Looking for input on the parts for my first build

Keith Kirk · December 6, 2022

My current parts list, it's over budget so I'd like to be able to get it down if possible, I currently have £720 saved towards it so if I can nudge it lower then I don't have as much remaining to save. A couple of the cheaper parts (250GB SSD & 1TB HDD) are likely to be Christmas presents so that does bring it down a touch. Stock for the case is also currently fluctuating so I'm hoping one of the online stores with a cheaper price for it will get stock back soon.

Budget (including currency): £800

Country: Scotland (UK)

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for:
Most Common Games: Minecraft, Stardew, Civ 6, XCOM 2, Fallout 4, Cities Skylines.

Most Heavyweight Program: Android Studio, so running emulators and compiling, etc.

Other details

Monitors: Two 1080p monitors connected via display port, no scope for changes to this is the next few years.
Environment: Room temperature has a low of 16°C in Winter and high of about 40°C in Summer. Undecided if it will be desktop or floor based. Also I don't have a wired network connection in that room and would need to consider power line adapters to get one.
Peripherals: I have an existing mouse and keyboard as well as printer, scanner and headset all using USB A. It will be sharing the peripherals and monitors with my work macbook which will be achieved using a second set of monitor cables and a USB switch, possibly swapping to a KVM Switch in the future.
Reason for upgrade: My current personal computer is a Dell G5 15 - 5587 laptop with an 8th Generation Intel(R)Core(TM) i7-8750H Processor and NVIDIA(R) GeForce(R) GTX 1050 Ti with 4GB GDDR5 graphics memory. I'd like to replace it with a desktop since it's become clear that I mainly use it in the same room so the flexibility I used to get with the laptop is no longer as necessary.
Things I've been considering:

I wanted to go with both AMD for CPU and GPU, I'll be running Linux (Fedora in particular) and thus far all my graphics cards have been Nvidia, I want to try an AMD GPU to see how it compares since I know AMD have a different stance of how to create Linux driver than Nvidia do.
My plan for the storage is:
- 250GB SSD: / partition with OS
- 1TB HDD: /home with general files, code projects, images, video etc
- 1TB SSD: Dedicated to games, although I may investigate if I can mount /bin there and add a steam directory under it. Would need to do some reading to see if that's a terrible idea.
I would have liked to have gotten an AM5 system so I was more future proofed but the CPU and Motherboards available right now were 150% more expensive and the DDR5 RAM was 50% more expensive so it went well over budget.

Overall what I think I'm lacking most right now is familiarity with the hardware products, I've tried to get to grips with the naming schemes and look at benchmarking info but there are so many options for a lot of the components I'm still not sure if I'm picking good options or am I wasting money on some so I thought best to ask and see.

If you require any additional info please let me know and I'll provide it.
Thanks in advance for any insights and advice you can offer.

jamie.three · December 7, 2022

Looks fairly good already, there are a couple of changes you could consider making:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/NXPrC6

CPU: you could drop down to a 5500 instead of a 5600. It is a little bit slower but its also 25% cheaper at the moment and at that price its a much better deal, especially if you are already over budget. You would loose PCIe Gen4 for Gen3 going doen to the 5500 but this shouldnt make any noticable difference with any of the components in this system, and by the time gen3 is really holding the system back (e.g. with future GPUs) you will probably want a CPU upgrade anyway.

The 5500 dosent seem to be supported by the motherboard you have in your parts list (acording to pc part picker) so if you do change to a 5500 you will need a different motherboard. Ive put in something at a simmilar price/ specs.

Storage: Ive put in 1x 2TB SSD rather than a 1TB and 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD. You would gain a significantly faster SSD with better write endurance so it should also last longer before faliure. Its also a bit cheaper overall and you can have a PC entierly free of spinning disks. it also frees up the 2nd M.2 slot so you can easily drop in another NVME SSD in the future if needed. The benifit from this faster SSD should be greater than the benifit from having a seperate boot drive.

PSU: ive put in a semi-modular PSU instead. it saves you almost £10 and its an equally high quality power supply.

Keith Kirk · January 27, 2023

Hey Jamie,

Thanks for your input, I'm afraid I only saw it today as I assumed I'd get emailed replies and didn't see any in my inbox.

