New Zen3 Build Plan [£4000 Budget]

Hardware Build a PC
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Budget: £4000

Country: England - United Kingdom

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Gaming - Cyberpunk 2077, maybe some light/ infrequent Virtual Machine use.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you’re upgrading from, when you’re going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

PCPartPicker Part List: https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/L332RT

CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 3900X
Reasoning: Actually planning for a 5900X here, but can’t select that from PPP at the moment. Also considering a 5950X, appreciate that the diminishing returns for that would be minimal but can afford it unless someone wants to talk me out of it.

CPU Cooler : ARCTIC LIQUID FREEZER II 360 56.3 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Reasoning: Seems to be the best 360mm AIO currently available or close enough to be negligable.

Thermal Compound: ARCTIC MX4 4 g Thermal Paste
Reasoning: Seems to be one of the best available, I don’t understand the application of Metallic Paste or Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut to make it worth the ~1.5 degree difference.

Motherboard: Asus TUF GAMING X570-PRO (WI-FI) ATX AM4 Motherboard
Reasoning: This is the part I am least suire about, has all the features I’d need, as far as I can tell the other X570 motherboards are similar enough not to matter.

Memory: Crucial Ballistix 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3600 CL16 Memory
Reasoning: Already have this, got a deal on it.

Storage: Sabrent Rocket 4.0 1TB with Heatsink
Reasoning: Already have, got a deal on it during Prime Day

Video Card: Asus GeForce RTX 3080 10 GB TUF GAMING Video Card
Reasoning: I trust the brand is the main reasoning, doesn’t suffer from the issues we saw with some of the other 3080 cards, might substitute with Gigabyte RTX3080 10GB Gaming OC. Guess it all depends what/ when I can actually get a 3080 :’(

Case: Phanteks Eclipse P500A ATX Mid Tower Case
Reasoning: Mostly because it seems to be one of the best cases for airflow.

Power Supply: SeaSonic FOCUS Plus Gold 850W 80+ Gold
Reasoning: Good brand with plenty of wattage headroom, that’s it.

Case Fan: ARCTIC P14 72.8 CFM 140 mm Fan
Reasoning: For rear fan mount of case, largest supported. As far as I’m aware Artic fans have comparable outcomes to Noctua equivalents, unless someone can demonstrate otherwise?

Case Fan: ARCTIC P12
Reasoning: Three of these to fill in the remaining case fan slots, as above, believe they benchmark near identical to the equivalent Noctua’s but at half the price.

Any comments/ suggestions etc will be much appreciated, haven’t build a computer from scratch in about 10 years (still rocking a i5-2500) so if I’ve missed any developments I’ve missed as suggested by the above just let me know.

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I would probably wait for the 5900x or drop down to 5800x (more then enough for your use case)

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Expected as much, just wondered if I missed anything I could tweak to eak out any extra performance, got plenty of budget left over as is.

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you could go custom water loop (or just and open one)
https://www.ekwb.com/shop/kits

Its really not that hard and just get a new cpu block if needed every upgrade compared to an AIO that will probably have issues way before like a D5 pump, should also be quiter also.

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Why not, might as well with your budget.

Good choice.

Unless you’re ordering right now, you could check out what AMD has to offer with their new card in two weeks

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With £2000 extra to burn over the computer, and seeing you’ve already got the budget for it… Two ways you can go about this.

  1. The “More performance than sense” route, go Threadripper. A 3970X will get you more cores than you know what to do with it. Of course, it doesn’t make that much sense to go there for your use case. It will be a loooooong time before you will need that many PCIe lanes and cores, sooooo…

  2. The Small and Watercooled option. Get a boutique case such as the Dice Flow, Loque Ghost S1, Sliger SM580 or NCase M1, and plan around that. You got the cash to burn for aesthetics might as well use that. :slight_smile:

And yeah, wait for AMDs RX 6900 XT before deciding on a 3080 or not. Rumors say it’ll be 10% better at same price, but then again AMD fanboys are known for dreaming big… :slight_smile:

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I wouldn’t dare try for a custom loop but fair enough.

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Its really not that hard with soft tube

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I’ll certainly look at AMD’s offering, this’ll be my first AMD CPU so why not my first AMD GPU?

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I’ll certainly take that into consideration, thank you.

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Honestly suprised no one has challenged me on the AIO (custom-loop suggestions non-withstanding) or fan choice, maybe I shouldn’t be.

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AIOs are fine. The risk of a water leak is obviously higher than a tower cooler, but modern AIOs are pretty safe nowadays.

I personally believe people are paying for the name with Noctua. Yes they are very good fans, but you can get ones that are 90% there for 50% of the price (like the Arctics).

I have fans from Scythe and EK that are great, and be quiet is well regarded too.

I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with Asus for the past like 7 products I’ve had of theirs, but you do you. Only brand I prefer is EVGA because of their customer service is solid, but passed that the others are all on par for me.

@MisteryAngel

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Naah, don’t go Threadripper. The 3950X or 5950X are already 16 cores!!! Don’t get more CPU horsepower than you need.
See how much power the Threadripper consumes at idle.

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Parts look good. The only thing I find odd is the 16gb RAM given everything else is pretty much as good as it gets. At least for me its very doable these days to get over 16gb usage by just ‘multitasking’. Might wanna throw in 32gb RAM.

Also would not go Threadripper. For mere mortal workloads its gonna be slower more often than faster. You really need to have a usage for this many cores, or you are gonna end up sucking more power from the wall for a negative performance increase compared to the 5950x. Unless you need the PCIe lanes for some reason.

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¨if¨ that board has all the basic features he needs.
Than it’s basically an okay choice for a 3900X.

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That is why I said it’s more performance than sense :grin: still for the budget mentioned a threadripper makes sense but not from a gaming perspective.

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You don’t need to spend the whole budget. A budget left over is certainly not a tragedy.
Surely there are other things to buy, like a good screen, a good ergonomic chair, whatever.

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Do you think an NH-U12A is enough for a 5950X? I’m planning on getting one and didn’t want to discard my current cooler

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Probably will deff get more out of a better cooling solution but if use case similar to OP probably won’t ever be that serious

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Then I’ll maybe get a NH-D15… I honestly prefer air-cooling, and I’m not planning on overclocking so soon, but I’m planning on doing heavy CAD work/video-editing and gaming on it