Zyndo

from a financial standpoint, the short answer is that such an endeavour would be a terrible investment. the amount of money you would spend watercooling would be yield far better performance if spent on a brand new GPU/CPU (after reselling your old hardware)
 
 
That being said, not everything in PC-land is a Price:Performance adventure for everyone. If you understand that this is not a good way to achieve price:performance, and you still wish to go forward with this, then you could look at a universal bracket like this one (also comes in black): https://www.nzxt.com/products/kraken-g12-white
It mounts on most GPU's of most shapes and sizes (list includes the RX 470) with little-to-no modifications. From there you can purchase any compatible AIO of your choice and mount it to the die, whilst the built in fan does a pretty good job of cooling everything else.

Whilst MX-4 is certainly a fine paste, there is nothing wrong with AS5 either. I find MX-4 separates a bit when in storage so each time I go to use it I have to sort of 'pre-use' it as it were... and waste some just to get the runny liquid out which has separated from the rest of the paste. Kind of annoying really.

AS5 is a thicker paste, but that makes it easier to handle and apply in my opinion, but you will also likely need to use slightly more of it to get as good of coverage. temp-wise MX-4 and AS5 are basically the same with a correct application and after a slight 'burn-in' from AS5 it's even technically slightly better (but we're talking differences of less than like 1C in either direction lol). The only thing of note with these two pastes is that MX-4 is non-capacitive and non-conductive, whereas AS5 is only non-conductive (although it's capacitive levels are hardly worth mentioning).

I've used AS5, AS5 is fine. I've used MX-4, MX-4 is fine. use whichever you want for whatever reason you want, but AS5 is hardly "old" and "junk" as these guys have claimed

the "best" is the i9 9900k...

the i7 9700k or i5 9600k are probably the ones you should buy. pick whichever best suits your budget. You could also maybe consult the used market and see if you can get a good deal on an 8700k, but if you're buying new I would suggest the 9000 series CPU's.

You need a part for each of these areas.... there are TONS of YT videos out there explaining what each area does and what you may need.
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/
 
A built system for gaming/editing would look something like this when you're done.
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/TvhCkd
 
Suggested hardware will depend on what you're doing with the system, the more specific you can be with your needs the more precisely we can suggest hardware. It's also worth noting that if you can stretch your budget even a little bit you can get a system which is quite a bit stronger.

Did your performance go DOWN after the upgrade? If it did, a CPU bottleneck can't be the culprit here. Bottlenecks don't reduce performance, rather, they limit performance increases.

If your performance went down, I would recommend uninstalling/reinstalling your drivers as it is something you didn't state that you did and it is HIGHLY recommended when changing GPU's (and i'm not saying update your drivers, i'm saying get rid of them and then install them again as previous driver into from your old GPU can be interfering). A 4770 is unlikely to be a "bottleneck" in 4k gaming, even with a 1080ti, because the graphical load is so extreme you aren't getting high enough FPS to really stress the CPU. If we were talking 1440p or 1080p then you can certainly be CPU limited in many titles when paired with a 1080ti, but at 4k the CPU load is relatively quite low.

there are a metric boatload of cases with 360mm front mounts, but many only have 240/280 top mounts. So you can still very easily get a 360mm into a case, but it just won't be on the top. Something like the Corsair 500D or 460x/570x are things to look at.

Also, if you don't need a see through front panel, something like the Define R6 or S2 from Fractal Design are excellent 360mm top mounted cases.

stop saying 1080p and 1440p like they are the same thing as 4k. You only need a more powerful GPU with each resolution increase. the lower framerates of 4k make it significantly easier for a weaker CPU to keep up. You started this topic asking about 4k. Are you trying to run the game at 1080p or at 4k? because our recommendations are going to be VERY different based on this information.
 
No. A benchmark like this is the BEST indication. It's a real world, repeatable benchmark, not a synthetic benchmark. It runs the game in game scenarios the exact way the game would be played. It runs the camera on a rail. I'm not asking you to run something like firestrike/timespy/superposition because that would be useless, but a benchmark like the GTA V benchmark is an extremely useful tool for troubleshooting performance issues.

stop saying 1080p and 1440p like they are the same thing as 4k. You only need a more powerful GPU with each resolution increase. the lower framerates of 4k make it significantly easier for a weaker CPU to keep up. You started this topic asking about 4k. Are you trying to run the game at 1080p or at 4k? because our recommendations are going to be VERY different based on this information.
 
