Advice on a new PC motherboard 'bundle' Featured

The pricing here, is highly specious, and some of these have had multiple price drops. You can use camelcamelcamel to get a graph of pricing, in some cases. My daily driver is a 5700G, the more powerful machine sits off to the side on a table by itself. 32 watts idle (has a cheap NVidia card, or the number would be even lower than that).

The single thread (left column), determines the "Windows feel". Sometimes Windows Update finishes a bit sooner on the faster single thread machine. the right column (multithread) helps determine how fast 7ZIP runs, or Cinebench, or Blender or the like. Just recently, for the first time, I watched as Windows Defender opened a .7z by itself, used libarchive, libarchive had a multi-thread decompressor for 7z and all the cores lit up. The first time I've ever seen Windows use all the cores without prompting.

Intel Core i5-14400 3,766 25,253 $178.96 6*2 + 4 threads Faster than your 6700K Intel Core i7-14700K 4,478 52,711 $319.00 8*2 + 12 threads Selected for single thread, high clock Intel Core Ultra 7 265K 4,870 58,789 $332.99 8 + 12 threads No-HT, 13 TOPS NPU

AMD 5700G (Zen3) 3,284 24,477 $148.00 8*2 threads AMD 7700X (Zen4) 4,192 35,862 8*2 threads $400 AMD 8700G (Zen4) 3,916 31,619 $307.88 8*2 threads Better iGPU, 16TOP via IFPU, unstable/biosfix AMD 9700X (Zen5) 4,658 37,223 $326.99 8*2 threads , good single thread, for Windows $360 AMD 9800X3D 4,434 40,068 8*2 threads , extra L3 cache (for games) $479

The purpose of having a high single thread, is insurance against moves in the future to slow the processor down. It's not your imagination, if you think things are more sluggish than they used to be. By measurement, NTFS file deletion is slower than it used to be (maybe 600 items per second now).

An item with extra L3 cache, the cache is faster than system memory, but the ratio is not all that great. The L1 and L2 are unimaginably fast, and have to be, to keep an instruction pipeline filled at 5GHz. On 7ZIP, the L3 helps with the "dictionary", and the dictionary would be biggest (cache busting) on random data, such as an encrypted file. That's why you don't compress an encrypted file, you compress first, then you encrypt.

Can you buy a refurb ? Of course.

But weight them and measure them first. If they don't have some measure of future proofing, they might not be a good value.

For the 14 series Intel, you should find the BIOS file that contains the "overvoltage/damage CPU" fix, before running the processor for any period of time. While the 14 series has an issue, a BIOS fix is available for it. Only "fresh" 14 series CPU are safe -- don't buy used ones, or a motherboard where the BIOS status is dodgy. A person could sell you a 14 series, because it's cooked.

It makes it easier to select a bundle, once you have some idea what direction you're taking. But at least compare them, compare them to your 6700K, before going too much further. These things are enough of a nuisance as home projects, without adding selection uncertainty to the mix. My last upgrade was a "wild ride". Not nearly as easy as projects in the past.

Paul

You have to be 15 years out of date First of all, even Nvidias own drivers (the problem was Nvidias closed source) were and still are pretty good. Secondly on board chipsets now comfortably outperform a traditional entry lvele Nvidia/Radeon card.

This machione was going to get a graphics update but the Intel chipset simply was good enough, so I never bothered

My old hardware just died. It didn't run out of Linux support.

You can still ruin older 32 bit Linux if you must.

It is still just about available.

I haven't had that happen since around 2005 IIRC that was Ubuntu on an old laptop. It just didn't work. But IIRC Mint did.

No one needs to rescue anything really. You cant run latest Linux on an IBM PC either.

If you want a machine like that, run DOS.

Linux is perfectly capable of running on up to about 15 year old hardware if the hardware itself is still OK.

You are just pushing the edges. Its not worth it. If you have standard hardware live boot a simple distro like Mint, see if it all works, if it does, install it. If it doesn't not much time wasted.

If anyone is interested, I have 803 stuff here:

Even the regular Windows is virtualized.

We used to have Nested Virtualization at work, on one of the early virtualization products. So we did do demos of "how slow" the inner-most OS is, when you do that. That's software that had no hardware virtualization support at all, and it was molasses-slow. On this platform, it should work a lot better, if I could get it to run.

Paul

It doesn't seem widely known that there are multiple generations of Win11, with some earlier Win11 machines not able to upgrade to the later one(s) and the early ones are now out of support. Later versions will not work with the early Trusted Platform hardware, even when it's real.

