I'm interested in buying my first gaming PC for FPS gaming, need advice

Tech Talk
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Good move.

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I have this sitting in my storage after upgrading.

i-5 4690K
MSI z97 Motherboard
GTX 970
16GB RAM (which was used)
Another 16GB RAM (brand new sealed)
27" Ultrawide Monitor 2560 x 1080p

I bought this stuff and build the PC March of 2016. It was used until September 2018 when I upgraded to what I’m current using. Therefore the listed above has been sitting in their boxes for over a year now. For $650 I’d give you all that.

  • The CPU, Motherboard, GPU were all bought from Newegg.com and I believe I have a 3 year warranty on them all which means they all expired this year. I can also show you the warranty, purchase dates, and anything else.

  • The quality is LIKE NEW. If you want to see pictures I can provided them.

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Help in Understanding Parts

This is usually pretty difficult unless you keep up with the tech news and check various resources, but the three main things to keep note of are G.P.U. performance, C.P.U. performance, and bottlenecks.

If the parts that I have been listing all come across as meaninglesss and confusing, then you may want to consult a graphics card hierarchy, and compare some C.P.U. benchmarks at User Benchmark to help give you a sense of relative value. The i5 9400 processor looks like it would be okay for a budget build, but the Ryzen 3600 is better, and the 3600x even more-so. The RX 500 series cards are ranked way below anything that was mentioned in this thread, and the i5 9400 is a good C.P.U. in terms of price to performance, but still ultimately performs worse than the Ryzen C.P.Us. In the midrange, Ryzen is offering better price to performance for running a C.P.U. stock. You might also want to read this article comparing the A.M.D. Ryzen 5 3600x vs. Intel Core i5 9600k because the 9600k is presently the closest rival to the Ryzen 3600x in the midrange processor market. This comparison from user benchmark also helps to establish the differences between the Ryzen and Intel chips.

Regarding the G.P.U. situation, that RX560 is an amazingly underpowered G.P.U. for something sold as a premium computer component in 2019. It was meant to be a $100 price range card when it was introduced two years ago, although this was one of those few occasions where street price was higher than M.S.R.P. due to increased demand, which was namely because of cryptominers. Anyway, everything else we have mentioned so far is in a higher price bracket and representative of this year’s releases.

As long as I am mentioning resources to help you understand what is on the marketplace, it should be noted that a U.K. version of P.C. Part Picker’s system builder which I have been using for reference, but the more I look into this the more I think I glossed over because of it. It is a quick way to check over many different stores, but the way it seems to factor in shipping is on a per item basis, which can skew results based on cumulative or free shipping. I glossed over C.C.L. Computers and their free delivery for orders over £50 in part because of it. It is useful for estimating the value of a part but you may want to scrutinize over the stores more carefully.

Regarding Prebuilt Systems

First, knowing that the Ryzen 3600X is comparable to the intel i5 9600k should help you understand the pricing a little better when you look into the Alienware Aurora’s customization options. Picking all of the options for the cheapest Alienware Auora that would make it as comparable as posssible to the £1000 build I suggested costs £1,505.15 from dell. Also of note is that I listed the wrong R.A.M. in my last build. I think a heavy duty gaming system should have at least 16 these days. When you buy Alienware, you are paying largely for a designer case and brand namme recognition, much like you would with an Apple computer, if Apple Computers shipped with Windows 10 instead of Mac O.S. X.

There are reasons to buy a prebuilt system. Although it is not very difficult to assemble your own computer some but there are many steps to the process and some parts about it can be frustratingly fiddly, tedious and time consuming. It is also nice to know that if the system breaks while on warranty that every component is covered by the same one, so you do not have to identify which part is broken yourself, which in some cases may be a task beyond your means depending on just what breaks. If you buy a motherboard and C.P.U. separately, and one of them is dead on arrival, then you might find yourself unable to discover which is the nonfunctional part without buying another motherboard and another C.P.U. However, in order to avoid paying too much for the system you need to know what the parts you are paying for is worth, and how much of a markup is reasonable. That requires you to do some market research.

