Recent content by E4g1e

You might have to downgrade your original CPU choice to an i5 (such as an i5-14500). You see, you will have to spend more than $300 USD just for a motherboard that can handle an i7-14700K at default settings, and with your chosen motherboard budget most of those cheap motherboards will throttle...

I would not recommend giving her your 5900X since it is way, way overkill for those apps that she runs on her PC. Unfortunately, you gave her a platform that requires a discrete GPU just to even work at all. However, the AM4 platform that currently holds that system's current Ryzen 5 3600XT will...

Bad idea. I would not buy a new AM4 desktop build at this point, especially since that Ryzen 5 5500 is just a lesser-performing Zen 3 APU (the Ryzen 5 5500G, in this case) with its integrated GPU permanently disabled, and that all Zen 3 APUs have only half the amount of L3 cache than their...

If you can afford it, my recommendation is a completely new system to retire that 7th-Gen Intel system. You see, Intel itself can, and will, terminate all support and driver updates for older parts. The 7th-Gen CPUs' support will end completely, outside of archived drivers, this coming March...

Until you are able to get a self-built system stable at the specs that you think it should have, and you are willing to spend thousands or even millions of dollars just to replace parts, then I would completely suspend building and instead buy a custom pre-built. You will have the exact same...

To tell you the truth about AM4 BIOS updates and compatibility: Be very, very careful! Some AM4 motherboards have BIOS versions that do not support both the 1000 series and the 5000 series CPUs at the same time! So, you may not be able to update your board's BIOS to a version that supports a...

In addition to the suggestions from chameleoneel, is there any reason why you're planning to get only 2.5" SATA SSDs? Are those the only storage devices and OS disk that you're going to use? If so, then I would change both of them to m.2 NVMe SSDs.

With DDR5 prices as low as they currently are, it's a no-brainer to get the kid 32 GB of DDR5-5200 or faster RAM for that build as that amount of DDR5 RAM now costs just a few dollars more than the DDR4 RAM that you would have gotten had you chose the 5600 instead of the 7600.

Updating my post: MSI is not to blame, in this case. Microsoft is. You see, since about 2021 Microsoft has closed a loophole that allowed free upgrades from an older OS to Windows 10 or Windows11 – and this software change has screwed up the activation of all “free” copies of Windows 10 or...

You all have some good points. However, some of the suggestions would still leave the thread starter's parents with an obsolete PC that will not receive any security updates at all whatsoever. 6th-Gen Intel parts have gone completely EOSL (End Of Support Life) back on December 30 of last year...

Congrats on your graphics upgrade! Although the Turing architecture which powered the GTX 1660 Ti was sound enough for its 2018 vintage, it is now becoming a bit long on the tooth by current standards. On top of that, you doubled the amount of VRAM on your GPU so that it would be ready for more...

Actually, without a GPU upgrade, the OP is better off staying put. That 1080 Ti will heavily bottleneck any CPU that's anywhere near a worthwhile upgrade from that 5700X. Instead, I would upgrade the GPU before I would upgrade the CPU. Unfortunately, the GPUs that are worth their upgrade cost...

It is due to the constantly active I/O die of the Zen 3 (and Zen 2) CPUs. And that separate I/O die within the CPU package, which is manufactured on an older 12 nm process node, is drawing a lot of power (relatively speaking) from the PSU. So, all Ryzen CPUs from Zen2 onwards that are not APUs...

Actually, none of the current GPUs are PCIe 5.0 compliant. Your RTX 4090 still runs at only PCIe 4.0 throughput levels. Thus, you do lose a very small amount of performance by going from PCIe 4.0 x16 down to PCIe 4.0 x8. No PCIe 4.0 x16 card can be set to run at PCIe 5.0 x8 at all - but if...

Only with the official Intel power limits set manually in the motherboard BIOS, IMHO. The trouble is, most if not all good Intel motherboards have their power limits set to "unlimited" or a very high value by default.