Help me build my PC 2017 Catch All

You can get a EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti XC Ultra GAMING from NewEgg for $310, plus a free mouse you don't need.

Vega 56 or 1660 ti. Both will let you stretch out that CPU for a while longer, and both are very good buys for the money.

At an equal price point, take the Vega 56. But the 1660 ti seems to sell around $25 less and that makes it a more even fight. A factory overclocked 1660 ti will close the performance gap, but the Vega 56 can overclock too and pull back ahead.

Quick Q:

I'm probably going to try and build a new PC this fall, and recently came across PCPartPicker.com to help me find all the stuff I need/want and make sure it actually works together. But is it the best guide out there, or is there another?

Prederick wrote:

Quick Q:

I'm probably going to try and build a new PC this fall, and recently came across PCPartPicker.com to help me find all the stuff I need/want and make sure it actually works together. But is it the best guide out there, or is there another?

Pretty much, yes!

I think it is good to get a general idea of prices. Some of the sites it picks I would not shop at, and it also doesn't have all the potential places so once you have a parts list I suggest checking where to prefer to shop too (for example it does not have Microcenter).

You used to be able to add Micro Center as a store in your account preferences but you can't anymore and I'm not sure why... Some sort of difficulty in pulling prices from MC's website I think?

Prederick wrote:

Quick Q:

I'm probably going to try and build a new PC this fall, and recently came across PCPartPicker.com to help me find all the stuff I need/want and make sure it actually works together. But is it the best guide out there, or is there another?

PCPartPicker is a great site, but I recommend creating a login and culling down the list of stores it pulls from. Some of them will make certain parts show for below normal prices from some scarce-quantity "sale" they have going on, making your build look cheaper than it really will be. Snip out some of those stores you've never heard of, and your results will be more in line with reality.

Ditto Legion's advice. PCPartpicker is excellent, but you really want to filter the stores it shows results from to sites you trust. Once you do it's excellent.

It even saved me from a cooler clearance issue when I was putting together a parts list for a friend. The case was just slightly too small for the air cooler I had picked. I hadn't done that research myself yet, and then didn't have to because the site highlighted it for me.

Thirding PCPartPicker, it's so great for creating part lists, checking quick compatibility and so on.

*Legion* wrote:

Vega 56 or 1660 ti. Both will let you stretch out that CPU for a while longer, and both are very good buys for the money.

At an equal price point, take the Vega 56. But the 1660 ti seems to sell around $25 less and that makes it a more even fight. A factory overclocked 1660 ti will close the performance gap, but the Vega 56 can overclock too and pull back ahead.

I bought a Sapphire Pulse Vega 56 with WWZ and Division2 bundled for $300 a few weeks back. I've been pretty happy with it so far. I'm running a Ryzen 5 1600 and I've been playing Monster Hunter World at highest settings for a few days now. The bundled deal just expired, but with Nvidia putting so much pressure on trying to direct compete AMD out of the market I'd imagine they'll start a new bundle soon enough.

Danke, gents.

Middcore wrote:

You used to be able to add Micro Center as a store in your account preferences but you can't anymore and I'm not sure why... Some sort of difficulty in pulling prices from MC's website I think?

Microcenter tends to run deep sales on certain items, trying to pull people into the store to buy everything else as well, and PCPartPicker encourages cherry-picking. If you buy *only* the sale items at MC, they might even lose money on the deal.

They might have just asked PCPP to stop sending them traffic, because it wasn't worth it to them anymore.

https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/10/1...

AMD announces one more new Ryzen. Not sure the purpose of this part. Seems like it would have been better as a TR chip. That’s a ton of cores for $750.

16 cores in 105 watts is ridiculously good. If they're not fudging that number, that is one *hell* of a chip.

Malor wrote:

16 cores in 105 watts is ridiculously good. If they're not fudging that number, that is one *hell* of a chip.

It is but it’s appeal is to larger memory size workstations and AM4 is limited to 4 Dimms. This proc needs 8 like on the TR4 platform.

I’m still sitting on my 1st gen TR. I’m anxiously awaiting to see what AMD does with 3rd gen TR.

Ah, good point. And isn't AM4 limited to just two DIMMs for best RAM performance?

Malor wrote:

Ah, good point. And isn't AM4 limited to just two DIMMs for best RAM performance?

I havent kept up but yeah on the X370 mobo your highest performance speed was achieved with 2 single ranked DIMMS. Maybe they changed that on the X470

So would 32 gigs be the limit in two DIMMs? I'm not sure how big they can be.

16 cores does seem a bit excessive for that.

Malor wrote:

So would 32 gigs be the limit in two DIMMs? I'm not sure how big they can be.

16 cores does seem a bit excessive for that.

64GB is the max the 4 slot boards will take, and 32GB is the max the 2 slot boards will take. That stands to reason then. Although, if you're seriously running 16 cores for stuff I think the greater amount of memory might outweigh the need for a speed tweak (if it still exists).

Malor wrote:

So would 32 gigs be the limit in two DIMMs? I'm not sure how big they can be.

16 cores does seem a bit excessive for that.

DDR4 is available in 64 gig DIMMs but the speed is low and the price is high. More of a server thing.

AMD announces their Navi 7nm GPUs, the RX 5700 and RX 5700 XT

The 5700 and 5700 XT appear to be the AMD's answers for the RTX 2060 and 2070.