If you are going to buy a prebuilt system, then this Cyberpower P.C. Ultra G.T. 7 is a much better system is much better than the Auora for about the same price, and This version of the Cyberpower P.C. Wyrven is similarly built for only £629. Granted, this is not an apples to apples comparison in brand names, since Alienware is owned by Dell, but even when we do make apples to apples comparisons with the Dell’s Inspirons, Dell’s G Series 500, H.P. Omen Computers and Acer Predator computers, the Alienware Autora does not seem to be a very good value in terms of what lies beneath the case, but to be honest, in knowing what you can buy in components, I can not say I could recommend any one of those.

NZXT does not ship outside of the United states by the way., so sexperienced can only use their systems as a point of reference. $1500 gets you this far from them with their streaming P.C.:

  • NZXT H510 (White)
  • A.M.D. Ryzen 7 2700X 8-Core 3.7GHz (Last gen’s processor)
  • NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER - M.S.I. VENTUS O.C. (Nice)
  • M.S.I. B450 Tomahawk
  • Team T-FORCE Delta R.G.B. 16 Gigabytes (2 x 8 Gigabytes) of 3000MHz R.A.M.
  • C.P.U. Cooler AMD Wraith Prism (comes with A.M.D’s processor at retail)
  • Intel 660p 1 Terabyte S.S.D. storage.
  • Seasonic S12III 650W Bronze
  • M.S.I. MS-B905C Wi-Fi
  • Software Microsoft Windows 10 Home
  • 2-year warranty on all parts & labor

The Cyberpower P.C. Ultra 7 G.T. looks like the better deal to me. The G.P.U. is a little worse, but the processor is better, and since I linked to the U.K. website the £1114 price is V.A.T. inclusive, wheras we might expect to tack another 20% to the NZXT machine’s final price, if it even was available to the U.K.

More Thoughts on Building Your Own:

Still though, in terms of price to performance, your money is generally better spent assembling it yourself most of the time because you are not paying somebody else a high salary to do it for you. Moreover, knowing how to build a computer also means you know how to upgrade it, which can save money as you selectively remove the obsolete parts from your build in favor of their replacements. Once you study the parts, you can also make judgement calls that would be almost impossible to make with a prebuilt system, because the parts are chosen for you. The Rzyen 7 3700x in the Ultra G.T. 7 is a fine general purpose processor, with the same clockspeeds as the Ryzen 5 3600, but a Ryzen 5 3600x makes more sense than a Ryzen 7 3700x because the 3600x is cheaper, and increases clockspeed rather than cores. Now if you planned to do something that could take advantage of as many cores as possible, like heavy video editing then the 3700x is considerable, because it is basically a Ryzen 5 3600 with twice as many actual cores, but for a dedicated game playing computer your money is better spent on one of the cheaper processors.

If the Ultra G.T. 7 and the NZXT repressent the best values you can get for a prebuilt system on an £1110~ budget, can get you can get better building it yourself, if you are not too terribly picky about nonessential elements.

Making Room for the 2070 Super In a Custom Built System.

I made some errors, availabilities changed, you seem to have an extra £110 to spend on this system, which is important because at the £1100~ price point, the RTX 2070 Super, which is a considerably better card than the RX 5700 XT becomes tempting, so I am going to revise my purchasing suggestions one last time:

Giving C.C.L. Computers a closer look, I think I would recommend buying almost everything from them. They list some of the promotions of the more expensive stores, which basically means free games, and they offer a B.I.O.S.update service for B450 motherboards, which is currently free if you buy both the motherboard and a Ryzen 3000 series processor from them, and that can save you even more money the A.D.M.I. combo I mentioned earlier

The total of these components comes out to £955.48

Add Windows 10 Full Retail for £120
Add that 2 Terabyte hard drive from Amazon for £35.50
Add a sata cable for .99

Total cost £1110.97

You also get a whole bunch of free redemption offers from the manufacturers:

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare with the G.P.U.
Monster Hunter World with the M.S.I. motherboard
A three month Xbox pass with either Borderlands 3 or The Outer Worlds with the C.P.U.

