Anomnomnomaly

Basically, I can get Pro for £50 and home for £35 through a scheme my work does.. because I use my home rig for the odd work related tasks.... Considering MS want £119 and £219 in the UK... I can easily get pro and still save over have of what home costs. I may not need 'ALL' of the extra features, but I'd probably need a few of them... I was certainly grateful for some of the extras in W7 Pro as I run a home network, as well as manage all of my families systems (my sister has a small business). So given a choice, I'd go pro everytime.

So I'm one of those W7 Pro holdouts, it's a great OS and I love it... Had to resort to all sorts of trickery to stop the forced W10 update a few years ago. But building a new rig and I'm gonna have to go W10 if I want to make the most of the new gen CPU's... I don't like it, I hate the insidious data collection, I am not a product to be invaded and sold for some one else's profit. I don't do facebook/twitter/ig/ or any unencrypted and insecure messaging apps, I limit what data google can get (duckduckgo FTW)... and I've been watching so many tutorials on how to limit what W10 can harvest. But which version should i get? I'll be gaming and doing a little work on it (some rendering, photoshop... well gimping really. and some architectural design software).. Watching movies and so forth too. Gaming will be in 1440p. I can get a license through my work and would prefer to get Pro rather than home... is it worth it, can I still set 'home' to a metered connection to stop it downloading updates whenever it wants to? The pro version is gonna cost me more... but way cheaper than the £200 MS want... even the Home variant is peanuts compared to the £119 MS want. I really hate having to install it...it makes my skin crawl. But W7 is EOL next Jan and I'll need 10 for gaming, and unless I dual boot with a linux distro and learn how to use it properly... I can't really see a choice. I've already got my flash drive ready to install... I just need to let work know which license I want by tomorrow or I have to wait until Weds... and as parts finish arriving tomorrow, I want to build and install over my 3 days off.

Go for the best PSU you can afford, if you want to upgrade the graphics later, or perhaps go SLI/Xfire... you don't want to be stuck with a PSU that can't handle it. I picked up the EVGA G2 Gold 650W... more than enough for my system and room for a more powerful video card later... or two of my current ones. (£80) I know some will say it's overkill... but future proofing is wise Motherboard wise, the Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro is rated highly, as is the Asrock Pro4 according to some... I've actually just bought the gigabyte one myself. (£109) Ryzen 5 2600x is a solid choice, but the 2600 is also good and offers a little better value for money... it's about £30-40 cheaper. (£150) Corsair vengeance 3200mhz DDR4 is always a good choice... make sure to get twin kits (2x8 or 2x16, or 4x4, 4x8) as the ryzens do love some of the dual channel stuff, and 3200 is the sweet spot. (£123 16gb, £229 32GB) Case... a very subjective thing... find what looks good to you and will meet your needs... you can get reasonable ones from £60-100 Cooler... air or water... Noctua, Bequiet are some of the best ones around... £40-60, if you want an all in one water cooled (AIO) a 240-280mm one will be anywhere between £80-120. Video card... again subjective... if you can wait for the RTX 2060 at around £380 it's as good as the 1070... better according to nVidia. Storage... get the best you can afford... I say this a lot... if you can afford an M.2 drive. the sweet spot is the WD black NVME 250GB, it's only £13 more than the Sata version M.2 but is 3 times faster... Again, some think it's overkill.. but at that size/price. It's daft not too. (£63) Gaming... got enough left over for a decent sized SSD... try the Crucial MX500 1TB currently down to £125 (I picked up 2 for £210 when they were around £150 each) Keyboard... go with what you want, if you like a mechanical feel spend the extra... if you're not that bothered a decent gaming one can still be found for £40-50, same with a mouse. I've got the corsair Glaive which I got on sale for about £40 Monitor, the Acer 27" GF276 is a reasonable 75hz 1080p monitor and can be picked up quite cheaply now, it's also freesync. New they can be found for around £180... but keep an eye on places like Amazon warehouse deals. I got one for a friend for £130 a little while ago. That lot comes to around £1400 and is a decent setup... and a good base to upgrade from a few years down the line. Don't forget you may need a windows license too. Don't be afraid to buy used either, you can stretch the budget out. But never forget that all opinions on parts are subjective and personal opinions and bias can and will cloud what people recommend...I wouldn't tell you what to choose... But if you check out the build logs section, I've just started one of my new setup.. which sounds like it will be very similar to what you want to get. But I am able to salvage a BDrom, USB3 card reader, graphics card, monitors, mouse, keyboard and a couple of 3TB drives. I picked up a load of stuff in sales, quite a few bits from Amazons warehouse deals... gotta love that prime free shipping too. So far I've spent around £960, but brand new everything I've bought so far should have cost just over £1200 Good luck.

