Need to replace my rig, trying to work out best OC prebuild for ~£1200 budget

maelstrang · 15 May 2021 at 21:16

So the current rig has ticked over to 9 years old now, and frankly it was a budget build back then so it's really struggling to do most things I'd want nowadays, especially graphics-wise. As the title says I'm looking at limit of £1200ish, which is basically all for the tower, I can get around to upgrading peripherals and maybe another good monitor later. Honestly this one is probably going to have to last for about as long, so if it needs to use all of the budget then so be it.

Last time round I got the parts and put it together myself, but given I'm seeing the issues with graphics cards, I'm fine with ordering a pre-built from OC as I've got a few friends who have done the same over the last year or two to make me have enough trust in going for it.

However, given I haven't really looked into any major upgrades in years, I'm a bit lost as to whether or not I should be going for a Ryzen or Intel build with my price range. Like I think I've seen enough to say Ryzen should be the pick, but I might have just been looking in the wrong places. Also pretty lost on whether there's any real major difference on the brands for likes of Hard Drives and RAM.

The main aim is for something that's good for gaming, but I wouldn't mind being able to look into recording and streaming again given I struggled to do that with anything semi-recent. The main games I'd be looking for are Total War: Warhammer 3, and F1 2021 in addition to the rest of my library that never really got played on anything above minimum graphics and painful load times, so I'm trying to aim for specs around:

Processor: Intel Core i5 9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1660 Ti or AMD RX 590

I looked up the 2 Ryzen builds that I think are fine, but not sure if I'm on the right track, and if there's anything that's not listed in the options that I should be asking to change.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x OcUK Gaming Enigma Essential - Ryzen 5 3600, GeForce GTX 1660 Super = £1,076.95
- Solid State Drive:WD Blue 1TB 3D NAND SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive *SI STOCK* (WDS100T2B0A)
- Memory:Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey
- Graphics Card:*Build Stock* MSI GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER VENTUS OC 6144MB GDDR6 Graphics Card
- Operating System:Microsoft Windows 10 Home Advanced - Systems
- Security Software:**Special Offer** Bullguard Internet Security - Anti-Virus and Security - 1 Year 3 PC
- Case:Kolink Citadel Micro-ATX Case - Black
- WIFI (USB):Unwanted

Total: £1,091.05 (includes shipping: £14.10)

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x OcUK Gaming Kinetic R3 - AMD B450 Configurable Ryzen 3000 Series Gaming PC = £1,154.98
- Case:Kolink Citadel Micro-ATX Case - Black
- Processor:AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Eight Core 4.4GHz (Socket AM4) Processor - Retail
- Graphics Card:*Build Stock* Asus GeForce GTX 1660 Super Dual Evo OC 6GB Graphics Card
- Memory:Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey
- Primary Drive:WD Blue 1TB 3D NAND SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps Solid State Drive (WDS100T2B0A)
- Secondary Drive:Seagate BarraCuda 2TB 7200RPM 256MB Cache Hard Drive - *System Stock*
- WIFI:Unwanted
- Operating System:Microsoft Windows 10 Home Advanced - Systems
- Security Software:**Special Offer** Bullguard Internet Security - Anti-Virus and Security - 1 Year 3 PC

Total: £1,169.08 (includes shipping: £14.10)

I'm guessing the second build would be the better one to go for. Anyway, thanks in advance for anyone reading this and dropping a response.

Quartz · 15 May 2021 at 21:35

Bang for the buck is the Intel i5-11400f on B560. Just avoid the Asrock motherboards.

The Kolink Citadel is a cracking mATX case but you should choose the Kolink Citadel Mesh variant.

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x OcUK Gaming Dagger - Intel Core i3/i5, GeForce RTX Gaming PC = £1,160.11
- Case:Kolink Citadel Mesh Micro-ATX Case - Black
- Processor:*Build* Intel Core i5-11400F Desktop Processor 6 Cores up to 4.4 GHz (CM8070804497016)
- Memory:Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey
- Graphics Card:*Build Stock* MSI GeForce RTX 3060 VENTUS 3X 12GB OC Graphics Card
- Primary Solid State Drive:WD Blue SN550 500GB SSD NVME M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3 Solid State Drive (WDS500G2B0C)
- Secondary Solid State Drive:Unwanted
- Storage Drive:Unwanted
- WIFI:Unwanted
- Operating System:Unwanted
- Security Software:Unwanted

Total: £1,174.21 (includes shipping: £14.10)

I've managed a RTX 3060 for you. Prebuilds are pretty much the only way to get new GPUs.

