Anomnomnomaly

Unless you must have the latest shiny thing for bragging rights and more money than sense... There's no point in buying into the RTX niche for a year or two at least. Current games number about 3 at this moment in time (more coming obviously)... and the performance hit is severe. If you're on a budget... you won't be able to do RTX at all really.... So as you suggest, wait and see what the 1160 specs are, and if the rumours are even real... Or pick up a 1070 which will give you about the same or slightly better than a 2060 for around the same price (assuming the UK variant is priced around the £350-400 mark, as we normally get screwed over US prices). I'm waiting to see what AMD release later this year... because I have 2 freesync 27" panels... So going nvidia is pointless for me... I may even pick up a 2nd RX580 for xfire, as that's supported in most of the games I play.

Thank you, I've already placed the troll on the ignore list... So I can't see his toxic drivel any more. As for the OP @handymanshandle I'd missed that he was running a single channel ram setup... I thought he was running 2x4GB.

I've already got 2x 1TB Crucial MX500's for gaming... I'll be adding an NVME for the OS. As I'll be overclocking, going for a B450 is counter productive, and as I'll be upgrading to a Ryzen 3xxx series later on, the X470 makes more sense.

It's not great, but it's not that bad either. You could do with much better storage, and if the board supports it I'd add a 250GB NVME M.2 like the WD Black which has around 3000/1600 R/W. That alone will see an improvement. I'd then consider upgrading the GPU to at least the 6GB model of the 1060... or waiting for the 1160 release. The 2700rpm drives... even with optane ... utter garbage for gaming... So invest in something like a 1TB Crucial MX500 There are better options out there, but at higher cost. The best part is that you don't need a 'new' build so you upgrade incrementally as your budget allows. Step 1: NVME if the board supports it... 250GB for around £70 (you don't specify currency). Clone the OS drive using something like Reflect (it's free) onto it and you'll get a decent speed bump. Step 2: Decide if you want faster gaming, or higher res/fps... If the latter, upgrade the GPU, if the former get an SSD... The Crucial MX500 1TB can be picked up new for around £130 now.... A brand new 1060 6gb will set you back around £200... But don't be afraid to buy used... the nvidia gpu market is vastly overpriced at the moment... and that's also the case with the second hand side... I've seen second hand 1080's going for not much less than a new 2080 over here. Step 3:... the other side of what you didn't do in step 2.

At that price point, you're comparing the 9600k to the R7 2700, the 2600 is a good 100 cheaper over here... You can sell the board and get a decent X470 AM4 for around the same price point too. The Ryzen 7 2700 beats out the 9600k in all but single threaded performance... But you should also factor in an upgrade path. Chances are any new 10th gen intel i5 will require a new motherbaord chipset... We've seen it happen all to often. Whilst AM4 may have newer chipsets, but are backwards compatible. So the X470 will be fine for the 3xxx series of CPU's and AM4 is supported through the next few years minimum. If you are on a budget and want a better upgrade path... sell the intel board and get the X470 and the 2700... or if you want a better option, go for the 2600x and then replace with a 3xxx series next year.

Which version of the 1060... there's several, some good, some not so good. Also... don;t get a B350 board, if you must have the B series board, get a B450... At least them you'll have a better upgrade path... More so if you can stretch to the X470 boards, Gigabyte Aorus Gaming X470 is at a good price at the moment and only an extra £30 more than the B450... That gives you overclocking potential as well as being the better path when the Ryzen 3xxx series comes out later this year.

If you can stretch the extra 30-40 for the X470 Gigabyte Aorus gaming MB I'd go for it... the B450 boards are ok but offer limited upgrade paths and not much headroom for any overclocking. A 550w PSU will be fine, a 650W like the EVGA G2 can be found for decent price and give you room for SLI/Xfire (on an X470) later... check out Amazon warehouse deals for discounts on new stuff too. I picked up 2x 1TB Crucial MX500's for £210 (even current sale prices put them at £140 each). If budget is a concern, ditch anything with RGB and spend the extra on better components... RGB is for bragging rights and fashion statements only... there are no go faster stripes in the PC world.

