Our desktop was getting a little old and since I was retiring I didn't want to deal with any of the changes that my employer had made to it anymore. So I put a new PC together last week. I mainly use it for photo editing but now that I'm retired I'll probably have time to play a game occasionally too. I specifically chose components that should make Lightroom and Topaz AI run faster.
- Intel Core Ultra 7 265KF
- ASUS PRIME Z890-P WIFI
- Patriot Memory Viper Venom 64GB (2 x 32GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6400 (PC5 51200)
- Corsair MP700 PRO SE M.2 2280 4TB PCI-Express 5.0 SSD
- WD Blue 8TB Desktop Hard Disk Drive (exclusively for backups)
- GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4060 Ti EAGLE OC 8G
- be quiet! DARK ROCK 5 CPU Cooler
- CORSAIR CX-M Series CX650M 650W PSU from my previous build
- Corsair Carbide Series 100R Silent Edition case from my previous build
I spent about an hour removing the old components and cleaning all of the dust ( soooo much dust!!!!) out of the case. It took another hour or so to install the new ones. It fired right up and I got Windows 11 installed fairly quickly. Then I spent about 3 hours installing programs and moving our files off the old drives. I had about 1TB of pictures on a platter drive. It was excruciatingly slow to move all of that over.
Once that was done the real fun began. Intel says that these new processors support up to DDR5 6400 MT/s. When I checked the BIOS the memory was only running at 4000MT/s. The new(ish) thing with memory is included overclocking profiles (XMP) that have to be enabled in the BIOS. I turned the XMP profile on and the machine wouldn't boot. WTF??? Oh yeah, the other new thing since I last built a PC is a QVL (Qualified Vendor List) from the motherboard manufacturers. Of course the Patriot memory wasn't on ASUS QVL. Berkeley! Apparently I bought the wrong hammer. I looked at the QVL and picked the fastest memory on the list:
- G.SKILL Trident Z5 Series (Intel XMP 3.0) DDR5 RAM 48GB (2x24GB) 8400MT/s.
That'll do! It's pretty freakin' expensive but it should be twice as fast as the Patriot once I get XMP enabled. Amazon had it in stock and it should be here today. Luckily Newegg will let you return used components.
I ran some tests on the machine and basically everything other than the ram is 3x faster than my old setup. I'll have to buy a new game to really test it to its limits though, right?
