Looking to build a new PC.

[Enigma]

I'm beginning to budget to build a PC to replace my current one. Nothing wrong with what I have but for gaming, it is showing its age.

Here's its current stats (that I can remember):
Motherboard: MSI MS-7758
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 4 Core(s)
RAM: 16GB (forgot what type)
GPU: GeForce GTX 960
PSU: Don't remember the wattage

I'm planning to budget somewhere between a thousand and fifteen hundred for all the components including case.

Right now I'm more concerned about what to look for in a motherboard\CPU\RAM. That is going to be my most important purchase once I start buying. I need help from the board. I want to get a good Intel MB\CPU\RAM but doesn't break the bank. Also any suggestion on the best brand for PSU and is my current GPU enough for current games or would I need a better one? If so, which Nvidia GPU card should I get? Not particularly interested in 4k\8k.

Thank you for any recommendations offered.

[Jub]

I'd hold off another few months until Ryzen 3 drops and the second generation chips, as well as Intel's offerings, drop in price.

[Enigma]

I'd hold off another few months until Ryzen 3 drops and the second generation chips, as well as Intel's offerings, drop in price.

I don't want to wait too long. I'm hoping to build it over the summer.

[Mr Bean]

I'd hold off another few months until Ryzen 3 drops and the second generation chips, as well as Intel's offerings, drop in price.

I don't want to wait too long. I'm hoping to build it over the summer.

Lucky you still have an option to go Ryzen now and drop in a shinny Ryzen 3000 series in a month or one of the 4000 series next year. Reason why Ryzen is recommended is simple, Intel is and has been a dick about sockets for a while now while AMD is been great about that promising full backwards compatibility for AM4 clear through to the end of 2020.

Meaning you can go out and buy a 4000 series motherboard (Or the 5000 series in less than thirty days) that supports the 14mm, the 12mm the 7mm and the 7mm+ editions of Ryzen without dropping down extra money.

That said lets look at existing hardware

Motherboard: MSI MS-7758
Processor: Intel Core i5-2500K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 4 Core(s)
RAM: 16GB (forgot what type)
GPU: GeForce GTX 960
PSU: Don't remember the wattage

If it's a 2500k that memory is likely DDR3 meaning you can't re-use it, you might be able to re-use the power supply you might not, like 90% you can re-use the case so that means we are crossing off the cpu (Intel is a dick about sockets) the ram, possibly the power supply and maybe the case. Give the 960 away to a good home.

Unlike with the CPU your GPU, memory, cases, hard drives and the like your free to pickup now. I'll throw something together on PC part picker stand by.

[Mr Bean]

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 2600 3.4 GHz 6-Core Processor ($154.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: Asus - ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING ATX AM4 Motherboard ($119.89 @ OutletPC)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 Memory ($77.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair - RMx (2018) 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($89.89 @ OutletPC)
Total: $442.76
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-05-15 22:59 EDT-0400

This is just a quick one thrown together to show what cpu+memory+mb+PSU is going to run you, no cases, no hard drives and no gpu. Again this is a bad pair of months since Navi soft launch is supposed to be June 10th and hard launch (in stores) during E3 in July. And while I don't think Navi will the most amazing thing since sliced bread what it is likely to be is Nvidia 2070 possible 2080 performance for half as much which should do nice things to 2070 and 2080 prices which are still north of 500$.

TLDR: get motherboard of choice buy a cheap ryzen 2600 or 1600 for 110$ or 150$ to be your CPU for now, in a year upgrade to a nice Zen 2/3 cpu but know that 85% of games these days would be happy with a 50$ CPU it's the GPU that matters. You can drop 400$ on a i7-9700K or 500$ on a 9900k but your going to see the very similar performance in most games to the 150$ Ryzen 2600. Gaming these days is GPU limited hard.

[Enigma]

I'm planning to build the PC from scratch and I want it to be better than my current PC. For RAM, my minimum is 32GB (2x16GB).

