Upgrade ~£1,400 base hardware budget - 3900X + 2070 SUPER?

Man of Honour
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19 Jan 2003
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Warwickshire
Hello - have not ventured into the PC building hobby for a long time and therefore I'm completely out of touch - so forgive me if I've made any major jumps in assumptions.

I'm looking for a fairly sizeable upgrade / new build

Main requirements:
- Capable of running Half-Life: Alyx on higher-end settings well
- to also be used for video editing
- Reasonably future proof - though I tend to have ~5-6 year upgrade cycle...

Budget for now I'm assuming circa £1,400 for main bits [as below] - but am hoping some of my older parts *might* be still useable - so hopefully you lot can help advise.


I currently have a ~6 year old:
Corsair Carbide Series SPEC-01 case
Antec TruePower Classic 750w '80 Plus Gold' Power Supply

Bits that'll be escaping the case:
Intel i5 4690K (Socket 1150)
Gigabyte Z97MX Z97
KFA2 Geforce GTX 770 2GB
8GB DDR3



Basic critique spec:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £1,378.96 (includes shipping: £0.00)​

So main questions:

- From what I've found on here sounds like 3900X is quite the CPU, and probably anything above an RTX 2070 SUPER just gets very expensive
- Is my case / PSU going to be able to take it? Size wise it looks like plenty of space for long card, and assuming ATX is still ATX.
- RAM - from research, 16GB probably is fine today - but 32GB would probably help for video side I'm assuming?
- Stock CPU cooler going to be OK for timebeing I assume?
- SSD - better to go PCI-E or SATA?

Think that's everything anyway, let me know if I've made any glaring errors?!

Thanks in advance!
 
Soldato
Joined
18 Nov 2007
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7,925
Location
Deepest Darkest Essex!!
Cheaper Ram:

My basket at Overclockers UK:
Total: £167.69 (includes shipping: £8.70)​

FYI there are hardly any 3rd party CPU tower Air coolers for the 3900x that will fit in your case, you may have to go AIO. GFX will go in that case no problem. SATA SSD would probably be more cost effective for video Editing unless you wish to store the end product for which a HDD will be fine. Truepower classic is seasonic based, so you should be good to go.
 
Man of Honour
OP
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Warwickshire
Thanks Grimley - I had just seen the cheaper RAM - think I failed on the search.

Excuse my ignorance - AIO [after googling] would be water cooling?
If the stock cooler fits in with everything else - I can make do - and expand to a new case if I really need it.

Having looked at a bit more on the SATA vs. PCI-E SSD, doesn't really look like worth that much more - I do have currently a 120GB SSD, but that's a bit too small.
 
Man of Honour
OP
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Soldato
Joined
6 Jun 2008
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Finland
Am I going overkill on my motherboard, or is that one to go for?
Just trying to figure out what I'd actually lose out on if I saved £50 and went down to:

That's no £50 saved, but more like £50 wasted over B450 Tomahawk.
VRM is exactly same, with only little bigger heatsink on it.
Fully loaded 12 core would make it run rather hot without cooling airflow.

MSI went from B450 hero to zero in X570 with half the range having same B450 copypasta VRM.
Like X570 Carbon here trying to start desoldering components from PCB's backside:
https://nl.hardware.info/artikel/94...den-review-op-de-proef-met-een-3900x-vrm-test
Good thing lead free solder has higher melting/softening temperature...

Gigabyte X570 Gaming X is better from cheap X570 boards, but still not really good and feature wise very stripped down. (no Gen2 USB)
That and Aorus Elite are actually in that linked comparison.
Should be obvious whose VRM has the best changes to stand against time and use...
 
Associate
Joined
11 Jan 2009
Posts
884
I hope the X570 Tomahawk is out soon and lives up to the hype.

I'm impatiently waiting here in a very similar situation to yourself, only difference being that I'm sticking with my GTX 1070 until Ampere is released.

If I wasn't locked into Nvidia with my Gsync monitor I'd be looking at the 5700XT though.
 
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