[SOLVED] Looking for opinions on what to downgrade on PC build

[teifang]

Hey everyone, so I am building a PC for Gaming and Photo Editing with LightRoom/Photoshop and my budget is supposed to be $2500. I will post the component parts below - if you could help me reach budget I would be very grateful. Currently the build is WITHOUT a monitor, keyboard, mouse or Power Supply and is still over budget. I am considering changing the idea of storing archived files on a large HDD to perhaps cloud storage. Open to suggestions and where I can cut some costs.

MOBO: Gigabyte Z390 AORUS ULTRA (Intel LGA1151/Z390/ATX/3xM.2 Thermal Guard/Onboard AC Wi-Fi/RGB Fusion/Gaming Motherboard) - $250 (Amazon)

CPU: Intel Core i-9 9900 Coffee Lake, 8-core, 16-Thread 3.6GHz (5.0GHz Turbo) LGA 1151 (300 Series) 95W - $525 (Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro Series H150i PRO Liquid CPU Cooler - $310 (Newegg)

RAM: Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-pin DDR4 SDRAM 2666 (PC421300) - $160 (Newegg)

GPU: EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Super XC Hybrid Gaming, 08G-P4-3188-KR, 8GB GDDR6, RGB LED Logo, Metal Backplate - $780 (Amazon)

Storage: Samsung 970 PRO SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe Interface Internal Solid State Drive with V-NAND Technology (MZ-V7P1T0BW), Black/Red - $350 (Amazon)
Seagate Barracuda 120 SSD 2TB Internal Solid State Drive – 2.5 Inch SATA 6GB/S for Computer Desktop PC Laptop (ZA2000CM10003) - $250 (Newegg)
Seagate IronWolf 10TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD – 3.5 Inch SATA 6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache RAID Network Attached Storage Home Servers - $255 (Amazon)

Case: NZXT H710i - $170 (Newegg)

Monitor: LG 34WK650-W 34" UltraWide 21:9 IPS Monitor with HDR10 and FreeSync (2018),black/white - $400 (Amazon)

Mouse: Corsair Gaming Glaive RGB Gaming Mouse, Backlit RGB LED, 16000 DPI, Optical - $78 (Newegg)

Keyboard: Logitech G910 Orion Spark RGB Mechanical Keyboard - $105 (Newegg)

Power Supply: Corsair RMx Series RM650x 650 Watt - $130 (Newegg)

Current Total: $3,633 (Over budget by $1,133)

I want to focus on speed with this PC - Speed and reliability which is why I've gone heavy on the MOBO, CPU, GPU, RAM and Storage options. I've done a pretty significant amount of research and the only thing I'm not certain about is if the Power Supply is rated high enough. The case I could work with changing (there's a lot of options) - the RGB features I thought would be awesome however my wife is not a huge fan, regardless of how 'cool' it will look, it's going to be in the main living room where everyone will see it and she doesn't want it to be an eye sore. The current MOBO is an eATX and the case supports that but so long as the case has some heavy duty cooling and maybe even a tinted glass side panel that's not quite so bright? My wife is a photographer and edits pictures for her business with LightRoom and I do Music Production with Studio One and I enjoy gaming from time to time. With this current build I was entertaining the idea of what it would cost to make it a VR machine too though from what I could tell, the Steam Valve Index is like an additional $1,000 for all of the hardware and such which doesn't make it as practical. Of course with the GPU it would be pretty future proofed for awhile but if I'm NOT going to do VR, then I wouldn't say I need to necessarily go THAT high with it. Additionally, I couldn't find a decent CPU closed circuit liquid cooler - I'm up for suggestions on a different one, since the price tag on the one I found was a whopping $310 which seems a bit over priced. The storage drives I'm also willing to downgrade a bit; my wife is using her 2TB computer and she's at 1.8TB used (so she's right at the tail end). My setup was going to ideally use the m.2 NVMe drive as my OS and LightRoom/Photoshop destination, then the other SSD as the workload drive that will house all the ongoing active projects and then the 10TB HDD as archival storage as I mentioned above. I figured 32GB of RAM would be sufficient, unless you think it may need more or less?

Thank you for your time and suggestions ahead of time!

 

[Gmoney06ss]

300+ for the h150i? What country are you shopping in? Because, yes that is overpriced. By near 160ish bucks.

Have you considered AMD? 3rd gen ryzen is on par with intel and would save you a large amount of cash. Also the h710i, while a nice case, lacks in cooling ability with the solid front panel.

 

[teifang]

300+ for the h150i? What country are you shopping in? Because, yes that is overpriced. By near 160ish bucks.

Have you considered AMD? 3rd gen ryzen is on par with intel and would save you a large amount of cash. Also the h710i, while a nice case, lacks in cooling ability with the solid front panel.

Yea actually my original build was off of the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and comparatively the i9-9900k out performed in gaming, though the 16 core count on the Ryzen (though I don't know if I'd really be tapping into that kind of core use) and the nearly double L3 cache are nice and it does beat the i9 in terms of workload, for overall use and for a slightly cheaper price, I went with the i9 after battling back and forth.
Hmm... Good to know about the case, I'll keep looking for other options. Thanks for your response.

 

[Eth0s_]

I second the 3900x suggestion. It's ~$100 cheaper than the 9900k on US amazon currently. Yes it will be slightly outperformed in gaming, but it will perform much better in some other productivity tasks. If you're not planning on running some intense overclocking I think the watercooling will be pretty overkill. The Noctua NH-D15S should be plenty for any realistic task you'd throw at your PC and drops ~$240 more off your price.

Obviously if you go this route you'll need to find a new motherboard and I'm afraid I can't really offer suggestions there but if you're going to be wired into the internet you can always consider a motherboard without a wireless card installed if you want to shave some more money off.

I think the RAM is fine. Whatever you decide on just make sure it's on your motherboard's QVL. You could go non-RGB and save a few bucks which might work out better for your wife anyway.

I honestly don't know enough about modern photo editing requirements to say whether the GPU you've listed is overkill or not, but I would look into whether you could get by with a 2070 super. It's still an insanely fast card and as far as gaming goes you should be able to max pretty much anything with the monitor you've listed.

These changes could shave ~$500-$600 off your price tag. You could go even further by sacrificing some storage space for now and expanding later.

The thing is you're looking for an absolute top of the line multi-purpose PC, and that carries some heavy dollar signs. If the MOBO, RAM, CPU, GPU being top of the line are very important to you and you wish to not replace them for years down the road, cutting down on luxuries that are not needed/easy to upgrade later is the only real way you could achieve your budget goal without buying a used system or components.

 

[Eth0s_]

To add to that, you could try the stock cooler on the 3900x if you went that route. Personally I think you'd get by with it just fine for your purposes. And if it proved to not be that way, look at how badly your temps are compared to what you want them to be. Then do the research and budgeting for an aftermarket cooler.

 

[GarrettL]

If your gaming at high resolutions then the 3900x is usually only a few frames less than the 9900K.

Ryzen 5 3600 vs. Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Core i9-9900K: GPU Scaling Benchmark

Having tested 3rd-gen Ryzen processors with the RTX 2080 Ti extensively, our idea behind this new feature is to add mainstream and budget GPUs to the mix...

www.techspot.com