Gaming PC upgrade options: Grandson plays, Daughter pays

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Networkn
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#3105354 18-Jul-2023 09:35

Jase2985:

so your saying with more than 750GB of data on a 1TB drive you will have significant issues? sorry but that's not correct. anything less than about 10-20Gb you will start having issues. drives that use their internal space for cache (dont have a specific dram chip for it) may run more slowly but its still going to be faster than a SATA SSD and you will likely never notice it unless your copying large files which you cant as you have no space left.

older SSD's had an issue with being too full with performance. I don't think a 1TB drive would be in that category, but do a google search for it.

I'd still be starting with a new temporary user profile to eliminate a number of software issues.

OldGeek

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#3105363 18-Jul-2023 09:42

I will look at SSD storage issues (particularly C: being too full) and look at temperatures.

It is worth noting that Grandson has predetermined the solution as being a new PC with faster CPU and GPU and more memory wherever possible, based on his cohort of gaming friends whose Windows and hardware knowledge matches my gaming knowledge. As I am not a gamer and I am elderly I am viewed with suspicion and certainly not a member of his team.

I will be adding his PC to my small list of Teamviewer-monitored PCs.

I hope to post on progress over the next day or 3. Many thanks to you all for your feedback.

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SpartanVXL

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#3105430 18-Jul-2023 11:29

Hopefully you can convey this more eloquently to your grandson, but you can otherwise tell him that Valorant can run on a potato. If it’s running badly then he has made his $X amount computer worse than a potato, and buying another $X computer and doing the same won’t help his issue.

The tips on storage are probably the main culprit, let alone SSD’s not playing nice with low free space Windows itself will crawl to a halt with only a few MB left. To play it safe you should always have 10GB free for windows to do it’s thing, patches etc.

And then there is Steam (Valorant is not a Steam game). If your grandson is installing games to C:\ then some of those when updating may ‘unpack’ where they take a copy of the game in order to patch itself. This require 2x the space requirement of the game further exacerbating the initial problem of free space. Install games to another drive or partition if possible or otherwise keep the above in mind.

The USB enclosures may also be causing something, if he is needing large storage it is better to attach it internally if possible. Or detach it when not using it.

Edit: just noticed the original spec has only one dimm of 16GB, if you can find another same spec dimm or replace with 2x8GB of faster speed memory then it might help, not only with performance but telling your grandson that it’s been ‘upgraded’. Configure the two sticks for dual channel and if possible enable XMP.

Here’s a video someone benchmarked for reference on performance:

Jase2985

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#3105513 18-Jul-2023 13:27

OldGeek:

It is worth noting that Grandson has predetermined the solution as being a new PC with faster CPU and GPU and more memory wherever possible, based on his cohort of gaming friends whose Windows and hardware knowledge matches my gaming knowledge. As I am not a gamer and I am elderly I am viewed with suspicion and certainly not a member of his team.

sounds like his friends have gotten newer hardware and he wants to upgrade his too so hes not "left behind". even though what he has is more than adequate for his needs.

allio

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#3105539 18-Jul-2023 14:44

Jase2985:

OldGeek:

It is worth noting that Grandson has predetermined the solution as being a new PC with faster CPU and GPU and more memory wherever possible, based on his cohort of gaming friends whose Windows and hardware knowledge matches my gaming knowledge. As I am not a gamer and I am elderly I am viewed with suspicion and certainly not a member of his team.

sounds like his friends have gotten newer hardware and he wants to upgrade his too so hes not "left behind". even though what he has is more than adequate for his needs.

I think you and your daughter are being taken for a little bit of a ride. That PC is beyond capable. It won't max out every single game at 1440P but unless your family is richer than rich, who cares? My gaming computers when I was 15 were scraped together bits of second hand gear that I paid for myself. I was lucky to be able to play anything on medium settings, if it played at all. Playing brand new games on Ultra settings is a great goal for him to work towards with his own money, not mum's.

Hardware wise I think everybody is correct that the only genuine reason that he would be "lagging" in Valorant would be running out of space on the system drive and/or a generally trashed Windows install. If your daughter is feeling generous she could buy a new, bigger SSD (they're cheap right now) and take the opportunity to do a fresh install of Windows. That said 1TB is hardly small and you would probably not find bigger in many, if any prebuilts. If it were me, I would tell him the solution to his problem is in his own hands and he can learn how to make better use of the great PC his mother very generously purchased for him at 13!

PS. I'm an adult who can now afford to buy any kind of computer equipment and I just did my first video card upgrade in 10 years. I got an RX 6600, which is slower than a 3060.

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#3105600 18-Jul-2023 15:48

OldGeek:

I have also just noticed, using NVIDEA Control Panel to display 'system information', that it is using (round numbers) 20 gigs of graphics memory, being 12 gigs of 'shared system memory' and 8 gigs of 'dedicated video (GDDR6) memory'. The 12 gigs of shared system memory takes a fair chunk of the 16 gigs of system memory available and I would expect logically this will drive demand for virtual memory storage that might have been constrained with C: being so full. Are these normal numbers in these circumstances?

Just to quickly address this - you're on the wrong track entirely here. The GPU will have access to a total of 20 gigabytes of memory, 8GB of which are onboard and 12GB are shared from the 16GB in the system. It will use the much faster onboard 8GB preferentially and only use system RAM if and when required. 8GB is a comfortable amount in 2023 and won't be presenting any issue today. You're correct that if the system ran out of total memory it would start paging, and that this would be a problem given that the system drive is nearly full, but there'll be zero paging happening in a 16GB + 8GB system.

https://www.cgdirector.com/what-is-shared-gpu-memory/

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#3105714 18-Jul-2023 19:30

SpartanVXL:
Edit: just noticed the original spec has only one dimm of 16GB, if you can find another same spec dimm or replace with 2x8GB of faster speed memory then it might help, not only with performance but telling your grandson that it’s been ‘upgraded’. Configure the two sticks for dual channel and if possible enable XMP.

