Out of the PC enthusiast loop, but needing to upgrade the rig

Hardware Hub Build a PC
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Hey! First time poster!
So needless back story:
I built my current rig probably back in 2017 or 2018 - and even at that time, the hardware I used was a year or 2 old (Ryzen 2700x, GTX1080ti)
Things are starting to show their age a little bit, so I was wanting to upgrade, especially with the launch of the RTX 50 series around the corner, it seemed like a good time to take the plunge.
Problem is…I haven’t really kept up too much with what has been going on in the PC hardware space over the years. (I did hear that Intel is having a tough go at it this past year)

I was hoping y’all could make some friendly suggestions to guide me down the right path on getting my money’s worth.

To put it up front, basically we can say there is no budget, but I do want my “unlimited budget” to actually be used wisely and not just blow a ton of money on things 'cause “it’s the best.”

  • I do a lot of gaming at 1440p, 120+ FPS - where possible (1080ti struggles to maintain anything close to that in many modern titles).
  • I also do music production stuff using Reaper as well as a slew of Kontakt libraries (which means I need lots of RAM. Is DDR5 affordable and/or worth the price? Also, these libraries are huge, so need lots of storage)
  • I do live streaming and some video production stuff using OBS and DaVinci Resolve. (Another reason for lots of storage)
  • I don’t do overclocking and I doubt I would get into it in the future.

So, basically we are looking at high-end enthusiast stuff, and probably staying out of the realm of workstation class hardware.

An important detail: I live in Japan (and use JPY).
Last time I built my PC I had bought the parts on Amazon.jp, but I would prefer not sponsoring Bezos’s next yacht if any of you know any Japanese retailers I could buy from (though I am not sure how many folks might know that. nbd, I have friends here I can ask about it.)

I am sort of over my era of making the inside and outside clean and beautiful. I’d honestly prefer a box that looks good on the outside but the inside can be ugly.
I’d prefer good airflow.I think it’s the Fractal North case that seems quite nice so would love to hear any opinions on that and I am open to other suggestions. Whatever the recommendation, I’d prefer something that has great airflow/cooling and hopefully looks mature and not too “gamery”.

Due to my music production stuff - and often it requiring me to record things - quiet is definitely preferred! I know Noctua fans are renowned for performance and quietness, but they are also very pricey. Are they still the king? Are there runner-ups in the fan category that might be more affordable?
I’ve stuck with AIO liquid coolers for most of my time as a builder, but I think for longevity and price:performance air coolers might be better. What do you think? And, what cooler would you recommend?

What PSUs do you recommend? Funnily enough my Seasonic has been carried across likely 2 PC builds now at this point (Likely exceeding 12 years of service). I’m impressed with it’s longevity, but I think it’s time to give it a rest before it fails critically. Is Seasonic still a trusted brand? Do you have other power supply recommendations?

As for peripherals: None are needed. I’m just looking to build a new rig, not a whole new battle station.

And I think that just about covers everything! Sorry for such a long post, but I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read through it and assist me!
Oh, and for the record, I’m not looking to pull the trigger on this right away; as I said, with the 50 series around the corner I’ll wait for it. If there are other up coming hardware launches I should wait for, let me know!

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I would check your motherboards compatibility for for a 5700X3D/5800X3D, you might need a bios update

It’s large cache will let maximize any GPUs full potential frame rate
As far as audio production goes I don’t have solid source to back up but, given how audio is dependent on latency, the large cache should help with that

The large cache does not help with streaming or davichi resolve but you should be using Nvidia GPU acceleration for that

You can’t overclock which you said is fine, you won’t need an insane cooler either

You should be able to keep every other existing component

You can maybe swap out the motherboard for a newer chipset for pcie 4.0 but I wouldn’t say it’s a hard requirement

I much prefer air coolers, fans and pumps will die, but heatsinks are forever
DDR5 is expensive, I would wait on a full platform update

Seasonic should still be a good brand but look up reviews, any company with a good reputation can make a cruddy product any time

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I have a North with the mesh side panel. It is not the most premium-feeling case I’ve ever had, but it is not a ‘cheap case’ feel either. I do find it to be quite loud though, if the internal components are loud (e.g. coil whine) and/or the fans have ramped up. I don’t know if the glass side one is any better in that regard, as I did not want to deal with the side effects should the glass break for any reason. I really, really wish they sold a plain side panel that I could put acoustic foam on (like they do on their Pop Silent or Define 7 lines).

