I'm sure this has been done many times, but just a quick sanity check for a prospective update to my rig. Currently on an i5 Haswell machine which is fine, but starting to feel a little outpaced in newer games. What's really tempting me though is the NVMe 4.0x SSDs as I've always been a storage whore. Anyway, currently looking at (with Scan.co.uk prices): Ryzen 5 3600X - £189 Asus Prime X570-P - £160 2x8GB Corsair LPX 3600Mhz - £75 500GB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe - £127 Now I could save £25 and go for a B550 mobo, but it doesn't seem like £25 is worth stepping down to an inferior chipset, especially with what I've read as the better memory bandwidth. Any glaringly stupid choices? It seems to tick my usual boxes. Quick edit: What's the best general benchmarking platform to use these days? Would like to get a before/after comparison just for fun.
You're insane, there I said it! Personally I'd go for the Corsair MP510 as the SSD, as it have an obserdly high MTBF and TBW values, far exceeding anything else out there and it'll double the capacity. In real world use the difference in speed will be invisable.
Can save a few £ for plain 3600? I'm sure there are cheaper RAM sticks, should be able to get 16GB for for around £60. That 500GB NVMe drive looks expensive, you can get ~1TB one for cheaper if you can downgrade speed from 5000 to 3500. But each to their own. One benefit with X570 is that you can have 2 or even 3 NVMe PCIe gen4 drives. So it's well worth going for it if that's what you want. Benchmarking? For CPU speed, I now use 7-zip just because I already have it. Cinebench seems to be used by a lot of people.
Thanks both, I think you're right that the SSD is a bit excessive for the price, looking a bit more closely the 1TB ones aren't that much more expensive, and shortly the Corsair M600 coming which is in the 4.7GB/s read kind of area (theoretical obviously) so still a huge step up from my current SATA3. The RAM I went with as 3.6GHz for extra bandwidth seems to be recommended for Ryzen as that's its party piece. On the CPU I was mistaken - it was the non-X I'd basketed, the X and XT are both quite a bit more, and I won't be overclocking for now.
I'd spend a little more to get a better motherboard - I paid £176 for the Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite on Amazon (the price fluctuates so you have to keep an eye on it). Or you can get the Asus TUF for £180 - both seem like a step up in quality and extra ports over the cheapest board. You'd still be fine with the one you specified though. On another note, I've never really seen the point of nVMe seeing as SATA SSDs are so much cheaper for high capacity drives. Depending on your usage there may be almost no performance difference. That drive seems expensive for the storage capacity (I got a 2TB drive 2 years ago for similar money) https://www.techspot.com/review/1956-storage-performance/
Hmm that's disappointing, I made the n00b error of thinking that new-gen = quite a lot faster. That said, I'd still have NVMe as it's a bit quicker, but mostly as I've got too few SATA ports on a standard mobo with 6.
£189 is the price for the 3600, not the 3600X, but that's fine - it's a good chip. Pro series SSDs, regardless of format, are not worth the premium.
Nothing wrong with your spec really, I would go for a cheaper bigger nvme drive and probably a lower spec mobo There's bugger all difference in price between a cheap sata and cheap NVMe drive these days, couple of quid in it, I would go NVMe, in gaming systems even the drives with lower quoted life will be fine, I have been running cheap ass adata 2TB ones for almost 2 years, they've been 190-210 over that time, bargain for what they offer. unless you are after some special OC potential, specific lane requirement or some higher quality bundled gear a cheap 550 will be fine, B550 still gives you gen 4 lanes from CPU, just not to the chipset/southbridge, so unless you see yourself plugging tonnes of stuff in, it is not so important, personally I find myself more and more plugging in high speed 10Gb usb devices so it wouldn't be my choice but if you are the type to fit a big drive, a gpu and close up the machine for years you might not need more. chipset comparison https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AMD-X570-vs-B550-vs-A520-Chipset-Comparison-1969/ I'd go cheaper 550 board and put the left over towards a cheap 2Tb nvme or more CPU, if its just for games.
Thanks, ordered. And thanks all for the advice so far, really very much appreciated. Went for an MSI X570 board in the end, but the difference was about £10 from that to the B550, but the layout of the X board is slightly more beneficial for my case setup. Also the Corsair RAM as found - can be had slightly cheaper than Scan price, but then you've got to add postage etc which made it effectively the same price everywhere. Now just to find an NVMe drive and I'm done.
I don't know what your typical usage is, but there's barely any difference in loading games between SSDs. I found this article very illuminating: https://www.techspot.com/review/2116-storage-speed-game-loading/ Of course if you're doing lots of intensive reads/writes then there's a bigger difference! Enjoy your new build
Yep, I'm not bothering getting in a twist about PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives now, but I am going to get one as this machine also kinda serves as a NAS for now. In future I'll split it out, but for now I need minimum 5x SATA3 mechanicals running, and probably add a 6th as backup. Yep it's not that one, but if I do have any issues I'll be straight back onto them about it
I realise I'm late to the party, but if you haven't built yet and wanted to change your mind and go through the faff of returning, Awd-IT had the 3600 and 3600X both for ~£190 (oddly) on Sun/Mon when I was looking.
Thanks, I'm not sure I can really be bothered now! Bought the mobo, CPU and RAM and all up and running - I forget how good Win10 is at switching hardware, took about 2 minutes of driver swapping and it booted straight up. Modestly overclocked at 4.4GHz - my plans for an NVMe drive were scuppered by forgetting that my waterblock wasn't compatible with AM4... So £100 spent on a new block and a few sundry bits to refresh the WC loop have left me back where it was.
