Considering building a new gamer PC on a budget - any advice?


piddy3825

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I think its about time that I consider building a new PC.  My current system is a little more than 6 years old and I've maxed out what I could.  I love the graphics of this game so I have everything set to ultra, which of course has taxed this older tech to the point that I am getting only about 30fps when playing and the load times are starting to get longer and longer and that's on a good day!  

Curious as to what most folks are running these days?  I'm probably going to be sticking with an AMD chipset as they are cheaper?  I am on a budget so although I would love to drop a big wad of cash on a new build, I am gonna have to keep my ambitions a little constrained.  

would like to hear your recommendations on parts and suppliers.  Been a long time since I've purchased computer parts thru mail, I'm currently overwhelmed by all the potential sources and would really appreciate any suggestions regarding reputable dealers with reasonable return policies.  

 

 

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Absolutely essential kit, for some people, is,

HP DreamColor Z31x 31.1" UHD 4K IPS Monitor   @  £2,323.98

A pair of  Asus ROG STRIX GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11GB OC Graphics Card     @  £1379.99   each,

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X AM4 Processor   @  £701.67,

Samsung 860 Pro 1TB SSD @ £232.67

If you are in USA it will be significantly cheaper.

 

Personally I am content with my redundant ex-office system with a R7 360 graphics card and 1920 x 1080 display.

 

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I'm rocking a cheapo mid range system I put together 3 years ago, still decent for me given I don't play the lastest and craziest games graphics-wise:

Ryzen 5 1400 @ 3.8Ghz + Asus B350 TUF Gaming Plus + Gigabyte 1060 6GB Windforce OC + 16GBs of HyperX Predator 3000Mhz RAM + Sandisk 240GB SSD and WD Green HDD 1TB + Corsair CX650 80+ bronze PSU. I know there are some weird choices there but the 1400 was a bargain deal ( given it did not sell as well as the 1600 at the time ) and the GPU was the cheapest non-mini 1060 6Gig I could find at the time. 

I've been following the recent hardware developments given I shall be upgrading within the next couple years and my advice for you would be to wait. Both NVIDIA and AMD are maybe coming up with new GPUs before the end of the year, AMD will refresh Ryzen one last time before Zen 3 finally arrives next year and maybe Intel can pull through and deliver 10nm by early next year ( doubtful ). 

Or... if you have a decent CPU and just want a quick and cheap kick in the pants performance bump in the meantime, you could order a cheapo used 4Gig RX570/580 from a known chinese webstore ( if you are outside the US, the US ebay has pretty sweet deals on everything ), update the BIOS, change the thermal paste and you have a pretty good GPU for TLD for the price of a good night out ( which you can't have anyway, given the human malware ).

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Thank you, @peteloud, @Dan_ and @odizzido for your feedback and suggestions.  I wasn't necessarily thinking about replacing my monitor as well, but now that it's been brought up, it would make sense to consider putting some thought into upgrading that component as well.  I have been seriously looking at the AMD Ryzen  9 chipset as the prices average around $500 USD and that fits my budget nicely.  I'm really liking the GEFORCE RTX 270 graphics cards too in roughly the same price range.   As my ole granny would say, "nothing that money can't cure," so I think I will start looking closely at some of the tempting offers I've come across online.  

thanks again for your ideas and feedback!

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Guest jeffpeng

Honestly: if you are content with 1080p (aka FullHD) and 60 frames a second ..... you are pretty fine with budget options like the RX 570/580 class cards or the GTX 1650 Super - or 1660 if you feel spendy. Unless you think of driving higher resolutions and/or framerates everything else is overkill. You might also look at the RX 5500XT if the the RX 570/580 is too power hungry for your taste.

On the CPU side I feel like you'll have a hard time getting significant gains past 8 cores, and with the new consoles also sporting 8 cores you'll be good with an AMD R7 3700X or or R7 3800X for a very long time, but, in all honesty: if you are looking budget for TLD specifically, I don't think you can beat the AMD R3 3300X price/performance wise, despite being a quad core. But all of those options aren't required to drive TLD at 60 frames. I push that easily with "just" an "old" AMD 2600, and chances are your 6 year old CPU isn't the bottleneck either, especially not if it's an intel one.

