First Time PC Build Questions

[charliezz123]

Hello, I am building a pc for the first time and wanted some advice before committing to buying parts. I will be using the computer to play games, use 3d modeling softwares (like AutoCAD), and maybe VR in the future. Here is the build so far:

 

CPU: Intel i7 7700k

Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO

Motherboard: MSI - Z270 GAMING PRO CARBON ATX LGA1151 Motherboard

Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory

Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive and Seagate - Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive

GPU: GTX 1080 ti

PSU:  EVGA - 850W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply

Case: be quiet! - Silent Base 800 (Orange) ATX Mid Tower Case

 

with Windows, a keyboard, and a mouse, the build is about $2100. I have not yet decided on a monitor. Here's all my questions:

 

1) Is the PSU overkill? Pc part picker says the build is about 500W rn

2) Is there any part of the build that would bottleneck the others, or one part that is way better than the others?

3) Monitors? what monitor would you all recommend for this build? I want a fairly nice monitor to match the quality of the other parts in my build, but nothing too absurd on price. I am going to start with a single monitor, and maybe upgrade to a second once I save up some more money again. I am looking at 27 inch, 2560 x 1440 resolution monitors rn, specifically i was looking at the Asus - MG279Q, but am totally open to suggestions.

4) Any other thoughts on something I might need, or do you see any compatibility issues?

 

All advice and general thoughts are appreciated, Thanks!

 

[Guest]

I don't see any issues and build looks good but why not go with ryzen?

[GDRRiley]

grab a better cpu cooler as the 212 evo is a little weak 

[TrigrH]

Id recommend a better cpu cooler for the 7700k.

600-650w is all you need, only get 850 if you have SLI plans.

You might want a larger HDD for the future.

[Tokeegee]

I don't see a reason for an 850W PSU unless you plan on buying another 1080 TI, even then a 750W should be plenty.

[rn8686]

650W is plenty, R7 would probably be better for your CAD. 

[jpfeif]

Umm... ryzen?   I would change the sata ssd for a PCI-E m.2880 form factor I would also use a 1920*1080 144hz and have two 2560*1440 at 60hz.  and maybe a 1070 unless you are going for future profuseness then I think the 1080ti would be good.

[TankError144]

Man I had an 800w PSU  that caught fire the first time I stress tested it with my R9 290X. Needless to say i went and got a(n) 1200W 80+ Gold PSU to keep anything from happening again haha. Bigger PSU just means you have room to grow.

[DocSwag]

I switched some stuff around and fit a 1440p 165 hz g sync monitor in there. Add in keyboard and mouse tho and it'll be over budget but CMON.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel - Core i7-7700K 4.2GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($326.32 @ OutletPC) 
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG - H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler  ($34.99 @ Newegg Marketplace) 
Motherboard: ASRock - Z270 Pro4 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($109.88 @ OutletPC) 
Memory: Team - T-Force / Night Hawk 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  ($119.89 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Western Digital - Blue 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($83.69 @ Amazon) 
Storage: Seagate - Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($66.89 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB SC Black Edition Video Card  ($714.98 @ Newegg) 
Case: be quiet! - Silent Base 800 w/Window (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case  ($129.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA G2 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($79.89 @ OutletPC) 
Monitor: Dell - S2417DG 23.8" 2560x1440 165Hz Monitor  ($399.99 @ Best Buy) 
Total: $2066.51
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-07-05 21:57 EDT-0400

 

I'm not great with peripherals so I'll leave those to someone else to decide for you. If you need to save some money somehow as $2100 is a pretty hard limit you could get a cheaper case, get a 1 tb hdd instead, and/or get a 120gb ssd instead.

 

For windows you could get a legit copy for $90 or get one from somewhere like kinguin.net for $30, or just run windows without a product key (you just can't change the background and there's a few things here and there telling you windows isn't activated, but it works totally fine).

19 minutes ago, MaestroOCZ said:

I don't see any issues and build looks good but why not go with ryzen?

