2024 PC build!

[Trunk Monkey]

It’s time to replace my desktop! What’s your dream build on a 1500 to 2K budget in 2024?

AMD vs INTEL CPU’s?
AMD vs NVIDIA GPU’s?

What are your thoughts?

 

[theterminator93]

I'll answer your question... with another question.

Are you reusing any components? SSD? Power Supply? Case?

What kind of work do you do with it; are you doing a lot of GPU-enabled encoding (video encoding, for example) or is your work more CPU-intensive?

 

[Irv]

My build last year cost $3106 even after reusing some components, but it included a new (to me) GPU and monitor which was $1500 of the build.

It depends on what you want to emphasize in the build. The main piece of advice I have is to buy your motherboard, CPU, and RAM at Micro Center. I see the grand opening date has been delayed, but you should be thrilled to be getting one in Charlotte.

 

[theterminator93]

When I refreshed my desktop 3 years ago, I got most of my components through MC as well. That was when the Ryzen 5900X was hit hard by scalpers and Micro Center had the smarts to sell them only in stores with a quantity limit of one per customer. The one closest to me (about 45 minutes away) was out of stock but luckily enough, there was another location about 2 hours away that had them.

 

[Chandar8]

I built my PC in the height of the crypto nonsense, but I used AMD CPUs and Nvidia graphics cards. I pretty much carry over all my drives until they die. I am unlucky that in Texas the nearest micro center to me was something like a 12-hour drive lol I only game on my computer so GPU and RAM were my main concerns. 4000 series GPUs look pretty slick though

 

[Swamprat]

Depends on your budget, your needs now and in the future as well as how much you are into bling.. Last year gutted my 2007 vintage Antec tower, replaced the motherboard with an ASRock z790 Lightning that supports Intel CPUs from gen 12 thru 14, installed a m.2 Samsung SSD, 32 gb of DDR 4 memory, 800 watt power supply, reused my existing Nvidia GPU because it did what I needed. The motherboard supports up to 128 gb of memory, has built in 2.5 ghz ethernet port, USB 2,3, and C. I went with water cooling AIO for the CPU. I also installed an 8tb Red WD hard drive for storing data. OS and apps reside on the much faster M.2 SSD. So far so good for me. I can open up 40 tabs on Firefox and run SDR trunking police scanner software in the background with under 10 percent load on the CPU. Full AI support is just starting to be released by parts vendors if that is the direction you want to go and will probably increase the cost of a build.

 

[NEURO]

I've been building my own PC's for over 20 years...and built my latest one just recently.
But like others have said, we need to know what you're using it for before offering recommendations.

For example, if you're going to be doing video editing and/or intense gaming, then putting an Intel i5 & middling graphics card in it would be bad advice.

But if you're using it to surf the web, email, watch porn, normal office/personal work, etc, then those parts would be great economical & strong choices. Most people don't know that even low-to-mid-performance parts are more powerful than their needs, so they waste a lot of money on high-performance parts and never use 1/10th of their potential.

For instance, I've owned a website development firm in Vegas for the past 25 years, so the rigs I build are used for Photoshop, coding, video, and other developer tools, such as Visual Studio, as well as MS Office and other business related software. And my rigs are driven 24/7 in continuous operation, so my parts selection when building a PC would differ greatly from a normal user who needs a basic PC...or a gamer who needs a powerful PC.

And don't go cheap on the case.
Proper presentation of your build is a statement.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

I've been building my own PC's for over 20 years...and built my latest one just recently.
But like others have said, we need to know what you're using it for before offering recommendations.

For example, if you're going to be doing video editing and/or intense gaming, then putting an Intel i5 & middling graphics card in it would be bad advice.

But if you're using it to surf the web, email, watch porn, normal office/personal work, etc, then those parts would be great economical & strong choices. Most people don't know that even low-to-mid-performance parts are more powerful than their needs, so they waste a lot of money on high-performance parts and never use 1/10th of their potential.

And don't go cheap on the case.
Proper presentation of your build is a statement.

View attachment 5402

View attachment 5404

Love that setup and your workstation!
I’m at work now but I’ll answer questions tonight.