Overall, which is better on a gaming standpoint, going with AMD or Intel\Nvidia?

[Mr Bean]

I'm planning to build the PC from scratch and I want it to be better than my current PC. For RAM, my minimum is 32GB (2x16GB).

Overall, which is better on a gaming standpoint, going with AMD or Intel\Nvidia?

The difference between the two is about .5% to 9% where something like Civ 6 gets full advantage (It wants cpu cycles) to less than half a percent in games in Unreal Engine 4 games which eat gpu's for breakfast. However if you want pure performance your going Intel they indisputably still have the performance crown even if your going to be paying 40% more for that same 10% or less performance advantage.

If you want the nice price/preformance balance you'll be looking at a Intel Core i5-9600K on socket 1151 which again won't be getting support for later CPU's for Intel's 10mm cpu which will come out sometime between this November to somewhere in 2025 since it's three years overdue at this point.

But your asking for performance, Intel i5-9600k runs about 250$-275$ and 32 gigs of ram will run you about 180$-200$ for Ryzen builds you want DDR4-3000 because Ryzen loves faster memory while Intel is happy with DDR4-2666 memory but these days that's about a five dollar difference.

[Enigma]

Then I'll try AMD but with beefier specs than the one you posted.

[Enigma]

I have no idea what video card to look for with an AMD set up.

[Mr Bean]

I have no idea what video card to look for with an AMD set up.

We are in an odd place with video cards right now still because of the semi-monopoly Nvidia has enjoyed for the last four years now. Here's Tom's Hardware Rankings as of about two days ago in order with all the benchmarks stripped out

Nvidia Titan RTX
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080
Nvidia Titan X
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
AMD Radeon VII
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070
AMD Radeon RX Vega 64
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 Ti
Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060
AMD Radeon RX Vega 56
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Ti
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660
AMD Radeon RX 590 8GB
AMD Radeon RX 580 8GB

Those cards range from 150$ at the low end to $2,500 for some reason reason you want a Titan.

It's the big list because big lists are fun but boiling it down for you with your stated 1080p goals I'd put the load end at the GTX 1660 (250$) or a Vega 580(200$) on the low end with the RTX 2060 in the 350$ range and the RTX 2070 in the 450$-500$ range.

So TLDR
Pick your price point
AMD RX 580 200$
GTX 1660-260$
RTX 2060-350$
RTX 2070-450$

This might be a time to go used however as there should still be some deals left over from the bitcoin mining days because quite a few people bought up cards they never used and might sell something like a 1080 or 1080TI that would be perfect for your purposes for 300$.

*Edit to give you an idea of scale if the AMD RX 580 is the bottom, the RTX 2070 at the top will be on average 40%-70% faster depending on the game with each rank between the AMD RX 580 and the 2070 offering some benefit for increased cost.

[Mr Bean]

Here's a webpage with pretty graphics Game debate so you can see the exact percentage matchups. You can change the graphic type at the top to see different matchups.

[Enigma]

What do you think of the Radeon RX Vega 56? To my untrained eye, it doesn't fare too bad compared to the 2070.

[Enigma]

Bean, what do you think of this parts list? AMD part list.

[Jub]

I'd suggest adding an SSD for frequently used programs but beyond that, it looks solid.

[Mr Bean]

Bean, what do you think of this parts list? AMD part list.

Three things
I second the SSD you can get SSD dirt cheap now, you can get the gold standard Samsung Evo for 78$ for 500 gigs (Perfect for your C drive) and the 1 TB version for 150$, to save some cash you can step down to a slightly worse warranty Crucial MX 500 at 66$ and 120$ for the 500gig and 1 TB models.

Two, be sure your happy with that case I can't stress this enough. I have nothing against it but before you start working in the thing make sure you happy with the looks the side and the face and all that. People screw that step up then complain about the physical skin a case can take. Again I have nothing against THAT case but cases are the one thing I know little about since I found a corsair case I liked years ago and since have ignored them.

