My daughters flatmate has asked me to build him a new PC. He wants it to be able to run the new cyberpunk game and his monitor is 1080P. He will need everything bar from the monitor and peripherals and the only thing that will be carried across from his old pc will be his HDD which will be used for non gaming related storage. As the title suggests he has a budget of £700 odd, might get away without buying a copy of windows if his old copy will transfer across but if not I will buy a cheap one from somewhere with the view to buying a more legit copy when he has the money. I'm think of a 1TB M2 NVME SSD, 16 gb of DDR4 and probably a 1660Ti but CPU and motherboard are where I'm a little stuck. Cpc recommend the I3 8300 as a budget gaming CPU but as I see in my copy of CPC this morning the AMD 3300X has come along and seems to be pretty good (got a premium award) . He could of reused his old Zalman case but that took some damage when he dropped it out of his parents car during transport.
3300X is the go to choice for a budget gaming CPU right now. The lower end Intel CPUs need fast memory and a Z series board to make up ground on the 3300X, which kills them as value options. That might change if Intel decide to unlock the memory on B & H series boards
Oh oh, pcparpicker time! This one isn't easy. I went a bit over 700 quid, and honestly I'd chuck in a good CPU cooler down the line and overclock. https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/ktbsQq While I know their are cheaper m.2 SSDs, this is the cheapest with DRAM cache I could find. This being the only SSD in the system, it'll fill up quickly with games. DRAM-less m.2 at 75%+ used capacity will soil the linen, I mean below spinning rust performance. As for the GPU, it's the best performing one I could find under 200 quid. You can maybe find something better second hand. There are cheaper cases, but mostly awful.
Might swap out the SSD for a slightly cheaper one that my lad and I have, seems fast enough and then see if I can push him nearer to £800 so he can have the 1660ti and a better cooler. Crucial I think he has a Zalman something or other in his pc at the moment but I doubt it has AM4 mounts and or is good enough.
The corsir have massively longer lifespan than the Crucial, its by far the biggest for its price point!
I'd go for a smaller m.2 and a 2tb spinner, or save some money and get a 960gb-1tb 2.5" SSD. Are you absolutely set on a 1660ti? Would you consider a 5600 XT?
I don't think he would be bothered which, he has a 7970 at the moment. I really wanted the M2 to save on wiring
Go for 1TB ssd, its lots for just gaming! Its what I have and I have 20+ games installed! The truth is 1TB is basically all you need for storage on a gaming system. And why go for a worse, be it longevity or performance, drive over a good one? Spinning rust has no place in a gaming system. And I'm totally with you on a M.2 for less wiring! At the end of the day, in a year upgrading the GPU is far easier than upgrading and rebuilding a SSD!
I'll balance up the differences. The 5600XT certainly looks a match for the 1660TI, seems as per usual some games favour AMD and some Nvidia in the bench marks, the 5600XT can be bought for less money so that's good. As for the Corsair having a longer lifespan than the crucial they both have a 5 year warranty and the crucial is nearly £35 cheaper for basically the same capacity. I'm also a little annoyed with corsair as they were supposed to sending me replacement keys for my K70 but saw fit to send them to Canada instead, then stopped me having access to my corsair account and then stopped responding to my emails.
From Crucial '† Three years or five years or writing the maximum total bytes written (TBW) as published in the product datasheet and as measured in the product’s SMART data, whichever comes first.' It has 200TBW, MTBF 1,500,000 hours. The corsair for compairson is 1700TBW and MTBF 1,800,000 hours.
Very unlikely to ever hit those values though, 12 hours a day usage is 125,000 days and my old Evo 840 only has 24tb writes after over 6 years as a main windows and games drive. If he wasn't on a tight budget I'd go with the corsair for sure.
Can anyone suggest a different mother board as the asrock B450M pro4 is out of stock, plus it looks like hes going to have to have the 3600 as the 3300 is out of stock too
MSI B450M Mortar Max if you're only using one nvme or can do without the pciex4 slot if using the second nvme slot as well. The Asrock was the other I considered before the MSI.
Out of stock on amazon too plus its another £20 and I'm trying to push him towards a 2060 so the budget is already stretched.
