planning Oh Man I Am Not Good With Computer Pls To Halp

Sniggyfigbat · October 14, 2019

...Well, OK, I'm not that bad. But I know when to ask for help from experts. My old PC, which has served me well for nearly 8 years (admittedly it's chugging rather badly nowadays) is on the way out - running MemTest86 reveals that someone has replaced my RAM with slices of Swiss cheese. It seems an appropriate time to get an upgrade.

I am a fairly hardcore gamer, who has just finished an undergraduate degree in games-related programming, and is currently doing a master's in AI. Oh, and I occasionally do 3D modelling in Blender. As such, I hit rather a lot of high-performance tick-boxes, and I recognise I'll probably want a fairly high budget. On the one hand, this will be a professional tool and it would be deeply short-sighted to underspec, but on the other I'm only working part-time and I don't have vast sums of disposable income to throw around.

Budget & Location: ~£2000, UK

Use Cases & Requirements:

Gaming. I tend towards lower-performance titles - thus my failing to upgrade in 8 years - but I'd still like to be able to play the occasional blockbuster at high-ish settings. I'd ideally like to be able to power a 4K monitor at 120fps, but I have no idea if that's plausible given the budget, and I strongly suspect that I'll have to settle for something less bleeding-edge. Ray-tracing would be a strong plus.
Games Development & Programming. This is largely a subset of the above, but I need a CPU with serious horsepower. Again, ray-tracing would be a strong plus, for professional reasons perhaps more than personal.
ANN Training. Training neural networks is likely to be a common use-case, serious GPU horsepower needed in that department. I have no idea what mix of teams red, green, and blue is optimal for this.
Modelling and Rendering: Secondary importance, but still a somewhat common use case.
32GB RAM, the good stuff: Someone's probably going to tell me, with perfectly good reasons, that I don't need this. But the established wisdom was that I only needed 8GB eight years ago, not 16GB, and I've long been thankful that I ignored that advice. I also wish I'd spent more on quality, given that it's been the first component to fail in my current build. I'm determined to be generous with my expenditure on RAM: speed, quantity, and quality.
Good 'n' Sturdy: I'm moving house several times a year atm, as part of the student lifestyle. I value sturdiness and portability much more than pretty tempered-glass side panels or marginally-worthwhile water-cooling. It doesn't need to be mini-ATX or anything, but I need to be able to lift it and pack it in the car without worrying about damage.
All drives in RAID1: I have no immediate need for additional HDDs, as my current WD Black 6TB is quite recent and can be moved across, but I would like an SSD boot drive. However, unless there's a strong reason not to, I'd like to upgrade to having RAID1 across all data on my machine, and advice on how best to accomplish this would be invaluable.
Screen: As mentioned previously, I'd like to upgrade my experience to a good resolution at 120fps, preferably with G-sync/free-sync. Good colour accuracy a strong bonus. A single, primary screen does need to be included in the budget, I already have a very modern IPS screen for use as secondary monitor.
Windows Operating System: I've done the Linux thing before, and didn't enjoy it.
No Other Peripherals: Aside from a single screen, matched to to the system's gaming performance, I'm good on peripherals.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Jurrunio · October 14, 2019

36 minutes ago, Sniggyfigbat said:

power a 4K monitor at 120fps,

With highish settings, that will rip away performance for the remaining requirements

36 minutes ago, Sniggyfigbat said:

Ray-tracing would be a strong plus.

At its current stage realtime RT is still in beta phase (2080ti for 1440p 60fps, seriously), so let next gen of GPUs do that

36 minutes ago, Sniggyfigbat said:

ray-tracing would be a strong plus, for professional reasons perhaps more than personal.

Expect low frame rates with RT enabled when you get good CPUs

52 minutes ago, Sniggyfigbat said:

ANN Training. Training neural networks is likely to be a common use-case, serious GPU horsepower needed in that department. I have no idea what mix of teams red, green, and blue is optimal for this.

Go green