New computer is awesome; very quiet (better airflow in this case, Noctua fans), very fast (the 3070 is no longer bottlenecked!), and the build was mostly uneventful. The amount of pressure required to install AMD's Wraith Stealth is kind of terrifying, needed a BIOS update to get the DOCP setting on my RAM to work, and I accidentally removed my digital Windows license from my Microsoft account but was able to get it back by reviving the old motherboard and logging-in there with my Microsoft account... Microsoft support had told me I was out of luck, but I sure showed them 😅 Kept the PSU and three hard drives from the previous build, replaced the failing 1TB HDD from 2010 with a 2015 one I found in my parts bin, and since my VR headset works with the onboard controller on the new motherboard, the Renesas D720201 PCIe card I picked-up for the old one went to my brother's Z68 build so he could finally hook-up the front USB 3.0 ports on his Meshify C. Also, the power and drive LEDs don't seem to work on this case... Meh.
Speaking of hard drives, I re-installed Anthem... But on the SATA SSD, so still not sure if PCIe Gen4 would help those load-times. Still fun to jump back into though; hit level 30, started playing the unlocked difficulty levels... Not really worth it; "Hard" seems to be the most casual fun that still yields decent rewards, in terms of currency anyway.
Tried Metro Exodus again, and it doesn't stutter anymore... Still kinda buggy in terms of mission completion conditions and lighting, but I wonder if the sudden performance issues were somehow related to the failing drive :\
Old computer is listed on Kijiji for $1000 CDN OBO; final specs are:
- MSI GeForce GTX 1070 GAMING X 8G
- Intel X-Series i7-3930K (6C/12T, 3.8GHz boost)
- ASUS P9X79
- 32GB (8x4GB) 1600MHz quad-channel DDR3
- Intel BXTS13A
- 2x WD 74GB Raptor 10,000 RPM (RAID 0)
- Corsair CX500
- Lian-Li PC-68
Unrelated, but one friend who was looking for a 2060 SUPER or better for Premiere finally gave-up and settled for a 1660 SUPER... Except he couldn't find one of those either. I found two profiteers for him - a 3070 for ~$1000 CDN or a 1660 SUPER for $450 CDN - he went with the latter, and he's happy.
