PC replacement

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by ptah, May 12, 2022.

  1. Veteran_BetaTester PIZZA!

    You don't want $100 laptop. Old windows, needs thermal paste.. battery is dying.. yeah bad idea.

    I would suggest a laptop.
    I would suggest NVMe M.2 SSD.
    Normal SSD have speeds of READ 550, WRITE 550 'ish.
    NVMe M.2 SSD speeds are READ 3400, WRITE 3400 PCIe 3, or READ 7200, WRITE 7000 PCIe 4. BIG difference
    SSD is a micro chip on a motherboard. Same with NVMe. Old hard drives were 7200 rpm or 5400 rpm and a spining disc with needle reader .. like a record player. Spin up times etc.

    So SSD's are faster, NVMe M.2 SSD's are top of the line.
    they make a difference in the game from zoing to load times.. makes things snappier.

    16GB RAM is the standard requirement now days. you just need it for widows and such.

    512 GB hard drive size (above SSD or NVMe ) I would not do 256 GB it will fill up to soon.

    You CAN buy an Alienware from Dell Outlet for about $899. open box. all the above will most likely be standard.. last year intel or amd cpu with a 3050ti graphic card (for that price). I would try for a 3060 at least, but I know people (2)that play EQ and have no problems with there alienware laptop using the 3050ti card.

    I think Walmart has an MSI that has a 1660 Grapics Card in it, maybe 8gb ram (memory) .. you could buy another stick of ram for it 16gb total. It might also have 256 gb NVMe.

    so depends on your budget. I would NOT build a PC . or have a desktop anymore.
    too heavy, too expensive.

    I'm rambling.
  2. kizant Augur

    I've used dell outlet before too and it worked out well. The laptop is still working actually and it's been like 8 years or so. I think a lot of their stuff is also just previously leased laptop from businesses.
  3. Chikkin Augur

    a lot of good info in here, unfortunately in a forum for a computer game, where most of the people are somewhere late 30's to early 50's ... a lot of experts too. lol.

    There is almost "too much advice" out there for people when they are looking for computer builds/requirements/etc. ... well i mean if there is such a thing as too much advice.

    Edit: My degree is in IT, i've been building PCs, and helping friends pick their PCs, and built m own since the early EQ days where I couldnt afford much.

    My only contribution to this thread is that, even if it's not a direct-win for EQ1 which seems to be up for debate in this thread, I have never heard any one ever say "got a new SSD, worst purchase ever, it's so slow!" .. a bit of silliness, but SSDs were like so fricken amazing that they suddenly made computers faster and become more about speed and less about storage at one point. What a wonderful step forward in hard drive technology technology.

    With that, I've not built a PC in over 2 years, and the info quickly out dates itself, so I didn't step into the more recent and specific chat.

    Side note: Still a shame that both EQ1 and EQ2 are so Processor dependent and not GPU dependent ... age old gripe, especially in EQ2 since they guessed incorrectly which way the industry was going to go.
  4. Iven Antonius Bayle

    It does depend on the use case. For most games an old 2.5" SATA SSD should be ok but there can be a noticeable speed difference between an old 2.5" SSD and a new M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD which is nearly the same than magnetic harddisk vs SSD generation one. OS boot and shut down time, starting programs, copying files etc, where the bus speed and the serial data rate does matter. As M.2 SSDs are already often cheaper than 2.5" SSDs and do get promoted with more TBW the decision is easy. Just compare a 500 GB Samsung 980 PCIe 3.0 NVMe with a Crucial MX500.

    Samsung 980 PCIe 3.0 NVMe
    Capacity: 500 GB
    Form factor: M.2 (2280)
    Interface: PCIe 3.0 x4 ; NVME 1.4
    Cell design: MLC (V-Nand)
    Endurance: 300 TBW
    Guarantee: 5 years
    Read / Write: 3.500 MB/s / 3.000 MB/s

    Crucial MX500
    Capacity: 500 GB
    Form factor: 2.5"
    Interface: SATA
    Cell design: MLC (3D Nand)
    Endurance: 180 TBW
    Guarantee: 5 years
    Read / Write: 560 MB/s / 510 MB/s


    If you want a special system with the best custom components for your needs you have to build it by yourself. This is what I had to do and I also saved about 400 € doing so. It is a lot work which does start with researching for months, and building a computer system was much easier in the past as everything was less complex, but it is still worh it. A new airflow steel case does only weight half as much than an old massive steel case and the most other components do have less weight also so this is not really a big factor anymore. Laptops should be only used for mobility reasons imo as many components like the keyboard and LCD screen cannot be changed without high extra costs and are much to small. Laptops also do cost about double as much money at same performance.

