Onyx. The slightly overkill 1080p fathers gift.

ivanrcks95 · February 22, 2020

So after completing Nyekundu (the budget 1080p rig), i felt an emptiness, no, more of an urge to build something else. And when my dad called me to tell me his gaming rig had finally shat itself, this was the perfect opportunity to do so. His current rig is a i5 6400, 750ti powered machine, nothing special but it got the job done for him for 768p gaming back when we first built it nearly 6 years ago now. It was time to move him into 1080p gaming, and its safe to say, this might be a bit overkill for that, but who knows maybe hell decide to invest into a 4k monitor after playing around with this for a bit. So the parts list and why i choose what i did.

CPU - Ryzen 5 3600, pretty easy choice here. Originally i was going to go with a 2700x, but after realising that the only thing my dad will use this PC for is gaming, the 3600 was a no brainer. The 3600x wasnt in stock anywhere, because i would happily spent the extra cash for one of those, so a 3600 OEM with a old gen (the one that has the copper vapor chamber in the middle) wraith spire cooler was the way to go. After a few stress test runs in Cinebench15, the CPU maxed out at 72c, on the silent fan curve profile. I would say thats a win.

Cost me 199USD for the CPU and 6USD for the cooler. 205USD total.

MB - Aorus B450 Pro. This was a far harder choice than i first thought. As good as the linus tech tip forum tier lists are, they also complicate your life a great deal, trying to find the perfect balance of cost to features to performance. I settled on this board, simply because all the "good" MSI B450 boards were out of stock here for a good couple of months. However, im glad i did go with this board, because not only does it look fantastic, and matched perfectly with the GPU, its so feature rich that i can take the slight performance hit knowing that my dad will take advantage of the features more than he will its over clocking potential.

Cost me 125USD

RAM - Kingston Hyper X predator 4x8gb kit. Pretty simple, was looking for the cheapest 3000mhz kit with at least CL15 timing, that was available without having to wait for 2 months. Managed to get it to be perfectly stable at 3200mhz and still keep the CL15 timings, that and the 32gb capacity will be more than enough for dad.

Cost me 185USD

Memory - Silicon Power A80 1tb NVme. Another purchase done based on the LTT tier list, the capacity is more than plenty for what my dad wants to do with it, and he can always upgrade to more memory in the future, nothing else to be said here.

Cost me 167USD

GPU - Aorus RTX 2070 Super. The 2070 super was always the option i was going to go with, seemed like the best card when looking around this price range (yes im aware of the 5700xt, but i didnt want my dad to even have to open this PC ever, let alone deal with crappy driver issues so Nvidia was the only option). The reason i went with the Aorus card is again due to LTTs very handy tier lists, the Aorus coolers and PCBs were ranked very high so i decided to go with it instead of the gigabyte gaming oc option i had chosen originally, it also helped that it now matched the MB perfectly. The card actually benched as much and sometimes more than an RTX 2080, so really happy with that, on stock fan curves it did get toasty at 74c, however after playing around with the curve a bit, and setting the front two 140mm fans to ramp up with GPU temp, made it far more reasonable at 68c after a few runs of the TimeSpy stress test. Idles far more reasonably at 39c.

Cost me 697USD

PSU - Corsair TX750M. Another no brainer, have the 550 in Nyekundu, has worked flawlessly thus far, so getting one with a bit more juice and the same 80+ gold rating was an easy pick.

Cost me 120USD

Case - Fractal Design Meshify C. Learning from my mistakes with Nyekundu, i decided that a cheap sub 40USD case was not worth it here for the hardware i was putting into it. Beyond that the fractal was another easy choice, highly recommended case by most people, from the build quality to the airflow i am definitely not disappointing.

Cost Me 100USD

Total including a set of ML140 fans - 1599USD

Now i am aware most people will comment and state that i should have gone for this, saved money here, saved money there. But that was not the point of this build. I wanted to build a PC for my dad that he wont have to ever worry about or have the need to even open beyond cleaning it for the next 3-4years, and for that i think its pretty much perfect.