Might buy half a computer - Ryzen 5600X - tell me not to

[Zetetic]

Got a PC. Thinking about a swapping out half the guts.

Current		Planned
Intel Core i5-4570		AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
MSI B85-G41		MSI B550-A PRO
16GB (2x8GB)		32GB (2x16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3000)
Fractal Define R4		Same
AMD Radeon RX480 (8GB)		Same
3 SATA SSDs (2TB, 1TB, 0.25TB)		Same
OCZ ZT 550W Power Supply		Same
2560x1440 Display		Same

Don't need motherboard Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

I think that single-thread CPU stuff should be about 50% faster and stuff that scales to 6 cores should be about 4x faster.

Mostly think I'm considering this so I can run OpenTripPlanner queries across Wales and the West Midlands quicker, which I'm not sure justifies the cost. I'd probably be more prepared to do other hobby-analyst stuff on it than with my current setup (which is no better than the £100 10-year old laptop that I'm typing this on) as well, but still.

Not sure that this will actually do anything for the few games where my current setup is just touching my (extremely high) tolerance for low frame rates  - I'm guessing that this is mostly my RX480 struggling with 2560x1440? Similarly I'm guessing this CPU change won't actually make much difference if I decide to buy a VR headset? I'd love to be told otherwise.

Would this stand a GPU or upgrade or two in the next decade, probably?

Will I discover a bunch of minor irritations with the motherboard or getting Windows to reactivate or anything like that?

Is there any reason to believe this will be less stable than my current setup?

Why is this a bad idea?

[seepage]

Why not spend a bit more on a new case + power supply + small m.2 NVMe drive to build the new PC in? Then you can keep your current PC as a spare and have something to fall back on if the new build goes wrong. An m.2 NVMe will be faster than your current SATA drive too. The i5-4570 has integrated GPU so you can still put your graphics card in the new PC. Also with such a big change from Intel to AMD you would probably have to reinstall Windows rather than just reactivate it.

[Zetetic]

Why not spend a bit more on a new case + power supply + small m.2 NVMe drive to build the new PC in?

This is pretty much the opposite of the point of this thread, and unfortunately it seems like it might be a a good idea. Off to find out what "a bit more" entails.

Also with such a big change from Intel to AMD you would probably have to reinstall Windows rather than just reactivate it.

What the fuck.

[Zetetic]

Getting on for £300 more with a 1TB M2 drive and another Fractal Define case.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Reckon you could buy a shit case and a small SSD (you seem to have storage on main machine so can punt files across I assume) for way cheaper than that and it'd make the 'spare' hardware eminently more useful than it is sat on a shelf as e-waste in waiting.

Although for opentripplanner and processing data sets in a 'hobby analyist' capacity (you probably know what I'm going to say here) ... that sounds like something you can rent off of aws in an ad-hoc capacity, which I'd recommend at least trying if you haven't rather than building a new machine.

[Endicott]

DON'T DO IT ZET!

[Zetetic]

Reckon you could buy a shit case and a small SSD (you seem to have storage on main machine so can punt files across I assume) for way cheaper than that and it'd make the 'spare' hardware eminently more useful than it is sat on a shelf as e-waste in waiting.

Although at that point I'm still ripping everything out of my Define R4 to build the new machine.

Although for opentripplanner and processing data sets in a 'hobby analyist' capacity (you probably know what I'm going to say here) ... that sounds like something you can rent off of aws in an ad-hoc capacity, which I'd recommend at least trying if you haven't rather than building a new machine.

I have to admit that's good idea, for OpenTripPlanner in particular, since this is very dockerisable and I'd just be making API calls from another machine.

Think I do need to try this. Any tips on not fucking myself cost-wise would be much appreciated.

[Sebastian Cobb]

I'm not sure exactly what the requirements are and whether you need a gpu but they do have some pretty exhaustive documentation and tables to figure out what you need.

Irrespective of how much grunt you decide you need, the best thing you can do to avoid a nasty surprise is set up a 'cloudwatch' alert to warn you when its uptime exceeds a certain amount so you don't forget to turn it off, you can then set it up with their 'simple notification service' to email or sms you about it (or perhaps when its been idling for a while).

[Zetetic]

Cheers.

I think I've already got a spend alert setup (because I already use Route53[nb]Shamefully. Part of this is that I don't really want to give any money to AWS. Trying to decide if Azure or Google Cloud is any more ethically tolerable.[/nb])...

