New Gaming PC (the slippery slope)

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Well, seems I failed to contain the upgrade of my GPU (1080ti to 3080ti) and PSU unit. And it has devolved into thinking about buying a whole new system.

I'm currently pondering if I should switch to Win11 and Intel Alder Lake (i7-12700K), but the one thing that worries me is game compatibility, with older games especially. I know there was an issue initially with some titles that used DRM, that officially got fixed (though I can't really confirm how much is it fixed). Then there's the fact that Alder Lake decided to bring in perf cores and efficiency cores? Plus all the Windows 11 issues I'm likely to encounter.

I think I found a thread where Moriendor mentioned he had been running Win11 for some time, and didn't have any issues. But I didn't catch the CPU he was using.

Anyway, the other miscellaneous issues around this upgrade are the fact that I'm gonna need to be importing the motherboard, since apparently none of the retail stores have anything more than low/middle end boards. And even those, none that give me any hope. Then there's the issue of this upgrade forcing me onto DDR5, which is another price increase.

Here's the system I'm pondering
I7-12700K
GTX 3080 Ti (this is the only one I already bought; yeah, i know the 40xx is apparently around the corner, but apparently I couldn't wait and also I like to give new tech at least a year before jumping in)
Gigabyte Z690 Aorus Master
Corsair Dominator Platinum

Anyone else thinking of a similar upgrade? Or did anyone else do a more thorough investigation as to how Win11/Alder Lake works with older titles?
 
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For what it's worth ( me being only an enthusiastic amateur -albeit for the last 30 years) : I really wanted to upgrade to an i5-12400 or similar. However after reading about the problem with warped LGA 1700 sockets /IHS, I have settled on a Ryzen 5600X with MSI B550 Tomahawk motherboard. It's the first time Ive strayed away from Intel in more than 20 years, to be honest. No problems so far -and I run plenty of "old" games. I run an Nvidia 2060 Super, which runs any game that I throw at it -so far....including Doom 2016. Therefore, I won't be upgrading my graphics card any time soon, as I find the prices to be still far too high. Let's be honest- they are bloody scandalous!
 
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For what it's worth ( me being only an enthusiastic amateur -albeit for the last 30 years) : I really wanted to upgrade to an i5-12400 or similar. However after reading about the problem with warped LGA 1700 sockets /IHS, I have settled on a Ryzen 5600X with MSI B550 Tomahawk motherboard. It's the first time Ive strayed away from Intel in more than 20 years, to be honest. No problems so far -and I run plenty of "old" games. I run an Nvidia 2060 Super, which runs any game that I throw at it -so far....including Doom 2016. Therefore, I won't be upgrading my graphics card any time soon, as I find the prices to be still far too high. Let's be honest- they are bloody scandalous!
I was also considering an Ryzen 9 5950x, since it seems to run a bit cooler than the Alder Lake intel cpus. It would also be my first straying from Intel in a long time. It's a bit overpowered for gaming, but thought I could get the benefit for work and regular use.
 
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I'm currently pondering if I should switch to Win11 and Intel Alder Lake (i7-12700K), but the one thing that worries me is game compatibility, with older games especially. I know there was an issue initially with some titles that used DRM, that officially got fixed (though I can't really confirm how much is it fixed). Then there's the fact that Alder Lake decided to bring in perf cores and efficiency cores? Plus all the Windows 11 issues I'm likely to encounter.
I would be surprised if compatibility ended up being a significant issue. I had the same concern about switching from Win 7 to Win 10, but I struggle to think of many examples where something wouldn't run on 10 that ran on 7.

Did you install the 3080 Ti yet? What PSU did you upgrade from and to?
 
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I would be surprised if compatibility ended up being a significant issue. I had the same concern about switching from Win 7 to Win 10, but I struggle to think of many examples where something wouldn't run on 10 that ran on 7.

Did you install the 3080 Ti yet? What PSU did you upgrade from and to?
I just installed the 3080 Ti, on the same system I bought 7 years ago or so. The only other thing I changed in it was the PSU from a 750W Corsair to a 1200W Corsair.

So that's an i7 4790k, 16 gigs of ram, and the 3080Ti instead of the 1080Ti.