That being said, my reference point for my prior build was an i7 5820k (140W TDP cpu) and a RTX 3080 running in a Silverstone FT02; the new build is a 7800x3d (set to 65W max in the bios) under an AIO, and a RX 7900XT. The new build should technically be more efficient and easier to cool, yet it is louder by far due to how open the case is.

The answer these days depends on size. For 120MM, the Phanteks T30 are the performance king, but they’re also 30mm thick rather than the standard 25mm thickness. For the practical, affordable side though: Arctic’s PWM PST fans (P8, P12, P14, etc.). Good enough performance, and come in 5-packs at an inexpensive price. At least in the States, the 140mm 5 pack is ~$40 vs. a single Noctua 140mm fan at ~$25.

Longevity and maintenance wise, air coolers are better. Price/performance is also tilted towards air coolers. But, and the ever-important but, if your CPU runs hot (and a lot of the newer ones do), AIO is likely a better safety net. But AM4 and AM5, at least at present? If you put the CPU in 65W ‘eco mode’ and use an air cooler, that will be plenty.

Good brands can sometimes make mistakes or have a bad batch. But Seasonic and Corsair are who I’d lean towards by name. I’d recommend checking Hardware Busters reviews ( PSUs - Hardware Busters ) and/or the Cybenetics certifications ( https://www.cybenetics.com/ ) as well, as they seem to have taken over in the void left when JonnyGuru stopped doing PSU reviews.

For declaring my biases, though – I’m currently running a 280mm AIO on my AM5 build and have been considering swapping to an air cooler for these same reasons. Likewise considering swapping cases due to the open-air nature of the mesh North being more loud than I was hoping.

In your case, though, I would agree with GigaBuster – check and see if your bios has an update to allow use of the newer 5000-series CPUs, upgrade the CPU, and choose a cooler to suit.

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If your current system is still doing the “work” side of that reasonably capably and you already have an adequate amount of DDR4, dropping a 5700X3D (or a 5700X, or 5800X) into your current system would put you in good shape in theory. Supposedly nV is going PCIe Gen 5 with 5000, but I’d expect 70+ to still be X16; if that isn’t the case, the 5070 might wind up remarkably poor on a PCIe 3.0 board (like the B350/450 that’s most likely what you’re currently running).

Arctic makes fans that are kind of spectacularly quiet; I had a Freezer 34 eSports Duo at one point that was best described as inaudible. Pricing is generally much better than Noctua by enough that I don’t think I’d feel good about paying the difference.

Going the newer platform route leaves two options. There’s a lot of haterade around Arrow Lake (Intel’s newest generation, Core Ultra 2xx) for not killing the 14900K at its game (whaaaaat, a 5% reduction in peak clocks sometimes loses 5% performance? Oh noes), but board costs and offerings seem to be very similar to AM5, which is probably the natural “go to” at this point. However, there’s an edge case I can make for Z890 that kind of revolves around storage. Z890 can run a 5.0 x16 GPU, a 5.0 x4 M.2, and then 3 more 4.0x4 M.2s without running into walls too badly; AM5 can do more Gen 5 storage, but at the cost of GPU lanes. I don’t expect this to be too major a factor in the majority of use cases though, and depending on exactly what you’re doing you may see more benefit from AM5.

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This is what I would get for a productivity-style PC this winter. As others have already said, you could go with a 5700X+B550 build and re-use the RAM, and you should be pretty much good to go for the next five years - that would set you back around $300 or so, $160 for a decent board and $140 for the CPU.

