900$ budget

[Najer]

Hey guys i have a budget of 900$ and i want to bild a pc but i am not sure what parts i should get. I was thinking about a ryzen 5 1600 and a 1060  6gb but i am new to this and thought better ask for help befor buying wrong thinks. What do you guys think i could get ?

 

 

[thorsong]

It depends entirely what your main use case is. If you are building a media server, a lot of that budget will go to storage. Gaming, more towards GPU. Workstation, probably more CPU heavy. So what are you going to do with it? Be honest with yourself and you will get a machine that you will be more happy with in the long run.

[Najer]

1 minute ago, thorsong said:

It depends entirely what your main use case is. If you are building a media server, a lot of that budget will go to storage. Gaming, more towards GPU. Workstation, probably more CPU heavy. So what are you going to do with it? Be honest with yourself and you will get a machine that you will be more happy with in the long run.

mostly gaming and a bit photoshop for fun and lightroom for photos

 

[Moeplazz]

Yeah go for 1600, that's what I have rn

[thorsong]

Here is my thinking. If you are playing games in 1080 and doing photo editing, you don't need a 1060. A 1050ti will do fine and costs almost half. As much as I would rather use Ryzen, it has been proven that you can get great performance from a normal disk drive and a $30 stick of optane, which greatly expands the storage you can buy and gets close to ssd performance. But to do that you have to go Blue. If your photo editing can benefit from more threads, buy the cheapest kaby lake i7. If you don't need it great, save more and get the i5. 

  Here is what I worked out. You can use the stock Intel heat sink. That would save you more money. But I did add a noctua cooler. I used to use the Hyper 212's, they work- but the noctua cooler in the same size is sooo much better. You will be able to use that cooler forever, noctua gives you mount kits for new sockets when they come out, you just have to ask.

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YMnBCy

[thorsong]

You would have to find a cheap case. And I am assuming you already have a usable monitor, keyboard and mouse.

[seon123]

3 minutes ago, thorsong said:

Here is my thinking. If you are playing games in 1080 and doing photo editing, you don't need a 1060. A 1050ti will do fine and costs almost half. As much as I would rather use Ryzen, it has been proven that you can get great performance from a normal disk drive and a $30 stick of optane, which greatly expands the storage you can buy and gets close to ssd performance. But to do that you have to go Blue. If your photo editing can benefit from more threads, buy the cheapest kaby lake i7. If you don't need it great, save more and get the i5. 

  Here is what I worked out. You can use the stock Intel heat sink. That would save you more money. But I did add a noctua cooler. I used to use the Hyper 212's, they work- but the noctua cooler in the same size is sooo much better. You will be able to use that cooler forever, noctua gives you mount kits for new sockets when they come out, you just have to ask.

 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YMnBCy

Optane doesn't give a HDD superpowers. It's just a stupid, glorified Kaby Lake exclusive SSHD.

The performance difference between a 1050 Ti and a 1060 is significant, and it doesn't cost twice as much (unless you're talking about the 6GB model). 

I have no idea why you would choose such a bad and expensive PSU, as well as such expensive RAM for Kaby Lake. 

[thorsong]

No, it doesn't give an HDD superpowers. But it is a better buy for the amount of storage, and the caching feature does speed things up quite a bit. Just about every tech reviewer out there has videos proving exactly that.

The 6GB model 1060 is exactly what he asked about. If he isn't gaming above 1080, you don't need more than a 1050ti. It also has 1GB more RAM than the 1060 3GB, in a lot of cases just having the higher quantity of RAM on the card makes a big difference. I have a 760 sitting around. That card can still do quite a bit, but it only has 2GB of RAM and that becomes a problem on texture heavy games. Sure it is the popular thing to get the big fancy card, but the fact remains that that 1050ti is very capable at 1080.
The RAM I initially chose for Ryzen, and I didn't change it. It isn't that expensive and it is good reliable RAM. The cheapest 16GB kit was only $20 less.

 The power supply is fine, the price wasn't. I just rechecked and found a CX500 for $30. 

[seon123]

8 minutes ago, thorsong said:

No, it doesn't give an HDD superpowers. But it is a better buy for the amount of storage, and the caching feature does speed things up quite a bit. Just about every tech reviewer out there has videos proving exactly that. The 6GB model 1060 is exactly what he asked about. If he isn't gaming above 1080, you don't need more than a 1050ti. Sure it is the popular thing to get the big fancy card, but the fact remains that that 1050ti is very capable at 1080.
The RAM I initially chose for Ryzen, and I didn't change it. It isn't that expensive. The power supply is fine, the price wasn't. I just rechecked and found the a CX500 for $30. 

Remember to quote, so that I get a notification. 

With a $900 budget, why even compromise, instead of getting an SL308 and a normal HDD?

The 1050 Ti isn't really powerful enough, though. Not at ultra, 60 FPS at 1080p. 

The issue with the RAM was that it costs $25 more than a 2800 MHz kit. 

