Help with Mini-ITX Gaming Build

[Pemalite]

Biggerboat1 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

In any case, just 500GB is pretty small and will only allow a couple games to be installed these days.

Hence my suggestion: First, get an AMD CPU. Then, get a 256GB M.2 NVMe SSD and a 2TB 2.5" HDD and combine them with AMDs StoreMI into one single drive that's as fast as a SATA SSD but costs significantly less for the amount of storage it provides.

The thing with Pemalite's suggested AMD CPU & mobo is that they're coming in at £244.98 & £158.99, compared to £179.99 & £95.48 for the 8400 & mobo I originally suggested...

On top of that, from what I can see from this article, the 8400 is faster for gaming than every Ryzen chip... So what am I missing - why would I pay significantly more for less performance?

 

The Ryzen 2700 gives you 2 extra CPU cores and 10 extra CPU threads.
It also has a 400mhz base clock and 200mhz Boost clock advantage... Plus cache advantages and so on.
End result is... Faster single threaded performance and massive advantage in multi-threaded scenarios.

You could probably find a cheaper AMD ITX motherboard... But you really are paying for significantly better performance.

As for the PC gamer benchmarks... Something is off. No way will a Broadwell 5930K outbench an i9 7900X.

Anandtech is a better representation: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2341?vs=2274
And as more games become heavily threaded, the Ryzen will age far far better... It's like the Core 2 Quad Q6600 and Core i7 980 all over again.

It's a complete reversal these days... I couldn't possibly recommend AMD FX to anyone, only Intel.
Today I can't recommend Intel, only AMD. AMD Simply have more bang-for-buck.

Biggerboat1 said:

Re. M.2 NVMe SSDs, I didn't even know they were a thing :)  Will definitely have a rethink on that one!

NVMe SSD's are also generally faster, take up less space.
The single caveat is they tend to consume more power, so for notebooks... It's best to stick with SATA drives for the time being if battery is a priority.