Estti379

Hello, I'm planning to build my first PC instead of going with a prebuilt. I'm planning to pull the trigger during this week/next week, but would still prefer to have other people who have an idea of what they are doing to do a sanity and compatibility check on the setup I'm going for! A little background about me: I'm an university student on his 5th semester in Computer Science. The new PC is in no way needed for what I'm doing in my studies, for that my Laptop is more than enough. It has a I5-7200U and a Geforce 940MX. The thing is, I do own another prebuilt ACER, i5-3450 and a geforce 620 or something like that. And since my laptop is slightly better than my desktop, I haven't turned it on in a long time, and I've been using my laptop for gaming, which is killing it's battery... But even so, my gaming experience on that laptop isn't that great. The titles I try to play in a regular basis, it can handle them only barely (KSP or GTA 5), others, like Cities Skylines, it lacks the performance and is way too frustrating to enjoy, and other beefier titles that it can't even run (Project Cars). Thus, I actually need a better PC badly. Unfortunately, there is nothing that I can salvage from my current desktop, so a whole new system it has to be^^' For the last whole year I've been thinking about what I would like from my system and I ended up with the few next points: a) A system based around a ryzen 5 3600 and a radeon RX 5700 XT. That is at a price point that I'm comfortable with and anything that is any stronger starts getting into overkill territory^^' b) A quiet setup (Yeah, there will be lots of parts from Be Quiet!) c) Tempered Glass + RGB. Addressable on top of that, that can be controlled by the motherboard. 1. Budget & Location I'm from Luxemburg (middle of europe) and the currency here is the Euro. My location actually has a huge impact on the retailers I can choose from, as there is none in the country(that I know of) which sells PC parts, and even amazon is pretty often a pain with delivering to my country... in the end, I found this business that ships here, so I'll be getting all parts from there. As for budget, I'm pretty flexible, 3k being a value I simply cannot go over, and preferring to stay under 2K euros. 2. Aim The main aim of this system is gaming. The bare minimum I would like, is to be able to play GTA 5 at 60 FPS at high to very high graphical settings on a 1080 or 1440 panel(more about that on the next point). Being able to record my gameplay is a great plus, mostly because I'm starting to casually speedrun GTA. Other games I play/would like to play: KSP(single thread cpu heavy), Cities Skylines(multithread cpu heavy), Project Cars (GPU intensive?), minecraft (*shrug*). As for my studies, there is nothing in particular that I would need from this system. I do plan on try my hands on Overclocking this system, even though, I doubt I'll be able to push it far, mostly because of thermals. 3. Monitors Right now I own only a 1080p@60Hz panel. I do not plan to buy anything new right now, mostly because I'm waiting to have a better idea of what I actually would need. But most probably, I might go for a ultra wide, curved, high refresh rate, 1440p monitor during the next year. Right now, my current monitor is used as a secondary display for my laptop, which is highly helpfull while programming. But my current desk does not allow to have 2 separate monitors. 4. Peripherals For peripherals, I won't need anything at all. The keyboard, mouse and headset i own aren't great, but good enough for now. As for an OS, I need to check if I still get a free key for a Windows 10 pro for free as a student benefit. (This might have changed recently) In the end, I came up with this part list. PCPartPicker Part List CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor (€206.48 @ Mindfactory) CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 50.5 CFM CPU Cooler (€73.89 @ Aquatuning) Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix X570-F Gaming ATX AM4 Motherboard (€249.00 @ ARLT) Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€64.90 @ Alternate) Storage: Samsung 970 Evo 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive (€169.99 @ ARLT) Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€57.90 @ Alternate) Video Card: Sapphire Radeon RX 5700 8 GB PULSE Video Card (€369.00 @ Alternate) Case: be quiet! Dark Base Pro 900 Rev. 2 ATX Full Tower Case (€214.90 @ Alternate) Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 650 W 80+ Platinum Certified Semi-modular ATX Power Supply (€154.90 @ Amazon Deutschland) Case Fan: be quiet! SilentWings 3 PWM High-Speed 77.57 CFM 140 mm Fan (€21.49 @ Amazon Deutschland) Case Fan: be quiet! SilentWings 3 PWM High-Speed 77.57 CFM 140 mm Fan (€21.49 @ Amazon Deutschland) Case Fan: be quiet! SilentWings 3 PWM High-Speed 77.57 CFM 140 mm Fan (€21.49 @ Amazon Deutschland) Total: €1625.43 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2019-12-01 06:16 CET+0100 Another thing That I would like to buy, that I cannot add on PC partpicker: 4 x Phanteks Halos Lux Digital 140mm for 100€ I'm aware that some of my choices might seem somewhat exaggerated. I'm going through my thoughts for each part. CPU Ryzen 5 3600: Good overall cpu for its price. High core count, which is great for game capture and some titles. Clock speeds aren't great, but it should be more than enough most of the time. In the end, the question is, is this cpu a bottleneck to a radeon RX 5700 XT? From my research, the answer seems to be no, but would still prefer someone else's opinion. CPU Cooler Dark Rock Pro 4: Huge. Ram clearance needs always to be checked. And I gave up on RGB RAM, as it would hide most of it anyway, unless I would move a fan to the back side of the tower. At 250W TDP it is more than overkill for a 65W TDP cpu. I'm banking mostly on the fact that this tower will already make a good job cooling the cpu while the fans are at low rpm. Noise levels are here my biggest concern. I would prefer to avoid AIO's here.