Building a new PC for Elite: Dangerous Odyssey (hardware discussion)

I've had my current i5 / GTX 1080 based PC for 8 years now. I got it from PCSpecialist, really liked their service and have been extremely happy with the build.

Recently tho' I've been casually toying with the idea of upgrading (I see detail in videos from people like @Rheeney and @Buur that I'm not seeing in my own game, the machine definitely struggles with framerates for the on-foot stuff and I've definitely had to wind down Odyssey quality settings when playing on my new Quest 2). I can't deny I've also been jealous hearing the experiences of Lave Radio's @Phoenix_Dfire whose new 4070 Ti has allowed him to play in VR with everything on Ultra.

A completely unexpected pay bonus has kinda clinched it so I've started putting together a new build.

While I know a little bit I'm still mostly clueless when it comes to putting a build together so I've also been in contact with @Morbad who's provided me with some excellent advice and really helped me make some wiser decisions.

Anyway, I thought I'd share the build here (along with some of the reasoning behind it) and open it up for discussion because I find this process really enjoyable and can hopefully share, learn from, and enlighten others who similarly enjoy their PC hardware discussions.

Oh, and while it feels a bit crass I suppose it is a key factor so I should probably state that my budget is around £2k.

So, here's what I've got so far ..

Case
FRACTAL NORTH TG GAMING CASE (WHITE)
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™ i7 20-Core Processor i7-14700KF (Up to 5.6GHz) 33MB Cache
Motherboard
GIGABYTE Z790 UD (LGA1700, DDR5, PCIe 5.0)
Memory (RAM)
32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR5 6000MHz (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card
12GB NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 4070 Ti - HDMI, DP, LHR
1st M.2 SSD Drive
1TB SOLIDIGM P44 PRO GEN 4 M.2 NVMe PCIe SSD (up to 7000MB/sR, 6500MB/sW)
1st Storage Drive
2TB Samsung 870 QVO 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gb/s (up to 560MB/sR | 530MB/sW)
External DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
8x Slim USB 2.0 External DVD-RW
Power Supply
CORSAIR 850W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling
PCS FrostFlow 200 Series High Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Extra Case Fans
3 x Corsair LL120 RGB LED Fan + Controller Kit
3 x Corsair AF120 RGB ELITE PWM Fan + Controller Kit
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Network Card
ONBOARD LAN PORT
USB/Thunderbolt Options
2 PORT (2 x TYPE A) USB 3.0 PCI-E CARD + STANDARD USB PORTS
Operating System
Windows 11 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence [KUK-00003]

North_White_TGC_10-Left-Front-Above-1080x1080.jpg

Let's go down the spec' and I'll talk about my reasoning and what I've learned so far.

The Fractal North Case? I mean come on, it's just gorgeous! Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course but I adore it and it's non negotiable! I gather the mesh version might be preferable from a cooling perspective (but PCSpecialist don't offer that option) and it's depth also means sub optimal placement of a cooler for the GPU I've chosen. That said, it's pretty much the same size as my current PC and so will fit very nicely in my existing desk arrangement. It also gets good reviews.

CPU - I'll confess I'm biased towards Intel and away from AMD. Can't really justify that (and I know a lot of folks will be biased one way or the other) but frankly I'm glad to have my choices halved. I've gone for i7 over i9 partly because of heat concerns with the latter inside this case but also because general wisdom seems to say that i7 is the right choice for a gaming PC. That said I've gone for a high spec cpu because I went too conservative with my existing PC and have regretted it slightly (it's definitely the bottleneck for Odyssey rather than the 1080 GPU). The K suggests overclocking options. In fact I'm not interested in overclocking (again, a bad experience with my current PC where I had to turn all overclocking off in order to prevent Half Life Alyx from crashing has made me favour reliability over a few extra fps). However, K parts also tend to have higher clock speeds generally. The F unit has no integrated GPU and saves a bit of money for something I'm unlikely to need.

