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Greetings. It's been a while since I built my 2600K system in 2011. On a $800 budget to rebuild the guts, this is what I've come up with:

ASUS Prime Z390-P LGA 1151 (300 Series)
Intel Core i7-9700K
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600)
SAMSUNG 970 EVO PLUS 500GB

I'll keep my old GTX 960 until I can throw more $ into a graphics card.

I've had an ASUS P8Z68-V GEN3 overclocked for 9 years, so stayed with ASUS, but really. I'm out of touch. Any non-obvious to me bad choices?

--Thanks

Are you absolutely sure you want to be stuck with a CPU that does not support AVX-512? Just wait a little longer and you could be the proud owner of a 10nm desktop CPU with a revamped architecture instead of an iterative rehash of 7th Gen Kaby Lake.

What do you intend to do with your new PC? In what ways is your overclocked Core i7-2600K not meeting your needs?

Intel's 10nm on the desktop is still disappointingly far away.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

What do you intend to do with your new PC? In what ways is your overclocked Core i7-2600K not meeting your needs?

Intel's 10nm on the desktop is still disappointingly far away.

FreeTibet, that last question is perhaps the most important one. Not only should AMD be granted consideration, if there's no particular reason to upgrade immediately, perhaps waiting for AMD 4700X or the like may be the way to go for you.

As a side note, with your budget, I'd get a better heatsink than the Cooler Master 212 i.e. a good 6 heatpipe heatsink.

FreeTibet wrote:

I've had an ASUS P8Z68-V GEN3 overclocked for 9 years

9 years? Overclocked to what speed? Did you ever have to downclock to maintain stability? Does your overclocked system exhibit any signs of wonkiness?

Thanks everyone.

The ASUS/2700K has been stable always from WIN 7 into WIN 10 daily from 2011 until the present. It's overclocked by the motherboard to 3.4 to 4.3 (I think).

Sometimes I work with a 800 page WORD doc with both Tibetan and English. Eventually this will be split into 8 books. At the beginning stage I add many footnotes identifying cited books and filling in the quotes. It's much faster to do this across what will be many books. So here's the problem. If I add a footnote at say page 600 it will take a full minute to re-paginate. This lag is what I want to avoid.

Thanks again to all.

You probably did that already but it doesn't hurt to mention: do check if Word can use many threads at all for background tasks like pagination. Is the processor at full load (or close to full load) while it keeps you waiting?

You would be building a system nearly identical to mine, so I can't say any of those choices are poor. I don't particularly care for the flimsy X-shaped mounting bracket on the 212 EVO (the less expensive 212 LED uses screws instead), but that's about it.

Without knowing more about the older system, it's hard to gauge how much of an improvement you might see. If you're not RAM or storage limited (for instance, using a mechanical hard drive), and the 1-minute delay is purely a result of CPU processing power, Microsoft Word may not necessarily show much benefit from the extra CPU cores. Someone who does more work in Word might know more. What version of Office are you using?

Either way, even if you see a large improvement (lets say....processing time is reduced from 60 seconds down to 20 seconds), is that time worth $800?? Only you can say. If you're planning to do gaming or other CPU-heavy tasks, then an upgrade makes more sense (but you might consider a Ryzen 3700X instead, depending on usage).

FreeTibet,

The real crux of the matter is whether the Word issue you are encountering is a software issue or a hardware issue. For a machine of your vintage, it wouldn't necessarily be a bad idea to go ahead and get new hardware. But not only may that not be necessarily, for all we know right now Word could act weird with that particular document on a totally separate computer. I've seen a lot of wonked Word documents (law firm environment).

Do you have a separate computer on which you could test working on that 800 page Tibetan and English Word document? If it works without issue on that computer, perhaps you want to consider the big hammer software route of reinstalling Windows and Word on your current computer to see if that's an effectual solution for you and postpone a hardware upgrade. But if it works on the separate computer, and you still have issues with your current computer after the big hammer software approach, sure, then considering the age of your current computer, sure, go ahead and upgrade.


