Critique my next build

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GhostCow

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 13, 2005
Messages
368
I'm having a hell of a time deciding which of these two builds I'm going to do next. Would love some opinions.

Here is the AMD build: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/GhostCow/saved/#view=r6CrVn

Here is the Intel build: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/GhostCow/saved/#view=RgjCLk

The only difference between the two is the CPU and mobo. I've been struggling with the choice between the two. 90% of what I do is gaming, but I also have gigs of videos that I need to convert to work with my new smart TV. I'd also like to give AMD money to help keep them in business. Haven't owned one of their products since the old X2s.

I know the psu is overkill, but PCpartpicker said the 650w I was going to go with was missing a connection for the am4 Mobo so I just picked random ones from Corsair and seasonic until it stopped giving the compatibility warning.

I wouldn't mind hearing what you guys think about the rest of the parts. I'm sure I could save some money or squeeze out some extra performance somewhere. I'm trying to keep the price not much more than $3200 for the entire build.

This is the computer I'm upgrading from if it matters: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/GhostCow/saved/#view=YCRH99
 
Not sure the Gen4 M.2 drives are worth it for the Intel system which is limited to Gen3 PCIe.
The PSU issue is likey the 650 lacking additional 4 pin eps but you'll not likely need anything more that the one eight pin eps anyway.
For gaming and transcoding I'd go the AMD route and benefit from the additional cores and Gen 3 PCIe.
You may want to up your RAM game a bit too with 32GB's but I would consult the QVL for the TUF board before dropping the hammer.
 
The 4 pin is exactly what was missing from the other PSU. I have no idea what that's for. I thought about going with 32gb, but I've never run out of ram with my current 16gb while gaming and keeping a browser open. I'm not the kind of guy to have a lot of tabs open. Does system ram usage go way up at 1440p?
 
Transoding can be a memory hog.
Gaming that is CPU Intensive can also hog memory such as many modern games which use more cores
My thoughts are two fold.
#1 32gb = future proof
#2 it pays to buy a matched set upfront vs adding to what you have later especially with memory.
 
If this is primarily a gaming box, I'd probably go with Intel. AFAIK they still have the advantage there. Though i understand wanting to go with the underdog and support AMD (and they're typically a bit cheaper).

Unlike gaming, video transcoding (for home, at least) is primarily a background application. If it takes a bit longer on the Intel relative to the AMD (I don't know, haven't seen those benchmarks), no big deal. Given that they're both 8/16 CPUs, I wouldn't anticipate too much difference.

As far as actual components go:
  • I'm highly skeptical that the first PCIe 4 SSDs are worth it (all the benchmarks show them performing about the same as good PCIe 3 units), especially when NVMe drives in general are barely a real-word upgrade over SATA units. The original Samsung 970 Evo is currently going for ~$170, ~$90 from that Gigabyte SSD (the 970 Evo+ goes for ~$230, -$30).
  • I'm guessing the 2TB SSD is for games/media? I'd consider a SATA SSD here. For about half the price you could get a 2 TB Crucial MX500 and see little real-world difference over a NVMe unit.
  • Platinum PSUs generally aren't worth the price premium. Newegg has a suitable Seasonic 650 W Gold for ~$35 less.
  • If you go Intel, you'd also be fine with RAM that's a bit slower (e.g., DDR4-3200, with possibly with a better CL rating) and cheaper.
  • I know case selection is highly subjective, but that seems like an especially large case for an air-cooled system. Also, does anyone actually make good 200 mm fans?
 
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I'm also skeptical about the SSDs. The secondary drive is basically a backup drive. It holds all kinds of installers, ISOs, drivers, my emulators, and anything I've downloaded but haven't moved to the NAS yet. I like to do quarterly formats to keep things clean (probably totally unnecessary, but it was a good habit in the Win9x days) and setting things up like that cuts down on install times a lot. That's why I was just trying to get the fastest hard drives possible. I figure they should last through multiple builds, so why not go big?

Thanks for the PSU link. If it has the 4 pin connector then I'll definitely go with that.

I'm definitely open to different RAM. I was sad to see that I'd have to go with a single fan instead of dual on the heatsink because of clearance issues.

