Time to replace the PC

Every once in a while, you end up having to replace your PC, and unfortunately that time has arrived once again at our house.

I say "unfortunately", because if you want a PC with any kind of longevity, you have to use higher-end parts.  That means expensive parts, so it's not something you want to do very often.  I've been building my own desktop computers since 2006.  It's usually a pretty fun experience, and this time I'm going to teach our daughter how to put one together.

I'm very fond of our current PC, which I assembled in 2011, and I am not really keen on replacing it.  I don't ask very much of it either graphically or computationally, so it works perfectly well for everything I need.  The only place where the old PC disappoints is storage.  The hard drive is full, as is the external backup drive. 
 
I don't really challenge the old machine.  I play a few older first-person shooters, and it works fine for those, even with the graphic settings cranked up to maximum.  The graphics card is a newer GeForce 1050Ti, with a Passmark score of 6,435.  It was replaced when the previous GTX 560 cooked.

The CPU on the old machine is a i7-2600K, which somehow still shows up at the very bottom of the high-end CPUs in the Passmark test.  It scores a 5,468 on the test, which doesn't seem all that "high-end" these days.  The current top Passmark score is 80,422 set by an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X CPU that costs $3450.

Why is it suddenly time to replace this perfectly OK machine?  Microsoft has stopped supporting Windows 7, so the Win7 Operating System is no longer receiving security patches.  Before long, businesses will balk at communicating with the computer for security reasons, and at that point it will lose most of its usefulness.  Microsoft recommends starting with a new machine and installing a fresh copy of Windows 10 to take advantage of all the new security features, instead of installing Win10 over Win7.  So that's what I'm going to do.

Since I have to spend money on a new Operating System and data storage, I might as well upgrade the entire rig.  After all, the rest of it is getting old as well.  I'll probably put the old computer in a spare room in the shop and turn it into a PC gaming room.

A brief trip down memory lane:
I bought my very first PC in 1988.  It was a Tandy 1000SX with an Intel 8088 CPU running 7 MHz.  Sweet memories!  Over time, I added 256KB of extra Micron memory, a 16 color VGA graphics card from Orchid, and a 20 MB Seagate Hard drive.  Larger hard drives were available then - expensive 40, 80 and 120 MB hard drives.  That amount of storage capacity seemed excessive, given that most software came on 1-4 floppy disks that held only 360 or 720KB of data.

Below:  The trusty 20MB Seagate ST-225 and controller card.

In those days, the hard drive was plugged into a separately purchased 'hard drive controller card' that fit into an expansion slot.  No computer upgrade was plug-and-play, and you had to go through a lot of trial and error to make your new upgrades work.  You had to adjust jumpers on your motherboard, modify your config file and sometimes the autoexecute file.  In one case, I had to cut a diode off of an expansion card so that it would work correctly.  This would of course void any warranty.  All of this was just a little more troublesome than it should have been, because the Tandy didn't exactly copy the IBM PC architecture and interrupts.

Since that machine I've owned a Tandy 2000 with a 80286 CPU (one of my favorites), a Gateway with a Pentium MMX, and a Dell with P4 Pentium CPU.  Beyond the machines that I purchased straight from the manufacturer, I've built three of my own computers.  I've also convinced several friends to build their own rigs with my help.  All of these PCs used Intel processors, and except for some issues with RAID configuration on the first one, every one of them has worked amazingly well.  Lots of fun.

Back to today:
Right now I've ordered the necessary components for a new PC, and I'm really looking forward to having all the parts gathered so that we can begin the project.  For the first time ever, I'm not using an Intel CPU, partly for cost/performance reasons, and partly to spread some cash to the competition.
 
This computer will use a CPU manufactured by American Micro Devices, or AMD.  The CPU is a  Ryzen 7 3800X, which scores an impressive 23,330 on the Passmark test.  It comes with a Wraith Prism Cooling fan (pictured).  The nominal clock rate is 3.9 GHz,  The CPU can also be overclocked to 4.5 GHz if you're feeling brave about smoking a $300+ processor.  It comes with a 32 MW L3 Cache and has 8 cores, and 16 threads.  I'm sure to look back on these stats in a few years and laugh at how lame they are, but today they look pretty decent.

