PC for the next 10 years build

Zarax

Zarax

Zarax

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Hello,

I'm considering to build a PC valid for the next 8-10 years, do you think this could be a solid future-proof build considering a mid-life GPU upgrade?

This would cost me semi-custom built (from a competitor) around £2400 (which is already above budget but RX6800 series are sold out).
Is it a good deal?

  • Intel Core i9-10850K
  • be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4
  • Arctic MX-5
  • 64 GB DDR4-3200 MHz (4x16GB)
  • PowerColor Radeon RX 6900 XT Red Devil Ultimate 16GB
  • MSI Z590-A PRO
  • 1000 GB M.2 SSD (NVMe)
  • 2000 GB SATA 3 HDD
  • ATX-Midi Corsair 4000D Airflow
  • Corsair TX-M850, 850W, 80+ Gold, Modular
  • Windows 10 Home
 
Honestly if you can hold out for prices to drop on GPUs its worth doing. But if not I would look at something with a 6700xt or similar GPU. The money you save could easily cover a GPU upgrade in a couple generations time that would likely make the 6900xt look silly

A way to think about it, if you were doing this 5 years ago, you'd be spending similar money on the Titan X. Which gets spanked by 3060ti or 6700xt.
 
I'm just worried about the 10850 being good enough for the long term but then AMD builds are more expensive and the 11 series is exceedingly poor bang for the buck...
 
For gaming I suspect the 10 core will be fine for a very long time. Its only been in the last year or so that quad core CPUs have started showing their age. Though you never know what could happen in the future, now that games have started actively leveraging more CPU cores, the trend may continue
 
10 years is a very long time. AM4 would offer a much better upgrade path with at least a 3D V-cache version of the 5950X.
 
Windows 11?

Does that mobo have a TPM chip to make it Win11 compatible? I assume that you would plan to upgrade to the new OS sometime in that 10 years . Win11 may turn out to be the new Vista but 10 years is an awful long time.

Like others have said, do not overspend on the GPU at this point in time. I would use any savings you make on the GPU to get an AMD based system with say a 5900x. Or get a 5600x now and buy second hand 5950x in 5 6 years time when they are cheap.
 
Z590 should have it by default I hope... My current PC saw Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 so hopefully next one will handle at the very least 11 and 12...
 
Zarax said:
I'm just worried about the 10850 being good enough for the long term but then AMD builds are more expensive and the 11 series is exceedingly poor bang for the buck...
Click to expand...
The only blip in the horizon it's that Is DDR5 memory is likely to become the standard next year meaning if you do need a mobo/cpu upgrade you'll need to change your ram as well. Personally I'd suggest just buying 32gb unless you really need 64gb for a specific purpose.
 
silvagti said:
The only blip in the horizon it's that Is DDR5 memory is likely to become the standard next year meaning if you do need a mobo/cpu upgrade you'll need to change your ram as well. Personally I'd suggest just buying 32gb unless you really need 64gb for a specific purpose.
Click to expand...

I feel RAM is less of a bottleneck than it's made to be, my aim is to keep 1080/60 for the foreseeable future and even my current build (i7-3770k 16GB RAM with RX 590) still more or less manages to keep that despite being nearly 10 years old aside from the GPU.
As for the 64GB, I plan to use the PC for machine learning as well and 64GB are pretty much the bare minimum for that.
 
silvagti said:
The only blip in the horizon it's that Is DDR5 memory is likely to become the standard next year meaning if you do need a mobo/cpu upgrade you'll need to change your ram as well. Personally I'd suggest just buying 32gb unless you really need 64gb for a specific purpose.
Click to expand...
For this reason I am not planning to upgrade until end of next year. Do you need the pc now?

Parts of my current pc are 10yrs old, but I don't think 10yrs is a very realistic goal. That is a long time in tech.
 
Honestly thinking a machine will last you 8-10 years and still play titles down the line at reasonable performance isnt very realistic. i understand that Intel CPU technology hasnt come on leaps and bounds in the last 10 years and people are still playing games on 2xxx/3xxx Intel CPUs with Memory/CPU upgrades rarely comes about. The advancements in CPU and GPU technology we have seen already from AMD/Intel/Nvidia will continue to grow quickly and as it does the longevity of systems gets smaller. I would say if you were to buy a top spec system now you would be lucky if you had any of the components in 3-5 years. It does however depend on what you are looking to do/game with the system and how happy you are with reducing image quality/performance as games are written to take advantage of newer technology.
 
EdwardTeach said:
For this reason I am not planning to upgrade until end of next year. Do you need the pc now?