Motherboards are a bit of a mystery to me frankly but choice of the highish speed DDR5 ram plus no need for built-in wifi (PC will be connected to a network cable) kinda landed me on this after I decided to save £100 by not going for the Asus ROG STRIX Z790-F board that originally caught my eye.

RAM - I had a bit of to and fro' on this. I originally had doubts about DDR5 after reading stuff about latency issues on the internet but Morbad was pretty confident that I should go the DDR5 route. I had originally picked 3200MHZ but in fact the price difference to step up to the 6000MHZ was only about £40 (although it did mean a motherboard change when the PC Specialist site said that wasn't strictly compatible with my original choice). Despite 32GB being on the lower end of the options offered by PCS my brief reading still suggests that's more than enough for gaming (and the price increases significantly with more). I believe common wisdom is that 2x16 is better than 1x32 (to do with increased bandwidth?).

GPU - choice of the 4070Ti is almost entirely @Phoenix_Dfire's fault but in fact it does sit in quite a nice place on the upper end of the diminishing returns, price/performance curve. Oh, and I like Nvidia stuff and additionally have heard so many issues about ED Odyssey not working well with AMD cards that I didn't really stop to even consider the alternative.

For storage a mix of M.2 and conventional SSD just seemed like a reasonably balanced choice (not sure hard disk is worth considering these days is it unless you need HUGE amounts of capacity). I originally had less but we always underestimate what we'll need in the future right? Think of a figure, double it and then add some more. I'm aware of lots of internet discussion about frequently written M.2 degrading over time but there's as many "experts" dismissing the problem as there are those warning us about it. I think it'll be fine.

An external DVD writer is a must (because I burn home video DVDs once a year for my son) but certainly no need in this day and age to have a drive built-in.

Power Supply - strictly speaking I think I could get away with 750W (there's a lot of recommendations out there for that with a 4070 GPU) but I'm really not comfortable with "get away with" when it comes to the power supply so I'd always tend to go up one.

Cooling is another mystery to me. I mean, I know what cooling is, but what's necessary and/or good? No idea. I picked what I think is quite a lot (partly due to the case choice and partly 'cos you definitely don't want to mess around with this stuff) and as for a little bit of RGB? Sure, why not! (I dare say this will cause more controversy than anything else here :LOL:). Oh, and I'm not interested in messing around with water cooling. I'm sure people will tell me it's fine but water and electronics in the same box? No thank you!

Errr what's left?

Audio I'm not that fussed. I like decent quality sound and I have a nice Steelseries Arctis Pro headset that connects via USB and which I love so I don't need anything fancier in that regard.

And USB connectivity - you can never have enough right? so I threw in a few more on top of the decent amount the mobo is already giving me.

And that's it.

I'm sure I've missed off all sorts of wisdom I got from @Morbad so I'll either throw that in to the discussion later on or he will. But otherwise have at it. Ask questions, make suggestions and also maybe tell me what you've got and what you like about it and what you don't (it'll still be a while before I actually pull the trigger on this).

One last thing I suppose I'll add is that I'm not interested in this turning into any kind of slanging match. Happy to chat about stuff and discuss the pro's and con's and be guided by what I learn but please try to be respectful of other opinions and let's make this fun!
 
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Looks nice, hope it will serve you well for many years... well... that actually depends.

Peeking in my own yard, i changed my gaming laptop in 2019 (i7-9750h, gtx1660ti/6), then again in 2021 (ryzen r9 5900hx, rtx3080/16) and this year again (r9 7945hx, rtx 4090/16)... so yea you get the point 😂
 
GPU - choice of the 4070Ti is almost entirely @Phoenix_Dfire's fault but in fact it does sit in quite a nice place on the upper end of the diminishing returns, price/performance curve. Oh, and I like Nvidia stuff and additionally have heard so many issues about ED Odyssey not working well with AMD cards that I didn't really stop to even consider the alternative.
Meanwhile I've read that Starfield prefers AMD over Nvidia.. Tis a shame we still live in a world where the brand of a card, with all else being equal, makes a difference depending on what games you wish to play. It takes me back to the Voodoo card days and the games specifically written for that card.