Oh well, I've already ordered the gigabyte one and it's being delivered tomorrow along with the ram, m.2 and cpu. I saved a ton of money on the case, SSD's, PSU and AIO... so an extra £30 on a motherboard is about 1/6th of those savings... I'm still good.

I also forgot to mention... the reason I went with 32GB of ram... When I went to order the 16GB (2x8GB)... it came up at a whopping £279.99...yet the exact same ram in 32GB (4x8gb) was only £229.99... Yup, £50 cheaper for twice as much of the exact same memory. I have no idea if they cocked up, it doesn't make any sense for them to do that and mean it... but from my perspective I'm future proofing because when I upgrade the mediaserver later in the year, I can always split that ram and have 16gb in each system if I wanted to save some money then.

I never saw one, the only ATX Pro4 I saw was a B350.. Could be it's not available in the UK right now.

A 1TB NVME WD black... kinda silly money at the moment... 10x more expensive per GB than what I paid for the 250gb.

I'll be honest... I've never owned an Asrock motherboard, I have no experience in their quality and of the comparisons and reviews I was reading, the Pro4 was mATX and I wanted ATX. I did take a look at the Fatal1ty, that was only a couple £ cheaper than the gigabyte one I got... But with no knowledge, I opted for the gigabyte... I kinda wanted ASUS as I've owned their boards for many years, always good over clockers. But I was reading that the VRM's weren't as good as the gigabyte... and MSI was out of the running due to the lack of voltage offset options.

It wasn't originally going to be a 'budget build' I'd already started buying parts (I've had the drives, aio & case since early Dec)... But the leaks of upcoming 3xxx series parts made me rethink... I waited to see what CES announcements may happen... and scaled it back about 30%. It's a decent mid range budget build with a few few higher end parts. but total cost so far has been under £1000... considering I've already got the graphics card. If I could afford what I really wanted... 9700K, Z390, GTX1080TI... It's definitely a budget build. As for the 3 SSD's... NVME is only £13 more than SATA M.2 at the 250GB range... So no brainer, 2x 1TB on special deals, too good to pass up and I have a lot of games... those 2x 3TB drives... both 50% full with games... Over 200 on steam and about 25 on Uplay, and other dozen or so on GOG. The more demanding gmaes go on the SSD's whilst the older ones that don't really need it can stay on the 3TB.

If you mean the MSI B450, I didn't go with that because of the lack of voltage offset for OC'ing with PB2. It's still a saving of nearly £40 over the X470 board I was going to get. I was going to get the 2600, but it was on back order and wouldn't be here for another week, and I wanted everything here at the same time so I could build over the weekend. The WD Black NVME was a no brainer really. The MX500's are SATA III, fine for gaming I just felt like getting an AIO this time round... In a few years when I build another system... I may do a water cooled rig... I consider this a bridging step. My current 550 Corsair, will be going into my mums PC as she's only got a little Bequiet 350W that's struggling these days (it's pretty old).. In fact my old case, PSU and cooler will be upgrading her system as the SFF case I built hers in... it's too small and not enough ventilation and on really, really hot days... has thermal throttled and shut down a couple of times. Better cooling is needed, and that old PSU can't cut it anymore. No controller for the fans, the 2 on the AIO have all the wiring to run of the board, I'm replacing the stock fans in the case with 2x 140 at the front and the 120 rear exhaust. the AIO is going to vent out the top. I have some splitters and all the fans are 4 pin, so can run of the board if need be.

