Advice on new PC build
Dear Tildesterites: my trusty PC has led a dutiful life of eleven years and, along with my keyboard, has finally met its earthly doom (total organ failure). I wish it luck across the ultraviolet lithographic bridge, at the other side of which we'll someday reunite to play Skyrim together again.
In the meantime, I would like another PC on which to play various modern AAA games except for The Elder Scrolls VI. I'd intended to replace my machine ~4 years ago when it was in fairer health, but other efforts took priority. Since then, the product market has inflated in price and all the SKUs have changed, so I'm back to being mostly clueless about the state of the industry.
I put together a parts list from some basic research and would like a gut check. I'm coming from an i5-4460, GTX 970, and 16 GB RAM at 1080p 144hz, which may as well be neolithic. I only really need this PC to play video games smoothly and to do standard workstation tasks (nothing remarkable).
Rationale and notes:
- 60hz to 144hz was the greatest upgrade I ever made and now it seems like 180hz or 240hz is the new 144hz. I've also wanted to move to 1440p for years. I reviewed the Gamers Nexus GPU benchmarks and it seems like 120fps+ is broadly possible at this resolution.
- Nvidia's cards seem unreasonably priced. A friend of mine offered me his RTX 3070 for free, which I would be happy to accept as a stand-in to keep the initial cost down, and in a year I might come back to get a newer card like the 9070 XT or whatever replaces it?
- I'd like an M.2 to keep cable management to a minimum.
- I will not overclock or undervolt the CPU. I'd just like it to run.
- I'd love for the thing to be quiet.
My questions are:
- Does the build feel balanced? Are there any egregious oversights?
- How much RAM is prudent, at what speed/latency? Do we expect prices to drop anytime soon?
- M.2 PCIe 3.0, 4.0, or 5.0 x4? Does this matter for games? Is a dedicated OS drive still best practice?
- IPS or OLED? WOLED or QD-OLED? Is Freesync Premium sufficient? (@AugustusFerdinand we spoke about this some time ago; has your opinion changed?)
I thank you in advance for your insights. I'm not going to buy this immediately (this summer at the earliest), but I'd like to know how close to reasonable I'm being.
As somebody who has both worked in tech, is a gamer, and has worked with AI on my local devices, I don't see prices coming down any time soon.
I bought a 3090 TI in 2022, and since my initial purchase, the price of my graphics card has doubled.
None of this is to say that you shouldn't try to get a nice computer, but I'll be frank and say that it's going to be very difficult to get something that can push 4K frames at a very decent rate in ultra settings on the latest games.
I think it is a great idea to accept the 3070 from your friend if he's genuinely willing to do that.
I have not tried them, but I've also heard great things from the latest Intel Arc series of GPUs.
I think the prices you've listed are par for the course, but it is kind of sad.
What sort of games do you play? This will dictate heavily what sort of system you need. Personally speaking I don't play anything that's very intensive anymore, mostly games from long ago. So I don't have much system demand.
M.2 generation virtually does not matter at all for most game load times. When a game loads, any vital resources will also be in system memory so it will not matter on that front either. You will probably want at least 16gb of ram. I have 64gb of ddr4, and I never come close to using all of that when gaming. You could probably get away comfortably with 32gb of ddr4 instead of ddr5. If you can find available sticks.
Do you intend to do anything beyond gaming with the system?
I'll second the recommendation to use the 3070, as that is still a respectable GPU and would cut down on cost so much. I've also heard good things about the Intel Arc GPUs, but if you do decide to use one, make sure you enable PCIe ReBAR, as it can make a large difference in performance. Also seconding the M.2 generation not mattering. And personally I've never used different drives for the OS and games since moving to M.2 from SATA.
Unless you need a new case to fit the full ATX motherboard or a long GPU, can you reuse your existing case? That would reduce the cost some as well.
Also, since you said you're not buying this until next summer, are you meaning northern or southern hemisphere summer? If you're looking to buy 6 months from now, that could impact what parts are available (either new releases or changes in stock) and their prices as well.
Northern hemisphere! Summer 2027 is admittedly rosy. 12+ months is more realistic, and at that point new graphics cards are presumably due for release, which is why I'm inclined to take the 3070 for now.
Most of what I play is decades old, but someone gifted me Cyberpunk 2077 which I haven't been able to run. As I work through the old Tomb Raider games, I'll eventually get to the new fancy-looking ones. I like all the nice sunsets and detailed grass textures in AAA games, which my 970 could never handle.
I had some fun with Cities: Skylines and would play a more advanced city sim if they ever invent one. Sometime I'd like to try Kerbal Space Program. And I'll probably never play much of it again, but I used to love Minecraft. Those all feel CPU-bound to me. Seems like I just want expensive everything.
No plans for any special use-cases. I can do most of my work in a word processor. I might spend more time in virtual machines in the future, but I'm rarely working with large amounts of data. When I was younger I thought I might like to make videos, but realistically I will never do that.