I am planning on building a new mini ITX PC. Space on the desk is tight so the foot print needs to be as small as possible. Here are the components I have selected, nothing ordered yet.
The case has a water cooler for the CPU and a power supply, 750W. The GPU will come out of my existing PC that has two GPUs. I needed to stay within budget so no new GPU at this time.
I am wondering if the memory is overkill for this system. I read somewhere that 6000Mhz was the sweet spot for Ryzen 7. I would like a solid platform with an easy upgrade path, likely a GPU in the future.
I will use this build for gaming.
OS will start out as Win 10 and then I suppose M$ will force me to upgrade to Win 11, unless there is a way to block that in the BIOS?
Another question rolling around in my mind is should I buy now or wait until next year? I am in Europe. I was thinking the best prices would be the 1st or 2nd week of January.
Prices will probably not drop significantly next year, so it won’t really matter when you purchase. As for your new system, given you emphasise the small footprint, consider Shuttle. Their EU HQ is in Germany, which I believe you are too.
If you don’t enable fTPM in the BIOS Windows 10 will think your system is incompatible and not update you to Windows 11.
I don’t think prices will come down, especially in Europe. If you want to wait I guess you’ll need to wait quite a lot, like in summer when people go on vacation and don’t usually spend so retailers are forced to discount some items. Or next fall, black friday/cyber monday.
I did consider a different case however the thermals appeared to be not as good for the GPU. The GPU is OC. CPU thermals were about the same for both cases. The GPU is just under 3mm of fitting in the case. I also considered getting the Ryzen 7 7700 however the ‘x’ was only 25 Euros more and I think the 7700 was sold out. The memory is low profile and no problem to fit and on ASUS’s approved memory list for the MB. The MB with the best bios layout is Gigabyte however after the way they handled the power supply problems I wanted nothing to do with them. I went with ASUS, they win bit time.
I also have to transfer the Win 10 License to the new system. And transfer the m.2 drive (1T) into the new system. And load AMD’s auto OC software (CPU and GPU). I am not sure what the name of it is, I’ll find out though. And I need to figure out the best bios settings. And I will disable a setting in the BIOS so Win 11 is not compatible. I expect the new system will be surprisingly fast.