[Sebastian Cobb]

I think they're ethically-speaking much of a muchness. AWS seems to have some interesting features and tools I will probably never use, and Azure seems to have a more consistent UI.

There are ethical/green cloud services but they're usually quite generic vps/docker hosting services from what I can tell. Also people do seem to offer specific AWS-compatable services but on an individual basis, e.g. Wasabi (and others) offering api/code compatible S3 equivalents.

[Old Thrashbarg]

Depending on how many trips you intend to plan, you might not even reach the payment threshold for many/most/all of the AWS services you use. So that's nice, in terms of not giving anything directly to Amazon. Apart from a piece of your soul.

[Zetetic]

Somewhere between 3 and 30 million, I'd guess.[nb]It's probably possible to reduce the size of what I'm trying to do by thinking harder, but I'd rather not.[/nb]

And they'll be multi-modal.

[Sebastian Cobb]

Depending on how many trips you intend to plan, you might not even reach the payment threshold for many/most/all of the AWS services you use. So that's nice, in terms of not giving anything directly to Amazon. Apart from a piece of your soul.

Yep. I really like lambda for this, and with tools like Zappa you can deploy a whole rest api in one and api gateway just spins it up and scales it out if needed.

I like some of the slightly hacky things you can do as a nice trick to avoid paying for a proper database too, for instance using s3 as a key:value or key:json store... you can also mount efs and chuck a sqllite db on there.

Obviously none of this is strictly good practice or would work at scale, but it's nice as a trick and for small stuff.

[seepage]

Getting on for £300 more with a 1TB M2 drive and another Fractal Define case.

I was thinking Define C Compact (£70 or plenty of adequate cases <= £50) + 500GB WD blue (£45) and move over your 2 existing SSDs that don't have windows on + psu (£75?) = £190.
Don't know if the AMD stock CPU cooler is any better than the Intel one?

[Sebastian Cobb]

Somewhere between 3 and 30 million, I'd guess.[nb]It's probably possible to reduce the size of what I'm trying to do by thinking harder, but I'd rather not.[/nb]

And they'll be multi-modal.

That's the spirit, why think when you can scale up and out?

Another way to get good discounts is by booking 'spot' instances. These use spare capacity and are much cheaper but might not be 'guaranteed'. You can choose what happens, so if you're doing something stateful it can just suspend rather than terminate the machine (which is fine for something like a restful service with redundant instances).

Don't do what a skinflint colleague did and set the bastion server up on one though.

[Zetetic]

'Spot' instances are a good shout, particularly once I've got a transport graph built.

[Zetetic]

That's the spirit, why think when you can scale up and out?

Think I might have been a bit optimistic.

Each trip request takes a little bit less than 2 seconds, but I can do 16 at once. Might be able to improve this a bit by deleting Birmingham or something but I doubt it'll be enough.

Naive approach would maybe take a month, which takes me into hundreds of pounds territory.

[aunt mildred]

Hello all I'm a long time lurker, it's not a sock account, I'm a newbie so be kind (unless I start acting like an arsehole - not going to happen).

In response to the original post. DO IT.

I did the same just before lockdown and don't regret it one bit (prices were a lot better then though). I went from an old amd fx 6 core to a ryzen 3600 6 core and the difference is night and day.

5600x prices are reasonable now, the 5800x is still overpriced so I would go with the 5600x and you can upgrade later. Ryzens are great processors and you can upgrade to a 12/16 core part later. I'm planning on an upgrade to a 5800x or better when prices come down.

I wouldn't get the 2x16GB Crucial Ballistix DDR4-3000 memory, I would be looking at 2x16GB DDR4-3600 CL16 or better memory, the reason being Ryzens love fast memory and 3600 is the sweet spot for a 1:1 ratio to the infinity fabric. You want 3600 CL16 or CL15 imho.

You may get a few extra frames on games but I think it's the RX480 holding you back here, I would drop the resolution down to 1080p with that card personally.

Would this stand a GPU or upgrade or two in the next decade, probably?

Yes

Will I discover a bunch of minor irritations with the motherboard or getting Windows to reactivate or anything like that?

If you create an online windows account in windows 10 with your current setup there's an option to connect the windows license to the online account so when you sign in with your new hardware it should activate. You can then go back to an offline account if you wish.


