Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

Here's a rough build list for an $800 budget: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gCmWFG

Since you said you wanted a compact GPU I guessed you would also want a more compact system overall and picked a micro-ATX motherboard, it also saves a bit of cash. I didn't put a case on the list because it comes down so much to personal preference on aesthetics and so forth but there's about $60 left in the budget, so for that much or a little more you can certainly find something decently constructed and not-excruciating to build in, if not necessarily something that has lots of bells and whistles and RGB bling.

You could save money by going with a B450 board and won't suffer any loss of performance, but the B550 board gives you more potential for future upgrades. The 500GB SSD will be enough to get you started for Windows and a few most-used games and applications, when you fill it up storage is cheap and getting cheaper all the time assuming you don't think you need the latest and greatest 4th-gen PCI-e NVME drive (although the B550 board will accommodate that).

Since power supply prices are painfully inflated right now, you could also save a bit by going with an inferior, semi- or non-modular power supply like this EVGA 500W BR and that would certainly be adequate for this type of build but it wouldn't be as pleasant to work with and wouldn't give me the same peace of mind as the SeaSonic unit does. That EVGA would be about the "worst" PSU I would consider putting in a build.

fangblackbone wrote:

Based on that, I don't see a case for anything Nvidia unless you are sitting on piles of cash. Then you go 2080 ti because that is the only card that can somewhat handle 4k gaming and you won't care that it will be replaced within 3-5 months by the 3080 or AMD's Big Navi.

I'm buying an RTX 3080 when they come out, because my gaming monitor is G-Sync, and not from the new generation whose module also supports VESA Adaptive Sync/FreeSync.

If not for that, I'd be very interested to see what AMD manages with Big Navi.

I am not saying don't get a 3080. I am saying that you get double whammied buying high end Nvidia right now. (despite the fact that there is currently no other high end other than Nvidia)
First, you are paying a horrific premium. (double or triple in most cases)
Then you're card will be replaced in 3-5 months. (some will get price drops to become mid end but still be too expensive because of point number one; others will not get significant price drops and be left to rot)

Middcore wrote:

Here's a rough build list for an $800 budget: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gCmWFG

Hehe, thanks Midd, I see your rough build and I raise you mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/feeank...

For now it's a simple exercise of keeping tabs on specs I want to aim for, not going to embark on this build for a while, so it's hardly set in stone. I have no PSU and cases selected as those would make more sense to acquire locally. Still, I want a quiet-er build this time, so I'll probably end up with a two-fan GPU, though I prefer single-fan as they usually don't need external power. Things to ponder upon on the months to come!

Feeank wrote:
Middcore wrote:

Here's a rough build list for an $800 budget: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/gCmWFG

Hehe, thanks Midd, I see your rough build and I raise you mine: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/feeank...

Would love to see it but your part list is set to private.

so I'll probably end up with a two-fan GPU, though I prefer single-fan as they usually don't need external power.

This is purely because they tend to be entry-level cards. There really aren't any new cards worth buying right now that don't require external power.

Feeank, if it's reasonable to do so, you might want to hang on awhile longer. New graphic cards are due soon, and AMD should ship their 4000-series desktop CPUs, which are likely to be pretty impressive.

Even if you don't buy the new hotness, its presence should make the old stuff cheaper.

Fans are loud when they spin quickly. Ideally, you want the biggest fans you can get, spinning as slowly as possible, if you want to minimize noise. My older NVidia 970, for instance, gets a little noticeable under heavy load, but it's really not bad. It just whooshes, it's not particularly annoying. IIRC, it's a two-fan unit, exhausting out the back.

Units that exhaust into the case are almost always quieter, and in theory can cool the GPU better, but that means you need solid case airflow, which again can make noise. I generally prefer cards that exhaust out the back to keep the overall cooling solution simple and easy, even though they're a little louder. If the GPU is blowing out the back of the case, then you're just dissipating CPU and motherboard heat, and that's usually easy to do with one intake and one exhaust fan.

Middcore wrote:

Would love to see it but your part list is set to private.

There you go: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/feeank...
I'm not so sure about picking a mini ATX board though it would save me a few bucks I could spend on doubling my ram, I'll think about that.

