It's been almost 10 years since I built a new PC. I switched exclusively to Apple hardware about a decade ago for several reasons. Being a dad, I didn't have much time to tinker with PCs and I needed something that "just works" at all cost. Fast forward 10 years, I now have a bit more time. Also, I'd like to show my kid the joy of having a powerful desktop by showing him some cool stuff like VR, MS Flight Simulator, etc. Besides, my 2017 Macbook Pro is starting to be annoyingly slow even for simple operations like Lightroom, Photoshop, and family video editing.
Instead of buying an expensive new Macbook Pro every few years, the intent of building my own PC is to know exactly what I'm buying so that I can expand it in a few years and make it last at least a decade. I don't want to buy a typical pre-built PC because they tend to come with cheap parts, RAM slots all pre-filled, lack motherboard documentations, and or comes with cheap motherboards that don't allow you to upgrade to newer generations of processors. Regarding processors, I decided to go with AMD's Ryzen series because of its superb performance/price ratio and that the AMD socket types (e.g. AM4 socket) is very very stable year after year. In contrast, Intel seems to come out with a new socket type every year, or something like that, which really turns me off because it precludes the possibility of upgrading newer processors with an older motherboard. No Intel, no messy LGAs. AMD all the way this time.
Below are the other parts I used. I've put links to Amazon.com and the prices at the time of writing (2021-08-19). Note that you may be able to get cheaper prices from eBay, new or old.
There is a plethora of motherboards to choose from. My go-to choice is ASUS due to their superb history of compatibility and stability, plus it is the only vendor with 3 years of warranty. There are also great choices at lower prices from Gigabyte, AsRock, MSI, etc etc (all with 1 year warranty). However, this is an area where I'm willing to pay a bit more for name-brand so that I don't have to deal with finicky settings and unreliable motherboards (from bad past experiences). For AMD AM4 socket there are some chipsets you can go with. The latest and greatest one is X570 that has 100% PCIe v4 interfaces for multiple high end GPUs. But, they cost quite a bit more ($300-$500). So instead I got one grade lower, the B550 chipset, which is mostly PCIe v4 except one slot is v3-- this is perfectly fine since I only plan to add just 1 GPU for gaming. The one I got is Asus B550-F Motherboard ATX Wifi
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x32GB DDR4 3600 $400 at the time of writing. Yes it's possible to buy 4x16GB 3200 for a much much lower price, but in a few years when I upgrade, I would need to sell all of them on eBay (at almost nothing) to buy 4x32GB modules. So this is an area where I decided to spend a bit more on name brand and on fewer modules, for future expansion to 128GB.
- HD: Western Digital SN850 1TB drive 7000MB/s M.2. I used userbenchmarks.com to look for specs. This is faster than Samsung 980 NVMe Pro M.2 for just a little bit more cost. I need as much IO as I can get for photo/video editing. Because this is name brand, it cost a bit more-- $200 at the time of writing.
- CPU cooling:
$65$60 at the time of writing. Scythe Ninja 5 quiet silent cooling This is near silent as it runs at 800RPM and is less than 10dB. The down side is that it is HUGE so make sure it fits in your full sized ATX case. Check out pcpartpicker.com, a great site that helps you look for the right cooler. - Power: Corsair RM850 gold power $134 at the time of writing. There are some great web sites out there to calculate how much power you need. I used this one: http://www.powersupplycalculator.net/ -- I put in the above components + 2 GPUs (future expansion possibility) and multiplied the power by 1.5x to get below 850W, which is a safe margin. You can check out YouTube videos spend hours and hours on this topic.
- GPU: This is a very personal choice. You can find plenty of used GPUs on eBay. Anything Nvidia GTX 1080 should be a decent choice. The RTX 3070+ are ridiculously expensive right now due to shortages, so I would wait to get new RTXs later.
- Case: Corsair 110Q quiet case $100 at the time of writing. This is not a fancy see through case, but it is a quiet case with extra sound paddings inside. No pretty light, nothing. Function over form for me.
- Bluray/DVD read/writer
- OS: Windows 10 Home
- Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements photo and video editors
Out of curiosity, I checked how much the equivalent Mac Pro would cost, and this is what I got:
