So I have gone and built a custom PC and am yet to buy it and want to see if people think I’ve got a good deal. So I’m wanting to use it for gaming and I’ll be playing games like Ark Survival Evolved, Minecraft with graphic enhancements, iRacing.
Here’s the build:
Intel Core i9 10900F 2.8GHz 10 Core 20 Thread 10th Gen Processor (Comet Lake),
Shadow Rock Slim CPU Cooler with 135mm Silent Fan,
Palit GeForce RTX 3060 Dual 12GB Gaming Graphics Card,
MSI MPG Z490 GAMING EDGE WIFI Motherboard,
Aerocool Zauron Saturn FRGB Standard Gaming Case,
2TB Seagate BarraCuda 7200 RPM 256Mb Cache Hard Drive,
600W - Zalman MegaMax Non Modular White Rated,
Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64 Bit Operating System - Includes USB Recovery Drive,
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy Fx 5.1 Sound Card,
Cooler Master Devastator 3 Gaming Keyboard & Mouse Combo - 7 LED Colours,
32GB (2x 16GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX 3000MHz Memory Kit,
3 Year Warranty.
All of this adds up to a price of: £1,586.94 Including VAT and shipping
Looks like a pretty decent price for a pre-built at that spec. I would suggest it is overkill for the games that your wanting to play, but overkill is always better than underkill!
I might suggest saving some momey on the CPU and go for a previous generation i7 instead. Maybe save some money on a cheaper MB. I’d then put that saved money into a better GPU, or add a decent SSD.
Do your research too, companies will tell you anything just to sell something. Don’t just trust people on here either - look at reviews, articles etc online too.
I have a few thoughts, though it does depend on your budget:
Add an NVMe SSD as your primary system drive. The Seagate Barracuda is fine as a data drive.
Drop the sound card. It isn’t exactly a high performance model so probably won’t get you better sound quality than the onboard sound on the mobo, which has a optical output anyway.
Maybe consider slightly faster RAM
I prefer an AIO CPU water cooler, but each to their own.
SSD 100%, try and get a TB, it runs out fast, also I recommend getting a more powerful processor with less cores, maybe an Octo or Hexa Core at 3.x GHz
Agree with all those suggesting an SSD /NVMe
Drive. You could actually ditch the spinning disk entirely unless your games have a lot of textures etc to download. If you have the budget and your motherboard supports it going NVMe for your OS and a 2.5” SATA SSD (now pretty cheap) for files will be slick. At the moment your storage is the bottleneck.
I just wanted to ask a few questions about your needs of the pc.
If you are using it for gaming then I don’t think you can justify the £300+ spent on a CPU. A Ryzen based system is far more cost effective. ARK is more GPU heavy and same with MC if you need high quality rendering.
Do you need that much RAM? (I have 16GB with a 3070 and at most I utilise about 10 in max settings in XPlane) Also keep in mind you are getting 3000Mhz speed with RAM. To see how efficient your RAM is divide your RAM speed by your Cache latency. The bigger this number is the better the RAM. (Don’t get to hooked on this though)
Are you going to overclock? Adding a CPU fan is a good idea if you need the cooling. However can lead to extra costs as stock will do fine normally. Side note: if you plan to overclock Intel is better.
IMO the 3060 is a bit of a waste of money. 3070 is more worth by far.
There is only 1 intake fan on your case. Could cause some heat issues.
HDD is good choice no problems there. Ditto what has been said about SSD/NVMe.
If you really want to save money you can install your own version of windows.
Most motherboards have good soundcards onboard so as motioned above. I wouldn’t bother unless you are an audiophile.
With all the money you are spending on the PC it seems like a skimp out the get that keyboard and mouse but in the end its not a big deal.
Lastly I would heavily discourage the usage of the PSU. A quick look at LTT PSU Tier list tells me “should only be used in cheap iGPU systems”.
All in all if you have the money then why the hell not. GPUs aren’t getting any easier to obtain but I advise you look for some other options.
Just for reference I got the following system for 1350 on sale.(I wouldn’t recommend buying this for 1700 at all) I cant remember quite where I bought it but I can try find out. Its expensive on their own website but have seen others reselling. Alphasync also sell on Amazon if you are interested.
