I summon thee, tech wizards of DLP.

It is that time of the year again. I’m in the mood of upgrading my rig for the pleasure of playing the new upcoming AAA titles (looking at you Cyberpunk). That’s the goal. Playing Triple-As on 1920x1080 144hz, all on ultra for a few years to come.

To that effect, here’s what I have found so far and also a few questions.

Fractal Design R5 (my old case, hopefully still servicable)
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB DDR4-3200

Now for the trickier stuff. I’m not sure if I should go for an RTX 2070 Super or an RX 5700 XT. As far as I know the 2070 has raytracing while the 5700 is cheaper. Does raytracing impact the visual quality of a game by a lot?

Then there is my old Thermalright HR-02 Macho Rev.B: is that one still serviceable for the new CPU? And what about my old PSU (be quiet! Straight Power 10 500W CM)? 500 seems a bit on the low end but I’m rapidly approaching the borders of my computer knowledge.

As for the motherboard, I’m also open for suggestions. I would like one with M2, though. In any case I would prefer to stay under or around ~1000€ on the whole (which is why I’m open for reusing old parts if at all possible).

I'd be grateful for any help on offer. Due to current circumstances that would also be the first PC I'd build entirely on my own (including disassembling the old one).

 

Alright, let's see.

1) The case.
Fractal Design is pretty much the poster child of 'unremarkably good'. If you're happy with it I see no reason for you to have to buy another as long as you keep two things in mind: Newer graphics cards are big; you're likely going to end up having to remove one of the drive bays to fit it. If that's not a problem, go ahead. And you're likely going to want to add extra fans beyond the included ones because of higher TDP in a lot of components. VRM and Chipset tend to rely a lot on ambient air for cooling.

2) Motherboard.
Because of the upcoming Ryzen Zen 3, and the knock on effects this has had on BIOS development, I'd honestly recommend paying a little extra for the x570 boards. This will secure you for a potential CPU update without having to gamble on buying a b450 boards where support will be available. It will also pave to road for any future PCIe 4.0 components. While these are not available now to any real extent if you wish to upgrade your GPU in another three or four years? Will likely be one of those things that make your life easier down the line.

3) Cooler.
According to the developer the Macho is rated for cooling a 240w CPU (theoretically). Given that the 3600 is rated at 65w? I don't think you'll have any problems, as long as you still have all the relevant mounting hardware. Going to need new paste though.

4) Nvme
Honestly? Probably not necessary. On the wast majority of casual use cases the difference between a sata ssd and a nvme ssd is going to be negligible. With that said Samsung's controllers are still the best available for consumers and they havn't launched their PCIe 4.0 lineup yet. Their 3.0 lineup still beats everyone else's 4.0 in random IOPS, though, and that is really what you care about for an OS disk. Unless you know that you're going to be doing a lot of sequential transfers of 100s of GB of data? Go with Samsung.

5) Graphics
5700xt is a solid card, especially now with the driver issues done away with. This is mostly a question of if you're going for performance per dollar or just performance. Nvidia's cards are better, but they are pricier too.

RTX is one of those things you don't really notice when you first enable it, but when you go back to a game which doesn't have everything just feels flat. You get used to static shadows and columetric lighting and no reflections pretty quick again but there really is an "oh yeah, this is how it looks without rtx" moment. AMD does have raytracing in the pipeline and it does appear to be a part-software development that will likely be available to some degree on older hardware, to some degree, but don't quote me on that.

6) PSU
500w is going to be on the edge during full load, probably. I'd honestly recommend upgrading but even without it? Unless you're going to do folding@home 24/7 it shouldn't be any issue. A couple of hours of gaming every other day isn't going to pose any problem, as long as you got decent airflow around your case. I'd recommend a 650w PSU for a build like this normally.

7) RAM
Your kit is one of those that'd I'd call good enough. On applications/games which hit the memory hard you'd likely see a pretty significant fps boost by buying a better kit though. When I overclocked my memory from 3200 cl14 to 3200cl12 I noticed a performance increase of about ~15% for gaming. Going all the way to 3800cl13 was an increase of about 40%. (I'm averaging min fps, max fps here). It's very likely you could overclock the ones you have a fair bit already, but really good memory is pricey. I paid about 400 usd for a 2x16gb kit that can hit those speeds and timings (this was 3800mhz with 13-13-13-26 timings, and really tight subtimings), and that is really not worth it if your concern is performance per dollar.