 

[Kenz]

The main piece of advice I have is to buy your motherboard, CPU, and RAM at Micro Center.

Nice site, I never head of them before. But my last build was in 2011. Been nursing my quad core AMD Phenom Black edition along for over a decade now, it's on it's second MB and case. I had it OCd originally but don't bother anymore. It still keeps up fine to any basic usage these days.

I went to check for a few parts recently and my first stop was Newegg, than I checked Tigerdirect. I guess Tigerdirect has been gone for a while now lol. Starting to feel old & outdated.

Will be following this thread; way past due for an upgrade.

 

[NEURO]

Nice site, I never head of them before. But my last build was in 2011. Been nursing my quad core AMD Phenom Black edition along for over a decade now, it's on it's second MB and case. I had it OCd originally but don't bother anymore. It still keeps up fine to any basic usage these days.

I went to check for a few parts recently and my first stop was Newegg, than I checked Tigerdirect. I guess Tigerdirect has been gone for a while now lol. Starting to feel old & outdated.

Will be following this thread; way past due for an upgrade.

Tiger, CompUSA, Fry's, Radio Shack...all the good places from our youth are gone now.
And NewEgg is way overpriced.
MicroCenter has a solid rep.
Also try Amazon...that's where I get most of my parts for a good price & fast delivery if you have Prime.

 

[dDUBb]

Fry's

My local Frys was turned into a Pickleball arena.

 

[NEURO]

My local Frys was turned into a Pickleball arena.

That's just wrong.

 

[Grog6]

I looked into pc's about 3 years ago, And one guy went with intel, one bought an amd threadripper 24 core. Processor wise; for gaming or data crunching , cores and memory is most important. For gaming in particular an intel processor always seems to have an advantage. Except using more power than a lighthouse, lol. These days, a 16 core isn't wasted.
You want at least 32GB or ram. I just put 48GB in an x58 MB, I bought a Xeon 5670 in, and they're unlocked.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

I'll answer your question... with another question.

Are you reusing any components? SSD? Power Supply? Case?

What kind of work do you do with it; are you doing a lot of GPU-enabled encoding (video encoding, for example) or is your work more CPU-intensive?

• No plans to reuse anything except for the SSD drives for storage. However with large enough M2 drives I could copy the data over and keep the old drives as backups.
• Yes, I currently have SSD drives but would plan to switch to M2 drives. Are there motherboard that support two or more M2 Drives on them?
• I'm not a gamer but do want to do photo and video editing which is just as intense in it's demand requirements.
• I currently have 32 GB of RAM but it's DDR3 I'm pretty sure the current standard is DDR5.

SIDE NOTE: I'm also considering just getting a laptop that I can dock at home. Any addl. thoughts on that?

I also have some WD platter drives that I'd like to continue to use for storage in a raid array. so I'll need some way to access those. They make external drive towers for that so I'll need one of those. Any recommendations there?

Thanks to all for sharing your thoughts.

 

[Grog6]

If you have a bunch of memory, especially DDR3 memory, you can buy an x79 Chinese knockoff board that supports m.2 nvram memory modules, that are smokin' fast. a 2TB module wasn't even too expensive. I found a 10/20 core Xeon processor with shitloads of L3 cache, for $40. With liquid cooling, it will run 20 cores at 4.0 GHZ by bclk overclocking. You can buy add in cards for x16 PCIe slots that can hold multiple m.2 modules. You want NVMe or PCIe, not SATA.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

If you have a bunch of memory, especially DDR3 memory, you can buy an x79 Chinese knockoff board that supports m.2 nvram memory modules, that are smokin' fast. a 2TB module wasn't even too expensive. I found a 10/20 core Xeon processor with shitloads of L3 cache, for $40. With liquid cooling, it will run 20 cores at 4.0 GHZ by bclk overclocking. You can buy add in cards for x16 PCIe slots that can hold multiple m.2 modules. You want NVMe or PCIe, not SATA.

Yeah, I have two 16GB sticks of DDR3 RAM but it's like 10 years old. I'm just going to step up two generations to the new DDR5 RAM.

DDR6 also in the works but it'll probably be two years or more before it's in widespread use.