The big sacrifice here is of course, the motherboard, and I think the money that would be spent on an x570 motherboard is better saved for a future purpose, while components that can actually do work for you in the here and now get prioritized. I chose the second cheapest option on the website, and the main reason I did not go with the cheapest is because of the Monster Hunter World deal. Right now that game costs $60 on steam, so it is worth more than the small amount you would save by going with the Asus model.

When the motherboard starts to become a problem, it should be more or less disposable, and the extra money put into the G.P.U. might allow you to wait out on upgrading the system a little longer before needing an upgrade.

Getting back onto budget:

Strictly speaking, you have not expressly raised the budget yourself, so discussing how this can be brought back down to about £100 is reasonable, esp. now that the Power Color card is not available at quite that price.

The GTX 2070 Super is a good card, if you want to try your hand at 4k gaming since it should just about mange 60 F.P.S. at that resolution. However, I do not think it makes enough of a difference at lower resolutions to justify the cost. It looks like it is a mere 5% better than the next card down at 1440P.

Generally speaking once you get to an M.S.R.P. of $300–$400 U.S.D. you start hitting the point of diminishing returns. The RX 5700 XT is probably where the sweet spot is for most purposes until Ray Tracing becomes more commonplace, and downgrading the RTX 2070 super to the M.S.I. Radeon RX 5700 XT Mech can instantly shave £100 off of the price, and that is £100 that might be best put into your next G.P.U., which you should be getting somewhere around three or four years in the future. Unfortunately, you lose Call of Duty: Modern Warfare this way, but pendent on the terms and conditions you might be able to redeem A.M.D’s. offer twice, to get another 3 month xbox passs and the other game. I am not sure, since I have not read the terms and conditions. The M.S.I. RX 5700 XT Mech O.C. should be a somewhat better card than the more standard powercolor model.

Most of the remainder can be made up by instead buying a used 1.5 Terabyte Western Digital Caviar Green off of ebay, if you do not mind taking your chances on buying a used hard drive. The few of those I am seeing are priced at £24.99. I personally think 2.5 terrabytes (including the S.S.D.) is plenty of space for now, and by the time you will not be able to cope with that I am sure hard drives will be even larger and/or cheaper than they are now. My first computer had a 256 megabyte hard drive which is piddly by today’s standards.

Making those adjustments brings the system to approximately £995. I would probably spend some of the spare on upgrading the P.S.U. C.C.L. is offering some interesting semi-modular designs at £42. The GameMax GM800 800W Modular 80+ Bronze PSU offers more headroom, whereas the Aero Cool Integrator 700W Modular 80+ Silver P.S.U. sacrifices some power for a higher efficiency rating. Either way the modularity makes the P.S.U. easier to work with since you do not have to figure out where to store the excess cables in your case. I would probably go for the headroom of the Gamemax just in case I ever find myself needing that much power, but perhaps you are more into energy conservation.

Thoughts About Premium Branded Cases

If you like to make the sort of definitive statement regarding the machine’s purpose like an Alienware machine would, you could spend a little more on the case yourself and probably still be ahead of the cost curve if you like that branded gamer aesthetic. There are a couple of Designed by Razer cases, The Razer Tomahawk Elite, the M.S.I. Mag 011C, the M.S.I. MPG GUNGNIR 100D and the Cooler Master MasterCase Maker 5 MSI Edition Computer Case. They are expensive and rather large, but most of these are still are not quite as expenssive. Moreover, most of them are rebranded versions of other cases that are still relatively expensive.