    I am only wondering why the thread starter has not replied yet. This does remind me to those endless returning player threads in the newbie forum where returning players nearly never do reply anymore after receiving tons of informations which is just bad behavior.

    Chikkin likes this.
  5. Windance Augur

    There is a huge difference between benchmarked and real word performance with a specific application like Everquest.

    I did some extensive benchmarking different applications when I moved from SATA SSD to NVMe.

    I cloned my OS/data drive and ran before after tests for EQ, timing how long it took to load into the game, and then go from zone to zone.

    There was a measureable difference but it wasn't nearly as much as I was hoping.
    Moving from a 500 MB/s SATA drive to a 3000 MB/s NVMe did NOT cut the zone time by 6x. It was more like 60s loads dropped down to 55s loads.

    With that said ...

    If you're machine supports NVMe drives then you should absolutely go that route, but ... you aren't going to see the same kind of differences as moving from a hard drive to SSD.
    Cannikin likes this.
  6. Windance Augur

    Follow up for those who who are not as tech savvy.

    When looking at the differences between a hard drive and the different SSD flavors ( SATA vs NVMe ) there a couple different 'big picture' terms you want to understand.

    Latency: How long before the drive starts sending data.
    Transfer Rate: How much data can the drive deliver once the data is flowing.

    Getting actual measured latency is difficult. You really have to dig into detailed performance benchmarks. Here are some 'averages' as reported by doing a google search for "hard drive vs SSD difference in read latency".

    Hard drives:
    Latency: 4-7 ms
    Transfer Rate: ~ 100-200 MB/s

    SATA SSD:
    Latency: ~ 0.100 ms
    Transfer Rate: ~ 500-600 MB/s

    NVMe SSD:
    Latency: ~0.050 ms
    Transfer Rate: ~ 3000 MB/s

    Moving from a hard drive to the SATA SSD gives you a huge ~ 50x or ~100x for NVMe.

    This is why loading many applications feels much quicker.

    NOTE:

    Many of the drives do not perform nearly as well as they are reported in the benchmarks. In order to achieve those peek performances they have very specific workloads that hit the drives very hard. EQ is NOT one of those hit the drives hard type applications
  7. Wdor Thief, Assassin, Purveyor of Fine Poisons

    I play on a 13 year old refurbished Dell E6430 laptop. It has Windows 10, which I assume whoever did the refurb installed. It is 8gb with SSD. I can easily raid or two box via alt-tab, with no noticable lag. I paid $139 for it three years ago from an online site, which I can't remember now. As far as I can tell, comparable machines run about $300ish now. I know the OP prefers a desktop, but, I just replied for context.
    Metanis and Windance like this.
  8. Wdor Thief, Assassin, Purveyor of Fine Poisons

    Indeed a potato will run EQ just fine. But, with the recent 64bit upgrade, you will need a red skinned.
  9. I_Love_My_Bandwidth Mercslayer

    Mostly agreed.

    QLC SSD write endurance is fine for most people. Media consumption and gaming are mostly read-focused activities. Reads cause zero/negligible wear on SSDs. There are several white papers on the topic, here is an excerpt from Micron's excellent paper on HDD vs SSD endurance : "If you make drive purchase decisions based on rated endurance, we show that for many read-focused workloads, low endurance SSDs meet or exceed the DRWPD of some capacity-focused enterprise HDDs." Read-focused workloads on a modern QLC NAND-based SSD pose significantly lower drive failure risk than QLC NAND drives sold even a little as three years ago. In short, the once widely-held belief that QLC NAND-based SSDs are a poor choice for consumers is no longer true (if it ever really was).

    Another point (you may already know this but wanted to clarify) is that SATA SSD drives can be 2.5" or M.2 form factors.


