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 ..
3 x Corsair LL120 RGB LED Fan + Controller Kit
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
). 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!
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 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]
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
). 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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