So, if I wanted to give my 6 year old PC a bump to run TLD at 1080@60 .... I'd personally get an RX 5500XT with 8 gigs (where 8 gigs is more future proofing than anything, 4 is fine for TLD, but heck... 30 bucks to make sure the card will run most games down the line) and then see if that already fixes my needs. If not .... I'd ask myself if I want to spend 120 bucks (3300X) for a CPU that's fast now, or 300 ish bucks (3700X) for a CPU that will remain fast for a few years. Unless you do CPU intensive stuff outside of gaming like cutting video or compiling large binaries .... the 3300X is all you actually need, and you can still upgrade in 2-3 years.

On the other hand ... if you really want to 4K@60 I'd still not go over an R7 3800X, and maybe have a look at the RX 5700XT for the GPU, which can be had for 350 bucks on sales, and @stratvoxhas had really good results with that card at that resolution despite it being much less expensive than the 2070.

With all that being said: as @Dan_ points out ... if your needs don't need urgent fixing I'd hold out for a few more weeks as there are several big releases coming in the next months that will likely shift the price/performance landscape a fair bit in your favor as vendors will start to clear stocks of the current generations. Not so much with CPUs (because intel is fubaring hard), but with GPUs there is a lot moving fast right now.

TL;DR: If you want to upgrade NOW to play TLD at 1080p@60 buy a 5500XT or a GTX 1650 Super and you CPU will probably be okay. If you want to go 4K@60 and be good for a few years wait a few months and have a look at a discounted 5700XT and a probably also slightly cheaper 3800X on a B550 board.

(Edit: just read that you already have an AMD "chipset" by which you mean CPU. That means you'll have one of those FX chips. In that case I think going with a 3300X would be the advisable, but still budget conscious option. Also edit: with Ryzen 9 around 500 bucks you'll mean the Ryzen 9 3900X. Don't go that one for gaming. It's amazing for productivity that needs a lot of threads, but for gaming the 3800X is the better choice as games hardly ever benefit from more than 8 cores [and won't for a very long time], but is a full 100 bucks cheaper)
 

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@jeffpeng, thanks for the feedback!  you have certainly given me much to consider and I appreciate your insight as well as your suggestions.  I'm not upgrading for TLD alone but I would love a 4k/60fps gaming perspective none the less.  Taking what you've said to heart, I've spent a little time comparing some tech and your right, I can still get the performance I am looking for without having to spend excessively.  I think at this point I will do as suggested and wait for bit and see where pricing goes over the next few months.  ...although I am thinking I might wanna splurge on a new monitor now rather than later?  

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Guest jeffpeng

If you are going 4K@60 I cannot stress enough to wait. The 5700XT is a good "entry" card for that, but we'll be seeing a lot of things move in the market until September with either better performance for that price range - or better prices for that performance range. A lot will hinge on how good AMDs new cards actually are, and if Nvidia is actually feeling pressured by that or not.

As for monitors.... hm. Little reason to have a high resolution display you can't really drive. And with Samsung (supposedly) getting into the OLED game .... we might actually see a lot move in that regard as well. So.... I'd even caution there.

I'm usually on the side that recommends buying now rather than later, but with everything that happens right now - the imminent launch of the new consoles, OLED entering the mainstream for displays, possibly the biggest gearshift in the graphics card market for about a decade and the release of probably the biggest PC title since GTA V, meaning Cyberpunk 2077 - I really caution against jumping the gun before before black friday this time around.

Edited by jeffpeng
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I am really looking forward to OLED monitors becoming affordable(for me). Sadly I think it will be 5+ years.

I am actually going to be looking at getting a new CPU/ram when the next ryzen processors launch. Four 11 year old cores isn't cutting it for some games and 8gigs of ram is struggling too.

I am not sure if I will get a new GPU yet....I have a gtx 970. The only problem is that GPUs seem to have just gotten more expensive for the most part. A 5700XT is about double the price I paid for the 970. The canadian dollar was above the US dollar when I got it but still, double the price for only a little over double the performance after six years? hmmmmm that's sucky when I look at it.

 

What I will probably end up doing is getting a new CPU, see how things are with my old GPU, and then decide after that.

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From the looks of it you got a formidable budget to work with, which is ideal when you upgrade less frequently. I'd still wait out for Big Navi and Ampére and buy something late this year/early next year, if the speculation is to be trusted you're maybe looking at the biggest leap in GPU performance in the last decade or so.  Echoing @jeffpeng, I'd advise you to skip the most expensive CPU ( Threadrippers and Ryzen 9 onwards ) options given these won't give you significant gaming performance gains over spending the extra money on the GPU or investing in fast RAM with good timings (Detail: Expensive RAM ~ Good RAM )

Good luck.