I've always gone with big cases just because I find them easier to work in. I've had some bad experiences with smaller cases in the past. That's actually small considering I usually go with full towers. I also like that it has a graphics card support arm. I know it's not generally an issue, but I grew up in the days of desktop cases and having giant heavy video cards hanging sideways has always made me feel anxious.
 
Yeah, quarterly rebuilds seems highly excessive unless you're doing a lot of install/testing/uninstall of apps/drivers/etc. If such rebuilds are necessary, a good system imaging solution would seem to be in order. Anyways, installers/etc. would benefit even less from NVMe, especially if they're only transient on their way to the NAS.

Also, don't try to future-proof by buying biggest/fastest/most expensive. It rarely works. Buy for the next 2-3 years, save your cash, and be pleasantly surprised if the system is good for longer or if a component is worth carrying over to the next build. e.g., by the time you'll be planning your next build PCIe 5 is expected to be a thing.
 
Here is my stab at an Intel system for you:
PCPartPicker Part List
CPU: Intel Core i7-9700K 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor ($339.99 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Slim CPU Cooler ($64.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 GAMING PRO CARBON ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($169.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory ($164.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($227.49 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung 860 Evo 2 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($319.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER 8 GB BLACK GAMING Video Card ($704.98 @ Newegg)
Case: Fractal Design Meshify S2 ATX Mid Tower Case ($162.98 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair TXM Gold 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply ($98.99 @ Newegg)
Monitor: Dell AW3418DW 34.1" 3440x1440 120 Hz Monitor ($779.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $3034.38
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-08-31 05:54 EDT-0400
 
If you live by a Microcenter I would get the INLAND Premium-- NVMe 1TB is $107... spec is close to the 970 EVO (see this thread https://hardforum.com/threads/hot-inland-1tb-nvme-premium-107-99-microcenter.1978390/

https://www.microcenter.com/product...el_Desktop_Memory_Kit_F4-3200C16D-32G_-_Black-$145
https://www.microcenter.com/product...e_Z390_Aorus_Master,_CPU_-_Motherboard_Bundle-MOBO Combo $550 Higher price but better than the MSI ... IMO
as far as cooling I went with a 240mm AIO from EVGA-$129 the Fans were a bit to loud for me so I installed Nactua NF-A14 IPP..on it They have great Flow and better Static PSI for getting air thru the radiator. never get above 55c even after hours of gaming
as far as case there are a lot out there..I used a Phanteks Eclipse P350X $75 on amazon..not the best but great for $75...as long as you do not want to mount the cooler up top (not enough clearance from MOBO. mounted mine up front)
https://www.amazon.com/Phanteks-PH-...-Tempered/dp/B07D5T4SC1?tag=hardwar0d-20&th=1

I have no comment on the Monitor....except your going to be pushing the Card Any Card to run at high settings at that refresh rate and screen size...I would go with a 27" 2650x1440
and maybe score a 1080Ti for $480-$525.. IMHO
 
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Yes, I considered including the better value SSDs but having re-read the OP's post he is perhaps someone who values quality and reliability. Samsung drives all have a 5 year warranty.

The Alienware monitor is really sweet. You are right it will be tough to drive AAA games at 100+ fps/hz with a 2080 Super but that's where the Gsync comes in. A monitor should last a long time and I expect the OP would replace the video card multiple times so it's best to over-spec the monitor IMO.
 
I also think AMD will better suit your needs as described, but I have a few thoughts about the parts you have chosen...

1) CPU: Go with the 3900x (more cores) or the 3700x (same cores, less cost). Numerous reviewers have demonstrated that the only appreciable difference between the 3700x and 3800x is the $100 in cost; they essentially boost to the same speeds. "But the 3900x is $100 more and out of stock everywhere!" you say. That $100 more buys you 4 more cores (8 threads). If transcoding video, this can be a significant performance improvement. The time saved from this improvement adds up quickly if you have a large collection you are looking to encode and leaves you a lot of leeway to do more in the background while the computer is also working on other things for you. As for availability, stock has been picking up and it is relatively trivial to get one in a timely fashion if you pay attention. NowInStock.net was very helpful to me in getting one. Since it keeps track of "when last in stock" it helped me find that Best Buy and NewEgg have been getting batches of them in stock every week or so and allowed me to anticipate and order one when it became available. There might be a week or 2 delay before you get the chip, but it is worth it in my opinion - especially for your use case.

