PC dyin', Doomkid's cryin' - Is my replacement PC adequate?

[Doomkid]

Thanks, Murdoch. It's actually reassuring to know the CPU might still be fine, and that the ol' mechanical HD (not to mention the "spare tire" GT 710 and even the RAM) are more likely to be sore spots than the CPU. I've got 8gb of compatible ram just sorta hanging around with my other spare parts, I might put it as well as the replacement HDD in my old tower and see if it can't get a second lease on life. As weak as it is, I feel like the GT 710 still has a lot of life left in it too, what with it being only just over a year since I bought it.

 

If I'm still blue screening with a new HD and different RAM in there, I'll be fairly confident it's a motherboard issue, since CPU faults are relatively rare compared to other components - had no idea that was (generally) true til reading your post, but I'm glad since the CPU is where a lot of the $$ comes into play.

[Shrekmeister]

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

RIP to the old PC I’ve been using since 2016! Every time I start it, I get a loud, dirty crash, usually a blue screen but sometimes not even that, even after taking everything apart, making sure it’s all clean, putting fresh thermal gel on the CPU and all that fun stuff.

 

The included graphics card finally went early last year, in other words since this one is only just over a year old I seriously doubt it's the problem (even though it's just some little inexpensive low-spec nvidia card). I think I've just thrashed the CPU so consistently since day one that it's finally croaked. Could also be some motherboard problem I suppose, but the symptoms seem more like that of a worn-as-hell CPU. That video response to Midnight is gonna be the last thing of note to have ever been done on that machine, lol

 

99% of everything I've made in the last 6 years was done on it, from maps to MIDIs to videos :( It was an Alienware X51 compact tower, btw - 6th gen i7 @ 3.60 GHz and with 16 gig of ram, a little beast in 2016!.. Even though I loved that little Alienware, I'm kind of interested in how a new one will feel after all this time.

 

Just ordered the new rig, 12th gen i5 @ 2.50 GHz base clock speed, 32 gigs of ram, with a basic Intel HD graphics card which I might upgrade when I'm not broke (this thing just set me back $1,000.. Ouch, but hopefully worth it.) It's also got a 1TB SSD, my old PC had an HDD so I'm hoping that even though the specs are comparable, I'll see no worse performance, or maybe even marginally better performance than what I'm used to. Course I'll use the HDD taken out of my old PC, might even put it in the new one for storage/easy access of all my old files, without being tied down to HDD transfer speeds and stuff for general use.

 

At the heart of all this rambling: My old PC could handle OBS recording fullscreen GZDoom gameplay at 1920x1080 48fps and high-quality audio commentary consistently for several hours at a time (I usually use DSDA Doom ofc, but I mention GZDoom because it's more demanding and I want that option). The old rig could also render 1280x720 videos @ 48fps pretty damn quickly, which I consider to be a solid baseline for video quality/gameplay footage in this era.

 

Anyway, that's the end of my rant - I'm really just hoping what I've bought will be an adequate replacement, able to do all the stuff I usually do, particularly the more demanding stuff like rendering videos and recording decent quality gameplay. I know a big component in that is the GPU, and the one that comes with the new PC is middle of the road Intel HD, but all the reviews suggested it was solid all the same. Any of you out there who know a thing or two about PCs, I'd love to hear your opinions!

damn im sorry for you,also i have an hp laptop from 2009 or 2008 ( cant remember ) that i primarily use right now also how the heck your pc  from 2016 broken ???

[Murdoch]

No problem. Other outside factors can affect components too. As someone said earlier, if you live in a damp environment or near the ocean, then dampness can get into the computer and cause corrosion. I have seen computers from people near the ocean that have white deposits on them, almost like salt. Dust obviously is also a factor. If your cooler gets full of dust, the CPU (or GPU) will not be cooling as effectively and that could bring up the probability that it's the culprit in your woes. Dust and dampness together is a one-two punch because the dust can act like a sponge, absorbing moisture in the air and corroding components - sometimes even the case itself. Worst one I ever saw was a desktop a few years back that got so badly tarnished through a combination of being in a very dusty and damp house that it interfered with the grounding of the CPU and blew the motherboard. I figured that out trying to get it to work on a new board that blew two PSUs before I clicked what was going on. Thank God modern boards have some degree of surge protection.

