2024 PC build!

[Trunk Monkey]

It’s time to replace my desktop! What’s your dream build on a 1500 to 2K budget in 2024?

AMD vs INTEL CPU’s?
AMD vs NVIDIA GPU’s?

What are your thoughts?

 

[theterminator93]

I'll answer your question... with another question.

Are you reusing any components? SSD? Power Supply? Case?

What kind of work do you do with it; are you doing a lot of GPU-enabled encoding (video encoding, for example) or is your work more CPU-intensive?

 

[Irv]

My build last year cost $3106 even after reusing some components, but it included a new (to me) GPU and monitor which was $1500 of the build.

It depends on what you want to emphasize in the build. The main piece of advice I have is to buy your motherboard, CPU, and RAM at Micro Center. I see the grand opening date has been delayed, but you should be thrilled to be getting one in Charlotte.

 

[theterminator93]

When I refreshed my desktop 3 years ago, I got most of my components through MC as well. That was when the Ryzen 5900X was hit hard by scalpers and Micro Center had the smarts to sell them only in stores with a quantity limit of one per customer. The one closest to me (about 45 minutes away) was out of stock but luckily enough, there was another location about 2 hours away that had them.

 

[Chandar8]

I built my PC in the height of the crypto nonsense, but I used AMD CPUs and Nvidia graphics cards. I pretty much carry over all my drives until they die. I am unlucky that in Texas the nearest micro center to me was something like a 12-hour drive lol I only game on my computer so GPU and RAM were my main concerns. 4000 series GPUs look pretty slick though

 

[Swamprat]

Depends on your budget, your needs now and in the future as well as how much you are into bling.. Last year gutted my 2007 vintage Antec tower, replaced the motherboard with an ASRock z790 Lightning that supports Intel CPUs from gen 12 thru 14, installed a m.2 Samsung SSD, 32 gb of DDR 4 memory, 800 watt power supply, reused my existing Nvidia GPU because it did what I needed. The motherboard supports up to 128 gb of memory, has built in 2.5 ghz ethernet port, USB 2,3, and C. I went with water cooling AIO for the CPU. I also installed an 8tb Red WD hard drive for storing data. OS and apps reside on the much faster M.2 SSD. So far so good for me. I can open up 40 tabs on Firefox and run SDR trunking police scanner software in the background with under 10 percent load on the CPU. Full AI support is just starting to be released by parts vendors if that is the direction you want to go and will probably increase the cost of a build.

 

[NEURO]

I've been building my own PC's for over 20 years...and built my latest one just recently.
But like others have said, we need to know what you're using it for before offering recommendations.

For example, if you're going to be doing video editing and/or intense gaming, then putting an Intel i5 & middling graphics card in it would be bad advice.

But if you're using it to surf the web, email, watch porn, normal office/personal work, etc, then those parts would be great economical & strong choices. Most people don't know that even low-to-mid-performance parts are more powerful than their needs, so they waste a lot of money on high-performance parts and never use 1/10th of their potential.

For instance, I've owned a website development firm in Vegas for the past 25 years, so the rigs I build are used for Photoshop, coding, video, and other developer tools, such as Visual Studio, as well as MS Office and other business related software. And my rigs are driven 24/7 in continuous operation, so my parts selection when building a PC would differ greatly from a normal user who needs a basic PC...or a gamer who needs a powerful PC.

And don't go cheap on the case.
Proper presentation of your build is a statement.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

I've been building my own PC's for over 20 years...and built my latest one just recently.
But like others have said, we need to know what you're using it for before offering recommendations.

For example, if you're going to be doing video editing and/or intense gaming, then putting an Intel i5 & middling graphics card in it would be bad advice.

But if you're using it to surf the web, email, watch porn, normal office/personal work, etc, then those parts would be great economical & strong choices. Most people don't know that even low-to-mid-performance parts are more powerful than their needs, so they waste a lot of money on high-performance parts and never use 1/10th of their potential.

And don't go cheap on the case.
Proper presentation of your build is a statement.

View attachment 5402

View attachment 5404

Love that setup and your workstation!
I’m at work now but I’ll answer questions tonight.

 

[Kenz]

The main piece of advice I have is to buy your motherboard, CPU, and RAM at Micro Center.

Nice site, I never head of them before. But my last build was in 2011. Been nursing my quad core AMD Phenom Black edition along for over a decade now, it's on it's second MB and case. I had it OCd originally but don't bother anymore. It still keeps up fine to any basic usage these days.

I went to check for a few parts recently and my first stop was Newegg, than I checked Tigerdirect. I guess Tigerdirect has been gone for a while now lol. Starting to feel old & outdated.

Will be following this thread; way past due for an upgrade.

 

[NEURO]

Nice site, I never head of them before. But my last build was in 2011. Been nursing my quad core AMD Phenom Black edition along for over a decade now, it's on it's second MB and case. I had it OCd originally but don't bother anymore. It still keeps up fine to any basic usage these days.

I went to check for a few parts recently and my first stop was Newegg, than I checked Tigerdirect. I guess Tigerdirect has been gone for a while now lol. Starting to feel old & outdated.

Will be following this thread; way past due for an upgrade.

Tiger, CompUSA, Fry's, Radio Shack...all the good places from our youth are gone now.
And NewEgg is way overpriced.
MicroCenter has a solid rep.
Also try Amazon...that's where I get most of my parts for a good price & fast delivery if you have Prime.

 

[dDUBb]

Fry's

My local Frys was turned into a Pickleball arena.

 

[NEURO]

My local Frys was turned into a Pickleball arena.

That's just wrong.

 

[Grog6]

I looked into pc's about 3 years ago, And one guy went with intel, one bought an amd threadripper 24 core. Processor wise; for gaming or data crunching , cores and memory is most important. For gaming in particular an intel processor always seems to have an advantage. Except using more power than a lighthouse, lol. These days, a 16 core isn't wasted.
You want at least 32GB or ram. I just put 48GB in an x58 MB, I bought a Xeon 5670 in, and they're unlocked.

 

[Trunk Monkey]

I'll answer your question... with another question.

Are you reusing any components? SSD? Power Supply? Case?

What kind of work do you do with it; are you doing a lot of GPU-enabled encoding (video encoding, for example) or is your work more CPU-intensive?

• No plans to reuse anything except for the SSD drives for storage. However with large enough M2 drives I could copy the data over and keep the old drives as backups.
• Yes, I currently have SSD drives but would plan to switch to M2 drives. Are there motherboard that support two or more M2 Drives on them?
• I'm not a gamer but do want to do photo and video editing which is just as intense in it's demand requirements.
• I currently have 32 GB of RAM but it's DDR3 I'm pretty sure the current standard is DDR5.

SIDE NOTE: I'm also considering just getting a laptop that I can dock at home. Any addl. thoughts on that?

I also have some WD platter drives that I'd like to continue to use for storage in a raid array. so I'll need some way to access those. They make external drive towers for that so I'll need one of those. Any recommendations there?

Thanks to all for sharing your thoughts.

 

[Grog6]

If you have a bunch of memory, especially DDR3 memory, you can buy an x79 chinese knockoff board that supports m.2 nvram memory modules, that are smokin' fast. a 2TB module wasn't even too expensive. I found a 10/20 core xeon processor with shitloads of l3 cache, for $40. With liquid cooling, it will run 20 cores at 4.0 GHZ by bclk overclocking. You can buy add in cards for x16 pcie slots that can hold multiple m.2 modules. You want nvme or pci-e, not sata.