So I finally built a new PC. My previous one was a 6th gen core i7 from 2016. It was having some issues that MAY have been the O/S... or possibly some hardware issues in the motherboard. Since it was old anyway, I chose to build a new PC. I did end up migrating my gfx card into the new build, since prices are still a bit crazy. My plan is in ~6 months to build another new computer (a higher end one) with a new graphics card. The one I just built will end up being moved into the living room solely for VR. A dedicated VR machine/room I think would be nice.

Anyway, these are my stats. They're not meant to be super high-end, but they're still not bad.

11th gen core i5 11600k with Noctua NH-u15s cooler (this was way bigger than I expected, but it fits... barely)
64GB of DDR4-3200 ram (2x32GB... I'll probably by 2x more 32GB modules eventually to bump it to 128GB of RAM)
MSI Z590m motherboard
Geforce gtx 1080 graphics card (moved forward from my last build)
2TB m.2 SSD and a 2TB regular SSD

I don't imagine most people care about the case or power supply, though I did buy a smaller mATX case with sound dampening since it'll eventually live in our living room. No side fan, no top fan, not front fan, but it's having no issues dealing with heat, so it appears to be fine. It's also quite a bit skinnier and WAY less deep than the last case I had, so lots of win there so far. I haven't done any 4k video transcoding yet, but I'm curious to see how much faster it is now.

*edit* I failed to mention that I sprung for a Windows 11 Pro license. I'm not sold on all of Win11s features, but it's not so bad so far.

Nice! How much did you pay for that, in total? I'm gonna guess the price was very reasonable, with those parts. Probably the Windows license was the most expensive thing. Totally get it re: the GPU, the prices are absolutely insane right now. I was looking at buying a new one for Elden Ring, but a) I wasn't ready to blow 400+ euros for a decent current gen card and b) turns out that my old GPU was perfectly capable of running that game smoothly. Who would have thought? It's a GTX1660 so slightly worse than yours...but seems like these cards are perfectly capable of running all but the newest games in decent resolutions.

In total I spent around $1500.The Windows license was like $160... the SSD and memory were about $400 each, so that's really where most of the money went. Eventually I want to bump up to 128GB of memory just because I can. Price per GB isn't terrible, but that's a lot of giggly bites.

AMD just announced their new processors. Assuming they do as well as they are advertised and can actually be purchased at reasonable prices, I may build an AMD-based system at the end of the year or toward the beginning of next year.

Looks like your next step should be replacing your GPU. Are the prices still as crazy or have they gone down to more normal levels again?

I need a new PC and/or a new phone and even though I don't urgently need either maybe I should it now before the world economy collapses even more and shit becomes even more expensive.

GPU prices are actually coming down. For a really long time you couldn't even buy them at all, even at massively inflated prices. I plan to get a new GPU when I build my next PC... this one will get moved to the living room as a dedicated VR box.

The 3080ti has an MSRP of $1,119. You can actually get some models on newegg for less than that now. https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-rtx-3080-ti-rtx-3080-ti-ventus-3x-12g-oc/p/N82E16814137651?quicklink=true

I still have a 1080p monitor so anything above xx60 doesn't make much sense.

Yea, that's fair. I've stepped up to a 1440p monitor for a while now, plus I just like running stuff that's newer. Oh, and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition requires a gtx2070 or newer to run.

I ran it on vega 64. Which is slightly behind 2060.

This is the recommended: GEFORCE GTX 1070 | GEFORCE RTX 2060 | AMD RX VEGA 56

Not sure where you got the 2070 from.

Ok I checked the info, 20xx is for ray-tracing feature. It will still run on other stuff but no ray-tracing.

Oh, yea, it was on the recommended requirements for ray tracing. I could've run it on my 1080, but I thought I'd save it for when I build a new box. That way I have something to look forward to where I can really crank the graphics to the max.

Interesting, thought they'd still be sky high. The company I work for is in telecommunications which is mostly cloud-based now and means installing switches everywhere and we have been unable to get them (mostly cisco) for the past 2.5 years and are still struggling thanks to the chip shortage. We're currently on a "get new business in on promises" push since we can't finish many projects and get the final amounts in so we're just promising everyone under the sun we'll do stuff in the next few years! Perhaps it's partly due to you being in the US; we learnt on one of our monthly calls that 95% of all the laser-grade uranium used in the US for cutting out the chips actually comes from Ukraine, so thanks Putin for fucking that up on top of the existing issues!

I blame Putin for my small penis. I mean, expensive GPUs!

On a more serious note, I've been suffering some weird crashes lately and I was seriously considering investing in a new PC before everything gets insanely expensive again downstream from the Ukraine stuff. But I noticed that it only seemed to occur while my PC was not under GPU load, or right after I put it under some load. So I changed my GPU setting from economy mode to maximal performance and...no problems for a whole week! When I suffered a crash almost every day before. Very weird. Still, maybe I shouldn't wait until it starts also failing at the other stuff and jump the gun.

So it was failing on normal levels, but when you cranked up the power it stopped? That can't be a good sign.

Yeah it got even weirder....it stopped for a while when I cranked up the power, then it came back on a more or less daily basis. Then I was away from home for 2 weeks, came back and haven't had a single crash this week. I didn't change anything.

The only thing I could think of is ambient temperature but even that isn't different than 2-3 weeks ago. I give up. I hope it holds out until my next bonus and then i'll upgrade.

Actually this sounds like a bake-a-cake use case. Meaning you should strip the gpu and oven bake it. It sounds like some soldering connections have cracked from thermal heating and cooling.

Mmm I don't have an oven here but it's worth a try if it starts occuring again on the regular. Thanks for the tip.