Guru3D PC Buyers Guide Winter 2017

PC Buyers Guide 38 Page 5 of 5 Published by

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The Megabyte - The Enthusiast Build

The Megatron - Our 'Enthusiasts class' Build

So we're finally here. The Megatron. The 'end all' build, for lack of a better descriptive phrase! This PC will run you close to 3000 EUR, or around 2,500 USD/GBP, depending on what variant of the recommended parts you choose to go for. Here, your aim is high refresh rate 1440p gaming or full 4k gaming at 60 FPS locked. Nothing else will do. We'll split this page up into enthusiast class affordable and HEDT choices wise.

CPU - Intel Core i7 8700k

You might have expected Threadripper or Skylake-X here, but for gaming really ... there is only one choice for this build. Intel's flagship i7 8700k (Coffee Lake). With 6-cores, 12-threads, and the potential to overclock north of 5Ghz on all 6 cores, it is the new performance king for gaming, bar none. We loved the 8600k, and - further to that - you can read our review of its father right here. It is fast, top of the line, and - for now - it's the best you can get. AMD's Ryzen has been incredibly solid for us up till' now, but for an 'end all build' that is purely focused on gaming, the 8700k is the better choice. However, with all of that potential, how do you cool it, and how do you power it? Well, that brings us onto...

CPU Cooling - BeQuiet! Silent Loop 280 or Noctua NH-D15

For the 8700k, you need the very best of the aftermarket cooling... erm, market? For the AIO, we have chosen a relatively recent entry into the liquid cooling market, BeQuiet!'s Silent Loop 280. Packing a high-density radiator, dual 140mm fans, and a very quiet pump, this is the perfect AIO to pair with the 8700k. You can check out our review of this unit here. The unit impressed for BeQuiet's first entry into the AIO market, and it's silent operation (even with an overclocked Devil's Canyon i7 4790k CPU) and the value was very noteworthy. There are, of course, offerings in the 280mm department from the likes of Corsair, NZXT, and Fractal Design. If you would like to check them out, please use the links in the earlier builds to refer to Guru3D's 'cooling' review page. Please remember, this is a guide! It is not a definitive order as to what you should buy, and personal research beyond using this as a starting point is highly recommended. Not interested in liquid cooling? Understandable, naturally! I have listed the advantages and list of considerations regarding cooling choice in 'The Byte...' so what air cooler should you go with? well, to my mind, there is one choice. Noctua's behemoth NH-D15 twin tower cooler, review linked here. It is big, bulky, very 'marmite' in its appearance (beige is not, I will admit, everyone's first color choice), and can potentially go entirely against the aesthetic you want. However, in terms of silence, cooling performance, and 'value for the money,' its performance is very much up with larger AIO's! 

Please note, if you are choosing RAM with an especially tall profile, then please consider the NH-D15S unit instead.

GPU - Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

Really, there is just one choice here, and one choice only. Nvidia's flagship 'mainstream' GPU, the GTX 1080 Ti. It is ludicrously fast, able to drive most modern games (even AAA ones) at 4K 60 FPS, even with IQ at 'ultra/very high.' It is a beast, however with a price to match.
 

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We have reviewed many iterations of the 1080 Ti at Guru3D, but the same advice applies now as it did in previous builds. Naturally, you are at liberty to choose whatever card you want, and - where the 1080 Ti is concerned - I would actively recommend a model with a beefy heatsink and cooling solution, as any flagship GPU is going to both draw in a lot of power and kick out a lot of heat! Please consider looking at our list of GPU reviews here, and look for 1080Ti articles. We particularly liked the Zotac AMP! Extreme 1080Ti (Review), Aorus Xtreme 1080Ti (Review), MSI GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio (Review) and the MSI Lighting 1080Ti (Review).

Remember, we could easily recommend a Nvidia Titan Xp here, but for less money, the AIB products are simply faster and as well as being cheaper.

Motherboard - Asus Prime Z370-A

We again went with Asus again for this build. Whilst it's certainly possible to spend untold amounts of money on a motherboard (almost at any level), the returns your get from doing so are often massively reduced beyond a certain price point. This is why the chosen board is in the comfortable 170-200 EUR range. Premium, but not outrageously expensive. The review to the chosen board is linked here. The board again earned our recommendation. At the time of review, we were unsure about its price at near 200 EUR, but a drop to a more realistic level makes it a much easier recommendation. It is stable, well featured, and lacks nothing that the average home builder in search of a high-end PC will find him/herself wanting for!

System Memory - 32GB DDR4 @ 3000MHz (and above)

Memory is, luckily, easier to recommend here! Whilst 32GB is entirely unnecessary for modern games (32+ is only really needed for content creators and creative professionals using applications such as Creative Cloud, Da Vinci, Final Cut, etc.), it's certainly nice to have! At this price point, only premium memory (to my mind) will do, so kits such as GSkill Trident Z, Crucial Ballistix Elite, Corsair Vengeance LPX/LED (and so on) are my personal go to's for high-end PC's. They use high-quality Samsung 'B-Die' memory chips, binned for high clock speeds, and are well built.

