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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

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Happy Sunday everyone. I am at a bit of a loss with how to go about potentially upgrading my desktop PC.

There is a well-established culture & system around upgrading phones every 2-3 years. Companies make it enticingly easy with trade-ins that reduce cost and waste. Same system exists for cars.

But not for PCs.

I have an HP Omen desktop that I bought for $1700 before tax in Nov 2020. It was on sale and had/s excellent specs: i7-10700K, RTX 3080, 32gb ram, 500gb SSD. I'm pretty sure it still sells for $1700+ today, at least in nominal dollars, which is bonkers for what should be fast depreciating. Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

I don't game much, maybe a little bit of StarCraft 2 and RimWorld every now and then. So the graphics card was an overkill from the start and meant to be future-proof. The 3080 will easily suffice for at least another 2-3 years, I'm sure.

But I'm tempted by a new CPU. UserBenchmark suggests that a 13900K outperforms the 10700K by 33% on "effective speed", or 61% on single core speed. By the time the 14000 series comes out next year, perhaps it'll get to +50% effective speed and +80% single core. At some point, the $600 or however much the next-gen costs will be is worth it to me if my computer runs 50-80% faster depending on the application (for example, RimWorld is mainly CPU limited and has no multithreading.

But it seems cumbersome to upgrade the CPU. I could watch a bunch of YT to learn how to swap out the CPU myself, but I'd rather not, in case I mess something up. I have no passion for tinkering, so the time I spend learning and failing would be stressful and a waste of time. I also understand that not all motherboards support newer CPUs, and the 13900K also draws double the power than the 10700K, so I may need to get both a new MOBO and a new PSU. All that feels like a tremendous headache to me if I were to DIY.

Alternatively, I could wait until the desktop is dying after 2-3 years, and then I toss/recycle it for a new one. But this seems suboptimal too, given I value and am willing to pay for a faster processor, but that's all that I care about. I don't want or need a brand new PC.

The third option is to find a pro to upgrade the CPU (and possibly the MOBO and PSU). Microcenter seems to have a CPU installation service for $80 (plus a $40 "recommended diagnostic"). I could also take it into a local repair shop, which I tend to think of as somewhat seedy and serving computer illiterate people at a premium, but that's probably just undue prejudice.

What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.

Aside from a few random blue screen of deaths maybe once a month, which I feel like is a feature at this point with any brand of PC, no complaints.

No it isn't.

A bsod isn't normal, there is something wrong maybe in the OS level, maybe with drivers, maybe hardware, but its more than a mere warning that can be ignored most of the time.

What would you do if you were me? Suggestions and recommendations appreciated.

Fix the bsod issue, then literally nothing.

Your setup is so hilariously overpowered (in all aspects) for StarCraft2 and Rimworld that you are doing this for no reason other than to please your lizard brain that just wants to buy shit.

You are asking "I drive my Ferrari to the grocery store all the time, should I buy a Lamborghini?" WHY WOULD YOU??

I play similar old school games like you and I'm using a Ryzen 5 2600 and a GTX 1070 setup I bough 5 years ago. Still running strong.

I would have fixed the BSOD if it just required the latest drivers and updates. It's probably something at the hardware level, which sort of goes back to my lack of interest in DIYing diagnostics.

My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld. This is too much detail, but once you get to 50+ colonists the game barely runs on 1x, let alone 3 or 5x speed.

Also, my setup hardly compares to a Ferrari. It's a $1700 machine. 14'' MacBook Pros start at $2k, and I know the average startup doesn't issue its developers a Ferrari on day one. It's more like a base model 2020 BMW 5 series, with me asking the best way to swap the engine for the 2023 model.

If your main goal is Rimworld performance, AMD's 5800x3D CPU is going to be the best value you can buy (or the 7800x3D when it comes out next year) because its huge cache makes a big difference (up to 40%) for complex sim games with lots of entities.

I've been drooling over these for Factorio, but similar sort of position where I can't justify it for the ~2hrs a week I spend using the PC that way.

CPU sim games are such an upgrade trap: "yesss, now I can simulate seven million pieces of iron moving down a belt! Progress!"

The widely-touted Factorio benchmarks run at well over 200+ UPS. The outsized gains from the big cache don't hold up as well with larger factories that struggle to maintain 60, presumably because they overflow it. Something that does help Factorio run faster on pretty much any computer is forcing it to use a larger page size with mimalloc.

Even in that case it's going toe to toe against a CPU twice its price with vastly higher single core speed, which is pretty amazing!

Thanks for the tip. If my business programs were available on Linux I'd switch over entirely at this point.

Interesting. Never thought about the cache mattering. Thanks for the tip.

Your CPU is in fact overpowered for Rimworld. Having 50+ colonists is an extreme outlier case, like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.

like people who play Factorio and then try to build mega factories.

Is there any point to factorio other than building mega factories? It's not called Cottagecorio, and only like 25% of the content is really involved in a playthrough that just "beats the game."

There are factories and factories. I've had a lot of fun building (quite large) factories in that game, but I have no desire whatever to try to get into the megabase game. Building a factory to produce thousands of science packs per minute is not my idea of fun.

Regardless, though, people who do that in Factorio are at the extreme edge of pushing the game. The hardware they need to sustain that is far greater than what the average Factorio player needs. Similarly, if one has a Rimworld colony with 50+ colonists that's outside the norm, and it means they're going to have higher hardware requirements.

My CPU is not overpowered for RimWorld

I do not know the particulars of RimWorld.

But exotic usecases are insatiable. You can make any CPU in the world struggle if you just spawn an arbitrarily large number of bots in games made in the 90's.

If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played, then I suppose just do whatever you want. (Do it regardless, but you asked for suggestions).

Ferrari

The point I was aiming to get across is that a Ferrari is far far far too overspecced to drive to the grocery as is a a high end CPU is for running games that were modestly intensive from half to 3/2 a decade ago.

Not about the expense of it.

If your usecase is not too far out of the bounds of how RimWorld is meant to be played

It is way outside the bounds of how Rimworld is normally played, for what it's worth. So a CPU upgrade may help, but it's hardly required by the game.

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