First Gaming PC Advice

[speedySat]

Budget (including currency): Approx. $1500

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Destiny 2, Fortnite, Age of Empires 4, Minecraft, Blender, Fusion360, occasional machine learning development

Other details: See Below

 

Hi everyone,

 

Been watching LTT for a while now and I'm finally looking to get my first gaming PC! I have not been a huge gamer in the past, but over the last year I've been playing more games as a way to stay connected with friends spread across the country. I'm an engineer by trade so I understand the specs, but am not really sure where to start when it comes to actually choosing parts that make sense together. I'm looking for some general guidelines of where to get started.

 

I'm not super picky about frame rates or latency, since I'm more of a casual gamer and am not very good at any of the games listed. I'm just looking for something to give me consistently decent performance (which I realize is a pretty vague term) and that will hold up for a while without needing major upgrades. I also play around with Blender and Fusion360 for fun and do some deep learning/machine learning development for fun as well, so anything that could help in these areas would be a bonus but is not required. Anything would be better than my current setup, which is a 5 year old MacbookPro that I dual-boot with Windows and use GeForceNow when that can't run the game.

 

Based on the research I've done so far, it seems like the following specs are around what my budget can get me:

• Intel Core i7
• Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12GB
• 16GB RAM
• ~1TB Storage

Some of my major questions are:

 

• Prebuilds vs. Self-Built: I've heard pre-built machines are generally not the greatest. However, when I tried pricing out a similar system on pcpartpicker, it seems like the prices were around the same. I would be willing to build a PC myself if that option makes the most sense, especially if that gets me better bang-for-buck. But given that the prices of GPUs are so high and the prices of pre-built machines seem comparable, does it make sense to just buy a pre-built?
• CPU Choice: Is it worth going Intel 12th Gen? Would I be sorry for not choosing the latest generation if I want to upgrade in a few years, given that the motherboard socket is different (and DDR5)? Does it make more sense to choose Ryzen 5000 over Intel 11th Gen?
• Any other factors to look out for when looking at specs that would be most impactful for performance? I know memory speed is one (going to do DDR4 regardless of choosing Intel 12th-gen or not).

I realize this is a lot of questions, but generally I'm just looking for some useful guidance to follow when building/buying your first gaming PC. So any help you could give me would be awesome! Thanks!!

[Dr0idGh0sT]

This will be best you can do with 1500$

Buy 6600XT for video card 

https://www.newegg.com/p/27N-0022-000E4?Item=9SIAYTVFN44727&Description=6600xt&cm_re=6600xt-_-27N-0022-000E4-_-Product&quicklink=true

 

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor  ($294.00 @ Newegg) 
CPU Cooler: Vetroo V5 52 CFM CPU Cooler  ($29.99 @ Amazon) 
Motherboard: MSI B550-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($138.99 @ Newegg) 
Memory: Team T-Force Delta RGB 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory  ($77.97 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Western Digital SN750 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive  ($109.99 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Seagate Barracuda Compute 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($46.99 @ Amazon) 
Case: Phanteks Eclipse P400A Digital ATX Mid Tower Case  ($89.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Corsair RMx (2018) 650 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply  ($64.99 @ Newegg) 
Case Fan: Phanteks PH-F120SK 50 CFM 120 mm Fan  ($13.99 @ Amazon) 
Total: $866.90
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-11-15 02:26 EST-0500

[Boyohan]

20 minutes ago, speedySat said:

Prebuilds vs. Self-Built:

The general problem with pre-built PCs is that a lot of components are of lower quality.

 

If you for example look at an ad for a pre-built PC the overall spec usually look decent for the price.

It is when you read the fine print in the specs that you can see where they have saved money. 

 

CPU and GPU are usually ok. 

But the motherboard is very often the lowest/cheapest model available for that CPU.

Slow RAM speed is also very common with pre-built PCs and sometimes you only get 1 stick of RAM so you cannot benefit from dual channel RAM. 

The PSU can very often be of dangerously low quality. 

Cheap, terrible or non-existent cooling and airflow in the PC. 

 

There are of course exceptions and you can find decent pre-built PCs but you must read the total spec and not just look at CPU & GPU. 

[suedseefrucht]

48 minutes ago, speedySat said:

I'm looking for some general guidelines of where to get started.

First: I'm not an expert. Just an electrical engineer who build his first selfbuilt PC early last year.

I read a lot, I learned a lot and then I built it.

 

CPU

Let's start with CPUs. The marked is dominated by AMD and Intel.

Intel i3 is a little bit like AMD Ryzen 3

The same thing for 5, 7 and 9.

 

3 is usually for basic browsing and office work (2-4 cores)

5 is usually the best one for gaming (about 6 cores now)

7 is usually the best option for gaming with some more cores (8 cores) for heavy calculations.