And did a 15 min run through Red Dead Redemption, at 3440x1440, with 95% of options on Ultra, Max, DLSS, or whatever i could push. I think I went through each of them, but I may have missed some since there's loads of settings. Now that I think about it, I'm not sure if I saw anything regarding raytracing. I have a feeling that if there is support, I missed that. I would imagine that would tank my system.

Anyway, so it ran pretty much smoothly, at least in how it felt. I didn't find any fps counter to display and couldn't be bothered to install a separate app or activate shadowplay or however it's called. But I'll have to, since I'm a bit curious. But the card itself was running at 70-75C with all fans pretty much at 70-80% speed. I didn't hear anything, but I assume this will change as the fans get used. I was surprised how well it seemed to run.

On the 1080Ti, it was also at around 70-80C, but I was with most things on Medium or High, no way could I handle all things on Max. But I don't even think it's worth pushing the GPU to the bare limit for little graphical improvements that I likely won't even see or notice. So I'll be sure to take it all down a notch. Basically, anything that I can't really notice is getting taken down.

So, I'm pretty suprised at what an improvement just a card makes to a 7 year old system. Shocked really. I'm even considering if I should even bother with the full system upgrade ... but it is getting older ... but I'm more tempted now to go for the AMD 5950x. Since obviously even my ancient CPU can handle games (thought I'm not sure if RDR2 is cpu-bound). So I'd rather have more productivity via what AMD has to offer. I don't know. I'll have to think about it some more.
 
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I also gave Cyberpunk 2077 a short test. Ran the benchmark, with everything on max, except for raytracing. Fluctuated between 45 and 120 fps. That's very unstable.

Anyway, also tried it in the game for a short while, and it is impressive looking. But again, the cards stays are 60-65C but with the fans at 78%. That seems excessive. I'm gonna look into lowering the max percentage. I think it's too high, and I feel the fans are the ones that are most at risk of getting damaged from usage. No? Though they do say this particular TUF model has some ball-bearing whatnot? Whatever, you can never really trust the marketing speak.

Yeah, and pretty great performance in Control also. Nice to know.
 
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78% for the fans isn't excessive as long as noise isn't an issue.

I'll be interested in hearing more results when you have time to try other games. I have the same CPU+RAM as you, and I was thinking of getting a 3080 Ti.
 
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78% for the fans isn't excessive as long as noise isn't an issue.

I'll be interested in hearing more results when you have time to try other games. I have the same CPU+RAM as you, and I was thinking of getting a 3080 Ti.
I don't know, I have an obsession about fans getting worn out. And I'm sure them starting and stopping is not good for them. So I put my fans on 0% until it reaches around 58C. Then it jumps to 40%. And then at 65% when it reaches 70C. And so far, the card very rarely got over 70C.

As far as other games, I'm not sure I have so many more left that are truly demanding. I tried Control, Cyberpunk and RDR2. And they run fine, with most/all on very high settings. Cyberpunk was the only one a bit unstable, sometimes. As I said, even the game benchmark went for a huge range, between 40something and 120 or so fps.

The only one I might try again is God of War? But it's kind of huge. Let me know if you really want me to try it with that. Or maybe you know of anything else that's highly demanding? I guess Horizon isn't worth it? Spiderman Remastered will release in august, so that will definitely be one to test.

I also pulled the trigger on the AMD 5950x and an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero, a Noctua NH-D15 and 2x Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO SL 32 DDR4 3600MHz. I hope this setup will last me a long time, since it cost a bunch.

 
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Not sure why you would obsess over your fan speed like that. There are more factors than just the speed determining if/when they wear out.

I can already run Control and Cyberpunk on max settings minus ray tracing with my current card. I haven't played RDR 2 yet, but I hear it's pretty demanding. I guess I have to decide whether I think ray tracing makes that big of a difference to the overall experience, and I'm not sure if it does yet.
 
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Not sure why you would obsess over your fan speed like that. There are more factors than just the speed determining if/when they wear out.

I can already run Control and Cyberpunk on max settings minus ray tracing with my current card. I haven't played RDR 2 yet, but I hear it's pretty demanding. I guess I have to decide whether I think ray tracing makes that big of a difference to the overall experience, and I'm not sure if it does yet.
Not just the speed, but more that the fans keep stopping and starting if I put the threshold too close to the idle temperature. Hopefully the new case will also help to lower that idle temperature.

