PC Upgrade

[DangerousDarkwings]

Budget (including currency): ~$1000 USD

Country: United States

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Game development (Unity and Godot primarily), Blender and 1080p gaming (Minecraft to Cyberpunk 2077) as well as Virtual Machines.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): Currently, I have the GPU and Power Supplyjfrom the build posted below.

 

I am looking to step up from my current PC (4th Gen i7, 32GB of DDR3, MSI Krait Motherboard) and join the modern era of computing. I don't need anything Next Gen, such as the 12th Gen Intel processors, nor the upcoming Zen 4  processors. I am hoping to further my game and application development career using this computer, as well as play the crap out of some games. I've been out of the PC build game for over a decade, and would love to hear some advice on the parts I picked out here. I currently have the fans, case, GPU and PSU in the list, so this build is not nearly as over budget as it looks.

 

Edit: I would also like to keep the on-board graphics as an option to make PCI passthrough for virtual machines easier (rather than having to offload the gpu, it's nice to be able to just hand off a card).

 

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/DangerousDarkwings/saved/#view=mVvQdC

 

 

[Dukesilver27-]

The price for those parts makes less sense if you factor in current gen parts.

11700K is 14% slower than 12600K, yet 12600K is cheaper, unless you find a used one, I don't see any reason to go last gen.

 

Not to mention, the CPU and GPU balance is not optimal, for your budget, 12400 and RTX 3070/RX 6800 (XT) is the best pairing. EDIT, didn't read that he already has the GPU.

[DangerousDarkwings]

Part of my concern with the 12000 series was cooling, to be honest. I've heard they're "Nearly Uncoolable" is this not the case?

[Dukesilver27-]

Not at all, up to 12700K, they are pretty much the same as older gens, 12900K is the one you're talking about.

[RONOTHAN##]

3 minutes ago, DangerousDarkwings said:

I don'tlneed anything Next Gen, such as the 12th Gen Intel processors, nor the upcoming Zen 4  processors

I get not going Zen 4, it's going to be pretty pricey for performance a lot of people don't need, but not going 12th gen is just a bad idea. The 12700F is the same price as the 11700K that you selected, but is in a different league of performance. It's 10% faster in single core sets and is 30% faster in multi core workloads for the same price, why wouldn't you go for that? The only disadvantage is that you don't get overclocking support, but at the same time Alder Lake has very little overclocking headroom anyway so it doesn't really matter. It would be effectively cheaper and just better performance overall. 

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/LKxCMb

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/3Kbv2m

 

Go for one of these, depending on if you want overclocking or not. both of these are cheaper than what you currently have selected and are better in basically every way.

[Somerandomtechyboi]

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/6MDXhk

¯\_ (ツ) _/¯ 

[Dukesilver27-]

21 minutes ago, DangerousDarkwings said:

I currently have the fans, case, GPU and PSU in the list, so this build is not nearly as over budget as it looks.

He already has the GPU, so only need CPU, board, cooler, and RAM.

[DangerousDarkwings]

2 minutes ago, Dukesilver27- said:

He already has the GPU, so only need CPU, board, cooler, and RAM.

That is correct.

I would also like to add here (and will edit the original post), that I would also like something with integrated graphics to allow PCI passthru for KVM, as I will be doing some virtual machine work for development testing, and would like to have my 3060 available to hand off to virtual machines.

[Dukesilver27-]

9 minutes ago, DangerousDarkwings said:

That is correct.

I would also like to add here (and will edit the original post), that I would also like something with integrated graphics to allow PCI passthru for KVM, as I will be doing some virtual machine work for development testing, and would like to have my 3060 available to hand off to virtual machines.

In that case, IMO 12600K is still the best option for you, fits within the budget too. The noctua you picked would do great, but personally I'd go cheaper ones.

[OrdinaryPhil]

I don't think it's reasonable to exclude current gen. 12th gen is big performance uplift over 11th and they are VERY close in price.

Also, as a game developer using Unity you'll get a massive benefit by going DDR5 over DDR4.

I'd recommend an i7-12700 (non-K) and something like a Noctua NH-U12A. You'll get plenty of cores to share with your VMs and the NH-U12A is more than enough to keep it cool.

The latest update to Hyper-V is a lot more memory efficient and using DDR5 is a big deal.

It's certainly not in your current budget but I'd load yourself up on the highest capacity DIMMs you can find. I've found that using RAMdisk to allocate RAM as storage works better for VMs that I recycle frequently.

[DangerousDarkwings]

I appreciate all the feedback. I realize now that my fears about 12th gen were probably largely unfounded. I do have some flex on the budget so I might look into some high capacity DDR5, but I do also need to justify some of the cost to the wife.

 

@OrdinaryPhil I'll look into using RAMdisk. I've heard it is incredible, but I have never messed with it much. As far as the VMs go, I will probably be running KVM off of Linux, though I have the storage available to dual boot if truly needed, and I know there are some benefits to Hyper-V in Windows. I've been trying to get off of primary dependence on Windows, especially with some recent shenanigans.

[DangerousDarkwings]

@Dukesilver27-You mentioned going with a cheaper cooler? What would you recommend? I'd like to try to stick with air cooling, and I'd like to shoot for something fairly quiet. RGB and all that jazz are uninteresting to me, and honestly I think going for a blacked out look on the cooler and fans would be neat, but is not a deal breaker for me.

[OrdinaryPhil]

15 minutes ago, DangerousDarkwings said:

I appreciate all the feedback. I realize now that my fears about 12th gen were probably largely unfounded. I do have some flex on the budget so I might look into some high capacity DDR5, but I do also need to justify some of the cost to the wife.

 

@OrdinaryPhil I'll look into using RAMdisk. I've heard it is incredible, but I have never messed with it much. As far as the VMs go, I will probably be running KVM off of Linux, though I have the storage available to dual boot if truly needed, and I know there are some benefits to Hyper-V in Windows. I've been trying to get off of primary dependence on Windows, especially with some recent shenanigans.

I understand - Microsoft seems intent on destroying any goodwill they still have with their users. Sadly, I have found that it is still a better production environment for my use cases. Hyper-V is meaningfully better than VMware in so many ways. It's "free" so that is already a huge plus. It has a much lower overhead on system resources and makes it easier to apply system changes to live VMs (somethings can still only be applied after a reboot).

 

I currently don't have a system with DDR5 for my personal use, but at work we've already made good use of the higher density DIMMs. The fact that ECC is built into the DDR5 spec means that it's an even more reliable way to use RAMdisk to store VMs.

[DangerousDarkwings]

1 minute ago, OrdinaryPhil said:

Hyper-V is meaningfully better than VMware in so many ways.

I can't agree more here. Kernel Based Virtual Machines have come a long way though. I plan to do direct KVM virtualization, which should give me some near-native results for most of my use cases.

[Dukesilver27-]

The cooler master hyper 212 is still doing a pretty good job, cheaper but performs the same Vetroo V5.