The CX500 is very mediocre, and the CX450M is available for $27. A better PSU and a better price. The CX500 only has 6W more on the 12V rail, so it's not even capable of driving a more powerful system than the CX450M.

This is what I would recommend, for $900. A little under $900 with rebates, $12 over without. 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor  ($196.88 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock - AB350 Pro4 ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($73.98 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2800 Memory  ($126.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: SK hynix - SL308 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($77.88 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Toshiba - P300 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($61.97 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB GAMING Video Card  ($269.88 @ OutletPC) 
Case: BitFenix - Neos Black ATX Mid Tower Case  ($41.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Power Supply: Corsair - CXM (2015) 450W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($26.99 @ Newegg) 
Total: $876.56
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-09-14 16:45 EDT-0400

[thorsong]

1 minute ago, seon123 said:

Remember to quote, so that I get a notification. 

With a $900 budget, why even compromise, instead of getting an SL308 and a normal HDD?

The 1050 Ti isn't really powerful enough, though. Not at ultra, 60 FPS at 1080p. 

The issue with the RAM was that it costs $25 more than a 2800 MHz kit. 

The CX500 is very mediocre, and the CX450M is available for $27. A better PSU and a better price. The CX500 only has 6W more on the 12V rail, so it's not even capable of driving a more powerful system than the CX450M.

This is what I would recommend, for $900. A little under $900 with rebates, $12 over without. 

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor  ($196.88 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: ASRock - AB350 Pro4 ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($73.98 @ Newegg) 
Memory: G.Skill - Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2800 Memory  ($126.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: SK hynix - SL308 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($77.88 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Toshiba - P300 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($61.97 @ Amazon) 
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB GAMING Video Card  ($269.88 @ OutletPC) 
Case: BitFenix - Neos Black ATX Mid Tower Case  ($41.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Power Supply: Corsair - CXM (2015) 450W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($26.99 @ Newegg) 
Total: $876.56
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-09-14 16:45 EDT-0400

And there was a Gskill 3200 16GB kit for around 129. What you picked out is fine. I have a CX500 in several machines I built, they are reliable and inexpensive. There isn't much difference between them. 
 I would avoid using a 250GB boot drive. With Windows 10 and only a few programs it gets filled up too fast. Above that the SSD's ruin his budget. I have an 256GB M.2 PCIe boot drive. I really don't think it is enough. Budget wise, it ends up being a wash at this price point, as you have shown. But the pain in ass of running low on boot drive storage is real. I would not go with an SSD boot unless you move up closer to 500GB. Just my opinion based on experience. Having your games and programs installed on the spinning disk in this instance will feel much slower as well. 

   Any of the recent games I have tried in the last couple years have run beautifully on my GTX950. Which is less capable. It really depends on what he is going to be playing. I had no issues with skyrim on ultra with a 950. That card has now gone to an Htpc and I am using a couple 480's. I would reccomend an RX470 4GB at its original price of about $180, but we all know what happened there.

[seon123]

1 minute ago, thorsong said:

And there was a Gskill 3200 16GB kit for around 129. What you picked out is fine. I have a CX500 in several machines I built, they are reliable and inexpensive. There isn't much difference between them. 
 I would avoid using a 250GB boot drive. With Windows 10 and only a few programs it gets filled up too fast. Above that the SSD's ruin his budget. I have an 256GB M.2 PCIe boot drive. I really don't think it is enough. Budget wise, it ends up being a wash at this price point, as you have shown. But the pain in ass of running low on boot drive storage is real. I would not go with an SSD boot unless you move up closer to 500GB. Just my opinion based on experience. Having your games and programs installed on the spinning disk in this instance will feel much slower as well. 

   Any of the recent games I have tried in the last couple years have run beautifully on my GTX950. Which is less capable. It really depends on what he is going to be playing. I had no issues with skyrim on ultra with a 950. That card has now gone to an Htpc and I am using a couple 480's. I would reccomend an RX470 4GB at its original price of about $180, but we all know what happened there.

The Trident Z in black and white? Not anymore. 

The green label CX series are very mediocre. Tier 4 according to the list, so not absolutely terrible, but you can get better for around the same price. 

250GB is generally considered fine for a boot drive and a few games. Not all games need to be stored on the boot drive. 

According to the review of the 1050 Ti, it doesn't look like it will hold up too well at ultra. If you lower the settings, then it's fine, but why would you

[Herman Mcpootis]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: AMD - Ryzen 5 1600 3.2GHz 6-Core Processor  ($196.88 @ OutletPC) 
Motherboard: MSI - B350 TOMAHAWK ATX AM4 Motherboard  ($70.98 @ Newegg) 
Memory: GeIL - EVO POTENZA 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  ($127.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: SK hynix - SL308 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($77.88 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Seagate - BarraCuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($44.78 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB GAMING Video Card  ($264.99 @ Amazon) 
Case: Deepcool - EARLKASE RGB ATX Mid Tower Case  ($49.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Corsair - CX (2017) 650W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply  ($39.99 @ Newegg) 
Total: $873.48
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-09-14 21:36 EDT-0400