@Malor sure thing, I'll be keeping tabs on this year's developments and prices, I'm in no rush to proceed yet,
Also, thanks for the advice on fans, both of you, very illustrative

Feeank wrote:
Middcore wrote:

Would love to see it but your part list is set to private.

There you go: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/feeank...
I'm not so sure about picking a mini ATX board though it would save me a few bucks I could spend on doubling my ram, I'll think about that.

@Malor sure thing, I'll be keeping tabs on this year's developments and prices, I'm in no rush to proceed yet,
Also, thanks for the advice on fans, both of you, very illustrative

You really don't need more than 16GB of RAM for general use and gaming.

I cannot recommend the GTX 1650 (non-Super) for... basically anything, it's a weak card for what it costs, lacks features of its siblings like the new-generation NVENC, and doesn't even have the saving grace of not needing external power to make it good for upgrading office prebuilts, I think every single model needs an external 6-pin.

Middcore wrote:

You really don't need more than 16GB of RAM for general use and gaming.

I cannot recommend the GTX 1650 (non-Super) for... basically anything, it's a weak card for what it costs, lacks features of its siblings like the new-generation NVENC, and doesn't even have the saving grace of not needing external power to make it good for upgrading office prebuilts, I think every single model needs an external 6-pin.

Yeah, about the ram, I've been dabbling with Unreal Engine lately, that thing eats up memory fast, it would really benefit the process all the extra ram, I also work with video content and will be making use of that overhead RAM one way or the other.

About the gpu, yeah, I picked that one mainly on an arbitrary price limit I'm trying to adhere to, will be investigating further.

Are you doing virtual set type stuff in Unreal?
Because if it is game stuff, I'd be cognizant of developing something that would alienate your player base by developing with so much RAM. Sure it will ease development but it will be much harder to make playable scaling back from 32 to 8 or 4GB than it would from 16 to 8 or 4GB. I am sure I am preaching to the choir. I just wanted to put it out there as a caution.
Though I admit if you are coding C++, the extra RAM will make compile times far more manageable.
For everyday work, you would be better off taking the extra cash and putting it towards a bigger SSD.

Feeank wrote:
Middcore wrote:

Would love to see it but your part list is set to private.

There you go: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/feeank...
I'm not so sure about picking a mini ATX board though it would save me a few bucks I could spend on doubling my ram, I'll think about that.

@Malor sure thing, I'll be keeping tabs on this year's developments and prices, I'm in no rush to proceed yet,
Also, thanks for the advice on fans, both of you, very illustrative

I'd steer clear of that QVO SSD. A TLC MX500 only costs $5 more and has much better worst case performance.

fangblackbone wrote:

I am sure I am preaching to the choir.

Preach away!

Doing both, virtual set / archviz thingies & game stuff
No coding on my side really, not really my forte, but I still compile and having done a not entirely terrible recreation of my apartment for practice, the struggle to compile it made me realize the practical limitations my current rig has. I also work my 3D / video apps in a main monitor but use another for web/network/etc, There's so much stuff you can do at the same time, but only so much before your ram says: you know what? eff this sh*t!
On storage, I plan to salvage my big 3 tb WD so a main 1TB SSD is fine as a starting point

I'm in favor of buying lots of RAM. I put 32 gigs in this system quite a few years ago(six or seven??), and it's really helped give the machine legs. With AMD chips, you want to stick with only two RAM sticks, but I'd personally not buy less than 16-gig sticks, and I'd be seriously eyeballing a pair of 32-giggers in DDR4-3600 CL 16.

Of course, that much RAM at that speed is (currently) about $350, which isn't going to work in an $800 build. Dropping back to DDR4-3200 CL 16 can be done for $220, if you're willing to buy G.Skill. That's better, but it's still too high.

If you stick with Corsair (one of my preferred brands), 3200 is still $300, so might as well spend the extra $50 and go for 3600 speed instead.

Having lots of RAM also makes it really easy to run virtualized operating systems, and with the advent of Windows Subsystem for Linux, along with the older VMWare titles, and the oodles of cores you get in a modern machine, you can easily run two or three OSes at once and still have plenty of horsepower left to run a game.