PCPartPicker Part List: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/RggHZf

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor ($189.99 @ B&H)
Motherboard: Gigabyte X570 AORUS PRO WIFI ATX AM4 Motherboard ($269.99 @ Best Buy)
Storage: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($124.99 @ Adorama)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon RX 5700 XT 8 GB GAMING OC Video Card ($409.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $994.96
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-05-23 15:40 EDT-0400


Motivation:
Very solid CPU that likely going to be good enough for anything you're going to be throwing at it for the next five or six years.
Motherboard: I went with gigabyte because I think their feature set is some of the most well developed this generation, and you get WiFi included. Good VRM, good RAM support, and all around well made board.
The GPU was honestly just the one that was the first result on the search, and while I don't have any personal experience with AMD GPUs from Gigabyte they've done good job on the Nvidia ones I've bought. The times I've had to reach out to their support has always been a very painless experience too.

Their RGB software sucks, though.

Samsung NVme, 500gb. Nothing fancy and 500gb is enough really. I'd recommend buying a 2-4tb mechanical drive for storage though.


Now, while this will hit the ~1000€ pricepoint it's not going to be able run everything at Ultra. Next highest, probably, if you want to hit 144hz at 1080p. Can't really speculate on Cyberpunk, but, yeah, looks to be pretty graphics intensive. Probably going to need a 2080Super to max out that game.

Then you also have the ever present question of "What comes next". AMD has Zen 3 coming out late 2020 which promise even more performance over Zen 2. AMD also has more GPUs coming. You also have DDR5 memory coming in another year or two. Nvidia has a new lineup of graphics cards coming this autumn (rumor only, so far, but very very likely). Waiting for DDR5 very likely not worth it, but for a better CPU or GPU? Might be worth it.

Hope this helps.

 

I agree with most of what Dansel said, except on the SSD. Most SSDs are basically equivalent with a few exceptions, so paying $125 for a 500 GB NVME Samsung drive doesn't make sense unless you have the money or the use case for it. Also, it's about $100 per TB of storage space on most SSDs these days, so $125 for just 500 GB ain't worth it.

Anything recommended in this video on SATA SSDs and this one on NVME SSDs are worth considering (only caveat is the SATA SSD video is from 2017, so newer versions of those drives may exist). I'd personally go for the 500 GB Crucial MX500 as a boot and programs drive and a 1 TB NVME drive for games (either the Intel p660 or the ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro, which is functionally equivalent to the Samsung 970), with a 2TB Seagate Barracuda mechanical drive for document and other non-game storage. It definitely costs more than buying just the Samsung 970 500 GB, but I think it's worth it long term.

 

Yeah, as mentioned in most cases the difference between a SATA SSD and an NVMe SSD is going to be very small. There are a couple of things you do want to keep in mind, though, depending on your circumstances

Take a look at the image above. Depending on how the manufacturer implemented everything there are some things you want to be aware of. If you're going to be installing a lot of extra hardware relying on USB, PCIe slots; things like 10GB networking, raid cards, capture cards, USB webcams, etc, and you expect to run many of them simultaneously having your OS disk on dedicated PCIe lanes means you have less worry about saturating them, since otherwise everything is going to go through the 4x lane dedicated to the chipset.

Very few people run into this issue, though.

Beyond that: NVMe SSDs shine if you intend to do things like video editing of 4k material, and other high-bitrate content, where you can expect long sequential read/writes. In most other applications it performs like an ordinary, if very good, SSD. I did some benchmarking some time ago with a Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1tb (NVMe) vs a Samsung 860 Evo 250GB (SATA) and while these are a generation and a priceclass apart: boot+login improved by about ~10%. I find the other benefits valuable enough that I always go with NVMe SSDs, but it isn't for everyone.

 

Okay, so I've been looking into things and got some more questions. First of all, though, thanks for all of your input, I appreciate it.