2) RAM: TridentZ Royal is an expensive looks-based RAM kit. You are paying a premium for that. Hell, I recently got 2x8G AMD Certified Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro sticks for $120. Right now, they are on sale via NewEgg through Labor day for just $92. These are Micron E-Die sticks and work very well with the Ryzen 3xxx series chips. This switch alone gets you that 3900x price difference above :)

3) SSDs: Your NVMe SSDs are very expensive. PCIe Gen 4 exists, but there really isn't anything right now that takes practical advantage of those speeds yet (Gen 4 SSDs post impressive synthetic benchmarks, but real-world testing shows negligible gains over Gen 3). It's a feature that's nice to have, but will likely be a lot more useful 2 years or so from now. You don't have to be near a Microcenter to get the Inland SSD deals - they will actually allow you to purchase those via their web store and they will ship them to you. I am looking very closely at getting the Inland 2TB SSD for ~$230 in a month or so. You could get 2 of these and come in close to the same price as 1 of yours. In addition, if you want to get a nice looking heatsink for it, they exist as well. I am using an EK NVMe SSD heatsink I got for $25 (they had a purple one!! :))

4) Power supply: DO NOT SKIMP ON YOUR POWER SUPPLY! Platinum rating is not necessary, but a Seasonic Focus Gold 850 can be had for about the same price as that 750 you are looking at and will absolutely provide reliable power to your equipment and comes with a good warranty. In addition, the wattage is high enough that your equipment running under moderate load will be close to the unit's peak efficiency and actually saving you power as compared to the 650W units I have seen suggested to you above. On top of all of that, that 850W power supply will leave your system some room for growth down the road.

Bonus Edit: If you can find one in stock, the Phanteks Enthoo Luxe 2 is an absolutely amazing case for the money (MSRP $189). Jayztwocents has an excellent video about it.

Also...

I may be old, but: Friends don't let friends buy Acer products.
 
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On a separate-but-related note...

The 2080 Super graphics card. Yes, it is close to the best thing you can get right now, but it is massive freaking overkill for 1440p gaming. I'd recommend a 2070 Super. Put the difference into a better (read: Non-Acer) monitor or pocket it for a future graphics card upgrade. You are only air cooled, so replacing the card later will be trivial, and future generations of cards will have much better RTX support than the barely usable stuff you get now (with RTX being the only real reason to get an nVidia 20x0 card over pretty much anything else - including older 10x0 series nVidia cards - anyway)
 
I've changed a couple of things after reading these replies. I ended up biting the bullet and going with Intel since I like to run RPCS3 and it's much faster on Intel due to an instruction set that AMD doesn't have on their CPUs. I don't think more cores would help me right now because single threaded performance is still king for some of the things I do and I don't see games using more than 8 cores any time soon. Also, isn't most video encoding actually done on GPUs these days? If so then it doesn't really matter which CPU I get for that job.

Those SSDs do seem a bit overpriced, but most of the reviews do seem to show a tiny improvement in load times over other SSDs and in one of the reviews the write speed was much faster than some other drives. Write speed for my main drive is very important. I'm probably going to go with something cheaper for the backup drive, but I haven't decided on what yet. I want to avoid SATA drives just because I think it would be cool to have empty or no drive cages and it's less cables to deal with. It might even be better for airflow.

I looked around for some different ram and found these DDR4 3600 CL16 sticks that seem cheap and low profile. The performance is similar to CL14 3200 sticks but at a price tag that's almost $200 cheaper. I thought 16gb would be fine until DDR5 is a thing, but ya'll made me paranoid so I bumped up to 32gb. https://www.newegg.com/corsair-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820236544

From the benchmarks I've seen, it looks like not even the 2080ti is going to get me the frame rates I want at 4k, so I went with 1440p/75hz as a compromise. I love me some IPS goodness and I care a lot more about the minimum frame rate than the average, so I'm not sure I'd say the 2080 super is overkill if you're trying to keep from dropping below 75fps at 1440p. It's also a nice bonus that the Acer has freesync. I'm also blind in one eye, so 32" is probably about as big as I can go without going bigger than my field of vision. The 27" I have right now is close to the limit. I'm also not a fan of curved monitors. I'm surprised that someone recommended one.

