PC Tech Thread

Thinking of building a new PC.

Could wait a year and get my employer to contribute $3k, but could also just pull the trigger.

What I'm using at the moment is an "OMEN by HP 875-1008na"... which cost me £1.6k and has an Intel i7-9700k, 16GB RAM and GeForce RTX 2080 Super. Purchased as a relatively cheap gaming PC at the beginning of the pandemic, I've absolutely got a lot of value out of it. Also, due to my really bad experience with my MacBook Pro (which now gathers dust) and discovering Windows 11's ability to run Linux... I now live on a Windows machine.

My use of this one PC is on 16h per day and I'm using it for gaming, transcoding, editing video webinars, 12h of meetings once a week (really heavy video conferencing), music, coding, photographic processing (RAW from 40Megapixel sensor, batch processing), etc.

Where I find my existing PC limited:

• No true Thunderbolt, just a lower USB-C spec.
  
• Water cooled is nice, but even when relatively idle the radiator fans run at near constant (and audible) speed.
  
• Case couldn't fit a larger GPU.
  
• Motherboard couldn't do ECC RAM and I am considering it now I'm coding more.
  
• Single NVMe slot, which is occupied.
  
• Slow on transcoding (beats all of the laptops, but it's not "fast").
  
• Gaming really only excels on 1080p, my monitor is 1440p and the fps drops... I may consider going 4k but there's no way this system goes there.
  
  

It's basically what it is... good value for the price point, got a hell of a lot of use out of it... but it's really not upgradeable at all and as I'm using it way more than I intended to I am feeling that.

So I want to consider something that is air-cooled (with ability to have fans stop or run slow when idle and not required), full Thunderbolt, at least two NVMe slots, potential for video capture improvements, a GPU that could in theory be fine with 4k or higher, ECC RAM (at least the option for it even if initially I'll just load it up with non-ECC).

I'll start by determining what a stupid version of this looks like, and will "value engineer" down to a palatable price point later.

My first draft thoughts have gone this way:

• Case (£200)- Fractal Design Torrent https://www.fractal-design.com/products/cases/torrent/torrent/black-rgb-tg-light-tint/
  
• Motherboard (£390)- ASUS ProArt X570 https://www.asus.com/Motherboards-Components/Motherboards/ProArt/ProArt-X570-CREATOR-WIFI/
  
• CPU (£640) - AMD Ryzen 9 5950x https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x
  
• CPU cooler (£90) - Noctua https://noctua.at/en/nh-d15-chromax-black
  
• RAM (£500) - 128GB DDR4 4x32GB
  
• GPU (£1.5k) - RTX 3080 https://www.asus.com/uk/Motherboards-Components/Graphics-Cards/TUF-Gaming/TUF-RTX3080-12G-GAMING/
  
• PSU (£135)- 860W https://www.fractal-design.com/products/power-supplies/ion/ion-2-platinum-860w/black/
  
  

First pass, comes out around £3.5k but a lot of that is the GPU and RAM, the rest feels reasonably good for what it is.

Could drop the motherboard down to a gaming one, but I super appreciate the cooling on it and the fact that it comes with 2 x 40Gbps Thunderbolt in addition to an abundance of USB3, and two ethernet which are a 10G and 2.5G one.

This is a lot of money... but this is also 16h per day and my livelihood and recreation. It doesn't feel wild to invest in that.