With Windows 10 EOL fast approaching, i think it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade the PC and put the i7-7700k out to pasture. I've been doing some digging, and the most popular suggestion seems to be the Ryzen 5 7600 with a B650 mobo that would allow for and upgrade to an 8000/9000 cpu in the future.

OR

I've been poking around over on the Intel side, looking at the i5-12600k and pair it with a B760 motherboard to leave the door open to upgrade to a 13th or 14th gen. The Intel seems to be a little cheaper and have a little more horsepower than the 7600, but it consumes a lot more power.

I don't know, the CPU market is pretty overwhelming. Which do you prefer? Any others i should be looking at in the sub-$200 range?

Go with the Intel 12600…AMD isn't even close. Power is not an issue these days

OldArmy07 said:

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7800x3d is still the best bang for your buck gaming chip based on benchmarks.

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My gaming needs are pretty light, this seems WAY overkill for me. It also appears to be ~$400, which is about double what i was looking to spend..

If you live near a microcenter (Houston/Dallas) they have the 7600x with motherboard and 16 gigs of ram for $300, pretty good start to a solid system if you ask me.

That would be great, but unfortunately i do not.

You mentioned your gaming needs are pretty light... Are they so light you could get by with one of the AMD APUs (CPUs with onboard graphics, the chipa that end in G). Assuming you mostly play older or casually play e-sport titles that might be another way to save some money to put more money towards the things you would get more value out out of (I e. Bigger monitor, larger SSD or more ram)

Noted. How often are you realistically planning on upgrading? If not every 3 years or so, I'd say don't worry about the upgrade path of a chipset. Buy the value now (even if last-gen chipset) and upgrade the whole thing again in 5 years. You'll come out ahead.

Even at the high end, CPU just isn't as important for most workloads as it was in the past. I went several years with a 5700x before I put in a 7800x3d and barely notice the improvement (a few FPS in games, at most).

Something like this will do well for years, assuming you have a GPU to pair it with.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/ChmZhk

The last time i upgraded anything was around 2018-19. I bought the i7-7700k used around that time. It was the beefiest cpu that my current mobo supports. So i'm definitely not upgrading very often.

And i'm still just chugging along with my GTX 1060 6gb..

boy09 said:

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The last time i upgraded anything was around 2018-19. I bought the i7-7700k used around that time. It was the beefiest cpu that my current mobo supports. So i'm definitely not upgrading very often.

And i'm still just chugging along with my GTX 1060 6gb..

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The 1060 is probably still better than current state g processors. I know the amd 6xxxg series i set my friend up with was equivalent to a 1030 at the time.

If you can swing it, try to get an AM5 processor/mobo combo for platform longevity. There should be plenty of combo deals on newegg or similar leading up to and during black Friday and even lots of prebuilts.

1060 trades blows with the 8600g but since it's been around so long some games are heavily optimized for the 1060 and it still wins on some cases. That said if I already owned a 1060 I'd probably stick with it and avoid an APU.

boy09 said:

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With Windows 10 EOL fast approaching, i think it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade the PC and put the i7-7700k out to pasture. I've been doing some digging, and the most popular suggestion seems to be the Ryzen 5 7600 with a B650 mobo that would allow for and upgrade to an 8000/9000 cpu in the future.

OR

I've been poking around over on the Intel side, looking at the i5-12600k and pair it with a B760 motherboard to leave the door open to upgrade to a 13th or 14th gen. The Intel seems to be a little cheaper and have a little more horsepower than the 7600, but it consumes a lot more power.

I don't know, the CPU market is pretty overwhelming. Which do you prefer? Any others i should be looking at in the sub-$200 range?

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This is a fantastic deal if you are able to buy. Its basically black friday prices for the deal.
https://slickdeals.net/f/17747688-intel-core-i7-12700k-cpu-gigabyte-b760m-mb-16gb-t-force-vulcan-z-ram-260-free-shipping-w-assassin-s-creed-shadows-pcdd

Out of stock…

That stinks. Hopefully more will popup soon like it. You can set alerts up on that slickdeals site based on keywords to get notified as soon as one is posted.

I check Slickdeals pretty regularly. That was a frontpage deal, not sure how i missed it.

