New AMD build in 15 years...Any advice?

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masshole

[H]ard|Gawd
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Feb 10, 2003
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Hey all, it's been a long time since I've built a PC, I'm talking 15+ years... Anyway- looking for a solid Mobo (if possible I'd like to stay in the $200-300 range) that will fit well with these other components. Also, if anything of this can be swapped out with a less expensive option, I'm all for it. I've been trying to navigate items that are sold out.

It will be for gaming/work and I won't be overclocking it. Ideally I wanted to stay within $2,200, but some of my first options weren't available. Games include, Witcher 3, Division 2, Red Dead, Cyberpunk (when it comes out).

Here's what I have so far:

AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 3.6 GHz 8-Core Processor
NZXT Kraken X52 Rev 2 73.11 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
G.Skill Ripjaws V 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 Memory
Crucial MX500 1 TB 2.5" Solid State Drive
EVGA GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB FTW3 OR
EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 8 GB XC
EVGA SuperNOVA G3 850 W 80+ or 1000w (depending on availability)
LG 27GL850-B monitor

Thanks for any help.
 
This is a list I posted for someone else, but it works here and is somewhat similar. I'll quote my entire response below as well, explaining my choices, but I'll talk directly to you first.

If you're not going to OC, there is no point to spending $80 on an aftermarket CPU cooler; the air cooler that comes bundled with the 3700X is fully capable of keeping it very happy at stock settings.

Your motherboard is a big choice; if you are unlikely to upgrade in the future to a Zen3 based Ryzen CPU, then you can still buy a B450 based motherboard and spend very few dollars on it. If Zen3 based Ryzens are in your upgrade future, then you will want either an X570 board (available now) or a B550 based board (available soon). My link has an X570 board on it. Similar to the cooler argument, if you're not OCing there isn't much of a point to buying an expensive motherboard either, so I recommend a budget board. If you have a local Microcenter, it is 100% the place to buy your CPU/mobo, since you can get a combo discount for buying both. When I bought my 3700X, I got an ASRock B450 Pro4 for literally $30 after the bundle discount and have been 100% happy with it.

Your power supply looks very nice. It also looks like way more than what you need- the Ryzens do not use that much power, and you're looking to run a single video card. Power supplies are one of my favorite things to simply buy when they are on sale, so I would keep an eye out for a decent PSU to pop up on slickdeals. Your system will likely consume 450-500W at peak load, so I would be comfortable with anything 650W and up with a decent 80+ efficiency rating. No need to spend $170 to get a power supply.

As for GPU, you have a question to answer to decide which route to go: are you going to need hardware video encoding (live streaming or local recording), and do you give a shit about raytracing? If the answer to both of those questions is no, then the AMD RX 5700XT should be a serious contender for your dollars. It offers performance around the 2070 Super, but for around $100 less. However, if you care about video encoding or RT, then Nvidia is your only choice. I would stick with the Super options, rather than the original 2070/2080.


sinisterDei said:
First up, the CPU - I chose the 3700X. If you are *strictly* gaming, then as of today the Ryzen 5 3600 provides essentially the same gaming performance as the 3700X at around $100 less, but your generous budget had me pick the 3700X. You also have the 3900X if you want to spend a bit more and move to 12 cores. Your laptop has 4 cores, so no matter what you get here you'll walk away smiling. The heatsink/fan that comes with the CPUs is also completely adequate unless you plan on OCing, which you don't need to do.

Next, motherboard. I picked an inexpensive X570 board. I'm not a big believer in buying fancy expensive motherboards, and I'm not honestly a fan of the X570 boards as a general rule. This one is literally here as a placeholder for what I would actually buy, which would be a B550 board that comes out next month. And again, the B450 boards are perfectly fine if you don't give two shits about forward compatibility with the next gen Ryzen CPUs.

RAM - 32 GB, 2x16GB configuration, preferably DDR4 3600. 3600 is the most optimized speed to run Ryzen memory at because it allows the fabric clock on the CPUs to run at 1800 (half the RAM speed) which is its most optimal non-overclocked point. 32 GB because, well, it's enough for everything for now and for tomorrow.

Storage- bigger is better than faster. There is essentially zero performance benefits to NVME on client workloads right now, while there is all kinds of benefits to bigger drives. Honestly with your budget I'd consider something even bigger, like a 2TB SSD, so that you don't have to think about it for a few years. Lot of wiggle room on this part, and you can get NVME options if you really want it. Maybe it'll matter with newer generation games / game engines, but so far nothing has cared.