However, if you feel AM4 has outlived it’s usefulness, here is the base system I would put together on AM5:

PCPartPicker Part List

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7900X $398.99
CPU Cooler Scythe Fuma 3 $49.99
Motherboard Gigabyte X870 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 $229.99
Memory Corsair Vengeance 2x48 GB DDR5-6000 CL30 $339.99
Storage Kingston Fury Renegade 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 $144.00
Storage TEAMGROUP MP44 4TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 $226.99
Video Card PNY VERTO OC GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER $609.99
Case Fractal Design North $139.99
Power Supply be quiet! Straight Power 12 850W Platinum Fully Modular $159.90
Total $2299.83

7900 and 4070 Super are chosen for a single reason - less heat → less cooling requirements → less noise. Your GTX 1080 Ti is still a decent card, so it’s not required to upgrade yet. If you want a cheap-ish +20% sidegrade however, look at the 7600 XT for ~$300-$330.

For storage, if 2TB is enough then buy only that drive. The 4TB is intended as bulk storage, so that would give you 2+12 TB storage, up to 2+24TB if you go with 8TB NVMe drives.

The Asus ProArt is the best creator motherboard but it also cost $200-$300 more for very little extra benefit.

Case and PSU are luxury, you could grab cheaper ones.

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Check lanes; my impression is that on the X6/870 boards, two of the Gen 5 SSD holes share lanes with the dGPU, leaving you with a ceiling of 2 drives (1 gen 4 from the chipset, 1 gen 5 direct to CPU). So 2+4/2+8, or maximally 8+8 if you really just wanted to spend money.

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welcome-aboard-the-nanny-r8atr07untq50sdt-4077816554

VERY cost efficient route, would involve maintaining AM4 platform
[ANY of the X3D chips + a 550(+) chipset mainboard], whether reusing [or upgrading] your RAM
Most larger air coolers are VERY adequate [Fuma 3 / Thermalrite PS 120 /…] and affordable

Mainboard would dictate, how many NVMe slots available [along with its PCIe divvying]

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Good point. On that specific board you have the card running in x8 mode if at least one of the two middle m.2 slots are occupied.

In reality this is a minor performance hit to the GPU, we simply do not have fast enough computers to push that many bits per second to fully saturate a 4.0x16 port.

On the above setup, at most 2% performance loss, if that is a deal breaker then EPYC / Threadripper it is.

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You will first need to decide if you want to go the frugal route with lower performance, or invest in a higher end system.

Option 1:

As others said, you can most likely drop a 5800X3D into your motherboard with just a UEFI update. It’d be a pretty large performance uplift from a 2700X, and the X3D cache will keep it relevant in games for a long time.

Downsides are you would have to buy a lot of capacity in DDR4 to upgrade that, and any GPU upgrade will use more power than your 1080 Ti necessitating a PSU upgrade anyway. Also it’s a dead platform, nothing better than the 5800X3D will come along and DDR4 is over, so only the PSU and GPU will live again to see another day.

Option 2:

A new build, new everything. It will cost more, but the parts will also stay relevant much longer. DDR5 is cheap as dirt, 32GB is standard, 48GB and 64GB are very affordable, and 96GB has a price premium but is easily doable if you needed it. The 9800X3D would be the best all-around processor and the absolute best for gaming. A B650 motherboard would be the most economical as the base for an AM5 build, the majority of which are pretty solid. There are good odds Zen 6 launching in 2026 will drop into an AM5 board as well, so it wouldn’t be a dead-end build (but there is no guarantee of this yet).

Obviously the downside is it will cost more, but you will get more bang and longevity out of it. Also next-gen AMD + NVIDIA GPUs aren’t out yet, so you will have to wait 1-2 months to know how things will shake out there. But you can keep using that 1080 Ti either way until then!

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For a home desktop PC build, I’d currently only consider AMD CPUs. Since you’re into gaming, a 9800X3D (8 cores) is the best for that. There are higher-core X3D models, but apparently on those only half the cores get the cache (which may make them less suitable for gaming, because the Windows 11 scheduler has (or at least used to have) problems with assigning the right cores to games.
For productivity use the 3D cache won’t benefit you much. In that case the 5950x (16 cores) would be the champion, but there are also models with fewer cores available.
Please note that AMD just announced new CPUs in their CES 2025 keynote, but I haven’t digested that announcement yet.

