Question Longevity and DDR4 ?

[Colif]

starts to wonder where you didn't post

Yeah, I have seen that guide. Thank you, but let me ask you one more thing. Those PSU's that have 7 year+ warranty, are they really going to be as strong 7 years in as in the beginning?

If they didn't think it would still work in 7 years, would they guarantee it for that long? Its a guarantee for a reason. If you can prove its younger if it dies, you get a new one for free.

 

[Satan-IR]

Thank you for your advice. I am aware of that, but changing the PSU in my PC is a big inconvenience because of the cable work...although I guess it is better than losing everything. Taking the same line of thinking, should I replace the motherboard or wait until it goes belly up? I am asking because I can do it for a difference of 50€ish, once I sell mine.

You said it. A few minutes, an hour or two of dealing with cables is better than a dead PSU that might take storage drives, graphics card, motherboard down with it. I've seen RAM broken by failing PSU once and haven't seen CPU killed by PSU yet.

Upgrading the whole platform now is really a matter of budget. If you can go on now with the PC and it meets your needs and you save more and that would mean getting a better upgrade it's worth the wait I guess.

I personally would replace that PSU ASAP. Yes, as said above, you don't have a very demanding system now but when a PSU is not good quality and it's worked for a while it doesn't really take much for it to fail and when low quality ones fail they're very likely to take another component or two with them. That's what nobody wants.

 

[Colif]

when I started making PC I had no idea and in the early 2000's most cases came with a PSU and they probably weren't amazing. I had a run of dying hdd that for a long time I blamed on the hdd, but now I see it was probably the PSU instead.

I have had a PSU take out my GPU and windows in one hit. That was 13 years ago or so now. It wasn't a bad PSU, just out of warranty like most of the PC it was in. You take notice when it goes bang.

After that I made sure to use good quality PSU to point when I made last PC it was on top of list...

No need to replace motherboard. If it dies, you might as well get an all new PC at same time. Its a good time to make a jump.
I replaced almost everything in this PC last year, only things remaining are:

• Motherboard
• Ram
• NVME
• cables
• Case

depending on which dies first, I see what next move is. Historically its been storage but I have yet to have an ssd die.

I suggested a Corsair PSU in another of his posts.

 

[RaidHobbit]

Greetings! I have one dilemma: Shall I upgrade now or shall I wait? My current configuration is:

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-AX370-Gaming (rev. 1.x)
PSU: Chieftec Element 600s (600W)
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600x (not overclocked)
GPU: ASUS Dual OC GTX 1060 (6GB)
RAM: 4x8GB HyperX Fury 3200MHz
SSD: HyperX Fury Renegade 1TB
HDD: Seagate BarraCuda 3.5" 2TB
CPU cooler: LC Power LC-CC-120-RGB (advertised for up to 150 TDP)
Case: MS Industrial Spectrum with 5 Arctic P120 fans (3 intake, 1 exhaust, 1 as 2nd CPU cooler fan-also set as exhaust)

So far the PC has worked fine. Had several instances of BSOD, but it has subsided after SSD replacement. All components are from 2018 except SSD, 2x8GB RAM, CPU Cooler and fans. SSD was replaced because the old one's sectors got corrupted. Other components were added/replaced becase I found them for a good price 2-3 years ago.

What I would like to achieve: Being able to use this PC smoothly, for next few years (Windows 10 and after its support is terminated, Windows 11) for, mostly, general purpose tasks and maybe some gaming (spending as little money as possible. Shocking! I know...).
Pretty sure that all I would need to replace is CPU with something like Ryzen 5 5600x, for general purpose tasks. It would also help with some games that I sometimes play. For many other games, I would simply need a much stronger GPU.

Why am I here? Well, this part... I am not really sure how to structure. I guess my main concearn is do PC components deteriorate over time? I suppose this might sound stupid, but nothing lasts forever (except maybe RAM :^) ). I am also concearned with Windows 11's support for DDR4 platform. Not really concearned with if the system is going to run, but are programs running on Windows 11 going to be optimized enough for DDR4? Therefore:

• Shall I replace components like Motherboard (with updated DDR4 version of it) and PSU? (There is also an advantage here in getting faster PCIe slots. Although, I am not really sure how much that really improves the performance?)
• Shall I save that money for completely new DDR5 PC?
• Or shall I leave current components as they are and add/replace those that influence the performance mostly (CPU and GPU) and what would be the best options?

If you have any other option in mind, please, do tell.

Thank you in advance. ♥

Focus on your gaming experience, are you still maxing everything out in the type of games you like at 1080p, and does maxing it out matter to you?

The BSOD is likely the GTX 1060 as they had a lot of problems, but could be aging from any component, and even from overheating. Do you clean your PC inside? If not, time to get the hoover out and place it on those fans to get the gunk off.

You don`t necessarily need DDR5 yet, its a loss of less than 5% of FPS in most games. But when you upgrade then yes its time to move across. If you can put it off a year or two the motherboards should hopefully be normal prices again and the real benefits of DDR5 will be starting to shine through.

