New medium gaming build

Wcool

After clinging on a long time to my old AMD FX-8350 system it is time to bite the bullit and upgrade.

I already have a case and a 2560x1440 monitor and was thinking about buying this:

ASRock Radeon RX 5700 Challenger D 8G OC - Grafikkarten - Radeon RX 5700 - 8 GB GDDR6 - PCIe 4.0 x16 - HDMI, 3 x DisplayPort
330,57 €

ASRock X570 Phantom Gaming 4 - Motherboard - ATX - Socket AM4 - AMD X570 - USB 3.2 Gen 1, USB 3.2 Gen 2
164,35 €

AMD Ryzen 5 3600 - 3.6 GHz - 6 Kerne - 12 Threads - 32 MB Cache-Speicher - Socket AM4
177,24 €

Mushkin Redline - DDR4 - 16 GB: 2 x 8 GB - DIMM 288-PIN - 3600 MHz / PC4-28800 - CL18
84,41 €


Kingston A2000 - Solid-State-Disk - verschlüsselt - 500 GB - intern - M.2 2280
65,65 €

be quiet! System Power 9 500W - Stromversorgung (intern) - ATX12V 2.4 - 80 PLUS Bronze - Wechselstrom 200-240 V - 500 Watt
52,61 €


Thoughts/questions behind this:
- x570 as I more than likely want to stick to this platform for 6-8 years (just upgrading individual components if need be)
- the memory is from an unknown brand to me. Problem?
- the company i think I will buy from is barax.de Anyone used them? any recommendations for German companies that ship to Ireland?
- is ryzen 5 3600 overkill?
- would you go for rx5600 tx vs rx5700 or do you value the 8Gb vs 6Gb?

Thanks for any comments!

K.O.Kiki

Mushkin are a reputable RAM vendor.
Maybe see if you can get CL17 for same price.

RX 5700 > 5600 XT @ 1440p

Where are you buying from?

Wcool

I looked at Geizhals and wanting to stick to one supplier I picked Mindfactory first. Really good prices but it seems you need a VAT number to order outside Germany.

Caseking seemed too expensive, i found https://www.barax.de/

looks ok but had to compromise on some components.

One more question: will DDR4 3000 vs DDR4 4200 make big performance difference?
I never saw any figures measuring this.

K.O.Kiki

Ryzen 3000 does best with RAM at 3600-3733 @ CL17 or CL16

Wcool

It's a bit shocking to find out how little FPS change with higher speed memory...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/ddr4-haswell-e-scaling-review-2133-to-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/6

Granted, this is a few years old but many games see almost no change in framerate.

I think I might downgrade to 3200 mhz and save 20 euro.

The other big dilemma I have is x570 + ryzen 5 3600 = 340 euro versus b450 + ryzen 1600/2600 AF = 160/190 euro

Even my AMD FX6300 never had an issue playing modern games, the GPU was always the bottleneck. Maybe I can save myself 170 euro.

Opinions?

Xenoronin

Go for a B450 board like the Tomahawk MAX (important to have the MAX for compatibility reasons) and the 3600. Not as amazing a saving, but still around 70euro. I think the 3600 is worth it, it's just a better all rounder and has all the lessons learned from the previous generations of ryzen.

K.O.Kiki

Wcool wrote: »

It's a bit shocking to find out how little FPS change with higher speed memory...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/8959/ddr4-haswell-e-scaling-review-2133-to-3200-with-gskill-corsair-adata-and-crucial/6

Granted, this is a few years old but many games see almost no change in framerate.

I think I might downgrade to 3200 mhz and save 20 euro.

The other big dilemma I have is x570 + ryzen 5 3600 = 340 euro versus b450 + ryzen 1600/2600 AF = 160/190 euro

Even my AMD FX6300 never had an issue playing modern games, the GPU was always the bottleneck. Maybe I can save myself 170 euro.

Opinions?

https://www.techspot.com/review/1891-ryzen-memory-performance-scaling/

That's Haswell.

The situation is VASTLY different on Ryzen.
Spend the extra for a 3600 and get an MSI B450 board.

Wcool

Very interesting. Even there on a RX 5700 there is at most a few frames difference KO Kiki?!
NVIDIA seems more susceptible to increases in Mhz

Clearly it's better to increase the Mhz before trying to lower the latency as the latter costs a lot more!

@Xenoronin: is the Tomahawk Max worth 50 euro more than the cheapest B450 board in your opinion and why?

GHOST MGG

THe tomahawk max in comparison to cheaper b450 boards..here is a few differences

1.Much better quality Vrms on the tomahawk max..cheaper b450 boards susceptible to voltage anomalies

2.Tomahawk max does not need a bios upgrade for ryzen 3000 series chips..