For RAM on the AM5 platform DDR5 is your only choice. Most folks recommend going with DDR5-6000 (perhaps at low latency). as the current sweet spot. Higher-clocked RAM may not benefit, because some of the clocks might run in asynchronous mode, but it would definitely drain your wallet more.

For boards I’d get something with an X670, X670E or X870 chipset. The 870E version seems like overkill for most uses. the X870 comes with USB4. If you don’t need or want that, go with one of the “6” chipsets.

In addition to the Level1Techs Youtube channel, the Youtube channel “Hardware Unboxed” also has some motherboard comparison overviews. If you need lots of storage, look for a sufficient amount of NVMe or SATA ports. (If you pick NVMe, then check the motherboard manual, because some NVMe ports “steal” PCI lanes from the GPU, which potentially isn’t so good for gaming (depending on how fast your GPU is). If you find some boards you’re interested in, you’d definitely want to check, if Wendell has them reviewed on the Level1Techs Youtube channel, because he goes much deeper into the pros and cons of each particular board.

For GPUs, both nVidia and AMD just announced their next generation GPUs. nVidia has the new 5000 series with first models shipping the end of this month and AMD has their new RDNA4 series coming, but only with mid-range models (RX 9070 and RX 9070 XT). At this moment though AMD’s announcement was extremely light on details (e.g. release date is “Q1 2025”).

I use a case, case fans and a CPU fan from beQuiet! a German company. (Noctua is an Austrian company BTW.) Here in the U.S. they also command a premium, so it’ll probably be similar in Japan. The “Gamers Nexus” Youtube channel has some good fan comparisons, so check them out.
I have always used air coolers, because I’m concerned about the possible pump noise of liquid coolers. When you get a beefy air cooler, just make sure that it provides enough clearance for your RAM.

Yes, my next PSU will most likely be a Seasonic one. But the brand is less important than the particular model.

The psu tier list by jonnyguru was for a while a great resource for PSUs, but he went to work for a PSU manufacturer and his website is no longer active. Here’s a reference I could still find: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1477009-psu-tier-list-rev-161a/

I also came across this one, but I don’t know how reliable it is: PSU Tier List rev. 17.0g - Cultists Network

I hope that helps a bit.

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AM5 and LGA1851 are DDR5 obligate. Depends what you’re buying but DDR5 tends to roughly double DDR4’s bandwidth. Best way to tell how useful that’ll be is to look how memory bound your workloads are.

At marketing and branding, so much so this continues to be a question even though the NF-A12x25 has been outperformed by other fans on both price and noise-normalized airflow since launch and the NH-D15 G1 hasn’t been competitive in years. Noctua’s performance competitive parts are currently the NF-A14 G2s and NH-D15 G2 HBC on LGA1700 (probably also low end LGA1851 but I’m not aware of data as yet), which are priced 2x and 1.5x more than to more or less equally or better performing parts, respectively.

See QuasarZone, HWCooling, Hardware Canucks, and sometimes Gamers Nexus for cooling reviews. HWBusters does cooling as well but you need to know how to separate the useful data from the errors and avoid the objective but mostly helpful comparative rankings.

AM5: Phantom Spirit 120
LGA1851 RL-ILM best guess: Phantom Spirit 120
LGA1851 default: maybe ID-Cooling A620
LGA1700: most parts are at AIO power levels

My experience is 120 W TDP/162 W PPT’s easily doable at not much over 20 dB(A) with 120 dual tower air. For 230 W default PPT I’d use an AIO or eco mode.

+1 for HWBusters and Corsair. Personally I’d look at at least XPG, FSP, Super Flower, Lian Li, and probably ASRock before Seasonic. And that’s without considering Seasonic’s aggressive fan curves and restricted fan stop zones make their supplies poorly suited to an audio build. Other supplies often have broader fan stop zones and more relaxed curves.

HWBusters and Cybenetics’ comparative rankings for supplies decouple from functional relevance too, but not as badly as with fans and coolers.

Common assumption but there’s not much evidence to support it, really. While the P28 ties the T30 and is 28 mm thick there’s also 30 mm fans that underperform most 120x25 mm fans. The top 140s are 25 mm and easily end up providing less noise-normalized airflow than 120s.