GPU. Your biggest single expense. You said 1440p, presumably at 144hz or so. I picked a 2080 Super because you have budget for it. In reality, at that resolution you could easily grab a RX 5700 XT if you wanted to spend lots less money, or a 2070 Super if you wanted to spend a middle-ground amount. The 5700XT and 2070Super trade blows in terms of performance, but the Nvidia option is better for video encoding (streaming) and has the raytracing tech, if that tickles your fancy. You pay for it though.

The case is a placeholder; cases are subjective for the most part. Get something pretty to you.

Power supply. Your system will use under 500W under load, so get something 650W+ with a good efficiency rating and you'll be fine. I like to buy power supplies when they go on sale, rather than when they are sold at MSRP.
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@[B]sinisterDei[/B] thanks so much for the detailed response. I'm taking your advice and going through some more components now. It's crazy to see how there are no 570 boards in stock anywhere. I may have to go down the B450 route, or wait it out.
 
The *only* functional difference you are likely to encounter is compatibility with the Zen 3 CPUs. And a B450 still isn't a dead end platform; later down the line you can grab a second hand 3900x or 3950x and add +50% or +100% to your core count.

Plus, there is an *outside* possibility that Zen3 support will be unofficially extended to the B450 platform. If that happens, it is more likely to be extended to B450 boards with a 32MB flash chip for BIOS settings, or for motherboards with fairly basic EFI interfaces to begin with. I understand that the MSI Tomahawk has a 16MB flash module on the regular Tomahawk, while the MAX edition has a 32MB and as a result the EFI interface on the MAX is fancier than on the regular one as well as might have more space to hold the firmware for a Zen3 CPU.

Meanwhile, on my ASRock B450 Pro4, which has a lowly 16MB flash chip, the EFI interface has never been fancy and even with a 16MB chip the BIOS file is only ~9MB in size, so presumably there would be room for Zen3 stuff if ASRock / AMD are so inclined.

If you want to look up whether one board has a 16MB or 32MB flash chip, reference the Google Spreadsheet in this post:
For me personally, I'm disinclined to move to Zen3, since most likely I'll be GPU constrained rather than CPU and so my next upgrade would be for the GPU, and by the time I do the CPU hopefully I'll be talking Zen4+DDR5 or whatever Intel has cooked up by then. The point of all that is that, even if support for Zen3 never comes to the B450, it's still been and will continue to be a fine platform for the Zen2 CPU I'm currently completely happy with, and should I need more I can get more cores while staying in the Zen2 lane.
 
This is all great information, thank you again. I'd be remiss to say if this hasn't been a bit overwhelming! It's like I'm relearning everything after a 15 year absence. I love it, but it's definitely a full time job, haha...

That Google Doc is amazing. I realized a lot of the stuff I was looking at was high end... something I don't necessarily need. For my needs, I may be better off and save a few bucks by looking at some of the other gear.

Back at it... thank you again- it's well appreciated.
 
Get you one of the newer motherboards is my advice...No way i would buy anything older than X570 chipset. Why even take the chance of not being able to upgrade to the newer cpus coming out? I see plenty of Asus and MSI models in stock.

edit: well it does seem after clicking on items some are out and some on backorder for early june. Even still i would wait it out if necessary. You waited 15 years, so whats a few weeks?

this one is in stock now https://www.amazon.com/MSI-Gaming-C...?dchild=1&keywords=x570&qid=1589764609&sr=8-6

https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-Plus-Ga...dchild=1&keywords=x570&qid=1589764879&sr=8-25
 
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primetime said:
I see plenty of Asus and MSI models in stock
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The cheapest ASUS X570 model in stock on Newegg is $379.99. For $380, one could simply buy an inexpensive B450 board now, and then an inexpensive B550 board later and still spend less than $380 total. With a run on X570 boards they make even less sense to buy now.
 
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sinisterDei said:
The cheapest ASUS X570 model in stock on Newegg is $379.99. For $380, one could simply buy an inexpensive B450 board now, and then an inexpensive B550 board later and still spend less than $380 total.
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Ever here of Amazon?
 
primetime said:
Ever here of Amazon?
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I looked there as well, they appear to be out of stock as well. I'd be happy to be wrong, and unlike Newegg it's much harder to tell what is and isn't in stock with Amazon since they'll still let you order something that has a set restocking date. Plus, when you sort by price on Amazon you get a ton of irrelevant shite because their filters are worthless, so my normal course of action is to shop on newegg to select a model, then directly price compare on Amazon for a specific model. Of course, X570 starts at a higher price point and has the stupid-ass active fan, so in my personal opinion they start from a disadvantaged position. I eagerly await B550 boards, as it sounds like a good middle-ground between B450 and X570, doesn't have the active fan, and will hopefully come in at an "above B450 but below X570" price point. Of course, if they're all sold out on day one then we'll see about availability!