Parts of my current pc are 10yrs old, but I don't think 10yrs is a very realistic goal. That is a long time in tech.
Click to expand...

I will likely wait as well but this is a "just in case" option if my PC decides to fail on me.
As for 10 years being unrealistic: I thought I would have replaced my pc by 2018 or 2019 (5-6 years) yet after 8 years I'm still pondering if an SSD wouldn't allow me to keep going for another couple years...
 
I thought DDR5, PCIE 5 and Intel big / little CPU`s were all due in the near`ish future.

So if planning a 10 year PC life cycle then i would wait to get those things or really try to hold out till AMD`s next gen of CPU`s.
 
dave28 said:
I thought DDR5, PCIE 5 and Intel big / little CPU`s were all due in the near`ish future.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I'm waiting to see what Alder Lake delivers at the end of the year. Unless you need a new system just now might be worth waiting as it sounds like it'll bring in some pretty major changes.
 
Zarax said:
As for the 64GB, I plan to use the PC for machine learning as well and 64GB are pretty much the bare minimum for that.
Click to expand...
Ryzen beats Intel in that.
https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-ryzen-9-5900x/10.html
And that's not even top model with 16 cores.

With Intel being behind in most single core performance and no reason to trust advertised improvements (Rocket Lake was supposed to be major improvement) 3D stacked L3 refreshed Zen3s likely match Alder Lake.
And in total performance Alder Lake will have even harder time, because of it having just 8 full performance cores, with rest being smaller lower performance mobile cores.
While AMD gives 16 full performance cores as option for later upgrade.

For gaming DDR5's challenge is going to be horrible access latency:
https://www.legitreviews.com/ddr5-6400mhz-memory-benchmarks-shown-on-intel-alder-lake-s_226693
That's over doubled from what DDR4 Intels achieve easily.
So while Alder Lake is no doubt going to do extremely well i nmemory bandwidth limited things, latency sensitive things like gaming could be entirely different thing.
AMD likely pushed Zen4 back to wait for less bad latency DDR5s.
 
dave28 said:
I thought DDR5, PCIE 5 and Intel big / little CPU`s were all due in the near`ish future.
Click to expand...
With latencies of knoww to be coming DDR5 there's little reason to expect much from it for gaming.

And it will be likely 5 years before PCIe v4 starts becoming any kind real limit for GPUs.

Big/little really doesn't make sense on desktop.
In laptops shutting full size cores during low loads/idling is certain power consumption advantage.
But on desk PC that watt or two difference is completely irrelevant.
Uncore/SOC consumes lot more during idling than cores.
Intel is bringing it to desktops clearly just to claim similar core counts to AMD.
 
Zarax said:
  • 1000 GB M.2 SSD (NVMe)
  • Corsair TX-M850, 850W, 80+ Gold, Modular
Click to expand...
Mid size 1TB SSD is entirely substandard for that budget and especially longevity aim.
Biggest games are like 200GB in size and there's more competition in 100GB size.

And mid level 7 year warranty PSU is definitely substandard.
10 year warranty PSU doesn't even cost really any more.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/msi-...s-gold-certified-fully-modular-ca-00j-ms.html


Zarax said:
I thought I would have replaced my pc by 2018 or 2019 (5-6 years) yet after 8 years I'm still pondering if an SSD wouldn't allow me to keep going for another couple years...
Click to expand...
That's because Intel was the biggest obstacle to advance of PCs (+game development) of the last decade stagnating to 4 cores for decade!
No doubt without AMD we would be lucky to have six core for ~£500 on desktop platform.
 
EsaT said:
With latencies of knoww to be coming DDR5 there's little reason to expect much from it for gaming.

And it will be likely 5 years before PCIe v4 starts becoming any kind real limit for GPUs.

Big/little really doesn't make sense on desktop.
In laptops shutting full size cores during low loads/idling is certain power consumption advantage.
But on desk PC that watt or two difference is completely irrelevant.
Uncore/SOC consumes lot more during idling than cores.
Intel is bringing it to desktops clearly just to claim similar core counts to AMD.
Click to expand...

good points, thank you
 
Zarax said:
Hello,

I'm considering to build a PC valid for the next 8-10 years, do you think this could be a solid future-proof build considering a mid-life GPU upgrade?
Click to expand...

why 10 years, you would get much better spending half the amount twice over ? the increase in performance you will see from doubling a budget now is marginal compared to the building two PCs at half the price.. and you can sell the first one you purchase for maybe 25-35% of the value to help fund the new system.

At the moment with graphics card prices the way they are they are probably better off getting a mid spec GPU and then upgrading it when the prices drop
 
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