Anyone built a PC recently? Advice/suggestions welcomed

strtdv

My elderly (8-9 years old) PC has had a lot of issues with getting stuck in boot loops recently, as well as having the 100% disk usage issue, not solved by any of the usual fixes. It was decent spec in it's day (i5 2600k, Radeon 6870, not super high end but quick enough). I'm doing a full clean install at the moment, but I realise it is pretty old and could probably do with replacement.

Although it's an old PC,  over the years I have spent a bit keeping it going.
As such, it has a good modular 650 watt power supply which is only a couple of years old, and a 500GB SSD (Samsung EVO 840) as the primary hard drive.

I was looking at getting a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/GPU combo and keeping the old SSD and PSU rather than buying a whole new PC for what looks like about £400 more than I can get the MB/RAM/CPU/GPU for

What would you get with a budget of £600-750ish?
I was looking at potentially an i5 8400/8600k and a GTX 1060 6GB, maybe even stretch to a 1070 Ti with 16GB of RAM although that would blow the budget somewhat..

I assume the old case will be fine? I don't need anything flashy and the old case is solid and well ventilated enough.

Also, can I transfer Windows from the old PC to the new PC or do I need to buy that separately?

The idea is basically that I would have something powerful enough to get back into a bit of PC gaming (at 1080/1440 rather than 4k or VR) and would be able to keep playing new releases (albeit not at full quality) for 3-4 years.

exocet

I recently upgraded my sons gaming computer. He had one of those Dell / Alienware things in the small form factor cases. He wanted a new graphics card and bought a 1080ti card before realising that a)Physically it wouldn't fit b) didn't have a suitable power supply for it.

So, he bought a new case and motherboard (older Asus that supported his existing 16 GB DDR3 RAM and i7 CPU) upgraded PSU to a 650 watt unit. We transferred all the bits over and booted it up. He already had Win10 on his HDD - didn't have the original source disk as he got Win 10 as a free upgrade from Win 8.1. I was expecting the worse with respect to drivers for motherboard chipset but it was fine first time. He's happy, from a gaming perspective it "flys" but could do with an SSD HDD because boot up is pretty slow. 

Myranda

strtdv said:

My elderly (8-9 years old) PC has had a lot of issues with getting stuck in boot loops recently, as well as having the 100% disk usage issue, not solved by any of the usual fixes. It was decent spec in it's day (i5 2600k, Radeon 6870, not super high end but quick enough). I'm doing a full clean install at the moment, but I realise it is pretty old and could probably do with replacement.

Although it's an old PC,  over the years I have spent a bit keeping it going.
As such, it has a good modular 650 watt power supply which is only a couple of years old, and a 500GB SSD (Samsung EVO 840) as the primary hard drive.

I was looking at getting a new motherboard/CPU/RAM/GPU combo and keeping the old SSD and PSU rather than buying a whole new PC for what looks like about £400 more than I can get the MB/RAM/CPU/GPU for

What would you get with a budget of £600-750ish?
I was looking at potentially an i5 8400/8600k and a GTX 1060 6GB, maybe even stretch to a 1070 Ti with 16GB of RAM although that would blow the budget somewhat..

I assume the old case will be fine? I don't need anything flashy and the old case is solid and well ventilated enough.

Also, can I transfer Windows from the old PC to the new PC or do I need to buy that separately?

The idea is basically that I would have something powerful enough to get back into a bit of PC gaming (at 1080/1440 rather than 4k or VR) and would be able to keep playing new releases (albeit not at full quality) for 3-4 years.

I definitely would aim for the 1070 or 1070ti (thanks to RTX cards coming out, you might even find an ebay bargain on a 1080)

If budget starts to stretch a little, try looking for a i3 8350K - very very capable CPU for gaming, and it can be over-clocked (also, side note, it's quad core now without hyperthreading, so will be more resistant to Spectre type attacks than the 2core/4thread version), and as a K skew it can be over-clocked if you have a good enough cooler

2160x1440 gaming taxes a GPU a lot more than people think, and is a big step up computationally from 1080p, so if you're aiming for this throw as many pennies at the GPU as possible.

You don't say what ram you have current machines are built for DDR4 and about the time your old PC was rocking around it was DDR3. DDR4 and DDR3 have different pin configurations so aren't compatible 

Transfering Windows to a new PC is... technically a yes... but it can be a pain in the bum-hole sometimes. When changing a lot of components windows can (but doesn't always) decide you're not really you and you have to go through and get your key reenabled (it walks you through the steps so don't panic)

So in summary - spend as much of the budget on GPU and get as good a CPU as is left in the budget and you'll be fine. Try to factor in Motherboard and possibly RAM into calculations 

My 1080ti is partnered with a 3770K (3rd gen where 9th gen stuff is just about to come out) and rarely notice CPU bottle-necking to an extent that makes a difference, so you shouldn't notice a real world difference between a i3 8350k and a i7 8700k (though you'd notice the price difference)

Snags

I used to do a lot of custom builds, professionally, but have dropped out of that game by and large.  However, you still can't go too far wrong with Asus motherboards - don't be seduced by the branding classification, just look at the chipset and the specs to guide you, and go for the best chipset you can stretch to.  We used to go with the Asus implementations of Nvidia and ATi too, unless it was proper high budget stuff in which case there are other brands to take your cash.


For gaming the video card will be far more important than the CPU, so I'd go with a reasonably pokey i5 (the extra cores over the i3 will make a difference) but it's probably not worth stumping for an i7 unless you have money to burn.

At 8-9 years old there's a good chance your old RAM won't be compatible with the new board.

When you say "keep Windows", do you mean just lift the SSD, fire it up, and let it have a driver panic, or do you mean do a clean install from media?  Either way you can do it, but the latter is preferable (if you had an OEM licence it's technically a breach, but no-one gives a crap as long as there's only one live machine at a time).  If you're going to just do a lift of the system then you'd be advised to take a full backup image and do a bare metal restore so it brings in the right drivers more elegantly than just making it crap itself on boot.

strtdv

I'm planning to do a clean install from media (basically do it onto a flash drive from the computer in the current form, then change the MB/CPU/GPU/RAM and then install from the USB flash drive.

I figured I'd need to replace the RAM at the same time.

This has caught my eye:
https://www.awd-it.co.uk/intel-i5-8600k-overclocked-4.6ghz-six-core-cpu-asus-z370-p-motherboard-bundle.html
It's only £60 more than the equivalent i3 8350 bundle.

duotone

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/

Worth a look to check if any any parts aren’t compatible

TwoSpellWizard

http://www.logicalincrements.com is wonderful for this kind of thing.

It'll give you the best build you can get at a series of different price points.

strtdv

Both those sites very helpful, thanks.

Looks like an i5 8600k build with a slight stretch to a gtx1070 might be a pretty solid bet coming in just under £800 if I shop around, and should get me close to what would be a £1300 off the shelf PC.

I take the point about the i3 processor probably doing everything I need gaming wise, although I also do a bit of photo editing which might make use of more cores, and the cost difference is under £60 which seems worth it.