I still stand behind the idea of a B450 in two cases: 1- you plan on sticking with Zen2 for a while 2- you plan on moving to Zen3, but you're OK with essentially having a $100 disposable motherboard in the meantime to run Zen2.
 
sinisterDei said:
I looked there as well, they appear to be out of stock as well. I'd be happy to be wrong, and unlike Newegg it's much harder to tell what is and isn't in stock with Amazon since they'll still let you order something that has a set restocking date. Plus, when you sort by price on Amazon you get a ton of irrelevant shite because their filters are worthless, so my normal course of action is to shop on newegg to select a model, then directly price compare on Amazon for a specific model. Of course, X570 starts at a higher price point and has the stupid-ass active fan, so in my personal opinion they start from a disadvantaged position. I eagerly await B550 boards, as it sounds like a good middle-ground between B450 and X570, doesn't have the active fan, and will hopefully come in at an "above B450 but below X570" price point. Of course, if they're all sold out on day one then we'll see about availability!

I still stand behind the idea of a B450 in two cases: 1- you plan on sticking with Zen2 for a while 2- you plan on moving to Zen3, but you're OK with essentially having a $100 disposable motherboard in the meantime to run Zen2.
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Me personally.....when i build a pc...its so i dont have to pull the motherboard for a very long time. Swapping cards and cpus is quick an easy, but swapping mother boards is a different matter. When i build i want the best largest compatibility i can buy. But hey if OP wants to swap motherboards sooner than latter then buy all means. :)
 
primetime said:
when i build a pc...its so i dont have to pull the motherboard for a very long time
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Haha. I come from Intel-land, prior to this. My last three build were Intel. And in Intel-land, when you got a new CPU, you got a new motherboard to go with it because they had no forward compatibility. And every other upgrade also involved swapping the RAM it would seem.

I'm not saying it's *right*, I'm just saying replacing a $100 (or less) motherboard isn't the biggest deal in the world. Plus, the Ryzen 3000 series is going to be a competent series of CPUs for a while now in terms of gaming performance. You could swap my 3700X out *right now* for a hypthetical "4700X" with +20% improved performance per clock and it would make absolutely *zero* difference in how I game, since I'm GPU limited 100% of the time. Hell, 99% of the time I probably couldn't tell a difference between my 3700X and a 3600, or even a 3300X when gaming. I bought the 3700X for non-gaming reasons. Since OP is just talking about gaming, I think s/he would be OK.
 
sinisterDei said:
The cheapest ASUS X570 model in stock on Newegg is $379.99. For $380, one could simply buy an inexpensive B450 board now, and then an inexpensive B550 board later and still spend less than $380 total. With a run on X570 boards they make even less sense to buy now.
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I was reading up on the B550 and evidently the CPU to chipset link is only PCIe 3.0 compared to PCIe 4.0 for the X570. That's a two fold speed difference. I'm not sure how much that effects performance, but I'd definitely want to see more information before settling on a B550 board. Since that's a four lane link, anything that runs through the chipset like a second m.2 drive would be limited to PCIe 3.0 speeds. Also that interface is shared with all chipset supported components so that lower speed link could be a bottleneck.
 
Thanks for all the posts. I'm still trying to decide on a mobo- I may just wait for a 570 to become available (Asus, MSI, Gigabyte.). I just don't have a need for an extra mobo if I decide to get a "cheaper" one.

I do know that when I do get something, I always have it for years. I usually buy the "best" then keep it for as long as possible. I had an Apple MBP for 10 years, the one I'm typing on is going on 6. My PC builds were the only ones I had and they lasted me for years.
 
sinisterDei said:
As of right now, not at all on consumer class equipment.
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I watched a video at Gamers Nexus on that. The guys there really do their research. Anyway, not a big deal on the PCIe 3.0 CPU to chipset link since the B550 does not provide a drive interface like the x570. So yeah, not an issue unless you need the extra drive interface the x570 provides. Also the B550 does not provide as many 10GB USB ports.

