Beat this cheap "VR-ready" build?

Humaj19 · October 3, 2020

Hello,

First of all, I'm assuming this build can handle the workloads below, but the first question is -- is that true?

Then, can I accomplish the same goals with a cheaper build? This build was supposedly $500 at some point and is currently $721 at the Amazon link below. Maybe a build of similar quality is around $500 now?

And/or can I get better results from a different build at a similar price point?

Should I try for a motherboard with 4 DIMM slots?

I think I forgot other questions while writing this novel, but it all kind of just boils down to "how do VMs and VR cheap pls" anyway.

Parts list:

AMD Ryzen 5 2600 $151.99

MOBO ASRock H410M $58.99

GPU Gigabyte GTX 1650S $271.93

RAM Patriot Viper 8GB $31.99 (pretty sure I'll actually start out with 16GB)

SSD ADATA 480GB $46.99

CASE AeroCool Cylon $54.38

PSU Antec 750W $104.94

Tried to build it on pcpartpicker.com, but several parts aren't listed there.

This slightly aggressive Amazon link will say "do you want to shove these parts into your cart?" and link all the items with a "don't shove them into my cart" link at the bottom. Build is from

https://techguided.com/vr-ready-pc-builds/

Budget (including currency): hoping USD500 isn't a joke for my expectations, since this build was USD500 at some point, but I can maybe go up to $800 (the Amazon link has this build at $721 currently)

Country: US

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Eve Online (1 instance on the host OS and 1+ in VMs, even though I can "multibox" on the host OS), Diablo 2 (3+ instances on the host OS if I find a better solution for that, probably trying to do 1 on host and 2+ in VMs), WoW Classic (1 instance on the host OS and 1+ in VMs, even though I can "multibox" on the host OS), League of Legends. One game at a time, but I'm going to multibox most games at some point. Minimum settings are fine, although if it can actually do all of that with the games at minimum settings, I assume I can run them at max settings.

Other details: I'd like to meet the minimum requirements listed for Oculus Rift (i3-6100 / Ryzen 3 1200; GTX 1050Ti / RX 470) and Oculus Link (i5-4590 / Ryzen 5 1500X; I think GTX 970 and AMD 400 Series are sort of the minimum, but not every GPU above those is certified).

At least one USB type A port and one type C at the USB 3.0 standard or better (type C usually means 3.0+ but doesn't technically have to).

The above are "hard" requirements if that's not absurd for $500. If it is, I'll try to go up as far as $700-800, but I'll also have to consider lowering my expectations to stay around the $500 mark.

4+ USB ports at 3.0+ highly preferred. Thunderbolt 3 preferred, but maybe not reasonable at this price point.

It suggested I mention what I'm upgrading from. It's an Aspire E5-575G-562T:

i5-7200U @ 2500MHz (well, that's what CPU-Z says in the Specification field, but I haven't overclocked it and Core Speed for Core #0 is hovering just under 3100MHz, so idk)

"Ironman_SK" mainboard

8GB single-rank DDR4-2400 & 16GB dual-rank DDR4-3200

GTX 950M 2GB

When I'm going to buy: Probably Prime Day, Oct 13-14

Displays: I'd like to be able to run at least three 1080p displays at 60Hz, but I only need two physical display outputs (I'll probably only ever have three displays in Immersed, which now supports fully virtual displays on Windows, so I won't need to plug a headless display emulator into a third output). I would like to be able to have 3 games, 2 in their own VMs, visible at the same time, but that's not a hard requirement (I think GPUs still do rendering work for minimized windows, but less? although that might not be true for minimized VMs). I'm used to having one game instance visible at a time and alt-tabbing between them, and when multiboxing Diablo 2 I'll hardly ever look at the VMs anyway (I'll be "cheating" with hotkeynet or similar, but not on servers with other people).

Bonus workloads: I'd also like to be able to run CoD BlOps Cold War, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76 smoothly at minimum settings, but that's less important, and it looks like if I can get anywhere near my VM and VR goals, these games will be fine.

Herman Mcpootis · October 3, 2020

don't go anywhere near that website again. anyone that recommends an AMD CPU with an Intel motherboard doesn't know what they're doing.

Aereldor · October 3, 2020

Pretty easy to beat a build where the CPU won't fit on the motherboard.

Same price, better CPU, much better GPU, double/faster RAM, better PSU, better SSD (presuming that's the ubiquitous SU635 you've got there), better case.

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 3 3100 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor	$114.99 @ B&H
Motherboard	Gigabyte B450M DS3H Micro ATX AM4 Motherboard	$72.99 @ Best Buy
Memory	ADATA XPG Z1 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 CL16 Memory	$49.99 @ Amazon
Storage	Mushkin Enhanced RAW 480 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive	$41.99 @ Newegg
Video Card	ASRock Radeon RX 5700 XT 8 GB CHALLENGER D OC Video Card	$359.99 @ Newegg
Case	Corsair Carbide 175R RGB ATX Mid Tower Case	$34.99 @ Newegg
Power Supply	SeaSonic S12III 500 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply	$54.99 @ Best Buy
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$764.93
	Mail-in rebates	-$35.00
	Total	$729.93
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-10-03 09:47 EDT-0400

If your budget is $500, this is still very much VR ready. Buy the CPU and motherboard at Micro Center and you get $20 off (and the CPU is $2 cheaper, the motherboard is $7 cheaper), so your total is below $500.

