I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back.
I am finding it easy enough to find build ideas for very capable (and expensive) machines but I am that out of touch with “what’s good” that I no longer have any idea of what would be “good enough” (to play most modern games at “high” settings and at 60fps).
Basically, I would like help in avoiding an attempt at going back to my old ways and building some kind of pie in the sky setup like this:
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
CPU fan NZXT Kraken 360 RGB
MB Asus Prime X670E-Pro WiFi 6E
GPU Gigabyte Aero GeForce RTX 4090 24GB
RAM G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB DDR5-6000
SSD Samsung 990 Pro 2TB
PSU Corsair RM1000x Shift 1000 W
Perhaps the could serve as a starting point - what could you cut from the above build and what would you substitute?
So, the trap of modern game setups is that there is a lot of super high powered hardware out there- but unless you’re driving 4K monitors at 120hz+, or striving for super fast 360hz+ refresh rates for competitive gaming, you don’t need any of it. And people often get too caught up in the flashy new latest-and-greatest to recognize what’s a good deal and what’s just showing off.
Define your use case. What’s your desirable budget? What kind of games do you want to play, do you want to do VR, what kind of display do you plan on using. Because while it’s easy to drop $2800+ on hardware these days (like I did), it is still very possible to end up with a $900-1k machine that is super capable at 1440p and can run most all games you throw at it for at least another 5 years. Dpending on what exactly you want to do with it, prioritizing certain areas of hardware over others will pay off.
I agree. I think 1440p+HDR is probably the way to go for now. HDR is FAR more impactful than a 4K resolution and 1440p should provide a stable 45ish FPS on Cyberpunk 2077 completely maxed out on an RTX 3080Ti (DLSS Performance).
And in terms of CPU, the same applies. 16 cores are for the gentoo using, source compiling folks like me. 8 cores on a well binned CPU from the last 3 generations goes plenty fast for gaming. CPU bottlenecking only really show up at 144fps+ in most games anyways.
Yes, HDR and higher framerates are a lot more beneficial for gaming these days than it is to go to 4K. HDR typically doesn’t have much performance impact at least, that’s just down to monitor support.
4K performance becomes relevant if you want to do VR though because of the dual-eye resolution.
Meanwhile I game almost exclusively on my Steam Deck nowadays.