TR Forums

Hi everyone,

I see from my usage stats I last posted here in 2011!

Anyway, I've been playing with NoLimits 2, including making videos from it, and Photoshop for scanning and manipulating old negatives (some of which are glass and produce beautifully sharp images at high resolution). I promised myself about 10 years ago that if I bought another desktop I'd build it myself and that day has finally arrived. I'll keep the laptop for internet and small stuff, but it's time I had a dedicated PC.

Here's my current laptop spec:

8 GB ram
Radeon HD 8670m 1 GB
Windows 10
AMD A4 quad core...no idea what it is beyond that

It makes me sad that I can't turn up the eye candy when it comes to graphics and I'm going to need something which can handle graphics heavy multiplayer games in the future (there's one I'm beta testing and my laptop can no longer cope). With the bigger negative scans Photoshop is maxing out my system ram (I can't increase it further) and any attempt to build actual parks as opposed to single rollercoasters is going to massively slow my frame rates. I'm already having problems as it is with more complicated layouts. What would make a good build for my needs? I have looked at the latest TR system guide from last year but I'm not quite sure which one fit best.

There are tons of build it guides on the internet.
The one we have here is a little dated but still has good info.

You would generally want:
a ryzen 3700x or 3800x;
32gb ram,
a 2tb nvme ssd, (hp 950 is an excellent choice)
A large secondary hdd such as a 8tb WD black or something similar to store your data or use as a backup drive for your primary.
a decent video card such as a Radeon 5700xt or nvidia 2070
A good mainboard such a ASus tuf gaming or msi tomahawk x570. I HIGHLY recommend getting a x570 or 550 chipset rather than anything older so you can upgrade to ryzen 4000 series non-apu chips when they come out. So far nothing older will be supported.
You may want a good heatsink if you find you are thermal bound with larger processing tasks.
Get a good midtower or full tower case such as phantecks enthoo etc.
Plenty of good cooling fans in a case pressurized scenario with good dust filters.

I'll generally agree with Aranarth's suggestions.

$274 AMD Ryzen 7 3700X (8 cores / 16 threads)
$0 Included Wraith Prism CPU cooler
or $60-$100 high-end CPU air cooler
or $100-$150 high-end CPU water cooler, e.g.: $100 Arctic Liquid Freezer II 280
$140-$240 Socket-AM4 motherboard with X570 chipset
or $80-$140 Socket-AM4 motherboard with B550 chipset (due mid-June)
$150 2x16 GiB PC4-28800 (DDR4-3600, 16-19-19-39 , 1.35 V)
$380-$400 Radeon RX 5700XT
or $525-$550 GeForce RTX 2070^SUPER
$260 2 TB ADATA XPG SX8200 Pro SSD
$200 8 TB 7200 rpm HDD without shingles (e.g.: Toshiba X300)
$95 Fractal Design Meshify C case
or $109 Define 7 Compact case
$113 SeaSonic Focus GX-550 power supply
or $140 Focus PX-650 power supply

$360 Dell S3220DGF - 32" 2560x1440 VA 165Hz Freesync Premium Pro monitor (Pro adds HDR to Freesync Premium)
or $325 Nixeus NX-EDG275 v2 - 27" 2560x1440 IPS 144 Hz Freesync Premium monitor (Premium includes 120+Hz and LFC)

The above would be kind of a spendy build, but it should give you plenty of performance.

Of course, since you are moving from a laptop, do you need a new monitor too? This may put a big dent on the budget. What is your budget btw? We can step down (or even move up!) a bit once you let us know your number.

The note about not getting an HDD with SMR or shingled magnetic recording is important.
I believe SMR can affect the longevity and data integrity of the drive and it is just plain SLOW.

HDD's should not use SMR and should be 7200RPM for best performance.

In my next machine I'll just use a pair of HP ex950 2tb drives and anything that needs to be backed up will go on my NAS box or cloud.
I'd prefer a 4tb sata ssd rather than the 2tb nvme but I can't find one with a decent price just yet and if i'm going to get a 2tb ssd it might as well be an nvme if i'm not going to save any money..

Flying Fox wrote:

What is your budget btw?

This x2. You can buy or build a desktop which will exceed that laptop on all specs (and meet the use case you've described) for around $1k, but the suggestions you've already gotten are pushing into the $1.5-2k range.

It's a bit unter $2K with the monitor, and we didn't add speakers yet. Shopping is always easier with someone else's money and no budget cap.

Especially when you're spending someone else's money.

Don't be afraid to look on ebay and get a 2700x or other older used computer.
There are tone of bench marks out there you just need to find what matches your use case and then find reviews that include that benchmark in their review.

For my next computer I will be spending big because I won't have much of a budget limit and I'll be building for the future. I'll hopefully to get 3 to 5 years out of it only upgrading the video cards as necessary before handing it down to someone and starting over.

The OP could save $50+ by getting a SATA SSD instead of NVME -- this would entail some loss of read-write performance, but not ginormous.

Also you could go with 16GB of RAM now (2x 8GB) then get a second set down the road as a way to keep the initial cost down. Depending on the size of images you will be editing you will probably want 32 GB as the end quantity, but it isn't essential to start out with that much. 16 GB would be a big step up from the 8GB you have in the laptop, so the amount of paging would be reduced.