I'm currently an Nvidia guy myself, but that's as much because I buy a complete package based on overall performance rather than build my own (laptop gamer). IIRC, you made the right choice pairing an Nvidia card with an Intel processor. No matter how good the individual parts are, they have to play well together as a team to get the best performance.
 
Meanwhile I've read that Starfield prefers AMD over Nvidia.. Tis a shame we still live in a world where the brand of a card, with all else being equal, makes a difference depending on what games you wish to play. It takes me back to the Voodoo card days and the games specifically written for that card.

I'm currently an Nvidia guy myself, but that's as much because I buy a complete package based on overall performance rather than build my own (laptop gamer). IIRC, you made the right choice pairing an Nvidia card with an Intel processor. No matter how good the individual parts are, they have to play well together as a team to get the best performance.
I forgot to say that I’m also planning to get Cyberpunk 2077 which I plan to play in full ray traced ultra quality which I gather is absolutely stunning. And I've heard that from Nvidia users so no concerns there. I agree with what you say tho. It shouldn’t matter and it’s disappointing that sometimes it does (especially if that’s the result of exclusive partnerships rather than technical accident ... not to say I’m explicitly aware of that happening but nor am I naive enough to believe it doesn’t).
 

Ozric

Volunteer Moderator
On the whole companies do tend to work with Nvidia stuff more, and it gets priority over fixes. Starfield is indeed a rare exception, but I haven't heard of any Nvidia related issues with it. The main problem with Elite is the 6000 series cards, which both Frontier and AMD have tried to address. I ran an old Vega 56 and it looked great, upgraded to a 6700xt and... well, not so much.

I'm an AMD person partly because they're cheaper, but also because they have Sapphire doing aftermarket GPUs for them. And they are widely regarded as one of the best, their 6700 out performs the base 6800.

I really like my Fractal case too. You wouldn't believe the hassle I had getting parts without RGB :D
 
Don't know if you are planning to let PCSpecialist build the computer, but I was happy adding this to my build, apparently it helps keeping the CPU flat for better cooling: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermalright-generation-anti-bending-correction-installation/dp/B0B92PNYJ5/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2LDI1XE45409B&keywords=thermaltake+13900&qid=1698946672&sprefix=thermaltake+13900,aps,82&sr=8-1&th=1

If I ever redo my CPU cooling I'm also going to consider the following TIM. Apparently it doesn't dry out like thermal paste can do, and seems more clean to work with:

Personally I'd go for a CPU with a built-in GPU too, for relatively little extra money it would make it easier to troubleshoot in case of any problem with the Nvidia card.
 
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Don't know if you are planning to let PCSpecialist build the computer, but I was happy adding this to my build, apparently it helps keeping the CPU flat for better cooling: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Thermalrig...&sprefix=thermaltake+13900,aps,82&sr=8-1&th=1

If I ever redo my CPU cooling I'm also going to consider the following TIM. Apparently it doesn't dry out like thermal paste can do, and seems more clean to work with:

Personally I'd go for a CPU with a buil-tin GPU too, for relatively little extra money it would make it easier to troubleshoot in case of any problem with the Nvidia card.
Interesting stuff, but yes ... I will just let PCSpecialist build the PC for me. I enjoy the process of choosing stuff and reading reviews and trying to come to the best decision on what to buy but I'm not really into the process of actually building the thing. They did a good job on the previous one so I just have to hope their standards haven't slipped in the meantime.
 
Also don't know how quickly you are buying the new PC, but there are many rumors of soon to be released super versions of the 4070/4070Ti/4080. But I have no idea how well founded the rumors are nor exactly when they'll be released or what the pricing will be.
 
