Some Honest Advice?

[HBahlsac]

I'm thinking of building a gaming pc with my stimulus money. I've never built a rig before, and I have some concerns. Any honest advice would be helpful.
The rig, as I price parts seems to probably be an AMD build. Over the past week or so, it seems that I have been priced out of an Nvidia 2070 Super, and the AMD 5700XT looks to be in staying my price range, combined with an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X, 16GB of GSkill 3600 RAM, and an MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX motherboard. The benchmarks I can find for the 5700XT/3600X combination seem to be acceptable, however...

My concern is all of the posts about driver issues concerning the AMD 5700XT. Some people claim that AMD has largely solved the issues, but others claim they can't boot games without hard crashes. I don't think my gaming needs are too intensive, as I primarily will be playing Kerbal Space Program and Microsoft Flight Simulator X, with an eye towards the upcoming sequels for each of them. However, I am very leery of potentially building a pc with driver issues, as the last custom pc I bought had driver issues, and ended up getting beat to death with a hammer, and thrown out the window!

So, any help that can be given about these issues would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Oussebon]

What monitor will you be gaming on? What resolution and refresh rate? What kind of adaptive sync, if any?

If you don't know, what make and model?

Or if you're still debating that too, what is your full budget for the PC + monitor?

And what country and currency are you shopping in? USA + USD?

The monitor + system pairing is the key thing before splitting hairs over GPUs - as the answer may be that none of the above are the best fit

 

[zSCHIZOz]

I have an all AMD system. When I first bought it my PC had a load of things that needed work. Boot time, driver reliability, etc. But with time AMD has resolved almost all the issues with my PC. If you can save a considerable amount of money, go AMD for GPU. If you must have reliability chose nVidia.

For processors its kind of a no-brainer to go AMD. They are dominating the market and Intel is still trying to compete but they are falling short.

 

[HBahlsac]

What monitor will you be gaming on? What resolution and refresh rate? What kind of adaptive sync, if any?

If you don't know, what make and model?

Or if you're still debating that too, what is your full budget for the PC + monitor?

And what country and currency are you shopping in? USA + USD?

The monitor + system pairing is the key thing before splitting hairs over GPUs - as the answer may be that none of the above are the best fit

OK, so I want to hook this PC up to the 55" 4K TV in my living room. At least to begin with. I want to be able to just kick back on the couch and be able to break free of the consoles. My TV is an older 4K and the refresh rate is locked to 60Hz. I know that's not ideal, but it will work in the short term until I can upgrade it.

I'm in America, and budget wise, I am setting a $1300 hard limit before taxes and shipping.

 

[HBahlsac]

I have an all AMD system. When I first bought it my PC had a load of things that needed work. Boot time, driver reliability, etc. But with time AMD has resolved almost all the issues with my PC. If you can save a considerable amount of money, go AMD for GPU. If you must have reliability chose nVidia.

For processors its kind of a no-brainer to go AMD. They are dominating the market and Intel is still trying to compete but they are falling short.

As far as CPU, I was looking at the 3700X or the 3600X, and never even considered an Intel CPU. They seemed overpriced and underpowered from what I could find. I'm having a hard time trying to get the 3700X into a build that stays under the $1300 cap I have imposed on myself, so that's why I chose the 3600X, I can come in at about $1288.

I won't lie, I wanted the Nvidia 2070 Super, but the prices seem to have gone up by $150-200 in the past 10 days. I guess I'm not the only one looking to upgrade with the government's assistance. I understand that custom builds come with their own problems, but I don't want an endless series of headaches. If that's my future, then the consoles become a more attractive option as they are just plug and play. Or, possibly just say screw the whole idea, and buy that fretless bass I've had my eye on.

 

[Oussebon]

Can you post your full prospective build? Maybe via https://pcpartpicker.com/

May help fillet off some other expenses

 

[HBahlsac]

Can you post your full prospective build? Maybe via https://pcpartpicker.com/

May help fillet off some other expenses

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/tyVhx6
There is the link to what I'm currently thinking about buying. I get that it might seem like I have too many storage devices, but I want the boot drive separate from the SSD, and I also want the ability to record myself playing various riffs and songs on my bass, while storing several large games hence the HDD.

Thank you for your help.

 

[Oussebon]

1) save $47 because the Wraith cooler is included with the CPU if you're buying it boxed (as it seems to be on your listing)

And if you were spending $50 on a better than stock cooler, you wouldn't buy another stock cooler

2) Why that PSU? You can get decent gold rated ones for less e.g.
SeaSonic FOCUS Gold 750 W

3) Case choice is probably not optimal. As a rule of thumb, if you're buying a case and then spending another $30 on fans, buy a case that has more / better fans / design / features etc off the bat.

Or are you choosing it for specific features e.g. it being a relatively compact ATX case?

4) It's not too many storage drives in principle (I mean, look at my spec), but it's not optimal, either for your budget or for slot usage.

