Recommendations plz

[Carlos]

Alright, so one of my computers was surged like... 6 months ago. The entire computer is "totaled" as they say in the car world (lol). So, my family is working on getting me a replacement. That's where we are right now.

I know the brands, but we are working under a budget. I know a lot about computers, but very much behind in terms of knowing how to put together a computer. Or at least know the best graphics card for the price range we're comfortable with.

So I'm posting 4 images, hit me with comments, recommendations and suggestions. Yes, you can mix and match.

I'll be doing my own research, but I thought it would be great to get activity here....

 

[KeyboardDemon]

Of the 4 listed I would go for the first, 2x 8GB would be enough for a gaming build, 2x 16GB would be better for video editing.

Ignore the option with the GTX 1650, this is an entry level 1080p card, not good for anything more, the GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti are both better than the GTX 1650, but if you can get an RTX 3060 or RTX 3060 Ti you would enjoy a far better gaming experience that's not too far behind the RTX 2080.

The last build has both a weaker motherboard with an extremely basic B520 chipset, limited expandability due it's M (Micro ATX) designation and a CPU that's 2 generations behind current AMD CPUs.

Newegg have 12 X570 mothboards listed on their website with prices between $152 to $230 from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI.

The Graphics card situation sucks right now, it is not easy to get your hands on to a top tier GPU, unless you know people that are willing to sacrifice giving up a GPU to help you out, which was the case for my new RTX 3080 (even then I paid over MSRP for mine). In this case the RTX 3060 at $799 is more than double MSRP but cheaper than any I could find.

Have a look at this build suggestion:



I swapped some parts from your original quote, saved you some money on parts like the motherboard, case, power supply, and ram, but the GPU is a higher price than your original quote.

I have kept with the original white theme but taken out the RGB components to keep costs down, but I couldn't add Windows 11 as it was not listed on PC PartPicker where Windows 10 Home is listed for $108.78 so you can use that an take the free upgrade to Windows 11 option.

With Windows 10 Home added the price comes to $1725.73 which is $253.27 cheaper than the build shown on the first quote, with no loss in performance against that more expensive build.

You can see the build here on PCPartPicker.

 

[Carlos]

Of the 4 listed I would go for the first, 2x 8GB would be enough for a gaming build, 2x 16GB would be better for video editing.

My opinion is that I want both. 32GB sounds like overkill, but... I think when you merge gaming and streaming, its gonna tax the system. I don't do PC gaming much, but I'd love to do some steam games. I have a PS4, so I'll need an elgato card/streaming device at some point, but I'm gonna STFU about that and wait for the right time to broach the subject.

Ignore the option with the GTX 1650, this is an entry level 1080p card, not good for anything more, the GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti are both better than the GTX 1650, but if you can get an RTX 3060 or RTX 3060 Ti you would enjoy a far better gaming experience that's not too far behind the RTX 2080.

This is a headscratcher, because of the last point. Two pages show 3060 and 2080. I'm going with 3060. I wish I could go 3080, but chip shortages, man.

EDIT: I understand why the person recommended 2080 over the 3060. The 2080 has GDDR6, which means faster texture streaming. The 3060 has more memory. I got it.. interesting.

The last build has both a weaker motherboard with an extremely basic B520 chipset, limited expandability due it's M (Micro ATX) designation and a CPU that's 2 generations behind current AMD CPUs.

I've crossed out that cheap board. I'm not going cheap on motherboard. I want this to have AT MINIMUM TPM 2.0 to be future proof.

Newegg have 12 X570 mothboards listed on their website with prices between $152 to $230 from Asus, Gigabyte and MSI.

I'm not sure we can do that, we are dealing with someone here in Alabama (where I live for the time being), that's buying these wholesale, so he printed the specs out for us and I have to tell him what I want.

The Graphics card situation sucks right now, it is not easy to get your hands on to a top tier GPU, unless you know people that are willing to sacrifice giving up a GPU to help you out, which was the case for my new RTX 3080 (even then I paid over MSRP for mine). In this case the RTX 3060 at $799 is more than double MSRP but cheaper than any I could find.