Third that power supply is not just excessive it's wasteful. You want to keep power supplies so they are producing between roughly 33% to 85% of their stated power load, with the computer your putting together now unless you buy FOUR more GPU's I'd say find a nice 650 watt power supply, 750 watt at the absolute most

A thousand watt power supply is for the person with the 4 hard disk raid, plus a system disk, two high end GPU's, and every usb port packed.

[The Infidel]

Bean, what do you think of this parts list? AMD part list.

Three things
I second the SSD you can get SSD dirt cheap now, you can get the gold standard Samsung Evo for 78$ for 500 gigs (Perfect for your C drive) and the 1 TB version for 150$, to save some cash you can step down to a slightly worse warranty Crucial MX 500 at 66$ and 120$ for the 500gig and 1 TB models.

Two, be sure your happy with that case I can't stress this enough. I have nothing against it but before you start working in the thing make sure you happy with the looks the side and the face and all that. People screw that step up then complain about the physical skin a case can take. Again I have nothing against THAT case but cases are the one thing I know little about since I found a corsair case I liked years ago and since have ignored them.

Third that power supply is not just excessive it's wasteful. You want to keep power supplies so they are producing between roughly 33% to 85% of their stated power load, with the computer your putting together now unless you buy FOUR more GPU's I'd say find a nice 650 watt power supply, 750 watt at the absolute most

A thousand watt power supply is for the person with the 4 hard disk raid, plus a system disk, two high end GPU's, and every usb port packed.

This! I, myself have a 850W power supply, but I bought it in 2015 to last at least 10 years.
Might I suggest the computer cases from Fractal Design? They have some discrete cases I really like. I have the old Fractal Design XL myself, but an R6 also looks nice (https://www.fractal-design.com/home/pro ... e-r6-black)

Also, DON'T use a mechanical disk as system drive, they are s-l-o-o-o-w! Even a SATA SSD is feeling it's age now. I bought an M.2 drive just before christmas, and it just fits right into the mobo, no wires needed and they are much faster than even SATA SSD and is the size of a juicy fruit, just make sure you get a NvME-version, not SATA-version, as the latter won't be any faster. This is the one after the one I have: https://www.samsung.com/uk/memory-stora ... -V7S500BW/

An optical drive? How... ancient... I haven't used one of those for years, and I've never missed it. Not in this era of USB sticks and cloud storage.

Disclaimer: I don't know the prices of these things where you live, so I hope they're not too pricey.

[Jub]

I would tend to agree with that The Infidel has said above with regards to SSDs. If I had the cash to spare I'd move away from running anything off my current mechanical drives and just use them for media storage.

On the topic of an optical drive, if you already have one toss it in, if not I'm not sure I'd bother. It'd be like including a floppy drive at this point, situationally useful but rarely indispensable.

[The Infidel]

Oh, I forgot to mention the new microcode security faults of Intel (MDS). Kinda like Meltdown v2. AMD is hardly affected at all. The security patches reduce performance on avg. 16% for Intel CPU's and 3% for AMD CPU's. If you want to be absolutely safe, it is recommended on Intel CPU's that you turn off hyper threading, and the the performance loss might be up to 40%.

AMD seems the way to go in the near future.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/2 ... ds-patches

[Ace Pace]

Oh, I forgot to mention the new microcode security faults of Intel (MDS). Kinda like Meltdown v2. AMD is hardly affected at all. The security patches reduce performance on avg. 16% for Intel CPU's and 3% for AMD CPU's. If you want to be absolutely safe, it is recommended on Intel CPU's that you turn off hyper threading, and the the performance loss might be up to 40%.

AMD seems the way to go in the near future.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/2 ... ds-patches

These vulnerabilities are nearly entirely irrelevant for the average user. Most of the plausible attack scenarios are relevant to servers in large multi-customer cloud environments.
The impact on the average user are not serious and will mostly be mitigated by the operating system.