"Windows 11 has an annual feature update cadence. Feature updates are released in the second half of the calendar year and come with 24 months of support for Home, Pro, Pro for Workstations, and Pro Education editions;"

"Windows 11 version 22H2 reached the end of life for Home and Pro editions on October 8, 2024. This means that Microsoft stopped providing security updates and non-security updates for these editions"

So there are two versions of Win11 gone end-of-life before Win10, and many refurbished computers will soon lose the ability to run a supported Win11, even when sold with it installed. This would seem to be an escalation of Microsoft's normal planned obsolescence policy.

Look. It really is not that complicated. Simpley look at what the machine is going to be used for, and use that to determine the CPU spec and RAM size.

And RAM can usually be increased later.

All machines are going to have 256GB+ of SSD of one sort or another.

All machines except seriously old cheap s*it are going to run Linux or Win 11 just fine

Search for a machine that fits that budget, bearing in mind that a new Mobo and CPU is likely to cost more than a whole refurbed 4 years old ex corporate PC with pre installed windows

No one wants to mess with OS and hardware upgrades unless they have to.

Pick the shortest route to the desired destination unless you enjoy the journey.

What a dogs dinner.

Sadly support for this linux version is ending in a week or so, and I am really contemplating just letting it not get updated any more.

And rather buy a new machine, install the latest LTS version and slowly migrate. Which is a pain.

Which is a pity, because this is a good machine. Maybe I could dual boot it...

Mine's a Xeon E3-1245v3, which is essentially a slower clocked version of that, it's a decade old, but not feeling slow yet ... thankfully it doesn't run Windows, so lack of TPM and generation of CPU isn't an issue.

Mine is Intel® Core™ i5-6600T CPU @ 2.70GHz × 4

It's perfectly adequate for everything I am doing

That's not right (low-rent vloggers inventing issues to get likes).

Microsoft don't support OEMs supplying latest Win11 on older hardware, but any hardware that came with Win11 installed back when, can upgrade to the latest Win11 now.

I use it to reduce file sizes of ripped DVDs (etc) for storage on a media server. My current PC (a new model Mac Mini) will compress a DVD to a fifth of its original size in minutes - at about 600 frames a second. I'd imagine a NUC would take considerably longer. There's also the issue of moving large files around.

Only a couple of minutes. Not even long enough for the fan to become audible. In fact I've never heard the fan - it just sits there stone cold. If I was compressing hundreds of video files, then yes, probably, but I don't think this machine consumes much more than about 30W even if stretched. <10W most of the time.> So it feels like requirements for powerful hardware are "you ain't going

Yes, maybe for most people. I use some fairly bloated software (MS Office, QGIS for example - as well as whatever the Apple OS and apps add), and edit and store thousands of photos, sometimes uncompressed. I'm sure I could manage on a low spec PC. I just choose/am lucky enough to spend a couple of hundred quid extra on decent hardware.

Where it's not wanted, I don't. The media server is a 14 year old Mac Mini - so maybe £50 on ebay. No need for anything more powerful. It struggles with very high definition video files (10GB+ heavily compressed) but they're of no interest to me. 4k H265 files play fine. That said, I'm not sure what takes the load - the TV or the Mini. Videos are played through Plex, served from the Mini, played on the TV's app.

Well, if you want what you do to be done more quickly, or quietly, or look better and made from better and longer lasting components, with decent I/O, you might want to pay more for a higher specced machine.

There's also the issue of future proofing. Things like OS upgrades (how long will W11 last?). My 5 year old Mac wouldn't run some of the latest features - AI in particular. That might be something of interest in the future, and a lower spec machine might not cope.

Look, it's simple.

Identify an item I can give a person, for a *flawless* experience.

That's what it takes to rescue 400,000,000 machines.

What you propose is fine for people with years of experience.

I bought a refurb Win11 HP a couple of months ago, specifying one with VGA and optical drive, as the advert stated. It arrived with neither, but I fired it up out of curiosity and got the 'Windows has reached end of servicing, please upgrade' message. I tried the upgrade, and got an 'insufficient resources' message. I didn't investigate further as the machine was going back anyway, but there was one computer which wouldn't upgrade Win11 to a supported version, so I know it can happen.

