Been out of the game a while, sense check my build?

[Devrij]

My PC is starting to get a little long in the tooth, and somewhere I have a hardware issue (maybe the 10yr old 1000W bequiet PSU, but the voltages look good so maybe not). So I am toying with the idea of throwing the parts cannon at it to solve my crashes and refresh things a bit while I'm at it. Budget is hypothetical, but since this is also my work machine, it is also a bit of an investment in stability. I'd be interested in knowing where you think I could downspec to save money though because I'd rather not build a whole new pc because, well the economy and all that. I generally don't go bargain basement on the mobo chipset because that is the biggest pain to solve later on when you want to expand on things with more storage etc, but if the x870 chipset is pants or anything, lemme know. I don't need wifi but seems like they all have it. Otherwise, mostly the cheapest of everything is what I picked so..

Got case, monitors etc

Here's what I'm thinking:

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D Eight Core 5.00GHz (Socket AM5) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3DT-AM) = £359.99
• 1 x MSI PRO X870-P WIFI (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MOT-MSI-03299) = £199.99
• 1 x TeamGroup Vulcan 32GB (2X16GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C36 5600MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black (FLBD532G5600HC36BDC01) (SKU: MY-0BB-TG) = £86.99
• 1 x be quiet! Pure Power 13 M 850W ATX 3.1 80 Plus Gold Power Supply (SKU: POW-BEQ-05637) = £109.99
• 1 x Gainward GeForce RTX 5070 Ti Phoenix-S 16GB GDDR7 PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GRA-GNW-05399) = £679.99
• 1 x NVIDIA Game Bundle - Arc Raiders Deluxe Edition PLUS Astro Cosmetic Pack (SKU: DIG-NVI-06436) = £0.00

Total: £1,436.95 (includes delivery: £0.00)​

 

[Devrij]

NB I have a 5800X, 3080 and 32GB of DDR4 to help offset the cost some, but since I can't nail down this crash, I may not end up being able to sell each of them if I do manage to narrow it down.

 

[Tetras]

but if the x870 chipset is pants or anything, lemme know

It offers USB4 over B850, so if you don't need USB4 then a B850 board is fine and you can save the money. USB4 also comes with a downside (mainly the possible lane sharing with M.2/PCIE), though not all boards handle it the same.

I'd be interested in knowing where you think I could downspec to save money though because I'd rather not build a whole new pc because, well the economy and all that.

GPU: it depends how much of an upgrade you want. The 3080 is still a very strong card, so I'd be reluctant to get much less than a 9070/5070 (then you're in downgrade territory), but ideally a 9070 XT or 5070 Ti.
CPU: you could just go with a 9600X, they're still decent gaming CPUs, but it is hard to look past the X3D for a high-end gaming PC and the 9600X is a false economy if you're going to quickly regret it.

but since I can't nail down this crash, I may not end up being able to sell each of them if I do manage to narrow it down.

Do you have a thread about that already?

 

[Gray2233]

You can buy a 9800X3D for £40 more, the similarly performing 9070XT is also much cheaper, USB concerns aside B850 would be fine. The savings allow for the 9800X3D and being an X3D part the slower RAM you selected wont cause any problems with performance.

Regardless:

basket at OcUK:[/b]

• 1 x Phanteks AMP GH 850W 80PLUS Gold ATX Power Supply Modular - Black (SKU: POW-PHK-02519) = £104.99
• 1 x Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 9070 XT Gaming 16GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GRA-SPR-03983) = £569.99
• 1 x Sapphire Nitro+ B850A WiFi 7 (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MOT-SPR-05688) = £157.99

Total: £840.96 (includes delivery: £7.99)​

 

[Devrij]

It offers USB4 over B850, so if you don't need USB4 then a B850 board is fine and you can save the money. USB4 also comes with a downside (mainly the possible lane sharing with M.2/PCIE), though not all boards handle it the same.


GPU: it depends how much of an upgrade you want. The 3080 is still a very strong card, so I'd be reluctant to get much less than a 9070/5070, but ideally a 9070 XT or 5070 Ti.
CPU: you could just go with a 9600X, they're still decent gaming CPUs, but it is hard to look past the X3D for a high-end gaming PC and the 9600X is a false economy if you're going to quickly regret it.


Do you have a thread about that already?

Okay that's good to know. I don't care much about usb4 so that sounds like a good shout on the chipset. I'd rather have more lanes for storage.

I went with the 5070ti for that reason really, enough of an upgrade to make it worthwhile, and stupidly the main reason I chose nvidia over amd is because I find nvidia broadcast great for noise filtering on zoom calls and it does background replacement better. If there's an alternative that does such a good job and is hardware agnostic then count me in because Nvidia have had enough of my money.

I figured I'd go 7xxxX3d and eventually jump to 9XXX3D when I needed it for an easy drop in upgrade. I don't really need the cpu grunt for much more than gaming, with the occasional encode and stupidly large xls sheets to push it, so maybe it is overkill.


On the crashes, no. For examples:

Starting nvidia broadcast on startup on a cold boot will often crash the pc. No problems if I leave it 20s before opening it. So I'm thinking maybe old PSU plus gpu load on cold boot means some transient spike is dipping voltage enough to crash it. I get a fairly vague WHEA error in event viewer to tell me something went wrong either with the cpu or pci bus. This is another reason I'm a tad worried it's the Gpu on its way out though because the crashes are always around something graphically demanding (but gpus are thirsty so could be power related).

Also playing space marine 2 tonight and suddenly black screen and I'm back at the bios splash screen. No BSOD or any events logged in event viewer at all. So that feels very "hardware" to me or I would have expected something to have logged an error saying "whoops I'm dead" before crashing.


So I'm currently just keeping tabs on the voltage readings in hwinfo to try and see if any of the rails are dipping, but even running occt power test sees the 12V dip to like 11.904 min which is nothing. But maybe cold, who knows.

That's actually why I posted that "how old is your windows install" thread elsewhere here because I thought "maybe there's just a bunch of junk in my registry and I need a clean slate.

Don't really want to drop a tonne of cash, but I can sorta justify it if I can narrow down a hardware issue.