About the most of a trend I can make out in the data is increasing thickness may make it easier develop greater noise-normalized pressure if the impeller’s designed for it, but not by so much the effect is unambiguous compared to fan to fan variation or measurement uncertainty.

The T30s can be fussy about intake obstructions, too.

Built a couple Norths. Overpriced and underbuilt IMO. I can’t tell if the wood’s real or a clever fake, the captive thumbscrews start falling off sometimes before the build’s finished, if you don’t support it right when putting the sides on the case goes together warped, and despite the open mounts 3.5s run warmer than they do when behind the same fan in a case with a more restricted drive cage. Also has Fractal’s typically less than great intake design, though the rectangular rear punch is generally well behaved and Gentle Typhoon impellers run low load noise on it.

Mostly I end up building Lian Li Lancool 207 and IIs. Different aesthetics but the 207’s priced 60% of a North, has somewhat better build quality, is smaller but fits larger dGPUs better, and runs cooler. Stock fans are probably better too, but not much data on that.

I’d be cautious of the suggestion of be quiet! here. Silent Wings 4s are competitive at their upper RPMs, not lower, and I haven’t been able to find good data showing their be quiet! cases are any quieter than anybody else’s. What I’m aware of suggests no real difference.

I don’t either but when I tested partial to full blocking of the mesh side the increased temperatures always made the North builds louder. Silent cases exacerbate this by further decreasing airflow, though in low to mid-power builds sometimes it’s an ok tradeoff for hard drive noise or as a way of elevating other noise to mask coil whine.

Mostly I use 20 dB(A) 3.5s, constrain dGPU power, and try to make educated guesses as to which dGPUs seem to have the best odds of unmeasurable coil whine levels. It’s mostly worked aright so far. Some of the cases where it hasn’t are glass side, where I didn’t measure much difference between leaving the side on versus taking it off.

MSI’s got three boards, I think, with dual PCIe 5.0 x4 M.2s from the IO die’s x4 PHYs rather than PEG. Cooling for the second M.2’s limited to armor heated by dGPU exhaust, though, so probably more useful to go with a board that puts a CPU 4.0 x4 behind slot 5 or 6.

x8/x4/x4 PEG bifurcation for additional CPU M.2s is just an X870E thing I think (maybe also high end MSI X670E?), probably partly to compensate for putting four lanes to the ASM4242 for USB 4.0, but has similar mechanical problems with NGFF heatsink clearance and dGPU cross heating. I’m not sure about x8(16)/x8(16) slots’ support for an x4/x4 M.2 riser card in one slot but, while mechanically a bit better, it’s still awkward with the heatsinks. And current risers seem to be 4.0 at best rather than 5.0.

Not bad when it was maintained, but it’s the better part of two years out of date now. The practice of tier ranking’s of questionable usefulness anyways.

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Ooh. Interesting. MSI appears to be using the USB4 connection for M2_2, while Gigabyte just consumes GPU lanes for both their “extras”, and then Asus… Is kind of all over the map, with some stuff nerfing the GPU to x8 for a single 5.0 x4.

Though the cooling issues probably make it almost moot; the spot below the GPU isn’t kind to most things, and with the heat output the gen 5 drives are capable of it’ll probably result in it just throttling to something resembling gen 4 performance much of the time either way.

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Wow, I didn’t expect so many replies over the night. Everyone’s suggestions are greatly appreciated!

I definitely appreciate the Youtube suggestions too.
This might sound a bit silly, but I haven’t watched a lot of LevelOneTechs despite joining the forum. I use to be an avid watcher of Tek Syndicate and was a regular on their forums back in the day, but obviously…rip. I had a feeling that this forum would be more welcoming and helpful compared to some other tech enthusiast forums (of the few remaining old skool web forums that still exist).
I’ll definitely check out more of L1T stuff after this!

I appreciate the suggestion to stick with the AM4 platform, but I do think I’d rather just go ahead and upgrade to AM5.
However, I have time to consider whether that’s what I really want to do or not, since 50 series isn’t out yet. Assuming there is nothing catastrophic at launch and the performance upgrade over the 40-series are true (ignoring the frame generation bs) I feel like 5080 is probably the way I want to go. If AMD can lock in a date for their new cards, I’d be willing to wait, but Q1 is a little too nebulous for me. Regardless, I’ll wait for the launch of the 50 series to see what the reviews have to say.

