Aptorian, on 06 August 2020 - 01:11 PM, said:
Instead of buying an X-box this fall, I've decided to buy a new PC.
I'm thinking of making it a little hobbyist project. I'll buy the parts, try to assemble them myself, fuck up terribly, rage at the injustice of the universe for a couple hours while watching trouble shooting videos and then likely abandon everything and buy a prebuilt piece of shit. Or something like that.
However I've seen that there's likely going to be new GPU and CPUs being released from both AMD and Intel this fall. So, the question for the PC enthusiasts on here, what should I be investing in? From what I can tell AMD have been making great leaps forward in terms of quality hardware. Meanwhile Intel seem to be resting on their laurels, releasing overpriced hardware. Back in the early 10s when a friend built me a PC, Intel was the must have GPU manufacturer because more games were compatible with their hardware/software.
If I don't mind dropping 1000-1500 USD on a GPU or a CPU, what should I be going for? As far as I understand the upcoming CPU's are built on a new 7nm manufacturing design, so is that "future proof" compared to say a slightly older but cheaper gen of hardware?
What about SSD's?
AMD CPUs are what the next-gen consoles are gonna be using. Ryzen 2 (the 3xxx series) are good value for your cash; Zen 3 are out next year. Intel is generally considered to be top performance, but they're expensive and still using 11 nm; their foray into 7 nm has been delayed to next year for commercial release.
GPUs: NVidia's rtx 30xx series are out this fall. For Nvidia, this is the second version of ray-tracing cards (AMD's Big Navi cards will be their first real foray into ray-tracing). No idea what the prices will be yet, but Nvidia's DLSS 2.0 tech is a software super-sampling that lets you upscale your 1440p resolution to 4k for A LOT less power needed. So some people believe that's the future, and if you're looking at resolutions above 1080p, that's something to consider. I really can't tell you much about AMD's cards at this point, except apparently they've also been getting better, and they improved their driver support a lot.
SSDs: so this is a bit tricky, since there's 2 types of SSDs. The more widely available and cheaper SATAs use the same cable connection as a hard-drive or a disk drive to connect to your motherboard. These have a read/write speed capped at about 500 mB/s- huge compared to hard drives, and generally good enough to run your OS.
However, both next-gen consoles are gonna be using NVME SSDs- which are much smaller, basically flash drives that slot directly into your motherboard. These are the ones with top read/write speeds of gigabytes/second. They interface with the PCIE slot (those same slots your GPU slots into). Current tech, PCIE 3.0 is limited at about 4 gB/s, I believe. PCIE 4.0 is theoretically capable of speeds higher than the PS5, but they're still in a design/test stage; that tech will be rolled out probably within the next 2 years, if I understand correctly. At that point, it will get rolled out on motherboards, but there's no telling who will be the first to support it, AMD or Intel. Intel's first stab at new CPU architecture isn't coming until next year, so overall impression is they've gotten pretty complacent and AMD's hot on their heels, and they were first to the punch with 7 nm tech.
Ideally, you want an NVME SSD to future-proof for games; however, for anything this gen, the difference between a SATA and NVME SSD is negligible- while the prices aren't; there's no unanimous opinion on how "next gen" games will work on PC, and whether they'll require an NVME SSD, or whether you're good enough with a SATA (there's an opinion that slotting in extra RAM (which is much cheaper) can compensate for the slower read/write speeds on the SSD). The only "Next Gen" game that's currently got system requirements out in the open is The Medium, and the Steam page doesn't mention anything about an SSD. The other one that we know of (Godfall) doesn't have it's system requirements up yet over on the EGS.
Personally, I'm banking on the fact that very few devs will be willing to demand a high-speed NVME from their PC audience. I'm counting on my 2Tb SATA SSD to do some serious heavy lifting for the next few years and be sufficient for most games. But at this point it's too early to tell for sure.
Help