Only then did I investigate, and there's plenty of material on the Net, it had just never occurred to me that the latest/current MS OS could already be EOL, as I knew Win10 would be soon. My first quotation was from:

The one I used was in the Optics Dept of the Physics Building at Imperial. Supposedly it was to be used by the Optics Dept to do ray tracing for (I imagine) lens design. But I never saw it used by anyone other than myself and another student, at the time members of the Astronomical Society.

At that time, planetary ephemera (if that's the word) were mainly computed by a couple of dotty old Revds - by hand. No real astronomer seemed interested in where Saturn might be in the sky, next Tuesday fortnight. We had the conceit that we could automate that, but never got anywhere close. We didn't know enough, and were anyway to be defeated by the poor language availability.

Still - I did learn an important lesson - that floating point numbers have limited precision and in some cases the number you want to enter can't be exactly represented.

I lurk on the SQLite User Forum, and even today about every three months someone writes in that they entered this giant number into a database cell, but didn't get exactly that back when they asked for it later. "Is this a bug?". Someone then politely points them to (e.g.) the Wikipedia article on floating point.

Thanks Bob - just having a quick look now.

-- “It is not the truth of Marxism that explains the willingness of intellectuals to believe it, but the power that it confers on intellectuals, in their attempts to control the world. And since ... it is futile to reason someone out of a thing that he was not reasoned into, we can conclude that Marxism owes its remarkable power to survive every criticism to the fact that it is not a truth-directed but a power-directed system of thought.”

Sir Roger Scruton

Perhaps not, but IME you will immediately "feel" the difference between a new mid range business spec machine and a new "low end" or ageing mid range desktop system.

For example, I have recently rolling out some software updates to a fleet of machines. The process is not that complicated - quit a couple of running apps, uninstall a couple, download and install a couple, start one of the new ones, and then do a bit of config. Most of it automated in a batch file. Doing it on a >= 10th gen machine gets it done in less than 5 mins. On a 6th gen i5 it is more like 10, and for a

How much that will affect your workflow will depend much on what you do and how you do it. If you load a couple of programs and then live in them all day - the impact of a slower machine is less noticeable. If you need to run multiple things, and frequently switch between jobs, it is a much bigger impact.

Yup WSL2 is handy, but VMs are still very useful and docker is not always a suitable replacement. Quite often for things like developing and testing on a variety of systems in different configurations, or for security when doing malware analysis or testing unknown code.

One of the dangers of assuming that your own particular uses for a machine will be the same for everyone else.

You can end up rendering video in a multitude of use cases, not just manipulating DVDs. Just doing jobs like trimming or joining video files. Using Handbrake to reduce video file sizes etc. Rending an animation from CAD etc.

I could sand something with a cheap £50 RoS from one of the sheds, but I choose to use a professional Mirka RoS at many times the price.

The better tool is not "necessary" in the sense that I could do the job more cheaply with a budget tool. However because it is so much more comfortable to use, does the job better and faster, and gives better results, I no longer care that it cost 8 times as much because it is a much nicer user experience.

You could make the same argument for the posh golf clubs or bike. Will the occasional user really get the best out of the higher end option? Probably not. Will if feel better / be more enjoyable / get better results? Probably.

Erm, I think the OPs message title kind of invited " Advice on a new PC motherboard 'bundle'".

If I am giving general advice without much detail on the specifics, then specifying something that will cope with most applications comfortably, and allow for a bit of future proofing, rather than just suggesting the cheapest option for a narrow use case is normally the "safest" recommendation IMHO

The pattern I'm seeing, is maybe desktops won't be getting a real NPU. AI computation can be done with a dedicated NPU (multiply-accumulate array), but it can also be done with the resources of a video card. Some video cards have Tensor cores.

Some laptops have the goods. (A few models have 50 TOPS dedicated NPU.)

Maybe somebody will make a mule rental shop, and you can go in there and play on an expensive system for an hour or two, and see if the gold rush is real or not.

The video cards can't do too much of this stuff, until the name of the software for it is more public. AMD has ROCM, which has just recently been split into two parts. I don't recollect the NVidia offering to have a name. While some review articles have AI benchmarks, that too isn't all that known by individual users.

There is ONNX-DirectML for some purpose, but when someone in the newsgroups tried to use that, the software was incapable of moving forward because it tripped over some drivers (that should have been tested).

There's a healthy dose of incompetence out there.

If it's one thing I've learned about hardware over the years, you never buy a hardware where "the cheque is in the mail". If the software isn't ready, you just don't buy the goods. You want the software ready. You want the software tested by more than one test-donkey to prove the software is real, and not a bug-zoo.

Paul