A Silver Surfer needs help in building a new PC please.

[Pythagoras]

I have been stuck in a time warp for far too long. I need to move into the 21st century.
I have been coping quite well with my basic Windows 7 desktop pc.
For security reasons I need to update and I am going with Windows 11.

I mainly use my computer for editing photographs. I photograph a road running race most weekends taking many thousand photos that I edit in Photoshop and upload onto the Internet. I am not a gamer.

I would appreciate it anyone could look through my list of parts and point out any mistakes and suggest alyernatives. I guess I might have missed a few things.

I would like to do the build for under £1.000.
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Gigabyte B550M DS3H (AMD AM4) B550 Micro-ATX Motherboard. £95

AMD Ryzen 7 5700G 8 Core 3.8 GHZ (Socket AM4) with RX Vega Graphics £170
or AMD Ryzen 7 5700X 8 Core 4.6 GHz (Socket AM4) £210

AMD Wraith Stealth AM4 CPU Air Cooler £15

PSU Seasonic B 12 BC - 650 650W 80 Plus Bronze £60

Corsair Vengeance LPX Black (2 X 8GB) 3000MHz AMD Ryxen Tuned DDR4 Memory Dual KIt £45

Samsung 500GB 870 EVO SSD (For Operating System) £55

WD 1TB HHD 7200rpm 64MB Hard Drive (For Backup) £45

Would I need this if I went for the processor with RX Vega Graphics:
Gigabyte Geforce RTX 3060 Eagle LHR 12GB GDDR6 PCI Express Graphic Card £300
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An Alternative build

I would like to buy the above parts from Overclockers and install them myself in an old tower I bought 20 years ago for £68, still as good as new.

Lian Li PC 60 Aluminium Midi Tower

Would the parts that I have listed fit into the tower?
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Any help much appreciated. Thank you .

 

[Pythagoras]

As Mcnumpty said, probably not and you can always buy it later, but be aware that Photoshop (and other 2D apps) are being updated all the time and it is likely that the load will shift more and more onto the graphics card. If you're only doing simple edits, that don't take much time to complete, then I'm 99% sure you'll be fine.


If you're going with the 5700X (no cooler included), I would not deliberately buy a wraith stealth, since there are better options.

The 5700G comes with the wraith stealth, if it is retail boxed.


The B12 isn't a Seasonic PSU, it just has their name on it. The Phanteks Amp 650 (£90) is Seasonic (even though it has Phanteks name), or you can pay £95 for the Focus GX, which is the real thing.


£55 seems rather a lot, you should be able to get a 1TB M.2 like the SN570 for that. I'd also personally avoid a HDD for backups as it can easily end up the bottleneck in your situation, but I suppose if you're sure that it won't be.


Seems a bit pricey for 16GB, an extra £10 or so should get you double the memory.

Thanks to very one who has sent me responses, you have been of tremendous help, I am so grateful.

I have tweaked my shopping list on the recommendations you have kindly made.

Just to add I went for the AM4 and Rysen 7 5700 initially, as rightly suggested for economic reasons.

Also I am 83 next birthday and I hope I live long enough to take advantage of no further updates

I wish you all well.

Thank you.

 

[Pythagoras]

I agree, throw out the mechanical hard drive, no point in those at that capacity anymore, you only really want to be using those if you are going to go for one that's got a much larger capacity, as in 12TB+ You can pretty much get a 2TB NVME drive for the price of the SSD and hard drive you picked, I would absolutely do that instead, no question, this will make the biggest difference to your build as is. Other than that, again 32GB of ram would make much more sense now, you might not need all of it today but you very well might tomorrow and given the prices you may aswell now. The 5700G is fine, it will do what you want without any need for a seperte GPU and you can always add one later if you want. consider how this will be cooled, your old Lian Li will only take 80mm fans which haven't seen much use since about 20 years ago but it was a nicely made case, I had one myself around 2000 but I upgraded to the PC7 when that became available as it took 120mm fans so cooled better and much more quietly, you can still buy 80mm fans of course so you could put some new ones in if you need.