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Guest jeffpeng
2 hours ago, Dan_ said:

investing in fast RAM with good timings

That's actually a very good point. As someone who has sold/built quite a few Ryzen rigs over the past 3 years I can only advise you to not skimp on quality memory when it comes to AMDs CPU offerings. More than as with intel AMD CPUs really rely on fast timings and higher "clocks" for memory.

If you are interested in why: While the desktop offerings from intel are monolithic designs, even the older Ryzen generations are basically "glued together" from smaller pieces. Even those that have only one silicon die are technically two quad cores CPUs wired up. This means that communication between those parts (which is called "Infinity Fabric, which is basically a memory synchronous SerDes Link, not unlike PCIe) is paramount - and this communication directly relates to memory speed.

So if you are going with a Ryzen 3000 Chip memory with 3600 Mhz (or more correctly: 3600 MT/s, but potato-potato) is the way to go. That's something you can achieve easily on all 3000 series CPUs sold (The 2000 series has this sweetspot at 3200 Mhz). Just make sure you buy memory that is qualified to work with your mainboard of choice. All big Motherboard vendors (Such as ASUS, ASRock, MSI, Gigabyte) have qualification tables for memory like this one for the rather new B550 Tomahawk: https://us.msi.com/Motherboard/support/MAG-B550-TOMAHAWK#support-mem-19

If you stick to those tables you can be 99.9% sure everything will just work. At least I never had any issues when I stuck to them - but quite a few when I did not. Although: the memory controllers have gotten much less flimsy than they used to by with first generation Ryzen. But if you go for a big, fast rig .... don't cut the wrong corner. And memory is definitely the wrong corner to cut with Ryzen.

As for how much you need: 16 gigs should be fine for games for the forseeable future. That I sport 32 gigs has mostly to do with work and my requirement to have 5 browsers open at all times, one of them in a VM (yeah, I know...). But if you want to be on the safe side for lets say the next 5 years .... memory doesn't stink. 32 gigs, even if you use half of it for filesystem caches, is never a bad thing to have.

Maybe a last word on Single-Sided and Double-Sided Ram. If you just run two sticks of memory Double-Sided Ram indeed has advantages. If you run four sticks .... stick with Single-Sided Ram.

Again, if you are intereed in why: Double-Sided Ram is basically two sticks in one, which Single-Sided Ram is just one stick. This is important because the CPU will alternate between both "sides" when running just two sticks as if you had 4 sticks (this is called Memory Interleaving), and by that only has to wait for half the memory to become "ready" at any given point. However if you already have 4 sticks using all Double-Sided ram puts a lot of strain on the memory controller, which will probably result in slower memory speeds or timings.



So, as an example: if you planned to run a 3000 series Ryzen CPU on the above mentioned B550 Tomahawk your memory of choice if you decide for 32 Gigabytes could be 
https://www.amazon.de/G-Skill-DDR4-3600-Quad-Kit-Arbeitsspeicher-F4-3600C16Q-32GTZNC/dp/B07VNCZX9S?language=en_GB.

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I was wondering how much well versed the OP is in the computer geek world, and how should I go on about explaining IF in a concise way but jeffpeng managed to pull it off. Honestly, with RAM coming down on price lately I'd get (a single matching kit of) 32GBs just for running big VMs, that or Google updates chrome to chew through even more RAM. 🤣

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25 minutes ago, Dan_ said:

I was wondering how much well versed the OP is in the computer geek world, and how should I go on about explaining IF in a concise way but jeffpeng managed to pull it off. Honestly, with RAM coming down on price lately I'd get (a single matching kit of) 32GBs just for running big VMs, that or Google updates chrome to chew through even more RAM. 🤣

well to be honest, my geekage could be better...  When I get together with my buddies (many of whom are in IT) and they start talking tech, my eyes do glaze over a bit, but I'd like to think I'm tech savvy enough to build my own box.  At the very least able to put part A in slot B correctly so that the thing works when I turn it on, lol.   That being said,  where I'd really love is some recommendations on is where to buy?   So many choices,  you know?  

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Guest jeffpeng
25 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

So many choices,  you know?  