Already discussed this earlier.

Have a look at this build suggestion:

View attachment 1976

I swapped some parts from your original quote, saved you some money on parts like the motherboard, case, power supply, and ram, but the GPU is a higher price than your original quote.

I've been hearing good things about Ryzen, I'm good with these suggestions. However, is THAT chip like the most recent chip, and is this 3900x good enough? I need opinions here.

I have kept with the original white theme but taken out the RGB components to keep costs down, but I couldn't add Windows 11 as it was not listed on PC PartPicker where Windows 10 Home is listed for $108.78 so you can use that an take the free upgrade to Windows 11 option.

I'm not a fan of white, but if I have to take white. I'll take it. I want black/matte/metalic whatever to fend off dust. I had a PS3, and that was a magnet for... dust. lol

I love the PS3. Best console ever made. Technically.

With Windows 10 Home added the price comes to $1725.73 which is $253.27 cheaper than the build shown on the first quote, with no loss in performance against that more expensive build.

You can see the build here on PCPartPicker.

Thanks for your input! Looking forward to others input. I like the first paper, too. However I like some specs from others.

This thread acts as a notebook, so respond away people.

The SSD is going to hold the Windows 10/11 files, my HDD is going to be where my files go. I read somewhere about this and I was "wait, so that's what people do!?" Mind blown. But makes sense because SSDs are new and are not entirely "reliable."

 

[KeyboardDemon]

My opinion is that I want both. 32GB sounds like overkill, but... I think when you merge gaming and streaming, its gonna tax the system. I don't do PC gaming much, but I'd love to do some steam games. I have a PS4, so I'll need an elgato card/streaming device at some point, but I'm gonna STFU about that and wait for the right time to broach the subject.

I've swapped the RAM in my suggested setup for 32GB Crucial CL15 RAM, this will help with video editing and the lower latency will improve performance, it comes in at $5 more than the CL16 modules so it's worth the extra $5. Have a look here.

EDIT: I understand why the person recommended 2080 over the 3060. The 2080 has GDDR6, which means faster texture streaming. The 3060 has more memory. I got it.. interesting.

As I understand it, faster RAM would help more in gaming, more RAM would help in video editing, however I just looked up the differences between the RTX 3060 and the RTX 2080 and the gap between them was bigger than I recall, so if you can afford it, the RTX 2080 would be worth it. The model you've been quoted for is an EVGA RTX 2080 Super KO, which is will perform better than most RTX 2080 models and almost as well as an RTX 2080 Ti.

I've crossed out that cheap board. I'm not going cheap on motherboard. I want this to have AT MINIMUM TPM 2.0 to be future proof.

TPM 2.0 has been around since 2014, all motherboards coming out now will support that, the original TPM (1.0) chips are no longer in production.

I'm not sure we can do that, we are dealing with someone here in Alabama (where I live for the time being), that's buying these wholesale, so he printed the specs out for us and I have to tell him what I want.

Bro, those wholesale prices are being beaten by Amazon's prices, are you sure you're getting a good deal?

I have gone for cheaper components where I can, such as the WD550 vs the Samsung

I've been hearing good things about Ryzen, I'm good with these suggestions. However, is THAT chip like the most recent chip, and is this 3900x good enough? I need opinions here.

The latest Ryzen CPUs are the 5000 series, the 5600X is a Ryzen 5, it would go head to head against an Intel Core i5, but now that the 12th Gen Intel CPUs have launched, I would consider an Intel as well, here is a comparison between the 5600X and 12600KF and the Intel performed an average 13% better than the AMD part. If you do decide to go the Intel route, stick to a system with DDR4 as currently there is no real performance improvement with DDR5 and you'll end up paying the higher early adopter costs if you end up going for DDR5 now.

I put my suggestions based on Ryzen as your quotes were all for Ryzen so I decided to aim at like for like.

Remember my original suggestions were $253.27 lower than your wholesale quote, that comes down to $180 difference with 32GB RAM instead of 16GB.