[Senor Cacodemon]

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

RIP to the old PC I’ve been using since 2016! Every time I start it, I get a loud, dirty crash, usually a blue screen but sometimes not even that, even after taking everything apart, making sure it’s all clean, putting fresh thermal gel on the CPU and all that fun stuff.

It's always said losing a pc you've used for a while, when I replaced my laptop with my pc I thought it was going to be great but I found myself missing my old laptop. I hope you enjoy your new rig!

[pcorf]

I have 3 PC's, one of them is 18 years old and the other two 10 years old and all working. Also two laptops for general internet usage, one which is 7 years old.

[Mr.Rocket]

@Doomkid, I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned it but I'd try a different power supply on your old system, see if anything changes.

[Dark Pulse]

9 hours ago, Doomkid said:

RIP to the old PC I’ve been using since 2016! Every time I start it, I get a loud, dirty crash, usually a blue screen but sometimes not even that, even after taking everything apart, making sure it’s all clean, putting fresh thermal gel on the CPU and all that fun stuff.

 

The included graphics card finally went early last year, in other words since this one is only just over a year old I seriously doubt it's the problem (even though it's just some little inexpensive low-spec nvidia card). I think I've just thrashed the CPU so consistently since day one that it's finally croaked. Could also be some motherboard problem I suppose, but the symptoms seem more like that of a worn-as-hell CPU. That video response to Midnight is gonna be the last thing of note to have ever been done on that machine, lol

 

99% of everything I've made in the last 6 years was done on it, from maps to MIDIs to videos :( It was an Alienware X51 compact tower, btw - 6th gen i7 @ 3.60 GHz and with 16 gig of ram, a little beast in 2016!.. Even though I loved that little Alienware, I'm kind of interested in how a new one will feel after all this time.

 

Just ordered the new rig, 12th gen i5 @ 2.50 GHz base clock speed, 32 gigs of ram, with a basic Intel HD graphics card which I might upgrade when I'm not broke (this thing just set me back $1,000.. Ouch, but hopefully worth it.) It's also got a 1TB SSD, my old PC had an HDD so I'm hoping that even though the specs are comparable, I'll see no worse performance, or maybe even marginally better performance than what I'm used to. Course I'll use the HDD taken out of my old PC, might even put it in the new one for storage/easy access of all my old files, without being tied down to HDD transfer speeds and stuff for general use.

 

At the heart of all this rambling: My old PC could handle OBS recording fullscreen GZDoom gameplay at 1920x1080 48fps and high-quality audio commentary consistently for several hours at a time (I usually use DSDA Doom ofc, but I mention GZDoom because it's more demanding and I want that option). The old rig could also render 1280x720 videos @ 48fps pretty damn quickly, which I consider to be a solid baseline for video quality/gameplay footage in this era.

 

Anyway, that's the end of my rant - I'm really just hoping what I've bought will be an adequate replacement, able to do all the stuff I usually do, particularly the more demanding stuff like rendering videos and recording decent quality gameplay. I know a big component in that is the GPU, and the one that comes with the new PC is middle of the road Intel HD, but all the reviews suggested it was solid all the same. Any of you out there who know a thing or two about PCs, I'd love to hear your opinions!

Ahh, I see the PC-signal was lit up at city hall tonight...

 

So let's do some spec checkin'!

• CPU: Based on the sound of things, I'm guessing the old one was a i7-6700K, and the new one is an i5-12400. Good call on Alder Lake. Don't let the lower clockspeed of the CPU fool you - you're getting two more cores and four more threads (it's a hexa-core CPU), which all means that heavily multithreaded stuff (like, say, video encoding) will all be considerably faster. It will naturally outstrip the 6700K at most any benchmark, all while producing less heat and consuming less power.
• RAM: Fine. More than fine, actually. Plenty of people would say 16 GB is enough, but 32 GB is solid futureproofing for the next several years. There's some more minutiae that could be done about the RAM (speed, timings), but by and large you should be fairly set here.
• GPU: Yeah, change that out. I see in some future posts, people mention a 3060. If you're not a heavy gamer and mostly just play classic stuff, that's more than fine. If you want to dip your toes into 1440p or 4k gaming, you might want to get something a hair beefier. See if you can hang on for a little while though - a new generation of GPUs should be out within a year-ish on nVidia's side, and then you get the choice of latest-and-greatest vs. last-gen being cheaper. Be careful here, though: You may need a better power supply to run those. (The listing does NOT mention the power supply, at all!)
• SSD: Oooh yeah, welcome to the future. :) That thing will boot Windows so fast your head will spin. Take care to really only install heavily-used stuff or games/apps that have lots of intensive loading or whatever on it - otherwise, try to shove stuff onto a mechanical HD. 1 TB seems like a lot, until it isn't.