Why should they get Ryzen?

13 minutes ago, rn8686 said:

650W is plenty, R7 would probably be better for your CAD. 

Most cad applications, especially autocad which op mentioned are quite single threaded which would result in a 7700k doing better

12 minutes ago, jpfeif said:

Umm... ryzen?   I would change the sata ssd for a PCI-E m.2880 form factor I would also use a 1920*1080 144hz and have two 2560*1440 at 60hz.  and maybe a 1070 unless you are going for future profuseness then I think the 1080ti would be good.

Why Ryzen?

[Ordinarily_Greater]

Someone just got skeptical about something here

[jpfeif]

On 7/5/2017 at 7:01 PM, DocSwag said:

 

Why Ryzen?

Because Autodesk stuff really likes a lot of cores and ryzen has the best price to performance so you can get over six cores for less then a 7700k and is already unlocked. Don't be an Intel fanboy be a smart person.

Edited July 6, 2017 by jpfeif

[DocSwag]

6 minutes ago, jpfeif said:

Because Autodesk stuff really likes a lot of cores and ryzen has the best price to performance so you can get over six cores for less then a 7700k and is already unlocked. Don't be an Intel fanboy be a smart person.

This is very untrue, autocad for example is heavily single threaded. Please research before making these claims.

[Drak3]

So long as the PSU is of high quality, there is no such thing as overkill. Ideally, you want full system load to be 50% or less of what your PSU is rated for, as that is supposed to be the most efficient point in it's efficiency curve.

Then you have PSUs that run cool enough under 50% thermal load that they don't need to spin their fan. That's another perk of going overboard with PSUs.

Longetivity. If a PSU is high quality, it generally dies far more gracefully. Instead of just dying, they'll slowly deliver under their ratings until they die, and sometimes they just fade quietly into the night.

Future upgrades. You don't know for sure if you're going to be running the same power draw after an upgrade or two. Better to have a good deal of overhead that cost $30 more upfront than to spend another $80-110 just to squeeze in that new high end GPU 2 years from now.

 

 

[charliezz123]

Dang, that was quick. Thanks for all the advice to help me with my build. DocSwag, I am very impressed you managed to fit the whole thing into $2100 dollars, but what I meant was that so far the price added up to $2100 dollars, my total budget is $2500. (I already have headphones and speakers so those don't need to be included). Thanks!

[Ordinarily_Greater]

8 minutes ago, jpfeif said:

Because Autodesk stuff really likes a lot of cores and ryzen has the best price to performance so you can get over six cores for less then a 7700k and is already unlocked. Don't be an Intel fanboy be a smart person.

To make your statement for real

 

On July 4, 2017 at 6:59 PM, Ordinarily_Greater said:

Sorry I couldn't answer right away, I was on a plane.

 

Anyway, the CPU usage drops when switching to Ryzen, and while that's a very good thing, there are some things to be aware of:

CPU usage, alone, doesn't mean anything other than that the CPU is not being pushed to it's limit (and therefore there is room to grow)

a CPU can bottleneck at 50% usage.

 

in this scenario:

   On July 1, 2017 at 10:04 PM,  Damascus said: 

 I went from up to 80% usage playing games to around 35% 6700K to R7

the usage went down because the core and thread count doubled. however, if the game/program he was running could only use 4c/8t, the lower usage numbers mean nothing, since 4c/8t might be sitting at 100%, while the other 4c/8t might be idling, therefore giving you 50% usage, but bottlenecking.

 

the important part to look at is the trend in games and their core utilization, and the overall usage.

if an i5 uses 80% CPU in modern games, it shows that there isn't much room to grow before the CPU starts bottlenecking.

the 1600, on the other hand, has more raw power, and therefore is more futureproof - provided that game devs and programmers optimize games/programs for more than 4c/4t.

this is the big caveat. in a world where everything was built for 4c/4t, the R5 1600 would be at 33% usage, and be bottlenecking. but, the trend right now is towards more cores and parallelization, which is why the R5 1600 is the better buy by a long shot.

