Specificationize a PC

[Explosive Newt]

My current system is mostly 9 years old (i5 4460, Asus Z97-P Intel Z97 mobo and 8Gb of DDR3).

It's time for a refresh and I wondered on your opinions on the below. I currently have a Radeon RX 5600 which I was going to temporarily re-use to lighten the financial load with a view to changing next year.

Please let me know if you would spec something different, and/or if I have made a catastrophic blunder in terms of things that won't fit together.

[Matty]

Firstly, what are you using it for?

Coupla things:
1. I'd probably go 32GB of RAM these days given how cheap it is now
2. Good PSU! Avoid Bronze, and modular makes it tidier
3. Ditch the 2.5" SSD and get an NVME; quicker and barely any price difference.

Aside - I don't like RGB fans, so unless you want an office disco, consider swapping for a plainer case (although you can usually turn them off). I too have a Corsair case (looks very similar, but black) and it's well put together.

[scotta]

Id quite like something that could run iRacing. I would not like to pay four figures though however.

[Explosive Newt]

Good point - I want something that will run games without breaking a sweat (I miss that) but will also be comfortable doing "heavy" office work ie having lots of tabs open, multimedia and some stats crunching.

[Matty]

Id quite like something that could run iRacing. I would not like to pay four figures though however.

Not an overly demanding game, could buy a PC that could do that for well under £1k.

Good point - I want something that will run games without breaking a sweat (I miss that) but will also be comfortable doing "heavy" office work ie having lots of tabs open, multimedia and some stats crunching.

What monitor do you have? Gaming at 1080P is much cheaper than gaming at 4k!
For office work, tabs and multiples you're just looking at a good NVME and 16 (ideally 32) GB of RAM. Past that, any PC in the last 3 years will handle that without any issues.

[Beany]

A marginally different take, as the LG1200 platform is dead now and will never get anything newer, so I tried adding up your parts cost (some £750) and seeing what I could do with AM5

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/2tYxVW

CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor (£192.95 @ AWD-IT)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler (£39.00 @ Computer Orbit)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B650M D3HP AX Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard (£145.00 @ MoreCoCo)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory (£105.00 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Western Digital Black SN770 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£63.98 @ Box Limited)
Case: Fractal Design Torrent Compact ATX Mid Tower Case (£112.99 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: Corsair RM850e (2023) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£120.23 @ NeoComputers)
Total: £779.15
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-01-05 18:29 GMT+0000

CPU is a bit slower here and there (not by much in the real world - the Zen4 Cores are newer, clock higher, and more efficient) but honestly, anything more than six cores/twelve threads is ample for most day to day, non-specialist work. IE if you're doing extremely hard math in excel, you might notice a difference, but in the real world, you set the thing running and get a cuppa, don't you?

Worth noting that the P/E cores on the intels is a bit of a fib; the e-cores are actually less efficient perf-per-watt, they're allgedly only more efficient in size - story is, Intel literally can't fit enough P-cores (the real ones that do the heavy lifting) into the die space because they're old tech 10nm jobs, so they had to put cut down cores in there to make up the numbers to compete with AMD from a marketing standpoint. Yes, it's fucking idiotic. The 12700 there is really an 8-core/16 thread part in every respect that matters.

With respect to future proofing, lets say in six months to a years time you bung £500 at a 1440p GPU (4070/7800XT) (which you could do with the intel, too) but then in two or three years time when you think you might want more CPU performance (maybe some new tech comes along that really hammers the CPU - fuckin' ray traced badger testicles on your desktop that make your dinner or whatever)

With the Intel platform, you're having to get new motherboard, RAM and CPU, and that means your CPU choice is restricted to mid-range stuff from a budgetary standpoint. If you have £500 to spend, £300 of that is going on MOBO/RAM leaving £200 for CPU.

With the AMD you should be able to just flash the BIOS and dump that entire budget into the CPU. So instead of getting something a bit mid, you can go for something top banana. 16 core, 32 thread X3D madness, etc.

The AMD 7600 is significantly easier to cool, too - those i7s 12700s can pull knocking on 200w just by themselves. The Peerless Assassin in my list above could probably just about handle it but the 212 you've got there isn't as good as the current crop of air coolers (see here: https://www. reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/r6chb8/i712700k_with_high_temps_paired_with_cm_hyper_212/ ) and is considered a bit old hat - so I'd not use it.

I've got a Noctua NH12-redux or something - the billy basic Noctua 120mm cooler - and on my 7600, and it's considered a bit old hat, too - but because the CPU never pulls more than about 70w, it barely gets above 65deg under load unless I do something deliberately heat generating like run AVX crap on it, where it gets to...oooh, 75deg. It never thermal throttles, something that I'd not trust the i7 to do, even with a good air cooler.

