one. (Video card prices may still be falling for the next month or three, though. Plus I think the next generation is coming out later this year.)
Probably not. The 77W of the 3770k is higher than a current gen i3 or i5 (either of which would be any upgrade) and even a cooler like the trusty old 212 Evo is rated for about 180W. Unless the plan is to go with a new i9 the old one might be fine if it’s a reputable brand (like Corsair) and not from the bottom of the SKU stack.
Speaking of, that is a -k chip so you could always try overclocking it for a little extra life. The board supports it. Doing so is a little fiddly so it really depends on how much you’ll enjoy the tech tinkering.
Thanks for the quick reaponses !
Yeah i may take a peek at the overclock , I used to be quite up on pc stuff and I built the system and have upgraded over time so I can tinker , I am just way way out of date now. Any useful resources ?
The SSD is only a couple of years old and is 512gig so that should be good for a system drive for a while , the 1TB hard drive is 4 years old , and the rest are just data drives.
The fan is a corsair h100 so I think thats got some legs left on it for cooling and PSU is 750w and maybe 3 years. I am not going dual graphics cards , although i will need to see what happens there , I think I’ll be waiting another year at least for a new GPU when some of the madness dies down so I will look at a PSU then.
Sounds like I am in the hole for minimum of a new mobo processor and RAM though. I was looking for a new wide screen monitor as well, oh well.
This is going to be tough to get budget approval for from the boss of the house , with two kids in out of state collage it may mean I need to go the OC route for a while .
Appreciate the responses, thanks again.
I was talking about if they wanted to maintain a similar level to the last time. A 12th generation i7 is more like 125W.
Can you actually air cool a 12th generation i7, or is that water cooling or bust? (I see now that he already has a water cooler.)
Water cooling isn’t actually more effective than air cooling for typical use cases. People do it because it can be quieter but mostly I think because they want to feel more techy.
Interesting. I suppose it would be quieter than a loud fan set up, pretty easily too. I have avoided water cooling not only because I’m scared little baby, but also the fact that on a quiet system, water cooling becomes the loudest part.
Two things I hope to never deal with in my PC building life: tempered glass and water cooling. I just keep thinking about what if it springs a leak… (Plus the noise I think would legitimately drive me crazy.)
Afraid not any I can personally vouch for but if you enter the motherboard model and “overclock” into Google, you’ll find a wealth of videos and forum postings specific to that board.
If you did want to just upgrade, I’d go for a 12th gen i3 or i5 with a decent motherboard. This would allow you to upgrade to a 12th or 13th gen i7 later if you wanted, although the lower tier CPUs in the 12th gen are very capable processors and Intel really knocked it out for budget-oriented builds with them. You can buy an i3-12100f for under $100 on Newegg right now and it’s probably another 70% better than the i7-3770k. Keep your cooler, SSD, HDDs, PSU, etc (you will need an adapter for the cooler though since 12th gen is a new socket shape but they sell adapters for it) and get 16GB of DDR4.
The 1060 was, until very recently, the most popular GPU in the Steam Hardware Survey for years. In fact, it was supplanted by a worse GPU mainly because of GPU shortages and cost issues.
In the mid-range, a good air cooler will perform as well as your typical 240/280mm AIO. At the high end, a 360mm AIO is going to do better than air cooling for your 12th gen power-eatin’ i7/i9 setups.
I own an AIO on my CPU and bought it to reduce noise which it did. Rather than one or two fans on the air cooler and another couple in front (and another in back), the two in front are doing the CPU cooling, thus reducing my case noise by two fans worth. I never hear my pump but I might just be lucky there – certainly there’s people who have bought AIOs and complained about pump whine. It does an admirable job of keeping my 5GHz i7-9700k cool but I’m sure I could get similar results from a big ole Noctua hanging off the CPU.
I am in two minds, I’d like to get a boost, and hitting some more cost effective paths is one way, but on the other hand, if I am getting a new mobo processor and ram, may as well go for the upper range of performance as it will be a while before the next upgrade.
Again all good useful info thanks.
For anyone exploring air cooling in a modern CPU, look no further than the BeQuiet! Dark Rock 4 or Dark Rock Pro 4. These are maybe a tad expensive, but they are quiet, super quiet and sexy black unlike the beige/brown Noctuas they are competing with.
I had the Dark Rock 3 with an intel I7-4770K and am running the Dark rock 4 with an AMD 5800X, I do have a big case with a lot of airflow but my CPU doesn’t reach 60 C when working hard. Plus, as i have said, super duper quiet, and no water to worry about leaking. (not that water leaking in an AIO is common, but one less thing for my brain to be anxious about)
This is accomplished by being freaking massive. The fan on the DR4 is a 140mm, the DR4Pro has 2 140mm fans.
I went with a dark rock slim for my i-5 10400 and I love it to death. Mainly I got it because I had already decided to get bequiet case fans, and I wanted as many fans as possible to be by the same manufacturer to minimize potential clashing fan sounds. (I wasn’t impressed by what I read about bequiet PSUs, though, so there I stuck with Seasonic. My only non-bequiet fan.)
The only downside to bequiet fans and coolers is that possibly-insane dude on Amazon who left long, highly rated reviews talking about how bequiet fan noise will literally drive you insane. Something about low frequency sound. It was unsettling to read, but as @Jophiel helpfully pointed out at the time, if my case fans did start driving me insane, changing case fans is simple enough. (EDIT: Link to old SDMB post where I quoted it.)
Note that you can get black noctua coolers now Instead of their signature brown, but of course the rat bastards make you pay $10 more for them. I considered going noctua instead of bequiet but the latter was cheaper for three fans and a cooler.
Ha! His reviews are still on Amazon for multiple be quiet products, still highly rated and practically pinned to the top, but I didn’t notice them at first because the crazy bastard still gave them 3 stars.
This freaking guy wrote a manifesto declaring that a) they don’t cool very well, and b) they will drive you insane while they literally kill you. 3 stars!