My Pre-build thread

[KeyboardDemon]

Ok. I am about to build a new PC, I have been talking about this for months as we get closer and closer to the day when it will all finally come together, it now looks like I will be in a position to order parts at the end of this month or the start of July, in the last few days I have been fettling away at my parts list to try and get the performance I want at the price I can afford.

@freakdaddy64 has been great at inspiring me and being a general sounding board for me to think my thoughts out loud and his experience with his build has been really helpful as I am a bit out of touch with current hardware, so thanks for that buddy.

Thanks to him, I have avoided paying over the odds on a CPU that costs 25% more and only delivers a 2% gain in performance, the same for the graphics card, I think I still have that old school e-peen mentality, where it's all about having the biggest numbers instead of being more grounded and thinking about what really matters in the build, so I have dropped the idea of getting an RTX 2080 Super, which doesn't offer a big enough gain over the RTX 2070 Super. I also dropped the idea of getting the RTX 2070 Super as the next card down in performance terms is the RX 5700XT which only gets beaten by an average of 7%-8% yet the RTX 2070 Super cards cost about 24-25% more.

Lastly, the case I really wanted was the Lian Li 011 Dynamic, this is a great looking case with 2 massive tempered glass sides, 1 covering the front and the other over the motherboard side giving a window into the build, but that comes with no fans so they needed to be added which pushes my costs up, what I really want though is a good airflow case, so that's changed.

Over the last 2 months or so, I have brought my build from being a colossal £2000 rig to a more modest build that's nearly half that price, and most of that has been down to conclusions that I have drawn from FD64.

What do you guys think of the build that I have got planned here:



The compatibility warning are listed here:


The B550 boards should launch tomorrow, so I might end up swapping my motherboard for one of those, I might stick to the Gigabyte even though I have been using Asus almost exclusively up until now.

Can anyone offer any helpful insight or advice that I might want to consider before I pull the trigger? It's not too late to make any amendments at the moment.

 

[freakdaddy64]

it all looks great im excited for the finish great price on solid state drive, i almost went that route didnt even know about those drives till i did this rig i have now. but i just bought a seagate firecuda 1 tb solid state so stuck with it. but mobo has the spot if i wasnt to add it later. all prices look great and it will be a great running rig. congrats cant wait to see pics.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

it all looks great im excited for the finish great price on solid state drive, i almost went that route didnt even know about those drives till i did this rig i have now. but i just bought a seagate firecuda 1 tb solid state so stuck with it. but mobo has the spot if i wasnt to add it later. all prices look great and it will be a great running rig. congrats cant wait to see pics.

Seriously, I can't wait to start taking pics, it's been such a long time since I put a build together.

I got butterflies and so excited right now.

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[freakdaddy64]

where are you located in europe?

 

[KeyboardDemon]

where are you located in europe?

I'm in the suburbs of North London.

Where are you? I'm guessing USA but that's a big place. [emoji12]

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[freakdaddy64]

im in tampa florida usa,

NOW GO PULL THAT TRIGGER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
GO TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[KeyboardDemon]

Really, I've been to Florida, but sure what part, it was about 14 years ago. We visited Mickey Mouse and spent 3 days there, we also went to Indianapolis, Chicago, North Virginia and Toronto in Canada.

It's great having family in other countries. [emoji2956]

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[freakdaddy64]

well i drive trucks was over the road for like 9 years so ive been all over the united states and really loved driving out to california and seeing new mexico and arizona i may retire out there somewhere. im just local now home everyday

 

[KeyboardDemon]

well i drive trucks was over the road for like 9 years so ive been all over the united states and really loved driving out to california and seeing new mexico and arizona i may retire out there somewhere. im just local now home everyday

I think I read somewhere or heard somewhere that most Americans don't travel farther than the towns in which they were born so you have seen more of your country than most average citizens that live there.

PC Partpicker has listed 40 AMB B550 motherboards but so far only 9 of them are priced, mostly ASRock and some Asus boards, hopefully, we will have more information on them soon.

I might swap my motherboard out for the Tomohawk, like yours, it has the best VRM support for future-proofing.

 

[freakdaddy64]

well take a good look at msi they have a pretty good selection of motherboards mine had really good reviews and for what i do on pc and only 114.00 bucks it was perfect.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

well take a good look at msi they have a pretty good selection of motherboards mine had really good reviews and for what i do on pc and only 114.00 bucks it was perfect.

I placed my order today, I ended up getting the MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX ATX AM4 Motherboard, which I think is the identical board to the 1 that you got, it has 1 corner with ARGB lighting and it looks really cool. I think the Gigabyte looks a bit better but I don't want to put looks over performance when the difference between them is so small.