I'm always reading up on new tech... So I know where I need my budget to be... For example, I decided I'd rather not bother with anything RGB and spend the extra on better parts. Only to find that my current budget allows for some RGB parts but not enough for really better components. Fore example.. I can afford to go RGB on 16GB of DDR4 3200mhz (Corsair vengeance as I have Corsair RGB mouse and H115 Pro AIO).. But I can't afford to go for 16GB of non RGB higher clocked DDR4... If I wait a couple more weeks, I could go 32GB of non RGB 3200mhz but not 32GB of RGB 3200mhz. I was all set to buy my last few parts CPU/MB/RAM/NVME, when I read the leak on the Ryzen 3xxx series... and now I'm waiting for more news and hoping they release it at CES this next week or so. I may end up going for a lower Ryzen 5 1600X for now, and then getting the 3600X later in the year... if the leaks are true and the R5 is getting humped up to 8/16 cores, and is faster than the current R7 2700X. Budget wise, I could easily get the 1600x now and the 3600x later... and not spend much more than a current 2700x costs.

Trust me, it's pointless checking out prices for a build that's 9-14 months away... CPU prices are currently inflated whilst ram prices have dropped (after being way over inflated most of the year). GPU prices are currently vastly over inflated too because everyone is trying to shift second hand 1080's for almost new 1080 prices, and the same with the 1070's... Because nVidia has no real competition in the high/middle high ranges... AMD is firmly fixed in the low and mid mid range, but has new stuff coming later this year that could compete more with the 2060/2070 range I started pricing up a new build a year ago... had the money saved up for anything up to a £1500-2000K build... and then had to replace the roof on my house last summer... £5500 later and my savings are half gone...and then my car needed replacing... and my savings are 90% gone. No new PC and no new bathroom. So I had to start saving again, and finally have enough for a mid range build... but am holding off to see what AMD release at CES for the Ryzen 3xxx series... As for my bathroom... saved 50% of what I need so far... Might be able to get it done towards the end of the year. So wait until you actually have the money in the bank.

As I said.. logically that makes sense... But I can't play any modern game with any kind of acceptable frame rates. GTA V, Far Cry 5, AC Origins... 1080p with low/medium settings and a max of 40fps with stutters down to low teens. I've turned of freesync for all games, there's no frame rate cap enabled... But I cannot get over 41 in any of those games... and it's unplayable. I'll wait a week or so until I get paid, as that will boost my budget by another £200-300 (I get a bonus this month) and to see if AMD announce anything at CES. If as I suspect the only upgrade the X570 chipset will have is support for PCIE 4.0,,, and given that no PCIE 4.0 cards will be around for some time. I'll go X470 and Ryzen 5 now... and upgrade to a Ryzen 7 3xxx later in the year. But when trying to game does nothing but either annoy the crap out of you, or force you to play older games... It's time for an upgrade, lets not forget that the FX8350 is now around 7yrs old, and was built on 32nm... and is utter garbage in single threaded performance... I really need that upgrade. I've checked comparisons sites and the R5 1600X gives me a 30% boost overall and a 40% boost in single thread performance and if I go the 2600 or 2600X, then it gives another 5-10% on top. A 1600X is currently £129.97, a 2700X is £309.99 If the rumours are true... a 3700x will be around the same price point as the 2700X but with 12/24 cores and a stock speed around 4.2ghz with a boost to 5ghz... If that's true and the R5 is going 8/16 cores... I could get the 1600x now and the 3600X later... and still not spend much more than a current 2700X costs.

At the moment RTX is a gimmick and not worth actually buying unless you really, really, really want those bragging rights... IE if owning the latest bit of shiny is more important to you than getting the best value vs performance. If you want pure performance for working and some gaming,,, then a 1080 is the way to go... you could probably go SLI for the same as a 2080.

What parts do you need, is there anything you can reuse from an existing build? If you need everything except a keyboard & monitor... you're gonna struggle to get a 1080p 60fps rig at that price. I'd suggest taking a look at second hand stuff, and/or amazon warehouse deals to see where you can save money.

I can save some more money by switching out the NVME M.2 for a WD Blue 250GB, that saves me a further £20... and If I go for the Ryzen 5, 1600X, that's currently £130, a full £70 less than the £2600X. I can then upgrade the CPU later when the Ryzen 7 3xxx chips are out. So that brings the build under £500, and allows me to get 16GB of the Corsair RGB (because the stock 3200mhz has doubled in price for some reason)

I've taken a pic of mine with the bdrom drive in place on the GD08, A rad would probably fit but the fans would have to go externally in a pull config... However a 120mm rad would fit perfectly well.