(More points of failure, possibly more noise even when cpu at lower temperature because of pump) Motherboard Asus ROG Strix X570-F Gaming vs Asus ROG Strix X470-F Gaming: Here, the main source I used to make a choice for a board partner, was a rant video about motherboards made by BuildZoid. It was about x470 (as the x570 didn't exist yet). In summary, I got from it: MSI, great VRM cooling, lacks an interesting overclocking ability/setting. Gigabyte, very bad VRM cooling, if any at all, great bios. Asus, bad cooling on high-end boards, pretty cheap on VRM phases(thus, less reliable power delivery to cpu). What made me ultimately choose asus over the other was aura RGB, and it's ability to sync with compatible RGB peripherals. And I chose the x470-f gaming specifically because if was the cheapest asus board with aRGB headers(Something I would like badly). When Ryzen 3000der cpu's became a thing, The question arised about going for a x570 or not. I decided to go for it mostly because of two reasons: I cannot risk getting a x470 whose bios does not support ryzen 3000er cpu's. I won't have any way to flash another bios by my own, I don't know anyone who owns an ryzen near me. And furthermore, the x570 has better VRM and VRM cooling, which is more likely to handle the CPU. Having PCIE 4.0 was never a real selling point for me anyway, even less so considering the NVME storage I plan to use, as it could force whole motherboard to use just PCIE 3.0 protocols. Memory I'm planning to go for 2 x 8 Gb at 3200Mhz CL16. Because of the cooler, I gave up on RGB memory. In the end, the exact brand of ram used doesn't matter to me (I just like the look of trident Z RGB, but well, it will be hidden). I picked the ones above because they are way cheaper than other kits, and the only difference I can find, is on their timing. Finally, on Ryzen's Memory Compatibility List , i couldn't find this specific kit. Is that a problem or can I ignore that? Storage There isn't much to comment on the HDD. 2T, 7200 rpm, 256mb cache, seems to be good for it's price. For the NVME there are still some open questions though. From what I understood, using any device that is compatible with PCIE 3.0, will force all lanes into PCIE 3.0 protocols, and, even though this NVME just uses 4 lanes, it will still force GPU to use only half of the 16 lanes that the GPU could have used instead. The first question is then, considering those two points, would that bottleneck an RX 5700 XT? If yes, what are my solutions that are not going for a Sata SSD? Finally, I'm going for a 1TB NVME mostly to be able to have both windows and ubuntu on it, and on top of that, some of my most played games. (very bad experience dual booting on my laptop, as it has just 120 on it's SSD + 1T HHD. Storage on SSD is always a problem) GPU I would prefer a RX 5700 XT. Going for a 2070 seems to be a bit of a waste, mostly because I doubt that I will be able to make good use of it's performance. The exact card in question doesn't matter that much to me. I'll just avoid any blower design like the pest, as they are very ineffective, and overheating becomes a real problem on those cards. I chose the the Saphire Pulse since I've read only good things about that card. Case The Dark Base 900 rev.2 might be the second biggest sink of my money that gives no performance at all(right after everything related to RGB). And on top of that, taking into account a video done by Gamer Nexus concerning noise levels of a high airflow case vs a noise dampening case, a high airflow case with bequiet fans is the better option. But even so, while I was trying to create part lists under a strict budget, I would always try to force this specific case into it, making the rest of the build somewhat underwhelming. (This case in a 900€ Budget build? Totally not worth it!) In the end, I'm so fixated on that case that I fear that, if I settle down for a cheaper case, I'll just end up still buying the 900 six months later, and thus the money spent on the cheaper case would be wasted. The main reasons why I would like this case is: Style and Size. I do like the look of the one with the silver accents and the fact that it is huge (I might even been underestimating how big that it is...) Other features of that case are for the most part secondary, even though I do like the possibility to invert the case and the ability to expand storage (that goes well with motherboard and PSU). I am aware that airflow is an issue on BeQuiets cases. I just don't know if the airflow issue is big enough to impair the CPU's and GPU's that I'm picking. PSU Dark Power Pro 11 650 W: Here I avoided cheaping out. 650W seems to be way more than enough to power everything, also when overclocking. Maybe even 500W should be enough. Better power conversion and longevity of components are the biggest reasons why I'm ready to pay a premium here. The PSU, together with the case, might become two things I won't need to upgrade ever again, even in over a decade, even more so if I do not cheap out here. It helps too that it powers up to 8 sata storage drives, the exact same number of ports that the motherboard has. As for RGB, that will be the main focus of the Phanteks halo rings. I do like the crazy look of the bequiet fans when they are lighted by the aRGB halo rings. I might buy some aRGB strips down the line, and I'll be getting aura compatible aRGB peripherals. Pure RGB puke^^' As for the extra fans, I'm planing to replace the two at the front with the high rpm variants, and put 2 at the top and one on the bottom of the case. Anyway, thank you very much for reading this far! I'm open for any input, remarks and criticism^^ I actually need them badly to avoid making decisions that I would regret the moment I would get my system^^' Servus, Estti379