Heyo Alec.

So loooovely choice of case, I went from the somewhat overdone Lian Li O11 Dynamic (big oul' desk hog) to that same Fractal North and really like it. I rebuilt my PC before I made the move back to Ireland from the US, where I had access to cheaper tech prices (and better funding since I was still employed!) so have a bit of recent experience in this...

Few opinions on your build:

I've been a lifelong Intel person as well, but switched to AMD for the processor and have to say they're phenomenal. I had the 5900X and recently upgraded to the 7800x3D and its an absolute lunatic. Other than the increase in performance and decrease in power usage, I haven't noticed a single issue since switching to AMD. Would recommend you have a think about it.

GPU - I went with a 4080 and its fantastic. Laughs at everything I throw at it. Mind you, I got mine for a great deal on Amazon, less than a grand (yeah, I know, that's considered a great deal these days) but the extra memory is almost a have to have versus a nice to have going forward. Again lunacy, but in this day and age it seems that 12gb is the "minimum" to have on a new card. ETA: I have a similar "I'd rather have NVIDIA over AMD, although some of their business dealings are shady" outlook, but I know @Rat Catcher uses AMD GPUs without any issue in Elite, so perhaps he can offer better insight here as they do seem to give more "bang for their buck" but if you want raytracing in Cyberpunk (which is looooooovely!) then NVIDIA it is.

Cooling - mine is a Corsair H100i (of some sort) with a 240mm radiator. Does the job nicely. Has a spiffy LCD screen you can upload an animated GIF to if you're into that sort of thing for an extra premium.

You'll also want fans. I used to have an RGB monstrosity (but ironically all set to white) but swapped them all out for Noctua fans. They're top of the line, ultra quiet, and efficient. Cost a couple of quid more than a standard fan but they keep the PC running VERY quietly rather than the noisier fans I used to have on there. I have three in the front pulling air in, and then the two at the top (with the cooler radiator) pushing air out, and one at the back also pushing air out.

image0(1).jpeg
 
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when it comes to cooling I have ported my portable heat pump to the air intake fans (made a box an hose that sits on top of cool air outlet on the ac unit so outlet air volume is split to room an pc)
chilling the beast in the summer the dried refrigerated cool air is adj perfect for it (and me) in winter that' hose is removed allowing the pc and portable ac to efficiently space heat
heat in the summer months being the enemy of all things pc.....VR inc (ambient room temps 25c + being slow cook component killer)
you have no reason to envy anyone with your new pc enjoy I chose vengeance ram too it makes a difference imo
 
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(especially if that’s the result of exclusive partnerships rather than technical accident ... not to say I’m explicitly aware of that happening but nor am I naive enough to believe it doesn’t).
Sometimes those exclusive partnerships are "illusive" (I just had to play the words). For example, Starfield is a Microsoft product (of sorts) so it's going to favor Microsoft hardware, that being the XBox, which built on AMD hardware. I'm not so sure this is about "screw Nvidia" (though it might be, indirectly, due to some backroom dealing). It's probably just as likely that the devs were up against the wall of deadlines, trying to optimize the game enough so it would run on XBox, so they went straight to the AMD-specific optimizations to make it run "good enough" on the XBox in time for launch. It just so happens that PC owners running similar graphics hardware also benefit.

Elite doesn't have this consideration (especially since consoles were dropped), and IIRC the problems Elite has on certain AMD cards is the fault of AMD rather than Elite. Though if a company puts out bad drivers and doesn't fix them in a timely manner, that'll push me to the competition as much as price and performance.
 
Heyo Alec.

So loooovely choice of case, I went from the somewhat overdone Lian Li O11 Dynamic (big oul' desk hog) to that same Fractal North and really like it. I rebuilt my PC before I made the move back to Ireland from the US, where I had access to cheaper tech prices (and better funding since I was still employed!) so have a bit of recent experience in this...

