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Build Advice Please check my gaming build before I buy the parts.

angry.pidgeon

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Hello. This is my almost finished list to buy after some research, please advise as needed.

The build idea is proportional scaling of price and performance (from my old PC: I7 3930K, GTX 690, 16GB) with no other budget restriction. The scale however is a bit of a rule of thumb

e.g. RTX 4070 ti rises 46% in price but only delivers 26% more speed than RTX 4070.
vs GTX 690 these cards increase in performance by 496% and 373% respectively, so I should be able to play modern games in HD

Thank you

List #1 (updated after talks)
 
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You don't need to buy a tube of, well, frankly, overpriced thermal compound. AS5 is a product from yesteryear, people only get it because they know the name. It was pretty good in the early 2000s, but since then...not so much. If you are going for a premium paste look at Noctua, Thermal Grizzly, Gelid, KPX, and many more. If you want a decent and cheap paste, look at Arctic MX-4 or MX-5 (Not the same company as Arctic Silver)

The included paste with the CPU cooler is perfectly fine to use as well.

I would actually go a little faster on the memory. DDR5 6000 CL32 isn't too bad price wise. (basically DDR4 3000 CL 16 latency) Also some CL30 out there. 5600 CL36 is basically DDR4 2800 CL18. which is pretty meh for a DDR4 system. Either way you get the bandwidth advantage, but for gaming you want the latency too.



Definitely the Cooler Master PSU over the Kolink.

If I were picking though:




As to storage I would take one these: (Partial to Crucial and Sabrent myself at the moment, but Sabrent is a little pricier than Samsung, which is usually not the case)



 
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1. NEVER cheap out on PSUs. You'll regret it when the PSU explodes and fries your other components (Yes, if the PSU explodes, the PSU isn't going to be the only component that dies)

2. I am concerned about the airflow of the case. The case looks like it has poor airflow.

3. The RAM is made by Samsung. If you want to manually overclock your RAM and potentially increase your performance by 10%, buy RAM kits made by SK Hynix.

4. Just a suggestion, you might be interested in the RX 6800 (XT) from AMD. The 16GB VRAM advantage will make it age better than the RTX 4070.
 
True, I just picked the "expensive" paste not knowing one comes with the cooler

I may notice the difference in latency up to 36. My current is 9, and human threshold is 16. But what can I do? I run two Android emulators at minimum graphical setting, they bloat up to 14.4GB RAM, and this MMO game menus can take 15 seconds to load up even when 1 instance is open, and in some areas and events game drops to like 0.5 fps, which is caused by CPU/RAM primarily I guess, since playing in HD or lowest settings hardly matters except in actual PVP where lack of jittering matters. Others report playing well on modern mobile, meaning better processing power of the many different moving parts in this game. I've played Counterstrike long ago with up to 100 ms, then Planetside 2 (MMO FPS), and couldn't really complain about the latency / lag, I was performing well

My current DDR3

About SSD, the one I picked boasts 7GB/s and that's all I look at when choosing, besides being recommended here and there as one of the fastest

About the airflow, if it has 3-4 fans like in the picture it will be fine, because I leave the case open so there's nothing holding the air inside. The PC is actually a good economical room heater in Spring and Autumn :)

About the PSU, I may revert to a 750W, considering it should be sturdy enough to handle my 500W build. Or 850W, whichever is cheaper and gold. I will only run the default turbo and motherboard OC settings, nothing manual or out of the ordinary. Not a fan of experimenting. Never had one blow up, but at least one croaked silently which was annoying

About Radeon / AMD, I've had an ATI Radeon whose condensers blew up 1 month after the 3 years warranty. Furthermore I've never had anything remotely similar happen so it's too suspicious. AMD bought ATI, therefore I will also never buy AMD, just as will never buy Sony after the bad experience I had in Planetside 2 etc.
 
... and here we are with yet another poster who wants to go cheap on the one component you should never go cheap on... the PSU.

Please don't.
 
True, I just picked the "expensive" paste not knowing one comes with the cooler

I may notice the difference in latency up to 36. My current is 9, and human threshold is 16. But what can I do? I run two Android emulators at minimum graphical setting, they bloat up to 14.4GB RAM, and this MMO game menus can take 15 seconds to load up even when 1 instance is open, and in some areas and events game drops to like 0.5 fps, which is caused by CPU/RAM primarily I guess, since playing in HD or lowest settings hardly matters except in actual PVP where lack of jittering matters. Others report playing well on modern mobile, meaning better processing power of the many different moving parts in this game. I've played Counterstrike long ago with up to 100 ms, then Planetside 2 (MMO FPS), and couldn't really complain about the latency / lag, I was performing well

I think you are conflating input lag and visual latency plus human reaction time with memory latency.