Storage - 512GB NVMe SSD (Boot) + 2+ TB SSD (2.5'', Bulk storage)

Yes, you read that correctly. We have now reached the budgetary level where we can consider traditional 2.5'' SSD's as 'bulk storage.' Truly a great time to be building a high-end PC ;) As before, our recommendations for M.2 drives will be hard to narrow down here, so please check out our storage reviews page (linked here for more information. The same applies to branding, however, and generally M.2 drives from the likes of Samsung, Adata, Western Digital, and Crucial are solid choices. As for bulk storage, 1TB SSD's from the same companies as above

Power Supply (PSU) - 750-850W, 80+ Gold (or greater)

Somewhat scarily, what I said before still applies here! This PC, even overclocked, would likely be just about ok on a high-quality 550W unit. I certainly wouldn't recommend it, but it's a reflection of the sheer efficiency of modern GPUs and CPUs. Linked here, again, is the PSU review list done by this website. Below are some updated recommendations for units suitable for this PC (taking into account the increased draw from an overclocked 8700k and 1080Ti):

  • BeQuiet Dark Power Pro 850W (Reviewed).
  • Corsair RMx/RMi 750-850W (Reviewed).
  • EVGA G3/P3 750-850W.
  • Seasonic Focus Plus 750-850W.

You might be wondering why on earth I have upped the target from 650-750 (which was already 'overkill' (for lack of a better word), to just shy of 1Kw? Well, with a PC like this, upgrading the GPU is something you could potentially do, in order to keep playing at those incredible high frame rates or resolutions. A single 1080Ti is fast, but two is on another level entirely. Now, with two GPUs, you must be made aware of the pitfalls that brings. Increased power draw, noise, heat, and - sadly - an ever increasingly small list of games that support multiple GPUs. Even then, if they do support multiple cards, they must do so well. My advice is to stick to 750W, and use single GPUs for your PCs.

Odds and Ends

With the amount of power and heat that this PC will be both drawing and spitting out, case choice is very important here. Whilst cramming all of this horsepower into a compact chassis like (for example) Fractal Design's Define C is doable, I would definitely not recommend it! Go for a larger mid-tower case, or even a full tower. Compact mid-tower cases are best suited to more mid/mid-high end PCs that (whilst more power hungry than lower end machines) are still not overly heavy on power draw. Again, you can check out our list of chassis reviews here, and make a choice that lists airflow being a positive aspect of the case. Like last time, a word on monitor choice. So far I have only mentioned traditional 1440p high refresh rate (i.e. 2560 x 1440 at greater than 60 FPS) or regular 4k (4096 x 2160 @ 60 FPS). However, there are many choices of monitor, and this also includes the increasingly popular world of ultrawide panels! Ultrawide monitors like Acer's Predator X34 (3440 x 1440 @ 60+ FPS) are a very popular choice due to their curved and wide nature giving the player a much greater sense of immersion. Indeed, games that properly support 21:9 monitor resolutions are fairly intoxicating experiences, and I would encourage you to at least look into them!

Going for a HEDT platform.

Now as a gamer your totally fine and covered with the previous recommendation, this wouldn't be an 'ultimate' build without me mentioning Intel's and AMD's most recent HEDT (High End Desktop) platforms, for the threaders & afficionados. Intel brought the X299 chipset to the market just after the summer of 2017, and AMD followed very quickly with (in my opinion) the incredibly named 'Threadripper' that operates on the X399 platform. Now, I'll say this very clearly. These are not gaming CPUs, and were never intended as such! 

High-end desktop platforms make very little sense if you are purely buying a gaming setup, as these chips perform either the same (or sometimes even slightly worse) compared to their high-end desktop counterparts. With that said, here are my recommendations for either an Intel X299 or AMD Threadripper based system.

Intel X299

For our CPU choice, we would recommend the 10 core/20 thread i9 7900X. You can check out our review of this CPU here. Whilst not at the highest end of the X299 platform, it is certainly a HEDT part (which, for the price of $1000, you would hope it would). The chip performs exceptionally well in games, multitasking, highly threaded workloads, and productivity. Now... how to cool such a behemoth? It is no secret that X299 CPUs are power hogs and - by extension - are, therefore, able to spit out an alarming amount of heat. For this reason, we at Guru3D recommend nothing less than a 280mm AIO, or even a 360mm unit. If you would like to look at some AIO reviews, then here is our cooling unit review page. Again, 280mm at the minimum! We liked BeQuiet!'s relatively new Silent Loop 360mm cooler, where we appreciated it's near silent operation at stock speeds (though you should note that the CPU tested in the review was a Haswell era i7 4790k).


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What about the motherboard? Well, more cores will - naturally - lead to notably higher power draw, which puts increasing amounts of strain on the board's VRM. For this reason, opting for a 'budget' X299 board isn't a wise idea, unless you are buying toward the lower end of the range (e.g. Kaby Lake-X or the 6 core Skylake-X parts). To that end, we have reviewed many X299 boards at Guru3D, and that list is here. However, we do have some recommendations!

