New Build Recommendations

• 

  p1 ama on 02/07/2019 - 18:07

  +2

  I'm strongly considering doing a new build in the next few months and haven't really kept up with all the newest developments.

  Basically the big news is that the AMD Ryzen 3000 series is coming in around a week. There hasn't been any independent testing yet, but AMD's own tests claim to have faster single-threaded performance than the Intel 9900K, which is Ryzen's biggest weakness so far.

  The other big news is the release of Navi, with the 5700 XT. It supposedly will offer around the same performance level as the RTX 2070. Nvidia is going to respond with the RTX 2060 and 2070 "Super" (which I personally think is pretty dumb, it's just their way of getting back into the spotlight), but either way, Navi seems quite disappointing as AMD still has no challenge to Nvidia at the top end. It's a superb business strategy because they did very well vs. Nvidia in the mid-range over the past few generations (RX 480 and RX 580 are excellent value cards).

  I'm open to both AMD Ryzen or Intel based builds and would like to centre it around a GTX 2080 ti so having the capability of running raytrace titles

  I would wait until the 7th of July when the review embargo for Ryzen 3000 lifts. The Ryzen 3900X would be a good pairing with 12 cores. If the gaming performance is similar (or better than) a 9900K, then it would be the CPU to get without a doubt.

  Budget just under 3k I don't want to have overclock it at all would consider silent operation if possible. Was initially thinking of a xeon. Want it to be solid as a rock and last 3 years max.

  Xeon only makes sense if you want ECC, but even then Ryzen supports ECC, so you might as well go with AMD. Hard to say how much the 3900X will be in Australia at launch, but in the US, it's $499 launch price, so hopefully it'll settle in to around $800 AUD, which is around the same price as the 9900K.

  You'd easily be able to fit in a 2080 Ti (around $1,500), 3900X (around $800) with your budget. I'd suggest having a look at your storage options if you're going to be running VMs, depending on how IO intensive they are (just because you'll be running databases). Even the fastest NVMe drives will struggle when you hit them with several VMs at once.

  • 

    DodgyDavesDiscounts on 02/07/2019 - 19:18

    Doing a new build currently and the above are all really good points by P1 ama.

    I got a 2080 recently and its amazing, you need to remember some titles have specific only nvidia features like Nvidia Hairworks, RTX etc which is why i went Nvidia over AMD for a GPU. But for a CPU i'm waiting for Ryzen 3000 series reviews. Hopefully its as awesome as early leaked reviews are suggesting it will be.

  • 

    mousie on 02/07/2019 - 20:09

    Love the detail mate, I can wait about 6 weeks for the right parts as in no great rush and looking to blow some tax dollars and write off.

    I haven't built an AMD box since the old Athlon 1400 and XP days. Is there much variance with the brand of board in terms of quality? I am thinking maybe gigabyte.

    • 

      p1 ama on 02/07/2019 - 21:21

      +1

      I haven't built an AMD box since the old Athlon 1400 and XP days. Is there much variance with the brand of board in terms of quality? I am thinking maybe gigabyte.

      Really shows how dominant Intel have been over the past 15 years or so (since the release of Conroe).

      There's much more variance within brands than between brands. The biggest differences between a cheaper board and a more expensive one is VRM and connectivity options, really. You can get a good current X470 board or wait for the X570 chipset to come out with the Ryzen 3000 series - might as well wait for X570 to see what they're about before deciding. I wouldn't get anything below an X470 for the Ryzen 3900X, the difference between B450 and X470 will be like $50 - literally less than 2% of your budget.

      If you're looking at Gigabyte, the X470 Gaming 5 is pretty nice (around $280) - it's a good high end board that'll let the Ryzen 3900X flex its muscle a bit.

      Re storage options. Would a pci express solution be better than a nvme. It's mostly just a dev box for crap I can't run at work, crunching SAS queries etc.

      NVMe is the protocol for storage drives using PCIe. I guess it depends on what sort of datasets you have and the drive. I haven't used SAS in ages, but from when I last used it (few years ago now), I think it doesn't cache the dataset in RAM. Either way, I'm not too sure about this because I only work with quite small (comparatively) datasets that I can load in RAM.

  • 

    mousie on 02/07/2019 - 20:12

    Re storage options. Would a pci express solution be better than a nvme. It's mostly just a dev box for crap I can't run at work, crunching SAS queries etc.

• 

  AquaDigger on 02/07/2019 - 20:55

  +1

  Don't have as a great a detail as the first poster, but have been doing some research for an upcoming build, probably in a couple of months time. Here's some great resources:

  https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/ - Build advice
  https://www.reddit.com/r/buildmeapc/ - Build advice
  https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcforme/ - Will put a build together for you (hands off)
  https://www.reddit.com/r/bapcsalesaustralia/ - Australian sales not a huge amount on there but with OzBargain you'll cover off on most things.
  https://pcpartpicker.com/ - Some build guides, but mainly used so you can put parts together, check their compatibility and prices.

  Hopefully this helps.

• 

  mousie on 03/07/2019 - 08:39

  Thanks all!