SpartanVXL makes a good point, original spec is 1x16GB ram, adding a second matched stick or a pair of 8GB or 16GB 3200MT specd sticks of RAM will make some difference. Running the CPU with only half it's available memory bandwidth is not going to be helping things! Other good upgrade would be to pick up a 3-4TB SSD and install that for additional fast storage.

Aside from that tend to agree with the others, clean out the C: drive aiming for 10-15% free space, make sure Windows Defender has run and remove any suspicious items it finds. Then have a look at the Start up list (CTRL + SHIFT + ESC > Start Up Apps) and disable anything they don't recognise or don't need should help things. Need to learn digital hygiene a PC that spec should be pretty decent with a second memory stick!

The current generation of graphics cards were expensive for not a lot more power so to get a system with a 10% faster GPU you would probably be looking at spending $2,500-$3,000 for a prebuilt system, or ~1,000 just for a new GPU. Fix the RAM and CPU first and see what that does.

Jase2985

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#3105716 18-Jul-2023 19:58

eonsim:

SpartanVXL:
Edit: just noticed the original spec has only one dimm of 16GB, if you can find another same spec dimm or replace with 2x8GB of faster speed memory then it might help, not only with performance but telling your grandson that it’s been ‘upgraded’. Configure the two sticks for dual channel and if possible enable XMP.

SpartanVXL makes a good point, original spec is 1x16GB ram, adding a second matched stick or a pair of 8GB or 16GB 3200MT specd sticks of RAM will make some difference. Running the CPU with only half it's available memory bandwidth is not going to be helping things!

the problem is thats not going to be whats causing any of the issues experianced.

It might make things marginally faster overall but one of those things it would be hard to notice.

Starlith

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#3105724 18-Jul-2023 20:22

Yea as everyone else said best to get some monitoring stats and you can both identify the bottlenecks - I would normally use Task Manager to see what parts of the system are under stress then start targetting areas from there. Keeping atleast 80gb free should be a start especially for those windows updates

mentalinc

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#3105796 18-Jul-2023 21:10

What version of Windows do you use?
My 3D mark timespy score has dropped from 18,500 to around 11,500 in the latest Windows 11 insider builds!
Very significant drop in performance.

Windows 10 (clean install) - https://www.3dmark.com/spy/40148548

Windows 11 (22631.2048) - https://www.3dmark.com/spy/40148828

Might be worth running any built in benchmark in games and check how they compare to others with similar GPU and CPU - have a look at benchmark comparison videos on YouTube - e.g. this is same CPU and GPU - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiXwc5ldrnY

CPU: AMD 5900x | RAM: GSKILL Trident Z Neo RGB F4-3600C16D-32GTZNC-32-GB | MB: Asus X570-E | GFX: EVGA FTW3 Ultra RTX 3080Ti| Monitor: LG 27GL850-B 2560x1440

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OldGeek

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#3105844 19-Jul-2023 07:35

mentalinc:

What version of Windows do you use?

Grandson upgraded to W11 some time ago, then reverted to W10 a few weeks later when perceived performance was worse.

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#3105851 19-Jul-2023 08:02

reverted, so not a fresh install of Win10. There could be remnants of Win11 there.

Recommend a fresh Win10 Install (after backing up all his stuff).

cddt

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#3105863 19-Jul-2023 09:22

I'll stick with my original advice: rather than faff around with whatever a teenage boy has done to the existing Windows install, re-install Windows 10.

Otherwise you could be poking and prodding at it for months without making progress. It's entirely possible one of his mates tried to help "optimise" his sytem by editing the registry willy nilly and you'll never work out what's thrown everything out of whack.

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#3109560 29-Jul-2023 14:14

Just an update for anyone interested...

My grandson freed up around 200 gigs of storage on C:. I then used Partition Magic to shrink the C: partition and create a new one (Z:). I moved Virtual Memory storage to Z: so that I had a separate partition dedicated to it.

The new issue is that a new Steam game - Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach - has been installed and regularly crashes. My grandson uses this as the latest pathway to PC. Google has been my friend - first suggestion is in Steam Properties for this game set a Launch option to -dx11. This apparently causes the game to use DirectX11 and the game is now playable. So we soldier on. It is to be noted that the PC exceeds CPU minimum (Intel I5-6600K) with an Intel I5-10400F, meets system memory recommended (16GB) and exceeds the recommended graphic card specs (GTX-1060TI) with a RTX-3060).

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Jase2985

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#3109576 29-Jul-2023 15:57

OldGeek:

Just an update for anyone interested...

My grandson freed up around 200 gigs of storage on C:. I then used Partition Magic to shrink the C: partition and create a new one (Z:). I moved Virtual Memory storage to Z: so that I had a separate partition dedicated to it.

Why?

OldGeek:

The new issue is that a new Steam game - Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach - has been installed and regularly crashes. My grandson uses this as the latest pathway to PC. Google has been my friend - first suggestion is in Steam Properties for this game set a Launch option to -dx11. This apparently causes the game to use DirectX11 and the game is now playable. So we soldier on. It is to be noted that the PC exceeds CPU minimum (Intel I5-6600K) with an Intel I5-10400F, meets system memory recommended (16GB) and exceeds the recommended graphic card specs (GTX-1060TI) with a RTX-3060).

ive had it happen with a game before never delved much into it just played something else. could be many thing s but unlikely to be the specs of the computer at fault.

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