The build so far looks like this:

• Fractal Design R5
  
• AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz
• Corsair Vengeance LPX 16 GB DDR4-3200
  
• Samsung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2-2280 NVME SSD (*1)
• MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT 8 GB Gaming X Video Card
• be quiet! Straight Power 11 650 W 80+ Fully Modular ATX Power Supply
  
• Thermalright HR-02 Macho Rev.B

(*1): I checked for current non NVME SSDs and the Samsung ones are barely any cheaper, mostly in the range of 10€ or so, so I don't think I'm going to save a lot here and can just go for the NVME variant. I also have a 120gb and another 240gb SSD from my current rig, as well as a 1TB mechanical drive.

The big question, as should be obvious from the list, concerns the motherboard. The one @Dansel linked isn't available in Germany, and to be honest a X570 board, for all the advantages it has, really cuts deep into my budget. Without MB I'm already at ~930 €. I went looking for other alternatives like X470 or B450 boards, but I got somewhat intimidated by pc-part-picker calling out possible incompatabilities and bios hijinks regarding the Ryzen cpu and those boards.

Honestly I'm not quite sure where to go from here. I need the installation process to be somewhat easy (and for it to be doable without access to internet until I can establish a connection in a browser to my dormitory LAN, since there's no wifi here). At the same time I can't really afford more than 200€ on a motherboard.

(Two of the boards I was looking at are MSI B450 Gaming Pro Carbon AC and Asus ROG Stric X470-F Gaming, but PC part picker indicated possible trouble for both)

 

The incompatabilies shown are probably about older BIOS versions, but you can ignore that nowadays unless you're really really unlucky. The current default B450 board that gets recommended is more often than not the MSI Tomahawk MAX. Though be aware that next month B550 boards will come out on the 16th, and from what has been shown so far their feature set will be kind of nice, with many models coming with 2.5G Lan for example, and vast improvements in the VRM department. If you want to go x570, go for the Gigabyte Aorus Elite for 210€.

If you can spare 20€ more on the RAM, go for Crucial Ballistix instead of the Corsair one, because the Micron E-Dies on there play very nicely with Ryzen. If it fits in your budget, go for the Nitro+ 5700XT, since this is pretty much the best model for the 5700XT. The Macho isn't really sold anymore here in Germany I think, so the Scythe Mugen 5 would be a good alternative, or the Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280 (or 240) if you want to go the AIO route.

Keep in mind that more silent oriented cases like the Define R5 will produce higher temperatures in the components. If you'd rather have a more airflow oriented case, look at the Meshify C if you want to stick with Fractal, or many other mesh-front cases out there. (I recommend GamersNexus for case reviews).

If you want some additional reading material, and some different opinions, take a look at Der ideale Gaming-PC.

 

Thanks. The Fractal R5 and the Macho Rev are components I alrady have from my old rig which I plan to reuse.

Edit: I looked into the Crucial and Nitro aspects. The GPU is no problem at all, barely 5-10€ more expensive. If I go with a cheaper MB, the 15-20€ for the Crucial RAM shouldn't be a problem either.

When I put the Tomahawk into pc-part-picker the following note pops up: "The motherboard M.2 slot #1 shares bandwidth with SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports. When the M.2 slot is populated, two SATA 6.0 Gb/s ports are disabled."

Is that anything to be concerned about that'll cause problems for me? Will I still be able to connect my other two SSD drives and my mechanical 1 TB drive?

 

Happened to me just a couple of weeks ago, but yes, it should be rare. There is more too it than that though. Older AMD motherboards have 16MB of on onboard ROM for BIOS. The BIOS for Zen 3 CPUs is greater than 16MB. As a compromise AMD has promised to supply a revised BIOS for these boards where they have removed the code for older CPUs in order to fit the code for the newer ones, yet this means that you loose backwards compatibility. This is less of a problem because the only reason you'd need that old CPU would be if the new one broke, which is very rare.

The big problem is that you're dependent on motherboard manufacturers to upgrade the BIOS for the older platforms, which I don't think everyone will do. Which is why I recommended a X570 board, since they have 32MB ROM and no compromises were necessary. Didn't think about the B550 boards but if they truly will be released this time waiting another month might really be the best choice.