I guess it comes down to fans, case, and cooler since I seem to be getting some mixed signals there (well, other than that Noctua can be safely replaced with more economic options).
I’ve been a long time fan of Gamers Nexus, though I had stopped keeping up with their content when I wasn’t rreally in the market for new PC hardware. Now that I am ramping up for a new rig, I’ve been trying to get caught up, but it’s nice to have a summary provided by you guys on the current trends and stuff.

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PCIe 4.0 or slower if the drive’s doing much, aye. If it’s lightly used then probably it’s fine with warm armor. But if it’s lightly used then 5.0’s very likely overkill so I find it all goes a bit circular. B850 beats B860 at least as the Arrow IO die’s 4.0 x4 isn’t brought out on those.

E28, E31T, and SM2508 should help some here, partly for the node shrink and partly because the packages all have IHSes, but I think availability might be limited to the MP700 Elite (E31T) so far. Maybe eventually also Piccolo but it’s just the 5.0 x2 990 Evo for now.

Haven’t seen anything about what Sandisk/WD might do for PCIe 5.0 yet.

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For gaming, forget the 5700X3D and 5800X3D. While sticking with DDR4 might seem tempting, the 5700X3D bottlenecks even the RTX 4070 Super in modern games, such as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, especially when using higher detail settings, ray tracing, or path tracing.

I’d recommend going the DDR5 route, but it ultimately depends on the games you play and how much RAM you need. If your existing DDR4 setup is sufficient for your use case, it could be more cost-effective to stick with it. That said, Arrow Lake processors are excellent for productivity, as are AMD’s higher-end models, which also deliver strong gaming performance.

A more budget-friendly option might be to consider Intel’s 1700 socket with DDR4. Z690 or Z790 series motherboards offer solid features and are quite affordable these days. An i5-14500 paired with your current DDR4 could be a good option. The 14500 has 14 cores and 20 threads, making it a reliable choice for multitasking, and its iGPU could assist with video encoding. It also avoids some of Intel’s past reliability issues.

As for GPUs, it depends on your specific needs. If you’re sticking with Windows and have the budget, the RTX 5090 could be a great choice with its 32GB of VRAM. If you’re considering Linux, the 7900XTX is a solid, more affordable alternative. Your decision should hinge on the games you play and your priorities. That said, the RTX 5080 might not be the best idea since, in rasterization, the RTX 4080 Super could perform better and may even be cheaper. Frame generation on the 40-series isn’t particularly impressive on midrange GPUs, so I’d prioritize the highest native rasterization and ray-tracing performance you can afford. In my opinion, Nvidia GPUs only make sense at the high end (e.g., 4090/5090) or if you need their codecs for live-stream encoding. Otherwise, AMD offers significantly better price-to-performance value.

As for the case, I’m not much of an enthusiast—I’ve been using an old Cooler Master Cosmos, which offers plenty of airflow and accommodates everything since it’s quite large.

For the PSU, Corsair and Seasonic are my go-to brands. There’s no need to overspend on Platinum or Titanium certifications; Gold is perfectly fine and often much more affordable. Keep in mind that the 5090 requires a 1000W PSU.

That said, it might be wise to wait a couple of months if you’re considering the new 5000-series Nvidias. Brand-new hardware can be hit or miss when it comes to reliability and performance. Personally, I’d stick with well-tested last-gen hardware or wait to see detailed reviews and tests. I made the mistake of buying the latest hardware recommended by major techtubers and overclocking gurus, and my CPU and motherboard failed.

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my previous seasonic was 12-14 yrs old before dying (in 2022) spectacularly, taking out my:
motherboard
cpu (5950x)
gpu (1050TI)
spinning rust hard drive
1 of 2 nvme drives
a usb3 add in card

So put in a new PSU.

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I usually get n-1 hardware (and phones).
n-1 means the generation before the very newest. Parts are usually cheaper, and not that far from the newest stuff. For my use case it works fine.

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