I'm not a fan of white, but if I have to take white. I'll take it. I want black/matte/metalic whatever to fend off dust. I had a PS3, and that was a magnet for... dust. lol

I love the PS3. Best console ever made. Technically.

Switching to black would reduce your costs.

I think the PS2 was the best console ever made, but I never owned a PS3 or PS4 and I got my XBox 360 free after winning it for the highest percentage sales of MW3 with the Season Pass, during the launch event that I worked at the time.

The SSD is going to hold the Windows 10/11 files, my HDD is going to be where my files go. I read somewhere about this and I was "wait, so that's what people do!?" Mind blown. But makes sense because SSDs are new and are not entirely "reliable."

Two drives are better than 1, three drives are better than 2.

Ideally, your C drive should only hold your OS and essential apps that can't be installed elsewhere, your D drive should hold your programs/apps/games etc... and then all data should be on a different drive too.

It's true, SSDs are not entirely reliable in the sense that once you have written to them so many times, the Nand chips that hold the data will start to degrade and eventually fail, in the same that once you have written to a conventional HDD enough times it will also fail, these are essentially consumables, but we are talking many years of service before they fail, that's why some SSDs, including mine, come with a 5-year warranty.

 

[Carlos]

I've swapped the RAM in my suggested setup for 32GB Crucial CL15 RAM, this will help with video editing and the lower latency will improve performance, it comes in at $5 more than the CL16 modules so it's worth the extra $5. Have a look here.

Excellent!

As I understand it, faster RAM would help more in gaming, more RAM would help in video editing, however I just looked up the differences between the RTX 3060 and the RTX 2080 and the gap between them was bigger than I recall, so if you can afford it, the RTX 2080 would be worth it. The model you've been quoted for is an EVGA RTX 2080 Super KO, which is will perform better than most RTX 2080 models and almost as well as an RTX 2080 Ti.

I see.

TPM 2.0 has been around since 2014, all motherboards coming out now will support that, the original TPM (1.0) chips are no longer in production.

Understood.

Bro, those wholesale prices are being beaten by Amazon's prices, are you sure you're getting a good deal?

Don't look at me. If I had the easy money, I'd have done your suggestion last night.

I have gone for cheaper components where I can, such as the WD550 vs the Samsung

I don't mind either. Both are good brands. I'd prefer Western Digital because they do quality hard drives. Samsung is better for entertainment products like TV's. They beat everyone at price.

The latest Ryzen CPUs are the 5000 series, the 5600X is a Ryzen 5, it would go head to head against an Intel Core i5, but now that the 12th Gen Intel CPUs have launched, I would consider an Intel as well, here is a comparison between the 5600X and 12600KF and the Intel performed an average 13% better than the AMD part. If you do decide to go the Intel route, stick to a system with DDR4 as currently there is no real performance improvement with DDR5 and you'll end up paying the higher early adopter costs if you end up going for DDR5 now.

I'm surprised you recommend Intel for gaming computes. Most PC gamers recommend Ryzen CPU's for gaming and/or other computes.

I put my suggestions based on Ryzen as your quotes were all for Ryzen so I decided to aim at like for like.

Remember my original suggestions were $253.27 lower than your wholesale quote, that comes down to $180 difference with 32GB RAM instead of 16GB.

Interesting.

Switching to black would reduce your costs.

I think the PS2 was the best console ever made, but I never owned a PS3 or PS4 and I got my XBox 360 free after winning it for the highest percentage sales of MW3 with the Season Pass, during the launch event that I worked at the time.

When it comes to games, yes... PS2 was the best console ever. But technically, PS3 was a great investment. Its sad how it was marketed. So much potential missed.

Two drives are better than 1, three drives are better than 2.

Ideally, your C drive should only hold your OS and essential apps that can't be installed elsewhere, your D drive should hold your programs/apps/games etc... and then all data should be on a different drive too.

It's true, SSDs are not entirely reliable in the sense that once you have written to them so many times, the Nand chips that hold the data will start to degrade and eventually fail, in the same that once you have written to a conventional HDD enough times it will also fail, these are essentially consumables, but we are talking many years of service before they fail, that's why some SSDs, including mine, come with a 5-year warranty.

