PC build thread

[isiolia]

i5 8400 seems to be available for $180 from some vendors (Best Buy for instance), where the Ryzen 5 2600 is more like $165. On that kind of budget, watching for a deal/bundle is probably good either way, though I suspect AMD is going to be cheaper. Still, Intel is doable if preferred - there are the H370 boards out, like this ASRock for ~$80, then whatever RAM. Newegg seems to have some 2x4GB kits on sale under $70. So that'd still put it cheap enough to fit under budget, though maybe not by enough to be able to pick up a 212+ or something as well.

'course, stock cooler not being great doesn't mean it won't work in the meantime. AMD's isn't awesome either, just better. It still gets outdone by a modest tower cooler.

[marlowe221]

I didn’t realize the stock Intel cooler was so bad.

I was kind of leaning AMD just because there seem to be more choices in my price range. I assume almost any modern Ryzen CPU will be a significant upgrade over my FX 8320.

I am brand agnostic when it comes to PC parts though. It’s strictly price per performance for me.

[marurun]

If you can pull off that i5-8400, Intel is your price/performance winner, even with Spectre mitigation patches.

Also, don’t settle for the stock cooler. Intel’s is bad enough you don’t want to settle. AMD’e typically is.

[emwearz]

Their coolers are even worse since they got rid of the copper slug in them, it is now all aluminum, utterly useless.

[marlowe221]

If you can pull off that i5-8400, Intel is your price/performance winner, even with Spectre mitigation patches.

Also, don’t settle for the stock cooler. Intel’s is bad enough you don’t want to settle. AMD’e typically is.

So... here's a question.

A lot of the gaming benchmarks I've seen show the i5-8400 somewhat ahead of the Ryzen 5 chips. But they almost always use a 1080ti for the testing.

I've got the 970, which is obviously way less powerful than the 1080ti. At 1080p, isn't my performance going to be limited more by my GPU than my CPU in 98% of games? If so, am I still going to get 15-20% more frames out of the i5-8400? Wouldn't the differences between CPUs start to fade in a GPU limited situation?

[marurun]

If you never plan on upgrading your graphics card, sure.

[marlowe221]

I’m sure I will but it will be a while. When I do, I’m sure I will stay around the x60/x70 level (or AMD equivalent) depending on price.

[casterofdreams]

The 970 is a great card that can last you quite a long time. Take it from me, who had an AMD 5870 from 2010 to 2017 (along with a first gen i7), mitigating the increase in required specs by reducing resolution from 1080p to 900p (Dishonored 2 forced my hand and had to build a whole new system).

This may *not* be sound advice but when I was building my system last year, one of my goals was to continue using Windows 7 (yes I’m stubborn). At the time the 7th gen intel processors were the lastest. They did not officially support Windows 7. The prior 6th gen did support the operating system officially. So I got the i7-6700k at a decent discount over the newer 7700k.

Long story short: you can save money by seeking out components that are a generation behind but still absolutely viable.

[Xeogred]

Still on Win7 myself.

Something I didn't know ahead of time when I built my rig in 2013, is that Windows 7 Home Premium taxes you out at 16GB of ram. I never knew an OS could block that off. And it's weird how other variations of Windows 7 support more. I was ready to go crazy with beefing up my ram more a year or so back until I realized this.

Also on an i5-3470 and that's never changing.

So I think the GPU is the last thing that can keep my rig strong going forward. I went with the 1060 GTX and it's been great ever since, but I think stuff like Cyberpunk or maybe even Metro Exodus next year will really start testing the limits and I'll have to cut options down a lot. No clue though, maybe I can keep upgrading the GPU for awhile and get more juice out of everything.

I'll be real curious to see how next gen consoles compare to my current rig.

[Tanooki]

I'm on 8.1 here using classic shell to work like 7, and since the 970 came up I'm basically running that. I have a 980 mobile version in my laptop which by spec runs like the 970 but with the 8GB of ram the 980 has going for it and I can run some very up to date stuff in impressive fashion still and I've been using this 4 years come December. I intend to run this into the ground at this rate or until some gaming commonly starts running like it's in low/med mix mode and becomes intolerable.

I came off a laptop that had the i5 sandybridge using the hd 3000 chipset and the difference was insane and it was hitting that low by the time I gave up on it.

Now more than ever considering whatever it is with heat or micron thresholds on current tech but CPUs and GPUs are lasting years longer for excellent performance which never was the case a decade ago back and further into the past. Best to just find a really good motherboard that can take a nice chip now and a very nice one later that has modern ports and things so you can slap a really decent video card (last gen) in it now and a beefy nice one later too. Nothing wrong with middling if you can up it later than being stuck with turds or stuck with older stuff capped out low making for many more part buys not that much later.