Interestingly it looks like there's not a whole lot the lower cost x570 board I'm using provides a B550 board could not. The way the maker set mine up, they opted out of a lot of those extra available ports. Considering you have to pay several hundred for a board that uses all those features, you're really paying a premium for them. It's pretty much just unjustified feature inflation.
 
I narrowed it down to the MSI MEG X570 ACE and the ASUS Tuf Plus Gaming. I know both are great boards, so it came down to availability (and reviews of course). I believe I had an MSI vidcard back in the day and was happy with it... or maybe it was a mobo... either way I was happy with it.
 
masshole said:
I narrowed it down to the MSI MEG X570 ACE and the ASUS Tuf Plus Gaming. I know both are great boards, so it came down to availability (and reviews of course). I believe I had an MSI vidcard back in the day and was happy with it... or maybe it was a mobo... either way I was happy with it.
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Can I suggest that you look more seriously at Gigabyte? Their VRM offerings at the moment are right up there.
 
Move fast. If you see something you like in stock then snag it quick.

I just got done building a new rig. Stuff was going out of stock right in front of my eyes. I’d find something nice. After an hour or so of research it would be out of stock or it would be marked up a couple hundred percent due to scarcity.
 
That's what I noticed. I didn't want to compromise but knew it would have been a while before I got anything...
 
What is everyone thoughts about Asus 570 Tuf Gaming vs the MSI MEG Ace?

I have the Asus in my cart trying to decide which will be best for my needs.
 
masshole said:
What is everyone thoughts about Asus 570 Tuf Gaming vs the MSI MEG Ace?

I have the Asus in my cart trying to decide which will be best for my needs.
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I love Asus motherboards, always have...but MSI boards are good to.....Flip a coin and order up

$189.99 at Best Buy https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-t...ard-with-led-lighting/6356983.p?skuId=6356983

6356983_sd.jpg
Buy it and be done with it:D
 
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haha thanks man... I know both are solid options...

maybe ill just put together two builds....;)
 
I have the X570 Unify which is basically the ACE without RGB and the 2nd LAN NIC. Saves you like $60 and I believe has a higher quality (metal) I/O shroud. Very high quality overall, hadn't had any issues with it (other than one that turned out to actually be a faulty GPU). Everyone who reviewed it pretty much raved about it.

Something to keep in mind, MSI's chipset fan placement is very well done on their X570 boards. Usually far lower than other brands so it doesn't absorb the hot air from the GPU sitting on top of it. MSI also allows essentially for a passive mode where the chipset fan will only turn on at 70*C (which is never in my usage, not even close). Maybe it has changed, but ASUS didn't allow for a passive mode when I did my research - the fan was always on.
 
exlink said:
I have the X570 Unify which is basically the ACE without RGB and the 2nd LAN NIC. Saves you like $60 and I believe has a higher quality (metal) I/O shroud. Very high quality overall, hadn't had any issues with it (other than one that turned out to actually be a faulty GPU). Everyone who reviewed it pretty much raved about it.

Something to keep in mind, MSI's chipset fan placement is very well done on their X570 boards. Usually far lower than other brands so it doesn't absorb the hot air from the GPU sitting on top of it. MSI also allows essentially for a passive mode where the chipset fan will only turn on at 70*C (which is never in my usage, not even close). Maybe it has changed, but ASUS didn't allow for a passive mode when I did my research - the fan was always on.
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Nice! I thought I read that there was some high temps with the VRM on these MSI boards... i.e. 100C??? Did MSI fix that with a BIOS update?
 
masshole said:
Nice! I thought I read that there was some high temps with the VRM on these MSI boards... i.e. 100C??? Did MSI fix that with a BIOS update?
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No, so MSI has "lower end" X570 boards that do have horrible VRM (the A and Gaming series boards). The Unify has the exact same VRM setup as the ACE which is regarded as one of the better VRM setups on X570 boards. I believe the Tomahawk X570 also has good VRMs, but avoid pretty much every other MSI X570 board that is under $300.
 
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exlink said:
No, so MSI has "lower end" X570 boards that do have horrible VRM (the A and Gaming series boards). The Unify has the exact same VRM setup as the ACE which is regarded as one of the better VRM setups on X570 boards. I believe the Tomahawk X570 also has good VRMs, but avoid pretty much every other MSI X570 board that is under $300.
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Thanks ex, this is all very helpful. Im glad you clarifed this.
 
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