Help me build my PC 2020 Catch All

They should've included this with the case...

EDIT: Saying that it was a bad decision not to. They were given feedback on that during development, but didn't include one.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/7dLpfxY.png)

NM, canceled my order.

Feeank wrote:

I've just paid about 40 USD for S&H for about 10 pounds of pc components from the US to Venezuela. This lot doesn't even include Case, Mobo nor PSU. I *may* have miscalculated shipping fees by a lot, those 3 items weight about 25 pounds together, so we may be looking at a 80-100 USD fee for them alone. Pfffft-wheoey thank god I managed to stay within my reduced budget, no wonder trying to buy a similar build locally is impossible/unpayable.

Just paid for the delivery of the rest of the components, 85 USD for Mobo, Case, PSU and ram. Hopefully next week I'll be posting from the new rig.

I gotta say, the sound on the ASUS board is quite nice. They boast about it a bunch in the promo materials, but there seems to be actual steak under the sizzle.

The sound system detected that my Senn HD600s are a high-impedance load, and raised its amplification level to "Extreme". At that setting, I've more or less settled on a system volume of 42 out of 100, because it gets LOUD. The bass seems quite powerful, so there appears to be real muscle in that headphone amp. It's not overdriving the bass, I don't think it's doing anything funny to the signal, it's just providing enough juice to make those high-resistance cans thump pretty good.

I was very impressed with the World of Warcraft soundtrack, just noodling about. It sounds bloody fantastic. I haven't installed Foobar yet to sample my main music library, but judging with unfamiliar music, it appears to be one of the best motherboard sound adapters I've heard. I had a board with a Realtek ALC889, years ago, which had the same underlying quality, but not much amplification. This version has both clarity and muscle.

Okay, so with black friday sales going, even though I can't get hold of a CPU or graphics card, I should probably start ordering some of the rest of the parts if there are good deals.

RAM - I haven't had time to learn myself about latencies, but is 3600 CL16 a reasonably safe bet? I know there's no real need to go higher than 16gb, but it looks like it's under $150 for 32gb, so why not?

SSD - What do I actually care about in an m.2 drive for mainly gaming? Prices seem to be all over the place for the same size drive and I don't know what the actual differences are. Ideally, I'd like a 2tb drive, but it's probably easier to just move my existing 1tb 2.5" SSD as a supplement to a 1tb m.2.

Power supply - I know there's a running list of the "good" power supplies in a thread somewhere, but I have a hard time parsing that. Any name-brand 750w 80+ gold rated power supply should pretty much be fine, right?

Chaz wrote:

RAM - I haven't had time to learn myself about latencies, but is 3600 CL16 a reasonably safe bet?

Yes.

I know there's no real need to go higher than 16gb, but it looks like it's under $150 for 32gb, so why not?

Agreed, I think 32GB is an easy purchase for builds that are mid-range or higher.

SSD - What do I actually care about in an m.2 drive for mainly gaming?

Right now? Little to none.

I think the PS5's storage solution might actually put taking advantage of fast storage on the game development map, to some degree, though the PC platform obviously won't be able to assume the presence of fast storage like the PS5 can.

I put some fast as hell Gen3 NVMe drives in my new build. Not quite as fast as the brand new Gen4 drives, but the price difference there outpaced the performance difference.

Any name-brand 750w 80+ gold rated power supply should pretty much be fine, right?

No. I mean, yes, they're probably "fine", but if you're spending the money for something new, might as well refer to the PSU tier list and ensure you get something A or at least B tier.

My order for an RTX 3070 has been waiting for delivery since 3 weeks now, while my place in line has moved up to 3 (started at 10). I finally got confirmation from the supplier that this was not due to other people cancelling their orders, but deliveries actually trickling in! Sooooooon...

Has anyone tried MicroCenters custom build options? Looks like you just buy your parts there and they put it together for a reasonable fee depending on how much water cooling your getting.

*Legion* wrote:
Any name-brand 750w 80+ gold rated power supply should pretty much be fine, right?

No. I mean, yes, they're probably "fine", but if you're spending the money for something new, might as well refer to the PSU tier list and ensure you get something A or at least B tier.

Yeah, that's the tier list I was talking about. I'll have to spend some time pulling up prices for the models in the A/B tiers.

Oh, the obvious thing I forgot was motherboard. With what I'm using the system for, I probably don't need the PCIe lanes, so should be fine with a B550 board, but X570 boards seem to be about the same price, so maybe it makes more sense to go with a 570? I don't know that'll be doing any overclocking, but it might be nice to have the option. Besides chipsets and whatever ports/headers/whatever I decide I need for whatever case I decide on, anything I should be looking out for or specific brands to lean toward or avoid? I don't mind spending up to around $200, but anything beyond that is probably pointless.

Then I just need to decide on a case (I'm leaning toward the Phanteks P500a) and whether I'm going AIO water or a big air cooler.

NathanialG wrote:

Has anyone tried MicroCenters custom build options? Looks like you just buy your parts there and they put it together for a reasonable fee depending on how much water cooling your getting.