You need to skip the 5600x though. While it has just six performance cores (which is fine for gaming as most are still needing quad cores) it is a DDR4 only chip. Out past two years you don`t want a DDR4 chip. I recommend switching to an Intel i5-12400 which is about the same price, same core count, but will take DDR5. There might be some AMD alternatives, I`m not up to date on them.

If you are upgrading but sticking at 1080p then GPUs are going to be cheap. If you want a brand new one nothing higher than a RTX 4060 is needed, and those are cheaper than the 3060s.

 

[Zograf]

Most of your questions have been answered. I'll just add this:

Your decision on whether to stick with DDR4 ram or use DDR5 comes down largely to gaming needs. DDR5 is faster but it does come with higher latency, and that can be a dealbreaker when gaming.

Building a new PC today, i would say it almost makes no difference which generation of RAM you use, with a few exceptions like latency. You'll probably find more modern motherboards with DDR5, but there are still good options when buying DDR4 motherboards.


As for longevity, i have a 12 year old DDR3 kit still ticking over nicely. And that PC was almost never turned off.
RAM and CPUs will tend to last foerever unless overclocked!

Wow, that is really impressive. Thank you for your comment.

 

[Zograf]

starts to wonder where you didn't post



If they didn't think it would still work in 7 years, would they guarantee it for that long? Its a guarantee for a reason. If you can prove its younger if it dies, you get a new one for free.

Well yes, of course. I was very tiered when I have asked that and cannot remember where I was going with that question. Thanks for confirmation though.

 

[Zograf]

You said it. A few minutes, an hour or two of dealing with cables is better than a dead PSU that might take storage drives, graphics card, motherboard down with it. I've seen RAM broken by failing PSU once and haven't seen CPU killed by PSU yet.

Upgrading the whole platform now is really a matter of budget. If you can go on now with the PC and it meets your needs and you save more and that would mean getting a better upgrade it's worth the wait I guess.

I personally would replace that PSU ASAP. Yes, as said above, you don't have a very demanding system now but when a PSU is not good quality and it's worked for a while it doesn't really take much for it to fail and when low quality ones fail they're very likely to take another component or two with them. That's what nobody wants.

Yes, you are very much right. What is interesting to me is that you are going to find two completely opposed camps especially regarding PSU. One where people treat PSU as "be all and end all", what it really indeed is, and those who are very non-chalant about it. And more I think about it, 100-200 of whatever strong currency is cheaper than 1-2k of it. The sweetest thing in my position is that I can easily use the same PSU in my next PC, the question just is how much of the headroom shall I leave? I was thinking about 850W. I don't really think I would go for anything stronger than 70 series, when it comes to Nvidia cards, in my next build.

 

[Zograf]

when I started making PC I had no idea and in the early 2000's most cases came with a PSU and they probably weren't amazing. I had a run of dying hdd that for a long time I blamed on the hdd, but now I see it was probably the PSU instead.

I have had a PSU take out my GPU and windows in one hit. That was 13 years ago or so now. It wasn't a bad PSU, just out of warranty like most of the PC it was in. You take notice when it goes bang.

After that I made sure to use good quality PSU to point when I made last PC it was on top of list...

No need to replace motherboard. If it dies, you might as well get an all new PC at same time. Its a good time to make a jump.
I replaced almost everything in this PC last year, only things remaining are:

• Motherboard
• Ram
• NVME
• cables
• Case

depending on which dies first, I see what next move is. Historically its been storage but I have yet to have an ssd die.

I suggested a Corsair PSU in another of his posts.

Thank you very, very much. <3

 

[Zograf]

Focus on your gaming experience, are you still maxing everything out in the type of games you like at 1080p, and does maxing it out matter to you?

The BSOD is likely the GTX 1060 as they had a lot of problems, but could be aging from any component, and even from overheating. Do you clean your PC inside? If not, time to get the hoover out and place it on those fans to get the gunk off.

You don`t necessarily need DDR5 yet, its a loss of less than 5% of FPS in most games. But when you upgrade then yes its time to move across. If you can put it off a year or two the motherboards should hopefully be normal prices again and the real benefits of DDR5 will be starting to shine through.

You need to skip the 5600x though. While it has just six performance cores (which is fine for gaming as most are still needing quad cores) it is a DDR4 only chip. Out past two years you don`t want a DDR4 chip. I recommend switching to an Intel i5-12400 which is about the same price, same core count, but will take DDR5. There might be some AMD alternatives, I`m not up to date on them.

If you are upgrading but sticking at 1080p then GPUs are going to be cheap. If you want a brand new one nothing higher than a RTX 4060 is needed, and those are cheaper than the 3060s.

Thank you. Yes, of course I am cleaning the PC regularly. That is not an issue. Since I have switched to 2k monitor I am indeed facing some performance dips in the titles that I have used to play, but honestly, nothing major. Although if I would want to play newer titles then I would definately need a new GPU for 2k, I am aware of that and was thinking about 4070 and its variants or something along that line (7800XT).

BSOD was a strange occurance, but luckily it is not happening anymore. It was not something freequent before but it would still happen from time to time. Now I do not have that issue but have mentioned it just in case that it might be related to the Motherboard and someone would notice that link if it was the case.