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Zkuq on 28 August 2023
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Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

I don't really think CPUs in general are priced badly, it's just the 7700 whose pricing I'm not fond of. It's quite far from the 7600 and relatively close to the 7800X3D in terms of price, and I feel like it should be a bit closer to the 7600 (250 € vs. 360 € vs. 435 € or so). It's quite expensive to get an 8-core CPU or better here, which is what I'd like for maximal future-proofing, if you care about power efficiency at the moment.

Ah. Euro. That mixes it up.

The 7600 is 6 cores @ 349.

The 7700  is 8 cores @ 499.

The 7800X3D is 8 cores+Lots cache @ 639.

That's Australian.

So the jump between the 7600 > 7700 > 7800 is roughly $150 here. It's not to bad.

Interesting to see how the lineup is staggered different in another region.

For me the ideal CPU is the 7950X anyway at $899.

Yeah, I noticed it's a bit different elsewhere. For some reason, it's pretty bad here. Prices also tend to have some extra, probably due to relative remoteness compared to most of Europe, and for some reason, the 7700 is quite skewed towards the 7800X3D too.

hinch said:

I wouldn't get a 8GB graphics card in 2023 tbh.. that's going to get real rough by the end of this year, never mind in a year or twos time. And that's going to have to last you until 2026 when Nvidia decides to launch the 5060.

I don't really want to either, but I'm not too fond of the options either. I still have yet to look up it in more detail, but cheaping out a bit now and getting a GPU upgrade in a gen or two might be the bullet I'm going to bite. Did I mention I have a GTX 1650 Super at the moment, and I intended to upgrade to the RTX 3060 when it came out and then things happened? I think I can get by for a few years with a fairly new GPU, even if it's not great.

Pemalite said:
Zkuq said:

Yeah, Starfield is definitely sweetening the deal for me. I haven't been terrible excited for it due to its theme, but it's Bethesda, so I'm expecting the game to suck me right in anyway. Not sure if there are going to be any sales any time soon, and I kind of want a new PC before Cities: Skylines 2 comes up, which doesn't help (there go the Black Friday deals).

Thanks for the advise on the GPU! I'll look into this a bit more, although I suspect an RTX 4060 won't be too bad for my needs. I'm not too fond of the other suggestions though: an RTX 3060 isn't that much cheaper here (unless buying used, where availability is so-so, but I might go for it anyway if I find a good deal), and the RX 6700 XT might end up costing too much to justify the extra cost (the XFX RX 6700 XT is the only one with a decent price at the moment, but it has only 10 GB of VRAM + I'll definitely miss out on any benefits DLSS might have, which I'm still expecting to be some). Really poor situation though.

What kinds of goodies might you be talking about with regard to Asus? As far as I can see, all three seem to have quite similar specs (aside from WiFi, which I won't be using), but I might be able to save a bit by getting an ASRock one (PG Lightning). I suppose Asus might have support for longer, but that's just speculation until I learn otherwise.

6700XT is a 12GB card.

The 6700 vanilla is 10GB.

FSR is improving very rapidly and gaining more support in games.

The 6700XT is the best price/performance card currently.

I double-checked, and you're absolutely right. I guess I messed up my search term or the RX 6700 somehow showed up anyway and I missed it. Anyway, judging by reviews, I'm not actually sure an RX 6700 XT is worth the extra price here then. Seems a bit so-so, so cheaping out a bit might make more sense for my needs. Also kind of seems it's a bet about the direction games are going to evolve in, and Chazore here has been sharing some of my concerns regarding upscaling, I think. FSR improvements are actually seeming quite promising, but on the other hand, AMD doesn't exactly have a great track record, so I'm not sure I'd want to bet on that just yet. It's a bit of a poor time to be upgrading at this price range, I suppose, but it is what it is...

JEMC said:
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)

The 7700 is a fine CPU choice, and faster than the 7800X3D in games that prefer frequency over cache. Not sure where Skylines 2 will land, tho.

The GPU situation in that "middle-end/mainstream" market is too convoluted at the moment. There's no right nor wrong choice. If you want to bet on upscaling techs, then the 4060 might work, but if you want a card that gives you performance without tricks, then the 6700XT is a better choice.
And who knows, maybe with the imminent launch of the 7700XT and 7800XT cards, plus the "back to school" deals some stores make, you may find an unexpected deal.

If you're worried about PCIe 5.0 and future proofing your system, maybe going with a B650E or X670E motherboard is your best call, at least those that support PCIe 5.0 for both GPU and storage. And some are reasonable priced. Club386 has reviewed the soon to launch ASRock B650E Taichi Lite, that's much, much cheaper than the none-lite model, but it's E-ATX.

Tallking about mobo sizes, are you also getting a new case? And, if so, what are you looking for? The Lian Li Lancool 216 is well priced and has a front USB type-C 3.2 connector and has room for all kinds of motherboard & GPU sizes.

Finally, I wouldn't go with a Gen 5 SSD. While sequential reads/writes are impressive, the random numbers aren't that impressive to justify the cost and extra heat.

Ah, thanks for the tips! Yeah, it's a bit of a gamble with C:S2 too, but with the first one being my most-played game on Steam and the second one seeming even better, I just don't see a world when I'm not buying it very close to release. Ideally I'd wait of course, but there's the Starfield deal as well, and it might be worth more to me than any potential gains I might get by waiting.

'Convoluted' is exactly the right word, I'd say... I mean it's pretty clear where things are now, but it's much less clear where things are going to be moving to.

Schools actually start a bit earlier here in Finland, around mid-August, so the back to school deals are already gone. I didn't notice anything interesting there though, otherwise I might have made by move already.

I don't think I'm going to be needing PCIe 5.0 for a GPU, considering I probably won't be getting any 500+ € GPUs any time soon. Depending on how things go, it might be worth it for an SSD even in my case though. I've actually looked up some motherboard with those finer chipsets, but it's probably not worth the extra cost to me.

Lancool 216 seems like a relatively reasonable option, although I'm trying to avoid a side window, and it kind of looks like a speaker to me. I've kind of been thinking about Fractal Design Define 7 Compact and Fractal Design North, but they're a bit on the pricier side, and I'm not 100 % happy with their features either - but I don't think I've found any decent-looking case with perfect connectivity at an acceptable price, so I'll just have to decide which bullet to bite I guess. But yeah, I'm getting a new case and everything inside it basically, but I'll be keeping pretty much everything else.

Definitely not getting a gen 5 SSD yet. I'm not a fan of the prices, and I'm hoping they'll somehow mature a bit more, e.g. to help with the heat. I'm more interested in future-proofing so I can upgrade if I want to without having to rip everything out. I'm probably getting an WD Black SN850X, which seems like a significantly better investment at the moment.