Speak to OCUK before ordering to check which motherboard they use - for some reason OCUK aren't stocking B560 motherboards at the moment - and to check that the PSU is of sufficient wattage.

Note that if you cannot transfer your current copy of Windows, licenses are available far more cheaply elsewhere.

Quartz · 15 May 2021 at 21:37

Oh yes: the Citadel Mesh comes with two 120mm three-pin fans and I would move them both to the front.

EsaT · 15 May 2021 at 22:44

maelstrang said:
Honestly this one is probably going to have to last for about as long, so if it needs to use all of the budget then so be it.

Well, that's mission impossible there, unless accepting being super low end toward end.
For start six core CPU won't be cutting it many years at higher level and would need upping core count at some point.
For comparison consoles have seven cores dedicated exclusively for use of the games and that will be standard level some years in future.

And while need to upgrade graphics card once in a while to play newer games (at better than slide show framerates) should be familiar, situation is now worser than ever with availability problems and mostly insane prices.
So instead of paying to become Microsoft's unpaid alpha tester suggest saving that money for hardware.
Though for old 1920x1080 there are options at more wallet friendly level.

As for those prebuilts they have cheapo level Kolink PSUs I wouldn't trust to last.
And while budget case won't be damaging parts, badly failing PSU can do that.

Psycho Sonny · 29 May 2021 at 21:38

EsaT said:
Well, that's mission impossible there, unless accepting being super low end toward end.
For start six core CPU won't be cutting it many years at higher level and would need upping core count at some point.
For comparison consoles have seven cores dedicated exclusively for use of the games and that will be standard level some years in future.

And while need to upgrade graphics card once in a while to play newer games (at better than slide show framerates) should be familiar, situation is now worser than ever with availability problems and mostly insane prices.
So instead of paying to become Microsoft's unpaid alpha tester suggest saving that money for hardware.
Though for old 1920x1080 there are options at more wallet friendly level.

As for those prebuilts they have cheapo level Kolink PSUs I wouldn't trust to last.
And while budget case won't be damaging parts, badly failing PSU can do that.

I very much doubt consoles being 7 cores gaming will make any difference to a 6 core desktop tbh. Games are usually never pushing consoles to their maximum until the end of it's lifecycle and desktop cpu's now will be faster anyway so a 6 core will match or even beat a consoles 7 cores.

EsaT · 30 May 2021 at 09:52

Psycho Sonny said:
I very much doubt consoles being 7 cores gaming will make any difference to a 6 core desktop tbh. Games are usually never pushing consoles to their maximum until the end of it's lifecycle and desktop cpu's now will be faster anyway so a 6 core will match or even beat a consoles 7 cores.

When finding things in games which multithread well those most likely scale as easily for 5+ cores than couple cores.
So don't underestimate how fast well coded games could use full amount.
(Cyberpunk 2077 actually scales to 12 cores in fps minimums)
And having guarantee for exclusive use of that certain number of processing power/cores is precisely what allows pushing limits and designing game around certain number of cores for optimal performance.

While in PC Windows and awful amount of mostly bloatware competes from time on those cores.
Meaning at least one core has to be counted out for running the game.
And that background junk is certainly also spilling over to consume some execution time from other cores.
Windows scheduler is no doubt bad at "protecting" cores running threads of the game.
That becomes easily important factor because every switching of execution between entirely different threads causes serious stall of the core in time scale of CPU.
And core which is constantly juggling lots of threads has notable part of its processing power wasted.

Psycho Sonny · 30 May 2021 at 11:31

EsaT said:
When finding things in games which multithread well those most likely scale as easily for 5+ cores than couple cores.
So don't underestimate how fast well coded games could use full amount.
(Cyberpunk 2077 actually scales to 12 cores in fps minimums)
And having guarantee for exclusive use of that certain number of processing power/cores is precisely what allows pushing limits and designing game around certain number of cores for optimal performance.

While in PC Windows and awful amount of mostly bloatware competes from time on those cores.
Meaning at least one core has to be counted out for running the game.
And that background junk is certainly also spilling over to consume some execution time from other cores.
Windows scheduler is no doubt bad at "protecting" cores running threads of the game.
That becomes easily important factor because every switching of execution between entirely different threads causes serious stall of the core in time scale of CPU.
And core which is constantly juggling lots of threads has notable part of its processing power wasted.

It scales to 8 from your other post not 12 which proves my point 6 will be enough for a while. Cyberpunk likley could have been optimised better and if coded efficiently could easily have similar performance at a low core count.

The only argument for more cores is bad coding but if it's a console port it should run fine on - anyway