See. There ya go!

 

[KeyboardDemon]

I'm surprised you recommend Intel for gaming computes. Most PC gamers recommend Ryzen CPU's for gaming and/or other computes.

My rationale behind building a PC either for myself or creating a parts list for someone else is to look at the workload first and then try and match the best features that most fully meet the users needs. In June 2020 when I built my PC I knew what my budget was and how I intended to use my PC, I also had a clear upgrade path in mind.

My choice of AMD over Intel had nothing to do with AMD being the clear performance winner, it had more to do with the way I could get within 3% of the equivalent Intel performance, but save around 20%-25% on the cost of the core Intel motherboard, and CPU> That meant I could put more towards a better graphics card allowing me to go from an RTX 2060 with an Intel build to an RTX 2070 Super with AMD.

Intel 12th Gen CPUs are a big step forward over the AMD 5000 CPUs, but as they are new there are still many early adopter issues that are still being worked out, the launch was at the end of October 2021, so if you are looking at YouTube videos for recommendations on which CPU to get, look for videos that were published after that launch date.

Earlier I said that DDR5 would not offer you a big enough advantage to need to consider it, today I saw a video that showed how this was true for gaming, but then also showed how this was not true for content creation, and how in an intensive audio production scenario DDR5 based systems were significantly faster than the equivalent DDR4 system.

Gaming can be run on either platform at more than acceptable performance levels, if gaming was your only concern, I would say AMD without a second thought, then you can save some money and spend it on things like RGB or a coffee machine or whatever.

You need to plan which platform will deliver the best performance for your more important workloads, in your case that would be video streaming and editing.

More CPU cores would help with editing, and the Intel processors will give you up to 16 cores. These 16 cores are comprised of 8 performance cores with 16 threads, and 8 efficiency cores, these combine to give you a total of 24 threads. Think of threads as individual streams of processing instructions or tasks, the more threads you have available to your CPU the better it is at splitting complex workloads over those threads to get the work done faster, where the software you're using supports it. When streaming you could use the efficiency cores to handle the streaming, while your performance cores handle the actual gameplay, again, this relies on streaming software that will recognise your CPU has P and E cores to ensure that the tasks are sent to right types of cores.

AMD CPUs like the 5950X and 5900X will also give you 16 cores/32 threads or 12 cores/24 threads respectively, but there are no options for DDR5 or PCI-e 5.0 connectivity on their motherboards, though it is highly unlikely that we will see consumer grade PCI-e 5.0 devices for some time yet, I did find a video where they were talking about an engineering sample of a PCI-e 5.0 SSD that was transferring data at 15GB/s which sooooo faaaaaast.

The information regarding the new Intel platform is confusing and data being shown on YouTube videos is often conflicted with other videos as they are all testing for slightly different user scenarios. If you have to buy now, then go with that first AMD build, but if you have the luxury of time to consider, then wait until there is more reliable data on the Intel 12th gen platform. I do think the new platform will put Intel back in the race again, and this is a good thing, not because I am loyal to Intel but because when both Intel and AMD are competing fiercely, all computer enthusiasts get better PCs.

 

[Carlos]

My rationale behind building a PC either for myself or creating a parts list for someone else is to look at the workload first and then try and match the best features that most fully meet the users needs. In June 2020 when I built my PC I knew what my budget was and how I intended to use my PC, I also had a clear upgrade path in mind.

My choice of AMD over Intel had nothing to do with AMD being the clear performance winner, it had more to do with the way I could get within 3% of the equivalent Intel performance, but save around 20%-25% on the cost of the core Intel motherboard, and CPU> That meant I could put more towards a better graphics card allowing me to go from an RTX 2060 with an Intel build to an RTX 2070 Super with AMD.

Intel 12th Gen CPUs are a big step forward over the AMD 5000 CPUs, but as they are new there are still many early adopter issues that are still being worked out, the launch was at the end of October 2021, so if you are looking at YouTube videos for recommendations on which CPU to get, look for videos that were published after that launch date.