No. A benchmark like this is the BEST indication. It's a real world, repeatable benchmark, not a synthetic benchmark. It runs the game in game scenarios the exact way the game would be played. It runs the camera on a rail. I'm not asking you to run something like firestrike/timespy/superposition because that would be useless, but a benchmark like the GTA V benchmark is an extremely useful tool for troubleshooting performance issues.

Did your performance go DOWN after the upgrade? If it did, a CPU bottleneck can't be the culprit here. Bottlenecks don't reduce performance, rather, they limit performance increases.

If your performance went down, I would recommend uninstalling/reinstalling your drivers as it is something you didn't state that you did and it is HIGHLY recommended when changing GPU's (and i'm not saying update your drivers, i'm saying get rid of them and then install them again as previous driver into from your old GPU can be interfering). A 4770 is unlikely to be a "bottleneck" in 4k gaming, even with a 1080ti, because the graphical load is so extreme you aren't getting high enough FPS to really stress the CPU. If we were talking 1440p or 1080p then you can certainly be CPU limited in many titles when paired with a 1080ti, but at 4k the CPU load is relatively quite low.

Best watercooling case, on the market, with triple fan support and TG on front/side, would probably be this one: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/Hwkj4D/lian-li-pc-o11dx-atx-full-tower-case-pc-o11dx
 
Comes in black or white if need be.

Also this:
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/xFs8TW/anidees-ai-crystal-atx-mid-tower-case-ai-crystal
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/pBp323/thermaltake-view-31-tg-atx-mid-tower-case-ca-1h8-00m1wn-00
(Acrylic front panel) https://pcpartpicker.com/product/q4YLrH/thermaltake-view-22-tempered-glass-edition-atx-mid-tower-case-ca-1j3-00m1wn-00
 
those are the ones I could find anyway... there are likely more. Also, the list becomes MUCH longer if you're willing to not NEED a 360 on top, or if you're willing to give up a TG front panel requirement.
 

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/Hzy4ZR

If you're willing to overclock, the 1700 is a much better investment than the 1800x. It comes with a stock cooler (the 1800x does not) and on top of not having to buy a cooler it saves you an additional $30 in cost outright (I know it's not dollars but my keyboard doesn't have GBP on it). You don't even need to try that hard for an OC either... a 3.6 or 3.7GHz OC should be very attainable and not warm up your chip too much on a stock cooler and be very close in performance to the 1800x. Though if you're uncomfortable with overclocking, then the 1800x is a pretty sensible purchase as well just keep in mind you'll also need to get a cooler for it.
 
I chose the motherboard I did because it seems to be on for a pretty good deal and it's (arguably) the best Ryzen board out there. You could save a ton of money by getting an X370 board which much cheaper (Like the X370 MSI SLI PLUS). Keep in mind this Asus board is an EATX board which means it's slightly wider than most ATX boards and it may not fit in all cases

32GB of RAM is easy. solid RAM, fast enough for Ryzen to benefit from it (if you remember to set XMP when you plug it in for the first time). Could easily save money by stepping down to a 16GB kit if you don't need the capacity.

No storage devices as I don't know what you need or what you already have. There is enough budget leftover in this build that you should be able to get some if you need it.
 
Your choice of GPU, since you're not a gamer, should be fairly straightforward. For your needs and price preferences I might recommend selling your current PC, and then using whatever funds you can get out of that to buy a used GPU. Everyone will be dumping their Pascal stuff now to buy Turing, so there should be a bunch of reasonably priced 1070's or 1070ti's on the market which you could easily get for the same price (or less, depending on the local used market) as you should be able to get from selling your PC.

Left the case blank because that's mostly personal taste. just know that if you wish to use the recommended motherboard that it will need to support EATX motherboards, which is fairly common of ATX cases.