9 is not really relevant for normal people. It's for professional workstations with a lot of cores or for people who dont know what to do with their money.

 

The main difference between AMD and Intel is overclocking and graphics units.
AMD CPUs and mainboards always support overclocking (but there are different VRMs for more or less power delivery).

If you want to overclock with Intel, you need to get a CPU with the letter K (for example Intel Core i7-9700K).

AMD CPUs with a G have a graphics unit inside, so you can use them without a graphics card.

Non-G AMD CPUs only work with a graphics card.

Intel CPUs usually have an internal graphics unit, but you can get a F CPU (like i7-9700F) without a iGPU to save some money.

Intel CPUs with a T are for less power consumption for low power systems.

An iGPU can make sence if something doesn't work and you want to test your system without the graphics card.

 

There are many generations of these CPUs.

AMD's Ryzen 5 is the 5600X for example. So generation 5XXX.
Intel's newest generation is 12XXX, so for example Intel Core i7-12700K.

 

Overclocking: In my opinion you just pay more money (for the K) and get less stability and more power consumption.
You can get like 10 % more performance in some cases, but the stability can suffer.

With AMD it might make sence when you still have an old CPU and you want it to keep up with your new graphics card.

 

Mainboard

 

Chipset:

Every CPU generation has it's own chipsets.

So for example Intel Core i7-12700K requires a 600 series chip set (for example Z690).

Just google "Chipsets for Intel 12. gen." to see the differences between the chipsets.

With intel you need a Z chipset to support overclocking. If you dont want to overclock, a B chipset is usually a good choice.
 

Socket:

CPU Generations can have different sockets.

Intel had the LGA1200 socket for some generations and changed to the new LGA1700 one.

AMD had the AM4 socket for many years now.

 

So your mainboard has to support yoour CPU's chipset and socket.

You should pick a mainboard which has all the connectors you want.

RAM

 

The has been the DDR4 RAM generation for many years now and Intel 12. Gen supports both, DDR4 and DDR5.

So make sure, your mainboard and your CPU support your RAM.

 

8 GB is good for browsing and office.

16 GB is good for gaming

32 GB and more are good for professional stuff or special calculations.

 

Your mainboard usually has 4 slots and 2 channels. So 2 RAM sticks can work at the same time.

Using 4 sticks is not slower or faster than 2, but if you get 2x 8 GB, you have space to upgrade in the future.

 

Graphics card

 

Graphics card prices are pretty insane at the moment, so you can wait or just get one anyway.
The market is dominated by AMD and NVIDIA.

I dont know much about AMD graphics cards to be honest.

 

For 1080p gaming up to 60 Hz, a GTX 1660 super is a pretty good deal for the money.

For Raytracing 1080p or 1440p at 60 Hz a RTX 3060 Ti is good.

and for higher framerates and resolutions, the RTX 3070 and RTX 3080.

The RTX 3090 is a bit like the i9 or Ryzen 9, just very expensive.

 

Keep in mind the recommended power supply power for your graphics card.

 

Power supply

 

Your graphics card's power supply recommendation is pretty good. You get get a bit more to be future proof for other graphics card.

650 W or 750 W should be good.

For a good quality take a look at our PSU Tier List - Power Supplies - Linus Tech Tips.

 

Storage

 

Get a 250 GB SSD or more for your system to boot fast and to work fast.

If you want cheaper storage, you can get an additional HDD.

But keep in mind, HDDs make noise, SSDs dont.

 

Here's our SSD TIER LIST - Storage Devices - Linus Tech Tips.

 

Case & optical drive

 

There are only a few cases with optical drives less, because most people download games.

So thing about, what you want.

 

The CPU temperature is not a big problem. It can get up to 95-100 °C without losing performance.

Only the lifetime can reduce a bit with high temperatures.

The graphics card and benefit from low temperatures it can run with higher clock frequencies if it is under it's thermal limit.

So airflow can help. Good airflow cases are cases like: Fractal Design Torrent, Meshify 2, Phanteks P300a, P400a, P200a, Corsair 4000D airflow, ...

 

If you have qestions or if you need recommendations, just ask,

 

Good luck, have fun.

[suedseefrucht]

1 hour ago, speedySat said:

However, when I tried pricing out a similar system on pcpartpicker, it seems like the prices were around the same.

What do people want to buy? People want to buy "RTX 3060 Ti,, Intel Core i7 1 TB SSD 16 GB RAM".

So if they see "RTX 3060 Ti,, Intel Core i7 1 TB SSD 16 GB RAM" for 1500 $ or 2000 $, they pick the 1500 $ one.