This means that those two ports and the M2 slot share PCIe lanes, and only one set can be used at once. I haven't looked at that specific board but there very likely is a bunch of other SATA ports connected to the chipset that will be available still.

If the motherboard does break your budget buying a 400-series board might very well be the best choice, especially if you can ask around among friends and see if any of them have a Ryzen 1000 or 2000 series processor, since then you could in the worst case borrow that one, pop it into your motherboard, upgrade the BIOS, and then use you own CPU from that point.

 

I made up my mind to wait for June in order to take a look at the B550 boards first (being two days after my birthday this also fits nicely with eventual cash injections). I'll likely revisit this thread and @ you when the time comes to make the final decision, and I'm in need of consultation again.

Right now, though, the ROG STRIX B550-E Gaming looks sweet. I wonder what the price will be.

 

Probably ~200 usd based on what the b450 strix gaming costs.

 

Things have changed a bit now @Dansel @Feoffic @Sacro

I'm not quite as stripped for cash anymore and I think I won't reuse any of my old components and instead try to sell my old rig as a whole to offset some of the cost from the new pc (more about that later). The new B550 mbs have also been released now and I think with a 200€ board I've got a good setup. The goal is still playing AAA titles with ultra graphics 1080p and 144hz for the coming years. Here are my current specs:

• Fractal Design Meshify C
• be quiet! Straight Power 11 650W 80+ gold (fully modular)*
• 3x be quiet! SilentWings 3 140mm fans*
• Asus ROG Strix B550-F (+ Wifi)*
• AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• Scythe Mugen 5 Rev. B
• Crucial Ballistix 16GB DDR4-3600 CL16*
• Gigabyte Geforce RTX 2070 Super 8GB Gaming OC 3X
  
• Sasmung 970 Evo 500 GB M.2 NVME*
• Seagate Barracuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200 RPM

*1: Is 650W sufficient? A friend suggested spending 15€ more to get the 750W version, so that there'd be more room upwards (also with a glance towards possible upgrades down the line).

*2: My initial recourse on the Fractal R5 and not a case with better airflow was because I'm usually quite sensitive to noise, which I find distracting while gaming. Apparently I'm also a rarity in that I couldn't care less for RGB or a glass screen to look inside. However, I have heard that with better airflow and non-stock fans I can have a reasonably quiet system without suffocating temps inside the case, so I'm willing to give this a try (as long as I can deactivate any and all lights if I find them to be a nuisance). The Meshify also has a pleasing aesthetic, which is a plus.

*3: I went with the B550-F instead of the B550-E because the latter seemed like overkill. I'm not too versed in these things, but I saw that the E version offers SLI support which I won't use anyway, so I think I can save 70€ and go with the lighter edition. The Wifi is a tempting bonus as well because there isn't any in my current living circumstances).

*4: I've read from several sources now that ryzen cpus pair very well with high frequency ram, so I thought that spending 15€ bucks to go from 3200 to 3600 wouldn't be so bad. I haven't done any overclocking before, but aside from the XMP profile there seems to be a nifty tool that can help figure out safe timings.

*5: For now I think 500 GB are enough for my system and gaming needs, especially because for Samsung SSDs (usually my go to) the price leap from 500 GB to 1 TB is considerable. However, I was suprised to see some SSDs like the Crucial P1 1 TB to be much cheaper, with a difference of almost 70€. Do you think it's worth it to go with the cheaper but bigger option?

All in all this system is quite a bit more expensive than I first anticipated and according to geizhals.de comes to roughly 1500€ all things considered. But I do want a gaming rig that'll last me at least five years like my old one did, so I'm willing to invest here. And with the B550 mb I'm also set for upgrading if I ever feel the need to or experience an unexpected windfall. I had a lot of fun (and a few very interesting nights) reading into all of that stuff, comparing builds and components, and watching reviews. I also stumbled upon the infamous Verge build and had a good laugh, and I can totally see how this can become an addictive hobby.