This is not the answer that you are looking for, but Microsoft will allow you to pay for security updates for 3 years. Consumer pricing is not yet available, but you may be able to kick the can down road a bit so you can decide all the details of your new build

Oh, i don't really care about W10 EOL, i would just keep using it. But that seemed like a good excuse to upgrade my PC.

Yea, that sentiment is shared with like 90% of active W10 users i bet lol. I sure as hell ain't moving to 11 on my main desktop.

I have W11 at work and it seems fine. Is there a reason why you dislike W11 so much? Maybe it's something should consider. I have 2 laptops that I will need to figure out in the next year or so.

Bobcat-Ag said:

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I have W11 at work and it seems fine. Is there a reason why you dislike W11 so much? Maybe it's something should consider. I have 2 laptops that I will need to figure out in the next year or so.

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• A lot of people don't like the hardware requirements and that you can't install it on older hardware.
• They don't like the it sends telemetry data back to Microsoft.
• You have to use a Microsoft account to set up a new computer, can't use a local account (this is my biggest gripe. You can still switch to a local account after setup, but it's still annoying. None of the workarounds for skipping Microsoft account login during setup have ever worked for me).
• I also hate the new Start menu.
• A lot of people complain that it is just unnecessarily slow, in general

I'm sure there's more. None of these are big enough deal-breakers for me to cling onto W10 past end-of-life.

In addition to the above, I can't think of a single thing W11 has improved or added that make it worthwhile. They removed more features that people actually liked, biggest ones being in the start menu, setting explorer and taskbar. Windows 11 is another microsuck stinker of an os just like ME was.

https://slickdeals.net/f/17763522-amd-ryzen-7-5700x3d-8-core-cpu-1tb-kingston-nv2-m-2-2280-gen4-ssd-209-more-free-shipping?src=frontpage_recombee&prop=rcmid-e1ab92eececbf0ecf3015b4172191af1

Decent components.

I ended up jumping on this Newegg combo a couple weeks ago.

Finally got everything put together, and now i'm having hell getting it to POST. I've checked all the cables i can, reset CMOS, checked the CMOS battery, tried every combination of RAM in every slot on the mb, tried outputting from the onboard graphics and from the GPU, everything i can think of short of taking off the cpu cooler and pulling the cpu to see if there's any obvious problems there. It all looked good when it went together though.

I was able to flash the BIOS via Q-Flash Plus, still nothing. The system fans, cpu fan, and gpu fan (when it's installed all spin up when turned on, the rgb on the ram comes on, some other misc rgb LEDs come on, but no video output of any kind. I also connected a speaker to the motherboard and i am getting no beeps when i power on..

Is there anything glaringly obvious that im missing before i pull all my hair out?

It is possible to use autounattend scripts to use local accounts when building new PC's (and probably remove some, but I doubt all, of the telemetry). Use Rufus to build your Win11 media and add the autounattend to the bootable USB drive.

https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall?tab=readme-ov-file
https://github.com/memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall/blob/main/IoT-LTSC-Like/autounattend.xml

Or alternative build your own:
https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator/

This is very cool. I will definitely be using this.


Also, i figured out my POST problem. Long story short, everything works and i'm just a huge dumba$$. Pro tip: Double check that you are plugging the correct HDMI cable into your motherboard... Preferably one that is actually connected to your monitor..

And i only figured this out after pulling the whole PC apart. So now i get to put it all back together again.

boy09 said:

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Bobcat-Ag said:

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I have W11 at work and it seems fine. Is there a reason why you dislike W11 so much? Maybe it's something should consider. I have 2 laptops that I will need to figure out in the next year or so.

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• A lot of people don't like the hardware requirements and that you can't install it on older hardware.
• They don't like the it sends telemetry data back to Microsoft.
• You have to use a Microsoft account to set up a new computer, can't use a local account (this is my biggest gripe. You can still switch to a local account after setup, but it's still annoying. None of the workarounds for skipping Microsoft account login during setup have ever worked for me).
• I also hate the new Start menu.
• A lot of people complain that it is just unnecessarily slow, in general

I'm sure there's more. None of these are big enough deal-breakers for me to cling onto W10 past end-of-life.

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If you're installing Pro, when you get to the point where it asking you to do the Microsoft account you can choose "Work or School Account" and then "Domain Join Instead". Then it will allow you to set up a local account.