Wipe it off dry with a paper towel, Kleenex (tissue), coffee filter, or some disposable material like that. rubbing alcohol is merely to make the process easier and quicker as well as to help get really fine residue out (as well as leaving none behind since it will all evaporate). Its more of a recommendation, and its certainly not necessary. Just wipe off the CPU until the visible stuff is gone, then grab another paper towel and continue wiping (you will notice the paper towel, or whatever you're using, is still turning grey as you wipe). repeat this process until there is no more grey residue left on the paper tower when you wipe the CPU.

If all you're interested in is overclocking, then a CPU upgrade may not be a bad idea. But if the end goal is to maximize the performance and minimize the long term investments... then wait for the mainstream unlocked 8 cores of Ice Lake or Cannon Lake or whenever it rolls around. with the pressure AMD has put on Intel for cores it won't be too far over the hill... next gen and more cores will mean more return on investment. the 7700k is, basically, just a faster 6700k. IPC and structure is essentially identical. Next gen should carry IPC improvements (8000 series is also still running on skylake IPC). So waiting for a platform which will offer core count increase, IPC increase, and likely an outright clockspeed increase should net the most bang for your buck.

Of course that's a relative term. It could easily be 6 months or a year from now. Up to you if you want to wait.

If all you're interested in is overclocking, then a CPU upgrade may not be a bad idea. But if the end goal is to maximize the performance and minimize the long term investments... then wait for the mainstream unlocked 8 cores of Ice Lake or Cannon Lake or whenever it rolls around. with the pressure AMD has put on Intel for cores it won't be too far over the hill... next gen and more cores will mean more return on investment. the 7700k is, basically, just a faster 6700k. IPC and structure is essentially identical. Next gen should carry IPC improvements (8000 series is also still running on skylake IPC). So waiting for a platform which will offer core count increase, IPC increase, and likely an outright clockspeed increase should net the most bang for your buck.

Of course that's a relative term. It could easily be 6 months or a year from now. Up to you if you want to wait.

Ditch Intel
 
#BetterRed

Because you want to and can are perfectly viable reasons. However, you get zero real world speed increase from using RAID0 much of the time. If you are going to use it though, absolutely do a fresh OS install.

SSD wont make any performance difference in games compared to HDD. it only affects load times. even in open world games a HDD can keep up just fine.

That being said, on my next rig I'm going to have 2 Samsung 950 pros in Raid 0 for 1TB of that 3.5-4GB per second speed limit. not because I need it for my games, but because oh my god thats going to be awesome! #moremoneythansense

mfw the tl;dr is bigger than the main part of the post

Depends on so many factors and how much of a fanboy the presenters are... but I'll try to simplify it for you...
 
An R7 1700 @ 4GHz vs an 8700k @ 5GHz, the result is the 8700k has roughly a 30% single core improvement over the Ryzen chip***. That doesn't mean you get 30% more fps in your games though, as often times even a 1080ti, even at 1080p, cannot generate enough fps to stress these CPU's in most titles at ultra (or above) settings. Only when the GPU is not the limiting factor (AKA, the bottleneck) will you see any benefit to having an 8700k over the 1700 in gaming. So basically, if you're not going to play CPU intensive titles at high framerates (144hz or more IMO) then you're correct, Ryzen will perform almost identically to an 8700k under these conditions.
 
You could make an argument for thread count here, but I'm unsure of any games which scale beyond 12 threads. On that note, it's worth mentioning that the 8700k is ~30% faster per core/thread(as discussed earlier, and based on those metrics) and the R7 has 33% more threads.... so the ONLY time the R7 is actually truly better than the 8700k is only if it's at 100% full utilization... and then it's only barely better.... and many people will be able to get more than 5GHz out of their 8700k if they invest enough in their cooling (or get lucky in the lotto), whilst it's almost impossible to get more than 4GHz out of an R7 1700.
 
 
So yes, for many users the difference between the R7 1700 and 8700k isn't going to be a lot. and lots of people may not be that extreme about overclocking. Back when it was 7700k vs Ryzen, Ryzen was an incredibly sensible and bulletproof argument for nearly everyone. Now that the 8700k has enough cores that Ryzen is less impressive in that area, it's basically a wash on threads, but the 8700k still has the single core advantage by a pretty significant margin.... so going forward, as games become more CPU intensive, and/or as graphics cards become much more powerful thus allowing us to push much higher framerates which leads to more demand from the CPU to keep up, the 8700k should show itself to be a better gamer across the board by as much as about 30% (or a bit more if you push it past 5GHz).

