My first PC building journey and first GPU purchase! Your advice please!

[vantila]

Afterwords: After writing this post, only now I have realised just how long it is ^_^'' and as a result a TL;DR version is in order so here it is:

TL;DR:

Should I get a used 6900XT for around 400$ - I suppose this would be the ultimate perf/$ choice.
or
a used 3090 for the 24gb ram and RT performance compared to amd counterpart
or
just go for a 7900XTX if I find a good deal on it? Features wise I don't care much about DLSS and 7900XTX ray tracing is good enough for me.
or... ORR!
What if I just get a cheap intel arc a750 for now and wait for 5090 to release and just get that on launch day if possible. Because I feel like (and Hardware Unboxed confirms my theory on this, they were discussing it on their podcasts) Nvidia and AMD has adopted Intel's Tick and Tock strategy and releasing one big leap in fps/$ every two generation. So the next generation from AMD will probably be Playstation 6 generation. So every 2 gpu gen there is a big leap and new console release which completely redefines how I think about game generations. So if I get a 7900XTX now I fear that I'll be missing out on a big dimensional shift in fps/$ and hardware requirements of games.

SSD - I haven't bought an SSD and Crucial has just released 2TB version of their T500 series and it seems great. I will either get T500 2TB or Samsung 990 pro 4TB.
Do you have any other reccomendations I should look at?

Also what if I get intel optane ssd for star citizen. Would star citizen benefit from random read performance of optane vs a conventional gen4 or gen5 ssd?

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FULL POST
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It exites me very much to tell you that I'm building my very first PC ever! Also to be honest, none of my friends share my passion for digital hardware so this is the only place I can share all this so that's why it ended up being such a lenghty post. I used pcs before and by no means I'm computer illeterate. Nonetheless never actually build one myself. Currently using a laptop with 1050 as gpu, 7th gen core i5 and 8 gigs of ram... so it will be a big leap in performance for me ahaha. I really am very much into pc hardware, technology, all things digital interests me. I follow LTT, Level1techs, Gamers Nexus, read TechPowerUp news feed and watch TechLinked almost daily and check prices on Newegg. BUT... BUT!!!! Whenever I wanted to allocate my wallet to buying a PC there was always something else wheter it was work or holiday abroad or too frequent going out with friends and drinking and so on and so forth, there was always some other thing. And that is why, because how much I like digital hardware (Ever since the first time I watched Matrix as a child) and how I never actually got into it before, building my firs pc will be a thrilling, very exiting event that I'll never forget! (This is also my first post here in the forums )

My component choices were based on 2 criteria: Finding good deals and Coolness factor (the most important one). Also features such as ray tracing to some extend. I didn't wanted to overextend my budget too much so no 4090 since I din't have anything! Nothing at all! Not a psu, no motherboard not even a PC case. When talking about hardware prices it would be cool to see youtubers talk about price of hardware for upgaders who already own rest of the pc and only buy a gpu and people who never ever had a pc before because it's a different ballpark. If I already had everything else maybe I would look at the price of 4090 differently and considered it or at least entertain the idea. Tho ultimately even if I had infinite money I would still rather wait for 5090 instead of now buying a 4090. So didn't neccecarily got the latest or the greatest but the hardware that I wanted and felt good about buying. If purchasing pc hardware based on how it feels is bad then maybe I'm the worst kind of hardware buyer ahaha ^_^'' But also isn't that what makes personal computers so great? Servers, data centers for instance, hardware they have are the ultimate embodiment of just pure functionality and efficiency. But the design and the shine of personal computer hardware is one of the main things that make it personal.


Motherboard - Z690 Evga Dark Kingpin
So first piece I ever purchased was an Evga Z690 Dark Kingpin motherboard which I got from Newegg brand new (sold and shipped by newegg) for a little over 300$! Which is a great deal and I believe it was the last of the stocks since it says out of stock ever since. I considered 7800X3d and after some deep and sophisticated and industry expert price/performance analysis... Opted not to get AM5 because I didn't liked the look of AM5 motherboards That's it really! And also price and getting a good deal for Evga board played a part too. I bought the motherboard months ago and AM5 seemed overpriced, there were DDR5 stability issues, bugs and they weren't that cool looking to begin with. I can always go for the next AM5 x770, B770 or X870 boards. Wouldn't it be cool to pair an X770 board with Ryzen 7 7700X CPU! I would call it "The 7 PC" and the ram would be configured to 7777mhz too. And there would be 7TB of storage consisting of 7 1tb ssds. And also there would be 7 games installed and I would play Cyberpunk 2077 on it for 77 minutes. The 7 ception is upon us!