As far as raytracing, I haven't seen anything that I can't miss. I keep hearing that Control has a good implementation, due to the plenty of marble and reflective surfaces. I'll have to try that. But it's definitely not worth getting just for raytracing. I'd rather have double the framerate than a little bit nicer rendered imagery. Maybe when we get the first game fully built from the ground up with raytracing in mind, and not just as an afterthought.

EDIT: and I found what I was looking for, to make the fans not start and stop as soon as the threshold is reached. It's called temperature hysteresis, which I didn't know of. It allows you to set a range within which to start the fans, and not start them up again until the range is reached.
 
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I would never want my fans completely off regardless of the temp. To me, that seems a lot riskier overall compared to worrying about your fans getting worn out.

*Edit* It's funny because, after posting that, I ran a hardware monitor program (CPUID) to see what speed my GPU fans were at when not gaming. For some reason I thought they still ran at a very low speed even when the GPU was idle, but apparently they don't. I guess I never bothered looking at them.
 
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I would never want my fans completely off regardless of the temp. To me, that seems a lot riskier overall compared to worrying about your fans getting worn out.
Really? So yours are running all the time? Even in idle? I think none of my last few cards, never had their fans work while in idle at least. Or do you not mean while the card is down-clocked and just sitting in desktop?

The only reason I started fiddling with this one is that I really felt it was going way too hard on the fan speed. It seems to constantly go from 50-80% fan speed, and wants to keep the card very cool. Much cooler than even the 1080ti, which regularly sat in idle at around 50C max, iirc. And after reading others' experience with their default fanspeed strategy, I started to fiddle.

My default strategy seems to be that they stay off until it reaches about 55C, but then it goes from anywhere in 50 to 80%, which seems excessive. I mean, under load it seems to run cooler than my 1080ti since by default the fans go up to, as I said, 78-80%.

EDIT: For some reason, I also installed GTA 4, and with everything cranked up to max, it has really random stutters. It's really annoying, since it doesn't even look that good. I wonder if it's my CPU. I remember that GTA 4 was very CPU heavy. I tried lowering the various settings, like traffic density, shadows, etc and it still didn't seem to make a difference.
 
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Really? So yours are running all the time? Even in idle? I think none of my last few cards, never had their fans work while in idle at least. Or do you not mean while the card is down-clocked and just sitting in desktop?
Nope. See my edit. You replied while I was adding that. :)

EDIT: For some reason, I also installed GTA 4, and with everything cranked up to max, it has really random stutters. It's really annoying, since it doesn't even look that good. I wonder if it's my CPU. I remember that GTA 4 was very CPU heavy. I tried lowering the various settings, like traffic density, shadows, etc and it still didn't seem to make a difference.
It's probably an issue within the game not your hardware. I didn't have any problems when I tried GTA 4 with the same CPU and my GTX 1080.
 
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It's not intuitive to think they'd completely switch off, but I suppose that if you don't have a lot of operations on the screen then it's just memory transfer and the interface to the monitor, at a lower frequency. Chips these days can switch whole parts on and off on demand, and switch frequency (and higher T means a chip can only achieve a lower frequency). If it's well and evenly placed on the die (not everything packed at the same spot), it should be able to dissipate the heat just with the sink.

Still, I'm surprised.
 
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"The only other thing I changed in it was the PSU from a 750W Corsair to a 1200W Corsair."
Good future-proofing decision... Specially if you ever consider getting an Nvidia 4000 series card (RTX4090?)...sound like they are gonna be real power-gobblers.
As for GPU fans - I reckon my (eventual) next card will be a 3-fan model. Never had one before. I'm presuming that they are much quieter and more efficient. They're certainly a lot more expensive than 2-fan models where I live.
 
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"The only other thing I changed in it was the PSU from a 750W Corsair to a 1200W Corsair."
Good future-proofing decision... Specially if you ever consider getting an Nvidia 4000 series card (RTX4090?)...sound like they are gonna be real power-gobblers.
As for GPU fans - I reckon my (eventual) next card will be a 3-fan model. Never had one before. I'm presuming that they are much quieter and more efficient. They're certainly a lot more expensive than 2-fan models where I live.
The main reason I switched the PSU was that in the last few months, every now and then, just randomly the whole PC would just die. I couldn't tie it to anything, didn't do any more investigating, but I assumed the PSU was starting to give in, since it also has around 7 years I think. So far, no computer shutdowns since installing the new one. Fingers crossed.