Monitors and the like are measured in milliseconds, or 1000th of a second. Human reaction time is roughly 25ms on average.

Latency in memory is measured in nanoseconds, or billionths of a second.

First Word Latency is basically how long the memory takes to store data as directed by the CPU. The faster it can do this the better the overall pipeline is.

Just saying that for not a lot you can increase the memory speed and reduce the latency at the same time. After a few years 5600 is going to look like DDR4 2133/2400 and we are already seeing DDR5 8000 kits, give it a few years and 7200 is likely to become the defacto standard just like 3200 did for DDR4.
 
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Its a bit more that the original builds, however, this is a very min-maxed build for price to performance with quality parts in mind:

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600KF 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor (£281.32 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler (£44.90 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B760M AORUS ELITE AX Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (£164.28 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-5600 CL28 Memory (£122.04 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Crucial P5 Plus 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£117.49 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: Sapphire 21323-01-20G Radeon RX 7900 XT 20 GB Video Card (£749.99 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Focus 2 RGB ATX Mid Tower Case (£70.97 @ Box Limited)
Power Supply: Corsair RM750e (2023) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£114.63 @ NeoComputers)
Total: £1665.62
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-06-08 19:21 BST+0100


The 7900 XT is about 10-20% faster than the 4070 ti, has 20gb of VRAM for future games, and much better at 4k if you ever make the jump. It only lags behind with some of the Nvidia feature sets, like DLSS. The CPU cooler provided will perform better than that CM AIO. The motherboard has good VRMs and enough of everything that most people need for ports and expandability. The CL28 5600 mghz RAM has the same first word latency as 30 pounds more expensive 6000 mghz CL 30 RAM. The case is a bit more expensive but has all the amenities of a modern Fractal case with great airflow. The PSU, as others have stated, should never be price cut to save a few cents.

*Edit: Fixed the link for the 7900 XT
 
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Here's a few ideas. This build gives you a case with 2x140mm front intake fans + 1x120mm rear exhaust fan. You can run these components through these two sites to check for better prices.

https://www.pricerunner.com/


PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: *Intel Core i5-13600KF 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor (£281.32 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: *Deepcool AG620 BK ARGB 67.88 CFM CPU Cooler (£57.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: *MSI MAG B760 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (£179.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: *G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL32 Memory (£111.50 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: *Western Digital Black SN770 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£99.00 @ Computer Orbit)
Video Card: *MSI VENTUS 3X OC GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB Video Card (£589.98 @ Ebuyer)
Case: *Fractal Design Focus 2 RGB ATX Mid Tower Case (£70.97 @ Box Limited)
Power Supply: *NZXT C750 (2022) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£99.00 @ AWD-IT)
Case Fan: *ARCTIC P12 56.3 CFM 120 mm Fan (£8.73 @ Box Limited)
Total: £1498.48
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-06-08 19:19 BST+0100


A better look at those components.

https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/focus/focus-2/rgb-black-tg-clear-tint/

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-B760-TOMAHAWK-WIFI


https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn770-ssd-review

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn770-nvme-ssd#WDS200T3X0E

 
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Here's a few ideas. This build gives you a case with 2x140mm front intake fans + 1x120mm rear exhaust fan. You can run these components through these two sites to check for better prices.

https://www.pricerunner.com/


PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: *Intel Core i5-13600KF 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor (£281.32 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: *Deepcool AG620 BK ARGB 67.88 CFM CPU Cooler (£57.99 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: *MSI MAG B760 TOMAHAWK WIFI ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (£179.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: *G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL32 Memory (£111.50 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: *Western Digital Black SN770 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£99.00 @ Computer Orbit)
Video Card: *MSI VENTUS 3X OC GeForce RTX 4070 12 GB Video Card (£589.98 @ Ebuyer)
Case: *Fractal Design Focus 2 RGB ATX Mid Tower Case (£70.97 @ Box Limited)
Power Supply: *NZXT C750 (2022) 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£99.00 @ AWD-IT)
Case Fan: *ARCTIC P12 56.3 CFM 120 mm Fan (£8.73 @ Box Limited)
Total: £1498.48
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-06-08 19:19 BST+0100


A better look at those components.

https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/focus/focus-2/rgb-black-tg-clear-tint/

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-B760-TOMAHAWK-WIFI


https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/wd-black-sn770-ssd-review

https://www.westerndigital.com/products/internal-drives/wd-black-sn770-nvme-ssd#WDS200T3X0E

Our builds are so close in price and performance if we had the same GPU linked, its kind of uncanny.
 