Few opinions on your build:

I've been a lifelong Intel person as well, but switched to AMD for the processor and have to say they're phenomenal. I had the 5900X and recently upgraded to the 7800x3D and its an absolute lunatic. Other than the increase in performance and decrease in power usage, I haven't noticed a single issue since switching to AMD. Would recommend you have a think about it.

GPU - I went with a 4080 and its fantastic. Laughs at everything I throw at it. Mind you, I got mine for a great deal on Amazon, less than a grand (yeah, I know, that's considered a great deal these days) but the extra memory is almost a have to have versus a nice to have going forward. Again lunacy, but in this day and age it seems that 12gb is the "minimum" to have on a new card. ETA: I have a similar "I'd rather have NVIDIA over AMD, although some of their business dealings are shady" outlook, but I know @Rat Catcher uses AMD GPUs without any issue in Elite, so perhaps he can offer better insight here as they do seem to give more "bang for their buck" but if you want raytracing in Cyberpunk (which is looooooovely!) then NVIDIA it is.

Cooling - mine is a Corsair H100i (of some sort) with a 240mm radiator. Does the job nicely. Has a spiffy LCD screen you can upload an animated GIF to if you're into that sort of thing for an extra premium.

You'll also want fans. I used to have an RGB monstrosity (but ironically all set to white) but swapped them all out for Noctua fans. They're top of the line, ultra quiet, and efficient. Cost a couple of quid more than a standard fan but they keep the PC running VERY quietly rather than the noisier fans I used to have on there. I have three in the front pulling air in, and then the two at the top (with the cooler radiator) pushing air out, and one at the back also pushing air out.

View attachment 372827
Beautiful, I'm even more excited about that case now. And you've given me some food for thought re: the Intel/AMD CPU thing. I might have to go and do a bit more reading now.
 
CPU - I'll confess I'm biased towards Intel and away from AMD. Can't really justify that (and I know a lot of folks will be biased one way or the other) but frankly I'm glad to have my choices halved.

In a system built from scratch for gaming on anything resembling a budget, I would have pushed for AMD, but being a pre-built from PSC the selection of components available and price difference doesn't really make it that much of an issue either way.

The 4080 is quite a bit faster than the 4070 Ti though.

Also, I noticed you went back to the LL120 fans rather than the AF120s. The AF120s are superior enough to justify the 5 GBP difference.

Meanwhile I've read that Starfield prefers AMD over Nvidia.

Only if one isn't using DLSS FGR, though that may change again once FSR3 matures sufficiently. Since about five days post launch (when the DLSS FGR mod became sufficiently stable), the two fastest GPUs for Starfield are the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090. Frame generation also removes the CPU bottleneck in the game. Without it, my 5800X3D was about 25% slower than my brother's 7800X3D, which in turn was a solid 20% slower than an equally well tuned 13900KS (Starfield heavily favors Intel CPUs)...with FGR they're all the same at 4k, because they're all completely GPU limited on watercooled RTX 4090s (which were in all three systems I tested).

Tis a shame we still live in a world where the brand of a card, with all else being equal, makes a difference depending on what games you wish to play. It takes me back to the Voodoo card days and the games specifically written for that card.

Different architectures, different advantages. Any differences also imply the ability to tune specifically for them.


It's not quite like the the 3DFX days, where there was an entire proprietary API (Glide) with hardware built around it, even if NVIDIA does try to leverage a slew of proprietary features to help maintain a near monopoly. Starfield certainly doesn't use anything limited to AMD.

Also don't know how quickly you are buying the new PC, but there are many rumors of soon to be released super versions of the 4070/4070Ti/4080. But I have no idea how well founded the rumors are nor exactly when they'll be released or what the pricing will be.