The cooler Master M.S.I. case only costs a little under £200, so for £1300 you are still getting a cheaper and better system than an Alienware Aurora with 8 G.B. of R.A.M, a 5700xt, and an i5 9600k.

Also, what is better than an alien? A bloody dragon, that’s what!

This is a picture of some M.S.I. cases with their long red chineese style dragon mascot logo on them.
This is a picture of some M.S.I. cases with their long red chineese style dragon mascot logo on them.1200×1029 210 KB

(From Tsukumo_eX’s Twitter account.)

What? The dragon does have a rather sanguine color to it. Also yeah, I know aliens have disintegrator guns, but generally speaking, even a trained monkey could use one of those so that is kind of like cheating. I mean, what do the extraterrestrials do when a dragon steals one of their guns?

Something worth noting about brand new M.S.I. cases is that they are also offering $10–$20 worth of steam credit if you buy from them., which may more or less equate to a straight discount for you if you buy from Steam frequently. I do hate to be mentioning M.S.I. but they’re just giving away so much. XP

In Closing

I think that is just about it. I think the RTX 2070 Super represents about the limit of what is worthwile to even consider at this point on this budget, and the value proposition is mostly contingent on standard application U.H.D. resolution, with a little bit of that being ray tracing. I ca not think of a good way to fit an RTX 2080 into this sort of budget, much less the Super or Ti versions of that card, and even if I could, the 2070 Super may already be excessive.

Getting Back onto Budget:

Cutting £100 out of this system would also be pretty easy if you do not think the RTX 2070 Super is worthwile. Just downgrade to the M.S.I. Radeon RX 5700 XT MECH. You won’t get Call of Duty, but it comes with the same bundle as the Ryzen processor, so you would be able to pick the other game. Unfortunately, the offer for the cheaper powercolor one is no longer available from ebuyer, and we are not ordering anything from them to mitigate the shipping. You can find the Powercolor one for £350 plus £10 shipping at Overclockers U.K, but at that point you may as well go for the improved cooler and the higher clock speed.

Not quite. Since the RTX 2070 Super replaced the original, the old version of the card has been priced at about $70 more according to G.P.U. check. That is still too much based on comparisons of other cards around that price point, but it was a premium variant of the card. In any case, I think an Asus Strix O.C. version of a card is easily worth more than the $30 extra I was considering, even before we factor in the ability to enable Ray Tracing, because that ihow the premium cooler variants are usually priced. The thing that makes me merely doubtful is that I do not know the Strix’s full potential. It is highly unlikely that it makes up the price difference, but I lack certain knowledge.

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Pretty good article, that’s what is needed to know. However you can get windows 10 for about £10, however their are some caveats to this, they are what are called OEM licenses so if you do a major hardware change on you system such as change the motherboard the license may no longer be valid, or you may have to contact Microsoft. So far since Windows 10 I’ve spent £25 on keys and I reckon I’ll spend maybe £40 in my windows 10 lifetime, but avoid if you plan to upgrade or swap parts often

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Tonepoet the information you posted was really useful, thanks.
I’m currently deciding between the following:
1)RTX 2070 Super
2)Radeon VII
3)RZ 5700 XT

I’ll focus on getting a 1080p monitor that runs at 120hz or more. Maybe I’m wrong but I don’t think 1440p is that much of a step up from 1080p to warrant me getting a 1440p monitor that can run 120hz, or maybe I’m wrong because I’m just assuming this, I haven’t compared the 2 specifically for gaming.

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I’d eliminate the Radeon VII right off the bat. AMD has deemed those cards to be end-of-life, meaning you would get zero assistance should you need technical support or an RMA, as those cards have been disposed of more than likely. So that narrows your choice to two, either the 5700 XT or the 2070 Super.

I’d ask these questions in order to decide, in this order.