[Jub]

There's also the fact that Intel is stuck at 14nm and can't seem to get performance gains out of their 10nm designs while AMD is pushing ahead with 7nm chips. This simply gives AMD more transistor density to work with and while smaller doesn't always mean better these days it's looking like AMD will hold a large edge over Intel for the next few years while Intel tries to play catch up.

Intel may also not even be able to catch up as AMD still has contracts with China while Intel has seen declining sales in that market. That means a lot more capital for AMD which means more R&D funding. It's a vicious cycle and if Intel can't recover and claw back market share they may fall out of the race.

For an, as far as I can tell, unbiased look at things check out this video. Yes, I know the title card and video title are sensationalist, but the content of the video is solid and based on long term market trends.

[Ace Pace]

You just massively shifted the goal post. The poster asked for specs, not stock investment. If you want to hijack something, don't hijack a perfectly sensible thread.

I will repeat what I said, security fear mongering is horrible for the average computer user and that includes most of the techies on this board.

If you want to have a conversation on performance, have it based on that and not amorphic things like what the fab process is, something that doesn't matter to the *current CPU performance game*

[Jub]

You just massively shifted the goal post. The poster asked for specs, not stock investment. If you want to hijack something, don't hijack a perfectly sensible thread.

I will repeat what I said, security fear mongering is horrible for the average computer user and that includes most of the techies on this board.

If you want to have a conversation on performance, have it based on that and not amorphic things like what the fab process is, something that doesn't matter to the *current CPU performance game*

It's rather relevant actually. For reasons already covered upthread, it's unwise to build around an Intel CPU right now. My addition is just making it even more clear why any PC hobbyist should be avoiding Intel until they show signs of returning to form again. Or are you going to argue that Intel's upcoming 9th Gen rehashes will somehow compete with this year's offerings from AMD?

[darkjedi521]

Oh, I forgot to mention the new microcode security faults of Intel (MDS). Kinda like Meltdown v2. AMD is hardly affected at all. The security patches reduce performance on avg. 16% for Intel CPU's and 3% for AMD CPU's. If you want to be absolutely safe, it is recommended on Intel CPU's that you turn off hyper threading, and the the performance loss might be up to 40%.

AMD seems the way to go in the near future.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/2 ... ds-patches

These vulnerabilities are nearly entirely irrelevant for the average user. Most of the plausible attack scenarios are relevant to servers in large multi-customer cloud environments.
The impact on the average user are not serious and will mostly be mitigated by the operating system.

And the OS level mitigations are what introduce those performance hits quoted above of 16% average to as high as 40% slowdown on Intel. At work I've got some i7-7700s and some i7-3400s. The 7700's came from Dell with all the Spectre/Meltdown firmware patches as of Christmas. The 3400's have not had their firmware updated and run circles around the 7700s for scientific computing that involves heavy network I/O. Both run fully patched RHEL 7.

[Ace Pace]

I feel like a broken record. OP wants a budget gaming PC. Gaming is not syscall intensive (the main reason for a performance hit).

For your needs, if you want maximum performance, you can just disable the OS level mitigations by passing in the appropriate boot time flags.

[The Infidel]

Anyway... Just an example of why you should use spin disks for data storage and not system drive.

I just tested my disks.
My SSD's came out like this:

My Samsung 970 EVO M.2 is only running at 2x (pci express lanes) as my old mobo can't give it the full 4x (stated 3400MB/s read and 2500MB/s write), so it's quite slow for an M.2 drive, but still faster than my SATA SSD OCZ Vector 180. These tests were both done in about a minute.


My 3TB WD spin disk used HOURS to complete. (I went to the pub. When I came back, it was still not done.) This test is not made for spin drives, but I just wanted a comparison.


In a data disk, sequential read/write is more important, as you probably have large data files on it, like movies, etc.
A system drive does a lot of tiny read and writes all the time, so 4K read/write and access time is much more important.

I see now that the Samsung 970 EVO Plus is on the pricy side. You can probably get an M.2 drive with the same capasity for quite a bit less, but some run hot and might need a heat sink. It is quite small, after all...

Just my two cents...