Windows 10 official release/rollout is here

I think eventually, you will see FidelityFX end up like Freesync (adopted industry wide with Nvidia taking credit for it adaptive sync) or with each game engine having it's own form of internal scalable image reconstruction methods (Unreal Engine 5 already has this). Much like Nvidia forced G-Sync through essentially useless hardware, they are doing the same with useless hardware on the RTX cards. Owning a 2080Ti, I can tell you that Control with DLSS 2.0 and Cyberpunk with DLSS both look a bit blurry. Yes, the performance boost is nice but the drop in graphics quality is noticeable, regardless of what the media will tell you. It's similar to running a 4K display at half resolution (2560 x 1440). It still looks decent and from far away it looks a bit soft but still nice. Get up close enough to it and you start to see just how janky it actually is.

So is it gonna help me at all if I upgrade my B450 mobo to a B550 or X570? For PCIE 4.0? I know with the card it won't but what if I get a 4.0 NVME drive? Any appreciable difference? If so what would you suggest or even what do you suggest in general if I was to get a 500 series? The ASUS TUF Wifi X570 is $150 and looks good but would pay more for a better device. Mainly asking because I kinda don't want to take my Ryzen 1600 or 3600 computers apart and looking to go from scratch. 1600 stays in place as the family computer, 3600 goes to my daughter with a the 290 GPU until I can find her something like a 3060 or a 2070 Super or even a 2060. Still have not put the damn 6800xt computer together for a few life reasons. Work has been bad and we've been dealing with a few other things with my wife and daughter. Nothing serious just... time consuming. Adulting is hard... Looking to do it this week unless I should wait for a new mobo.

I actually just made the switch to Ryzen for my daily. There is hardly any difference in jumping to PCIE 4.0 storage. If you look at the numbers it looks incredible, in reality, not so much. A fast PCIE 4.0 drive can do over 6500 MB\s read and 5000 MB\s writes which is twice as fast as a fast PCIE 3.0 drive. However, think about the difference between a fast PCIE 3.0 drive (3300 MB\s read and 2500 MB\s write) vs a SATA SSD (550 MB\s on both). Are there differences, yes, but substantial real world differences, not really, at least not what the numbers would have you believe. Looking at the difference between 3300 and 550 looks MASSIVE, in the real world, you might save a few seconds loading up something but in all honesty, you probably won't notice.

Here is a video showing the loading times between a SATA SSD, PCIE 3.0 and 4.0 -
A video Linus posted with a blind test comparing SATA SSD, PCIE 3.0 and 4.0 -

All that being said, I think a few years from now, the SSD is going to become a more leveraged part of the system. Look at how the PS5 and Xbox SSX are using their SSD for crazy fast caching and a really fast swap drive, not to mention those load times.

As I mentioned earlier, I just made the switch to a Ryzen setup, an Asus B550 Rog Strix B550F Gaming, a 5950X (16 core / 32 thread @ 4.75 Ghz all core) and I am currently using the memory from my old X99 system (4 x 8GB DDR4 3466 C14) while I wait on my new RAM and I also bought a Sabrent Rocket 4 2TB PCIE 4.0 drive, which I am also still waiting for. Outside of the crazy jump in CPU power and more stability, this system seems to be quite alright. I am a bit pissed that this motherboard doesn't offer more IO. It is lacking on USB 3.x, USB 2.x and SATA. I wish I would have picked up a better board, I am thinking about getting an ASUS ROG Crosshair VIII Extreme, depending on how much gold Asus thinks it is worth.

So that was a lie... MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk with their 240mm AIO RGB cooler for $259 deal on Amazon. AIO is going in a Zalman R2 white case for my daughter with the white Taichi X370 board. Got a Corsair 2TB TLC NVME PCIE 4.0 drive for my rig. My Fractal Define S case is awesome but I can't find a glass panel for it anywhere so it might become the server case since it allows 0 dust and I'll go with a LianCool or another Fractal... I have a line on a BNIB EVGA 3060 which I can hopefully snag. Same price from reddit hardwareswap as Newegg is asking in their shuffles so win there. Also for my kid. She actually does not want my old Ultrawide 34" but two real good 1080p monitors for school/gaming/social media so that's actually kinda good. Coupled with the Ryzen 5 3600 there. I'll put the old 34" ultrawide above my new 38" LG Ultrawide via a mount and have two screens above the main screen. Ryzen 5 1600 and a 290 are staying in the family computer but with upgraded cooler and case. Wife uses it for streaming, social media, random stuff and a high end art tablet. Lot of $$$ but worth it for what we all do and what is a very large chunk of our free time. #firstworldproblems.

