Zkuq said:
Probably going to be ordering a new PC very, very soon, and while I'm happy to finally upgrade, I really don't like the current market situation:
- GPUs: Not much to say here. It's a bad choice one way or another.
- CPUs: A bit unclear whether this is a good moment to get a new one. At least the next gen sounds like it's going to be a refresh for both AMD and Intel so nothing significantly different in a while, but pricing is a bit bad: I want to future-proof my PC as well as possibly while still not investing too much, so it sounds like Ryzen 5 7700 it is... which is terrible value. If it didn't sound like Cities: Skylines 2 was pretty CPU-heavy, I'd probably get a 7600 instead and consider upgrading later if necessary.
- motherboards/cases: USB-C and PCI-E 5.0 are kind of coming, and things are moving on this front. AM5 is terribly expensive, but I need it for future upgrade potential. USB 3.2 support in cases is also relatively rare.
- SSDs: PCI-E 4.0 sounds fine, but with PCI-E 5.0 coming along, I'm not confident my timing is great. At least prices don't seem too terrible (although I'm not sure if the situation is actually good, compared to historical prices).
Anyway, thinking of something like this:
- AMD Ryzen 5 7700: Future-proofing, like I said. Terrible value, and I'm not quite willing to invest in a 7700X3D. An Intel Core i5-13600 seems like something that would be more suitable for my needs, but I'm kind of interested in power efficiency, and I'm more confident in AM5's longevity.
- GeForce RTX 4060: Again terrible value, but should do at 1080p, which is what I'll be using. I'll still have to check whether it's actually usable for ray tracing at 1080p and with DLSS, but I'm expecting it to kind of be. I'm betting for DLSS 3 to be worth more than the extra raw power I could get with the RTX 3000 series, but that's a bit of a gamble for sure (+ RTX 3000 availability seems a bit poor here at the moment). For me, it probably makes more sense to get an RTX 4060 and upgrade to something like an RTX 6060 whenever it comes out than getting a more expensive GPU now (but again a bit of a gamble).
- Asus TUF Gaming B650-Plus WiFi or ASRock B650 PG Lightning or ASRock B650 Pro RS: A bit of a tough choice. Sounds like ASRock might be faster at booting, but dunno. It's really hard to find any usable data on the ASRock boards.
- a bunch of whatever for the rest (been looking into these carefully but not really interesting enough to write here, aside from complaining about poor USB-C and USB 3.2 support in cases + I absolutely hate how everything has a window these days)
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CPU: If you buy it while it's on sale + with Starfield, it could be a pretty good deal.
GPU: Now you know that I am the type of person that loves Nvidia's technology and the features they bring to the table. But I'd seriously reconsider getting a 4060 because DLSS 3 adds to the vram requirement of games and with 8GB of vram plus the capabilities of the 4060, you really won't have a good time imo. 4060 really is a 1080p card and DLSS3 doesn't look very good when rendering at that low of a resolution. I'd highly consider either a 6700XT or a 3060 12GB. 6700XT would be my go to even if you miss out on DLSS because it has both Raster and Vram to run modern games at pretty good frame rates. You can also choose 3060 if you want Nvidia's features like Reflex and it's discounted a good amount but 6700XT will be a lot faster than it.
Motherboard: Between those 3, I'd get Asus and enable "Memory Context Restore" and it will fix any boot time issues. Since you want to keep it a long time and upgrade in the future by the sounds of it, I'd rather get the goodies the Asus one provides.
Last edited by Jizz_Beard_thePirate - on 27 August 2023
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