PC building is about to get good again Howdy howdy guys ponchato here, and welcome to Monthly Builds for September of 2018

In these videos I show you the parts I’d use for building gaming PCs at various budgets, and this month we’ll be switching it up with $400, $1000, and a super high end $2000 PC To keep up with new prices and components, I put up a new video every month so be sure to subscribe to stay up to date Before we get to the builds, let’s look at some PC industry news We’ve had quite a few big announcements recently, so this is going to be a busy one Intel’s 9th gen was paper launched (in other words, “we have it but you can’t buy it yet”) in another desperate attempt to catch up to AMD

It’s codenamed “Whiskey Lake”, which is (another) refresh of the 14nm node We’re at something like 14++++ now Nice Intel’s freaking out because AMD’s second gen Ryzen processors are stomping all over them and AMD, unlike Intel, is on track to release their next generation as well Intel’s only announced 3 new processors, all at the upper end: the i9-9900K with 8 cores and 16 threads, running at 3

6GHz with boost to 5; the i7-9700K with 8 cores and 8 threads, and the i5-9600K with 6 cores and 6 threads Alongside the new processors, the Z370 chipset is being rebranded to Z390 but with an improved VRM reference design For now, it’s only a paper launch – actual availability and reviews won’t be here until October at the earliest Team Green also (finally) announced their next desktop graphics series, the RTX 2000 GPUs This’ll be their first new consumer-level series in… what, more than 2 years now? The first cards to show up will be the $500 RTX 2070, $700 2080, and top-end $1000 2080 Ti

They’ll start shipping on September 20th, but if you didn’t preorder on the first day, don’t expect to actually get one anytime soon I’m expecting real retail availability somewhere around October to November, but that might be wishful thinking In terms of performance, leaked benchmarks put the 2080 Ti at around 30 to 50% faster than the 1080 Ti, a healthy improvement The big new thing Nvidia is pushing with these cards, and the reason for their rebranding from GTX to RTX, is ray tracing which, pro tip, is going to run like absolute trash Ray tracing is unbelievably expensive from a computational viewpoint

There’s a reason you’ve never seen an example of real time proper ray tracing running on anything close to consumer hardware; it is insanely, ridiculously hard to do at decent resolutions in real time From the few leaked benchmarks we’ve seen, even with the top end RTX 2080 Ti, you can expect something like 30 to 60FPS at 1080p That is definitely impressive, and we have never seen ray tracing performance like that before, but that just isn’t an acceptable framerate for gaming We aren’t going to see decent ray tracing performance until, at least, the next generation of GPUs And if current trends continue, that means we might be waiting for a while

Over on the red side, AMD launched their second generation of Threadripper processors Already released are the 16 core, 32 thread 2950X and the huge 32 core, 64 thread 2990WX That’s a lot of horsepower Two more models will be coming out in October: the 2970WX with 24 cores and 48 threads and the 2920X with 12 cores and 24 threads These aren’t super relevant to gaming, but at the absolute top end of systems these could be game changers, and we’ve never seen this amount of computational performance in any consumer or prosumer-level parts before

Back to Intel, we got a short teaser of, get this: a discrete gaming GPU All we have so far is a very vague teaser video and a few bits of text, but Intel’s getting into the graphics scene and will be competing with AMD and Nvidia We haven’t seen a legitimate competitor in the graphics industry in something like 2 decades, so this is a very exciting bit of news You’ll have to be patient though; their first lineup with the rumored code name “Arctic Sound”, won’t be hitting the market until 2020 As a last note from Intel, we did see a very brief and harshly criticized faux pas from them

In response to the huge and growing list of hardware vulnerabilities in their processors, and the performance drops in some applications when those vulnerabilities are patched, Intel updated their microcode license to explicitly disallow any comparison benchmarks of “before and after” results Naturally, telling the entire review industry “you aren’t allowed to show people that our patches kill performance” blew up directly in Intel’s collective face and they revised their license agreement within about 24 hours It’s still somewhat ominously worded, but at least it doesn’t explicitly prevent people from showing the benchmarks With the news covered, let’s get to the builds First up, the $400 build

