General Use / Video/Photo Editing and occasional gaming

[MrX]

Hi,

It has been a while since I built a new PC (mine i7 has done v well over the years). I generally use it for general use and video and photo editing with only occasional gaming and don't need to run a game in full detail everything etc. I used to read CustomPC magazine before it stopped, hence not sure where to go for recommendations etc these days as that is no more.

I like Gigabyte motherboards and always have. I also like good quality PSUs and a lot of RAM. I like what I see now with AMD CPU's and would like the best bang for the buck but also to be fairly energy efficient. Storage I will add, but at least one fast solid state drive (my crucial has done well). Gfx card wise I see some mega prices and do not require something completely overkill, just something with a fairly large amount of RAM onboard and not to silly!

Ta in advance for your recommendations!

Best, Paul

 

[Tetras]

I like what I see now with AMD CPU's and would like the best bang for the buck but also to be fairly energy efficient.

The 7900 does very well with energy efficiency when you're running multithreaded, though the single/lightly threaded efficiency is not so great:

AMD Ryzen 9 7900 Review - Impressive Efficiency

With the Ryzen 9 7900, AMD is offering a more affordable version of their powerful 12-core processor. Our review confirms that the performance difference to the 7900X is small, yet the 7900 non-X consumes less than half the power compared to its big brother.

www.techpowerup.com

Gfx card wise I see some mega prices and do not require something completely overkill, just something with a fairly large amount of RAM onboard and not to silly!

VRAM is the killer, I'm afraid. Nvidia want you to pay mega bucks to have more than 12GB. If your usage isn't super heavy on the GPU, I'd just get a 3060 12GB, though that's really a 1080p or light 1440p card for gaming.

You could consider AMD 9070/9070 XT, which are supposed to have been significantly enhanced for media encoding/decoding compared to the previous gen.

Nvidia mention some of the improvements in their latest gen in this article (page 27), which you could check if any are relevant to you:

https://images.nvidia.com/aem-dam/Solutions/geforce/blackwell/nvidia-rtx-blackwell-gpu-architecture.pdf

If they're not relevant, a 4070 (from the previous gen) is cheaper than the 5070, which would you give pretty good efficiency for 1080p or 1440p gaming. A 4070 or 5070 can do 4K at a push, but not something I'd get for 4K AAA gaming.

The Lian Li case can do water or air cooling, so drop whatever you don't want. The average and top-end power consumption of the 7900 is very low, so it doesn't need an expensive cooler.

My basket at OcUK:

• 1 x AMD Ryzen 9 7900 Twelve Core 5.40GHz (Socket AM5) Processor - Retail (SKU: CP-3DU-AM) = £329.99
• 1 x Gigabyte B650 EAGLE AX (Socket AM5) DDR5 ATX Motherboard (SKU: MOT-GIG-03573) = £139.99
• 1 x Corsair Vengeance EXPO 64GB (2X32GB) DDR5 PC5-48000C30 6000MHz Dual Channel (SKU: MEM-CRS-02841) = £179.99
• 1 x Zotac GeForce RTX 5070 Solid OC 12GB GDDR7 PCI-Express Graphics Card (SKU: GRA-ZTC-04529) = £599.99
• 1 x Crucial T500 2TB NVMe PCIe Gen4 M.2 Solid State Drive (SKU: STO-CRU-01090) = £127.99
• 1 x Lian Li Lancool 216 Mid-tower PC case - Black (SKU: CA-7BG-LL) = £85.99
• 1 x Antec HCG 850 Pro Platinum 850W ATX3.1 Full modular Power Supply (SKU: POW-ATC-02745) = £159.95

• 1 x Arctic Freezer 36 120m Black CPU Cooler - 2x 120mm (SKU: COO-ARC-02420) = £22.99
• 1 x Corsair NAUTILUS 360 RS All In One CPU Cooler - 360mm (SKU: COO-CRS-03514) = £109.99

Total: £1,768.86 (includes delivery: £11.98)​

 

[Bagnaj97]

A curveball suggestion perhaps, but take a look at the Minisforum BD795i se. It's a high end laptop CPU (Ryzen 9 7945HX) on an ITX motherboard. The CPU itself is, to all intents and purposes, a desktop 7950x limited to 100w. The 7950x has an eco mode at 105w for comparison here

If you buy an AM5 motherboard and CPU separately then you're only looking at an 8-core CPU for similar money; bang-for-buck is incredible! The downside is that because it's a mobile CPU it's soldered to the motherboard, not socketed, and therefore not upgradeable later.

But for video and photo editing those 16 cores will really shine and gaming performance is decent too.