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	Intel Core i3-9100F 3.6 GHz Quad-Core Processor	$71.88 @ Walmart
Motherboard	MSI H310M PRO-VDH PLUS Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard	$56.99 @ B&H
Memory	ADATA XPG Z1 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3000 CL16 Memory	$49.99 @ Amazon
Storage	Mushkin Enhanced RAW 480 GB 2.5" Solid State Drive	$41.99 @ Newegg
Video Card	MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6 GB VENTUS XS OC Video Card	$219.49 @ Newegg
Case	Corsair Carbide 175R RGB ATX Mid Tower Case	$34.99 @ Newegg
Power Supply	EVGA BR 450 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply	$49.94 @ Office Depot
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total (before mail-in rebates)	$570.27
	Mail-in rebates	-$45.00
	Total	$525.27
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-10-03 09:54 EDT-0400

Humaj19 · October 9, 2020

On 10/3/2020 at 6:26 AM, Herman Mcpootis said:

don't go anywhere near that website again. anyone that recommends an AMD CPU with an Intel motherboard doesn't know what they're doing.

Yeah, I (and that site) done f***ed up.

Humaj19 · October 10, 2020

On 10/3/2020 at 6:54 AM, Aereldor said:

Pretty easy to beat a build where the CPU won't fit on the motherboard.

Same price, better CPU, much better GPU, double/faster RAM, better PSU, better SSD (presuming that's the ubiquitous SU635 you've got there), better case.

[Builds redacted, full post above]

If your budget is $500, this is still very much VR ready. Buy the CPU and motherboard at Micro Center and you get $20 off (and the CPU is $2 cheaper, the motherboard is $7 cheaper), so your total is below $500.

That's embarrassing, both the CPU/mobo mismatch and the fact that I couldn't find anything close to those great value/dollar ratios. Thank you.

I'm digging that second build, but I remembered one of the other things I'd forgotten to put in my original post. I feel like on-board NVMe support might be important, although LTT's SSD blind taste test video showed that NVMe might not help me out at all. I thought an NVMe to PCIe 3.0 x1 adapter would work with no bottleneck, making NVMe on the board itself even less of an issue, but if an NVMe drive can utilize up to 4 PCIe lanes, one definitely might be a bottleneck (which would explain why the x1 adapters are so rare).

I thought this Asus Prime B365M-A motherboard would be nice to swap into that build since I think I can boot it from an NVMe drive (that m.2 slot is for NVMe rather than AHCI, right?), and I might eventually appreciate the extra DIMM slots. But it's still dual channel (and quad channel might be one of the best potential benefits of four slots?), and I assume that this whole build will be garbage by the time I want 64GB of RAM, and I'm not sure spreading 32GB over four slots instead of two will matter much for me. It looks like it often doesn't matter at all, depends on whether the individual DIMMs are single or dual rank, and might not be a big deal with these other components anyway (even in specific situations where four DIMMs can help).

So maybe that board is basically just an extra $23 to be able to use an SSD that won't be noticeably better for me? It looks like it has the same PCIe slots, 6 SATA ports instead of 4 (and I do probably have at least 6 old small SATA drives to use with those, but how valuable is it to jury-rig two extra 2.5" HDDs internally rather than using them externally or not at all? I do have this garbage), and the same USB headers (and if the motherboard supports more I/O than the case, am I just going to have more cables coming out of a hole somewhere with an extra I/O panel dangling from them? Well, maybe, but I should try to control myself). So if I want to throw another $23 at that build, that board might not be the most useful upgrade.

Also, it looks like that CPU and motherboard are in-store pickup only from Micro Center. I might be able to get someone to go in to the St. David's location in PA, but then shipping them from PA to OR probably isn't worth it. So maybe I'll get that exact Intel build and throw another $29 at it. Both builds are awesome. Thank you!

Aereldor · October 10, 2020

11 hours ago, Humaj19 said:

I feel like on-board NVMe support might be important

I assume that this whole build will be garbage by the time I want 64GB of RAM, and I'm not sure spreading 32GB over four slots instead of two will matter much for me

NVMe is overrated, cheaper drives are DRAMless and slow anyway. I'd stick with SATA to save $. The LTT vid you mentioned is ample evidence.

Games still largely run fine on 8GB of RAM, only just now are we starting to see games need more. You'll likely never need 64GB for gaming - not for decades.

32 GB in 4x8 or 2x16 is still going to be dual channel. It'll just be two sticks per channel vs one stick per channel. Consumer hardware generally doesn't support triple or quad channel anyway.