Oh, nice, google says the 4070 does as well, no separate purchase necessary. That Amazon one is neat looking, though, agreed.
Not planning to buy yet, but have been keeping an eye out on pricing. The MSI Gaming 4070’s have unfortunately gone up to $750, which is ridiculously expensive. That’s in the ballpark of a 4070 ti price. Very discouraging.
So I’ve been looking at alternatives based on the youtube video from O!Technology: Which RTX 4070 to BUY and AVOID?! | 46 Cards Compared! First Ever F Tier from MSI! (The F Tier to avoid is the Ventus.)
One promising candidate is the Gigabyte Gaming OC, which is listed here on newegg for a perfectly reasonable $599. Granted that’s a sale price, but still.
Here’s my concern. If you go to the details section in that newegg listing it says:
Max GPU Length 300 mm
Which seems great; that would fit my case’s 341 mm max gpu length much better than the MSI Gaming’s 338 mm. But I happened to scroll through the pictures on newegg, and one of the pictures says the gpu is 13.46" long, which google says converts to 341.884 mm. Uh, what? Does that mean I can’t trust the Max GPU Length value in the newegg details? According to the picture it wouldn’t fit my case.
The official listing on Gigabytes page says 300mm and the product pages on Best Buy and Microcenter say 300mm. I’d assume a bad image got onto Newegg’s page.
They also have the width wrong (should be 5.11 inches). That size image isn’t on Gigabytes page so “someone at Newegg messed up converting for their graphic” sounds more plausible to me than “Gigabyte has no idea what size their card is”.
That’s reassuring, thanks much. It would annoy me to no end to completely lose faith in newegg’s listed details; I don’t mind the pictures being unreliable. It didn’t occur to me to go to gigabyte’s site directly for the official specs. I’ll keep that in mind going forward.
The irony is, after I posted I realized that the only reason I say my case’s Max GPU length is 341 mm is because that’s what Newegg has it listed as. I’ll double check that on fractal’s site.
I finally bought a new video card for Starfield. My old card was a GeForce 1050Ti 4GB. During the early access period I actually saw some YouTube videos of people running Starfield on a 1050 Ti and it wasn’t pretty, low settings didn’t look good and performance wasn’t good either.
So my new card is a RTX 3060 12GB. Along with my old AMD FX-8350 CPU it lets me run Starfield at a mostly consistent 30FPS at medium/high settings, which I’m happy with.
I had also bought a Ryzen 7 5700X CPU but got mixed up which motherboard was in my gaming PC, it doesn’t support that CPU. But surprisingly Starfield doesn’t max out my FX-8350, both it and the GPU run in the 70-80% range. So I will hold off on upgrading the motherboard for a while since that’s a lot more trouble.
Is Starfield the new Crysis?
Nah, Cyberpunk is still the new Crysis 
I don’t know about that. My five-year-old HP OMEN runs Cyberpunk with no problem but struggles with Starfield, even on low. I’ll have to save up and make the trip to Micro Center for a new motherboard, CPU, and GPU one of these days.
I already upgraded the GPU and other parts a couple of years ago; it has a 2060 now, which I think – judging from Newegg – is about as high as that mobo can go.
Maybe I should just save up for a new computer and a KVM switch so I won’t need to transfer all my files.
I would skip the KVM switch, and move the harddrive to the new machine as an extra drive.
My rig currently has 5 drives in it. The original 1 TB hybrid spinner when I built it in 2017, the 1 TB SSD from an upgrade, a 2 TB NVME from a more recent upgrade and 2 500 GB drives, one SSD and one spinner from laptop drive upgrades over the past few years too.
You will have to reinstall software but you will want your files on your fast, shiny new machine.
I’d prefer not dealing with Win 11 unless there is some bit of software that needs the faster system.
Not software, hardware. My understanding is that Windows 11 utilizes Intel’s performance cores and efficiency cores much more effectively than Windows 10.
I was referring to this:
My SO has Win 11 on her laptop; I do not like 11’s UI so I only use her laptop if she needs my help with something.
