Hey guys,
I’m helping a friend build a pc, this will be both our first time doing this. I have chosen all the parts for the PC but I wanted to know what you guys thought.
In no particular order:
What monitor?
I would never spend that much on a gaming PC and settle for 12gb of vram. Maybe just me.
In the era of 300gb AAA titles, 2TB ain’t what it used to be.
That’s a nice, pricey white fish tank, and a lot of boring black components you’re stuffing in it. You sure that’s the vibe you want?
I think 12G is fine tbh. By the time we need more, the GPU is probably obsolete anyways.
My friend already has the peripherals. For CPU he said he wanted an NVIDIA so that’s what I could find without going over 2.1K. But given some other suggestions on places I can save money maybe I can change the GPU.
Also he doesnt care about the looks as he is just going to have it in a not to visible place anyways.
Thanks for the feedback
I didn’t ask who had the monitor or where it was, we need to know the model/specs to determine the appropriateness of the computer/card that will driving it. If you’re doing all this to pair with a 15 year old 60hz 1080p monitor you’re wasting everyone’s time and your friend’s money.
If your friend doesn’t care about looks that case is a collosal waste, just get a black box with decent intake filters and nice fans for half the price.
Any specific reason you’re going for Intel?
For that money, you can get much better CPUs for gaming or productivity from AMD but it may hold the lead in some very specific tasks.
You should also generally explain what specific purpose they need such an expensive CPU for; it’s way outside what you need for typical gaming or PC usage. For gaming purposes, you usually want to spend most of your budget on GPU and monitor.
Motherboard is quite expensive; do you require special features that a more basic board wouldn’t provide?
The memory is extremely overpriced. Cheaper memory can be had for >1€/GB less. You can get 48GB of the same model for less: https://nl.pcpartpicker.com/product/NTHqqs/corsair-vengeance-rgb-48-gb-2-x-24-gb-ddr5-5200-cl38-memory-cmh48gx5m2b5200c38
For memory, always sort by price/GB and choose the cheapest that has an appropriate module size and is on your motherboard’s supported list.I don’t trust WD. I’d get a Samsung SSD.
Case is quite expensive but if they like the looks, that obviously trumps.
I can’t believe I missed that on the RAM. Thats crazy. Thanks for the tip
I have WD and dont have any issues.
Yeah I can probably go for a cheaper case, my friend just wanted something with a transparent side panel so this fish tank looking thing looked right hahaha and he approved.
As for the mother board I dont really have an answer I just went with a recommended one for the CPU. I dont know much about motherboards so I’m sacred to get creative there
Any compatible motherboard generally works for the CPU.
With AMD, this is basically a non-issue but high-end Intel CPUs are so incredibly power hungry that a motherboard VRMs can become a limiting factor. More money isn’t always better here though; a 120€ board could be better than a 300€ one. You’d have to look up the specific board.
Most important though is feature support which mostly boils down to what I/O you need. E.g. NVMe slots, expansion cards, thunderbolt, networking or even just how many USB-A ports there are.
I don’t have any specific requirements here, so I’ve so far gone with one of the least expensive boards that isn’t utter trash and I’ve had no issues.
I will admit I am biased towards Intel but I checked the CPU benchmarks of other AMD processors at that price range and also more cores.
My friend wants the PC for 3D rendering and VR stuff, so more cores seemed better in my eyes.
but I checked the CPU benchmarks of other AMD processors at that price range and also more cores.
Which benchmarks? There’s a notorious site out there that has “benchmarks” so biased to the point of being as good as non-factual.
Hardware benchmarks are not a simple topic, so any one number that you see presented as “the truth” will be wrong for a thousand reasons. Please always use real-world benchmarks that closely resemble your actual projected usage (i.e. the games your friend likes to play) for gauging hardware performance.
My friend wants the PC for 3D rendering and VR stuff, so more cores seemed better in my eyes.
That’s good to know. VR doesn’t need any more CPU perf than regular gaming but 3D rendering can. It highly depends on what kind of 3D rendering your friend is doing though as you’d typically do that on the GPU; preferring GPU power even more than games.
Which specific software is this? Some software can’t do GPU rendering but i.e. Blender can (and you certainly want an Nvidia GPU for that). You’d also probably want more VRAM then.
Also, are they doing this as an actual hobby; spending significant time on it or is it just a side interest? The latter use-case can be satisfied by any reasonably powerful system, the former justifies more investment.
I used this for comparing the CPUs https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleCompare.php.
My friend mostly works with unreal engine.
Its their for them to be able to work basically
I used this for comparing the CPUs https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleCompare.php.
Okay, at least that’s not userbenchmark but what I said still applies: this number does not tell you anything of value.
My friend mostly works with unreal engine.
Oh, that’s quite something else than 3D rendering.
It’s been a while since I fiddled with it it but I didn’t do anything significant with it.
According to Puget systems’ benchmarks, this is one of those specific tasks where Intel CPUs are comparatively good but even here they’re basically only about on par with what AMD has to offer.
Something like the 9900x smokes the 14700k in almost every other productivity benchmark though.
If you care about productivity performance first and foremost, the 7950x could be a consideration at 16 high-performance actual cores which smokes anything Intel has to offer, including in Unreal. It’s by no means bad at gaming either but Intel 14th gen is surprisingly competitive against the non-x3D AMD chips for gaming purposes.
Though, again, CPU doesn’t matter all that much for gaming; GPU (and IMHO monitor) are much more important. (Some specific games such as MMOs are exceptions to this though.)Its their for them to be able to work basically
As in professional work? Shouldn’t their employer provide them with a sufficiently powerful system then?
Thank you for all the input and information.
They dont have a job yet, just finished university.
Basically what I wanted to ask is whether they’re taking this seriously and are doing demanding stuff or whether they’re just starting out with basic things. Also how important gaming vs. Unreal is to them; would they care if it took a bit longer to e.g. compile shaders if that meant 20% more fps?
They care more about the rendering than the gaming
Wouldn’t trust a Gigabyte PSU, don’t care how long it’s been since they say they fixed those issues. You could probably save some money with a ThermalRight Phantom Spirit cooler, save on the RAM as suggested in another comment, you might be able to get a similarly spec’d MSI or ASRock motherboard cheaper, and put some of those savings into a Seasonic PSU instead.
Now me personally, I like to keep my OS install on a separate drive from games, data, etc, so I’d look into a smaller 128GB or 256GB nvme just for that, but as I said that’s a matter of personal preference.
Why do you keep the os on a different drive? Also do you dual boot and if so would you have 4 drives?
In case you should need to reinstall the OS for whatever reason, I have more peace of mind knowing that data is on a different drive entirely. It can also save time if you’re upgrading your system you don’t have to download games again, for example, though you could just bring an old drive into a newer system and likely achieve the same, but to me it’s simpler to have it separated, and then you don’t have to worry about booting from the right drive. Which probably answers your last question, no I do not dual boot but if I did I would probably have at most 1 drive for data and 1 drive per OS (though most likely I would just partition a single drive for OSs).
I was not aware of those issues
