My new PC (and why I chose the components I chose)
During December I finished building my new PC. My previous PC was not terribly dated or slow (and continues to be used by my wife), but I felt it’s favorable time for update. It’s not balls to wall build, rather something I think is good for my workflow – mostly development and related tasks. I don’t edit movies, stream (or play for that matter) games, etc. I describe each component (in no particular order) and my reasoning why I chose it, your mileage may obviously vary.
CPU
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. I was thinking about 5900X, but I think I wouldn’t be able to fully use all the cores and hence 5800X it was. Also, I was extremely lucky, the most common e-shops here where I was looking for 5800X (or 5900X) were not having any in stock and the restocking was unknown, but one B2B distributor had 5800X in stock. When I found out I immediately placed the order – at 22:47 on Saturday. 😃 If you’re wondering why not Intel… Last time I used AMD CPUs was in “486” era, but I felt I need to try AMD again (you know to have some excitement). I also think the Zen 3 architecture really pushes the bar.
Motherboard
ASUS TUF Gaming B550-PLUS. I went for B550 chipset because I don’t need much of extra cards and hence X570 seemed overkill. My previous PC used ASUS motherboard and I had no issues with it, I went for ASUS again.
RAM
Kingston HyperX Fury DDR4 64GB (Kit 2x32GB) 3200MHz CL16 DIMM 1.35V. I wanted 64GB in two sticks, dual rank at 3200MHz, CL16. And this one was in stock and very reasonably priced. I ran MemTest86 for almost 24 hours when the build was done, and the RAM passed.
SSD
Samsung 980 PRO 500GB NVMe M.2 . Because it’s PCIe 4.0. And although in last 10+ years I used Intel SSDs, I think this is better option.
Cooler
Noctua NH-U12S SE-AM4. I’m big fan (no pun intended) of Noctua products. Both because of performance and reliability. And although I’m not a professional PC builder, the research on NH-U12S looked like it’s going to be more than fine and so far, I haven’t even seen the fan going to full speed.
PSU
Corsair RM550x. I used it before, again no issues. For my build 550W is enough and I like the zero RPM feature. 80 Plus Gold certification doesn’t hurt either.
Case
Fractal Design Define S. I don’t mind the look and my PC is purely functional, it’s not for looks in any way. Simple black block.
GPU
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1650 D6 WINDFORCE OC 4G. Frankly I have no idea what I’m doing here. I don’t need much from GPU. Bit of OBS? Visual Studio? Word? Excel? Firefox? YouTube? Vimeo? SMPlayer? In my last PC I used integrated Intel HD 630 and my workflow was never affected. If the 5800X would exist with integrated GPU I would go that way. I know everybody is crazy now about the “3090”, “3080” and so on, but I literally have no idea what I would use that GPU for… The “1650” seemed good enough, was in stock, and with decent price. But again, I have no idea what I’m doing here and how my workflow would benefit from better GPU.
Summary
I know everybody has its own needs and this build doesn’t aim to be “reasonable”, “budget”, “performance” or something like that. I’m not a professional PC builder, I went on what felt like it would make my life – as a developer; day and night – more pleasant. I might be wrong. I would also trade stability over performance (the PC waits for my brain/fingers most of the time anyway) anytime (the PC runs smooth – knock on wood – so far).