Keyboard - Evga Z15
Odd purchase right after the motherboard but it was also on a discount so I got a Z15 Evga keyboard alongside with motherboard.

Case - NZXT H510 & Thermaltake CTE C750 Air Black
Then I got myself an NZXT H510 case because it looked cool, had dust filters everywhere and it was the only one with these qualities for the price. It was very cheap. Then I discovered CTE C750 Air exists! And how cool is that rotated hardware mount is! And how the fact that from behind it actually looks good as mobo back cover is fully inside the case and facing upwards. So I had to buy that one too and now I have two pc cases and 0 actual pc to build
No worries tho since I'm entertaining the idea of starting to making those youtube video ideas that I noted down and always thought would be cool if I actually made them and also stream games, (Mostly Star Citizen and From Software games) so maybe I'll be building a cheaper streaming pc as well and then I would have a use case for this nzxt case. Pun geniuniely unintended. Speaking of here is the link to my twitch page. I haven't streamed anything but worked on it to curate a cool page. If you subscribe you'll know when this pc is put together. I think I can have a regular two days a week stream habbit and it would be chill and cool and with lots of memes so you won't regret subscribing (I hope ^_^''). Twitch channel

CPU - 12900ks
As for CPU, a local trusted place had new core i9 12900KS's that they wanted to move so I got a good deal out of that as well. It was cheaper than 13700k and even if it wasn't I would still get the 12900ks because KS makes me feel like I'm getting something special. I like being a special snowflake ^_^''. Even if performance/$ wise it doesn't mean anything I like it and it feels good to get the KS. Although when it comes to 14th gen KS's even I can't justify that nuclear reactor.

PSU - Thermaltake Toughpower GF3 850W.
I thought if they make such cool cases their other products should be good too, then checked some psu reviews and toughpower series looks solid. It has japanese capacitors. I have no idea what that means but I like Japan so it's cool.

RAM - Gskill CL30 6000Mhz 2x32 GB Trident
For RAM, with this laptop I only had 8 gigs of ram and never bothered to open the back of the laptop and add another stick so I just let myself be bothered by the limitations of 8 gigs of ram instead.
Therefore for the first PC I'm building I want unlimited RAM!

The next best thing to that was 64 gigs of 2x 32gb sticks. Which then can be upgraded to 128 gigs with 2 adititional sticks with a new 4 ram slot motherboard (evga z690 has 2 slots) when amd 8000 or 9000 series cpus release. I think it well be usefull for unoptimised games full of bugs * cough * star citizen *cough *

SSD - I haven't bought an SSD and Crucial has just released 2TB version of their T500 series and it seems great. I will either get T500 2TB or Samsung 990 pro 4TB.
Do you have any other reccomendations I should look at? What if I get intel optane instead of a gen4 ssd would that make sense for star citizen for instance?

To build a pc I need a case, motherboard, psu, cpu, ram, gpu, ssd... And that's it! Did I miss anything? Guess I'll find out when everything arrives and I'm putting them together.

Oh and for cpu I bought thermal grizzly carbon sheets because apprently cpu paste can dry and needs to be replaced from time to time and I don't want to bother with that and these carbon sheets seems to work just as good.
I also considered phase change thing from LTT but that works less efficiently under low power/ low temps when it's not fully liquid and you have to cool it before placing it on top of cpu and all so carbon sheets = much better.

If you have read all this thank you and I hope you find it entertaining. I haven't bought SSD and GPU yet as I said. So please let me know what you reccomend.

