Hell yea

Haven’t seen this mentioned, but did you make sure to plug the display cable into the GPU and not the MoBo?

edit: nvm, just saw a comment with same suggestion

Nitro+ worth it?

I guess not for that much more. A 10% increase is substantial, and I don’t think the difference in actual performance is enough to justify it; but you also said that your region can get toasty in summer, and the Nitro+ has better cooling which could help. I don’t think the Pulse will get too hot to work, but it may be something to consider!

DDR5

Those are one of the best performance to price ratio, and they’re very inexpensive for what they are (plus full support for AMD overclocking, EXPO I think it’s called); you can also go higher frequency, but prices will go up as well.

cooler

Good call then, AIO will probably perform a bit better with extreme high ambient temps

970

All good, a 970 Evo Plus might be cheaper so why not!

5.0

Yeah, there’s no way gaming will saturate PCIe 5.0 anytime soon, no need to pay premium for specs you won’t benefit from

Happy building and gaming!

About RAM, Trident Z5 NEO @ 6000Mhz seems to be the best price/performance ratio.

About GPU, I’d personally go for a Sapphire as they’re one of the historic AIB for AMD GPUs and I also dig a lot the design of the Nitro+ lol

See if you can save something on the MoBo (by getting a lower trim) and 2x2TB might be a bit overkill for gaming only (ofc it depends on your habits, but I personally don’t have games installed for more than 500-600GB). Also, you picked two PCIe 4.0 NVMEs, so maybe consider a 970 Evo Plus if it’s cheaper than the 980 Pro

About cooler, I’d prefer an old fashioned air cooler simply because it can’t leak lol

Sorry for late reply, app kept saying “this account is being verified” and I coulnd’t comment or anything else.

Anyways, I kept them. One drive loss won’t be catastrophic (got two mirrored and also spare backup), so I decided to go for it!

Sorry for late reply, app kept saying “this account os being verified” and I coulnd’t comment or anything else.

In the end I decided to keep them, considering the store provides warranty! Loving the gigantic storage amount I have now haha

That’s fair, I paid three times as much though so I do care a bit more haha

Actually, I found something: “DOM: 07JUN2022”. I guess that’s “Date of Manufacturing”?

I was a bit off, they were 15% cheaper than the Ironwolf on the same website/from same seller (156, not USD, vs 179, not USD).

For a better comparison, I went to WD’s official store and for what I spent on these two 8TB Exos (312, not USD) I can get two 4TB Red Plus (310, not USD). Can’t make a direct comparison with other Seagates because their “buy now” section redirects me to Amazon, which, as you said, is not the best since they allowed third party sellers, but on there the 8TB Ironwolf is 250 (!!).

As you already know, I’m not in the US so I can’t buy from there. Unfortunately, Seagate’s “buy now” section (which should be official retailers) brings me to either Amazon or other chains that don’t have much else besides portable drives.

At this point I have two options, really: try again the same online store (which is kinda like Amazon, many third party sellers), but getting Ironwolf, which should be more likely to be “legit”, and of course check them as well when they arrive, or settle for two 4TB WD Red Plus (which isn’t ideal as I’m already nearing 2.5TB total, but should allow me to get by a while longer) bought directly from WD.

edit: looking at the link you provided, I paid 30% less for my Exos. Would that sway you towards keeping it without warranty (apart from the seller’s, which is one year I think)? Mind that I don’t need enterprise-grade drives, and I think even NAS drives are overkill for my needs. For example a WD Blue with its 55TBW per year might be enough for me (that’s 150GB a day everyday for a year, which is above my average writes), but those don’t come big enough (I need 6TB min to be comfortable)

Agree, I stopped buying Sony games because of that

I feel the pain: began my Linux journey some four months ago, tried Ubuntu first, played with it a bit for a couple days, abandoned it; then tried PoP!_OS, got it up and running, broke it, wiped it; tried again and it finally clicked! I’m now dailying it, and it’s been pretty good so far!

Keep trying without forcing yourself, maybe try different distros depending on what you need!

I saw W11 in action on a different PC and that made me stay on W10. In the meantime, I researched Linux and dipped my toes in it for a while. Just made PoP! _OS my daily driver (installed on my main NVME), with much less pain than I thought, while I moved W10 on a secondary, old and small SSD, only for those games that don’t work in Proton/Wine.

It is a bit difficult to learn everything from scratch, but it’s a small price to pay, to be honest

Since you already got your answer (separate cables are safer), I’m absolutely loving the fit. Gigantic GPU and coolers inside small cases are the bane of my existence. I’m also about to shove a 7900XT into a Meshify C, plus I’m sporting a Dark Rock Pro 4 haha and I really like the way it looks

I’m sorry about your experience! I actually have an IronWolf, a small 2TB one, and it’s been a year without issues. I don’t write big amounts of data daily on it though, so my experience might be different.

Good luck with your replacement though!

edit: forgot to mention that I’m not USA-based, sorry! Wow, US prices are amazing. In my country that one is just a little less expensive, adjusted for capacity (the ones I picked are 4TB and 120, the Barracuda is 8TB and 205)! That’s a bummer haha but thanks for the suggestion! edit: let me check the 4TB though edit2: now that’s better, the 4TB is only 89 compared to 120 needed for the IronWolf

Yeah, the only thing they say is “For Ryzen Series APUs (Cezanne and Renoir), ECC is only supported with PRO CPUs.”. That’s why I didn’t pick a Ryzen with integrated GPU (I can’t find PRO models in my country). 2666 speed is supported, so those RAM I picked should work. Thanks!

Yes, those are cheaper but I also want reliability, so I prefer spending a bit more for the actual storage to get something known to be good!

The ones I picked are part # WD40EFRX, so CMR according to that image you linked. It’s just that PCPP doesn’t call them WD Red Plus, but they are. In the end I think I’ll go with the IronWolf instead, since they’re not that much more expensive, but more loved by the community! Thanks

Makes sense, unfortunately it’s all a game of balance between CPU and GPU when you have a fixed budget, and a 5800X3D paired with a 7800XT won’t give me 120+ FPS at 3440*1440 (on average, max FPS at 4k is 60, so around 100 FPS at 3440*1440), a 5600X with a 7900XT probably yes (on average, max FPS at 4k is 80, so around 133 FPS at 3440*1440). At this resolution, I feel like investing in a better GPU is the better choice, also for longevity.

Plus, I think it will be easier to upgrade CPU than to upgrade GPU, were I to need it, for example in the next six or eight months: in that time frame I can easily save for a brand new 5800X3D (which is around $300, especially if I can sell the 5600X), while saving for a 7900XT ($900) is a whole different feat, even factoring in a potential sale of the used card.

If I were in the USA I would’ve gotten a 5600X3D because that’s basically a 5800X3D for much less, it’s a shame it’s a MicroCenter exclusive, guess they don’t have enough of them to sell worldwide.

if you can see yourself building a new setup in the next couple of years

I surely hope not haha, I can totally see a motherboard and RAM upgrade, and at that point a CPU upgrade as well, down the line, but I hope I can keep the 7900XT for a bit longer than that! To be quite honest, the amount of newly released AAA games that I’d like to play has been decreasing in the past few years, so I’ve been feeling less inclined to upgrade, and with this new PC I can play 100% of my backlog and also 100% of the yet-to-be-released games I’m looking forward to (though I’ll admit that’s a very short list), so hopefully it will last me a while.

Thanks for the suggestions though!

I’ll keep an eye out for it, thanks!