Why not a Ryzen 3/5 and a B450 motherboard and a low end vid card...Would probably work out cheaper too.

I'm so old that PC gaming when I started out was in DOS and you had to create specific boot disks for specific games to enable certain things. No 3d video cards, in the early days... not even a sound card. 1MB of ram The first PC games I can remember playing are the original Civilisation, X-Wing and the monkey Island games... Then as Windows 95 came out, Quake and onwards and upwards from there. My first gaming PC was a Pentium 1 200mhz and a really old nVidia 3D card in around 97/98. I then got a PII 350 (one of the old Slot A CPU's) and a Voodoo2... then Voodoo 3, Voodoo 5 on AMD T-Bird's... then ATI before AMD bought them out... The odd nVidia card at times. Sheesh... I'm really, really old... I've been building PC's for longer than some of you have been alive.

I have this one https://www.silverstonetek.com/product.php?pid=331&area=en It's a thing of beauty, will take full size ATX PSU and MB, has room for 6 fans and fairly tall coolers... as well as a 240mm rad. Mine is whisper quiet and has been since I built it about 4/5 years ago. I keep expanding storage (it's got room for 8 HDD's + 2 SSD's It's not a cheap one and it's about the size of a large home cinema amp... but it's sleek and looks great and can be rack mounted too with a couple of extra brackets.

Not a bad list, but weith that board you should definitely think about a little NVME M.2 drive for the OS... at least a 250GB one and ditch the mechanical 1TB for as large a capacity SSD as possible for gaming. I recently picked up 2x 1TB Crucial MX500's for £210 here in the UK. Check out Amazon warehouse deals for parts too, you often get brand new stuff that's got a little bit of damaged packaging or an unwanted return... at decent discounts. A mechanical drive is fine as a back up drive and for general storage, but for games you want an SSD and the NVME M.2 drive for the OS is faster than a SATA one.

X299 is a waste of money in my opinion... Save some money on something cheaper, you can still get some decent ASUS boards. Plus intel have a habit of killing off chipsets with new gens of CPU's... which in the past has rendered CPU upgrades impossible... It's one of the things that bugs me about intel over the years... and why I've normally gone AMD as you can be certain they support each socket for at least 4yrs. AM3 was mid 2000's and then went AM3 in around 2010 and survived until AM4 in 2017... and AM4 is supported until 2020 minimum and likely well beyond that before you'll probably get an AM4+ socket. If you're only going for a 1060, then intel may not actually be the best value CPU to go for... and the 1160's are supposed to be out soon... as well as the 2060. Unless you are looking to pick a 1060 up second hand. Which could be the better option anyway, nothing wrong with buying used parts.

Same dilemma over W10 here... I'm one of the W7 pro holdouts and went to great lengths to stop MS trying to 'force' the downgrade onto me... I loathe the whole windows as a service business model and the whole data slurping. I don;t have a facebook account and I'll be dammed if I'll allow MS to steal my privacy for profit. There are things you can do to limit what they take... but the whole forced updates issue is the biggest problem... I run a media server, and there's no way I can allow the OS to reboot whenever it feels like it, it's unattended 90% of the time and streams around the house and to devices outside of the house at times. So that will be left on W7 Pro for as long as possible, and may get upgraded to W8.1 before I'll ever allow W10 on there. But my gaming rig... It looks like I'll have no choice but going W10 on the new build... But It will be Pro and I won't be paying full price for it. I can get a license through my job for £20 for the Pro... what's even more amusing, is that the 'home' edition is £30 You can get unactivated copies of W10 home for free too... But you can't stop the slurp and you can't even do things like change the desktop.