I haven't, but whenever I've been in a Microcenter, their tech area has looked busy, so people are obviously returning to their services. Whether that means they're good or not... dunno.

edit to add: note that building a modern PC is not difficult, unless you're doing something crazy with water cooling. It's pretty much all Tab A into Slot B. You gotta be careful mounting the motherboard in the case (getting exactly the right number of standoffs in exactly the right places), and be very careful mounting the CPU in its socket, but those are the only parts that are even a little bit tricky. Everything else is pretty much Tab A into Slot B.

The hard part is picking the parts, not assembling them.

Chaz wrote:

Besides chipsets and whatever ports/headers/whatever I decide I need for whatever case I decide on, anything I should be looking out for or specific brands to lean toward or avoid? I don't mind spending up to around $200, but anything beyond that is probably pointless.

Then I just need to decide on a case (I'm leaning toward the Phanteks P500a) and whether I'm going AIO water or a big air cooler.

For motherboards, I typically use ASUS, and I'm happy with the x570-based Crosshair 8 Hero. That's out of your price range, but I was looking seriously at the Prime x570 Pro, which cost $239 when I was shopping. The reason I went $100 higher was because the Hero supports flashing the BIOS without a working processor, which struck me as important in the very first wave of 5000s. The Prime Pro doesn't do that, so you gotta be sure that you get a BIOS that can boot up with one of the new Ryzens.

As an aside, the Prime Pro is a white board, which might go well with a white Phanteks case.

The only brand I actively avoid, in all things, is MSI. That's a bad outfit.... bad support, and they've been caught scalping their GPU allocations through EBay. They screwed over at least one Goodjer, but I've forgotten who.

Gigabyte is a well-respected name in motherboards, but I've never bought one of theirs. I bought one cheap ASRock a number of years ago, and it's still humming along merrily. It was kind of a crap board for a quick fix, but it's been surprisingly reliable. It has a nice BIOS, too; at the time it was better than ASUS, though they've caught up since. They're a spinoff of ASUS and are aimed at the lower end of the market, but I've been happy with the one of theirs I have.

Contrast that, though, to 20ish years using ASUS.... I've bought a lot of their boards, and I only remember one of them dying untimely.

Malor wrote:

The only brand I actively avoid, in all things, is MSI. That's a bad outfit.... bad support, and they've been caught scalping their GPU allocations through EBay. They screwed over at least one Goodjer, but I've forgotten who.

It's a real shame they did this. I love their ROG motherboards, but like you I'll be avoiding their products from now on.

With Ryzen 5000 availability being what it is, I've resigned myself to pushing back my upgrade until the new year. The bright side of that is MB and RAM requirements should settle out enough that with guidance here and the various review blogs/vlogs I should be able to pick a decent set of parts. If RTX 3000 video cards ramp up availability as well - woohoo!

It's not like I'm going to be able to cozy up to a nice PS5 in the meantime, either

I love their ROG motherboards,

Isn't ROG (Republic of Gamers) from ASUS?

Malor wrote:
I love their ROG motherboards,

Isn't ROG (Republic of Gamers) from ASUS?

So I had to crawl under my desk to check. Yes, you're right. I meant their "Godlike" series. But thanks for reminding me that ROG is Asus, who I've had great success with in the past.

So it begins

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/TTiKiq1.jpg)

The build process I'm posting it here It should be done by tomorrow afternoon

The case is wonderful, I had a hard time installing the PSU but after analyzing the phenomena I was able to do it, it involves screwing and hooking up up two bracket-like attachments with anti vibration pads to the frame that work as some sort of swing for the psu, definitely not the friendliest case for a beginner.

Sadly, the Arctic Alpine 64 pro that shipped last week is defective, the fan attachment relies on 4 hard plastic spikes where the silicon supports anchor to the radiator. 2 of those 4 came broken, the cooler came with no protective material and the box looked as it was tampered with. I wish I had discovered the Deepcool iceblade 200M before as that one has been a blessing to my old rig, I would have gotten 2 of them instead. I could try using the Alpine but having that fan full speed on only 2 supports will surely make a lot of noise. I could use the other Arctic cooler I got for my old rig a few weeks ago that has been substituted by the Iceblade but I'm not sure yet.

Okay, so I think I've kind of settled on some of the components. The motherboard is just the result from a filter, I haven't decided on that. Same with the cooler. Everything else I think I might be decided on, maybe. Any red flags before I start putting in orders?

I decided to just go with a faster 1tb SSD, and just move the 2.5" SATA drive over.

You don't need both the Noctua and the Corsair cooler; you'd want to pick one or the other.

You can save a few bucks by buying a motherboard without the WiFi; I prefer avoiding wireless signals unless I really need them, because that's an attack point I can't easily control. If you do need wireless, then it's only a $7 difference, cheaper than an add-on.

That G.Skill memory should be fine, but verifying that that specific model number is on the motherboard validation list is never a bad idea. The 16-16-16-36-1T memory I just bought was $230, where you're getting RAM that's only a hair slower for $140. That looks like a pretty good deal to me. (the chips are probably from SK Hynix, which are a little slower and substantially cheaper.)