Note: If you do go ahead and upgrade, a <$200 cpu or even less may be more than enough for your current requirements should you not be doing hard gaming or the like anymore. E.g. a Ryzen 2600 for $115 or some such is a lot of value. And re future-proofing, get a good motherboard for the 2600 or the like, and if my understanding is correct, you could always throw a high end Ryzen 4x00 in it in the future should you upgrade your 960 video card to a 3080 Ti or the like in the future and find the Ryzen 2600 a bottleneck.

FreeTibet wrote:

If I add a footnote at say page 600 it will take a full minute to re-paginate. This lag is what I want to avoid.

I am using Word 2016 on a Core i5-2400. I created a dummy document with a 1000+ pages of random text and then tried adding footnotes to different page numbers randomly. I did not experience any re-pagination delay. It's pretty quick. Just a slight pause and it's done. Saving the file might take a few seconds if you are using an HDD but that's about it. Have you considered the possibility that the document might be corrupted? It's also possible that styling and having two languages in the document might be having some kind of processing strain on Word. You can take a random page from the document, paste it in a new document 10 times, then copy paste those ten pages and paste them 10 times more to make it around a 1000 pages and see if you can reproduce the problem with the new document.

This link might have the solution to your problem: https://word.tips.net/T001294_Jumping_t ... ating.html

It appears that after closing and opening the document that I created, it is now taking almost two minutes to save it. Appears to be a Word problem and not a PC performance problem. Word, even after all these years and billions into Microsoft's coffers later, is still not equipped to deal with large documents it seems.

Another interesting Word quirk: if I add a bunch of footnotes and click the close button, Word asks if I want to save and selecting Yes does some sort of a quick save. So you can save time that way, though I guess the file size may increase quite a bit after not saving normally for a while.

I did a fresh install of Win 10 Pro last weekend and reinstalled Word 2019 home office, so that's all fresh.

Just now I timed adding a footnote at the very end (# 1501). Repagination took 54 seconds. The resource monitor during the process suggests this is a one thread operation, so I'm guessing brute force helps. Then I also made a 1500 page all times new roman doc. Adding a footnote anywhere takes 2-3 seconds. I think the Unicode Tibetan (Microsoft Himalaya) is the factor slowing the repagination.

Try turning off background repagination: https://wordribbon.tips.net/T005975_Tur ... ation.html

You can also try saving the document in a new file using the "Save As" option and see if the issue persists in the new file (the theory is that Word will create a fresh file without the mess and clutter of prior saves accumulated in the original file).

Hey there I-K! You totally nailed it. By turning off background pagination (accessible only if you enter the options menu from within draft mode -- I didn't know that) I can enter footnotes at any part of my monster doc almost instantaneously. Wow. Double wow. This is finding not what I was looking for (new computer) but actually want (faster footnotes) for free. I'm going to share this with my colleagues immediately. I should mention we do all our translations bilingually in English and Tibetan, so we have to deal with this all the time. Thanks ever so much.

Even in a small nonprofit administration rules must be followed, so I'm back to rethinking my one-time-only, spend it or lose it $800 hardware budget. Future proofing is what I should keep in mind. I can go back to a 9600K. and think about a video card.

I'm still blown away by this great footnote fix.Thanks again.

You may find that going to an AMD 3600 system with 32gb ram will give you better performance than going to a 9700k.

AMD Ryzen2 chips work really well in office tasks and beat Intel in both price and performance.

FreeTibet wrote:

Hey there I-K! You totally nailed it. By turning off background pagination (accessible only if you enter the options menu from within draft mode -- I didn't know that) I can enter footnotes at any part of my monster doc almost instantaneously. Wow. Double wow. This is finding not what I was looking for (new computer) but actually want (faster footnotes) for free. I'm going to share this with my colleagues immediately. I should mention we do all our translations bilingually in English and Tibetan, so we have to deal with this all the time. Thanks ever so much.

