desktop PC died. Any advice for building a PC for 4K playback instead of gaming?

[BusterD]

Hi guys,

Looks like either the motherboard or CPU in my old Win7 machine I built in 2012 has died: got a BSOD last night, seemed fine after rebooting but woke up to find the PC frozen with no video output, rebooted and it froze during POST after checking the hard drives, and now I get an endless boot cycle (2 seconds on with fans spinning and all 4 lights on the motherboard turn on, shutoff, repeat) before reaching POST.  Pretty sure it's not the PSU as that's only a few months old.  Even if its something fixable I think it's time to move on from this PC, as I've been having some other hardware problems lately.

So looks like time to build a new PC.  Guess I'll be going with Win10, was initially against upgrading from 7 due to software/hardware incompatibilty fears (and spyware, but I'm sure MS put the same crap from 10 into updates for 7), but I don't think there's anything I normally use that isn't compatible. Even the Win7 64-bit driver for the M-audio 2496 I got in 2005 for capturing PCM seems to be compatible with Win10 according to https://homerecording.com/bbs/general-di...-a-389994/

I know this isn't a PC forum, but curious as to what people here are using.  Probably not going to be doing any modern gaming my new PC, but quality 4K video playback might be nice.  My 5-year old Radeon video card as well as my laptop (also Radeon) from last year do 4K output, but the video either freezes or chokes on trying to play 4K77 or UHD .mpls files in fullscreen.  Also always got tearing when playing 1080p video on my desktop, but maybe that's because it was an old Intel motherboard paired with a Radeon video card?  Seem to remember hearing something a long time ago about tearing due to c

Probably won't be doing any major video editing, but would like have a motherboard/CPU that can last for at least 10 years if needed, but maybe I just need to dust the inside of the PC more often...

[deleted user]

I've been looking myself recently, though my own needs are a bit different to yours. I want something that's really small and passively cooled. Been waiting for the new AMD Ryzen 4000 APUs to come out for this reason, since its manufactured with 7nm technology and eats less power from what I understand. For 4K playback I believe you ideally have a hardware decoder, which often comes with GPUs, but I think Intel and AMD have some built-in into some of their CPUs or APUs. For NVIDIA this is called NVDEC, AMD is VCN, Intel is QuickSync afaik. You can look up online which codecs these support for which card/APU/CPU. In short I think any setup that has any of those hardware decoders should serve you well, since they tend to support HEVC and 4K these days, or even more.

Either way, the Ryzen 4000 has just come out, but I'm waiting a bit for more tests etc to come out. It's also rumored that in September Intel will come out with their new Tiger Lake CPUs, which I think is worth waiting for, if only to get cheaper prices on the old generation. With that said, the Tiger Like will be the first to have proper hardware fixes to some of the exploits that have been around like Spectre and Meltdown. Currently its mostly software fixes that can significantly slow down the CPU and it's also still the old 14nm architecture so I wouldn't buy Intel until at least Tiger Lake comes out, see if its gotten any better. Also profit from some energy savings perhaps.

Other than that, I'm really not an expert on a lot of what has changed in the last years, but some things I know of that came out and are worth looking into: M.2/NVME, Intel Optane, Thunderbolt,...

[Feallan]

The best motherboards for future upgrades are probably something based on X570 chipset. I have Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite and I'm happy with it. As for the CPU, your options are basically either Ryzen 3600 or 3700X, depending on how much you want to spend, anything more doesn't seem justifiable for your uses. If you're not going to play games, you can find any cheap GPU that has a H265 decoder (for Nvidia list is here https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encod...ort-matrix, too lazy to Google AMD too )

Keep in mind that new Ryzen CPUs are supposed to release in a couple of months

[deleted user]

Keep in mind that new Ryzen CPUs are supposed to release in a couple of months

The 4700G etc have already released a few days ago. But you're right, Zen 3 is just around the corner as well, forgot to mention.

Edit: Early benchmarks have shown that the 4700G is roughly on par with the 3700X, with losing out in only a few cases (presumably due to slightly lower cache).

[Feallan]

Yeah, I meant Zen 3. As far as I remember, Ryzen APUs have +1 on the first digit for no reason, so 4700G is actually Zen2. That CPU might actualy be a good choice for his use case

[deleted user]

Yep, they're still Zen 2, but still a decent choice depending on the use case maybe. We'll have to see when more tests come out. Exciting times.

[BusterD]

Ah, thank you both! Yeah, don't see a need to get the latest and greatest, but price reductions due to upcoming hardware might be nice. Don't want to wait too long, though.

[alleycat]

I second the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite, recently upgraded my machine and I went for this. It also supports PCIe 4.0 so in the future when they come down in price I'm going to get one of the new M2 drives for caching.

[ac3]

I have the aorus master I don't use a receiver I have a 7 channel emotiva Amp hooked to the on board audio. To a uhd30 4k pj and Dali Oberon 7s. So I've saved about a grand or two and still got a near top of the line dac.

[spoRv]

Yep, AMD is the best CPU now - price/power ratio; I'd take also in consideration the old 1900x or 1920x - you can get them for great price, still you need more expensive motherboards, but you will get more PCI-e lanes that could be useful in certain cases.

GPUs: yep again, AMD 5700 is enough, but I guess you can get enough quality even with the old RX580 8GB (or RX590 8GB if the price is similar); Nvidia 1070 should do, too.

SDD: almost mandatory for OS disk, SATA would do but fast NVME are much better.

You can read here about my actual system, maybe some useful info could apply: http://theresolver.sporv.com