Help me... put together a neatly themed PC...

Chris [BEANS] · 27 May 2019 at 13:10

So I'll be building a new PC over the next few months.
I'm in no rush, and it seems it's a good idea to wait and see the score with Zen 2 and Navi etc...

I've built the last three computers I've had, so to call me a complete noob is probably not totally accurate, but between builds I pay very little attention to advances in component tech and I basically re-learn what's what prior to a build. So I'm not far off being a noob to be fair.
If I'm making any mistakes or doing anything silly please pipe up, I won't be offended to be told any of my plans are pointless or stupid!!

It's the finer details I really need a pointer on, like correct fan configurations, and which type of M.2, what wattage PSU I want and why, whether I'm missing anything small but essential (thermal paste, cable tie type stuff) etc...

I'm a bit older now, so I'm kind of in a position to do pretty much what I want, but that doesn't mean I want the most expensive everything just for the sake of it. I'll only ever be casually gaming, and I may well try a modest overclock on the CPU, but that's probably it.

I'd like to keep a nice coordinated theme, and at this stage I think a green 'Razer' theme is the move.
Simply because I treated myself to a load of Razer peripherals in the Easter Sale, and I really like the look of the forthcoming Razer Raptor monitor that should be out (in the US at least) some time soon.

Budget is probably 3 grand max, but that's not set in stone and as said above I'm going to be a casual gamer so if I have anything overkill and there are savings to be made, that'd be awesome.

So far I have:-

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Razer Epic Keyboard and Mouse Bundle - Blackwidow Elite Gaming Keyboard and Deathadder Elite Gaming = £159.95
1 x Razer Nommo Chroma Full Range 2.0 Gaming Speakers for PC (RZ05-02460100-R3W1)= £129.95
1 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus Polaris 500GB M.2 2280 PCI-e 3.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive= £119.99
1 x Seagate 1TB FireCuda 3.5" 7200RPM 64MB Cache SSHD Internal Hard Drive (ST1000DX002)= £66.95

Total: £486.74 (includes shipping: £9.90)

The 500 Gb M.2 will be a dedicated Steam drive, and the Firecuda is intended for just general storage.

So far i 'think' I want:-

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Lian-Li PC-O11 Dynamic Razer Edition Mid Tower Case - Black Tempered Glass= £149.99
1 x ThermalTake Riing Plus 120mm LED RGB TT Premium Edition Fan - Triple Pack= £86.99
1 x Seasonic Focus Plus 750W 80 Plus Gold Modular Power Supply= £104.99
1 x Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut High Performance Thermal Paste - 1 Gramm= £4.99
1 x BitFenix Alchemy 2.0 PSU Cable Kit, SSC/XFX-Series - Black & Green= £79.99
1 x OcUK Branded Cable Tie 1m Length Cutable to Length= £0.49
1 x Samsung 970 EVO Polaris 250GB M.2 2280 PCI-e 3.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive= £89.99

Total: £530.63 (includes shipping: £13.20)

The smaller M.2 will be a dedicated OS drive.
The reason for the ThermalTake fans is that the RGB will sync with Razer synapse, so I can keep the whole thing uniform.

What are peoples experience of BitFenix cables? Looks like the Cablemod ones may be neater as they come with attached closed cable combs??

Aside for (of course!!) the CPU, cooler, mobo and GPU, RAM, which I'll choose once the dust has settled, am I missing anything? Is there anything more I 'should' do, or is there anything that could be done better/or cheaper for the same quality/or both?

I've been on YouTube this morning following all the AMD announcements, and it seems that the Zen 2 with an X570 motherboard will probably be the way to go.

Not enough information to make an informed decision on the GPU just yet, but rather than just go straight in for a 2080 Ti at about £1200, I 'might' go with one of the new AMD GPU's at about £700 which appears will beat the 2070, and then next year when the AMD card that goes head to head with the 2080 Ti is released, I'll sell the card I have, and go with whichever top card comes out ahead...

Any tips or ideas on customisation or keeping it thematic would be great.

I've googled and come up blank, but are there any mobo and/or GPU that will sync with Razer synapse?