Even in a small nonprofit administration rules must be followed, so I'm back to rethinking my one-time-only, spend it or lose it $800 hardware budget. Future proofing is what I should keep in mind. I can go back to a 9600K. and think about a video card.

I'm still blown away by this great footnote fix.Thanks again.

TBH, I'm surprised that it fixed your issue but great that it did. Happy to be of service

These might also be helpful in further streamlining your workflow:

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ccaabaa/is/docume ... manual.doc
https://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/oer/oers ... 20cprt.pdf
http://web.binus.ac.id/els/file/LongDoc ... 971875.pdf (ignore the 1st page)

FreeTibet wrote:

Even in a small nonprofit administration rules must be followed, so I'm back to rethinking my one-time-only, spend it or lose it $800 hardware budget. Future proofing is what I should keep in mind. I can go back to a 9600K. and think about a video card.

What is your deadline for that?

My choices of spending $800:

1) Intel Core i7-9700K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor $389.99
Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED 66.3 CFM Rifle Bearing CPU Cooler $32.29
ASRock B365 Phantom Gaming 4 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard $104.99
Crucial Ballistix Sport AT 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory $148.99
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive $109.99

2) Intel Core i3-9100F 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor $82.66
Cooler Master Hyper 212 LED 66.3 CFM Rifle Bearing CPU Cooler $32.29
ASRock B365 Phantom Gaming 4 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard $104.99
Mushkin Enhanced Silverline 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-2133 Memory $101.99
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive $109.99
EVGA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB SC ULTRA GAMING Video Card $409.99

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Crucial Ballistix Sport AT 32 GB (4 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory $148.99

Starting off with 4x 8 GiB is a bad idea. Get 2x 16 GiB, instead.

Igor_Kavinski wrote:

Intel Core i3-9100F 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor $82.66

I wouldn't hesitate to go with an unlocked 7 nm six-plus core AMD Ryzen processor instead of an outdated locked 14 nm quad-core CPU from Intel.

Aranarth wrote:

You may find that going to an AMD 3600 system with 32gb ram will give you better performance than going to a 9700k.

AMD Ryzen2 chips work really well in office tasks and beat Intel in both price and performance.

Add me as another vote for an AMD chip in that budget range. If you're primarily using Word you likely don't need a lot of cores, so a 3600 would be sufficient.

Not sure that 32 GB of RAM is a worthwhile expense vs. 16. I would recommend you check Task Manager during your heaviest workload and see how much RAM you are actually using. If it's close to or over 16 GB then getting 32 makes sense, but if it's lower than 13 GB you probably could save some money on RAM. (Remember that getting more RAM only helps you if you're exceeding your physical memory and having to go to page file -- if you're not having to go to the page file, adding more RAM won't give you any boost.)

Don't forget to get an SSD!!!

No matter what your boot drive should be a 500 to 1tb ssd an nvme drive is even better.

A computer is only as fast as it's slowest system so why saddle a machine with a slow hdd?

You don't need a powerful video card so a radeon rx 470 or similar level of card will be just fine.

https://www.amazon.com/ASHATA-Optane-St ... 0837RC77D/

The Intel H10 drive is even faster than SSD due to using 32GB Optane memory as cache.

Just look at the fantastic load times here: https://www.legitreviews.com/wp-content ... esults.png

REVIEW

Hello All,

Thanks for all your help. You know how sometimes the unexpected happens? I was given an Alienware R9 w/ 9900 & 2070 Super, so I have joined the current age in a way I had not anticipated. Of course there are more questions. I teach classical Tibetan. In the classroom I'd be at the white board diagramming sentences. Now I teach on line and need a drawing tablet I can use via shared screen to serves as the former white board. Maybe just knowing which forum to post this question is a place to start. In any event, thanks again for all the help.

--Later