  1. Asus ROG Rampage VI Extreme. If this board's ROG branding and... extensive name didn't already tell you, then this board is the king of the hill in the X299 category. 10Gb Ethernet, M.2 DIMMs, AD WiFi, impressive audio, and solid overclocking cement its position as X299's creme de la creme. Would I pair the 7900X with this board? Likely not, as a board worth just over half the value of the CPU perhaps isn't the wisest use of your money. That said, it is 'The Everything' build, and we had to at least mention it.

  2. Asus ROG Strix X299-E Gaming. Another board from Asus, and - this time - at a much more reasonable price point, especially for a CPU like the 7900X which is certainly not at the very highest end of what the new platform has to offer. It is also more a board suited to those in either stock or 'easy' tweaking, so true enthusiasts looking for a more manual experience may wish to look elsewhere.

  3. MSI X299 Gaming M7 ACK. An entry from MSI here, but one that we liked very much. Initial BIOS issues aside (though, in fairness, this is an issue that hurt all X299 boards on release, and is very typical of a new platform. Available at a slight premium over the aforementioned Asus board, it is - nonetheless - a high quality and good looking product.

AMD TR4 (Threadripper)

AMD offers three different Threadripper chips. The 8 core/16 thread 1900X (essentially a Ryzen 7 CPU operating on the X399 chipset), the 12 core/24 thread 1920X, and the 'daddy' 1950X, packing 16 cores/32 threads. Keeping things roughly akin in cores/threads to Intel, we are choosing the 16 core 1950X CPU (review available here). We felt that (matching the 7900X in price), the 1950X was an easier product to justify and understand. It is a true multithreading beast, and whilst gaming performance is sometimes notably weaker than Intel's mainstream chips (and X299, for that matter), you are ideally buying this CPU for things other than gaming. The value proposition with Threadripper is through the roof. Furthermore, the full quotient of 64 PCIe lanes is a major advantage of Threadripper over X299. Cooling? With many cores, and up to 1.4v going to each of those cores (all 16 in the 1950X's case), Threadripper can run hot. With that said, our recommendations for cooling any TR4 CPU are exactly the same as with X299. Keep it liquid, and keep it above 240mm. There is, however, one fairly notable 'issue' with TR4 that one must take into account!

In case you hadn't noticed, the IHS on Threadripper is simply huge, and most conventional CPU coolers do not do actually cover the entire chip. Due to this, we highly recommend that you purchase Threadripper specific CPU coolers. Our exception to the 'liquid' rule is Noctua's line of excellent TR4 specific coolers, review available here. As a caveat, we felt that only the bigger NH-U14 unit was sufficient enough to tame Threadripper, and it is our recommendation unless you are keeping things stock, or form factor - for some reason - stops you.
 

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Should you wish to go liquid, then currently the only TR4 specific AIOs belong to Enermax. Note that whilst you can simply use a non TR4 specific AIO, your temps will be higher as a result.

When it came to board choice for Threadripper, whilst (linked here) is our motherboards review page (where you can find more X399 entries), we really only had two options, with the following products scoring 5/5 in our reviews:

  1. Gigabyte X399 Aorus Gaming 7. We noted just how good this board looks, and aesthetics are a big seller in the RGB obsessed year we live in. Whilst it lacks 5/10Gb Ethernet, the included Wifi, strong overclocking potential (on both CPU and RAM), and ran very well out of the box. BIOS updates have only served to improve its reliability. As stated in our review of the board, sure, it's not an ROG Zentih... but, then again, it's also a whole lot less money.

  2. Asus ROG Zenith X399 Extreme. As usual with its 'top of the line' boards, Asus has gone absolutely all out with this product. 10Gb Ethernet, fast WiFi, excellent memory support up to 3600Mhz, and stunning looks all lead to a hearty recommendation. Price is a major hindrance here, granted, but when you're spending this much on a PC and platform, what is a few extra 100's?

With that, you have our 'brief' (or as brief as I could realistically make it) summary of X299 and Threadripper. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions, please head on over to our forums, the link to which is here.

A small summary

Our predictions for 2017 being a great year for PC hardware came 100% true in the 2016 version of this guide, with the release of AMD Ryzen, Vega, Nvidia's flagship 1080Ti, and Intel's Coffee Lake CPUs. 2018 looks set to carry on that trend, with (potentially) the release of Zen+, Volta, Navi, and Intel Cannonlake! I understand that many of you may be wondering if it's worth upgrading your system, or - if you're waiting for your first build - just 'waiting for the next release.' If you're in the former camp, then make your decision based on reliable and informed benchmarks. Nothing else. Looking to support any one company isn't smart. Please choose parts based on what you want, and more importantly, what you actually need! Build a DiY PC - just do it. It's incredibly rewarding, teaches you a lot about PCs. For the enthusiast gaming build, we stick at the 8700K setup as the primary recommendation. It is one of the best gaming CPUs we ever chose to opt just after the release of Devil's Canyon (i.e. Haswell+), and have never looked back. In all other categories, AMD Ryzen definitely comes into play. 

Happy buying!

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