 

[evernessince]

Motherboard - Z690 Evga Dark Kingpin
So first piece I ever purchased was an Evga Z690 Dark Kingpin motherboard which I got from Newegg brand new (sold and shipped by newegg) for a little over 300$! Which is a great deal and I believe it was the last of the stocks since it says out of stock ever since. I considered 7800X3d and after some deep and sophisticated and industry expert price/performance analysis... Opted not to get AM5 because I didn't liked the look of AM5 motherboards That's it really! And also price and getting a good deal for Evga board played a part too.

Just in case you are not aware, Kingpin no longer works at EVGA. EVGA laid off nearly all it's staff. The fact that there is no official product page for this motherboard is a huge warning sign, you have to dig around to even find the BIOS and that's likely because the last time any EVGA motherboard received a BIOS update was over a year ago.

If your goal was to avoid potential issues you probably picked the worst possible motherboard vendor to begin with because any existing or future issues will be met with zero BIOS updates and little in regards to support outside of a replacement.

I also do think the Kingpin boards are absolutely not for people's first PC. They are extreme overclocking boards designed for ultra-enthusiasts. This board lacks some features like eco-mode in favor of overclocking. In addition if you look at the EVGA support forums for this product you will see there are a ton of people complaining of issues. It's not the feint of heart, this board is for those that are fine with encountering many issues. It's precicely the opposite of what I'd recommend to someone's first PC build.

I bought the motherboard months ago and AM5 seemed overpriced, there were DDR5 stability issues, bugs and they weren't that cool looking to begin with. I can always go for the next AM5 x770, B770 or X870 boards. Wouldn't it be cool to pair an X770 board with Ryzen 7 7700X CPU! I would call it "The 7 PC" and the ram would be configured to 7777mhz too. And there would be 7TB of storage consisting of 7 1tb ssds. And also there would be 7 games installed and I would play Cyberpunk 2077 on it for 77 minutes. The 7 ception is upon us!

AM5 is more expensive because it will last 3-4 generations as opposed to the single refresh the Z690 motherboard you are purchasing has already seen. Platform longevity is a huge factor.

There are no "DDR5 stability issues" or bugs that rise to the level that one should be of cocern at this point for AM5. DDR5 stability was never an issue, not even at launch. The biggest issue the AM5 platform had was slow boot times and that's mostly been resolved.


You clearly have plans to upgrade to next-gen AMD and and 128GB of memory. If I were you I'd save yourself the hassle and just go AM5 right off the bat. Not sure what your proposed use case for 128GB is though. That's eniterly overkill for anything outside of certain professional work. 64 GB is overkill too, if you can't name a specific use case for it the most you want to go is 32GB. With 32GB RAM you can be playing a game, encoding video, and rendering AI artwork all at the same time.

Oh and for cpu I bought thermal grizzly carbon sheets because apprently cpu paste can dry and needs to be replaced from time to time and I don't want to bother with that and these carbon sheets seems to work just as good.

It should be noted that those are conductive so you are going to want to make sure you cut them to the right size and that you do not get any of the cut material onto other parts of the PC.

Thermal paste does need to be replaced every year or so but how much that matters really depends on how long you intend to keep the system for. TIM sheets are intented for longer term application and I believe the Thermal Grizzly sheets can be pretty fragile in order to get higher performance, which makes it harder to reuse if upgrading. Given the price you'd have to replace the time four times before getting to the cost of a single sheet. I have some less fragile TIM sheets made of graphine but their performance is worse than Thermal Grizzy which isn't a big deal as I just use it for testing. Trade-off whichever direction you choose really.

Should I get a used 6900XT for around 400$ - I suppose this would be the ultimate perf/$ choice.
or
a used 3090 for the 24gb ram and RT performance compared to amd counterpart
or
just go for a 7900XTX if I find a good deal on it? Features wise I don't care much about DLSS and 7900XTX ray tracing is good enough for me.
or... ORR!

Depends on your use case. If you don't case about DLSS and AMD RT performance is good enough it makes little sense to get Nvidia given those features are factors into the cost of Nvidia cards.

In addition what monitoir do you plan on getting and what games do you plan on playing? It may be that all of the above are overkill for your use case.