My final parts list ended up like this:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/g2fGzf

I managed to get a few parts on winter sales, the most notable being the Case for £50 and the MB for £82, also the RM650 dropped in price so it was only a couple pounds more than the RM550 I'd been looking at. I ended up stretching my budget to just over £850, and I'm conscious that there were choices where I wasn't making the optimal price for performance decisions, particularly since I picked RGB RAM.

Also I kept the SSD layout I had as I was getting the 256GB SSD as a Christmas gift from a family member. The spinning disk I may regret, but by the time I had those thoughts I'd already purchased it. Might reconsider that in the future.

The build went fairly smoothly, although I had to finish quickly so cable managing the back was super rushed. I took the panel off last night to try and tidy it up as it was making the panel bulge. I averted the bulging but it became clear I'd need to disconnected and refeed cables from the front to properly organise it and I didn't fancy doing that.

Setting up Fedora was easier than I could have dreamed, I didn't have a single issue with my AMD drivers, much less awkward than my experiences with Nvidia in the past. However my idea to mount /usr on the 1 TB SSD was not a good one, it worked fine for my native Linux games however Proton could not handle it due to how parts of Proton operate, more details on this issue can be found here.

I resolved this issue by migrating my games library to the /home partition on the spinning disk, then reformatting and reinstalling Fedora. This time I partitioned the 1TB SSD into a generic /games partition and transferred the games back onto the drive and all games then worked fine.

Not sure why the fans look blue in the images, they are set to purple. And apologies for the cable mess on the desk, I'm still trying to cable manage the desk but tehre are limits, I use the same space for my personal PC and my work mac so have a USB Switch for peripherals which limits how much of the USB cable can be hidden, also the displayport cables for the monitors are too short to let them hide below the desk.

Hinjima · January 27, 2023

6 hours ago, Keith Kirk said:

Hey Jamie,

Thanks for your input, I'm afraid I only saw it today as I assumed I'd get emailed replies and didn't see any in my inbox.

My final parts list ended up like this:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/g2fGzf

I managed to get a few parts on winter sales, the most notable being the Case for £50 and the MB for £82, also the RM650 dropped in price so it was only a couple pounds more than the RM550 I'd been looking at. I ended up stretching my budget to just over £850, and I'm conscious that there were choices where I wasn't making the optimal price for performance decisions, particularly since I picked RGB RAM.

Also I kept the SSD layout I had as I was getting the 256GB SSD as a Christmas gift from a family member. The spinning disk I may regret, but by the time I had those thoughts I'd already purchased it. Might reconsider that in the future.

The build went fairly smoothly, although I had to finish quickly so cable managing the back was super rushed. I took the panel off last night to try and tidy it up as it was making the panel bulge. I averted the bulging but it became clear I'd need to disconnected and refeed cables from the front to properly organise it and I didn't fancy doing that.

Setting up Fedora was easier than I could have dreamed, I didn't have a single issue with my AMD drivers, much less awkward than my experiences with Nvidia in the past. However my idea to mount /usr on the 1 TB SSD was not a good one, it worked fine for my native Linux games however Proton could not handle it due to how parts of Proton operate, more details on this issue can be found here.

I resolved this issue by migrating my games library to the /home partition on the spinning disk, then reformatting and reinstalling Fedora. This time I partitioned the 1TB SSD into a generic /games partition and transferred the games back onto the drive and all games then worked fine.

Not sure why the fans look blue in the images, they are set to purple. And apologies for the cable mess on the desk, I'm still trying to cable manage the desk but tehre are limits, I use the same space for my personal PC and my work mac so have a USB Switch for peripherals which limits how much of the USB cable can be hidden, also the displayport cables for the monitors are too short to let them hide below the desk.

I think that is a good setup you got there. Going for the 650w over the 550w PSU leaves more room for future upgrades as well. You can slap in a 5800X3D and upgrade to a newer lower tier GPU like a 5060 or AMD equivalent whenever that happens that is rated for 650w PSU spec and still game comfortably in modern titles.
All I can say now is: Good job on the build and happy gaming