Believe it or not, I'm not a huge fan of RGB, but as literally everything has it now days, this seems to be my best shot at keeping things uniform and neat.

Ta

orbitalwalsh · 27 May 2019 at 13:21

first week of July is Ryzen launch . depending on your budget and what resolution your gaming at, mostly you'll end up rtx 2080 over Navi

if going nvme , are you just gaming ? if so, waste of cash , specially if it can be used to up GPU choice !

also new Lian Li dynamic case incoming !

Chris [BEANS] · 27 May 2019 at 15:19

orbitalwalsh said:
first week of July is Ryzen launch . depending on your budget and what resolution your gaming at, mostly you'll end up rtx 2080 over Navi

The monitor I'm really hoping to get a release date for at E3 is 1440. My thought with getting the £700 Navi at release for the 2070 beating preformance, then the winner of the better Navi vs 2080Ti when it comes out, rather than simply stumping up £1200 on the 2080 now and hoping AMD don't beat or under cut it early next year...

if going nvme , are you just gaming ? if so, waste of cash , specially if it can be used to up GPU choice !

Really?? I thought the whole point was that it massively reduced loading times etc, and made transitions between areas/levels much smoother. If I'm fine using the Firecuda for a steam drive, then perhaps I'll just get another for storage and use the M.2 I have for a boot drive. Thanks!

also new Lian Li dynamic case incoming !

The reason I've gone with this one, is that it is a Razer colab, and syncs to Synapse.

Cheers for the advice dude :cool:

EsaT · 27 May 2019 at 19:37

Chris [BEANS] said:
Really?? I thought the whole point was that it massively reduced loading times etc, and made transitions between areas/levels much smoother. If I'm fine using the Firecuda for a steam drive, then perhaps I'll just get another for storage and use the M.2 I have for a boot drive.

Meaningfull big difference is between HDD and SSD.
After certain level of access latency and transfer rate, main bottlenecks for game loading times move elsewhere and highest snake oil benchmarketing numbers loose their meaning.
Plenty of comparisons in Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nvme+ssd+hdd

Of course if you have massive library of not constantly played games, then SSD caching would be another option for improving performance in those without paying cost for all SSD.
PrimoCache would allow taking partition from normal SSD and using it as cache for normal HDDs or RAID array. (works at Window's drive letter level)
First access of data happens at speed of HDD, but then next access of same data happens at speed of SSD.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/did-some-benchmarking-of-an-ssd-caching-solution.2533859/
Once cache becomes full oldest/least used data gets evicted to make room for newer data.
Some say 50GB cache could hold decent number of older/smaller games.

SSHDs are basically waste of time compared to that.
Their Flash cache size is by today's measures tiny 8GB, yet extra cost is same as in ~240GB SSD.
That's why they don't tell cache size in advertising material.

As another thing about SSDs Samsung 860 QVO and Intel 660p use QLC Flash, which stores four bits into one cell and has to tell apart 16 different charge/voltage states to avoid error.
That's pretty much analog storage and myself wouldn't touch those until they've been real world home use tested for couple years.

EsaT · 27 May 2019 at 20:26

Chris [BEANS] said:
Budget is probably 3 grand max...

My basket at Overclockers UK:

1 x Lian-Li PC-O11 Dynamic Razer Edition Mid Tower Case - Black Tempered Glass= £149.99

1 x ThermalTake Riing Plus 120mm LED RGB TT Premium Edition Fan - Triple Pack= £86.99

That case is rather bad for heatpipe coolers with only 155mm clearance.
Scythe Mugen 5 is one of the very few high end coolers fitting into that:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/search?sSearch=Mugen+5
In cooling performance per noise it, like other high end heatpipe coolers, actually beat majority of waterpipe coolers.

And there would be lot less overpriced adressable RGB fans than those premium profit margin Thermaltakes.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/air-cooling/fans/rgb-fans?ckSuppliers=22&sSort=3&ckTab=0

Also for that price PC stereo speakers for gaming are like buying dozen years old graphics card.
Such gaming trinket speakers can't be even expected to have decent sound quality.