So companies have to put as much "RTX 3060 Ti,, Intel Core i7 1 TB SSD 16 GB RAM" in there as they can for the lowest money possible.

So quality suffers.

[igormp]

13 hours ago, Dr0idGh0sT said:

Buy 6600XT for video card 

OP mentioned they want to work with ML, so AMD is a no go.

[speedySat]

Thanks for the quick replies everyone! All of your comments are super helpful! As @igormp mentioned, I'd like to stick with Nvidia for the GPU since its a lot harder to do ML work with AMD.

 

22 hours ago, suedseefrucht said:

Just an electrical engineer who build his first selfbuilt PC early last year.

@suedseefrucht could you explain how you ended up with the build you did? Just interested in the thought process. I'm also an EE, so sounds like we have a similar situation.

 

One last question that I'd still like some help on: Does it make sense to go Intel 12th gen, since it seems like the 12th gen i5 is a pretty good bang-for-buck (according to the LTT review)? Would going 12th-gen Intel help with future upgradability, since its DDR5 compatible and uses the new CPU socket? Or does Ryzen 5600X make the most sense right now?

 

Thanks so much again! I really appreciate all the help!

[suedseefrucht]

1 hour ago, speedySat said:

could you explain how you ended up with the build you did? Just interested in the thought process.

The thought process is basically the long text up there.

But here's more detail:

 

When I was 14, I bought my very first prebuilt pc.

It had 4 cores and a very small NVIDIA graphics card.

The graphics card was mounted under the top whithout any airflow, so you could cook something on top of the case.
And the power supply got really loud after some time.

There I learned: Prebuilds are cheap (only 400 Euro back then), but they are also bad.

I also bought my 1080p monitor back then. 24 inch Acer.

 

When I started studying at the university, I used a notebook but it was not for gaming.

In 2015 I talked to some IT guys and they helped me to pick the parts for my first not prebuilt pc.

It was the max. performance but I saved some money by getting a cheap case.

GTX 970 Jetstream, i7-4770, Crucial M500 SSD, 2 TB Seagate HDD, ...

It was good for 1080p gaming.

 

Everything was fine for 5 years.

 

Then early 2020 my monitor stopped working after 11 years by my side.

I didn't buy much stuff for many years. I had an old used chair from a IT company, no mousepad.

So I wanted to do something good to me by getting an awesome desk setup.

I bought a headset, a 1440p monitor, a mousepad, a new chair, speakers, and I built a new PC for 1440p gaming.

 

My 2015 PC was pretty good but in the end I regreted picking the cheap case.

It just felt cheap everytime I pressed the power button.

So I sold it for 350 Euro.

 

New PC:

 

The new gaming PC should have a high quality case and it should be very quiet.

I found fractal design, phanteks, lian li and corsair to have some beautiful cases.

 

For low noise you need big fans, because big fans can move the same amount of air with less RPM.

So I looked for a case with 140 mm fan support.

And the most quiet fans I could find were the be quiet! silent wings 3 PWM.

I picked 2 for front intake and 1 for rear exhaust because positve pressure keeps dust outside.

I also wanted a closed top, because you can easiely wipe the dust off a solid top panel.

Also I didn't want the air to escape through the top but to go over my motherboard to the rear.

I decided for the Define R6, because it's a good compromise between airflow and noise dampening.

Yeah I know, many people say: A solid front panel is much worse than a mesh front.

But I like it's look, it's timeless and quiet. And yes, I know the video about mesh vs airflow in terms of noise.

be quiet!'s silent cases have very bad airflow, which is why I went for the Fractal one.

 

I read a lot about watercooling and aircooling.

In the end I decided for aircooling, because big air coolers are pretty cool and quiet.

Yes, with watercooling you have more surface and more fans, but you also have pump noise.

And while water can leak, you may have to swap the liquid, aircooling is a lot easier to maintain.

Just blow the dust out and you are done. If the fan breaks, you can just replace it.

Very easy to repair.

The good thing about watercooling is the cooling of the graphics card, because their aircoolers are loud under load

and custom air coolers for graphics cards are bad. Yes, you can cool the GPU chip but the other chips just get passive coolers glued onto them,

which fall off because the graphics card is mounted upside down.

My mistake was to pick one of the cheapest RTX 2070s (Gigabyte Jetstream), I could find. A more expensive one could have been a little more quiet.

 

I didn't go for overclocking, because I wanted a stable system and I didn't want to spend extra with Intel for a K CPU and a Z motherboard.

I went for Intel because Intel didn't dissappoint me in my 2015 build and I have no experience with AMD what so ever.

So I took the saved money from not buying a Z motherboard and a K CPU and spend it for the i7-9700.

The integrated iGPU is good, just in case my graphics card dies.