Stick to the 500gb SSD, and acquire other, larger SSDs down the line. If you ever do clean installs of the OS - one of the main arguments for having a separate OS-only drive - you need to reinstall most non-gaming software as well anyway. So you may as well have a larger OS drive to keep both the OS and the software on it.

I'd suggest dropping the M.2 SSD for now, and getting a faster 250gb+ M.2 SSD when funds allow.

You will ideally want favourite games on the SSD - you could easily buy a single 1TB SSD for the same price as your current 2 SSDs. e.g. Crucial MX500.

You don't want to have lots of small SSDs as they are a pest to juggle things between, and if you create music you'll eventually want another SSD on top of what you buy now for sample libraries and so on.

 

[HBahlsac]

1) save $47 because the Wraith cooler is included with the CPU if you're buying it boxed (as it seems to be on your listing)

And if you were spending $50 on a better than stock cooler, you wouldn't buy another stock cooler

2) Why that PSU? You can get decent gold rated ones for less e.g.
SeaSonic FOCUS Gold 750 W

3) Case choice is probably not optimal. As a rule of thumb, if you're buying a case and then spending another $30 on fans, buy a case that has more / better fans / design / features etc off the bat.

Or are you choosing it for specific features e.g. it being a relatively compact ATX case?

4) It's not too many storage drives in principle (I mean, look at my spec), but it's not optimal, either for your budget or for slot usage.

Stick to the 500gb SSD, and acquire other, larger SSDs down the line. If you ever do clean installs of the OS - one of the main arguments for having a separate OS-only drive - you need to reinstall most non-gaming software as well anyway. So you may as well have a larger OS drive to keep both the OS and the software on it.

I'd suggest dropping the M.2 SSD for now, and getting a faster 250gb+ M.2 SSD when funds allow.

You will ideally want favourite games on the SSD - you could easily buy a single 1TB SSD for the same price as your current 2 SSDs. e.g. Crucial MX500.

You don't want to have lots of small SSDs as they are a pest to juggle things between, and if you create music you'll eventually want another SSD on top of what you buy now for sample libraries and so on.

https://pcpartpicker.com/user/HBahlsac/saved/z89p23
Based off of your advice, the above link is to a modified parts list. How does that look? It has me back to a 2070 Super and right at $1300.

Thanks for that info. Let me go point by point to ask a couple questions if you don't mind.
1.) Done, I wasn't sure about the need for that anyway.

2.) The PSU has been one of the most head pounding items to come up with. Every time I choose one, PC partspicker throws up an error about the motherboard having an extra 4 pin 12 volt connector that the PSU lacks, or the PSU is out of stock the next time I look at it. Granted, the 4 pin/12 volt problem was exclusive to when I was looking at the X570 chipset, and ultimately drove me to the B450 chipset. The new PSU is 650W to be less money than the 750W you suggested, but still in a good place for the efficiency curve of the unit.

3.) My decision to purchase the fans in addition to the case was to be able to have 2 140mm fans intaking air from the front, and 2 120mm fans exhausting air out the top and back so I could have positive pressure in the case to help with dust management. Was that a bad idea? I dropped the 120mm fan, figuring that I can just use bothe the fans that come with the case.

4.) The M.2 is now 256Gb.

 

[Oussebon]

2.) The PSU has been one of the most head pounding items to come up with. Every time I choose one, PC partspicker throws up an error about the motherboard having an extra 4 pin 12 volt connector that the PSU lacks, or the PSU is out of stock the next time I look at it. Granted, the 4 pin/12 volt problem was exclusive to when I was looking at the X570 chipset, and ultimately drove me to the B450 chipset.

It's also largely a non-issue outside of beefy CPUs with beefy oveclocks. But there's no reason I can think of to get the Cooler Master PSU at that price.

3) You might not actually get positive pressure with that setup. 2 front, 1 rear would be more usual. Also point still stands about just getting a better case. P400A Digital perhaps?

4) Not much hassle. A few ways you could do it.

You could partition the 1TB drive and have 250gb for OS + programs and 750gb for games (obviously a bit less because you don't get 1024GB, you only get 931GB but you get the idea).

When the time comes, use the free and easy to use (and very powerful) tool called Macrium Reflect to copy the relevant partitions to the new drive. Check it works. Delete the partitions off the old drive. Extend the games partition to make use of the vacated space. All doable via GUI (no command line stuff) in Disk Management or with something like Minitool Partition Wizard. You'd could be done in half an hour including the copying time.

Or don't partition the drive and just do a clean install + format the old drive. They're not that much hassle to do and you'd do clean installs of Windows periodically anyway (if and when Windows 10 breaks itself with upgrades for example). You could just copy the games onto another /external drive and then copy them back once you formatted the 1TB drive so as to save the bother of redownloading them.

Most games don't need redownloading after a clean install, you can copy them back and the game clients can be told where to find the game files.

How to transfer game files between PCs

It's possible on every major digital storefront... except the Microsoft Store.

www.pcgamer.com