-Looking at the gpus available at that price range AMD is competitive but unfortunately it is the RX 590, a polaris card. (dated technology) It matches the 1660 and is $25 less but you run into the issue that new gpus are coming in 3-5 months. That is just too narrow a window to recommend a stop gap gpu.
-So instead of spending the extra $$$ on RAM, I'd spend it on well I don't know. I can't really recommend spending it on a 5600XT which is a much better gpu but that $150-$250 segment of the market is the most vulnerable to the new gpus.
-That market segment is going to get totally wiped out. This is all my speculation but reports and leaks are claiming real world gains of 20-30% with the new generation over the 2080 ti which is already an insane card.
-Price dropping the 2080 ti in half would be so disruptive to the rest of the market and at $1200, Nvidia both has to do it and has the room to do it. There is no way the 2080 ti would continue to sell at even $800 if the new generation is that much of an improvement.
-Even if Big Navi fails and only matches or nears a 2080 ti, AMD would disrupt the market by introducing it at $500-$600. (AMD has the radeon VII that introduced at higher I believe, but that is the outlier for sure)
-I really hope AMD doesn't get f*cked again by a surge of bit coin miners every time AMD releases a new gpu. I guess it didn't seem to happen with the 5700 series IIRC.

The Radeon VII was just Radeon Instinct server accelerators that didn't make the cut, repurposed as gaming cards and pushed out the door to get some attention for AMD while Navi was still baking. Very weird card, although in fairness an undeniably formidable performer in certain games/applications.

Malor wrote:

I'm in favor of buying lots of RAM. I put 32 gigs in this system quite a few years ago(six or seven??), and it's really helped give the machine legs. With AMD chips, you want to stick with only two RAM sticks, but I'd personally not buy less than 16-gig sticks, and I'd be seriously eyeballing a pair of 32-giggers in DDR4-3600 CL 16.

Of course, that much RAM at that speed is (currently) about $350, which isn't going to work in an $800 build. Dropping back to DDR4-3200 CL 16 can be done for $220, if you're willing to buy G.Skill. That's better, but it's still too high.

64 GB in ram would be overkill for me, I'm willing to overspend to get up to 32 but more than that would stiffle my budget. I found a 16x2 set by G.Skill that's about $120, so I've updated my list accordingly, I've also changed the MOBO to Middcore's suggestion, as pondering my current rig, I went with an ATX board and in 9 years only ever used one pci slot, for a wifi antenna. Pretty sure I won't miss the 4-5 extra slots this time.

I think I'd want a board with at least three PCIe slots of at least x4 width. I wasn't paying attention to that when I bought this z97 board, and it has only two slots like that MicroATX board, plus an x1 stub that's hardly useful for anything. I've got a video card in the x16, moved my NVME drive to the x4, and now all I have left is that useless x1.

It's got like four PCI slots, but one of those would be plenty.

Is a good 500w power supply still enough for a single gpu non overclocked build? I have a spare unboxed corsair unit.

Cases, anyone have a favorite that includes removeable fan filters? Mid tower?

Heretk wrote:

Is a good 500w power supply still enough for a single gpu non overclocked build? I have a spare unboxed corsair unit.

Assuming it's a reputable unit that actually makes 500W, probably, unless the single GPU is a 2080 ti.

unless the single GPU is a 2080 ti

LOL

A little over 7 years ago I bought my current PC part by part over a few months and then built it over a weekend. It was a great experience, but now it's a little long in the tooth, and even if it wasn't randomly crashing from time to time over the past several months, it's time for a new PC.

This time I'd like to put little effort into building and maybe get something great that I can pull out of a box and plug in and it'll work. I'm surprised to see that Alienware at a reasonable price at the top of many "best of" lists. (I seem to remember them always being $4000+ price range for high end gamers)

Anyone have any experience with the Alienware Aurora? It starts at under $1000, but when tinkering around with the customization, I can easily get that price up to just around $1500 (doubling the memory from 8 to 16gb; adding dual drives 1TB SSD and 1TB SATA; switching to a NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2060 6GB).

I was thinking of staying in the $1000-1200 range but I'm wondering if this might be worth it for quality and ease of use.