Anyway, last part on the agenda is getting rid off my old rig. I'm honestly not sure how to price it, so maybe you've got some insights there, since you seem to be quite involved in tech issues. I'd try fencing it in my immediate area first, since sending full pcs with large coolers via post seems an unstable affair. Here are the specs:

• Fractal Design R5
  
• be quiet! Straight Power 10 500W semi-modular
• Asrock H97 Pro4
• Intel Core i5-4460
• Thermalright HR-02 Macho Rev.B
• 2x8 Crucial Ballistix Sport Series VLP DDR3-1600
  
• 4GB Sapphire Radeon R9 290x Vapor-X Tri-X
• Samsung SSD 840 EVO 120GB
• Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
• A 1TB HDD the name of which eludes me

It works pretty much without issue. Old school AAAs like The Witcher 3 run well on ultra settings; newer games like Assassins Creed Odysee and Anno 1800 at medium to high, and so on. No idea how to price this thing, though. RAM and CPU are pretty old of course. The GPU too but I invested a good deal of money in that thing five years ago, and I'm happy that it held up so well.

 

750W is overkill to be honest, 650W is already plenty, so save the 15€ there and put it into something else. The P1 isn't really the best NVME drive, so that's why it's cheaper - look at some performance benchmarks and decide if the speeds are enough for you (also keep in mind it's QLC, so it has a worse lifespan than TLC). As for the RAM, you can stick with the 3200 and manually bring it to the 3600 sweetspot that Ryzen has if you want to save the 23€.

An alternative to the silent wings 3 would be the NF-A14's, which can move more air at the same RPM than the silent wings 3. If you are a real "silent freak" though, you'll probably have to do your own custom fan curves in either case. If it doesn't have to be the fractal, you could take a look at cases with 200mm intake fans instead. Since they're larger they can move more air while spinning slower, and thus quieter usually. Although they're not something you'd put on a radiator, but since you're sticking to air cooling it'd be an option. The cheapest one I'd personally get is around 115€ however, with the Cooler Master H500.

Now to be honest at the current price the B550-F is too expensive in my opinion, since you can get the x570 Aorus Elite for literally the same price, and the MSI MAG x570 Tomahawk looks like it'll be just ~15€ more once it's available (although no idea when that will be). So personally I'd probably go with the gigabyte, unless you really need the wifi. I'd also wait until this weekend at least, so prices on B550 can stabalize a bit more, and some reviews can come out.

As for your old rig, take a look at ebay/ebay-kleinanzeigen to see if there's any similar builds (or look for the individual components and add it together), or ask in the Computerbase Sammelthread.

 

Make sure you get the 1600rpm versions. I had the slower 1000rpm ones first but they just don’t push enough air.

Regarding ram. Two things: remember that the speed on the packaging is a case of lowest common denominator for that set; they can often be clocked much higher. Second 16gb is enough but there already are games that can benefit from more. They’re rare still, but if you want to have things running in the background while gaming 16gb might not be enough.


I wouldn’t pay more than 400 usd at most for the old comp, but I’m kinda picky.

I’m on vacation at he moment so can’t really double check anything but your build looks solid.

 

TBH you don't really need to go with a Samsung SSD unless you're using it for things like video editing/etc. that requires lots of reading/writing data.

If it's just gaming you can go with cheaper SSD's and not notice much of a difference. Western Digital SN550 is an example of a much cheaper NVMe SSD that's still plenty fine for gaming. (In Canadian dollars, it's about 10$ less for 1tb SN550[179$ CAD] vs 500gb Samsung 970 EVO Plus[189$ CAD])

 

@Sacro God are the Noctua fans ugly in their original appearance. Thank the Lord that there are black versions of them on Amazon. As for the mb, the wifi really is a big deal for me, so I'll probably stay with the board. I'll wait a bit anyway. At the earliest I'm going to order the parts in two or three weeks.

@Dansel 400, huh. Well if I can get 300-350€ for this system that'd already be a hefty chunk of money for the new pc, so that's good. Thanks.

 

I finally assembled my rig yesterday.