I waited for the AMD news at CES and decided I couldn't wait until July for Ryzen 3zxxx series CPU's and Chipsets... So I've adjusted my original R7 2700X, X470, 32GB DDR4 plan as follows.... Because I also have a mediaserver stull running an FX 6300, 8GB on a 770 chipset and W7 Pro... that needs to be upgraded too. So I'll build this one now for gaming, but then swap the MB/CPU into my mediaserver case towards the end of the year. If the news is true that new 3xxx chips will be in the same budget ranges as current ones, and that means getting an R5 8/16 for under £200 or an R7 with either 12/24 or 16/32 cores/threads for around the £260-320... then I can get a new MB/CPU for gaming, and split the 32GB of ram between the 2... or just buy another 16GB if prices fall further. Besides... I could by 2 motherboards and 2 CPU's for what a single MB and Intel 9700k would cost. So the new build is as follows. Gigabyte B450 Aorus Pro ATX (£109) Ryzen 5 2600X (£187) WD Black 250GB NVME M.2 (£63) 32GB (4x8) Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3200mhz (£229 - But silly old Amazon Delivered 64GB 4x16GB instead of the 4x 8GB) Two Crucial 1TB MX500's (£210 for both in sales) Two Seagate 3TB HDD's (storage and backups from my existing setup) (Free) Sapphire RX580 Nitro 8GB (Free) Sharkoon BW9000 Case (I needed one with drive bays for BDrom and Card reader from existing setup) (£55) Corsair H115 Pro AIO (£115) EVGA G2 650W Modular PSU )£82) 2x Corsair ML 140mm fans (£25) 1x Corsair ML 120mm fan (£14) I'll be reusing my existing 3 monitor setup (2x 27" Acer 1440p Freesync and 1 Benq 1080p in portrait mode) I've not skimped on the storage, I managed to get those 2 1TB drives in sales for around the price that one used to cost... they'll be fine for my games. The NVME is overkill, but given that the price difference between NVME and Sata M.2 drives in that capacity is £13... It's utter madness not to take advantage of it, and it will help with some of the software I use for rendering and architectural design, as well as photo editing in gimp. The old system (FX8350, 16GB ram will be transferred into my Mediaserver until the new parts are released (looking at the upgrade 4th quarter myself) and after that will give my mum's PC a huge boost (she doesn't game outside of solitaire, hearts, freecell and so forth.) as she's running an old FX4100 and 4GB ram on the same board that's in my mediaserver... So I may just swap my board over too as her's has a slight fault with the network hardware (she's on wifi, so doesn't matter) Some of the parts are being delivered tomorrow, so for now I've started setting up the case, and taking a final backup of my data and a clone of the OS drive as I have a raid setup... So I thought best to clone that onto a single drive just in case. Will update with pics over the weekend... But they'll be boring as I'm not doing silly RGB lighting, aside from what is part of the H115 Pro AIO... I wasn't even going to bother with a tempered glass side, but this case was on sale and would suffice.

That's such a noob thing to say.... 'just save up more money and buy better' Not every one has that option, it's not just a question of buying a new CPU... but motherboard and ram on top. Your 'just buy better' genius solution costs a few hundred dollars more than anyone on an extreme budget has got.

My first PC was mid 90's, but my first ever gaming console as an ickle kiddie was a pong machine, with a light gun... then an Atari 2600, which I was later sold to put money towards a Commodore 64 which is where I first cut my teeth on basic programming... From there onwards into my teens, it was Atari ST, Amiga's, SNES, Megadrive, in my 20's, PSX, N64, Game Cube, PS2, Xbox and Wii... No longer bother with consoles at all now. Other things take my money too, like a Mortgage, cars and vacations. Now strictly PCMR.

Can't see anything wrong with those parts, will give you a more than reasonable setup for the games you mentioned. You can get Windows 10 for free still, it's not activated and it's restricted a lot... but it's free and you can activate it later on if you want to save some money. I'm assuming you can reuse your peripherals, so that's good.

