Building a PC - Looking for some advice.

Wabbit

Wabbit

Wabbit

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Hello.

I am currently looking to build a PC mostly for work.

The work that i do involves heavy usage of Photoshop, Lightroom and various other graphic and photography programs.

I have been using a Macbook Pro for the last 7 years, and it's literally on its last legs!

Also note, i used to heavily play PC games approx 15 yrs ago, so there is a possibility that i could be interested in some gaming, but, I'm not too bothered about it, if it's going to save me a small fortune!

So, anyway.. as you can expect, 15 yrs has passed and I'm completely out of touch with a lot of the latest components etc..

I'm about a week into some research and I've already purchased the 12th gen i5 12600KF so i will need to build around this.

My initial questions that google hasn't really been great at answering for me is about DDR4 and DDR5 memory.

I've been looking at the Kingston Fury Beast DDR4 and DDR5 and there's not a huge price difference for me. Should i just go for the DDR5? And yes, I'm aware that the motherboard will need to be compatible etc..

So.. that comes to my second question.
Motherboard... i am quite limited where i can get the motherboard from, but I've been looking at the ASRock Z690 Phantom Gaming 4/D5 as this is available to me and not too expensive. Does anyone here have experience or knowledge with this motherboard?

Aaand lastly.. Graphics Card. These are way over my head.. they aren't like they were 15yrs ago lol.

Throw some suggestions at me. Not too expensive and not to cheap will approx £300 be sufficient or am i way off?

That'll do as I've written enough for now!
Thanks
 
We can only suggest OCUK as a store due to forum rules and it being their forum/store :)

Is the £300 for the gpu or the whole lot, if it's the whole lot then you're way off, if it's gpu only (which I hope is the case) then I'd argue it's bare minimum if you are considering gaming these days.

Ram - The CPU you bought can technically run with DDR4 or DDR5 depending on the board you pick, DDR4 is generally speaking cheaper option.

Do you need case, cpu cooler, psu, storage, screen, keyboard/mouse etc. If you don't need a screen, what screen (resolution and refresh rate especially) will you be using because it could have an impact on the gpu you need

We normally try to spec around the total cost you want to spend rather than just individual parts so full budget might be beneficial.
 
lsg1r said:
We can only suggest OCUK as a store due to forum rules and it being their forum/store :)

Is the £300 for the gpu or the whole lot, if it's the whole lot then you're way off, if it's gpu only (which I hope is the case) then I'd argue it's bare minimum if you are considering gaming these days.

Ram - The CPU you bought can technically run with DDR4 or DDR5 depending on the board you pick, DDR4 is generally speaking cheaper option.

Do you need case, cpu cooler, psu, storage, screen, keyboard/mouse etc. If you don't need a screen, what screen (resolution and refresh rate especially) will you be using because it could have an impact on the gpu you need

We normally try to spec around the total cost you want to spend rather than just individual parts so full budget might be beneficial.
Click to expand...
Hi.

Yes, the £300 is was suggested for the graphics card

The system will be used for heavy graphics work like 90% of the time. Any gaming is just a bonus, so as i mentioned, the gaming aspect isn't a deal breaker for me.
The graphical work is most important. The i5 that i bought doesn't have integrated graphics, so a graphics card of some sort is needed. I just don't have a clue where to start.

Regarding the Ram.. the price difference between the DDR4 and DDR5 for me is about £50 which isn't much at all. I'm just after some advice on how much improvement i would see with the work I'll be doing?

Regards to the other parts like keyboard, mouse, screen etc.. i haven't begun any research on that yet.

I'm just concentrating on the CPU, Board and Memory for now as that'll be my brains for my work

I should also note - The budget isn't a huge factor regarding the PSU and the essentials.
Also to note - I'm not in a hurry to have it built immediately as I'm happy to continue with my Macbook for now.

I'm just collecting the parts needed over time - so, if it takes a few months, I'm good with that.
 
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Wabbit said:
Hi.

