Question New midrange build

[strep3241]

Sorry if this has been asked many times over and over. My dad is looking to get a new desktop pc, looking to spend around $500, can stretch the budget a bit but not by much and of course cheaper is a good thing too. Not sure if it would be better to buy a prebuilt or build him one(I will be doing that). He does typical office stuff, word, excel, surfing the net with multiple tabs open. Does not do any gaming of any sort. Would not need a monitor, keyboard or mouse. He has a full tower now but a midtower would be just fine, probably better because of space. I am guessing this time of year would be a good time to buy it with black friday and all that coming up. Typically buy stuff from newegg but not opposed to buying other places like amazon or microcenter. Don't have a microcenter store near us but wish we did. Currently he is running i5-760, asus p7p55de motherboard, 8gb's of ddr3 ram, 2 WD Black 500gb hdds. I know one thing I would like to have is an ssd drive. As far as intel or amd preference, I have always been a fan of intel, but I realize at this price, amd might be the better choice.

If he was to get a prebuilt, are there certain brands or specific models to stay away from?

 

[Steltek]

I agree, that there is some concern for data-loss for HBM-based NVMe SSDs. And somewhat related, Mushkin SSDs in general. (One of the few brands that I've had go belly-up on me personally.)

Can you not afford an AData 8100 model NVMe SSD?

AData via Newegg has a 512GB XPG SX8100 on sale for $58.00+ tax for the next 7 hours.

 

[UsandThem]

I would personally buy the Kingston A2000 drive if you're staying in that price range.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/kingston-a2000-m2-nvme-ssd
https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/9203/kingston-a2000-1tb-nvme-pcie-gen3-2-ssd-review/index.html

$59.99 at Amazon for the 500GB version right now.

 

[strep3241]

I bought the mushkin drive before I seen the last few comments. Surely it will be fine.. I still have the option of cancelling it but I guess will see what happens.

All that stuff Steltek said is kind of over my head lol

 

[Steltek]

I bought the mushkin drive before I seen the last few comments. Surely it will be fine.. I still have the option of cancelling it but I guess will see what happens.

All that stuff Steltek said is kind of over my head lol

All it simply means is that the Mushkin SSD, lacking built-in cache memory, will instead use a small block of system memory to increase its performance. As a result, you have an increased chance (greater than that of an SSD with onboard cache memory) of data loss if you have memory corruption or a sudden loss in power at the wrong time. You can compensate partially by using a UPS on the computer.

For what you say your dad does, I have no doubt it will work fine for day to day general use.

Your proposed build is pretty solid, and since it is Ryzen-based you can always upgrade to a much higher-end CPU to extend its useful lifetime.

 

[strep3241]

I want to ty all for your help with this, it is much appreciated.

I am going to run a performance test on both machines just to compare them, probably run passmark performance test. Not sure if there is a standard program to run for things like this.

This is something I don't understand. If the user does not change what he does with the machine and it is plenty fast enough when the machine is new, what causes it to slow down years down the road? I know windows updates can cause slow downs but reinstalling windows takes that out of the equation. I mean if cpu usage is not hitting 100% all the time, ram usage is below 30%, hard drive health shows good through programs. Is it just the age of the hardware or how software is coded? But I would think as time goes on, things supposed to get more efficient, right?

 

[VirtualLarry]

But I would think as time goes on, things supposed to get more efficient, right?

Nope, the opposite. Look up "code bloat".

 

[strep3241]

I got this build up and running. So far so good for the most part. Got windows 10 installed, installed few small programs and drivers, temps are fine although hwmonitor shows tmpin6 and 8 really high. But from what I have searched, there may not be a sensor for those and it just puts a random value there and can be ignored. How do I find out if there is a sensor for those for sure? Highest cpu temp so far is 49, used the thermal pad that came on it. If temps become an issue, I will put actual paste on it.

One thing I have come across is in the bios, I set the boot time to ultra fast mode, it is either that or disabled. Once I did that, it just boots back to the bios screen, it does not go to windows. Once I disable that, it goes into windows fine. Not a big deal at all if fast boot can't be used but curious as to why it is doing that.

Also had an issue where the dvi to vga adapter for the monitor would not go into the motherboard. It looks like it should fit and nothing blocking it as I can see. But it does not want to go it. I didn't try forcing really hard but did put some pressure on it.

Other than that, everything else is good so far. Have not hooked up 2nd drive yet.

EDIT: May have found out the issue with the ultra fast boot. After a little searching, it seems it can't work if the bios is in legacy mode instead of uefi. Found this by running msinfo32. Not sure if it should be in uefi mode or is legacy mode. It seems there is a way to change that without reinstalling windows although have not searched it much yet.