DDR6 RAM: The next-gen memory standard, explained

Unsurprisingly, DDR6 memory will gradually replace the current DDR5 memory over the next few years, but what do we actually know about the upcoming memory standard? We'll tell you.

www.pcworld.com

 

[Irv]

You don't want to use ancient RAM anyway. A new desktop CPU with your system budget will obliterate a server CPU from over a decade ago.

 

[Irv]

Yes, I currently have SSD drives but would plan to switch to M2 drives. Are there motherboard that support two or more M2 Drives on them?

All of them.

I don't know if that's actually true, but that's an extremely common feature. I have a 1 TB and a 2 TB NVMe SSD in my build and I still have another empty M.2 slot.

SIDE NOTE: I'm also considering just getting a laptop that I can dock at home. Any addl. thoughts on that?

You'll be getting significantly less CPU and GPU horsepower per dollar. I'd only consider it if you plan to travel with your workstation often.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

My build last year cost $3106 even after reusing some components, but it included a new (to me) GPU and monitor which was $1500 of the build.

It depends on what you want to emphasize in the build. The main piece of advice I have is to buy your motherboard, CPU, and RAM at Micro Center. I see the grand opening date has been delayed, but you should be thrilled to be getting one in Charlotte.

That's my plan. I wanted to get an LG C3 OLED in a 42" size for my monitor and my wife had a friggin' meltdown. Telling me my 30" IPS Monitor on a stand is good enough.

Will definitely swing by the CLT location when I get home. I've been on the road pretty much nonstop since January 17.

Currently finishing up a job in Terre Haute, IN.

 

[Irv]

That's my plan. Will definitely swing by the CLT location when I get home. I've been on the road pretty much nonstop since January 17.

Currently finishing up a job in Terre Haute, IN.

Nice, and it looks like they had their soft opening last week and they're finally doing the grand opening ceremony June 7.

As far as CPUs go, AMD just announced their Ryzen 9000 series CPUs today, which will be the second CPU generation on Socket AM5. Surprisingly, they also announced additional CPUs for Socket AM4, which debuted 8 years ago. They also said AM5 will be around until at least 2027. I appreciate that AMD commits to their CPU sockets for that long compared to Intel. It makes drop-in CPU upgrades several years down the road so convenient.

I have a Ryzen 9 7900X. My motherboard will be good for at least Ryzen 9 9950X (and its 3D V-Cache variant when it comes out next year), which is nice considering AMD has been much better about generational performance uplift versus Intel over the last few years.

$1500-2000 is a healthy-enough budget to afford almost anything you want inside and including the case. The cost of the actual computing hardware other than the GPU is rather trivial with a budget that large. As I mentioned before, half of my build went to an external DAC, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, and a 38" ultrawide monitor, which pairs with a 55" 4K QLED TV that I got at the end of 2021 that I don't include in my build cost. Most people aren't going to spend $2000 on PC displays and another close to $700 on audio hardware.

I think I posted this in the old forum, but this was where my build landed by mid-2023. Anything without a price was something I already owned at the start of 2023.



The only other piece of advice that jumps out at me off the top of my head is friends don't let friends buy Asus. Get a motherboard by any other company. Asus sucks from a quality, customer service, and value standpoint. They're coasting on their reputation right now. I don't like my motherboard for various reasons, but not enough for me to change it.

 

[gunn]

Counter argument: you are on the road a LOT so consider buying a decent laptop that's lightweight enough to travel AND a nice monitor/keyboard/mouse setup to use at home.

- You don't game so while you mention video/photo editing, you certainly don't need a RTX4090 or some other crazy GPU. That could be 50% of your budget right there.
- Now, if you do want to game occasionally, I've found NVIDIA's cloud service to work quite well, even when travelling. My kid plays on a NVIDIA GPU powered HTPC but most of my gaming is done via GeForce Now on my laptop. Costs $100/yr.
- except for the shitty speakers, I've been super happy with my Asus Zenbook 13" OLED. Gorgeous screen. There are some mixed reviews about the current gen of this laptop. If I had to buy a new one tommorow, I'd probably pick up a Razer Blade 14. I would skip the luggable 17" and 18" laptops though (too large to want to actually transport).
- Monitor wise, I love my LG 34" ultrawide. They are quite affordable (under $400) and I like the seamlessness of that much real estate on a single monitor. Ive tried using HDTV monitors and didn't like how it looked from this close up. I think this is "enough" but if I wanted to go for excess, you see the Samsung Odyssey NEOs as cheap as under $1100 when on sale for 49" or 57" for ~$1500.