Of course you could also just game at 4k and then none of this matters since GPU's are currently nowhere near powerful enough to reach framerates high enough to properly stress CPU's at this resolution haha.
 
TLDR; Can't see your link brah.
 
 
***(both fairly high overclocks but also reasonably attainable for a lot of people provided they have enough cooling, this also assumes properly calibrated memory on both platforms)

it is; but to be fair, if some random dudes can get it even semi-functional, it really brings into question the validity of Intel's claims towards its being completely incompatible. Intel, or any of the board partners, with all their inside knowledge and extremely low-level product information/workings.... they should have no issues making a perfectly functional version of this same stuff.

Lack of understanding on their part, and a lack of interest on the part of the students

M.2 is a form factor. Just like how you can get HDD's in 3.5", you can also get them in 2.5" (for laptops usually). Most SSD's are 2.5", but some are M.2. Its just a form factor/interface. However, NVMe and M.2 are very very different things.

most 3.5"/2.5" storage devices run on a protocol called AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface). It worked great for the normal, (relatively) slower, SATA based devices, but that protocol is simply not fast enough for the kind of speeds NVMe is capable of. NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) is a newer protocol which allows drives to perform SIGNIFICANTLY faster than the old 600MBps bottleneck which was in place with SATA/AHCI. So, your fastest SATA drives are limited to about 500-550MBps and they will never get any faster due to their already being at their limit. Currently, the fastest NVMe drices are capable of 3GBps reads; this is a hardware limitation of the drives and of the DMI (Direct Media Interface), which is 4GBps, so we should expect to see NVMe drives get massively faster over time as SSD technology improves and as DMI (or whatever they upgrade it to) expands in order to adjust for this new surge of performance.
 
 
But as a gamer, NVMe drives offer performance in an area you won't ever really experience since SATA SSD's are already so [relatively] fast for gamers they do everything so well that at best you're going to maybe save a second or two on a load screen in SOME games and that's about it.
Yes, sticking with a SATA/AHCI drive is almost always the best thing for a gamer to do. No sense investing more money in faster storage as that will not improve performance. Upgrading your CPU, GPU, investing in water cooling, or pretty much anything else, besides NVMe, is almost always better as far as performance:dollar goes in regards to gamers.

you do you man. case fans do not typically make as much a difference as people would like to believe they do. so if you want those fans and they make you happy without breaking the bank then it sounds like a good plan to me.

your impression is correct. most 3 pin fans can easily be controlled in the 60%-100% range. PWM usually merely offers increased functionality ranges (some going as low as 20%). but no. you really don't need PWM for case fans. whether or not you want better case fans is up to you, but to make that decision solely on using 3 pin or 4 pin fans is largely irrelevant.

probably a better deal to go with the pre-built tbh. that 1070 is going to yield more performance than your 1060 by a fairly noticeable amount and the 1700x will have a better lifespan than your 1600x (not that it will live longer exactly, but will stay relevant for longer). but there are a few things to keep in mind. the cooler they have in this PC will not be well suited for overclocking, so you may need to replace that if you want to overclock your CPU. pre-builts tend to use the cheapest versions of whatever is available to them, so expect a low end 1070 (looks like MSI 1070 Armor OC), a mediocre PSU, stock 2133 memory, and probably the cheapest mATX B350 board they could find(looks like MSI B350 Bazooka).
 
Also keep in mind that your cart is unmodified by Black Friday pricing so far, and that there are other redeeming qualities in your build over this prebuilt (such as its faster RAM, larger SSD, and so on). If you wait for those deals, adjust your build a bit, step down to a 1600 and ignore a cooler for now (use the stock cooler), maybe step down to a 256GB SSD if needed, change your case and PSU to better ones for similar costs, maybe get one of those cheaper motherboards.... you could very likely get a 1070ti for little to no additional cost and be even better off than this prebuilt.