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!

 

[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

 

[Arthalen]

How does the following look? Am I missing anything (Extra Fans?), have I got the right RAM for the CPU/Mobo combo (I think this ok?), SSD ok etc etc?

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x Corsair Vengeance RGB 64GB (2X32GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C32 6400MHz Dual Channel Kit - (SKU: MEM-CRS-03242) = £199.99
• 1 x Arctic Liquid Freezer III ARGB High Performance CPU Water Cooler - 360mm (SKU: COO-ARC-01992) = £89.99
• 1 x Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (Arrow Lake) Socket LGA 1851 Processor - Retail (SKU: PRO-INT-03110) = £569.99
• 1 x Intel Holiday Bundle - Assassin's Creed Shadows + Ubisoft Plus (SKU: DIG-INT-03637) = £0.00
• 1 x Asus Prime Z890-P (LGA 1851) DDR5 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MOT-ASU-03415) = £284.99
• 1 x Crucial T700 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen5 M.2 Solid State Drive with Heatsink (CT2000T700SSD5) (SKU: HD-07G-CR) = £222.94
• 1 x Zotac GeForce RTX 4080 Super Trinity Black 16Gb Graphics Card (SKU: GRA-ZTC-01496) = £899.99
• 1 x NVIDIA - Indiana Jones and The Great Circle Game Bundle (SKU: DIG-NVI-03769) = £0.00
• 1 x Antec HCG 1000 Pro Platinum 1000W ATX3.1 Full modular Power Supply (SKU: POW-ATC-02746) = £179.99
• 1 x Antec C8 ARGB Midi Tower - Black (SKU: CAS-ATC-02732) = £129.95

Total: £2,577.83 (includes delivery: £0.00)​

And, I'm not ignoring the advice on getting a 9800X3D, I hear you guys, but I have more to do in mind where a CPU with more cores will give me.

 

[Arthalen]

M2 pcie 5 ? Can you take advantage of the speed otherwise 2 x 2tb pcie4 mw drives will give you more storage and decent transfer speeds
Why that motherboard?

Yeah the motherboard has a M2 PCIE 5 slot for NVMe drive I've put in the spec. I tend to copy/clone and snapshot a lot of nested VMs all over the place, so I think I can justify the extra speed.

As for the motherboard - I don't overclock (anymore), and I don't need Wifi, so was thinking the base level board would do. I guess I have a fair amount of Brand loyalty to Asus as well, I've been using the boards for years without issues. I'm happy to go to a different/better/more expensive board if there's reason to do so.

 

[Arthalen]

The C8 seems to have less bundled fans than the C5, odd, but I guess if you're using an AIO in the roof it matters less.


I was pretty confident the 265K would be fine with anything, but the 285K uses quite a chunk more power. The spec on their website looks pretty beefy (the VRM), but I'd really hate to recommend a board you might do long-run intensive workloads with a high-end CPU and have no thermal testing that I can check it with.

Yeah I like the C8 over the C5 as it just has a bit more room to work with for my large club-like hands, despite the loss of the side mount fans as standard.

As for the motherboard, again, happy to hear on other recommendations to suit the 285K better. Is it a VRM phase concern or more a VRM cooling concern with the model I have at the moment? Or something else?

 

[Arthalen]

** Much awesome feedback **

Firstly, thanks for the info on the 9800X3D. And I totally get what your saying. The only thing I can say about the 285 is that.... Intel want to fix it?

I did watch the following which kind of assured me they would get to the bottom of things with Arrow Lake, but this is the Marketing Guy covering for his company, sooo.....

....might be worth waiting for...not sure how urgent you want the new pc

I'm trying to wait. But it's not everyday that the Wife tells me I can spend £3K on a new PC, nor have something like this sat next to me waiting to be opened and gazed upon lovingly.......