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The Kingston SSD I chose is reported to have 7000MB/s

Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280
6600MB/s

WD_BLACK 2TB SN770
5150MB/s

I like this better latency RAM
G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-5600 CL28 Memory

The internets report that 16ms is the human threshold. In my game I definitely have a minimum of 30ms delay perhaps to the server, but at times it behaves crystal clear, so maybe the latency isn't noticeable for me in particular. Certainly is nothing one can react to, given human reaction time is 300 ms off the top of my head, but when moving about latency can make one feel disconnected for once, and then if it's randomly variable it worsens your performance as a player, makes it difficult to parkour and aim

About DLSS I doubt my GTX690 has it, but when I use these two emulator instances on lowest graphics, randomly one starts looking fuzzy, the other sharp as HD, even if they have identical settings. Maybe the refurbished defect finally showed up. Otherwise I doubt one instance is using the 1st GPU, and the other my 2nd GPU, as that almost never happens unless specifically supported, or chosen by me in settings. That said, SLI is a bust

That Radeon's price is 25% greater, which doesn't scale proportionally with an ~15% improvement in performance, plus as I said I don't trust the firm. Finally, I never play in 1440 but 1080 tops and if I can get 60 fps stable I'm good. I have to look at the video memory requirements of some games I wish to play again, given it seems a very significant issue which can't be easily surmounted

Right now the bottlenecks in my system are the lack of a SSD, clearly since my HDD led stays lit for a long time while the game hangs, then at other times the HDD isn't as solicited, but game still hangs meaning I lack the processing power most likely.
My graphics isn't low for what I play right now, but in general - I can only play No Man's Sky at low graphic settings for reference (and because of SLI being unsupported). I could probably keep the GTX 690 running but it would be a shame to create a bottle neck with a new system on an entirely different generation.

I'll start by ordering what I have no doubts on, such as the CPU, then complete the research on the others. I have only seen a Samsung SSD reported by Overclockers to run at 7700MB/s, so if the price is also only a 10% increase over the Kingston, I may consider it

The ideea of not spending 3000 now on a higher performance by price hyped build, is saving the 1500 to spend 5 years later, if the technology progresses to the next generation and today's top prices drop
 
The Kingston SSD I chose is reported to have 7000MB/s

Crucial P5 Plus 2TB PCIe M.2 2280
6600MB/s

WD_BLACK 2TB SN770
5150MB/s

I like this better latency RAM
G.Skill Ripjaws S5 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-5600 CL28 Memory

The internets report that 16ms is the human threshold. In my game I definitely have a minimum of 30ms delay perhaps to the server, but at times it behaves crystal clear, so maybe the latency isn't noticeable for me in particular. Certainly is nothing one can react to, given human reaction time is 300 ms off the top of my head, but when moving about latency can make one feel disconnected for once, and then if it's randomly variable it worsens your performance as a player, makes it difficult to parkour and aim

About DLSS I doubt my GTX690 has it, but when I use these two emulator instances on lowest graphics, randomly one starts looking fuzzy, the other sharp as HD, even if they have identical settings. Maybe the refurbished defect finally showed up. Otherwise I doubt one instance is using the 1st GPU, and the other my 2nd GPU, as that almost never happens unless specifically supported, or chosen by me in settings. That said, SLI is a bust

That Radeon's price is 25% greater, which doesn't scale proportionally with an ~15% improvement in performance, plus as I said I don't trust the firm. Finally, I never play in 1440 but 1080 tops and if I can get 60 fps stable I'm good. I have to look at the video memory requirements of some games I wish to play again, given it seems a very significant issue which can't be easily surmounted

Right now the bottlenecks in my system are the lack of a SSD, clearly since my HDD led stays lit for a long time while the game hangs, then at other times the HDD isn't as solicited, but game still hangs meaning I lack the processing power most likely.
My graphics isn't low for what I play right now, but in general - I can only play No Man's Sky at low graphic settings for reference (and because of SLI being unsupported). I could probably keep the GTX 690 running but it would be a shame to create a bottle neck with a new system on an entirely different generation.