Super version of the 4070 and 4080 are pretty much sure things. I expect the 4080 Super to be pretty pricey though, with rumors of a price increase on the RTX 4090 to make more room to slot it above the existing 4080 without reducing prices of that part. That depends on the path taken by it though; it could be a fully enabled AD103, in which case it's likely to only be modestly faster than the current 4080 and could effectively replace it. It could also be a heavily cut down AD102, in which case it would likely have more a performance advantage over the current 4080 and could justify a new price segment.

Cooling - mine is a Corsair H100i (of some sort) with a 240mm radiator. Does the job nicely. Has a spiffy LCD screen you can upload an animated GIF to if you're into that sort of thing for an extra premium.

You'll also want fans. I used to have an RGB monstrosity (but ironically all set to white) but swapped them all out for Noctua fans. They're top of the line, ultra quiet, and efficient. Cost a couple of quid more than a standard fan but they keep the PC running VERY quietly rather than the noisier fans I used to have on there. I have three in the front pulling air in, and then the two at the top (with the cooler radiator) pushing air out, and one at the back also pushing air out.

View attachment 372827

The cooling layout here is something I specifically try to avoid in my own builds as the bulk of the exhaust from the GPU is ingested by the AIO radiator, which makes water temps (and thus CPU temps) about 10C hotter under load than they would be if the radiator was an intake.

I use a lot of Noctua NF-A12x25s myself and they are still hard to beat, even at the 30+ dollar per fan mark, but PCS does offer the the Corsair AF120s, which are still quite good, and the closest one is going to get in an RGB fan.
 
(Starfield heavily favors Intel CPUs).
That's good to know (in my favor) for when the day comes. And my Nvidia is old enough that it won't be missing out on AMD-specific features..... said a batter way, the equivalent AMD card to my 1660ti probably doesn't offer any advantages.

That's another reason I'm reluctant to buy Starfield at cost, because I might find out that it runs like a sleeping pig in January on my computer. At least with Odyssey I'm able to test the planets and installations in Horizons 4.0 before buying. Steam's refund window really isn't a lot of time to properly test a game like Starfield. It usually takes me two hours to design my character, let alone visit various environments!

BTW, Greta does not approve of all these fossil-fuel guzzling computers. You should be playing OOLite on a Raspberry Pi, not Odyssey on a Watson supercomputer 😜
 
That's good to know (in my favor) for when the day comes. And my Nvidia is old enough that it won't be missing out on AMD-specific features..... said a batter way, the equivalent AMD card to my 1660ti probably doesn't offer any advantages.

I should have said, current Intel parts. It's not really the brand it favors, but the properties of the architecture. Alder Lake (12th gen) was a fairly radical departure from Rocket Lake (11th gen) and I have no idea how Starfield performs on Rocket Lake.

As for the GPU, Starfield is pretty tolerable on my desktop 1080 Ti, but I think the mobile 1660 Ti is probably going be extremely borderline. Not sure how much it favors Turing over Pascal though.

Edit, found this test:
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6wIROe1oeA


The intro is not the most demanding area of Starfield, but it looks like that laptop 1660Ti is good for 1080p medium-high with 50-60% render scale and is probably completely GPU limited on a 10th gen laptop i5 or i7 with such a GPU.

BTW, Greta does not approve of all these fossil-fuel guzzling computers. You should be playing OOLite on a Raspberry Pi, not Odyssey on a Watson supercomputer 😜

I live ten miles from the Niagara river; pretty much all my electricity is hydro.
 
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As for the GPU, Starfield is pretty tolerable on my desktop 1080 Ti, but I think the mobile 1660 Ti is probably going be extremely borderline. Not sure how much it favors Turing over Pascal though.

Edit, found this test:

..but it looks like that laptop 1660Ti is good for 1080p medium-high..
Well that doesn't look so bad. I'll have to keep an eye out for a similar test video in a big city. I do almost all my gaming at 1080p (looks great on a 15 inch screen), so that won't be an issue.

You can have your thread back now, Alec! :LOL:
 
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