You could use a newer/faster GPU (the mobo is rarely the limiting factor unless it just has seriously antiquated PCIe slots) but it probably isn’t worth it with a 7th gen i5.
HP lists the slots as PCIe 3.
For current GPUs in real purposes (as opposed to synthetic benchmarks) there’s virtually no difference between Gen 3 and Gen 4 PCIe. And, by the time you reach a GPU & function where it might matter at all (“Hey, let’s put a 4090 in here!”), your CPU is going to be far more of a problem.
Anyway, none of that takes away from your correct read that a new system at some future point is overall the best way to go. Just clarification on what’s realistically holding you back. Although, of course, you can’t actually upgrade the CPU without a new motherboard anyway due to the socket type so it DOES deserve upgrading, just not because of the PCIe slots.
My bad, my writing was unclear. I was trying to say that there isn’t any software that needs Windows 11 over Windows 10. There is some hardware that needs Windows 11 over Windows 10, but that’s only for 12th gen Intel CPUs and later, so wouldn’t apply to your older system being upgraded.
Hm. Don’t know why but Starfield seems much less choppy now.
Been doing some upgrading over the weekend, mostly out of necessity. The power issues I was experiencing previously with my motherboard returned. Shutdowns under load, power cycling on startup, eventually it just failed to boot at all and died. GPU and RAM are both more or less brand new and my PSU tested out just fine, so either it’s my CPU or the motherboard, so I assumed the issue is with the one major component that’s already had issues, the mobo.
I was never really completely happy with the MSI Z590A-PRO; I mean it was fine, but it always seemed just a little bit… cheap. Which makes perfect sense, I bought it at the time because it was inexpensive. I’ll never really know what exactly I did to break it, but I suspect it was from pushing it when it only had the stock Intel cooler on the CPU and not enough case fans. Thing sounded like a jet engine before but now it’s more or less silent even at max load; Noctua NH-D15 is a beast.
Replaced with an MSI MPG Z590 Gaming Plus, the next tier up in MSI’s line. The difference in quality is pretty obvious. Even the box is better looking. Guess I should have just spent the extra $40 to start with. Aside from a little bit of cabling confusion that was simply me not reading the manual closely enough, it swapped out pretty easily. Took a little bit more force than I am totally comfortable with pushing the CPU retention arm down, but apparently that’s normal and expected.
I swapped out the PSU while I was at it. Old one tested out just fine but I wasn’t 100% confident in it so I replaced it with a Seasonic Focus GX850. Pretty sure I wired it back up correctly. I certainly did a better job of cable management this time around.
Had a nervous few minutes firing it back up the first time and it booted directly into BIOS, but after fixing the previously mentioned wiring issue (certain SATA connections don’t work if certain M.2 slots are used, and I didn’t read the manual carefully enough), it booted into Windows just fine. Ran a bunch of stress tests in OCCT and it passed everything easily whereas before it crashed after just a few minutes of any testing.
So now I have a new mobo, power supply, and all new cables. Doing all that work and having it work just fine the first (or second) time is very satisfying. I’m very happy with myself right now.
ETA: of course now that I’ve more or less replaced my PC’s entire innards in the last few months I’m now looking at a pile of old gear that aside from the mobo, a CPU, and a case is more or less a complete system. I’m thinking I might pick up another cheap mobo and a used CPU at some point and put together a “beater” PC just for funsies. Maybe I’ll just attach it all to a 2x4, or even just screw the parts to the wall.
It’s the first step to having three giant plastic bins full of misc PC parts in your closet. Don’t ask me how I’d know.
Congratulations on the successful PC rebuild/repair. The retention arm has always been my least favorite part of building PC – so stressful. I always follow it up with hooking up a PSU and RAM and firing it up to make sure I get a POST before spending the rest of the time to assemble the PC just to learn that I bent a pin. I was actually happy about the 12/13th gen where I bought a screw-down bracket instead for better cooler coverage and didn’t have to use the arm mechanism.