With the new range of budgets, I wanted to include an even more affordable entry point, and $400 can get you a great build if you’re new to PC gaming For the CPU I went with Intel’s entry level G5400 for $74 The G5400 is only a two core processor but it does have hyper threading, giving it a total of 4 threads; enough for competent performance in 720p and 1080p gaming It also runs at 37GHz, and so it isn’t handicapped by a slow clock speed

The GPU I paired with that is the GT 1030 from Nvidia for $90 Despite being Nvidia’s most entry-level GPU, the 1030 is a pretty strong performer 1080p, and more than capable at 720p Plus since it uses such little power, it creates very little heat and noise For the motherboard I picked Gigabyte’s H310M S2H for $56 This is a pretty barebones motherboard but it does come with an M

2 slot for an SSD, something many other budget motherboards leave out And, because it’s a microATX board, it’ll fit into any mid or mini tower case RAM goes to Corsair’s Vengeance LPX kit for $80 This is a 2x4GB kit so it’ll be running in dual channel mode and it’s rated for 2400MHz, to match the G5400’s maximum memory clock 8GB is enough memory to handle any game today, and that amount won’t hold back this PC’s performance

For storage I chose Western Digital’s Blue 1TB for $44 Dirt cheap, plenty of storage, and it’ll give you enough space to hold all your games and media when you decide to upgrade to an SSD in the future For power, I picked EVGA’s 400 N1 power supply for $30 EVGA has an excellent reputation in the budget power supply market and the N1 is probably the best option for anyone breaking into PC gaming with a tight budget It comes with a 2 year warranty, 120mm fan, and all the important electrical protections for conditions like over voltage and short circuit

Finally, for the case, I went with Rosewill’s FBM-X1 for $27 Despite being a budget case, it doesn’t sacrifice the important features; it has 4 USB ports up front include two USB 3s, a 120mm intake and 80mm exhaust fan, and a side window to show off your stuff Plus, it’s not a bad looking case for being under $30 Altogether these parts are just over budget at $403 For an entry level gaming computer, this a great starting point, and a great way to learn how to build a PC

If you’re just trying to get into PC gaming on the tightest budget possible, this build will suit you well Click the link in the description to pick up these components for yourself Moving up a bit, let’s look at the $1000 build This is where you’ll get some serious upper-midrange performance, and with the GTX 10 series dropping in price due to the RTX series being announced, 4K gaming is well within reach For the CPU I went with AMD’s Ryzen 5 2600 for $166

With 6 cores and 12 threads, this CPU can more than handle even high end GPUs without bottlenecking And because it’s a Ryzen processor, it’s unlocked and ready for overclocking To help facilitate that overclocking, I picked the Cryorig H7 Quad Lumi CPU cooler for $60 In my review of the Quad Lumi it proved to be a very capable cooler and has some pretty sweet RGB LED lights Plus for those of you concerned about noise, the Quad Lumi can run the fan slow enough at idle to be completely inaudible

On the graphics side of things, I went with a GTX 1070 from Gigabyte for $400 The 1070 is a fantastically strong card and can max out any game at 1080p, run most games at the highest settings at 1440p, and handle medium to high settings at 4K With 8GB of memory and such a strong core, it uses quite a bit of power but Gigabyte’s dual fan cooler design will keep temperatures and noise at easily manageable levels The motherboard will be a Prime B450M-A from Asus for $80 Because it has the latest 400-series chipset, it’ll be compatible with the Ryzen 5 2600 out of the box, it supports overclocking, and it has the essentials for upgradeability: 4 RAM slots and an SSD slot

Plus, being a microATX board it’ll fit into just about any case For memory I picked GSkill’s Ripjaws V series 16GB kit for $140 An upper midrange build like this deserves 16 gigs of RAM, and because these sticks come with proper aluminum heat spreaders, you should be able to squeeze a bit more performance from them with overclocking Onto storage, for the SSD I picked ADATA’s XPG SX6000 for $43

It’s 128GB which will provide enough room for Windows 10 plus a few games, and because it’s an NVMe drive it supports much higher read and write speeds That’s something that’ll drop boot and load times a ton For bulk storage I went with Western Digital’s Blue 1TB for $44 For most people I recommend a 1TB hard drive, but if you have a very large game library or deal with storage-intensive work, the 2TB version is only about $15 more On the power side, I went with Thermaltake’s Smart 600 for $40