I also switched out the Noctua DH-D15 for an H150i just because it seems like less trouble and from what I've read, using it as an intake fan and blowing hot air into the case won't raise GPU temps more than 1c. I'm still mad that I saw some air coolers beat my h100i after I bought that one for the last build though.

I still have up to two weeks before I pull the trigger on any of this.
 
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GhostCow said:
I've changed a couple of things after reading these replies. I ended up biting the bullet and going with Intel since I like to run RPCS3 and it's much faster on Intel due to an instruction set that AMD doesn't have on their CPUs. I don't think more cores would help me right now because single threaded performance is still king for some of the things I do and I don't see games using more than 8 cores any time soon. Also, isn't most video encoding actually done on GPUs these days? If so then it doesn't really matter which CPU I get for that job.

Those SSDs do seem a bit overpriced, but most of the reviews do seem to show a tiny improvement in load times over other SSDs and in one of the reviews the write speed was much faster than some other drives. Write speed for my main drive is very important. I'm probably going to go with something cheaper for the backup drive, but I haven't decided on what yet. I want to avoid SATA drives just because I think it would be cool to have empty or no drive cages and it's less cables to deal with. It might even be better for airflow.

I looked around for some different ram and found these DDR4 3600 CL16 sticks that seem cheap and low profile. The performance is similar to CL14 3200 sticks but at a price tag that's almost $200 cheaper. I thought 16gb would be fine until DDR5 is a thing, but ya'll made me paranoid so I bumped up to 32gb. https://www.newegg.com/corsair-32gb-288-pin-ddr4-sdram/p/N82E16820236544

From the benchmarks I've seen, it looks like not even the 2080ti is going to get me the frame rates I want at 4k, so I went with 1440p/75hz as a compromise. I love me some IPS goodness and I care a lot more about the minimum frame rate than the average, so I'm not sure I'd say the 2080 super is overkill if you're trying to keep from dropping below 75fps at 1440p. It's also a nice bonus that the Acer has freesync. I'm also blind in one eye, so 32" is probably about as big as I can go without going bigger than my field of vision. The 27" I have right now is close to the limit. I'm also not a fan of curved monitors. I'm surprised that someone recommended one.

I also switched out the Noctua DH-D15 for an H150i just because it seems like less trouble and from what I've read, using it as an intake fan and blowing hot air into the case won't raise GPU temps more than 1c. I'm still mad that I saw some air coolers beat my h100i after I bought that one for the last build though.

I still have up to two weeks before I pull the trigger on any of this.
Click to expand...

I honestly do not know if Ryzen 3000 series CPU have an equivalent to TPX or not. Google-Fu does not say one way or the other. If it does not, than the Intel setup would be best for that emulator. As far as encoding is concerned, I never GPU encode because quality suffers, so CPU cores are very important in my use case.

Edit: Re:RPCS3 - It would be very interesting if someone could do comparative benches of this...

2nd Edit: Reading the RPCS3 Reddit, the 3700x and 3800x AMD CPUs have very strong performance with this emulator, similar to the 8700k @ 5GHz in some instances (and the 8700k has TPX support). Reportedly, performance suffers with the 3600, 3600x and 3900x due to the way the way the emulator has to map threads across CCDs (4 core/8 thread per CCX maps well whereas 3 core/6 thread does not - presumably the 3950x will perform well with this also). 9700K would likely still have an edge however.
 
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I ended up making a few more changes. I realized the motherboard I picked didn't have internal connections for the usb-c port on the case, so I went with the mobo that TheFlayedMan recommended. I've never really strayed from Asus because they've always been reliable for me in the past and supposedly they had the best bios when I built my last rig. One of the reviews listed the bios on the msi board as one of the pros, so I'm going to hold my nose and give it a shot. I also switched out the SSDs for some that use mlc for reliability
 
For Asus I think you have to pay a bit more (the Asus tax lol) something like the Asus ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING I quite like the look of.
 
The H500M is definitely overpriced. I wish it was possible to get one without the glass front for a slightly lower price. I really like the way it looks though. The only other case that looks as good to me is the Corsair 500D rgb, but that one is too rich even for my blood.

The funny thing is I don't even like lighting anywhere on my PC. I'll be turning any and all lights off. It's just that sexy body that I'm into
 
Now If the would only make the P350X with the front cover of the P400A(Not the RGB behind it)
 
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