I now have two 4k monitors. Overwatch, in maximum settings at 4k60, uses about 65% of my 1080’s power during play with no frame drops.
I’m preferring the 144hz over the 4k at the moment.
Some time early next year I’m going to build a new computer to replace the one my father and I put together in 2010. I added an SSD, 3tb HDD, and a Geforce 960 to it in 2015 when the initial hard drive started to fail. I’m going to take those drives and the graphics card and add it to a new system. I’m fairly happy with what I’ve assembled, but I don’t trust the wattage rating on PC Picker, it seems way too low for a full system. Here is what I have put together so far including the graphics card and the drives.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Zwh9QZ
Am I right to not trust the PC Picker power rating? Is there anything else here I have deeply wrong? Please let me know if you see anything obvious. I can’t do this super often, so I want to get it right!
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My PC has pretty similar specs to what you have laid out and a 450 watt power supply has worked just fine.
Modern Power supplies tend to be most efficient when they’re running at 70-80% capacity so that’s a pretty good target. I’ve heard that the max output tends to degrade some over time but haven’t done any research on that.
I think people used to go crazy on over-rating the PSU to account for the gradual collection of new hard drives and for most of the 00s every new generation of hardware seemed to be more power hungry so you wanted room to upgrade.
So I bought some cheap bluetooth mouse for my TV when I’m streaming my pc to it and it was absolute garbage. So then I did what I should have done the first time and bought a good logitech one and it’s infinitely better. It’s like I havn’t learned this lesson a thousand times before.
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I have the G703 and I love it. Will probably buy the charging pad soon.
That time when you go to install a game, and your drive is full. Ooops.
Right now these are the drives I have:
Main M2 drive - 500G - OS and Program Files
SSD - 256G - It was the drive in my previous PC that held the OS and program files. Has some backups on it. Too small to be useful.
User - 2TB - A spinning disk drive. I remap all my user directories here like Downloads, Desktop, Music, Pictures, etc. Most of the space is taken up by photos. Only 100G of free space. Oh no.
Media - 4TB - Another spinning disk. Whenever I record/edit video it goes here. only 500GB are free.
NAS - 4 x 4 TB drives, can actually hold 10.5 TB of data. 68% full.
The thing is, I have a lot of redundant backups. I can probably delete a lot of stuff on the media drive that is backed up on the NAS or cloud already. It’s just so much work because the files are not super organized. I really don’t want to spend my vacation organizing files.
Maybe I should take a huge chunk of old files and back them up onto a cloud backup like glacier as well as a single spare magnetic drive. Then I can just delete them from the NAS and also my local drives. The problem is I don’t really have the upstream bandwidth to get TBs of data into the cloud easily. It’s fine when the cloud backups are incremental. The problem is the initial upload.
I want to buy more drives, but also I don’t want to. Right now the 1TB M.2 drives are reasonable and 2TB are expensive. I was hoping to wait a generation or two to get either cheap 2TB or 4TB to fill my empty M2 slot. Maybe I have no choice.
I’m glad I already have a 1TB PCIe drive. All the games I care about are installed here, with plenty of space to space.
I have the RAID5 of spinning disks for the rest of my games (rarely played, huge, or otherwise not performance intensive), and the other super fast 512GB SSD that’s for regular applications and Windows.
Having two SSDs: one dedicated to Windows/apps and one dedicated to games and video editing was the best decision I ever made in my entire life. I just never have to worry about it.
Having a giant local RAID for everything else makes it easy to have all my “things” in one place and have a very good incremental backup pipeline from that to the NAS.
Hmm, maybe I’ll use that windows combined volume storage thing. It would at least reduce the logical burden of thinking of what goes on what disk.
That was actually my primary reason for going all overkill on my disks with the new computer. I just didn’t want to ever have to think about it. Performance was a secondary concern.
If I logically combine an M2 PCIX drive and also some SATA SSDs in Windows, how does it manage which data goes in which physical place? Does it smartly put the most accessed data on the faster device?
I doubt it’s that smart.
Ok, so I freed up most of the space on my M.2 drive by moving my iTunes backups to another drive. Turns out a complete backup of my iPhone and iPad are bigger than all steam games combined. Also, Apple has no official way to do this, you have to move the backups by hand and make a symlink.
Thanks to this, though, I have realized just how much I’m using my magnetic drives still. Meanwhile I only have one non-M.2 SSD. It’s fast, but small and old, and I’m not using it at all. It’s just holding the os of my previous machine. 4TB SSD are still too much money, but I can get 2x2TB SSD and combine them into a single logical drive. I’ll use that to replace the 2TB magnetic drive that I currently use for most everything. Then I can organize my larger files later.
Hmm, maybe I just set my money on fire and get 2x 4TB so I don’t have to worry later?
I checked and it seems like these things get updated every 2-3 years, and the newest drives are barely/almost one year old, so waiting is not going to help much.
Symlinking in windows. I haven’y futzed with that in a few years and I remember in whatever os I was last trying to do it in, it was possible but fiddly. I imagine now it’s easier.
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symbolic links are usually an essential part of my personalization in windows
They would be, but they added the feature that officially lets you change the location of all the special user directories like My Documents, Desktop, Music, etc.
Also, for the iTunes thing, you have to use /J to make a hard link. I think an actual soft/symbolic link will confuse iTunes.
You’re right, I do use /J more for things. I’ve also realized that the official windows directories are crap and every software ever likes to fill them with crap. I used the feature for user directories and now everything is kind of confused… I actually have two sets of “My *” folders and Dropbox (for my ebooks and wallpapers) screams at me regularly.
I am super lazy and in the end don’t have any data on disk that I really care about so I have a 500GB SSD with Windows and games and a 1TB spinning disk that everything just dumps to that I occasionally sort into images, video, music, and document folders. Not much is organized below that. I don’t cloud backup anything.
Edit:
I lied slightly. I do put some very few important things like tax returns in Google Drive.