IMAGE(https://www.techpowerup.com/img/QGj7xcBb1KE3qZFP.jpg)

Good that AMD is continuing to provide competition with NVIDIA's xx60 and xx70 product ranges, but still nothing against the higher end options. :/

Rykin wrote:
Malor wrote:

So would 32 gigs be the limit in two DIMMs? I'm not sure how big they can be.

16 cores does seem a bit excessive for that.

DDR4 is available in 64 gig DIMMs but the speed is low and the price is high. More of a server thing.

Well, historically it hasn't been that uncommon to have newer RAM chips that are too big to be driven by older boards. What I was intending to ask was the maximum size for a RAM stick on the x470 motherboards, but phrased it very poorly.

If you can put 64 gigs on a board, and run it at the higher speeds, that would be all right. 4 gigs per CPU seems reasonable. If I were to buy one of these, I'd probably turn off hyperthreading, and just run 16 real cores on 64 gigs of RAM. Overkill, but it would sure be fun.

If I were stuck with 32 gigs at high speed, though, I probably wouldn't bother with more than 8 real cores.

So I know it's a bit hard to say given that Microsoft didn't get as far into the weeds about what the hardware inside the next Xbox platform is going to be, but do you guys have any thoughts at this point on what tier on the new AMD CPU lineup is where things are comfortably into the "future proofed through the next console cycle" range is going to be?

zeroKFE wrote:

So I know it's a bit hard to say given that Microsoft didn't get as far into the weeds about what the hardware inside the next Xbox platform is going to be, but do you guys have any thoughts at this point on what tier on the new AMD CPU lineup is where things are comfortably into the "future proofed through the next console cycle" range is going to be?

Midrange, eg. Ryzen 5 3600. Maybe a little below in terms of clock speed.

I suspect that an 8-core CPU will probably be something you'll really want to match the next generation, and video somewhere on par with a current 1660Ti. But that is 100% pure speculation, and it could be wrong in truly epic fashion.

Yeah, I'm less concerned about the video card side -- I'd already be planning on doing a mid-cycle upgrade there, and if I do go ahead and build this summer, my options are basically a 2080 (super?) or 2080 ti, since I'm targeting a 3440x1440 resolution.

To me the big question is whether Sony and Microsoft will be building off custom versions of the 6 core 3600 or the 8 core 3700. I mean, obviously by current pricing the 3600 seems like the more likely fit, but we are still more than a year away from the new consoles, so maybe they'll work some pricing and/or engineering magic somewhere and hit closer to the specifications of the 3700.

And if they do manage something like that, then it seems like a 3800 might become the basement of where you could acceptably skate through the next generation on a single CPU -- but if you're going to go with a 3800, why not drop an extra $100 and jump up to the 12 core 3900, right?

Bah -- I was really hoping Microsoft would reveal a bit more. Between that uncertainty and the rumored relatively high pricing on x570 motherboards, I'm now a bit more apprehensive about building this summer.

Well, the longer you wait to do the build, the cheaper it gets. Maybe wait until there's a game in the offing that you'll need more horsepower for?

Sounds like next gen will be 8 or 12 cores. Ryzen based with a ~20Tflops performance level GPU. Microsoft said 4 times the performance of the Xbox One X which is roughly 6Tflops.

Malor wrote:

Well, the longer you wait to do the build, the cheaper it gets. Maybe wait until there's a game in the offing that you'll need more horsepower for?

Well, I've got a Valve Index arriving later this month, which is likely to be the triggering factor. Granted, most things will probably run fine on my current computer, but still, I'd like to do better than that.

Depending on how that goes, my other potential option will be to just pick up a 2080 Super and run with that until, well, probably next spring when the first wave of generational transition games starts to hit (assuming things like Cyberpunk actually hit their currently announced dates, of course), then build a new core computer then and swap the cards back around.

But, as I mentioned in post a few pages back, another nice benefit of building this summer is that I've got a friend that I could really help out by giving him my current rig more or less intact as a hand-me-down. Not that his situation will probably change by next spring of course, but I'd just love to get to see him enjoy what would be a significant upgrade for him as soon as possible.

Ah, well, that is an excellent build reason.

It really seems like 8 cores is the least you'll want, and 12 isn't likely to hurt anything but your wallet. You might end up trading off top speed to get 12 CPUs, though. (I haven't examined the 3XXX series much at all.) And, as you say, you can replace the video card mid-cycle, so you don't have to guess perfectly.

I don't plan to do an immediate build, but I'd eventually be interested in a Linux host with a Windows 10 guest, handing it a dedicated video card that it can drive on its own. I could still game, and Windows 10 couldn't abuse its position of ultimate trust, because it wouldn't have that anymore.

A high core count would be helpful there. A 12-cpu system would let me hold 4 for Linux and any other guests I want to run (much like my current desktop), while assigning 8 dedicated cores to the Windows gaming guest. That *should* end up giving me performance that's nearly identical to a dedicated system, and probably substantially faster than what I'm using right now, but Windows and its snooping would be screened away from the stuff I actually care about. I can play games without needing to trust that OS, and then if and when Linux gaming becomes a thing (it's getting better, but that OS is still pretty rough around the edges), just not running the guest becomes an option.