Since I stopped building the custom PC's a good few years ago now, I've had one PC and used that for gaming, photo editing and my main usage, web development. Now though its starting to creak, especially with some of the latest titles I play. For work, it's fine. I currently have an Asus P6T, Core i7 920, 16gb RAM, nVidia GTX960 and 2Tb HDD. As I'm so out of touch with building PC's, any recommendations for components would be really helpful at the mo and much appreciated. I've got up to £1000 to spend on the base unit. I have a good 32" monitor, keyboard & mouse, speakers and external storage so I just need a base unit that I can spec out and build. Nothing fancy in terms of design or anything like that.
The default recommendation for bang for buck is something along these lines (plus or minus depending on budget) Ryzen R5 3600 B450 or B550 Motherboard (or x570 if budget stretches and you want the extra features) 16GB or 32GB of 3200 Mhz RAM GPU - Current bang for buck would be a Nvidia 1660 Super (or Ti ) but the whole GPU market is in flux right now with new releases from Nvidia and AMD in the next month or so. As always, the more you spend the longer it will last. 550w+ PSU (decent quality brand) Case of choice (too many options!) As big an NVME M.2 SSD as you can afford with maybe a cheaper secondary SATA SSD to increase capacity (or mechanical HDD if you need >2TBs of data) That will probably come out a bit more than £1000 but you can then priortise
i5-10400F ~£150 Gigabyte B460M Aorus Pro ~£100 MSI 2060 Super Ventus GP OC ~£380 Team 2x8 GB Vulcan Z T Force 3200 ~£60 Crucial P1 1TB M.2 ~£105 Fractal Design Focus G Mini ~£45 Corsair CX550M ~£65 Coolermaster Hyper 212 Evo ~£30 Comes to about £950, or £1000 if you wanted to move up to 32GB Ram. That being said, I'd recommend waiting instead, new GPUs due from AMD at the end of the month (and the new more budget friendly Nvidia GPUs are due soon as well).
Thanks fellas, so on both your advice, looks like I'm going to hold off on the new PC until the new GPUs hit the shelves. I'm leaning towards 32gb for RAM, I use Lightroom and Capture One Pro (Fuji) a lot so I think it would be money well spent there.
Well I ended up sorting the new PC out, I bought all the parts from Ebuyer and put the PC together last night. I'm blown away with the improved speed and the virtually silent running, especially when compared to my old PC. So I ended up getting: Asus ROG Strix B450-F AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU Corsair Vengeance LPX Black 32GB 3600MHz 2x16GB DDR4 Corsair Carbide Series SPEC-05 case Aerocool Integrator MX 600W PSU Adata XPG SX8200 Pro M.2 SSD - 2TB PowerColor Radeon RX 5600 XT 6GB Red Dragon GPU I've got a 1GB SSD from my old PC that I've dropped in to the new one as a second drive. I had to get a couple of decent case fans too, the total spend came out at just over a grand. It's not going to break benchmark records but it's a massive improvement over my old rig and it came in ever so slightly over budget, so job done
I couldn't help myself!! With the upgrade from the Corsair Spec 05 to the Lian Li PC011 Dynamic case, the new case was begging for something visual with the tinted glass front and side. So I bought a 3 pack of the Corsair QL120 aRGB fans with the bundled controller. Been messing about with lighting schemes since
Nice. I was itching to write out a full page of advice, but you already got good advice and bought components, so I've missed the bus. If you need extra storage for games, keep an eye on the price of the Crucial MX500 1TB SATA, currently my favourite budget SSD, often comes down to £80 on lightning deals. edit - just reread properly and realised you've got a combined 3TB of storage, so probably not lol
Thanks. I will need extra storage for my photo collection at some point so will keep an eye out for those SSDs. I'm also playing with the idea of setting up a RAID array so might end up buying some more drives.