What if I just get a cheap intel arc a750 for now and wait for 5090 to release and just get that on launch day if possible. Because I feel like (and Hardware Unboxed confirms my theory on this, they were discussing it on their podcasts) Nvidia and AMD has adopted Intel's Tick and Tock strategy and releasing one big leap in fps/$ every two generation.

Well you are going to be waiting awhile as the 5090 is not going to be releasing until end of 2024 at the earliest or could even slip sometime into 2H2025.

You'd also have to ask the question how much you are willing to pay because if the 5000 series is a big leap I would not expect the 5090 to be cheaper than $1,600.

I haven't bought an SSD and Crucial has just released 2TB version of their T500 series and it seems great. I will either get T500 2TB or Samsung 990 pro 4TB.
Do you have any other reccomendations I should look at? What if I get intel optane instead of a gen4 ssd would that make sense for star citizen for instance?

T500 is good, 990 Pro 4TB is good. SK Hynix P41 platinum, Kingston Renegade Fury, WD SN850X are all good as well. Really just go look at storage benchmarks, so long as you don't get something bottom of the barrel performance is going to be identical between most m2. NVMe SSDs unless you are constantly trasfering large files. If you have a write heavy use case you are going to want to consider TBW figures.

Case - NZXT H510 & Thermaltake CTE C750 Air Black

The NZXT H510 is a midtower so just make just it has enough clearance for whatever GPU you want to put in it. There already are 4090s that exceed it's maximum GPU clearance and that's without something like a rad installed.

CPU - 12900ks
As for CPU, a local trusted place had new core i9 12900KS's that they wanted to move so I got a good deal out of that as well. It was cheaper than 13700k and even if it wasn't I would still get the 12900ks because KS makes me feel like I'm getting something special. I like being a special snowflake ^_^''. Even if performance/$ wise it doesn't mean anything I like it and it feels good to get the KS. Although when it comes to 14th gen KS's even I can't justify that nuclear reactor.

12900KS + 4090 on a 850w PSU is ill advised. The 12900KS pulls up to 443w at full load and it's less efficient that the 14900KS at mixed and single threaded workloads in addition to at idle.

A majority of the time the 12900KS will be worse than the 14900KS in regards to power consumption.

You really have to have a reason to need all those cores and every last drop of performance. Anything over 8 cores is worthless for gaming and a CPU like the 12900KS spends a lot of extra power to squeeze out a 1% or two more performance. If you don't need that extra percent you can get something like the 13600K. Or you can get something like the 7800X3D and not have to compromise on performance at all while being extremely power efficient. Options for everyone.

 

[vantila]

Just in case you are not aware, Kingpin no longer works at EVGA. EVGA laid off nearly all it's staff. The fact that there is no official product page for this motherboard is a huge warning sign, you have to dig around to even find the BIOS and that's likely because the last time any EVGA motherboard received a BIOS update was over a year ago.

If your goal was to avoid potential issues you probably picked the worst possible motherboard vendor to begin with because any existing or future issues will be met with zero BIOS updates and little in regards to support outside of a replacement.

I also do think the Kingpin boards are absolutely not for people's first PC. They are extreme overclocking boards designed for ultra-enthusiasts. This board lacks some features like eco-mode in favor of overclocking. In addition if you look at the EVGA support forums for this product you will see there are a ton of people complaining of issues. It's not the feint of heart, this board is for those that are fine with encountering many issues. It's precicely the opposite of what I'd recommend to someone's first PC build.



AM5 is more expensive because it will last 3-4 generations as opposed to the single refresh the Z690 motherboard you are purchasing has already seen. Platform longevity is a huge factor.

There are no "DDR5 stability issues" or bugs that rise to the level that one should be of cocern at this point for AM5. DDR5 stability was never an issue, not even at launch. The biggest issue the AM5 platform had was slow boot times and that's mostly been resolved.


You clearly have plans to upgrade to next-gen AMD and and 128GB of memory. If I were you I'd save yourself the hassle and just go AM5 right off the bat. Not sure what your proposed use case for 128GB is though. That's eniterly overkill for anything outside of certain professional work. 64 GB is overkill too, if you can't name a specific use case for it the most you want to go is 32GB. With 32GB RAM you can be playing a game, encoding video, and rendering AI artwork all at the same time.