Mine is occasionally used for casual gaming, I put my old ASUS R9 280X in there about 18 months ago. It'll do 1080p gaming on anything 3yrs old with medium settings, and can do older games on high. AWhich is why I'd recommend the Ryzen 5 and B450 with the nvidia 950 series card you've got spare... It'll struggle with 1080p gaming I reckon. Your case will be a factor... I went for a Silverstone HTPC case, because it's got room for loads of drives... but the vid card now blocks 2 drive bays... and I've had to disconnect the BDrom as I have 6 disk drives for storage (5 mechanical, and 1 SSD). I was going to buy a SATA expansion card for a couple of extra drives... But the MB I have didn't have a USB 3 header, so I fitted a PCIE USB 3 card to enable the case front USB3 port... Which takes up the only PCIE slot on the mATX board. The silverstone cases aren't cheap (mines was around £110 UK), but it's a thing of beauty and sits in my media cabinet nicely... it's roughly the same size as my home cinema amp and came with 4 quiet fans fitted. So great airflow... you can barely hear it at all across the room, and if the TV is on, it's completely inaudible. The occasional HDD noise as a drive spins up from low power mode So work out what you need now... and what you may want to add later... and build from there. Don't be afraid to buy second hand either, or from Amazon warehouse deals... maximise your budget as best you can to get the best performance possible. I'm in the UK so, prices are quite different. A quick check on Amazon USA gives you a 2600 for $165, a mATX B450 for around $60 and 16GB of DDR4 2400mhz for $109... that's around $335 which leaves you around $170 for the case and a small SSD for the OS... I'm assuming that you can re-use a PSU and some HDD's for storage. Because adding those isn't gonna be doable with that budget. Of course, you could go for a Ryzen 3 for now and save a further $70-80... and upgrade later, and 8GB ram would save more money... But if you want to do a little gaming, I;d stick with 16GB really... But with a Ryzen 3, you'll really be struggling with 1080p gaming on higher quality settings with that vid card... But 1080p low settings should be more than enough grunt.

I've had a HTPC for about 10yrs now, it's currently on it's 2nd iteration. I started with am Athlon 2 (dual core) and 2GB DDR2, and 3TB on an older AM3 mATX MB... and it had extra storage added over the next 5yrs. I then rebuilt it with an AM3+ board, FX 4350 (4.2ghz 4 core) & 8GB DDR3 on a 760G chipset, and that's still purring along today... with 28TB of storage. I run Emby server on it and stream to various TV's and PC's around the house as well as a couple of Shield TV boxes. Not all at the same time of course, but it's not uncommon to stream to 2 things at the same time without any trouble. But only 3 devices are 4k (1 TV and the Shield boxes). Given that I have no issues with my now old setup... I don't see why you'd need to spend a lot... I would however recommend going with a B450 board instead of the B350... simply because of the 2xxx series Ryzen CPU's... and with the Ryzen 3xxx series along 2nd quarter. You want to be sure of compatibility for future upgrades without losing features. I'm just about to build a new gaming rig, so my HTPC will be getting double the ram and an FX8350. That should see it through another year or two before I'll think about rebuilding it once more. It all depends on exactly 'what' you need it to do... Are you streaming local media within the house, or do you just want something quick and easy to stream from the net on... If the latter, then the Shield TV box is an excellent choice.

Current spec preference is (all prices on Amazon UK as of this evening, Prime only parts listed, I tend not to buy 3rd party sellers due to problems in the past, and most of the UK specialist sellers are 10% more expensive (or even higher) Gigabyte X470 AORUS Ultra Gaming (£134.99) Corsair Vengeance 3000 DDR4 (16GB) (£123.59) (Amazon is showing the 3200mhz at a whopping £279 for 16GB right now, I could get 32GB of RGB for that) Ryzen 7 2700X (£309.99) Ryzen 5 2600X (£197.99) Ryzen 5 2600 (£150.46) 250GB Samsung 970 Evo (£82.11) So with the 2700X and 16GB it's £650 ish, with 32GB it's £775 ish But go with the 2600 and that comes down to £614 ish with 32GB or add another £48 for the 2600X and or subtract £123 if I stick with 16GB... Which should be more than enough still. I've never run out of memory in this rig.