There's no real way to 'upgrade' what you have, CPU & MB are 3 gens old, ram is 1 gen old. A new graphics card may help, but you're going to run in a CPU bottleneck unless the games are really old ones. You could salvage some stuff, the case and PSU (if it's still compatible) and the hard drives for storage, the rest could do with replacing to be honest. But it doesn't have to be expensive, an AM4 motherboard and a Ryzen 3 like the A320M boards and a Ryzen 3 2200G with 8GB of DDR4 can be bought for £220 in the UK, and I'd put money on US prices being better as usual. If you go with 8GB, make sure it's 2x 4GB as dual channel will help too. Throw in as large an SSD as you can afford and reuse your existing peripherals, and you'd have something you can build on for a few years to come. if you could stretch to a B450 motherboard and a Ryzen 5... you'd be in better shape and still under 500 dollars. I don't know what capacity your mechanical drives are, or if they're SATA II or III... But you may have room for a 1TB 7200rpm drive in that budget too if yours are really old and well used... Hell, if you were in the UK, I've got a few old SATA III drives laying around as spares... 3x 500GB and a 1TB and you'd be welcome to have one of those. But with shipping over there, it'd be cheaper to buy a new one. You've got a replacement video card, the R9 series in 3 gens old now... you don't specify which one... but if it's at least a 270 or 280 you should be fine with the games you mentioned. Plus you can build on in the future, the AM4 platform will be around for a few years to come, so replacing the CPU at a later date and the video card can be done any time... Adding a little more ram further down the road too... But make sure that your MB has 4 DIMM slots so you can add the same ram again later, rather than replacing it with 2x8GB (I made that mistake with my first HTPC build 12yrs ago back when DDR2 was still in use) Don't be afraid to buy second hand either, I've done mini refreshes and upgrades with used parts on many occasions... In fact I just sold an old Phenom 2 955BE, motherboard and 4GB ram to a friend recently, he wanted a mini diagnostic PC in his garage for his cars. With a budget of $500, you'd be surprised what you could get used. Good luck

They may be similar performance wise... But at roughly twice the price.

Personally, I don't care for lighting a case, I find it a waste of money that could be spent on better components. If you have a build costing around 1200, up to 200 of that could be lighting alone... That's enough to go from 16 to 32gb of very good high speed ram. I'm not knocking those that like it, but it's only actual use is bragging rights and perceived status.of those that like it, and those that aspire to have it. It's a fashion statement built upon marketing to those swayed by such things. The only time I get annoyed by it... is when p[people think that it makes their rig and them better than those who either don't want it or can't afford to waste money on frivolity... Those kinds of elitist f*ckwits can shove it. ?

and a 7600k isn't enough of an upgrade. mind you, for the price of an i7 7700k you could get a ryzen 2600X and a B450 board.

Upgrade the GPU first. Does the board support the 8th or 9th gen CPU's? If so, that's the next thing I'd suggest... Probably get a beefier 240/280mm AIO such as the Corsair 115 Pro if you like to OC the 8600/9600k

I have to disagree on keeping the sound card, onboard sound has come a long way in the last 15yrs. I use the onboard over optical to my 7.1 amp in my home office and it's great... and my MB is a good few years old. Unless you really have a need for exceptional sound, it's an expense you can avoid. Do you really need RGB? It's a fashion statement and you could get better components if you dropped it. You can also get cheaper cases that offer just as much functionality. You could then spend that savings on a 1TB Crucial MX500 ssd and drop the HDD... which isn't really great for gaming. I picked up a couple of them on Amazon over Xmas for £105 each... You can get them for around £130 or lower normally. mine were on sale. If the budget stretches... an M.2 drive for the OS would be good too... a 250GB would be more than enough. I'd always recommend an NVME if the board supports it rather than a standard SATA M.2... there are those that think it's overkill, but they don't understand the advantages and the difference between a sata M.2 and an NVME one is less than £15 whilst the speed boost you'd get is more than double. As for graphics... even on ebay 1080's are vastly over inflated at the moment... a 2080 new isn't that much more than some of them... Are you gaming in 4k, if not... perhaps a 1070 would be a better option and give you more wiggle room. Also will a 2600 end up being a bottle neck with a 1080? With fans, just remember to keep positive case pressure (higher intake CFM) There's a thousand different options to choose from... your's is a decent spec... So in the end, go with what you want.

Then there's the pipes for the AIO, they'd be external and no way to route them back inside the case and the 2 rear vents are only 80 or 92mm, so can't mount there. I also check the 2 bottom intake vents... there's room for a rad but not a rad & standard sized fans. As you can see with mine I went with a Noctua aircooler... which is not only whisper quiet but cools the FX4350 @ 4.2Ghz perfectly and that gets rather toasty, so it's a very good alternative should an AIO not be suitable. It was about £50-60 when I bought it 4-5yrs ago. just be sure to check the height of them as many are about 10-20mm too tall.

2-3hrs is about normal inc all unboxing, and tweaking bios... then another 30-60 for a windows install... and then probably 2-3 weeks (the odd 10-30mins here and there) of installing updates and tracking down that bit of software you forgot to install because you only use it once in a blue moon, but need it again... but won't need it again for 2yrs. ??? That doesn't include stress testing and overclocking... Which I'll hone in over a few days.

