4K Gaming PC

[Arthalen]

Hoping I can get some help with choosing a new PC. I have a budget that goes to £3K max for the just the PC tower. I've already treated myself to an early Christmas present with the Alienware AW3225QF a 32" OLED 4K Monster.

I do a decent amount of Gaming and Virtualisation on my home PC for work learning, running a nested vSphere lab inside VMware Workstation. My current Skylake 7820x / 64GB / 1080 Ti setup at 2K has done me very well on that front, and will be enjoying a retirement to 1080p gaming for my daughter.

So now I need a new PC to properly drive my new monitor to 4K Gaming Goodness. I have a long list of games that I want to play - Space Marine 2, Starfield, Jedi Survivor, Cyberpunk 2077, FFVII Remake - that I've been holding out on playing until I had the setup to do them justice.

I normally go down the Intel/Nvidia route, and was initially thinking the Arrow Lake 265K combined with a RTX 4080 Super would do the job. I would like to invest in having PCI-Ex 5.0 for the long term, as I don't expect the 4080 Super to last too long before I want to upgrade it for more FPS in future games. But then I've encountered a lot of chatter on how poor Arrow Lake has been with gaming performance, and even that the Raptor Lake refresh has had instability issues? So is Intel off the board for this?

Normally I'd sit down and do the research, but time is ticking away, i'll miss the Black Friday deals, and so I could do with some real advice on what direction to take and what to put together!

 

[Tetras]

But then I've encountered a lot of chatter on how poor Arrow Lake has been with gaming performance, and even that the Raptor Lake refresh has had instability issues? So is Intel off the board for this?

Normally I'd sit down and do the research, but time is ticking away, i'll miss the Black Friday deals, and so I could do with some real advice on what direction to take and what to put together!

Long story short: arrow lake has poop gaming performance, but poop is relative, because they are not terrible, they're just not competitive at gaming with AMD's X3D CPUs or with 13th-14th gen.

Intel 13th-14th gen issues are supposed to be fixed (that's what Intel says if you use the latest microcodes), but it'll take a few years before we know if these CPUs survive long-term. I wouldn't buy one unless I was satisfied with the 5 year extended warranty on K CPUs.

If you're content with gaming performance that is somewhere around a 13600K, then the productivity performance of the 265K isn't bad at all, around a 9900X.

There are supposed to be BIOS and software updates coming to address the inconsistent performance.

 

[ben1987]

If it were me I’d not show any loyalty to intel and just buy what’ll give you the best performance.

If the bulk of what you want to do is game, then the 9800X3D is the king.

I’d find it pretty hard to spend the best part of a grand on a 4080 super now with the 50 series rumoured to be out in the new year. I’d either wait on the GPU side or see if I could snag a bargain 4090 as there will be a few people looking to sell them in anticipation of a 5090

 

[Arthalen]

If it were me I’d not show any loyalty to intel and just buy what’ll give you the best performance.

If the bulk of what you want to do is game, then the 9800X3D is the king.

I’d find it pretty hard to spend the best part of a grand on a 4080 super now with the 50 series rumoured to be out in the new year. I’d either wait on the GPU side or see if I could snag a bargain 4090 as there will be a few people looking to sell them in anticipation of a 5090

I'm comfortably with the 4080 Super, for now, to be honest. I'd probably upgrade that when theres a card capable of doing Raytracing at 60+ FPS at 4K.

I need a good balance of cores for my PC, and an uptick to 12c+ would be welcome over what I have with my 7820X, so would probably opt for the Ryzen 9 9900X over the 9800X3D. But this was also why I was looking at the Intel 265K, 8+12 cores seemed like a good idea, for me.

Regardless, both the AMD Processors in this equation are out of stock at OCUK

 

[Tetras]

But this was also why I was looking at the Intel 265K, 8+12 cores seemed like a good idea, for me.

If you went with the 9900X instead, some of the gaming advantage would be diminished anyway, since the Core Ultra CPUs aren't that much slower (the 265K is around a 7700).