Chris [BEANS] · 27 May 2019 at 21:04

EsaT said:
That case is rather bad for heatpipe coolers with only 155mm clearance.
Scythe Mugen 5 is one of the very few high end coolers fitting into that:
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/search?sSearch=Mugen+5
In cooling performance per noise it, like other high end heatpipe coolers, actually beat majority of waterpipe coolers.

Nice catch!! I absolutely had not realised that!! The Mugen 5 actually looks quite quite nice too, so I may well go that way...
I wasn't planning on using an AIO, as they seem more expensive for little if any performance gain, but aesthetically, they're a possibility and again I can use ThermalTake fans to sync with the rest of the lighting...

And there would be lot less overpriced adressable RGB fans than those premium profit margin Thermaltakes.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/air-cooling/fans/rgb-fans?ckSuppliers=22&sSort=3&ckTab=0

Yeah, I get that there are cheaper options out there, but the specific reason for the ThermalTakes is that they can sync to the rest of the Razer Chroma lighting on all of the peripherals and the case, and it will therefore be nice and easy and streamlined to keep everything uniform.

Also for that price PC stereo speakers for gaming are like buying dozen years old graphics card.
Such gaming trinket speakers can't be even expected to have decent sound quality.

These were bought cheaply, and frankly to fit the rest of the Razer Chroma theme. In actual proper gaming I'll be using a headset. To be fair though, they've actually reviewed rather well.

Cheers again :cool:

Chris [BEANS] · 27 May 2019 at 21:24

EsaT said:
Meaningfull big difference is between HDD and SSD.
After certain level of access latency and transfer rate, main bottlenecks for game loading times move elsewhere and highest snake oil benchmarketing numbers loose their meaning.
Plenty of comparisons in Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=nvme+ssd+hdd

Blinding. Thanks. As I already have the M.2, I'll use that for a boot drive, and I'll get a higher capacity SSD for the steam drive for the same price as a small M.2 (This is exactly the sort of advice I needed!!).
I have the Firecuda now, so I guess I'll simply use it for storage. That won't make any use of the SSHD features, but I have it now, so it is what it is...

Of course if you have massive library of not constantly played games, then SSD caching would be another option for improving performance in those without paying cost for all SSD.
PrimoCache would allow taking partition from normal SSD and using it as cache for normal HDDs or RAID array. (works at Window's drive letter level)
First access of data happens at speed of HDD, but then next access of same data happens at speed of SSD.
https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/did-some-benchmarking-of-an-ssd-caching-solution.2533859/
Once cache becomes full oldest/least used data gets evicted to make room for newer data.
Some say 50GB cache could hold decent number of older/smaller games.

SSHDs are basically waste of time compared to that.
Their Flash cache size is by today's measures tiny 8GB, yet extra cost is same as in ~240GB SSD.
That's why they don't tell cache size in advertising material.

As another thing about SSDs Samsung 860 QVO and Intel 660p use QLC Flash, which stores four bits into one cell and has to tell apart 16 different charge/voltage states to avoid error.
That's pretty much analog storage and myself wouldn't touch those until they've been real world home use tested for couple years.

I mean, I had to read that a couple of times, but I hear you. SSD it is (thumbs up emoji)

EsaT · 27 May 2019 at 22:13

Chris [BEANS] said:
Nice catch!! I absolutely had not realised that!! The Mugen 5 actually looks quite quite nice too, so I may well go that way...

Mugen 5 is only step behind the best heatpipe coolers.
It just doesn't have marketing hype brand premium profit marging price extra, but instead has put all the money into design.
Giving complete DIMM/PCIe clearance and height fitting to almost any case.

Even RGB version is correctly priced.
Plenty of bling blinged basic coolers with gross overpricing.

Just like lots of those RGB fans...
They don't even give proper warranty length for the price:
Arctic gives 10 year warranty for £6 fans.
That's how much butt raping&robbery fashion+hype brand fans have in price.

Chris [BEANS] said:
I mean, I had to read that a couple of times, but I hear you. SSD it is (thumbs up emoji)

Crucial MX500 and WD Blue 3D are the best priced SATA SSDs with five year warranty.
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/wd-b...-solid-state-drive-wds100t2b0a-hd-54j-wd.html
Samsung has clear brand extra.
For shorter 3 year warranty there are some other cheaper ones.