1.) Do you want/desire Ray Tracing? RTX isn’t everywhere yet, and you’d be paying for the first generation of a new technology. Rumor has it that Nvidia Ampere is coming H1 2020, with substantially better performance and voltage draw than the current RTX cards. If you really want to wait, you could buy a EVGA 2070 Super card, and use their Step Up program to upgrade, provided they’re announced within 90 days of purchase.

2.) If you don’t want/desire Ray Tracing, what board partner would you buy a 5700 XT from? I’d personally recommend either Sapphire or a Red Dragon card from Powercolor. XFX is on my shitlist right now over their “THICC” card, which is lazily designed and put together. I’ll link a video from Gamers Nexus below about it.

Video about XFX THICC card:

5700 XT card roundup (goes into best/worst cards):

Hope this helps, and godspeed.

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I would also discourage buying the Radeon VII. It is an older $700 card that does not perform much better than the newer $400 Radeon RX 5700 xt, and performs considerably worse than a $500 RTX 2070 Super. Even if you wanted to spend $700 on a G.P.U., that is money you would be better off buying a newer RTX 2080 Super. Past $400 it seems like all of the relatively worthwhile cards are Nvidia branded.

Considering your original goals of playing Apex Legends and Quake Champions on a 144hz monitor at 1080p I think the 2070 Super is not only overkill, but actually the worse choice. Looking at an Apex Legends specific comparison of the two cards, the 2070 Super actually performs a little worse in that particular game than the RX 5700 XT. The RX 5700xt also hits 143.6 F.P.S. on that benchmark, and another benchmark I saw puts it at 145. I can’t get reliable numbers on Quake Champions unfortunately.

The extra $100 is getting to the point where it’s 25–33% down towards the cost of whatever the next optimal midrange card might be when it is time to upgrade. Hardware and game values depreciate quickly, so I would probably suggest saving the money, and either saving it for the G.P.U. upgrade or upgrading the case, since the case can be more of a long term multi-generational investment, and we are already starting to go past the point of diminishing returns by going with the Ryzen 3600x and RX 5700 XT, rather than the baseline Ryzen 5 3600 and RX 5700. I mostly recommended the costlier components to hit the optimal performance threshold. If you want to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare the value proposition changes somewhat thanks to the redemption offer, but otherwise go with A.M.D.

Also, the Monster Hunter deal ended on the 10th, which is unfortunate. It can be redeemed by registering on M.S.I’s. website before the 17th if you already ordered the motherboard. I wish I noticed it sooner. You may as well go with this cheaper Asrock board with the B.I.O.S. update (ordered separately) if you have not ordered the motherboard already, and maybe put it towards one of the P.S.U. upgrades I mentioned. If you have, then you have until the 17th to register the board with M.S.I. to redeem the deal, presumably to account for shipping times.

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Is there a release date for the next generation of GPU’s? I’m willing to wait a few months if I can get a better deal than what’s currently on offer.

I’ll re-list all the games I intend to buy so I can narrow it down to the most compatible GPU for all.

*Apex Legends
*Quake Champions
*Doom Eternal (which supports Ray tracing, I really want Ray tracing but if it’s optional I probably won’t need it at this point but I will for my next upgrade. I don’t want to tank the frame rate below 100fps and like Hawkingbird pointed out, first generation hardware isn’t worth buying.

*Overwatch

and

*Quake Live (Mid to highend GPU’s would be overkill but I need that 120hz frame rate)

mikeohara I’ll probably go with Red Dragon because it’s cheaper, other than that I can’t decide between the two, both have good reviews. The Saphire Pulse XT and non XT have different coolers and I don’t know how much of a difference that makes.

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Ampere is rumored to be releasing in the 1st half of 2020. If there’s any truth to that rumor, we’ll see it at CES next month (nVidia usually has a keynote during the event). I’d hold off on buying a GPU personally until after that ends, especially if we see something out of nVidia’s camp.

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Both the current Navi offerings will give you 120hz at either HD or qHD depending on your budget.
Wait for CES as has been said and you’ll find great deals to counter any positive press Nvidia may garner

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good decision

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