3R 3100 - What are your thoughts?
3R 3100 - What are your thoughts?
I spotted it on Facebook marketplace. He was offering 120, then lowered it to 100. Since I’ll need to drive over an hour to collect it, he’s extending the deal. It’s been liquid cooled throughout its life and comes with the original plastic Wraith unit—which matters because I won’t be moving to an AIO for a while.
A $100 purchase with a Wraith cooler is certainly a good offer if it's in good condition. It would be a better choice than buying the new R5 3600 for $230, particularly since you might plan to upgrade the 3600 in a few years when tuning preferences shift toward 8C/16T processors. I don’t know the current market value of a used 3600, but it could be worth more than what you’re offering.
I also wish to include anything else on an SSD. In games like WoW, I saw a big difference in load times. Even on my FX, I loaded faster than my friend who had a 10th gen i5. There’s value in choosing games that run well on my SSD, even though I know the real performance boost from moving data is limited. The quicker loads are what matter most to me.
Sold 200 units of the 3600 model, then priced around 240 for the 3600X and 255 for the 3600XT.
Today it seems like an AIO isn't worth it unless you're using a top-tier CPU that generates a lot of heat, especially given how bad things are at overclocking these days. It's not the same as 2011 when you'd upgrade a 3.4 GHz i7-2600k to 4.8 GHz with big performance boosts using liquid cooling. Skip the cooling in 2021 unless you're just going for looks.
I neglected the loading times for games. I regularly play around ten large titles—Minecraft, Civ 6, Among Us, Portal, Portal 2, Trine, Trine 2, and Cargo! The Quest for Gravity. None of these are significantly impacted by HDD loading speeds, and I’ve consistently used HDD for game startup, so it never occurred to me. I can appreciate your interest in NVMe though. I’d just wait for a 3600 and expect better optimization with more cores. A 6C/12T CPU should outperform a 4C/8T CPU thanks to its extra cores.
SSD will definitely affect load times, though I should mention I actually ran RDR2 off a hard drive because I didn’t want to wipe 110GB on my SSD. The difference between NVMe and SATA SSDs probably won’t be that big unless you’re opting for a PCIE-3.0 or even better PCIE-4.0 NVMe drives. As someone who owns a PS5, I can say the NVMe PCIE-4.0 SSD inside it is incredibly quick—much faster than the SATA SSD on my PC.
I had my understanding adjusted - his machine ran an i5-9600k with WoW installed, while I used an FX6300 on a very old Toshiba SSD that was nearly full. We tried running multiple instances together over the same network, keeping all other settings identical except for the hardware. Despite the SSD speed, I could still load faster, which is why I’m keen to use it more. My experience with this setup hasn’t fully unlocked the SSD’s potential yet, even though the load screens were impressive. However, a recent video by Anthony suggests any real improvement would be minimal—just slight micro-stuttering at best. So I shouldn’t expect major gains, but it still looks like a smart investment given the system will likely run on a 5600XT later. Aiming for a mid-range setup makes sense.