Something you didn't mention, is your monitor, this is the thing that makes more difference to a comforatable edditing experience than any other, I would highly recommend a good 4K monitor for photo edding, it doesn't need to be a fast gaming oriented display a 60HZ IPS would be fine and would be a much better buy for you doing what you do than a seprate GPU would for £300 as you mentioned. This would be ideal I think. Food for thought anyway, it very much depends what you already have, given the fact you said you were using an old Windows 7 PC, I rather suspect you have some ancient 1080P TN panel with big shiny bezels and a commedy stand from that era, maybe not even 1080P.

Like all the other replies, I am go grateful for you taking the time to make helpful suggestions.

I was a little concerned about my old Lian only having 80mm fans, if I go down that route I will certainly replace the fans, thank you for the advice.

As to the monitor, a close friend died a few months ago and I was given his monitor which gave me the nudge that I needed to get a new computer.

The monitor is a Benq 27" PD2700Q which certainly looks the business, I hope so.

That said, I will have to re-organize my desk, as my previous monitor was only 19".

A small price to pay given the advantages you say such a monitor will give me.

Once more thank you, much appreciated.

 

[Pythagoras]

PD2700Q though a bit old now
Was a decent enough monitor aimed at
The sort of thing you want to do
1440p (2k) should be perfectly fine
It's a very popular resolution for both gaming
And production work
Got 2 x 27 1440p monitors here myself

Thank you so much for your reassuring response, much appreciated.

 

[Pythagoras]

Oh yea a PD2700Q is fine, I was just a bit concerned you were going to be using this with something like your old 19" monitor, as I feel that wouldn't give you a good experience at all nor a 'modern' feeling one, you'ed still be editing like it's 2004 which isn't ideal.

I really appreciate all the help I am getting from members of the forum.
Thank you so much.

 

[Pythagoras]

I think the 8600G comes with the wraith stealth and the 8700G comes with the wraith spire, but can't confirm that on AMD's website.

Thanks again folks for chipping in on this one, it is really, really appreciated.

The latest posts unfortunately came in a day too late, damn.

I bit the bullet and purchase the parts from Overclockers a couple of days ago and they were delivered yesterday.

I say "damn" because I wish now I had spent a bit more money, I am a cheapskate, me thinks

This is what I went for:
AMD Ryzen 7 5700G (this came with a heatsink)
Planteks AMP 650w 80 Plus Gold
Gigabyte B550M DS3H
Corsair Vengence LPX Black 32GB
WD Blue SN580 500GB SSD NVME M (O/S)
MSI SPATIUM M450 1TB SSD PCLe
ASUS 24x DVDRW

I set to as soon as the parts arrived, put them together, installed Windows 11, hit the on-switch with my fingers crossed and it fired up beautifully.

I installed the parts in my Lian aluminium case that I bought 20 years ago, still as good as new.

Wiring up the Front Panel Header took the longest to do, Power LED, Power Switch, HDD LED, Reset Switch. A bit 'trial and error' but I got there in the end.

I am sure I could have done better with other suggested parts, but compared with the PC that Overclockers built for me 10 years ago, it is blistering fast. Fingers crossed.

I just ran CrystalDisk, Health Status: Good 100%, Temperature: 27 degrees C.

Thanks again everybody, you are a great team.

 

[Pythagoras]

Surprised to see DVD RW on the list do you still use it?

I use it very occasionally. When I started taking road race photographs 20 years ago I backed up all my photographs on DVDs. In recent years I have backed them up to hard drives. In that time I have taken over 1 million photographs, I have archived every photograph I have ever taken. I still get asked by runners if I took photographs say in Potteries Marathon in 2004 I also have a quite a lot music CDs. I still have a record player that plays Vinyl