Hmm, forgot about ryzen, could perhaps get mobo and cpu cheaper.

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?

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

2600X is a lot faster in non-gaming tasks and can be overclocked, same with the gen one processors. But obviously that would need a case cpu cooler competent at cooling, your plan my indeed be better.

The difference in performance is minimal as you're mostly limited by the GPU anyway. What more in frames it can produce is neither discernible or felt IRL. However, with 12 threads instead of 6, it's much more future proof. Any game that can make use of 8 threads or more the 2600 will beat the 8400, and that list of games is growing.

Edit: look this video, it's about 10% faster at best than the 2600 in 1080p, with some games being virtually identical. In higher resolutions, the GPU limit sets in, and the 8400 looses it's lead completely.

But look up in my first post and you'll see I suggested an R5 2600 instead, which is slightly cheaper then the 8400 (about 5£), and any B450 Mainboard suffices for StoreMI, so you can choose a (much) cheaper one than the one suggested without any real drawbacks there.

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.

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.

Biggerboat1 said: darkknightkryta said: Just get this: Is that an actual modern, available product? I guess the design brief prohibited the use of right-angles :)

They refreshed it in 2018 to have a stock 8700 i7 and a GTX 1070 mini in this white build.  But it's a bit hard finding this build now.  The cheaper, black, 1060 build is the only one that you can find easily.  But it's got a 3GB 1060 instead of the 6GB version.  So it's useless.

Ok, I'm definitely coming around to the 2600.

They offer to OC it to 4GHz free of charge - which actually puts it above the 8400 across the board!!

Obviously the issue would be cooling.

From this review of the SilverStone FTZ01 it shows an OC'd i5-4670K (@4GHz) paired with a Noctua NH-L9x65 cooler being 48°C increase over ambient (Delta T) when running Unigine Heaven and Prime 95 v25.11.

Would those results indicate whether an OC'd 2600 (using the same cooler) would be ok? And if so, what would be my starting point for a suitable mobo?

Thanks again for the advice!

Would you say that the 2600, as Bofferbrauer2 is suggesting would be a good compromise? (especially if the OC is a realistic option...)

Overclocking is always a realistic option with AMD.

The 2600 will win in lightly threaded scenario's once overclocked, no question against a stock R7 2700/i5 8400. - But it's heavily threaded performance will probably come up short against the 2700... Which is expected with a 25% reduction in core/thread counts.

I would still go with the 2700 personally, even if it meant a reduction in the GPU performance. (Which you will likely swap out for a faster one in a couple years anyway.)

That's not to say the 2600 is a bad chip, far from it... But I am of the mind of buying the best CPU you can afford, because these days they tend to last 7-10 years in a rig where you  replace a GPU far more often... My 6-core i7 3930K chip in another PC from 2011 is still playing the latest games at max settings for instance.

**********

Or you could take it in the complete opposite direction and grab the Ryzen 3 2200G. 3.9ghz is good with those chips...  And then upgrade to the Ryzen 7 3000 series when it releases, which should increase clocks, core counts and IPC across the entire board later this year. (Also AMD's first 7nm CPU's.)
...Should also be a drop in replacement. win win.

The reason I was questioning whether it would be realistic to OC the 2600 is due to the tiny case I'm going for (and the inherent thermal issues) - as I wrote a couple of posts back the case can handle an OC'd i5-4670 with a decent low-profile cooler. Do you think that indicates that the 2600 (or other AMD CPU) would be ok, or are they more prone to heating issues when OC'd than intel's chips?

Another option is to drop the RTX 2060 into my current big-rig (i5-4670K oc'd @ 4.2) to replace my SLI GTX 660s and wait until the 3000 series release before moving to the mini-ITX machine... I'm reading that they're due to launch mid-year...