Some people buy because of the badge and nothing more... It's for bragging rights and status... the actual usability of a product tends not to factor into it at all. Now I'm not saying everyone who jumped on to the RTX bandwagon is like that, some want the current best on the market and are willing to pay these exorbitant prices... They may have more money than they know what to do with.. in which case, could I suggest donating and supporting a charity. Some may require a high end card for work related tasks, but can't afford $2500 for a single card... So go with the next best thing. But when it comes down to the 2060... I can't figure out one simple thing... WTF bother? It's not gonna give you decent FPS with RTX on, at least not what I consider playable... even the 2080 is just at the kinda acceptable end. For me.. RTX is nothing more than the new shiny thing that some people want... until it hits it's 2nd or 3rd gen, until it becomes widely used in games... it's nothing more than a niche, within a niche, within a niche. It's a waste of money buying something 1st gen, you are basically paying a premium for bragging rights in 3 (currently) games. Not gonna say people shouldn't buy them, it's their money and their choice... I feel it's wasted but then again I will go for the best value vs performance I can get. My current rig is still an FX8350, 16GB DDR3 and RX580 8GB... Which is why I'm about to build a new one... but keep the RX580. I'm waiting to see what AMD does with the next gen GPU's and the 3xxx series of CPU's.

I paid £102 for my RX580 14 months ago... that's brand new, not second hand... So I consider it one of the best value cards I've ever bought... Better even than the R9 280X I got for £140 a couple of years earlier. It's a great card, and given my current (soon to be replaced FX8350) build... it's not really been taxed to it's fullest... I'm still running W7 Pro, so not even run anything in DX12 on it. But I will soon be forced to use the insidious POS that is Windows 10, making sure I get the Pro version though, and will be locking it down as best as it can be... and there's a few programs out there to help defeat the MS spyware side of it. I'm currently using a couple of Freesync Acer 1440p 27" monitors, and a Benq 22" 1080p one in portrait... So Freesync cards are important... I don;t see mine listed anywhere, so nvidia cards are a no brainer... and g-sync is ridiculously expensive, Gsync 2 even more so... So few people bother with it, makes sense for nvidia to adopt freesync and hopefully drop gsync entirely... One is basically free, and the other costs a lot of money to implement. You can even buy freesync TV's now. I'll be watching what AMD brings to the table in the gpu market this year. I may pick up a 2nd RX580 for some xfire again (not done that since my xfire 5770's all those years ago) until I really need to upgrade the gpu.

OK, so I can't fathom the actual point of an RTX 2060, let alone the half a dozen different variants of the same die... 3gb/6gb and GDDR5/GDDR6. It's almost like nvidia thought.. we've got all these failed 2080/2070 die's... so lets throw them out as a 2060 and try and fool the gullible into buying them. You won't be able to do RTX on games at any kind of acceptable FPS... and there's only what... 3 current games supporting RTX at the moment... Yeah, I know more are coming. But in it's current state... it's a waste of money buying into the RTX niche... unless you have more money than you know what to do with (in which case, could I suggest donating to charity) and/or you are one of those people who must have the latest bit of shiny for bragging rights and a fashion statement. neither of which I'm able to comprehend if I'm honest... I just don't get the mentality of wasting money. From what I've read and seen so far, the 2060 gives close to 1070 performance... but the 1070's have more headroom for overclocking to stretch the lead... and given the price points of both cards (I'm in the UK, so we get screwed over here)... Both cards are priced within £20 of each other... So I'd recommend getting a 1070 now and waiting for the RTX cards to reach 2nd or 3rd gen before buying. I'm not saying RTX is a waste of time... just that it is 'right now' Give it a year or two, when most games are able to make use of it, when AMD has their version of it out for some competition in the market to drive prices more for the benefit of consumers. Think of it like VR... it's been around for a couple of years now (in it's latest iteration) but it's not gained traction yet, it's still a niche product within a niche market. It's expensive and you need an expensive rig to run it properly. Personally I think AR is more interesting than VR... mainly because whenever a product comes out that is wearable and makes the user look a little daft whilst using it... History shows that it tends to fail. AR on the other hand has proven to be popular to the masses (think pokemon go)... and if them meld the two properly, and bring the price down... I think that's a winner. But I digress... VR and RTX... too expensive for the masses... give it a couple more years before taking the plunge unless you've got money to burn... in which case... please help out a charity and the needy, and buy a 1070/1080 instead.