I ran a pass mark performance test to see how things are running. Not sure if this is a good score but this is with only windows drive hooked up and only basic programs and drivers installed. Ran this on the old machine and it got a score of 824 overall.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Also had an issue where the dvi to vga adapter for the monitor would not go into the motherboard. It looks like it should fit and nothing blocking it as I can see. But it does not want to go it. I didn't try forcing really hard but did put some pressure on it.

Note that those DVI-I (analog) to VGA mechanical adapters, will NOT fit into a DVI-D (digital) output. The pinouts are different, look at them closely. All DVI is not the same, there are like 18-20 variants.

It is unlikely that a DVI port on a modern mobo is anything but DVI-D, and WILL NOT accept a mechanical adapter to VGA. Sorry.

Edit: Btw, congrats on the build. Is this the 2400G $500 build? That's probably about right for the CPU score then. (Edit: Maybe a tad low? I think 10,000? My Ryzen R5 3600 is like 19,900 or something.)

Edit: Did you remember to go into BIOS, and set XMP (DOCP on Asus boards) for the RAM?

 

[strep3241]

Note that those DVI-I (analog) to VGA mechanical adapters, will NOT fit into a DVI-D (digital) output. The pinouts are different, look at them closely. All DVI is not the same, there are like 18-20 variants.

It is unlikely that a DVI port on a modern mobo is anything but DVI-D, and WILL NOT accept a mechanical adapter to VGA. Sorry.

Edit: Btw, congrats on the build. Is this the 2400G $500 build? That's probably about right for the CPU score then. (Edit: Maybe a tad low? I think 10,000? My Ryzen R5 3600 is like 19,900 or something.)

Edit: Did you remember to go into BIOS, and set XMP (DOCP on Asus boards) for the RAM?

Ty, yes this is the 2400g build. Not a big deal with the dvi adapter. Didn't need it in fist place since mobo has 3 different ports, vga, dvi and hdmi.

I haven't set it to XMP in bios yet but will. This is an Asrock mobo.

Really curious about the legacy issue. I read it can be changed without reinstalling windows, will try it, now is the time to do it if I need to reinstall windows. But even if I reinstall windows, don't see how that is going to help. When I installed windows for first time, I didn't see anything about legacy or uefi. And not sure what it has to do with windows, isn't this a bios thing?

 

[VirtualLarry]

When I installed windows for first time, I didn't see anything about legacy or uefi.

It has to do with the "mode" that your install media was booted as.

If you are using a USB stick created with the MS MCT, then when you boot your BIOS, hit your hotkey for "boot menu", and it should show your USB stick twice, once with the "normal" name, and once with "UEFI:" pre-pended to the name of the device. If you select the "UEFI:" one, it will boot UEFI, and install your system UEFI. If you don't use the boot menu, many older BIOSes, that are in fact UEFI boot-capable, will still boot the stick "Legacy", and you will install Windows 10 with a "Legacy" boot scheme.

 

[strep3241]

It has to do with the "mode" that your install media was booted as.

If you are using a USB stick created with the MS MCT, then when you boot your BIOS, hit your hotkey for "boot menu", and it should show your USB stick twice, once with the "normal" name, and once with "UEFI:" pre-pended to the name of the device. If you select the "UEFI:" one, it will boot UEFI, and install your system UEFI. If you don't use the boot menu, many older BIOSes, that are in fact UEFI boot-capable, will still boot the stick "Legacy", and you will install Windows 10 with a "Legacy" boot scheme.

Yes I am using a usb stick created with the MS MCT. Come to think of it, it did show it twice but really didn't notice what they said. I was wondering why it was shown twice. I think I got it converted to uefi using command prompt under advanced startup options with the command mbr2gpt /convert. Shows uefi under msinfo32 and gpuid under properties of the drive in disk management. May reinstall windows just to be safe.

EDIT: Offtopic but what is going on with this site? Using the brand new machine to post this and having trouble staying logged in. If I go to main forum listing, it shows I am logged in but as soon as I start to go where I want to, it shows I am logged out. Sometimes going back to previous page shows logged in again and so on and so on. There is a thread about this in for the forum issue section. Being this is happening on a brand new machine with only the required stuff installed, doubt it is on my end unless it has to do with my ISP. Getting to be really frustrating. Tried different browsers and same thing. I know others are having same issue but don't see a ton of posts about it. Maybe just certain accounts are affected for some reason.

And it is not just this site doing this either. Not going to mention any names as not sure if allowed. But I think that forum also runs on vBulletin, maybe an issue with that.

 

[strep3241]

I reinstalled windows again selecting the uefi boot usb and windows is still showing as legacy, not sure what the deal with that is.

EDIT: Not sure what happened but now when I try to run performance test, it crashes at the 3d part as soon as it starts. No type of error comes up or anything, screen just goes black for a few seconds then restarts. I changed the xmp to profile 1 in bios, thought maybe that was the issue but changed it back to auto and still happens.