Earlier I said that DDR5 would not offer you a big enough advantage to need to consider it, today I saw a video that showed how this was true for gaming, but then also showed how this was not true for content creation, and how in an intensive audio production scenario DDR5 based systems were significantly faster than the equivalent DDR4 system.

Gaming can be run on either platform at more than acceptable performance levels, if gaming was your only concern, I would say AMD without a second thought, then you can save some money and spend it on things like RGB or a coffee machine or whatever.

You need to plan which platform will deliver the best performance for your more important workloads, in your case that would be video streaming and editing.

More CPU cores would help with editing, and the Intel processors will give you up to 16 cores. These 16 cores are comprised of 8 performance cores with 16 threads, and 8 efficiency cores, these combine to give you a total of 24 threads. Think of threads as individual streams of processing instructions or tasks, the more threads you have available to your CPU the better it is at splitting complex workloads over those threads to get the work done faster, where the software you're using supports it. When streaming you could use the efficiency cores to handle the streaming, while your performance cores handle the actual gameplay, again, this relies on streaming software that will recognise your CPU has P and E cores to ensure that the tasks are sent to right types of cores.

AMD CPUs like the 5950X and 5900X will also give you 16 cores/32 threads or 12 cores/24 threads respectively, but there are no options for DDR5 or PCI-e 5.0 connectivity on their motherboards, though it is highly unlikely that we will see consumer grade PCI-e 5.0 devices for some time yet, I did find a video where they were talking about an engineering sample of a PCI-e 5.0 SSD that was transferring data at 15GB/s which sooooo faaaaaast.

The information regarding the new Intel platform is confusing and data being shown on YouTube videos is often conflicted with other videos as they are all testing for slightly different user scenarios. If you have to buy now, then go with that first AMD build, but if you have the luxury of time to consider, then wait until there is more reliable data on the Intel 12th gen platform. I do think the new platform will put Intel back in the race again, and this is a good thing, not because I am loyal to Intel but because when both Intel and AMD are competing fiercely, all computer enthusiasts get better PCs.

Wow. A really thought out post. This is why I love forums over Social Media.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

Just a bit of a crazy, out there thought for you @Carlos

If you're replacing your old build, what components do you have that you can carry forward?

It is quite possible that the surge only killed your motherboard, have you tested the components in another build?

If your GPU still works and you can carry that forward, that will enable you to spend more on a CPU, either a Ryzen 9 5900X or an i9 12900K, and then you could add a stronger GPU later, but that does depend on how good your GPU is.

 

[Carlos]

Just a bit of a crazy, out there thought for you @Carlos

If you're replacing your old build, what components do you have that you can carry forward?

It is quite possible that the surge only killed your motherboard, have you tested the components in another build?

If your GPU still works and you can carry that forward, that will enable you to spend more on a CPU, either a Ryzen 9 5900X or an i9 12900K, and then you could add a stronger GPU later, but that does depend on how good your GPU is.

The people we went to said the WHOLE thing was fried. As I expected. Because the motherboard was burned, soo... The only thing that survived it is the hard drive. We don't care about the pre-built HP computer. It will NOT run Windows 11. The motherboard is pre-2014.

I understand what you're asking, but we're not going to do what you're asking. I had the same mindset you have. Can we move stuff forward? Some parts, but I don't care. I'll use my old hard drives to offload files THERE.

I am not completely sure, but I may end up moving my old parts to the last remaining pre-built. This build is going to be computer B. If a storm kills my computer, I can use this as backup. I use computers to manage websites such as this.

I don't like Alabama because its very, very small town, and it has storms almost every other month or years. My family doesn't understand how I am wired.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

Ewww... a prebuilt HP, OMG, I think I would've torched it had it survived the storm!

Right, so even if the GPU survived, it has more value as a paper weight than it does as a gaming GPU, it might be ok for a web access PC, not for what you're looking at, unless by some chance it was a pre-built HP Omen gaming PC.