If you are willing to pay closer to $2000 ($1899 I think), the Aurora's get very interesting. (in the category of I don't know if I could custom build the equivalent for that price)
At that point you won't get a 2080 ti but they are practically giving away a 2080 super which is just a few percentage points less powerful. I don't remember if you get the ryzen 3700X or 3800X but both of those will do nicely.

edit: turns out it is on sale for $1799. It looks like on the surface system builders could best it but the costs add up quickly. They have some cheaper ryzen builds but for some reason they chose the ryzen 5 3500 instead of the much better ryzen 5 3600. Plus it comes with a 2060 super instead which you are going to want to replace by the end of the year. Anyways, $1799 for:
ryzen 7 3700x
16 GB ram
2080 super
1 TB SSD
Window 10 Home 64

The best I could build was $1600-$1700 without mouse and keyboard depending on whether I used a B450 or B550 motherboard: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/RKptzN

I wouldn't build a computer right now if you can hold off a little longer. The Ryzen 4000s should be announced in the next couple months, and there's a new generation of graphic cards coming soon as well. Once those are out (particularly the 4K Ryzens), then you'd have the knowledge on where to jump.... the existing parts should be a little cheaper if the new stuff isn't cost-effective. If you absolutely want something now, you probably want a Ryzen CPU, as they're compellingly better than Intel. They're a little slower per-core, but offer a lot more cores. Ryzen 4K may be faster per-core, in addition to offering double the CPU count.

The Alienwares you link aren't eyebleedingly expensive like they used to be, but one possible problem is that I can't tell how many slots they have, and of what type. They don't even mention PCIe except in the context of SSDs. Desktops last a long time, these days, and having expansion options strikes me as a very good idea.

At least on the Ryzen side of those machines, they jump straight from a 2060 to a 2080 Super, which seems a little weird. I'm not sure why they'd skip the 2070.

Ryzen 4K may be faster per-core, in addition to offering double the CPU count.

More than likely for less. (until they make their evil turn...)

Off topic: is there any reason why 3 or even 4 threads per core hasn't been developed? I am sure it has been thought off and perhaps researched. I am wondering why I haven't heard anything about it...

edit: looks like it was rumored to be in zen 3 a while back but squashed and apparently IBM and Sun servers have been doing it for years. With technology like Unreal 5 coming, I wonder if it will be revisited for desktop cpus?

The reason for multithreading is to partially compensate for long pipelines. When there's a pipeline stall, the execution unit is stuck idle until new data shows up. RAM has barely improved in terms of speed for the last 18 years or so, so those stalls take a long, long time. Multithreading lets the execution unit work on a different thread until the data for the first thread shows up. In effect, you end up with two cores that run at slightly more than half speed. Instead of one core at 100%, you have two cores at 55%.

There's probably not much additional benefit to building circuitry to run three or four cores, since two pipelines stalling simultaneously will be much less common, and the extra transistors take up space and burn more power.

SFF PCs where to start a good build?

JohnKillo wrote:

SFF PCs where to start a good build?

PCPartPicker Forums is one of the best I know.

So if I buy this off the shelf alienware R11 machine, how much better is Edgar_Newts build?
[ see https://pcpartpicker.com/list/r48vMc ]
(Let's assume he listens to reason for once a gets the recommended 32gb ram not the overcompensating 64bgb). I'm not sure i can handle my brother out performing me?
And yes, if you are wondering, I've gotten sucked into the Tarkov world and need a new rig to compete.

Processor:
10th Gen Intel® Core™ i7 10700KF (8-Core, 16MB Cache, 3.8GHz to 5.1GHz w/Turbo Boost Max 3.0)
Operating System:Windows 10 Home, 64-bit, English
Video Card: NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 2070 SUPER 8GB GDDR6 (OC Ready)
Memory: 32GB Dual Channel HyperX™ FURY DDR4 XMP at 3200MHz;
Hard Drive:1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD
Chassis Options
Lunar Light chassis with High-Performance CPU Liquid Cooling and 1000W Power Supply
Wireless
Killer™ Wi-Fi 6 AX1650 (2x2) 802.11ax Wireless and Bluetooth 5.1
Alienware Aurora R11

Looking to upgrade my monitor for $200-$300. Want a good gaming monitor for Rocket League primarialy.

27" (possibly larger)
120+ refresh
Gsynch/Freesync
Fast response time. What's fast for gaming, sub 5ms?

I'm trolling PCPartPicker, but interested in any suggestions or reccomendations.

The LG 27GL83A-B is exquisite, but just a bit higher than your price range, unfortunately.