Octopus Overlords

Going to have the mortgage paid off this week, so it's probably time for a new rig. I'll probably have about $1200 budget, but I'm out of the loop, hardware-wise.

Are you a build it or buy it guy?

the new hotness is the m.2 format for hard drives they look like a stick of gum. they are super fast. have to check carefully that your motherboard is compatible, and you may need to fiddle with the bios to get it to recognize it when you build it.

you can get a 500gb for $60. When I built a few months back, I got a 2TB Sabrent Rocket for $279. it took some googleing to get it to work, but now that it does, I am super happy. I boot up windows in under 10 seconds.

I'm a build it guy. Those m.2 drives are what got me interested.

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 for best bang-for-buck. 4th gen Ryzen processors come out in September.

hitbyambulance wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 8:45 pm AMD Ryzen 5 3600 for best bang-for-buck. 4th gen Ryzen processors come out in September.

It depends on the workload. For gaming, the weakness with AMD chips is that the equivalent priced Intel chip will generally outperform it when paired with nVidia GPUs. For example, this comparison of 9400F vs 3600 w/ Fortnite. For general purpose workloads the Ryzen does better.

Please wait a couple months. New processors and video cards are literally just around the corner. Anything you buy now will in 8 Saturdays be dramatically overshadowed. AMD RDNA2 cards also coming later this year but wait for the Ampere announcement at least before sinking any money into a video card, and with Ryzen 4 processors also coming, it may be the worst time to buy or build in a decade.

If you can wait until Nov and build a $1400 system, you will get far more bang for your buck, even if you just get people selling cards to upgrade.

Edit: if you see a great deal on a power supply, case or X570 motherboard between now and then, I don't know I would be afraid to buy now, as those things might be easier to get now before people start building now systems when the new processors hit. Power supplies have been in short supply for a long time now and only recently have started to return to less-than-super-outrageous prices. Cases also have been limited due to early COVID crimp in China supplies only recently having began to been put right. Now may be the best time to decide on and pick up some of those parts.

Default wrote: ↑Wed Jul 22, 2020 1:04 pm Going to have the mortgage paid off this week, so it's probably time for a new rig. I'll probably have about $1200 budget, but I'm out of the loop, hardware-wise.

I'd advise you to get the monitor first, then work backwards from that. Gaming at 1080p vs 1440p vs 4k will call for different components. Gaming at 144hz vs good ol' 60hz will call for different components. If you want Gsync or Freesync will affect your choice of monitor and videocard. If you intend on streaming your games on Twitch or something you'll need more CPU power than if you're just gaming. I wouldn't bother with a soundcard unless you have a specific need for one. If you choose a motherboard with anemic sound, then get a small headphone amp/DAC and nice headphones. Send the sound signal from your computer to your amp and power the headphones from that. I personally would invest in a quality mouse and keyboard. I've gone the cheap route before and always wind up regretting it. The Ryzen 5 3600 is the pick for price/performance. Before you spend more on something else, at least check benchmarks with that CPU paired with the videocard you think you'll be buying and make sure you need the extra CPU power.

For example, if you're going with a 60hz monitor are you really going to care that a better and more expensive CPU gets you 100 frames per second instead of 90 with the 3600?

Right now, I have a decent sized touch screen monitor, so I'm good for a while. Not interested in streaming or online gaming, so that's not a priority. I am in the planning stages, so I can wait for the prices to drop. I just need to get a hardware list together.

I saw some videos on Youtube, I'm thinking of building a new computer, that compared the Ryzen 3 3300x to various higher end Ryzens. One thing I noticed is that at 1080p there really was no difference in game performance when the CPU is paired with a videocard capable of 60fps 1080p performance. Differences didn't pop up until resolution was raised to 1440p or 4k and the videocard was an RTX 2070 level of card or higher. My takeaway from that is that as long as you get a CPU that is 'good enough' for the game, 1080p performance will be capped by the videocard.