 

[Damascus]

6 minutes ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

To make your statement for real

 

 

Actually as a heavy CAD user myself the ryzen cpu was a bit of an upgrade over my 6700k, similar performance when modeling but the r3nders are insanely fast.

[Damascus]

11 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

This is very untrue, autocad for example is heavily single threaded. Please research before making these claims.

 

1 minute ago, Damascus said:

Actually as a heavy CAD user myself the ryzen cpu was a bit of an upgrade over my 6700k, similar performance when modeling but the r3nders are insanely fast.

Its a 1700 at 3.6 vs a 6700k at 4.6, take it as you will.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

2 minutes ago, Damascus said:

Actually as a heavy CAD user myself the ryzen cpu was a bit of an upgrade over my 6700k, similar performance when modeling but the r3nders are insanely fast.

Oh yeah i just remembered that you are inside @RadiatingLight's quote

[Damascus]

1 minute ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

Oh yeah i just remembered that you are inside @RadiatingLight's quote

Quoteception. BTW fix the quote for night theme plz.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

1 minute ago, Damascus said:

Quoteception. BTW fix the quote for night theme plz.

Oh yes, gotta find the original quote then. Seeking @RadiatingLight activities

[DocSwag]

13 minutes ago, Damascus said:

 

Its a 1700 at 3.6 vs a 6700k at 4.6, take it as you will.

Interesting, all the benchmarks I found indicated otherwise.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-9.html

 

Did you notice significant improvements in rendering or not that large ones?

[Damascus]

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

Interesting, all the benchmarks I found indicated otherwise.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-ryzen-7-1800x-cpu,4951-9.html

 

Did you notice significant improvements in rendering or not that large ones?

Going to note 2 things.

 

A) my gpu was a 1050 ti at the time (on both systems) methinks a bottleneck existed

 

I stupidly never ran benchmarks, I was always too full on drive space to get anything new.

 

It was marginal but what you really notice is the system doesn't grind to a halt when you start rendering. 

[DocSwag]

8 minutes ago, Damascus said:

Going to note 2 things.

 

A) my gpu was a 1050 ti at the time (on both systems) methinks a bottleneck existed

 

I stupidly never ran benchmarks, I was always too full on drive space to get anything new.

 

It was marginal but what you really notice is the system doesn't grind to a halt when you start rendering. 

That last part makes sense, the extra cores mean you can do other stuff while rendering.

[RadiatingLight]

8 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

That last part makes sense, the extra cores mean you can do other stuff while rendering.

I'm not a CAD user myself, but being able to model while rendering is probably a huge time saver. definitely worth the upgrade to Ryzen, even if you already have a 6700K

[Damascus]

10 minutes ago, RadiatingLight said:

I'm not a CAD user myself, but being able to model while rendering is probably a huge time saver. definitely worth the upgrade to Ryzen, even if you already have a 6700K

 

19 minutes ago, DocSwag said:

That last part makes sense, the extra cores mean you can do other stuff while rendering.

/\ /\ /\ This /\ /\ /\

 

Sorry about that, phone was dying and time was limited.  My version of CAD, revit 2017 will use up to 16 cores, especially when rendering.  It also requires a minimum 4 cores to run but recommends more.  The general advice is to get a balance of the highest clock speed/IPC and the most cores possible.  

 

Put this in comparison to standard autoCAD, that requires a mere 1Ghz clockspeed and one core.  Very different programs, both are from autodesk and both are commonly used CAD modeling softwares.  With base autoCAD and no verticals (software specializations for different use cases) you want max clocks and cores drop to the wayside, meaning you can set up an extremely fast low core system and still do pretty well, this is why a 7700k does so well here.

 

 

As you may be able to tell, my 1700 made more of an improvement in revit than it ever would have in standard autoCAD