Hey, everyone. I’m building my first PC and would like to ask for some help. I’ve always been more of a console guy, and all my PCs so far have been pre-built and intended mainly for office stuff, so I have zero experience with this.
This is what I had in mind:
https://de.pcpartpicker.com/user/kablurk/saved/hxR6Bm
It’s around €700. If I can gain a significant performance boost for paying a bit more, I can do that. For example, I’m considering getting 32 GB of ram instead of 16, although that would probably be overkill for my needs. Other than that, I’d like to keep a balance between low price and parts that aren’t already outdated in a few months.
As for my requirements:
I want to try out Linux, and I’ve read that AMD GPUs are more compatible with it than NVIDIA cards.
I’m not much of a gamer anymore :( at least at the moment. So I don’t need games to run at a 4K resolution or triple digit FPS. If modern games run at around 60-ish FPS for some casual gaming, I am more than happy. I checked some system requirements for a bunch of emulators, and they should also mostly run fine (I think).
What’s confusing to me is that the RX 6500 XT only has 4 GB of memory. Would an RX 580 with 8 GB make a difference in performance, despite being older? (Pricewise they are almost the same)
There are two motherboards in the list. One of them gives me the following warning:
“The ASRock […] Motherboard supports the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G […] Processor with BIOS version P5.00. If the motherboard is using an older BIOS version, upgrading the BIOS will be necessary to support the CPU.”
Is this a big problem or a complicated process? Would you recommend just getting the other, slightly more expensive board?
Any feedback is much appreciated. Thank you!
For the GPU I would actually recommend the RX 6600. It’s a bit more expensive, but a lot better.
Also I would completely skip the mechanical harddrive and just get a bigger M2 drive instead.
For the Motherboard you usually need an old compatible CPU to do the update, so it’s not really doable. I would strongly recommend another one that is compatible by default. (Or potentially look at an 12 or 13 gen Intel CPU in the same price range…)
Oh for sure! It’s better than a nvidia 1060 ti and i also have one and it’s working without issues. Just make sure that the drivers are up to date and that you don’t have duplicate drivers.
Edit: If he decides to get the 6600 a higher grade PSU is probably better because the GPU sometimes spikes and it can shut down the PC if the PSU can’t handle it.
You’ve got a micro-atx motherboard there, which is going to be a bit cramped - if you’ve got a midtower case, you might have a better time with an ATX board. Not a dealbreaker, just harder than it needs to be.
Do not buy a mechanical hard drive in 2023. There’s just no reason you’d ever want to. Find a cheap SATA SSD instead, or put the money to a bigger boot device. Spinning rust belongs in the past - it’s disgustingly slow, it’s fragile, it’s loud, you will hate your life.
If the motherboard supports it, an nvme ain’t half bad.
Make sure your PSU can handle the total watts your parts will use. You might want to check how many watts the GPU and CPU use on average. Gold or plat is better than bronze because the PSU will be able to take a sudden spike in power without turning off. Make sure you update your motherboard, especially if you get an AMD GPU.
Edit: your PSU will handle the parts you have, might want to get silver grade PSU but bronze is fine. To update the motherboard it’s just downloading the bios update and installing it via usb in the BIOS menu. Usually you just hammer F2 to get into the BIOS menu, but if it isn’t that key then the splash screen should say how to get to it in one of the corners of the screen.
I’ve been out of the loop for a bit, so I could be wrong, but I think that warning is specifically about using the integrated graphics on the processor and isn’t a concern if you have a dedicated GPU.
As far as RAM goes, I went with 32GB when I built my system but I’ve never used more than 16 that I’m aware of and I have three monitors full of Firefox and chrome windows and tabs, a cluster of background programs, live wallpaper, and a custom rainmeter interface.
An iGPU isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the GPU isn’t working properly, at least the iGPU will let you see what the PC is doing when the GPU isn’t working correctly.
I meant that if you have a dedicated GPU, I think you can update your bios either way. My understanding was that the warning was because you wouldn’t be able to get graphics output with an old bios version that didn’t support the igpu
Also it would allow you more options when you retire the CPU in the future.
Thank you all for your advice. If anyone is interested, this is my new list:
https://de.pcpartpicker.com/user/kablurk/saved/n6VyFTI replaced the motherboard with a larger one (I didn’t even pay attention to the size before)
replaced the HDD with a second NVME SSD
replaced the PSU for one gold grade one (something else I didn’t know anything about)
and I replaced the RX 6500 XT with the RX 6600 (in return I’ll stick with the 16 GB RAM)Again, thank you all for your comments!
Let me see if I can take a crack at this.
Let’s see if this works for you, https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/KNvmd9