One thing not noticed by you: The new system supports PCI Express 5.0. Considering that 4.0 is just starting to trickle out to GPUs, this will mean a good thing for you once you get a new GPU (and it also means any PCIe 4.0/5.0 SSDs will scream in that thing). Your old system would've eventually been kneecapped by supporting only up to 3.0.

 

For recording videos, right now the weak link is going to be that IGP, and even that might not be too bad. For your purposes, here's the things it can do that your old CPU could not with dedicated hardware:

• Encodes 10-bit HEVC/H.265 video (6700k could only encode up to 8-bit, but could decode 10-bit)
• Encodes VP9 codec (6700k could only decode it)
• Decodes AV1 codec (6700k had no hardware for this at all and had to do it via software decoding means). YouTube is actually pushing this fairly hard - any 8k video is actually using this codec. HEVC actually can't do it!

I think as long as you make sure you have the power supply issue settled before you get a GPU, that system will keep you going for quite some time. :)

[Doomkid]

27 minutes ago, Mr.Rocket said:

@Doomkid, I'm not sure if anyone's mentioned it but I'd try a different power supply on your old system, see if anything changes.

I've just been assuming the PSU was fine, but maybe it's foolish of me to do so. Definitely gonna be doing some surgery & frankensteining on the old rig here and there to try and bring it back. I think my dad might actually have access to free PSUs at his job, so this should be a pretty easy part to replace.

 

EDIT: @Dark Pulse, thank you so much for the detailed post! This is so helpful to a layman like me with only a basic grasp of PC parts and how they function.

[Summer Deep]

I can't praise my own laptop highly enough, as it's surpassed all expectations. Acer E1-572, i3 processor, 8gb RAM, 1TB mechanical hdd. About 10 years old, bought it secondhand in 2017, I've played over 40 Doom megawads on it, and hundreds of smaller ones, as well as using it as my daily all-purpose machine, and it still runs faultlessly. May retire it when the Windows 8.1 operating system goes out of support in January 2023, but who knows? By the way, Windows 8.1 is, in my view, the best Windows OS ever, whatever the critics say....

[Alex S.]

25 minutes ago, Summer Deep said:

I can't praise my own laptop highly enough, as it's surpassed all expectations. Acer E1-572, i3 processor, 8gb RAM, 1TB mechanical hdd. About 10 years old, bought it secondhand in 2017, I've played over 40 Doom megawads on it, and hundreds of smaller ones, as well as using it as my daily all-purpose machine, and it still runs faultlessly. May retire it when the Windows 8.1 operating system goes out of support in January 2023, but who knows? By the way, Windows 8.1 is, in my view, the best Windows OS ever, whatever the critics say....

I'd say keep the machine after EoL for Win 8.1. It could probably run Win10 just fine, and worst-case swap the HD for an SSD and get another several years out of it.

[Murdoch]

6 minutes ago, Alex S. said:

I'd say keep the machine after EoL for Win 8.1. It could probably run Win10 just fine, and worst-case swap the HD for an SSD and get another several years out of it.

 

Yeah if it's still running the original HD that thing will be getting worn out by now, and the performance will be suffering as consequence. And yeah, honestly, with Classic Shell installed and file associations tweaked to avoid the "modern UI" apps, Windows 8.1 is actually halfway decent. Fresh installs are a bastard though, soooo many patches that take forever to come down. I usually use a manual download and install tool for the first batch. Other thing to check for before spending significant money on an old laptop is the cooling fan. If that's getting tired, finding a new one can prove very problematic. 

[Codename_Delta]

I forgot to mention my 'rig' Take rig with a grain of salt due to it being a laptop, Ik it ain't good enough to run something like Doom Eternal... It kinda hated having to play TF2 everyday with near-max settings, to the point where blue-screens weren't all that rare... It doesn't bluescreen anymore thankfully.

 

• Windows 11 (laugh at me if you want, Windows 11 is actually good.)
• Intel UHD 600 GPU (what came built-in)
• CPU:  Intel Celeron N4020 CPU @ 1.10GHz, 1101 Mhz, 2 Cores

 

To me this is mostly all technobabble.

Edited May 12, 2022 by Codename_Delta