Hahaha .. first world problems for sure.

I probably have $9500 in random computer parts on my work bench right now. Been building systems like crazy now that AMD CPUs are starting to become available at MSRP or lower prices. Still can't get my hands on a GPU that can actually do anything for even half of what they are worth. Been building these systems with a lot of re-used GPUs. A few days ago I built a Ryzen 5900X (12 core / 24 thread) 64GB ram 4200 C16 (@ 3600 C14 because Ryzen), 2x 2TB NVME drives, custom water cooling 360 and 240mm rad in a Corsair 500D, 850W EVGA PSU and a water blocked Geforce GTX 780Ti from his old Intel 2500k build. In games, the CPU is basically idle and runs about 5 - 8c above ambient. Still, even with the massive GPU bottleneck, in 3dmark Firestrike, his graphics score jumped by 1200 points over his 2500k, which is surprising. In cinebench 23, on his 2500K @ 4.6 was around 3500 multi core and 900 single core. On the 5900X with just some memory tweaking (no all core overclock), his multi core score was 24,400 and his single core was around 1650. That is some impressive progress and I was really shocked by the near doubling in the single threaded workload at similar clock speeds. That just goes to show how much Intel has been sandbagging all these years.


Just for reference, my new 5950X with 2 480x65mm + a 360x65mm radiator with push/pull noctua and vardar fans (22 fans total) at full speed and sitting on my AC register, can run at 5.15 Ghz all core ( 16 core / 32 threads ) at stupid voltage for Ryzen (1.51 vcore) with manageable temps (70C) and in cinebench 23, it scores 34,219 in multi core and 1710 in single core. It is so stupid, I really like this CPU. It is my number 2 favorite CPU to mess with, that FX8350 you have was and still is my favorite. I currently own 5 FX8350, 8370 and 9590 and none of them are in the same realm as the one you have.

Lol if you ever want it back I'll ship it back to you, you've been a huge help on this thread over the years so just lmk and I'll send it out. I'm retiring that finally, the 5800x went on sale yesterday for $50 off plus another $15 coupon and I had a $50 gift card... 0 issues at all with the thing. Ryzen 5 1600 is going to be powering my garage machine/server now with a cheap like $50 350 motherboard or something...

The 5600x I got is outside its return window but I'll just throw that in my kid's rig instead of the 3600. 3600 goes in the family PC and the 1600 goes into my server.

My kids build is an all white build (she wants an all white but minus GPU most likely) I was going to use the x370 Taichi and the 3600 because no 5000 series support for older boards but I found out that ASRock released two beta bios that had 5000 series support before AMD killed support on the older boards and actually posting from the machine that has that motherboard now with the 6.62 beta bios flashed and no issues at all. Just don't have that build even started yet because I'm still waiting on parts to come in for her. Still GPU hunting but found a few promising ones on hwswap. She's only 1080p gaming unless I stumble on someone selling a 3060ti or a 2070 Super for close to MSRP which I have seen a few times on hwswap. I can definitely get her a 2060 for $400 but that seems to be underwhelming with a 5600x system... Probably better to get a 1080ti for $500 if I'm at that price range...

So office family build is:

R5 3600
B450 Tomahawk Max
16GB G Skill FlareX C14 3600mhz ram
512gb NVME
2TB HDD
R9 290
Basic 120mm tower air cooler
Gigabyte budget mesh case
Old 3440x1440 LG Ultrawide
Corsair 650w PSU

Kid's build

R5 5600x
x370 Taichi
16GB G Skill RGB C16 3200mhz ram
2TB Silicon Power NVME
Either a 2060/1080ti/2070/3060 or something in the $400-$600 price range
MSI RGB 240mm IAO
Zalman R2 white mesh case
Triple monitor setup but only the middle one for gaming. 24" 1080p high refresh rate unless I stumble on a real good deal on a card good for 1440p then a 27" Gigabyte 1440p.
EVGA 650w PSU

My build

R7 5800x
MSI B550 MAG
32GB Corsair Vengeance C14 B die 3600mhz ram
2TB Corsair PCIE 4.0 NVME
AMD 6800xt
Cryorig R1 Ultimate triple 140mm fans
Fractal Define S case
Sentey (superflower guts) 1000w PSU
LG 38GL350G-B 38" Ultrawide


Indeed first world problems... and let me know if you want that FX8350 shipped back.

-Scott