 

[Derphound01]

Counter argument: you are on the road a LOT so consider buying a decent laptop that's lightweight enough to travel AND a nice monitor/keyboard/mouse setup to use at home.

- You don't game so while you mention video/photo editing, you certainly don't need a RTX4090 or some other crazy GPU. That could be 50% of your budget right there.
- Now, if you do want to game occasionally, I've found NVIDIA's cloud service to work quite well, even when travelling. My kid plays on a NVIDIA GPU powered HTPC but most of my gaming is done via GeForce Now on my laptop. Costs $100/yr.
- except for the shitty speakers, I've been super happy with my Asus Zenbook 13" OLED. Gorgeous screen. There are some mixed reviews about the current gen of this laptop. If I had to buy a new one tommorow, I'd probably pick up a Razer Blade 14. I would skip the luggable 17" and 18" laptops though (too large to want to actually transport).
- Monitor wise, I love my LG 34" ultrawide. They are quite affordable (under $400) and I like the seamlessness of that much real estate on a single monitor. Ive tried using HDTV monitors and didn't like how it looked from this close up. I think this is "enough" but if I wanted to go for excess, you see the Samsung Odyssey NEOs as cheap as under $1100 when on sale for 49" or 57" for ~$1500.

I agree. I'm also going to play devil's advocate here as I only have one PC and it is my iRacing rig.

I have a 2019 MacBook Pro 13" with a VMware Fusion Win10 virtual machine. It is my work computer that I travel with. I run it on OSX 95% of the time and only boot into Windows 10 when I need to hook to a car via Forscan / VCDS / Techstream / etc. or connect to that one corporate VPN that doesn't like Apple.

I don't game much on it outside of the occasional Steam game, but it does well. Photo/video editing doesn't stress it one bit. And since its a full aluminum chassis, it doesn't get torn up in the car or on a plane. When I am at the office, it docks into a station and I use a LG IPS screen with Apple's wired keyboard and Magic Mouse.

I also still have a 2015 MBP 13" that is now a full-time shop computer. It still works flawlessly.

Anyways, I'll see myself out.

 

[Irv]

This is why I asked about what was important to emphasize (meaning the usage scenarios) at the beginning of the thread. The truth is, despite having what is one hell of a gaming rig, I've hardly had any time to play games since I finished building it last year because it's been work and one house project after another. That's not to say it's totally gone to waste though. I do a fair amount of video and photo editing on it, and most notably, I was coming from a 12-year-old Intel Core i7 build that choked on VR, had micro-stuttering in games, and felt sluggish day-to-day even with SSDs.

I also have a 15.6" laptop weighing only 4 lbs. that I bought in 2020. It has a Ryzen 7 4800H, 32 GB DDR4, and an RTX 2060 mobile. It does everything I need it to do while traveling, most notably photo editing. It also plays games well for not being a high-end gaming laptop.

 

[Grog6]

If you have a tower case, or mid tower, You can reuse it, but you'll want a new power supply. The hard part to decide is what motherboard, memory, and chip. The threadripper system I built came in about $7k, the intel system about $5k. Either way, you'll want a new hard drive, Enough memory to do what you want to do. A good motherboard, I'm partial to Asus. A huge cooler. a liquid cooler is pretty good, but they eventually die. Heat pipe coolers last forever.

 

[Boston-Bull]

I used to build tower PCs in the early 2000s, Prices now Asus was a go-to product.

 

[Irv]

The short version of why not Asus is to watch the different videos from GamersNexus and JayzTwoCents on YouTube about Asus over the last year. For years, Asus was the gold standard for motherboards. I didn't buy my first Asus until last year, which I guess was a reason to be kind of excited, but I didn't know until too late that it was long after they stopped building good boards and started coasting on their brand cachet.