I'll start by ordering what I have no doubts on, such as the CPU, then complete the research on the others. I have only seen a Samsung SSD reported by Overclockers to run at 7700MB/s, so if the price is also only a 10% increase over the Kingston, I may consider it

The ideea of not spending 3000 now on a higher performance by price hyped build, is saving the 1500 to spend 5 years later, if the technology progresses to the next generation and today's top prices drop
The Kingston you posted cost 117 quid. The WD I posted cost 100 quid. Just curious but do you think you'd actually notice the difference between 7000MB/s and 5,150MB/s when loading Windows and games?
 
The Kingston SSD I chose is reported to have 7000MB/s

That Radeon's price is 25% greater, which doesn't scale proportionally with an ~15% improvement in performance, plus as I said I don't trust the firm. Finally, I never play in 1440 but 1080 tops and if I can get 60 fps stable I'm good. I have to look at the video memory requirements of some games I wish to play again, given it seems a very significant issue which can't be easily surmounted
The kingston SSD has no DRAM cache and total throughput has nothing to do with what gamers do 99.9% of the time. SSDs that are fast have the fastest low queue depth random 4k reads and writes. The crucial SSD i posted is nearly identical in price.

The 4070 you chose is 570 -620 dollars. The 7900 XT is 750 dollars and is around 40-50% faster for29% more cost. That is better than linear scaling and it has 20gb of VRAM instead of 12 GB which is 66.66% more VRAM for 29% more cost.
 
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The kingston SSD has no DRAM cache and total throughput has nothing to do with what gamers do 99.9% of the time. SSDs that are fast have the fastest low queue depth random 4k reads and writes. The crucial SSD i posted is nearly identical in price.

The 4070 you chose is 570 -620 dollars. The 7900 XT is 750 dollars and is around 40-50% faster for29% more cost. That is better than linear scaling and it has 20gb of VRAM instead of 12 GB which is 66.66% more VRAM for 29% more cost.
Then I'm that 1% gamer that is different :) Let me tell you what I do as a gamer, right now. I run 2 Android emulators because I play 2 MMO characters at the same time (which isn't cheating by definition because not only most top players do it, but the company is aware and tolerates it, thus anyone can). I can handle 4 at times making them do something automatic or stand by while I "help" them complete a mission to consolidate the rewards afterwards on the main character...


What does this mean? It means firing up 2 instances of the emulator which load up to 8GB each at the beginning. On my current PC it's best that I load the sequentially from my 7200 rpm HDD. It takes about 3 minutes to load 1, 6 minutes to load both


Then it begins... given each instance on the HDD is about 25GB, it load dynamically from that throughout my gameplay, some of which remains in memory because it's crap software with memory leaks, meaning I have to reboot the instances after a while to clear the "caches"


Often when the game hangs, I see my HDD led lit up, so I estimate a huge speedup just by having an SSD, which means I might as well have a virtual RAM drive, which I should research instead since RAM is faster than SSD. I'm not sure why this happens. I only have 2GB video memory and set it up to use RAM as needed, however switching between minimal and Ultra HD makes no big difference except in understandable loading time


I googled and is true: "The main benefit of a RAM drive is its increased read and write speeds compared to an SSD or hard drive. It will be multiple times faster than even the fastest solid-state drive."

In conclusion I should have an SSD to load the emulators from into a RAM drive fast, however the problem is I need 25GB for each instance, thus 50 GB minimum for at least 2

So with a 7000 SSD that would take 7 seconds, as opposed to 10 seconds by a 5000 SSD, no big difference... if I decide to buy 128 GB RAM to make that RAM drive a reality which is the better option


Then the question is, is that 5000 SSD a lot cheaper? Seems not but will consider, therefore I still opt for the 7000 for now


Bottom line is, if I don't buy 128 GB RAM for the RAM drive, I better get the fastest SSD there is because dynamic loading is a reality in my game

A fast SSD is useful for the same reasons to any gamer. Games today have hundreds of GB and load dynamically, meaning I won' t be able to make a RAM drive to hold hundreds of GB, meaning I have to have a fast SSD for my mental sanity as a gamer :)



Therefore I will buy RAM now keeping in mind I only have 4 slots, and to make a virtual RAM drive I most probably need 128 GB, as much as the motherboard supports, therefore I should buy 2x32GB to start with



Benefit is that any game that occupies less than 100GB, I can install to the RAM Drive



If you question the benefit, I've recently played a game where I was afraid to save and load the game because it took at least a minute... X4: Foundations if I'm not mistaken, because the stupid save game engine is based on XML. Furthermore that is archived else the save game can be like 500MB...



