Build Advice Complete new build or upgrade what I have ?

Good morning all,

I might be in a position at the end of next month to be able to afford to upgrade my PC. Now I'm in two minds what to do. Specs are in my sig down below.

I would be able to afford a complete new build and I'm looking at going for a Ryzen as opposed to Intel build as the benchmarks and performance levels speak for themselves. I mainly play games at 1080 and on a 23 inch monitor so graphics card I am looking at going with a GTX 1050 Ti as I feel that is a lot of card for the money and performance.

I've costed out a build which comes to £930 and a few pence as I will essentially start from scratch, the only things I wouldn't need to buy is a keyboard, mouse & monitor and neither do I need an operating system as I have a retail Windows 8 Pro which I used when Windows 10 was free.

Or looking at my current hardware which has never actually given me any problems with anything I've played or ran on it (other than Forza Horizon 3 due to only 2 gig GPU) and just upgrade the GPU and put in a large SSD.

I'll have around £1,000 to play with (hopefully)

 

Easy these days. Ryzen 1600, 3000mhz ram, B350 Strix happy days

 

I can vouch for the 1050Ti, thing is a little pocket rocket @ 1080p and they don't argue when it comes to cranking up the clocks either... Hopefully Nvidia (or anybody!) will eventually release a driver/BIOS that removes the current 1911Mhz cap. To be fair, because of the miners ruining everything for everybody else, the only viable options atm are the 1050Ti or 1080... Unless you go 2nd hand, but then nothing will come close to the performance per watt.

I would say a 1600, hell even a 1500 with the IPC increase, would be worth the upgrade cost - especially as B350 boards can be had so cheap. If you pick up some 2400/2666Mhz DDR4 2nd hand on the cheap, that's a whole lot of platform upgrade for not a lot of outlay.

 

I wouldn't buy DDR4 slower than 3000. Ryzen likes fast ram, and up to 3200 it really makes a huge difference.

 

The same thing has always been said of RAM, and it only makes a "huge" difference in benchmark performance, not real-world everyday use. I have bog-standard 2400MHz DDR4 and my rig is snappy as hell, despite falling behind Ryzen's memory performance in some benchmark tests.

@Behemoth, if you have £1000 to play with you should be able to put together a Ryzen 1600 & GTX1070 rig together quite comfortably. IMO you should keep what you can, e.g. case and PSU if they are up to snuff for the new hardware. If you're only gaming at 1080p then a GTX1060 would be perfect for you, and that'll take the total cost of an upgrade down considerably.

In addition to comments above re. memory, it's of far more use to you to get a good SSD. I reckon you could put together a new Ryzen R5 1600, 16GB RAM, GTX1060 system for around £800-850, and I would thoroughly recommend that you do!

Edit: couldn't resist putting a system together for you. This is Scan only so you could probably get the price down quite a bit by shopping around. DDR4 is stupidly expensive now (I got 16GB for £70...).

You already have a good case and (presumably) a good PSU, so this is all you really need.

 

I've got a Corsair CX750 at the moment, its not all that old to be fair. I was looking at going to a larger case as I'd like to put more hard drives in, I have about 5 - 6 drives and the Air 240 only has room for three but I could stick with that case and stay mATX as that would save some money which I could put into a better graphics card. I think in reality I'm looking at building something thats going to last at least 4 years (ha I'll be lucky) out of this upgrade as opposed to doing incremental ones every 2 years like I have been.

 

Yeah see if I paid £275 for a 1060 I would have to kick my own ass.

Ram on Intel is totally different. The CPU is made up of two quad core units and the faster your ram the faster they "talk" meaning massive improvements in rendering, gaming and benchmarks. The B350 Prime is rubbish also, loads of issues.

 

@Behemoth, you'll easily get four years out of a good Ryzen system. And by all means you should use up your budget by getting the components you want; my list above was just an indication of how cheap Ryzen can be. I don't think there's much point getting a GTX 1070 for your gaming resolution.

@Vault, I think that "massive" improvements in gaming can only come from a more powerful GPU, not +600MHz on the RAM frequency. I know Intel RAM works differently, but my point stands: 3000MHz RAM is not necessary for a powerful and enduring gaming system. It's L337 hardware for people who want and can afford the very best.

 

I can see what your saying there but that MIGHT change if I decided to get a bigger monitor or wanted a bigger resolution, but to be honest a 1060 with 6 GB would probably see me through for quite sometime

It really all hinges on my job and IF they offer me a new position on a new campaign within the company when the contract for the current campaign expires at the end of next month.

 

Have you looked at prices recently? it's like £20 extra going from the slowest DDR4 to 3000. Your point is wrong dude. Seriously, every single review out there and every Youtube video says that the faster the ram the better. You're good to 2988 (so 3000) and then you run into problems.

Ryzen is absolutely pants for gaming unless it's overclocked running fast ram. That is how the whole platform works. You will score about 1300 points in Cinebench @ 3.9ghz on crap ram. Change that to 3000 ram? you're talking north of 1700. And the same boosts are seen in gaming also.

 

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...-kit-black-tdked416g3000hc16ad-my-083-tg.html

£6 more than your Corsair.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...al-channel-kit-grey-tlgd416g30-my-087-tg.html

Cheaper than your Corsair.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/team...-channel-kit-grey-tdged416g300-my-089-tg.html

Also cheaper than your Corsair (though arguably not as much).

ETC, ETC. If you put Ryzen with slow ram you're crazy, given that it depends on it.

 

I'll just link to the cold hard numbers for the gaming impact of Ram speeds on Ryzen:

https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/AMD/Ryzen_Memory_Analysis/9.html

 

On March 31st 2017.
A lot has changed since then.

 

This is what I've come up with, given I won't be going down the road of a full system now, I've gone for a slightly higher spec CPU.

 

I really would not buy a Gigabyte board.They over volt like crazy. I would pay the extra for the B350 Strix, because it's the best B350 board bar none. It also has a really nice sound card and Nichicon caps for the headphone amp part. I would not pay that for ram. Not when it's £20 cheaper elsewhere. I'm also not sure the 1600X is worth £30 more than the 1600, tbh. Also, nearly £290 for a 1060? nah. Seriously, wait until mining crashes. That's a friggin piss take.

https://www.eteknix.com/memory-speed-large-impact-ryzen-performance/

Is also worth a read... It's the exact same story in Tomb Raider (the new patch).

 

I was just basing it on what was in stock, when I have the money (well if) I know things will be different then.

I've always used Gigabyte or Asrock boards, but will concede to the superior intellect and look at the Asus - not had much luck with Asus boards before.

 

Doesn't really matter that it got better since then, the difference was already enough to justify faster ram back then (at the low resolutions in question here).

 

Yeah I know man, but it has just gotten better since

 

Terrible time to upgrade, prices on all hardware is pretty mental, especially GPU's.

Not sure when it will all die down however.

 

Its always a terrible time to upgrade, its a case of it needs to be done when I have the money. Although I could sit on it for a while and see what happens.