It should be noted that those are conductive so you are going to want to make sure you cut them to the right size and that you do not get any of the cut material onto other parts of the PC.

Thermal paste does need to be replaced every year or so but how much that matters really depends on how long you intend to keep the system for. TIM sheets are intented for longer term application and I believe the Thermal Grizzly sheets can be pretty fragile in order to get higher performance, which makes it harder to reuse if upgrading. Given the price you'd have to replace the time four times before getting to the cost of a single sheet. I have some less fragile TIM sheets made of graphine but their performance is worse than Thermal Grizzy which isn't a big deal as I just use it for testing. Trade-off whichever direction you choose really.



Depends on your use case. If you don't case about DLSS and AMD RT performance is good enough it makes little sense to get Nvidia given those features are factors into the cost of Nvidia cards.

In addition what monitoir do you plan on getting and what games do you plan on playing? It may be that all of the above are overkill for your use case.




Well you are going to be waiting awhile as the 5090 is not going to be releasing until end of 2024 at the earliest or could even slip sometime into 2H2025.

You'd also have to ask the question how much you are willing to pay because if the 5000 series is a big leap I would not expect the 5090 to be cheaper than $1,600.



T500 is good, 990 Pro 4TB is good. SK Hynix P41 platinum, Kingston Renegade Fury, WD SN850X are all good as well. Really just go look at storage benchmarks, so long as you don't get something bottom of the barrel performance is going to be identical between most m2. NVMe SSDs unless you are constantly trasfering large files. If you have a write heavy use case you are going to want to consider TBW figures.



The NZXT H510 is a midtower so just make just it has enough clearance for whatever GPU you want to put in it. There already are 4090s that exceed it's maximum GPU clearance and that's without something like a rad installed.



12900KS + 4090 on a 850w PSU is ill advised. The 12900KS pulls up to 443w at full load and it's less efficient that the 14900KS at mixed and single threaded workloads in addition to at idle.

A majority of the time the 12900KS will be worse than the 14900KS in regards to power consumption.

You really have to have a reason to need all those cores and every last drop of performance. Anything over 8 cores is worthless for gaming and a CPU like the 12900KS spends a lot of extra power to squeeze out a 1% or two more performance. If you don't need that extra percent you can get something like the 13600K. Or you can get something like the 7800X3D and not have to compromise on performance at all while being extremely power efficient. Options for everyone.

Thank you for all the insightful comments!

It's not the feint of heart, this board is for those that are fine with encountering many issues. It's precicely the opposite of what I'd recommend to someone's first PC build.

I browsed EVGA forums to see what ram speeds the board can support and it was somewhat active, hopefully if / when I face a problem I'll be able to work out a solution in evga forums.

It should be noted that those are conductive so you are going to want to make sure you cut them to the right size and that you do not get any of the cut material onto other parts of the PC.

This is excellent advise, I bought the pre cut cpu size one so I won't need to cut it so all needs to be done is making sure it just touches the cpu and the cooler and nothing else.

In addition what monitoir do you plan on getting and what games do you plan on playing? It may be that all of the above are overkill for your use case.

Bought a G32QC Gigabyte QHD 32inch VA panel monitor. Will be playing star citizen, from software games and game development. As you may know game engines can eat up ram pretty easily. Going for 64gb is so that I don't hit the limit with 32gb when compiling or experimenting.

You clearly have plans to upgrade to next-gen AMD and and 128GB of memory. If I were you I'd save yourself the hassle and just go AM5 right off the bat.

Or you can get something like the 7800X3D

I already recieved the cpu and motherboard and motherboard is out of return period so for the better or worse I'm set on intel ^_^''. It seemed like a good idea at that moment. You are right that with something like 7800x3d am5 is clearly would have been a better choice.

Well you are going to be waiting awhile as the 5090 is not going to be releasing until end of 2024 at the earliest or could even slip sometime into 2H2025.

True, it's easy to think about 5000 series launch being relatively close but it's still at least a year away in practice. Budget wise, only if I cheap out on gpu right now I can splurge 1.5k on a gpu then. So going for something more expensive than 400-500$ now is mutually exclusive with getting 5090 at the end of 2024. But nonetheless I need a gpu now and I should get what I can now and shouldn't overthink about it.