I have these parts coming over the next 3 days:

MSI B450 TOMAHAWK MAX Motherboard	£119.99	18th June
Corsair CP-9020131-UK TXM Series 750 W TX750M ATX/EPS Semi-Modular 80 PLUS Gold Power Supply Unit	£89.99	18th June
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 Processor	£157.08	18th June
Corsair Vengeance RGB PRO 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4 3200 MHz C16 XMP 2.0 Enthusiast RGB LED Illuminated Memory Kit	£93.98	18th June
WD Blue SN550 1TB High-Performance M.2 Pcie NVMe SSD	£114.45	18th June
MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT Mech Enthusiast Graphics Card 8GB Navi 10 XT	£381.19	19th June
PHANTEKS Eclipse P400A midi-Tower, Tempered Glass, Drgb - Black	£91.80	20th June

My AMD Wraith Prism RGB LED Cooler has already arrived, which was £29.98 including delivery.

Total build cost: £1078.46p

So, I can start my build on Saturday or Sunday.

Expect pictures by Monday.

OMG. Amazon are showing my mobo and PSU as delivery date pending. I'll keep an eye on them, I don't need a 750 watt PSU but it was cheaper than the 650 watt model from the same range.

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Right, so I have swapped out my MSI B450 Tomahawk Max for an MSI B450 Gaming Plus Max and swapped the Corsair Semi-modular PSU for a Seasonic Core GC-650 Non-Modular PSU, both should arrive by Saturday and that should save my a few £££s bringing my total down to £1,039.58p.

 

[freakdaddy64]

awsome stuff congrats ive heard good things about the msi gaming plus and seasonic psu,i went with thermaltake 700 watt smart series non modular, i think you will like the msi gragon center it allows you to see the volts and watts and really everything going on with it,im not technical to understand it all, and i think you can change the rgb light patterns and stuff also. is your case one that you can route wiring through the back and hide them.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

awsome stuff congrats ive heard good things about the msi gaming plus and seasonic psu,i went with thermaltake 700 watt smart series non modular, i think you will like the msi gragon center it allows you to see the volts and watts and really everything going on with it,im not technical to understand it all, and i think you can change the rgb light patterns and stuff also. is your case one that you can route wiring through the back and hide them.

Yes, the case is a revision of an older design, it was really well received as a good air cooling case, comes with 3 RGB intake fans at the front and in testing for his review, Steve Burke from Gamers Nexus said that adding a fan at the back as an exhaust actually made the cooling worse. This is his review of the case.

The motherboard I got has only 2 main differences between this and the 1 I wanted originally, 1 being not so important and the other is the VRM cooling is not as good as the Tomahawk. The VRM could be an issue if I ever move up to a Ryzen 9, as much as I'd like to do that, I can't think of any reason why I would ever need to. The other less worrying difference is that it has no USB-C connector and my case doesn't come with this either, this might be a problem if ever I decide to connect my Oculus Quest to my PC, which is a possibility, but it seems unlikely, there's only 1 game I want to play and that's Elite Dangerous.

Another bonus with the Gaming Plus Max is that the Black and red are more eye-catching than the black and white, plus I got a few ££s back which I might put towards a PSU cable extension kit or extra RGB fans, like 2 140mm to push air out of the top of the case, but I will wait to see how the case performs as it is.

The Seasonic PSU was a no brainer, I have always wanted a Seasonic PSU but never thought I would be able to afford 1, it was just a few ££s more than the Corsair and at 650 watt it gives me room to expand still and is the same capacity as the PSU I was originally aiming at. Another brand I would have considered is Superflower who make the Leadex iii, which got 2nd place in a review by Tom Logon from OC3D, the first place PSU was the 1200 watt Corsair AXi model when he ranked them by how clean they ran or how little ripple they produced.

 

[freakdaddy64]

thats a real nice case i cant wait to see the finished monster!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

[KeyboardDemon]

thats a real nice case i cant wait to see the finished monster!!!!!!!!!!!!

It looks like it will be arriving tomorrow, a day earlier than originally promised.

I could have saved money by selecting the cheapest vendors, but the small savings would mean more difficulties when it comes to support as since of the vendors are unknown to me. Amazon have been really good with things like support and then with this order they have managed to change my ETA from Saturday to Friday.

I've started taking pictures of the parts as they arrive, well the boxes anyway and I've cleared a build space too, I'll hold an album soon.

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I will upload my pictures to this Album.

I already have a few of the box shots in there.

 

[freakdaddy64]

quit teasing me i want to see finished rig

 

[KeyboardDemon]

quit teasing me i want to see finished rig

lol.

I'm still waiting for parts to be delivered, at least if they had sent me the motherboard and PSU then I could have pictures of an on the box build.

This is the best that I can do in the meantime.

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[freakdaddy64]

good luck im sure build will so smoothly, you will have an exciting weekend.

 

[KeyboardDemon]

All parts have arrived now, minus the case that is. Amazon sent an email to say the bar case is delayed.

I've added pictures to my album and will test it all by installing on to the box, so all I'll need to do when the case comes in is put the motherboard and GPU into the enclosure.

Then I can leave it overnight to install CoD and maybe the demo version of Shadow of the Tomb Raider so I can run the benchmark and compare it to my current PC.

A good project would be done video editing, so I think I'll shoot a video about the build as well.



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[freakdaddy64]

is that a ryzen water bottle i see. where you get that.