That's likely to be a very nice power supply. Seasonic does good stuff. That sizing should be a good fit for a 5600 plus 3080.

That list looks fine to me. Chop one of the CPU coolers out, decide on WiFi versus non-WiFi, and you should be good to go.

Give me some credit here, I know I only need one cooler. I just haven't settled on type or model, so I've been messing around with them, and left two on by accident.

updated build process pics

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/t0dDXux.jpg)

Funny, that's the same monitor I've been using for the last 10 years, you can tell its age by the blue and red lines.

Decided to give the spire a chance, its a *massive* cooler, slightly bigger than the broken alpine 64 pro.Temps seem fine but I'll try to gauge its performance as soon as I install some demanding games.

RAM is being reported as 2400mhz which isn't ideal, but I'll get to fixing that later in the coming days. For now I'm installing drivers and prepping the ground for migrating my old 3tb HDD, I'll post some final, more flashy pics when all the bells and whistles are completed.

RAM is being reported as 2400mhz which isn't ideal,

There is a mode you have to enable in the BIOS to get 3200 or 3600mhz.

fangblackbone wrote:
RAM is being reported as 2400mhz which isn't ideal,

There is a mode you have to enable in the BIOS to get 3200 or 3600mhz.

Yeah, DOCP I think it's called on this bios, but I'll get to that after ironing all the wrinkles first.

Edit: nope, couldn't find DOCP, but I loaded a "xmp profile" and now the ram should be running at 3000mhz

Huh, they call it DOCP on my ASUS board. Not an XMP to seen anywhere. Took me awhile to figure out how to clock the RAM to 3600, glossed right past the right spot probably four or five times.

I thought it was still called XMP, but I guess AMD, or at least ASUS, disagrees.

Chaz wrote:

Give me some credit here, I know I only need one cooler. I just haven't settled on type or model, so I've been messing around with them, and left two on by accident.

Sorry, btw, it was just that between the two coolers and the almost-exactly-$1500 price, I thought it was a genuine oversight.

As far as which to buy, remember that ultimately the cooling power depends on the radiator, and that AIOs add at least two additional failure points. (the pump, and loss of liquid.) But I'm also realizing that in, for example, that bottom-to-top case I bought, something like an H100 might work much better than what I picked, because pretty much the entire top of the case is a bracket to mount a big radiator. With a standard air cooler, the CPU is in a deadzone behind the GPU. (I have a riser cable on order to try to fix that; it will let me turn the GPU vertical.) So airflow patterns might change your mind one way or the other.

I think the Phantek 500 is front-to-back, so the Noctua's likely to be fine, particularly for a 5600, which won't run that hot. And it will never wear out; the most you'll ever have to replace is a fan, and the motherboard will normally give you substantial advance warning of incipient fan failure.

It's a shame that we can't get Cryorigs anymore. Stupid tariffs. I have a little one on my 4790K that's very effective, despite being compact.

Malor wrote:

Huh, they call it DOCP on my ASUS board. Not an XMP to seen anywhere. Took me awhile to figure out how to clock the RAM to 3600, glossed right past the right spot probably four or five times.

I thought it was still called XMP, but I guess AMD, or at least ASUS, disagrees.

XMP is an Intel brand name so some AMD boards call it something different.

Malor wrote:

I thought it was still called XMP, but I guess AMD, or at least ASUS, disagrees.

XMP is an Intel technology and an Intel trademark. RAM is submitted to Intel for validation and certification to get the XMP markings.

XMP is specifically by Intel for tuning Intel memory controllers, so pretty much by definition, AMD platforms don't have XMP. Motherboard manufacturers have created equivalent implementations that read the XMP profiles from DIMMs and perform the same sort of clock settings on AMD platform memory controllers.

On ASUS boards it's called DOCP. On Gigabyte boards, it's EOCP. On MSI boards, it's A-XMP. Not sure about other board manufacturers.

There's potentially some small inaccuracies in the above, but that's the jist of it.

I just bought this.... https://www.ebay.com/itm/EVGA-GeForc...

It can't be real can it? The reviews of the seller say that he was scamming them... but ebay protects against that right?

If it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t true.

Yep!

i figured there wasn't much to lose though since ebay always sides with the buyer

In-demand item sold for less than MSRP

"Clearance sale" on a brand new item

Seller with under 100 total feedback ratings, 82% positive

Multiple negative reviews calling him out for trying to scam people with sales of this very item

I don't even know why you'd take the flyer on it, honestly, unless you're hoping your report that he's a scammer can contribute to him getting banned from ebay completely

Whatever you received would not be worth opening up your PC to try.

New frustration is that the case I'm looking at has a front USB-C port, but there don't seem to be many/any motherboards other than MSIs that have a header for a front USB-C. Do I need a front USB-C? Probably not. Will the front USB-A ports that I will use work fine? Yup. Will it bug the crap out of me that the front USB-C port will be a dud? Oh you bet it will.