I just hope the 40xx or the next cards after that will be a more significant improvement. Unless I'm missing something, from what I've seen the 3080Ti offers roughly about 2x the performance of the 1080Ti. So, an 100% increase is not really that significant, especially in 5-7 years. So what I'm saying is, I hope they give me a good reason to not wait another 5+ years. :D
 
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The main reason I switched the PSU was that in the last few months, every now and then, just randomly the whole PC would just die. I couldn't tie it to anything, didn't do any more investigating, but I assumed the PSU was starting to give in, since it also has around 7 years I think. So far, no computer shutdowns since installing the new one. Fingers crossed.

I just hope the 40xx or the next cards after that will be a more significant improvement. Unless I'm missing something, from what I've seen the 3080Ti offers roughly about 2x the performance of the 1080Ti. So, an 100% increase is not really that significant, especially in 5-7 years. So what I'm saying is, I hope they give me a good reason to not wait another 5+ years. :D
Just makes me wonder though -given the power draw (apparently) of the new 40xx series -whether they have hit a brick wall where performance vs efficiency is concerned.

Speaking of faulty power supplies - I thought that I had a similar problem to you, some time ago. System dying for no apparent reason etc. However, my problem turned out to be my Automatic Voltage Regulator. I'd used it for years and years. It was rated at 500W. I figured out eventually that it wasn't coping with my ever-increasing power draw due to GPU upgrades etc.. So now I have a 1000W AVR....Problem solved....(y)
 
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I also pulled the trigger on the AMD 5950x and an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Dark Hero, a Noctua NH-D15 and 2x Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO SL 32 DDR4 3600MHz. I hope this setup will last me a long time, since it cost a bunch.

You know, I've got exactly the same MB, CPU, and RAM (possibly also the same fan). But the GPU is a 2080 Ti. Quite happy with this, and I think it will last me a looong time. (At my age, possibly the rest of my life. Ouch!)

Regarding Win11. I upgraded and I regret it (a little bit). The games I've tried, and my major applications work just fine. But some minor ones don't. Among those are Windowblinds. Not a big deal, but considereing that I actually doesn't see any benefits of Win 11 over Win 10 (there may be, but I haven't seen it)....

pibbuR 67

PS. Fortunately Stardock's Start menu, Fences workds kjust fine, and Groupy to some degree DS.
 
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You know, I've got exactly the same MB, CPU, and RAM (possibly also the same fan). But the GPU is a 2080 Ti. Quite happy with this, and I think it will last me a looong time. (At my age, possibly the rest of my life. Ouch!)
A bit depressive, but I hope that's a long time from now. :D

Since I splurged this much I thought why not throw in fast ssd. So I did, a WD Black SN850 Gen4 NVME SSD. Not I suspect my ram will be the bottleneck, and not the ssd. :D
 
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You know, I've got exactly the same MB, CPU, and RAM (possibly also the same fan). But the GPU is a 2080 Ti. Quite happy with this, and I think it will last me a looong time. (At my age, possibly the rest of my life. Ouch!)

Regarding Win11. I upgraded and I regret it (a little bit). The games I've tried, and my major applications work just fine. But some minor ones don't. Among those are Windowblinds. Not a big deal, but considereing that I actually doesn't see any benefits of Win 11 over Win 10 (there may be, but I haven't seen it)....

pibbuR 67

PS. Fortunately Stardock's Start menu, Fences workds kjust fine, and Groupy to some degree DS.
I have windows 11 and window blinds works just fine for me. So it is possible.

I’ve had a 12900k , gigabyte aorus master and 32GB of ddr 5 sitting in my computer room since alder lake launch but haven’t had time to put it together. I was going to get a new power supply but will wait for Atx 3.0 psu’s and see what kind of power connector the nvidia 40 series cards have.

By the time I get it together ryzen 7000 and raptor lake will probably be out. Oh well.
 
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