    Nicely written!
  10. Iven Antonius Bayle

    From my own experience a SSD does not make EQ much faster at all, it is only a minor difference. I did run EQ from a very old and slow harddisk (5.400 rpm) some years ago after I installed it before it got moved to a SSD. The most noticeable difference is that the computer is much more silent when playing EQ from an SSD and that most SSDs do have a much higher lifespan than harddisks.
  11. KermittheFroglok Augur

    Clearly a lot of ideas have been thrown out there. It sounds like you want BASIC, very basic no frills, just something you can buy & setup that's reliable and can play EQ & Monster Hunter.

    A few have suggested building, DO NOT BUILD IF YOU JUST NEED BASIC. OEMS (e.g. HP or Dell) can get basic components way cheaper than us. Honestly, I'd just recommend you go with a bare bones, nothing sexy, HP Pavilion with a GTX 1650, on sale now for $500 when you actually go to the page & then click on the customize & buy option (it'll show $600 until you do).

    HP Pavilion Gaming Desktop TG01-1160xt| HP® Official Store.

    To give some context on pricing I just tried building something custom that's comparable on Micro Center's page & it came out to about $630. The 8gb or single channel ram really won't matter for either game, you'll probably get better performance from Monster Hunter with a couple sticks totaling16 gb but even their recommended spec is 8 gb, it really won't matter enough.

    Based off your post I think the most practical solution is probably an OEM prebuild, meaning all this silly talk of which type of SSD to use becomes moot because Dell & HP generally only offer NVMe options for their pre-builds' boot drives because they can manufacture the PCs with NVME drives quicker than any SATA option. (Given you pretty much just have to insert & screw the NVMe drive in while SATA drives need to be screwed into a cage and plugged into power/data cables, 30 seconds versus 180 seconds adds up quick on a production line.)

    So ptah, to save you some time. If you want basic, and have $500, I'd suggest looking at an OEM like HP or Dell and pick their bare bones pre-build that has a modern discrete graphics card. You'll be fine given how low the recommended requirements are on EQ and Monster Hunter.

    I love how this thread turned into all us computer nerds over complicating the solution. o_O
    Windance and Metanis like this.
  12. Iven Antonius Bayle

    This thread is not about ptah anymore because he/she/it decided to ignore us or cannot access the forums. Giving the thread starter advices is like /tth and the thread turned into a strawman discussion with fictional assumptions which is grotesque. But there should be other readers who can learn from it.
  13. Whulfgar Augur

    What I just got two of. Recently..

    Intel core I9 12900k (processor)
    32 gig dominator platinum ddr5 4800 Mhz (memory)
    Z690 ddr5 (motherboard)
    GeForce rtx 3090ti (graphics card)
    2 tb M.2 Nvme SSD (storage)
    Corsair 850 watt 80+ gold fully modular (power supply)

    And I absolutely love them.
    Metanis likes this.
  14. Nennius Curmudgeon

    Personal question. What was the cost?
  15. Whulfgar Augur

    Think like 4500ish cash per.
  16. Whulfgar Augur

    Can't honestly remember off top of my head heh .
  17. Chikkin Augur

    I fell out of my chair and then looked back and saw "what I recently bought 2 of" and was like "oh... 2 of'em... whew!"
  18. Whulfgar Augur

    Funny story.. was talking talking buddy of mine in reckless I got them he didn't believe me.. I literally just took a picture wittem.. an posted it in discord so he couldn't say I just Google a pic.. bwhahaahahaha
    Chikkin likes this.
  19. CazRaX Elder

    I've bought many laptops from eBay, just check the seller rating and you should be good. You generally will want to buy a cheap SSD (120GB cost less than $20 now, it also is not an option, you WILL WANT one) and maybe more RAM for them but other than that they are fine.
    Metanis likes this.
  20. CazRaX Elder

    Old myth and was never real (only mattered when SLI and CrossFire was a thing and not for single GPU configs), any GPU will work just fine with any CPU, the only time it matters is if you bottleneck the CPU or GPU by not matching tiers not companies. Basically do not match a RTX 3080 with an i3 CPU or match a Ryzen 9 5950X with a GTX 1050. It's not a bad idea to get the most GPU you can afford and upgrade your CPU later but do not just get a bottom basement CPU, go for a mid tier one.