- Aug 25, 2001
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Picked up an "extra" Ryzen R5 1600 CPU, for $120 + tax from Newegg last week. Also, the DeskMini A300(W) is out, that's the AM4 APU DeskMini barebones mini-PC with wifi. And I just found out that Intel has extended support for Optane Memory (caching) to 8th-Gen Celeron / Pentium chips, which intrigues me. Always wanted to build an Optane rig, and test it out, before handing it off to a friend.
I've committed (thus far) to buying an RX 570 4GB off of FS/FT here from a well-respected member, and I was originally planning on putting that into my friend's Athlon II X4 rig, instead of his GT610/620 (forget which he has, it's a low-end non-gaming-class Fermi derivative card). Want to allow him to use VSR on that card, and virtually "increase" the res. on his 1080P monitor. (Working well for me thus far, 5120 x 2880, on a 4K UHD screen.)
But if I build him an Optane-based rig, with a new HDD (maybe could re-use his 500GB WD Black drive, unsure how much wear+tear it has on it), then add the RX 570, then I'm going to want to throw in a gaming-class CPU, like an i5- 9400F, rather than a Pentium/Celeron, as nifty as the idea might be. (At the very least, an i3-8100.)
But I keep coming back to the overall VALUE that you get from a Ryzen CPU-based / AMD-GPU-based rig, and why I chose those components for my own rig. And Optane seems like a sort of stop-gap. The way that the OEMs are selling it, as a replacement for RAM (4GB RAM + 16GB Optane Memory cache somehow equals 20GB of "Memory" in their PCs? No thanks!) seems pretty-much like Snake Oil. Sure, it may be effective in SOME cases, just as using a SATA6G SSD as a paging device, can allow you to keep using your PC or laptop, even if you memory commit charge (overall virtual-memory allocation) exceeds physical RAM total by maybe 1-2-3-4GB, beyond that you start to get serious "pausing".
So, it's kind of like, Ryzen CPU + NVMe SSD (Patriot Scorch 256GB is a great entry-level option) + optional HDD, or Intel 6-core or better CPU + Optane Memory (would want 32GB rather than 16GB) + larger HDD.
Edit: THIS IS BASICALLY AN EXPLORATORY HYPOTHETICAL BUILD FOR NOW. PROBABLY NOT GOING TO ACTUALLY BUILD THIS.
I've committed (thus far) to buying an RX 570 4GB off of FS/FT here from a well-respected member, and I was originally planning on putting that into my friend's Athlon II X4 rig, instead of his GT610/620 (forget which he has, it's a low-end non-gaming-class Fermi derivative card). Want to allow him to use VSR on that card, and virtually "increase" the res. on his 1080P monitor. (Working well for me thus far, 5120 x 2880, on a 4K UHD screen.)
But if I build him an Optane-based rig, with a new HDD (maybe could re-use his 500GB WD Black drive, unsure how much wear+tear it has on it), then add the RX 570, then I'm going to want to throw in a gaming-class CPU, like an i5- 9400F, rather than a Pentium/Celeron, as nifty as the idea might be. (At the very least, an i3-8100.)
But I keep coming back to the overall VALUE that you get from a Ryzen CPU-based / AMD-GPU-based rig, and why I chose those components for my own rig. And Optane seems like a sort of stop-gap. The way that the OEMs are selling it, as a replacement for RAM (4GB RAM + 16GB Optane Memory cache somehow equals 20GB of "Memory" in their PCs? No thanks!) seems pretty-much like Snake Oil. Sure, it may be effective in SOME cases, just as using a SATA6G SSD as a paging device, can allow you to keep using your PC or laptop, even if you memory commit charge (overall virtual-memory allocation) exceeds physical RAM total by maybe 1-2-3-4GB, beyond that you start to get serious "pausing".
So, it's kind of like, Ryzen CPU + NVMe SSD (Patriot Scorch 256GB is a great entry-level option) + optional HDD, or Intel 6-core or better CPU + Optane Memory (would want 32GB rather than 16GB) + larger HDD.
Edit: THIS IS BASICALLY AN EXPLORATORY HYPOTHETICAL BUILD FOR NOW. PROBABLY NOT GOING TO ACTUALLY BUILD THIS.
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