Bonus: a RAM drive will extend the SSD's lifetime by decreasing its use
 
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The Kingston you posted cost 117 quid. The WD I posted cost 100 quid. Just curious but do you think you'd actually notice the difference between 7000MB/s and 5,150MB/s when loading Windows and games?
Yes, definitely, read my extensive post above to helper800 :) I will have a 5000/7000 increase in initial and dynamic loading speed, or 40%, which justifies the 17% increase in price. This also justifies DDR5 over DDR4 for me, because fps isn't everything
 
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Thats not the way it works with that type of data.
I am aware of small file access issue, which seems worse than I imagined now that I researched it:


However that's a post since 2010, and I need a benchmark from 2023. Also, I won't be able to have Windows on a RAM drive, and not sure if I can move its virtual file there either again, as I was doing at one time before SSD even existed... so there's many compounding reasons to have a fast SSD, the least being initial loading


So the question is whether SSD improves dynamic loading of small files over the HDD. Will get back on this after some research
 
Its not an "issue".
It is simply the way it works. And it has not changed in the last 2 decades.

That big 5000-7000 number you see is directly and only for large sequential data.
The vast majority of what we do is not that.


Copying a large movie file between identical PCIe 4.0 drives will be faster than copying that same file between 2 identical PCIe 3.0 drives.
That is not what you're doing.

In my system (specs below under Viper), I have 6x different SSDs.
Samsung 980 Pro, Intel 660p, and 4x SATA III.

In daily use (yes, games too)....it is hard to tell the difference.
When we changed from HDD to solid state...HUGE difference.
Between the various flavors of SSD? Not so much.
 
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"Research" done :)

Dynamic read/write 4.4 GB/s on a Kingston Fury Renegade


Dynamic read/write 3.4 GB/Sec on a WD SN770


3.3/4.4 = 0.75 or 33% more speed from the Kingston Fury Renegade. Not the full 40% as the marketing gimmick advertised, but still price justified

This also shows the Kingston to be the most value, that is if prices on others weren't intentionally left out :)

In my game there's firing rate bonuses of 10%, and I can tell the difference. It will be the same for dynamic loading because this game is the worst bloated nightmare especially in events gathering many players in one place, and their various appendages :) There's a lot of pay to win content, which is custom content, which must be loaded when players wearing it enters the proximity...
 
Well, you have convinced yourself that there will be a significant difference.

I hope you do see that difference.
As you won't be buying both of those drives to do a real world test, with your use case, we'll never really know.
 
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"Research" done :)

Dynamic read/write 4.4 GB/s on a Kingston Fury Renegade


Dynamic read/write 3.4 GB/Sec on a WD SN770


3.3/4.4 = 0.75 or 33% more speed from the Kingston Fury Renegade. Not the full 40% as the marketing gimmick advertised, but still price justified

This also shows the Kingston to be the most value, that is if prices on others weren't intentionally left out :)

In my game there's firing rate bonuses of 10%, and I can tell the difference. It will be the same for dynamic loading because this game is the worst bloated nightmare especially in events gathering many players in one place, and their various appendages :) There's a lot of pay to win content, which is custom content, which must be loaded when players wearing it enters the proximity...
Your not going to tell a difference in the Kingston and the 81 buck Samsung 970 I listed above.

Your way overthinking everything. Not sure why you posted since you already know all the answers.
 
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Well, you have convinced yourself that there will be a significant difference.

I hope you do see that difference.
As you won't be buying both of those drives to do a real world test, with your use case, we'll never really know.
My environment is set for high speed access of several, not just one source of data

I use 2 and they compound enough read/write so that at times I can only use one to progress. I (not my PC) can use 4, meaning I need a PC that can handle 4. I'm not sure what is the read/write requirement of 1, but 2 exceed the capability of HDD at times. 4 are impossible. I'ld say faster SSD matters, and I will only have 1 SSD of 2 TB. Maybe I should have 2 of 1TB each, don't know. I am currently researching how I can decrease price and increase RAM to 128GB for that RAM Drive, else my SSD won't have a long life :)


Just think that mobile phones don't have HDDs, but run on SSD/RAM, so I'm using emulator to simulate SSD/RAM using the HDD, which is why it doesn't work... and will definitely stress any PC SSD since RAM is faster still
 
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