PC Setups

[blackjacksike (Weird FNAF cat)]

@Deathwake

play games and, say, listen to a youtube video at the same time

But why would any woman wanna do that!?

—Jim Carrey

Not speaking of women specifically, I’m talking about any PC user, but the quote was quite fitting, lol.

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

Listening to music while gaming is a thing…

[blackjacksike (Weird FNAF cat)]

Oh, that makes sense… OR DOES IT!?

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

Yeah, I don’t know why you would do that for a game with an OST as much of a banger as Undertale or MOTHER, but it’s good for many games. KSP, while super fun, has mostly royalty-free music, so I can see why you would play your own music.

[blackjacksike (Weird FNAF cat)]

But you could just use the Steam Overlay for web browsing music videos.

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

Huh, didn’t know that existed.

[hhyyrylainen]

I’d say that mos of the time 128 GB is pretty much unnecessary. I could get by with 64 as usually my RAM usage is about 32-40 GB but when I’m doing some compiling or other work that often spikes to roughly 50 GB. So theoretically I could get by with 64 GB of RAM, but very often my usage would spike to up to 90% and that would make me worry that I’d need to manage my RAM carefully. Now with 128 GB I just never have to think about it. For example if I run some buggy program that needs to allocate 20 GB RAM to get its job done, go ahead I have enough headroom.

The only times I’ve seen my RAM usage go above 64 GB has been a silly thing on my part like some buggy program eating all available RAM and then crashing (as it was so bugged that it basically would have needed infinite RAM) or recently I was testing various AI models and I accidentally forgot I had them cached in RAM so I was using 96 GB of RAM and I didn’t notice any problems on my computer. So that’s the kind of power 128 GB give: you don’t have to worry about RAM whatsoever. I did eventually notice that massive RAM hog and turned it off just in case I needed those 30 GB of RAM for something else. If I had less memory my computer likely would have started to lag and experience other issues so I would have had to figure out what’s going on and free up RAM before I could have continued using my computer.

@Deathwake

112 GB last I heard, which was in 2019 (I recall in another thread he might’ve said 128 GB more recently)

Yes, I’ve had 128 GB RAM on two of my latest computers now. I upgraded that 112 GB computer to 128 GB as it was pretty cheap to get a 64 GB kit to swap out my smallest RAM sticks.

@aah31415

I suppose that’s needed for running Thrive and stuff well.

Running Thrive is like the least RAM intensive thing I do. It takes only a bit over 1 GB of RAM to run Thrive. I’ve even configured my IDE to use up to like 5 GB (which I only need as I have multiple C# projects open at once).

@blackjacksike

But you could just use the Steam Overlay for web browsing music videos.

Steam Overlay is just Chromium embedded. So it uses as much memory as Chrome for displaying a single page. Though of course you usually don’t have dozens of tabs open in Steam Overlay so it consumes less total RAM.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

@hhyyrylainen

Running Thrive is like the least RAM intensive thing I do. It takes only a bit over 1 GB of RAM to run Thrive. I’ve even configured my IDE to use up to like 5 GB (which I only need as I have multiple C# projects open at once).

How much RAM do you think will the most RAM-intensive sections of Thrive (once it’s “complete”) consume?

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

Looks like my i5 12600KF is on sale!

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

So how much money do you have left until the limit now?

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

$40 is what I have left, it’s still not comfortable but it can leave some wiggle room.

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

What is the comfortable amount?

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

Around 75$ I’d say. Hopefully no random price increases happen…

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I suppose that is why the buffer must exist.

[Deathwake (i nuked zenzone and will never let him forget it)]

@hhyyrylainen

So that’s the kind of power 128 GB give: you don’t have to worry about RAM whatsoever.

Huh, I suppose that makes sense. I do “run out” of ram when I compile, say, an entire browser (which is a bad idea but librewolf-bin was giving me issues and I like the AUR so…) or try out an AI model, but yk linux isn’t stupid and I have a 32 GB swap partition last I checked, so I can still use my computer, but if I also have 50 tabs of firefox youtube stops buffering and my jellyfin server slows way the hell down and I’m sure the thing would compile faster if I (had a better CPU) had enough RAM it could just load stuff whenever instead of waiting for things to finish. I usually don’t go above like 25-30 GB of real usage, so I don’t think I will upgrade this PC (maybe when AM6 comes out I’ll jump over and get 128 GB) because that kind of margin just feels like overkill. 64 is enough I can do literally anything, even if it’s the only thing I can do (for example my wimpy little laptop will crash KDE if I try to compile librewolf from the AUR without mapping /tmp to disk and closing all my other programs). The actual solution would seem to be getting a server so I can restart my computer more and offload irritating baseload tasks to it, which I do plan to do but I dunno any good places for used servers nearby (except my school but even though I work with the IT people and they all like me, they won’t give me any servers :<).

@blackjacksike

But why would any woman wanna do that!?

Playing a game without a really good soundtrack or highly immersive sound design with no background sounds is deeply irritating and understimulating. If you list alternatives to having a browser with youtube, they go something like this:

• spotify: electron, it’s just a broswer in a funny outfit
• soundcloud or amazon music: it’s a website like youtube
• steam overlay: it’s chromium in a funny outfit
• discord call with a friend: electron, it’s just a browser with a funny outfit
• watch some TV: doing that on a PC implies either going to a website or downloading a belgium-y electron app or doing either AND hosting a jellyfin server (or something else but I do use jellyfin)
• use a native media player to watch or listen to something: does work, VLC is pretty good, but: issue here, you have all these files, but they’re stuck on your PC. If you have a lot of TV or even music, you might watch to watch those on your phone/tablet, which might use up a whole SD card and be hell synchronizing, or on a TV, which has no storage and no way to synchronize it. You might as well host it on Jellyfin or Plex or smth, but that’s plenty resource intensive, about matching a browser with caching on.

point being, almost all PC users will want to have enough RAM and such for background browser tasks (one unoptimized/intensive program), unless they’re playing a super realistic game (which hogs EXTRA resources), or playing an indie so small a 12 GB laptop could run a browser too (do that many mid-high performance games have good music? I think not, it’s basically just nier and, idk, uh, dyson sphere simulator?) Anyhow, you should have at least 24 GB imo, which I’d like to upgrade my laptop too, but I also don’t want to put any work into it bc the screen is barely functional and the touchpad sucks and I bet the battery wants to start bulging soon.

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

I just saw some items went off sale… $20 below budget…
I changed the motherboard to be $60 below budget: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/KqJMKq
Edit: NVM I’m stupid, $40 below budget

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

How much RAM do supercomputers have?

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

At least 10 hh PCs worth of RAM!

[aah31415 (The maker of SitF, Radiostrocity, The Lifenote and TGBing; The Second Ascended...; And just maybe a security warning come alive...?)]

I think way more they got…

[JustaDumbThriver (Thrive is the only environment where I am not too lazy to capitalize)]

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LMYdwY
I decided to use the A580 GPU, because it has more GHz of speed and more VRAM at a lower price than a 1660. Apparently it consumes more power though… What power amount would you recommend for the build?