Ok hive, I need some help. I no longer know crap about computers, never did any real gaming, and my son is wanting to build a gaming desktop. I want to make sure that he spends his money well, he has worked hard this year and saved $800 so far. May not sound like much, but for him to actually save money is pretty huge to me, and I’m going to help him with it. My philosophy is to buy it right the first time and save money in the long run when practical. He had talked about buying some things then upgrading later, but since the likelihood of getting any return for entry level goods is unlikely, I recommended he look at something that is a better grade that will hold him for a good while. He doesn’t need top end things, but I want to make sure that his research is sound before he spends a bunch of money and gets disappointed. The games that he primarily plays are the DOOM games, Warhammer 40K (especially Space Marine), Jurassic World Evolution and it’s sequels, Monster Hunter and Cyberpunk. The set up he is looking at is a ASUS ROG Strix X870-A motherboard, $319, a AMD Ryzen 7 9700X cpu, $306, Sapphire Nitro+ RX 9070xt gpu, $800, Corsair Vengance DDR5 6400MHz 32GB ram, $100, Okinos Cypress 7 case, $87, Thermaltake toughpower 1050w power supply, $136, Arctic Freezer III Pro ACFRE00184A cooling, $96, 2TB Samsung 990 EVO plus storage, $130. The graphics seems a little crazy to me, but I may be just ignorant of what things go for these days. I started back in the days of the TRS-80 with a cassette drive and then an 8086, so I have no frame of reference. I also figure that those of you that know these things are much more helpful than me trying to google stuff and learning nothing accurate. Are these good starting points, are any of them stupid overkill, can you give me any recommendations? I really appreciate it. Thanks!
In reply to HoserRacing :
Eyeballing the build list it looks good and not too excessive, the most demanding game he wants to play is probably Cyberpunk 2077. The things that might be overkill are the GPU and the power supply. I'd have to look up the power requirements of each component to be sure, but I'd think an 800W PSU would cover it. I once ran a pretty power-hungry gaming PC that had twin video cards in SLI and twin 10krpm HDDs in RAID0 on a 650W PSU and it would trip out sometimes, an 800W PSU fixed the problem (and I'm still using it to this day).
Cyberpunk 2077 can eat all the graphical processing power you can throw at it, but buying a used GPU in the ballpark of an RTX3070 could give a lot better value for money. Buying anything close to the latest and greatest new video card is always going to be extra expensive, and in recent years there have been few games that can benefit significantly from them.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Thanks for the input! I had told him to prep for any upgrades later where it wasn't too expensive, so I had not even looked at the power supply since it was one of the lower priced items. Knowing that things are basically a flash in the pan since technology is moving so fast, I had steered him away from used, but that was from my fear of not knowing the market well enough to know what a good deal is or isn't.
HoserRacing said:
The graphics seems a little crazy to me, but I may be just ignorant of what things go for these days.
The pricing of graphics cards has gotten completely out of hand due to their use in AI and Crypto mining.
That said, paying $800 for a $600 9700XT is a bad deal.
The mother board choice is not a good one. If you are not going to over clock the cpu a standard motherboard is really all you need. The ROG STRIX is the top dog. Unless you are messing with over clocking and need all the features of the bios and the best quality VRMs it is a wast of money. A TUF gaming mother board is plenty good. If it matters it is what my son uses and he does a bunch of gaming.
The YouTuber Jays Two cents just put out a video about building a gaming pc at a reasonable price and discusses the choices and why you make them.
You both should watch this. It will most likely change your purchasing choices.
In reply to dean1484 :
Thank you! I'll sit down with him tonight and watch that. I appreciate it!
So what did you end up going with?
In reply to HoserRacing :
I would check Power supply. You may be able to shave off a few dollars there. The GPU may be a bit excessive but for cyberpunk it may just be needed. i would consider that new gen upper mid to lower high spec build. I have a ASUS ROG Strix B550-F and its amazing. Keep in mind thats AM4 and only supports ddr4 RAM. But the ASUS ROG Strix stuff is good value for the money. The GPU is overpriced in my opinion. It is rare to find a fairly priced cpu or gpu today. none of the prices make any sense. The RX 9060XT is only $300-360 which is a much better deal. I would search around for a more fairly priced GPU with benchmarks and stuff.
Plugging GP Simports right here if he wants to play assetto corsa with us.
In reply to dean1484 :
The video was a great tool for us to watch, I really appreciate it! He ended up going to the MicroCenter in Kennesaw after watching that and found a few deals. Here is what he ended up going with:
AsRock Phantom Gaming X870E motherboard
Thermaltake Toughpower power source (after watching what the video said about cheaper to overbuild then have to replace later, he went ahead & got this just so he's got room for later if needed)
TeamGroup T-Create 32G Ram
Havn 420 MidTower case (He loved the clear glass of it)
Radeon RX 6950 XT 16GB- Graphics Card (used from ebay with warranty - it works with his VR stuff he already has so he doesn't have to get an adapter)
Samsung 990 Evo Plus SSD, 2TB
Ryzen 7 9700X processor
Phantom Spirit 120SE cooling
I think that's all of it lol He was a little disappointed when he started to dig into everything last night after his case arrived, opened the motherboard, and there are some bent pins on the place where the processor clips in, so having to do a return with Amazon, replacement gets here Wednesday or Thursday.
Sounds like a good solid PC!!!!
In reply to dean1484 :
Thank you Dean, I'm hoping he gets lots of good fun and enjoyment out of this, I really can't say enough how much I appreciate y'all's input, I know where my knowledge stops, glad to have the hive around for the rest of the information!
Just wanted to say thanks again, the motherboard replacement got delayed, so he went back to Microcenter, got one from them and got everything assembled last night, turned it on and everything worked great. It was such a good feeling watching him do this. He has helped his friends with repairing old video game systems, and trying to figure out things through watching videos, but this in my opinion is the first serious ground up thing he's done, and I was proud that he was able to accomplish it. He also told me he learned something else for his PS5 from watching more of that guy's videos, so that was a plus as well. Love the hive!
I learned so much building mine. Im glad he enjoyed it!
In reply to HoserRacing :
I like Jay. He has some good content. He does not talk about it much on his channel but he is also a serious car guy as well. He has at least two and possibly three really cool cars. Seems to be just a good guy that wants to share his passion for everything PC related while not getting so far in to the weeds.
If one was wanting to build a PC to only do sim racing (lets say iRacing game)
What would be a good setup for a computer?
How much should be budgeted?
In reply to hybridmomentspass :
I think a lot of it depends on how serious you want to be with it. I was doing iRacing with my old laptop, seemed to be fine, it was a gaming laptop, but that was several years ago. I'll let someone with more knowledge give you more information, but I think one question will be how serious you want to be. Do you want to go head to head with serious drivers and have all the visuals of really being there? Or do you want to learn the tracks before you go race? Or do you just want to have some fun and pass some time racing on the computer? Good luck, I was really happy with the input from the hive!
I want to learn tracks and have a fun hobby
I dont need to go head to head with serious drivers, but I dont want to be lagging behind due to software/hardware constraints in the PC
In reply to hybridmomentspass :
you can definitly budget and not lag behind at all. You will have worse graphics but performace will be just fine. I was running an i310100F gtx 1650 and 16gb RAM and I had no problems.
Yeah iRacing is not much more demanding than AC, it requires something resembling a gaming video card but I wouldn't be surprised if a modern office computer ran it well (Edit: 16GB RAM being nothing too special these days...but it might be more than an older PC would have):
https://www.iracing.com/membership/system-requirements/
Just watch out for iRacing's relatively huge subscription and DLC costs!