It’s 80 Plus certified for efficiency, has a 120mm fan for quiet cooling, and comes with a 5 year warranty In my testing of the slightly lower-wattage Smart 500, I found it to be very quiet even under load, and the sleeved cables really help keep your PC’s interior looking good Now to show off that interior, you’ll need a case with a window And for that, I picked Cooler Master’s MasterBox Lite 31 for $41

This case has a sweet dark tinted side panel and mirrored front panel, comes with swappable red, black, and white trim pieces for the front, and has a moveable hard drive cage to support a 240mm radiator in the front if you go the AIO route With everything together this build comes out to $1014 If you’re after a PC that’ll give you strong performance for years to come, and look really good doing it, this build will work perfectly Click the link in the description to pick up these parts for yourself Finally, for the top end of gaming: the $2000 build

This will give you the highest end performance available today with all the best components For the CPU I went with AMD’s beastly Ryzen 7 2700X for $320 This is AMD’s highest end offering from their consumer lineup; 8 cores, 16 threads, and a 37GHz base clock with 43GHz boost

It comes with the very capable Wraith Prism cooler, but to get the absolute max overclock possible, you’ll need to go with liquid cooling That’s why I picked the Cryorig A40 Ultimate 240mm liquid cooler for $115 This is the strongest cooler I’ve ever had on my test bench Noise performance is great, and the airflow fan on the pump works wonders to keep your motherboard’s VRM temperature under control Graphics will go to the current king, Nvidia’s GTX 1080 Ti for $650

This is the absolute top end of performance from consumer graphics with a ridiculously strong core and huge 11GB of memory Plus, this triple fan cooler from Gigabyte will keep it cool under load without going crazy on the noise For the motherboard, I went with Asus’ beautiful Prime X470-Pro for $165 It comes with 4 RAM slots, an M2 slot with a dedicated heat sink, and Aura Sync RGB lighting to control all the LEDs in your case

Not to mention, plenty of cooling power for the CPU VRM For the memory I went with Corsair’s Dominator Platinum 16GB kit for $206 At 3200MHz, this kit is blazing fast, and with its large heat sinks should be able to handle even higher speeds with overclocking For the SSD I picked Samsung’s latest 970 EVO 500GB for $168 This is one of the fastest NVMe drives on the market, and read speeds top out at 3500MB/s – that’s insanely fast

500GB will provide plenty of room for programs and games, but in case you need a lot more storage than that, I included the Western Digital WD Blue 4TB drive for $100 Capacity like this is well beyond most people’s needs, but it’s one of those “better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it” things If you need even more space, 8TB hard drives can be had for around $190 Power goes to Seasonic’s Focus Plus Gold 750 for $100 The Focus Plus series has plenty of high-end features; fully modular cables, 80 Plus Gold efficiency rating, and one of my favorite features: a fanless mode

All that, plus a 10 year warranty, makes the Focus Plus hard to beat in high end power Finally, maybe my favorite part, the case I went with Corsair’s Crystal 570X RGB for $180 This case is over the top all around; three 120mm RGB fans up front, space for a 360mm radiator, integrated hard drive and SSD mounts on the back of the motherboard tray, and a ton of tempered glass The front, top, and both sides are all tempered glass panels

Ridiculous? Absolutely Altogether these parts come out to $2003 Past this budget, you’ll be into workstation processors and quad channel memory, and prices go up exponentially For a pure gaming build, though, this is pretty much the top end Upgrading won’t be necessary for a very long time, but it’ll be easy to do when you want

Click the link in the description to pick up these parts for yourself So that’s it for the September 2018 edition of Monthly Builds If you’re building a PC for the first time, welcome to the community and be sure to check out my build videos to see how it’s done If you’re a veteran and just needed to catch up, I hope these recommendations helped you Hit subscribe and click the bell icon to get notified of new videos as soon as they’re up

So guys if you liked this video hit the like button, if you want to see more hit subscribe, and if you have any questions on the news or these builds, leave them in the comments below Thanks for watching, I hope I helped, and I’ll see you in the next video