3.Tomahawk max has a bigger bios chip (32mb)

4.Tomahawk max is cheaper now than the non max version by about 50 quid

5.Tomahawk max boards have support for up to ddr4 4144mhz where the cheaper b450 boards are only rated up to ddr4 3466 (bios updates might have changed this recently)

BloodBath

You don't need x570 unless you want a load of sata drives or nvme's.

The MSI b450 tomahawk max will be more than good enough for a 5-6 year platform imo.

That's what I'm going for. VRM's and cooling are more than good enough for 12-16 cores.

Also most 3000-3200 memory is capable of overclocking to 3600+.

Looking at prices I don't think you will get much cheaper than Amazon UK factoring in free delivery from them and easy free returns if needed.

K.O.Kiki

Wcool wrote: »

Very interesting. Even there on a RX 5700 there is at most a few frames difference KO Kiki?!
NVIDIA seems more susceptible to increases in Mhz

Clearly it's better to increase the Mhz before trying to lower the latency as the latter costs a lot more!

You're misreading those benchmarks slightly.

It's not "AMD vs Nvidia" rather it's "Very high-end (2080 Ti) vs midrange (RX5700) vs lowend (RX580)", which means that the 2080 Ti is never a GPU bottleneck.

Also (looking only at the RX5700 results) in some titles, faster RAM is giving an uplift of 10% - this is an appreciable increase, and this difference will get bigger once the next-gen consoles are out & developers tune their engine to them.

Now, this isn't to say you MUST buy fast RAM, as you can always take a chance on a 3000/3200 kit and manually overclock it - but IMHO it's easier to just spend the extra few quid now.

Wcool

Thank you very much all, I defintely won't go for the x570 now. I don't need extra SATA or NVMe for my game computer.

Not particularly convinced I need very high speed memory but if it's only a few bob over 5 years it's nothing of course.
And likely I will go for the MAX version now as the tomhawk board seems to be more robust and future proof.

BloodBath

I would go for a 1TB NVME drive though. That's the best value atm for € per gigabyte and it will be significantly faster with a longer lifespan.

Wcool

Well i have a lot of spinning rust lying around, the 500Gb is only for the OS and maybe a favourite game

BloodBath

Your ssd can speed up the spinning rust significantly. Assigning some cache space to them from the ssd.

Wcool

I went for:

Description 
MSIB450TOMAHAWKMAX-Motherboard-ATX 112.26 EUR 
AMDRyzen 5 3600 177.56 EUR
MushkinRedline-DDR4-16GB2x8GB-3600 CL18  82.32 EUR 
ASRockRadeon RX5700 Challenger OC 321.82 EUR 
bequiet System Power 9 500W 80PLUSBronze 59.70 EUR
Sabrent M.2 NVME SSD TLC/QLC (512GB, TLC) £69.99

Excited, first big purchase in 7 years, after months of buying rubbish AMD FX boards to keep my AMD FX 8350 working (but failing miserably) and burning a Vega 56 in the process!

Wcool

Sorry for dragging up my own thread.

Just want to say: a sincere thank you for your advice. my newly build gaming computer works like a dream on 2560x1440. Thank you so much for the tips. Extremely pleased with the end result, especiallly being at home. It plays anything I throw at it with ease.

py2006

Wcool wrote: »

I went for:

Description 
MSIB450TOMAHAWKMAX-Motherboard-ATX 112.26 EUR 
AMDRyzen 5 3600 177.56 EUR
MushkinRedline-DDR4-16GB2x8GB-3600 CL18  82.32 EUR 
ASRockRadeon RX5700 Challenger OC 321.82 EUR 
bequiet System Power 9 500W 80PLUSBronze 59.70 EUR
Sabrent M.2 NVME SSD TLC/QLC (512GB, TLC) £69.99

Excited, first big purchase in 7 years, after months of buying rubbish AMD FX boards to keep my AMD FX 8350 working (but failing miserably) and burning a Vega 56 in the process!

Well done, I am on the verge of getting a new set up. Where did you buy all your stuff?

Wcool

https://www.barax.de/

Except the NVMe card, they didn't have the one I wanted in stock.

I compared the same basket later with Amazon.co.uk but Amazon was 70 euro more expensive.

2 disadvantages:
1) took 2 1/2 weeks to arrive as not everything was in stock and barax are silent if there is no progress to report.
2) no english language version of the website but that wasn''t a problem for me (I can read German quite well), Google translate will work and most buttons are obvious anyway.