Looking for advice

Reaper332 · November 14, 2022

Budget (including currency): $2000 USD

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Primarily for gaming. I mostly play single player games.

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): I would like a monitor and some basic speakers. Mouse, keyboard and OS aren't needed. Looking to buy around black Friday to get access to the best deals.

Hello,

I have two builds I put together after going through various articles, one with AMD's newest 7000 series and another with the older 5000 series. Not sure if spending more for the 7000 series/DDR5 PC is worth it for future proofing.

Build 1: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/6mj8sL

Build 2: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/jgtxC6

I'm trying to get the best price/performance while staying under $2000. I'm also looking for good monitor recommendations.

Feel free to scrap both those builds and recommend your own if they aren't good.

I'm a first time builder and any and all help would be appreciated.

Thank you!

RONOTHAN## · November 14, 2022

14 minutes ago, Reaper332 said:

Looking to buy around black Friday to get access to the best deals.

Before anything, I want to point out that if this is the plan, it might make more sense to wait till then before deciding on exact parts. There might be some really good deals on some last gen CPUs that would make all recommendations now irrelevant, though speaking out of what the Black Friday deals have been in the past 3-4 years I wouldn't really expect much, usually it's just some SSDs on sale, with the occasional PSU, sometimes RAM, and occasionally a motherboard, and none of which are really off that much anyway. Not saying this year won't be different, just keep expectations low.

So right now, Intel CPUs are the better value overall. If you can afford to go with a 13600K, you want to go for a 13600K. It's the same price as the 7600X, significantly faster in every way, motherboards are a fair bit cheaper, and you can use either DDR4 or DDR5. It just makes more sense. The 13600K with just the P cores can outperform the 5800X in multithreaded applications, and add in the E cores and it's a multithreaded beast with great gaming chops as well. It's a CPU you won't need to upgrade for quite a while, and it's not really much more than the 5800X so I'd spend the extra money on it.

As for the rest of the build, it's fine. PSU is a little expensive for what it is (at least at the moment, PSU prices change on a daily basis), SSD is way overkill for just a gaming build, and the fans can be had in a 5 pack for $8 more, so I figure you might as well get them, either setup push pull on the AIO or just have a couple spare in case one ever dies. I'd personally stick with DDR5 if you don't already own a kit of DDR4 you'd carry over, maybe dropping down to a 5600MT/s kit instead of 6000MT/s (all 5600MT/s kits can do 6200MT/s+ assuming a good board and CPU if you increase the voltage slightly, so that can save you $40 if you're willing to run a memory stress test, though I can understand arguments of just enabling XMP and being done with it), it's decreased in price enough that it's not like you're spending 4x as much for it like you were in the beginning, and it is a bit faster than the similarly priced DDR4.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/t6mftn

That system should do just fine for this use case. I won't include a monitor recommendation because I'm no where near qualified in doing that, so I'll leave that to someone else who knows better than me in that area.

Reaper332 · November 14, 2022

32 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Before anything, I want to point out that if this is the plan, it might make more sense to wait till then before deciding on exact parts. There might be some really good deals on some last gen CPUs that would make all recommendations now irrelevant, though speaking out of what the Black Friday deals have been in the past 3-4 years I wouldn't really expect much, usually it's just some SSDs on sale, with the occasional PSU, sometimes RAM, and occasionally a motherboard, and none of which are really off that much anyway. Not saying this year won't be different, just keep expectations low.

So right now, Intel CPUs are the better value overall. If you can afford to go with a 13600K, you want to go for a 13600K. It's the same price as the 7600X, significantly faster in every way, motherboards are a fair bit cheaper, and you can use either DDR4 or DDR5. It just makes more sense. The 13600K with just the P cores can outperform the 5800X in multithreaded applications, and add in the E cores and it's a multithreaded beast with great gaming chops as well. It's a CPU you won't need to upgrade for quite a while, and it's not really much more than the 5800X so I'd spend the extra money on it.

As for the rest of the build, it's fine. PSU is a little expensive for what it is (at least at the moment, PSU prices change on a daily basis), SSD is way overkill for just a gaming build, and the fans can be had in a 5 pack for $8 more, so I figure you might as well get them, either setup push pull on the AIO or just have a couple spare in case one ever dies. I'd personally stick with DDR5 if you don't already own a kit of DDR4 you'd carry over, maybe dropping down to a 5600MT/s kit instead of 6000MT/s (all 5600MT/s kits can do 6200MT/s+ assuming a good board and CPU if you increase the voltage slightly, so that can save you $40 if you're willing to run a memory stress test, though I can understand arguments of just enabling XMP and being done with it), it's decreased in price enough that it's not like you're spending 4x as much for it like you were in the beginning, and it is a bit faster than the similarly priced DDR4.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/t6mftn

That system should do just fine for this use case. I won't include a monitor recommendation because I'm no where near qualified in doing that, so I'll leave that to someone else who knows better than me in that area.

Thank you for the advice, I'm glad the new list you provided also comes in a little cheaper. Ill stick with the DDR5 since I don't have an older DDR4 kit (upgrading from a laptop). I don't know how to play around with voltages so ill to just enable XMP.

RONOTHAN## · November 14, 2022

3 minutes ago, Reaper332 said:

I don't know how to play around with voltages so ill to just enable XMP

It's not really hard, there's a setting in the BIOS labeled "DRAM Voltage", you just want to up that to 1.35V, set the DRAM frequency to 6000MT/s, and set the primary timings manually from the sticker on the label (in order it goes tCL, tRCD, tRP, and tRAS), though if you want to be safe you can loosen all of them out to 40 with tRAS at 80 and it should work just fine. Once that's setup and the system is booted, run a memory stress test for a few hours (TestMem5 or Memtest86 would do great) and call it a day.

If you don't want to do any of that though, spend the extra $20 on a 6000MT/s kit instead, 5600MT/s is fairly slow for DDR5. Something like this should do just fine, just slot it into the previously recommended build instead of the 5600MT/s kit:

https://pcpartpicker.com/product/XsqPxr/gskill-ripjaws-s5-32-gb-2-x-16-gb-ddr5-6000-cl36-memory-f5-6000j3636f16gx2-rs5k