The Motherboard is an ASRock X570M Pro 4.  It doesn't seem to be all that special.  The main thing I care about is that it supports the CPU that I picked out without having to flash the BIOS.  There is a certain level of pain in the butt I'm willing to put up with when I build a PC.  Locating and installing a newer BIOS version for a brand-new motherboard is pretty much where my cutoff is.  I get enough of that updating crap from Windows.

Memory: Crucial Ballistic Tactical Tracer RGB3000 MHz DDR4 16 GB. 8GB x 2 sticks.  Very colorful.  Hopefully the memory part of the sticks work too.

The Graphics Card is an MSI RX580 Armor 8GB OC.  The Passmark score on this card is 8,715.  I probably should have spent an extra hundred bucks for a faster video card, with a rating somewhere up around 12,000 on the Passmark score.  Once again, I'm trying something new.  On my earlier builds, I always used graphics cards that used Nvidia hardware, but this time I'm going with a Radeon-based card.  Radeon is a division of AMD, who also manufactures the CPU.  We shall see how it goes.

Operating System drive: Crucial MX500 SSD 500 GB.  Windows 10 will be loaded onto this, and that is the only data that will be there.  An SSD is basically a whole bunch of memory chips, and unlike a normal hard drive, it has no moving parts.  Accessing the data goes faster, because there is no delay while the read head locates data on a spinning disk.  The purpose of putting Win10 on a SSD is to speed up the boot time a lot.  This arrangement has worked well on my current PC.

Main Internal storage drive: Toshiba 4TB 7200 rpm 128 MB cache.

Nothing special here.  Standard 6GB/Sec data transfer rate.  4.17 mSec average latency.  Looks like it has 5 or 6 platters.

Optical drives: Two LG Blu-ray read write 16x. They also read and write DVD and CD.  From time to time I make copies of CDs, so it's handy to have two optical read-write drives.

External storage: Seagate 8TB USB 3.0  drive.  Again, nothing special, except that it backs up everything.  When a fire engulfs the forest, I'll grab this thing, the paper documents, and the critters.

Power Supply: Corsair CX650 650 watt bronze 80+.  This the cheapest power supply I could get away with, because the motherboard required an extra 12v power cable that other power supplies didn't have.

Case: Apevia Hermes green.  I have some width constraints to deal with, and I still need front bays to burn disks, so my options were a bit limited on the case.  I like having the USB and headphone ports up high so I don't have to bend way down to plug in.

...and of course, the reason I have to do all of this in the first place... Windows 10.

Most of the components have already arrived, and I'm beginning to get excited to assemble it.  Afterwards, if I decide that I'm up to Call of Duty: War Zone, the new rig will be able to swing it.  I've got a bit over $1600 into this one so far.  Fortunately, I don't have to buy any peripherals - mouse, keyboard, speakers, or monitor.

Speaking of keyboards, I got a new one recently, and I can't say enough good things about it.  It's a K70 Lux, made by Corsair.  The keyboard has pretty backlighting and a roller volume control that I find really handy - like most gaming keyboards these days.

However the keys are old-school mechanical keys - when you press down, at first you get a bit of resistance, then the key drops down and you get a nice sharp "click" as a mechanical switch makes up.  FYI - The switches that give both resistance and click are the "Cherry MX Brown" switches. 

In the event you decide you want to build your own PC, I recently learned of a very handy website that helps you choose components, and lets you know if everything is compatible.  I found it very helpful, and this time around, it saved me having to do several hours of research on individual parts.  The site is called PC Part Picker.  Screenshot of the main page, below.

On the home page are a couple of mid-range PC build guides for both AMD and Intel home-made machines.  At the top of the web page are tabs for "build guides" for higher and lower end machines.  There is also a "completed builds" page for enthusiasts who have assembled machines and then posted images of their projects.

The part I used to select all my parts was the "System Builder".  It's a super-useful tool that helps you avoid incompatibilities in your components.  For example, it warned me that the power supply I chose did not have enough power cables to support the motherboard.  As I said, this is the first time I've used a builder tool, and I'm a huge advocate of this web page already.

If you decide you want to take a shot at building a PC, there are some good YouTube videos out there on how it all goes together.  This guy here does a good job, in a three part series.  You should do this!  It's fun to do, and the best part is that you don't get a corporate PC that comes pre-loaded with bloatware, adware, and spyware.

Edit:
All the stuff has finally arrived - last to arrive was the memory.  Now the only thing lacking is time to assemble the machine.

Edit 2: The hardware build portion is complete