Personally I'm a half-life (xD) long customer of the German e-tailer Mindfactory. But that's a .... very German option. Where you from?

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20 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Personally I'm a half-life (xD) long customer of the German e-tailer Mindfactory. But that's a .... very German option. Where you from?

Vancouver, WA USA  

I used to purchase computer parts from Newegg here in the states, but last time I was on their site to make a purchase my credit card company flagged them as being "suspect" and blocked the transaction for my safety.  I was buying a Roomba at the time, lol

Edited by piddy3825
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Guest jeffpeng

Also:

It's worth noting that more than 3600 Mhz here isn't better. The reason is unintuitive, but makes sense once you know a bit more. Since the "internal communication" (aka IF aka Infinity Fabric) of the Ryzen CPUs is memory synchronous the CPU has to cut the Speed in half if it gets too fast. So with 3600 MHz memory the internal IF clock is 1800 Mhz. Every CPU can do that. If you go 3800 MHz that would be 1900 MHz IF clock, and chances are your CPU can't run that. In that case you will have to cut the IF in half to 950MHz - and then you're definitively not faster than 3600 MHz memory, but more likely even slower. Another possibility is to run both asychronous (which is a new feature since Ryzen 3000) .... but that's more a workaround than an actual fix as the results vary from "well not totally bad but still not good" to "holy frick". So ... in most cases you will end up running your memory that is faster than 3600 MHz .... with 3600 MHz anyways. And since your geekage is limited - 3600 MHz is what you want 😉

And:

3 hours ago, stratvox said:

I'm going to agree on the CPU front. I have a 3950X (16 core/32 threads) but I also do audio production on this computer and in that world there's never too many threads or too much ram when doing the post production.

I can confirm. Been a while since I have been doing real sequencing .... but for productivity in general there is (almost) no such thing as too many threads or too much memory. Plus @stratvox: That's some serious blues you got there, buddy. 😄 Very nice. Makes me actually miss jamming.

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Guest jeffpeng
10 minutes ago, piddy3825 said:

Vancouver, WA USA  

I used to purchase computer parts from Newegg here in the states, but last time I was on their site to make a purchase my credit card company flagged them as being "suspect" and blocked the transaction for my safety.  I was buying a Roomba at the time, lol

Wait what there's a Vancouver in Washington? ^^ Whaddayaknow. Well many people from the US of A keep being very fond of Micro Center. But doesn't look like there's a store near you.  Well - there's always Amazon *sigh

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8 minutes ago, jeffpeng said:

Wait what there's a Vancouver in Washington? ^^ Whaddayaknow. Well many people from the US of A keep being very fond of Micro Center. But doesn't look like there's a store near you.  Well - there's always Amazon *sigh

Yes, indeed!   right across the river from Portland Oregon.  One of our local residents was a contestant on Alone - The Arctic in season 6. 
...and yes, sigh... at least I'll get free shipping with Amazon...

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2 hours ago, piddy3825 said:

well to be honest, my geekage could be better...  When I get together with my buddies (many of whom are in IT) and they start talking tech, my eyes do glaze over a bit, but I'd like to think I'm tech savvy enough to build my own box.  At the very least able to put part A in slot B correctly so that the thing works when I turn it on, lol.   That being said,  where I'd really love is some recommendations on is where to buy?   So many choices,  you know?  

Hahah sorry about that! Sometimes we do get carried over. There's so much information available nowadays that even IT people sometimes get overwhelmed when they haven't put a system together for a long time. You can be hardware savvy and come from other walks of life, absolutely! Choosing Ryzen means you're very well synced to the industry and overall consensus of the hardware world. 

1 hour ago, piddy3825 said:

Vancouver, WA USA  

I used to purchase computer parts from Newegg here in the states, but last time I was on their site to make a purchase my credit card company flagged them as being "suspect" and blocked the transaction for my safety.  I was buying a Roomba at the time, lol

And I was going to suggest newegg anyway, it's the steak and potatoes of PC assembly even though amazon sometimes has better deals on select parts. I'd say check 'em both and see. Anyway, got that Roomba? Is it any good? Asking for a friend. 

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14 hours ago, jeffpeng said:

That's some serious blues you got there, buddy. 😄 Very nice. Makes me actually miss jamming.

Thanks :) You're listening to my nym there; that's my old strat (79, I got it in 84 when it was five) through my vox (ac15htv, truly an excellent guitar amp). Pete's doing the singing.

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