Is there any reason to believe this will be less stable than my current setup?

Not really, some people have had usb issues with some motherboards but I think that's all fixed with the new BIOS, I've had no issues but I'm using a X470 motherboard.


Why is this a bad idea?

It's not and you would probably get £100 plus for your current parts on ebay if you sell them as a cpu/ram/mobo combination, if you don't want to keep them.

I would also consider getting a nvme drive for the OS, with a B550 mobo you can get an extremely fast PCI 4 drive like the wd black sn850 (512GB about £120 so expensive), I'm using a PCI 3 wd black sn750 (512GB about £60 but half the speed). I don't think you'd notice the difference between them in real terms but you do notice the difference between a standard sata ssd and a nvme.

[Zetetic]

Cheers (and welcome) mildred. Will painfully consider what you've written.

A complication is that the Great British Taxpayer is now probably going to pay directly for the computing I need for the travel time analysis[nb]Think I've found some reserved Azure time lacking a use.[/nb], so I don't have that excuse.

[Wilbur]

Bit late to the party here but I also have just done similar.

Old i7 to AMD 5600X with new memory and power supply mainly as the old board was getting a little flakey and its my work machine and I need it to be reliable.

No major issues, it failed to activate but an old Windows 7 pro key sorted that out. Couple of programs have blue screened and needed re-installing but mainly plain sailing.

W

[aunt mildred]

Cheers (and welcome) mildred. Will painfully consider what you've written.

A complication is that the Great British Taxpayer is now probably going to pay directly for the computing I need for the travel time analysis[nb]Think I've found some reserved Azure time lacking a use.[/nb], so I don't have that excuse.

Fair enough, it's still a nice upgrade if you're feeling flush.

There's some potentially good news for you re: framerates, AMD are bringing out their version of NVidia's DLSS at the end of this month (I think) and it should work on your RX480. I've no idea if it will look like crap or not but you should get a decent framerate bump. We all know it's impossible to buy a graphics card now so hopefully it works well to bring older cards back to life.

[mobias]

I upgraded from an i7 7700 to a 5600X earlier this year. Very pleased with it. Reinstalling windows and starting again from scratch is highly recommended when switching processor brand.

The 5600X is a great processor. Fantastic bang for buck. I know some people say 6 cores are going to get old fast but you can always upgrade to a 5800X later if you really need to.

[Zetetic]

Didn't bother doing this. Discovered this, which makes R5 much more accessible (in case somehow someone comes across this thread for a relevant reason).

Still a bit want to do this. Might see what happens with prices after some of the AMD socket stuff plays out.

[aunt mildred]

I'd wait a while too, intel is releasing their new big little cpu in two weeks and early leaks suggest it's good. AMD will also be releasing zen3+ early next year with it's fancy new cache (like they've done on their memory bandwidth limited gpus) which is supposed to work well too.

If you're waiting for AMD's new socket and zen4 that will be later next year but you will probably need DDR5 RAM and that's going to be pricey for a couple of years (there's a good chance that some early mobos will be capable of using DDR4 or DDR5 though). But you could end up waiting forever because there's always something new around the corner. Personally I would wait until zen3+ comes out and see how it compares to intel alder lake.

[Steve Lampkins]

I recently did my big upgrade -- even with the new gear around the corner -- and I couldn't be happier. There is always something new around the corner, so you end up waiting forever. My upgrade was basically for the upcoming BF game, and the new stuff is going to be a big unknown quantity regarding availability and prices. My last build lasted me a decade (with a couple of GPU upgrades along the way) because I went a bit overkill on the build. So this build was also a bit of a splurge: AMD 5900X on a decent x570 motherboard, with 32GB 3600MHz RAM, a 3080, and a couple of fast NVME hard drives.

[aunt mildred]

No 5950X? haha just kidding. Nice build, not sure how you managed to get that 3080 though.

[Steve Lampkins]

No 5950X? haha just kidding. Nice build, not sure how you managed to get that 3080 though.

Small shop local to me -- you'd better believe my full build order went in immediately when it popped up. 1150 euros, but I had already come to terms with that, fortunately... Amazing what this drought does to your sense of perspective. :D

[seepage]

Went from an i7 4790K to an i5-11600K recently. No overclock apart from enabling XMP. No noticeable speed improvement apart from much faster start-up but that seems to be down to the Z590 BIOS taking less time to poll the hard drives.