Their quality control, customer service, and warranty service all suck. Their motherboards are loaded with a BIOS injection to prompt you to install their bullshit Armoury Crate bloatware on your Windows install (which can be disabled, but you need to go through the BIOS to find the setting before you boot into Windows for the first time). They overvolted the VSOC on AMD motherboards for Ryzen 7000 with EXPO enabled. They do some other stupid crap on their Intel boards for the default CPU settings. A few months after I finished my build, my board exhibited some irritating coil whine that I managed to silence, although I also haven't seriously played games since making those changes.

If I were building a new system today, I'd get an ASRock board from their Taichi series.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

The short version of why not Asus is to watch the different videos from GamersNexus and JayzTwoCents on YouTube about Asus over the last year. For years, Asus was the gold standard for motherboards. I didn't buy my first Asus until last year, which I guess was a reason to be kind of excited, but I didn't know until too late that it was long after they stopped building good boards and started coasting on their brand cachet.

Their quality control, customer service, and warranty service all suck. Their motherboards are loaded with a BIOS injection to prompt you to install their bullshit Armoury Crate bloatware on your Windows install (which can be disabled, but you need to go through the BIOS to find the setting before you boot into Windows for the first time). They overvolted the VSOC on AMD motherboards for Ryzen 7000 with EXPO enabled. They do some other stupid crap on their Intel boards for the default CPU settings. A few months after I finished my build, my board exhibited some irritating coil whine that I managed to silence, although I also haven't seriously played games since making those changes.

If I were building a new system today, I'd get an ASRock board from their Taichi series.

Very helpful information. Thanks so much for sharing this along with your build details.

 

[gunn]

The short version of why not Asus is to watch the different videos from GamersNexus and JayzTwoCents on YouTube about Asus over the last year. For years, Asus was the gold standard for motherboards. I didn't buy my first Asus until last year, which I guess was a reason to be kind of excited, but I didn't know until too late that it was long after they stopped building good boards and started coasting on their brand cachet.

Their quality control, customer service, and warranty service all suck. Their motherboards are loaded with a BIOS injection to prompt you to install their bullshit Armoury Crate bloatware on your Windows install (which can be disabled, but you need to go through the BIOS to find the setting before you boot into Windows for the first time). They overvolted the VSOC on AMD motherboards for Ryzen 7000 with EXPO enabled. They do some other stupid crap on their Intel boards for the default CPU settings. A few months after I finished my build, my board exhibited some irritating coil whine that I managed to silence, although I also haven't seriously played games since making those changes.

If I were building a new system today, I'd get an ASRock board from their Taichi series.

Funny. AsRock was started as Asus's budget brand (like Hyundai started Kia). Both compete with each other now but Asus still maintains an ownership stake in AsRock's parent company Pegatron. It's all incestuous corpo stuff.

My last few motherboards have all been Gigabyte with one or two MSI boards thrown in.

 

[Irv]

Yeah, but since Asus and ASRock operate independently, it's been fascinating to see how ASRock actively tried to improve their products and reputation over the past decade, while Asus got arrogant with their customers. ASRock and MSI are the only major motherboard makers now that don't slip crapware into their BIOS. My previous Core i7 build used an MSI board from before they established their current product line naming.

All the motherboard manufacturers have their issues, but Asus's have been blatantly anti-consumer on another level as of late.

 

[Grog6]

I still have a asus p4T computer from 2003 or so.3.06GHz p4, with 32 bit rambus memory. Never had any issues with it; it's outlasted a half dozen power supplies. My last mobo purchase was a cheap chinese knockoff board, x79 chipset, and a socket2011, and I'm stuffing it full of ddr3 memory.
Since I dumped a glass of tea into the tv computer I was working on, I'm going to put a x58 chipset, socket 1366, ddr3 mobo in it, because it has pci slots my sata raid 5 card will fit in. I have a 3T drive with a working win 7 install on it, for this mobo, and a xeon 5670 unlocked processor. Of course it's an asus mobo, a p6td deluxe. I currently have 3 versions of that mobo.