 

I picked the RTX 2070 for raytracing and 1440p gaming.

You could go for 4K gaming at 60 Hz with the RTX 2080 Ti but it was 3 times the price of a RTX 2070

and a 4K monitor would have been more expensive too.

 

I picked 16 GB RAM and picked the max. speed supported by my CPU,

because 16 GB is enough for almost all games.

I made the mistake of picking 4 sticks for 4 slots. It's more expensive and not upgradable.

 

And because I hated the loud power supply of my firtst prebuilt PC,

I made sure to get a quiet one with a long warranty and I wanted it to be modular with sleeved cables.

 

Then unfortunately after I purchased the parts, I asked for opinions in this forum.

 

 

[suedseefrucht]

1 hour ago, speedySat said:

Would going 12th-gen Intel help with future upgradability, since its DDR5 compatible and uses the new CPU socket? Or does Ryzen 5600X make the most sense right now?

Intel 12th gen benefits from windows 11. I've heard they use different types or cores to save power under low load.

I noticed, I dont like every second windows. XP was great, Vista was crap, 7 was great, 8 was crap, 10 is great...

I feel like microsoft uses every second version to test something new. With the next version the new thing is implemented in a good way.

Like Windows 8 was half a PC OS, half a tablet OS and Windows 10 is finally a good PC OS again.

I can be wrong and Windows 11 can be good, but I will stay with Windows 10 for now and that's why I would probably go with Ryzen for it's efficiency (performance / power consumption) with Windows 10.

 

And you can still install windows 10 without a microsoft account if you use the trick of not setting up wifi and not connecting a network cable.

If you dont do the trick you dont even get the option to install without a microsoft account. And it takes some time to find all the configurations to disable sending data to microsoft about your behavior.

I dont know how it works with Windows 11 but I expect it to be worse.

[Jonathan Lee]

11 hours ago, speedySat said:

One last question that I'd still like some help on: Does it make sense to go Intel 12th gen, since it seems like the 12th gen i5 is a pretty good bang-for-buck (according to the LTT review)? Would going 12th-gen Intel help with future upgradability, since its DDR5 compatible and uses the new CPU socket? Or does Ryzen 5600X make the most sense right now?

oooo I have a hot take that most people probably won't agree with. In my opinion, any 6 core CPU doesn't make sense for new builds today. Primarily cause the trend in CPU's is increasing core count, even the consoles have 8 cores now. If game devs can reliable say that a person will have higher core counts CPU's, they will probably develop games that are more multi-threaded than not. The new "entry" level i5-12600k has 10 cores (6p + 4e) just for reference and AMD is planning to release higher core count CPU's in the future.

 

Of course if you're just playing older games and non AAA games, 6 cores will be fine. If you plan to play latest and greatest games though, I really think 6 cores will age pretty poorly in 1-2 years. I would say if you're sticking with your computer for more than 2 years go with 8 cores to be safe (or more if you can afford it).

 

CPU's I would recommend: 5800X for fastest 8 core CPU (with potential to upgrade to 5950x in future), 10/11700f (non-k) for a good value 8 core CPU.

 

In terms of DDR5, I wouldn't get just yet. Current DDR5 isn't really faster in real world performance compared to lastest gen DDR4. You can get 12th gen Intel boards with DDR4 support though. I would recommend going with that if you want 12th gen Intel.

 

In terms of upgradeability, probably none. Intel tends to release a new board with CPU releases. 13th gen might be supported, but I wouldn't bank on it.

[speedySat]

Great! Thanks for all the help everyone! I'm going to continue doing some research and will come back if I have any other questions!

 

22 hours ago, suedseefrucht said:

Like Windows 8 was half a PC OS, half a tablet OS and Windows 10 is finally a good PC OS again.

Thanks for explaining your thought process @suedseefrucht it was very informative. I agree Windows 8 was a nightmare, hopefully Windows 11 is not anything like that.

 

12 hours ago, Jonathan Lee said:

In terms of DDR5, I wouldn't get just yet. Current DDR5 isn't really faster in real world performance compared to lastest gen DDR4. You can get 12th gen Intel boards with DDR4 support though. I would recommend going with that if you want 12th gen Intel.

 

In terms of upgradeability, probably none. Intel tends to release a new board with CPU releases. 13th gen might be supported, but I wouldn't bank on it.

This is very helpful, thanks! I was planning on going DDR4 regardless, since I know DDR5 is still very new and very expensive. But I wasn't aware that the board changes that often. I won't put too much stock into upgradability then when choosing the CPU.

 

I'll likely be back once I have a preliminary parts list for a sanity check. Thanks again!

[TheeShadowStorm]

I'd definitely go for a 3060 over any amd card purely because of dlss