New gaming PC

[SwordsMaster]

Hello all,

Advice needed on new gaming rig:

I have not had a gaming PC now in about 4 years - life has been too busy. However, now I am back to a point where I'm able to dedicate it some time and some dollars.

Most of the games in the past 18months have been a nightmare to play on my 5yo laptop - forget about Witcher 3, Andromeda, even RTW2 struggled. I would like to play them and get some kind of enjoyment out of doing so. Shooters aren't really my favourite kind of game, so lightning fast multiplayer isn't a requirement. I do intend to do some movie-watching on the same machine/screen.
I don't even own a screen at this point.

My budget tops out at aprox 1500$, and I do have the skills to assemble a tower. This doesn't need to include peripherals (mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc) but it would be perfect if it included a 30in screen. Probably asking for too much :)

If it helps, I live in Dallas, so UK/EU deliveries are not the best.

Comments appreciated, opinions welcome.

Thanks

[Xiahou]

Just a month or two ago, a guy in my office sent me the specs of his new gaming PC. I would feel comfortable endorsing what he picked out without any hesitation. He has serious nerd cred, is a hardcore gamer and spent hours researching his build.

The build:

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 1700
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1080
SSD: Toshiba OCZ RD400 NVMe PCIe M.2 256GB
HDD: Seagate ST2000DM009-2G4100 2TB
RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3200 C16 2x8GB
MBD: Asrock X370 Gaming K4

I'll probably be looking to my next PC build around February, but I doubt I'll have that kind of cash to throw at it.
I usually spend time trying to find the price/performance sweet-spot and leave room for future upgrades rather than mind-melting performance- but the reason for this is purely financial.

Anyhow, hope this serves as a good starting point.

[Husar]

It is a good starting point, although it really bugs me that AMD has no card to compete with the GTX 1080. There were some benchmarks that seemed to show that the AMD Ryzen CPUs don't always work very well with NVidia cards and you may get more performance out of them with AMD cards. The RX 580 would however make the system slower than the GTX 1080 even if the latter can't take full advantage of the CPU. The only help I guess would be either some NVidia driver optimizations for Ryzen (might have happened, I didn't follow the story) or waiting for the AMD Vega, which is at least two month away from now. That's if you're not limited by the GPU performance anyway.

Other than that, Xiahou's suggestion seems solid.

And regarding the screen, do you have any wishes? Resolution? I've personally switched to a 27" LG MU67 and I think it is great.
The 160 dpi really improve the way text is displayed and FreeSync makes the picture feel very smooth above 40 fps. Of course with an NVidia card you'd want to go for G-Sync, which tends to extend to lower frequencies like 30 fps but also makes the monitors about 100 bucks more expensive. (Although if the maximum frequency of the monitor is double or more the minimum FreeSync frequency, it can also work below the threshold by showing the same picture twice etc.).

Er, well, that's the basics, monitors can be complicated.

edit: Oh yeah, just read about it again, if you want to wait for Vega, this can be really hard. Not only is the launch at least two months away, but AMD cards also get bought by these crypto currency miner people/nerds because they're especially useful for that sort of thing. So it could be 4-6 months until they're actually available at a decent price if the miners jump onto them right away again.
I find it rather sad how the market works at the moment, I want to support AMD due to the monopoly behavior of Intel and NVidia, but it's not exactly easy like this.

[SwordsMaster]

Thanks for the thoughts gents,

Brand doesn't really concern me. I'm probably looking at a late july-early august timeframe so a 6month wait is not ideal... Monitor-wise - I'd like something in the 30-32' size with a resolution that will be enojable with a high-end graphics card. Since I don't really do online gaming I'm not too concerned with microsecond response times, although, obviously i'll take the best i can.

Ideally the whole package will land at under 1500$ but i'm pretty flexible within that.

Is 16Gb RAM enough at this point?
Are 8 Cores necessary? I had been thinking of something similar to the i7 7700/7820, but then I haven't really been following things much - any thoughts?

[Husar]

Brand doesn't really concern me. I'm probably looking at a late july-early august timeframe so a 6month wait is not ideal... Monitor-wise - I'd like something in the 30-32' size with a resolution that will be enojable with a high-end graphics card. Since I don't really do online gaming I'm not too concerned with microsecond response times, although, obviously i'll take the best i can.

Brand concerns me insofar that I don't like to pay money to people who are ripping me off with their monopoly, I've been an Nvidia ccustomer for a very long time, but what they do with G-Sync and mandatory signups for automatic driver updates etc. is just not my cup of tea.

The G-Sync and FreeSync do not improve any response times, they just synchronize the monitor refresh rate to that of the GPU, which not only eliminates screen tearing, but also makes the scene look smoother in general. I got FreeSync with my monitor and didn't look for it at the time and when I tried it I thought it's really nice. You basically get it for free with AMD anyway, just with NVidia it costs extra because they don't support the free standard and have their proprietary one only. Of course some people swear on 120 Hz or higher monitors. I can see the merit in that as well to some extent but personally chose a higher resolution instead.

Is 16Gb RAM enough at this point?
Are 8 Cores necessary? I had been thinking of something similar to the i7 7700/7820, but then I haven't really been following things much - any thoughts?

I think 16GB should be okay, RAM is very expensive at the moment and IIRC also expected to rise even further this year. And by expensive I mean 2-3 times as much per GB than last year. If you get 2x8 GB and somehow games require 32GB in 2 years, which I find a bit doubtful, you could still buy more then.
As for the CPU, yes, 8 cores seem to be the new sweet spot. You can easily find benchmarks that show the 7700K as the best and fastest gaming CPU, but there are some caveats to that:

1. More and more games actually make use of more than four cores, I heard in BF1 loading times are faster with up to eight cores. Ashes of the Singularity is faster on four but actually automatically disables some effects below five or six cores to improve performance. So in this case you actually need more than four for the full experience one could say.

2. In many benchmarks where the 7700K beats the AMD octa core CPUs, the 7700K is at 99% usage level while the octa cores sit at 60% or so and are a few percent slower. This means the octa cores have a lot more performance to offer that current games just don't always use while the 7700K is absolutely maxed out. Octa cores are more future proof and Intel plans to increase core numbers now as well, thanks to their quasi-Monopoly they just didn't have to until now.

3. Due to the Intel reign of the past few years, many current games are only really optimized for Intel CPUs, which may well cost the AMDs a few percentage points here and there. With the now-competitive AMD CPUs selling well, future games will likely be more optimized for them as well. As I said earlier, the NVidia driver seems to run badly with them as well and most benchmarks are done using NVidia GPUs to avoid running into a GPU limit with current AMD cards.

4. CPU benchmarks are mostly done with rather low resolutions and settings, if you go for higher resolutions and settings, your GPU will be your primary FPS limit in most cases and whether the 7700K could theoretically give you slightly higher framerates in current games becomes an academical exercise since your GPU cannot provide them anyway.

5. A lot of people who switched from Intel to AMD Ryzen claim their minimum FPS increased, so their framerate stays higher and doesn't result in annoying dips as often as with Intel.

[SwordsMaster]

Thanks Husar! That was very well thought out and helpful. I'm curious, why is the price of RAM going up? ISn't traditionally the trend for memory cost to go down, and do so quite quickly?