The third picture has been taken earlier than the first two, which is why the two front fans are positioned differently. The process itself was fun even if I had one or two oh shit moments. One example would be forgetting that the bios doesn't recognize M.2 NVME drives on first boot, and starting to panic about possibly having to take the system apart again to properly connect the SSD. Another moment was mounting the CPU cooler, which required an inordinate amount of pressure for the first screw to actually thread. That was perhaps the most nerve wracking part.

Anyway, final specs for those interested (clocking in at ~1600€).

• Meshify C
  
• Rog Strix B550-F (Wifi)
• Ryzen 5 3600
• Gigabyte 2070s Gaming OC 3X
• Crucial Ballistix DDR4 3200 16-18-18
  
• 1 TB 970 EVO Plus M.2 NVME
  
• 2 TB Seagate Barracuda
• 2x 140mm be quiet! Silentwings 3 (Noctuas had delivery issues)
  
• 1x 120mm be quiet! Silentwings 3
• Cooler Master Hyper Evo 212 (The Mugen one also had delivery issues, jumping from 1 day to 33, which prompted the switch).

Thanks to everyone who helped with picking the parts! In the foreseeable future I might put another 120mm exhaust fan on the top panel (might reuse one of the fractal fans if they're not too noisy) but for now that system should last me a while.

 

I’d recommend not having another exhaust fan. You probably want more intake than exhaust as otherwise you can start sucking in air through gaps in the case, and that’s how dust gets in. Generally referred to positive pressure.

Also remember to enable the XMP profile for the RAM, especially if you don’t intend to manually overclock. Even more important is to remember to enable precision boost for the cpu. It allows higher clocks under load, but almost more importantly much lower voltage when idle.
Edit: actually I just realized I don’t know if the non-X series cpus support PB. Guess you’ll find out.

Shoot me a message if you want to play Titanfall 2 or Battlefront 2; it’s what I play at the moment.

 

@Dansel : Precision Boost should be stock for all Ryzen 3000 series. The following article does an excellent job of differentiating the differences in terminology for PB.

@Eilyfe : You can use this article to help you decide if you need to manually overclock your cpu or not.

Source:
https://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/3491-explaining-precision-boost-overdrive-benchmarks-auto-oc

 

I'll keep it to the one exhaust fan for now. I have DOCP enabled and manually tweaked the frequency from 3200 to 3600 at 16 18 18 36 @ 1.35 V. The system is stable with these timings (which are the stock timings for 3200). I was experimenting with the timings quite a bit earlier but it was getting annoying to clear CMOS every time and I was getting frustrated by constantly having to reestablish the baseline I had before tweaking that wrong number. I haven't yet found where in the bios I can create my own timing profile, or if there is such a function at all, which is why I kept it at the frequency overclock and the stock timings for now. If I decide to delve deeper into this I'll probably use my reset connector on the cmos clearing two-pin and see if that works, so it gets less annoying and I won't have to short it with a screwdriver all the time.

Sadly I've neither got Titanfall 2 nor Battlefront 2, so I won't be able to play those with you. It's kinda weird that I built this pc and now all I'm doing is reading webtoons, watching more tech videos and now and then fiddle with a zoo management game (which admittedly takes a lot of gpu power and looks damn amazing on the new rig - my incestuous zebras are coming along nicely). Kinda waiting for Cyberpunk at this point. I'll also have to find out which games have RTX and DLSS so I can actually see what my gpu really gets me in terms of visuals. Might try Battlefield 5 for that.

Yeah I watched the video corresponding to the article. It was quite useful in getting somewhat of a grasp on the difference between PB, PBO and Auto OC. I used Ryzen Master now enabling PBO and Auto OC with an offsett of 200 mhz boost override. With my rudimentary ram tweaking, Ryzen Master and some fiddling in Afterburner (+135 mhz boost clock; +500 mhz memory clock - might be able to go higher on the latter) I think I'm pretty much set in terms of performance. Any tweaking I do now (specifically in terms of memory timings) is purely from a point of interest.

The only thing I'm somewhat dissatisfied with is my cpu cooler. The Hyper 212 Evo looks puny, and I wonder how effective it is versus my old Thermalright Macho Rev B or the Mugen Scythe 5 Rev B I couldn't get in time. In time (and with new pay) I might invest in a good upper tier Noctua air cooler.