Logically, that makes sense... but I'm getting more and more frustrated trying to play games... and I've got a lot of free time to play games right now. I've been putting of the new build for about a year now... I had more than enough last summer... and then had to replace the roof on my house. So I then had to start saving all over again. I've spent about £475 so far on the Case/PSU/AIO & 2x 1TB SSD's (gotta love sales and Amazon warehouse deals, it's saved me around £150 so far). So logic aside... I WANT A NEW SHINY THING TO PLAY WITH Overclocking isn't essential, but given that I've bought an AOI that's overkill for what I'll be using it for... Perhaps I'll see if I end up with a decent CPU. I tweak rather than seriously OC... At least not since the old T-Bird 1.2ghz @ 1.55ghz days (am I showing my age now?) I had my old Phenom II 955BE 3.2 @ 3.7ghz for 4yrs on air and my current FX8350 sits at 4.4 on all cores without any extra voltage, but it does get a little toasty when taxed. I was looking at the corsair vengeance... it's in my amazon basket... 16gb 3200mhz for around £125. Going for a 1070 isn't an option on my budget right now. Perhaps later in the year I can pick up a second hand 1080 or something... or if the rumours about the 1160/1170 are true... that might be an option depending on price. I tend to go mid range on cards... and was considering another 580 for Xfire again (not done that since I had a couple of 5770's back in 2009/2010) I've even considered sticking with the X470 board, but getting a cheaper Ryzen 5 2600 as it's £100-150 cheaper (depending X variant) than the 2700X... prices in the UK have been fluctuating badly recently with a current 2700X sitting at over £300 when it was around £274 just recently. If I get a cheaper CPU now, I can always upgrade at the end of the year... I've been looking for a reason to rebuild my mediaserver as that's 5yrs old now too. I was going to upgrade it with the 16GB and FX8350 (currently has an FX 4250 and 8GB). But a B450 board and a ryzen 5 would be nice... although it does mean upgrading my systems to windows 10... and I've refused so far as I hate privacy invasion with that POS OS. But if I'm building a new rig... I've not got much choice really... and W7 is EOL next Jan. I'm procrastinating far too much.

Hi all Looking for some reasonable advice on a new build... I've been building my own PC's for 20yrs... but it has admittedly been a few years since I last built one. Tech has moved on and I've been doing some research into components. I've always gone for performance vs price rather than the high end stuff... but for once I've got a little extra in the pot.... Prices are going to be UK based, so bear in mind that we get screwed and typically pay a lot more. I've mostly gone AMD in the past, ever since my first duron build back in the very early 2000's after having a PII 350... yup, one of the old Slot A CPU's That was the last off the shelf PC I ever had. But I'm not ruling out Intel this time around. I've been buying a few parts here and there in sales, so I already have the case (Sharkoon BW9000), PSU (EVGA G2 650W) 2x Crucial MX500 1TB. I'll be reusing my Liteon BDRom and Sapphire Nitro 8GB RX580 graphics for the time being and I've got a Corsair H115 Pro AIO for the new build too. So my current ancient build is Asus 970 Motherboard FX 8350 @ 4.4ghz across all 8 cores 16GB Gskill DDR3 (4x4GB) 250GB Crucial SSD 2x 3TB storage R8GB X580 All I need now is the CPU, MB, Ram & an NVME drive for the OS. I've been reading as best I can and cannot come to a decision... it's been 5yrs since I built a new system, so my new one needs to be able to run games @ 1440p with decent framerates... which I'm just not getting anymore on anything released in the last couple of years... 75fps is the min because I have a couple of 27" Acer monitors that only go up to 75hz and I have no plans to upgrade to a 120hz or higher monitor for a few more years. I'm struggling to run Far Cry 5 and AC Origins @ 1080p and 40fps on lowish settings. It's just not good enough. I've kinda stopped buying new games because it's just annoying trying to play them. I thought I'd settled on a Ryzen 7 2700X on the X470 chipset, 16 or 32GB DDR4 3200 and a 250GB NVME... I'd saved up enough to buy those now... and then I was reading about the Zen 3xxx leaks and the X570 chipset... So far whilst the Zen 3xxx cpu's are looking great, the only real info I can find on the X570 is that it will have PCIE4.0... Everything else appears to be the same, and I'm unsure if waiting another 3-4 months is worthwhile, considering how frustrating it is trying to game on this thing anymore. Cost of all that with 16GB is around the £650-700 range and £780-830 with 32GB Then I started looking at Intel, and comparing prices.. But to be honest, I have very little knowledge on Intel CPU's and chipsets. Ram and NVME are gonna be the same I'm assuming... so it's just the MB/CPU combo and it needs to come in within or under the budget I have. I couldn't give a crap about RGB, to me it's pointless... it's a gaming PC not a display piece or a fashion statement... I know some people like it... I couldn't care less. I'd rather spend my money on better parts. So... advice/suggestions/insults on a postcard too...... Or just reply. tl:dr - Building new pc... AMD or Intel