Yes, the £300 is was suggested for the graphics card

The system will be used for heavy graphics work like 90% of the time. Any gaming is just a bonus, so as i mentioned, the gaming aspect isn't a deal breaker for me.
The graphical work is most important. The i5 that i bought doesn't have integrated graphics, so a graphics card of some sort is needed. I just don't have a clue where to start.
Click to expand...
last I checked and from my own experience Adobe (in the larger scheme of things) seems to work better with nvidia and it's cuda cores than it does amd and opencl so for graphics I'd personally be looking at an rtx3060 ti founders edition which is fraction above your £300 budget at £370.
It should be fine for photoshop/lightroom work even on a 4K display but it will struggle with gaming at higher resolutions and refresh rates. Gaming at 1080p and even 1440p should be ok in most cases though.


Regarding the Ram.. the price difference between the DDR4 and DDR5 for me is about £50 which isn't much at all. I'm just after some advice on how much improvement i would see with the work I'll be doing?
Click to expand...
Honestly you'd probably not notice any difference but if you want a bit of future proofing ddr5 is the way to go and you can then potentially use it in future builds etc.

Regards to the other parts like keyboard, mouse, screen etc.. i haven't begun any research on that yet.
Click to expand...
at the very least I'd recommend you decide on the screen resolution and refresh rate, it could have an impact on the rest of your build.

I'm just concentrating on the CPU, Board and Memory for now as that'll be my brains for my work
Click to expand...
I'll let some others suggest motherboard(s) because I'm in the AMD camp at the moment so don't have any real experience on their (intel) latest boards. Something to help them though... do you want a smaller build, think mac studio range (mini itx or micro atx) or are you ok with going full size, think mac pro (atx boards)
 
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Thanks guys.. I'm sure i could stretch upwards to approx £400 for the card if it's needed for sure!

I'll get reading up on it.

lsg1r said:
do you want a smaller build, think mac studio range (mini itx or micro atx) or are you ok with going full size, think mac pro (atx boards)
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I'm happy going with full size ATX - i think thats what i need - using the macbook for years with limited storage has been a huge pain! So if the board size gives me all the slots for extras including the drives, that'll be great :)

lsg1r said:
at the very least I'd recommend you decide on the screen resolution and refresh rate, it could have an impact on the rest of your build.
Click to expand...

I'll get reading up tonight on the screen as it will be very important to me and probably a large cost towards what I'm building.. most of my graphics work is photo editing (I'm a sports photographer)
I remember an old monitor i had years ago and it was awful for editing photos - since using the macbook, I've not had any issues regards to colours etc.. so as long as it's as good as the macbook screen I'm happy

lsg1r said:
Honestly you'd probably not notice any difference but if you want a bit of future proofing ddr5 is the way to go and you can then potentially use it in future builds etc.
Click to expand...
I think for the sake of about £50 I'm happy with the DDR5 and being a bit more future proof.
But, obviously it'll depend on the mobo i decide on. The mobo i previously mentioned handles DDR5 and is very reasonably priced.
 
Having a brief look at graphics cards the cost is huge nowadays!!
I remember when a Voodoo card at £200 was a lot!
 
Wabbit said:
I'm happy going with full size ATX - i think thats what i need - using the macbook for years with limited storage has been a huge pain! So if the board size gives me all the slots for extras including the drives, that'll be great :)
Click to expand...
Well I'll give you something else to read up on tonight :P
Most modern boards will give somewhere between 4-8 sata connectors for storage plus 1-3 nvme slots.

Storage on modern pc's doesn't have to take up much space either... nvme drives (which you'll want at least one of, probably 2 if you want a scratch disk etc, because they're the fastest options) literally plugs into your motherboard a bit like ram does. I'd also recommend sata ssd's these days for a pc over hard drives, they'll just perform better overall and to top it off they're smaller lol. Basically you can have a small compact case AND a decent amount of storage these days....

However if you want 'mass storage' of say your photo archives then I'd suggest going down the route of a nas with redundancy and the ability to access from all devices in your network.
 
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