I did blow out a bit on the GPU and get a Nitro 7800XT which has a massive heatsink, but ultimately I can play UE5 engined games at 60fps at 1440p and the system is almost entirely silent, because
The chassis (Fractal Torrent Compact) pulls in huge volumes of air, quietly thanks to dual 180mm fans
The CPU draws less power, meaning it's fans barely spin up as the air cooler is well fed with air from the case
The GPU has a massive heatsink meaning it doesn't run the fans too much either, and again, the airflow from the case means it doesn't have to work hard. There's no 'stale' warm air in there.

In short I have a very fast machine, and it only makes a noise if I go out of my way to make it generate heat - in actual real world use, it's near silent with any non-synthetic workload.

That said, my idea above is really aimed at someone who wants to do some decent gaming a fair bit, and other than your cooler and storage (as Matty noted) and the chassis (eew, RGB, but really just personal preference for me - I really do like that Torrent chassis in all black) there's nothing really 'wrong' there I don't think.

My shopping list based around an i7 12700 on a DDR4 mobo (if you intend to keep it for another five to ten years, no point worrying about DDR5 carry-forward, we'll be on DDR6 by then) and with that Fractal case in there because I'm a tart.

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/nPP49c

CPU: Intel Core i7-12700K 3.6 GHz 12-Core Processor (£269.99 @ Amazon UK)
CPU Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler (£38.68 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Gigabyte B760M DS3H DDR4 Micro ATX LGA1700 Motherboard (£100.97 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory (£73.97 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Western Digital Black SN770 1 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive (£63.98 @ Box Limited)
Case: Fractal Design Torrent Compact ATX Mid Tower Case (£112.99 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: Corsair RM850e (2023) 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply (£109.73 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £770.31
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2024-01-05 19:16 GMT+0000

That was a fun couple of hours of fantasy PC speccing and waffling while my former workplace fucked up their entire billing system for want of the correct ethernet port after moving a server

[Mito Man]

Can’t beat an Xbox series X @ £350 and gamepass found online at £5 per month for just general gaming.
Just a graphics card which will perform as well as that will cost as much as the Xbox alone.

[Beany]

Can’t beat an Xbox series X @ £350 and gamepass found online at £5 per month for just general gaming.
Just a graphics card which will perform as well as that will cost as much as the Xbox alone.

Perfect for running excel or browsing the web with dozens of tabs or doing research based statistical work in Python or R or similar.

Wait, sorry, incoming news: Fucking useless for that.

Go home console gamer.

[Shlergen]

Agreed on an NVME vs. SSD, no brainer.

Is an i7 worth it over i5 these days, unless doing encoding etc? Depends on price diff as well. Mid range between AMD and Intel price difference seems to have disappeared (I'm on an 5600x) so take your pick.

[Explosive Newt]

Excellent thoughts, all. I have had a bit of a dig on the Intel vs AMD threads but am still undecided there. I do take your point on futureproofing though.
Have swapped to the NVME, increased ram and gone full tower with the case (just because it'll fit in me office better).

[Beany]

Games are moving to being more realistically/truly multi-threaded but it's a slow roll so far. Buying a massively threaded CPU for gaming at the moment isn't worth it. The 7800X3D (16 threads) is as fast as the '32' thread i9-14900k because games benefit more from a big on-chip L3 cache than they do from threading at the moment.

An i9-14900 will destroy a 7800X3D in CPU based tile based 3D rendering though, because that *does* benefit linearly from thread increases. But you aren't doing that, etc. It might be faster at doing a big sort in Excel, or are rendering out a video, but again, the cup of tea and a biscuit argument comes up. You ain't making money on this machine so as long as it's good enough, it's good enough, and the midrange at the moment is plenty good enough.

Really, a min of twelve fast (IE approaching 5ghz) threads is probably safe for the next half decade at least.

An i5 xx400 or Ryzen5 x600 from the last few generations is probably OK, really. You could switch to the 12400 but you might find the extra threads on the 12700 useful at some point so it's proper 'splitting hairs' stuff.

Re the revamped list, seriously, change that Hyper212, get a Peerless Assassin, it's a way better cooler. Gamers Nexus decided it was their favourite overall air cooler of the year this year, and you won't be needing closed loop water cooling with the CPUs your aiming at.



Here's the written version if you can't be arsed with a 30 min video:
https://gamersnexus.net/coolers/best-ai ... oise-value

They also had a look at the Pop Air case and they quite like it. The XL might be overkill but otherwise it seems pretty decent and shouldn't restrict you for GPU size in future (my Torrent Compact *just* fits a 7800XT with a big cooler on it. They did a review on the Torrent Compact too if you want to see that, just search their channel) so it should be fine for what you need.

