11–18 of 18 posts
Highly recommend starting with a budget and use cases (VR, ray tracing, 4K, etc) and then using https://www.logicalincrements.com/ to fill in the details.
There's a lot fewer components for a basic system these days.
If you want a GPU, prices are crazy, and the best value seems to be buying a whole system with the GPU in it already. If you go with a smaller integrator, you'll get real parts that can be upgraded later as needed, if you go with like HP or Dell, you may get a propriatary PSU and case which could be difficult to upgrade later.
Some of the latest gen Intel motherboard use DDR5, which is also crazy to get right now. Word is supply is coming soon, but early DDR5 isn't much better than current DDR4 for most things, so I would go with a DDR4 system (3200-3600 MHZ seems to be the right balance of price and performance for DDR4)
Short answer - everything is expensive due to supply chain issues - at every step, videocards are even more expensive due to crypto miners using them. Unless you are price insensitive - wait a bit.
I am very happy with the machine. If I were to do it again, I would probably get a bigger power supply.
Sadly, "building" a PC nowadays is not very fun.
Install CPU, RAM, m.2 SSD... and that's all if you use iGPU. Just almost bare motherboard, there is even no cables to the disk drive!
GPU? Isn't needed if you aren't driving multiple monitors and/or gaming. Even if, it's just one card, install it.. and that's all.
BD/DVD? In 2021? Really?
Soundcard? If you really care than you just pipe it to your $kkkk receiver through SPDIF/HDMI/whatever, otherwise it is just fine.
OS? Just install it. Win10/11 would work out of the box, most Linux distros would work too.
The only "fun" there is hunting specs through the atrocious naming schemes (to be sure you aren't buying some 5-10 y/o part with the same index re-used on a modern piece) and hunting down the specialty things, like a SFF[0] mini-ITX cases and parts what would fit in it.
My recommended specs are the following-
Ryzen 5 5600X
B550 Motherboard
RTX 3060
32GB Trident Z RAM[16GBx2]
Samsung 970 EVO 1/2TB
NZXT case - H510 variants to choose from
850W Modular PSU
For CPUs, I normally use cpubenchmark.net ratings. For GPUs, I simply look at “single precision TFLops” column on Wikipedia.
> make sure they are compatible
That’s a bit tricky indeed. TL/DR version – pick a CPU first, a compatible motherboard next, the motherboard’s manual will tell you about compatibility with RAM and disks. For RAM, go with maximum supported frequency, and minimum latency you can find (the latency is CL number, lower the better, if you’ll pick an AMD CPU the latency better be an even number). For disks, manufacturers typically specify both sequential (MB/second) and random (IOPS) performance, for both of them higher the better.
Once you picked the rest of the components, use an online calculator to find PSU wattage, leave some reasonable headroom like 20%.
> coding, compiling, somewhat heavy-ish on the browser
You’re lucky you didn’t list gaming, the global GPU shortage is still ongoing. A CPU with integrated graphics should work fine for you. BTW, I’m currently using a PC with Ryzen 7 5700G CPU, can recommend.