12900KS + 4090 on a 850w PSU is ill advised.

I'm planning on underclocking 12900ks, I learned that ks is not only good for overclocking it's good for underclocking efficiently as well. And if I ever end up with something more power hungry than 3090 I'll follow your advise and get a bigger psu. In my head my basic calculation was 12900 would pull max 300w and gpu would pull another 300-350w.

There already are 4090s that exceed it's maximum GPU clearance and that's without something like a rad installed.

!!!!! Incredible the size of those air coolers on 4090 gpus.

 

[Vya Domus]

Should I get a used 6900XT for around 400$ - I suppose this would be the ultimate perf/$ choice.
or
a used 3090 for the 24gb ram and RT performance compared to amd counterpart
or
just go for a 7900XTX if I find a good deal on it? Features wise I don't care much about DLSS and 7900XTX ray tracing is good enough for me.

Used 3090s are usually very overpriced, I definitely wouldn't buy one of those.

 

[pavle]

How about a Super 4070 for the graphics card? It's the same performance as 3090, but sips power (or do you need more RAM).

 

[evernessince]

True, it's easy to think about 5000 series launch being relatively close but it's still at least a year away in practice. Budget wise, only if I cheap out on gpu right now I can splurge 1.5k on a gpu then. So going for something more expensive than 400-500$ now is mutually exclusive with getting 5090 at the end of 2024. But nonetheless I need a gpu now and I should get what I can now and shouldn't overthink about it.

If it's just a temporary GPU I'd probably recommend something like a 6700 XT given it's only $330. It gets you decent performance at a very good price:

How about a Super 4070 for the graphics card? It's the same performance as 3090, but sips power (or do you need more RAM).

It's the best Nvidia option although $600 is a lot to spend on a temporary GPU.

Used 3090s are usually very overpriced, I definitely wouldn't buy one of those.

Yeah they typically sell for around $850 used, which is not at all great considering the 4070 Super is $600. The 3090's price is higher because it has appeal for AI usage thanks to it's VRAM buffer.

I'm planning on underclocking 12900ks, I learned that ks is not only good for overclocking it's good for underclocking efficiently as well. And if I ever end up with something more power hungry than 3090 I'll follow your advise and get a bigger psu. In my head my basic calculation was 12900 would pull max 300w and gpu would pull another 300-350w.

That should go a long way to taming it. You can undervolt a 4090 as well should you choose to get one, it responds very well to that. Although TBH I'm not sure it's worth getting a 4090 this late in the GPU cycle. A lot of the 4090's value will be shaved off once next gen drops.

 

[DaemonForce]

You're most likely not going to find a 3090 or 7900XTX at a good price so try to avoid both.
I hemmed and hawwed over this same situation. Discount 6900XT vs 7800XT is a tough choice.
Picked up a 7900XT because there are things where I want/need the speed and additional memory over the increasing norm.
Everything you pick is going to be for a multitude of reasons in a time where price discovery just...Isn't very good. So be aware of that.

If you're looking for a card with good speed and features, the 6900XT and 7800XT seem fine for anything in 2K.
If you're doing 1080p144, CPU performance will suffer before the card.
Everything else looks fine.

 

[vantila]

After thinking about it, it's safe to say that it's not a great time to buy a gpu in general right now. I thought about getting 7900 XTX and then maybe selling it when 5090 releases, or getting something like amd 6700. I will be looking for good deals while other parts are in cargo. Overall I don't want to go above 400 for a temporary card.

If you're looking for a card with good speed and features, the 6900XT and 7800XT seem fine for anything in 2K.

Yeah currently the cards I have in mind are 6800 XT / 6900 XT, 3090 (Only if I can find a good 3090 below 600 I might make an exception for that. ) used or if I can't find a good deal for these maybe I'll just get an amd 7600 or intel arc a770 since it's the first card they release and the first card I'll be buying ever ^_^''. Watching Pat Gelsinger on Gamers Nexus has been very interesting so I'm interested in this card. I have ended up with two cases right now and later down the line I might build a cheaper streaming pc and this gpu would get into that one.