Bear in mind the thermal testing GN do is based on pretty high loads that you won't be reaching unless you decide to dump £1k+ into a massive GPU which isn't that likely. Also, the fan curves (IE what speeds they run at what temperatures) can be adjusted in the motherboard bios/motherboard software so you can quieten it down/speed the fans up depending on load so it's all quite adjustable. The review includes build notes and things so it's worth sitting down and having a look at.

[Simon]

Just one piece of advice if it hasn't been said already. Remove 'future proofing' from your list because it will never, ever be possible to do that no matter how much you spend. Plan for reasonable future, not future proof.

[Explosive Newt]

I'm genuinely quite impressed how a 9 year old CPU/mobo combo has lasted me including playing fairly up to date games until basically a couple of years ago (it managed Doom Eternal in the pandemic for instance). So I think I am less worried about the idea of swapping out components as time goes on and who knows what the future will bring.

@Beany I will go with your recommended heatsink, only Scan doesn't sell it so will grab it off amazon. These cases seem pretty decent (my existing case I think is I think circa 2005 although I was tempted to re use it) but I am mystified as to how some brands are selling cases for around £300..? The torrent compact is a good looker and I was tempted by its bigger brother - wasn't sure if there was a particular reason you had not gone for full ATX?

I think also I have to think carefully about what the PC is for. I want to game on it but it won't only be for that - a lot of boring MS office apps but also data crunching with R/SPSS/matlab for work as well as handling teams/zoom with lots of other bits open (induces my current PC to get laggy).

[Beany]

Full ATX is pretty overkill for most things IMHO, and I wasn't expecting to put a proper monster GPU in there. That, and I don't have lots of spinning disks any more, so the full size Torrent seemed like overkill. The Compact is big enough for what I need and still has the airflow/features etc, but most importantly, build quality, I wanted. Mind you if you aren't used to having to measure GPUs and coolers to see if they'll fit, Full ATX is an easy option and saves a lot of headaches

As for £300 cases, they're generally set up for serious custom stuff, like hardline watercooling, huge thick radiators, and the space their seperate pumps and reservoirs require - something neither of us need to care about.

And yeah, if you'll be doing some number crunching then the i7-12700 will be fine for that and more useful than the i5 version, which has fewer P-cores/threads. You might want to use a process manager to keep R or other hard-math stuff off the e-cores though, they're fine for web browsing and youtube, but pretty dogshit for real work, running at far lower speeds, lacking cache etc. Again, their only efficiency is in physical space, not in performance. The P-cores are actually more efficient, but too big to fit enough on the die to compete with AMDs bigger CPUs (which are on a smaller process node).

I wrote three paragraphs on how utterly dogshit the intel architecture is for scheduling in hardware and software (IE putting processes that need performance on the e-cores and slowing it down etc) and realised it was too much detail, so I'll just say if you notice any hard math work going to e-cores and slowing it down, look for something called 'process lasso' which should help keep that sort of work on the P-cores. I've not had to use it but apparently it's pretty good for such things.

Unless you expect to make R your actual career though, I don't see that being a particularly big headache that something like the above can't work around - and certainly not enough to justify switching to an AMD platform, etc given it sounds like it'd be intermittent use - that, and I'm sure you know people who do similar work who could tell you how to expect it to perform. And again, cup of tea and a biscuit rules apply, etc.

[Ascender]

Can’t beat an Xbox series X @ £350 and gamepass found online at £5 per month for just general gaming.
Just a graphics card which will perform as well as that will cost as much as the Xbox alone.

Perfect for running excel or browsing the web with dozens of tabs or doing research based statistical work in Python or R or similar.

Wait, sorry, incoming news: Fucking useless for that.

Go home console gamer.

That outburst has just made me laugh more than it should. No idea why.

Thanks @Beany

[Beany]

I have my moments.

(consoles are fine for their use case, etc)

[scotta]

Id quite like something that could run iRacing. I would not like to pay four figures though however.

Not an overly demanding game, could buy a PC that could do that for well under £1k.

Yeah...But id want to run it in 4k on my 65" OLED...

[Beany]

iRacing doesn't appear to have a benchmark, and it seems to be really variable depending on what you actually do. IE if you want ot have 40 cars on track it'll want a lot more CPU threads etc.

Most people seem to run triple heads setups rather than 4k and that seems to be where most hobbled together performance numbers come from.

Best bet genuinely looks like going to the forums/discord/reddit, and saying "I have this setup, and I want to get 4k60fps on (whatever detail you're comfy with) settings at (your favourite tracks with however many cars you prefer to race with), what will I need to achieve this and what do you get with your setups?"

I've spent the last 20 mins trying to get consistent details on iRacing performance on different setups and it's a fucking mess to gauge it from the outside. And I haven't even checked if it supports upscaling natively which would throw another spanner into the bloody works...

[Mito Man]

With competitive online games you usually get people running on 1080p with minimum setting otherwise to get over 200fps. FPS is king.

[Explosive Newt]

Escalation