Great buyer's guide HH. 🙂 Thank you Raffaele 🙂

Thanks, but Raffaele wrote this one mate. He'll surely appreciate your compliment though 🙂

Thanks, even though some of this stuff may be obvious this is a good read and guide. Peace.

A very good article, an interesting & entertaining read, and good to see some other people taking the load off Hilbert! Yeah, it's refreshing to have some different writers, you can feel the different writing style as well as the angle of thought. Hey, I like Hilbert's articles too, but this mixes it up a bit. Some solid advice in this article & well laid out for an easy informative read. High-end gaming GPU segment recommendations were a bit vague in terms of the large spread of different options, and I feel that NVidia GPU's here are a better deal overall, but I suppose you gotta mention AMD if they're putting in half a fight. I wish they'd put in a better fight, I'll buy one next time if they do. Undervolted & overclocked Vega56 is for me the only relevant AMD GPU currently, but you need to be a proper tweaker to get that one, and then you don't have the RTX & DLSS features of NVidia (yes, some people slate it, but it is looking forwards, and I think they will become more relevant).

Nice guide, but I would argue that for the high end build, despite the budget, if gaming is the only purpose then NVMe could be happily skipped. I'd rather throw that extra cash at cpu/gpu/ram

@buhehe until you start playing online and realize your the one holding up the game because of "slow" loading. im not talking about the fastest drive out as a 1TB, but going nvme instead of sata on the same size usually is the better choice, if price is close.

fry178:

@buhehe until you start playing online and realize your the one holding up the game because of "slow" loading. im not talking about the fastest drive out as a 1TB, but going nvme instead of sata on the same size usually is the better choice, if price is close.

Although testing here on Guru3d for program & game load times has shown that NVMe is not significantly faster than the better 2.5" SATA 3 SSD's - talking less than a second difference if I recall correctly. So I tend to agree with @buhehe that NVMe is not important in a gaming build and that money is better put towards CPU & GPU (or anything else). SSD is certainly important in a high-end gaming build though, and I would say that all games should be stored on an SSD for such a build, 2.5" SATA 3 SSD is just fine for that though. NVMe SSD only has benefits for moving large files around, maybe some kind of video editing or something. EDIT: Now I think about it I remember you saying in the past that you had game load advantages of NVMe vs SATA 3 SSD - fair enough, but it's not really reflected in the Guru3d game load time testing so for me that carries more weight. I have only SATA 3 SSD's (no HDD's and no NVMe) in my gaming build, and I'm not holding anyone up with game load times in BF1, nor Titanfall 1 & 2. (why doesn't quoting someone's post here not always show like it's "quoted" when viewed from the comments section on the main article page, yet it looks properly quoted when viewed in the forums - at the moment it looks like I've written this entire post myself rather than quoting someone, I've noticed this over the past year or more here at Guru3d, seem like a bug, maybe @Hilbert Hagedoorn ?)

All sounds good to me, though for the budget build, I think a 2400G with no discrete GPU would be more fitting.

fry178:

@buhehe until you start playing online and realize your the one holding up the game because of "slow" loading. im not talking about the fastest drive out as a 1TB, but going nvme instead of sata on the same size usually is the better choice, if price is close.

All the evidence I've seen suggests that game load times is only marginally faster - 0~10% in most cases. There was one game, FF-something, where it was a lot more noticeable, but so far it's just an exception. That extra $100 goes a much longer way elsewhere

Thanks for the buyer's guide, never wrong to look into it.

High refresh rate gaming at 1080p can't go wrong and isn't too expensive, but unfortunately AMD currently has nothing to offer on the CPU side of things. However I will most definitely have to upgrade my overclocked i5 due to the lack of cores, but it gets the job done with high fps in my modern and retro games.

I didnt mean whats faster loading the game on startup, but how a drive can slow down loading the level/map. Game drive got too small (275gb), so I bought a new sata ssd with 3D nand (tlc), ddr and slc cache (5xxgb). loading R6 siege already took significantly longer, but biggest impact was on loading the map. With same ppl in group, maybe 5 to 10s from last pers clicking ok till map. With the new drive this went up to 30s, sometimes almost 1min (depending on map/game mode). Cloning it back to old drive and problem was gone. So getting only one drive would still prefer going nvme. Outside thst it frees up a sata connection and less wires, and less used space/cleaner looking on cases with windows.

RzrTrek:

High refresh rate gaming at 1080p can't go wrong and isn't too expensive, but unfortunately AMD currently has nothing to offer on the CPU side of things. However I will most definitely have to upgrade my overclocked i5 due to the lack of cores, but it gets the job done with high fps in my modern and retro games.

Current Ryzen 2 chips are fine for 144Hz. I'm running at an R7 2700 at 4125MHz and I've rarely encountered scenarios where I've had frame drops due to the CPU, and when I have it looks more like the game is being retarded rather than the CPU itself being limiting. Like seeing 15/16 threads at squat for usage, with 1 at 30-40% (and of course GPU resources free as well). Generally you're safe outside of non-Japanese games, which are notorious for being piss-poorly coded. I had an i7-4770K running @ 4.2GHz, and on paper going to a Ryzen 2700 @ 4.1GHz doesn't sound like much of an upgrade for gaming, but it has been. The only scenario where I'd advise staying away from a current gen Ryzen chip is for someone crazy enough to use a 1080p 240Hz panel. Zen 2 will change that. Regardless, Zen 2/Ryzen 3 is coming later this year. I think that's the time for you to upgrade.

fry178:

I didnt mean whats faster loading the game on startup, but how a drive can slow down loading the level/map. Game drive got too small (275gb), so I bought a new sata ssd with 3D nand (tlc), ddr and slc cache (5xxgb). loading R6 siege already took significantly longer, but biggest impact was on loading the map. With same ppl in group, maybe 5 to 10s from last pers clicking ok till map. With the new drive this went up to 30s, sometimes almost 1min (depending on map/game mode). Cloning it back to old drive and problem was gone. So getting only one drive would still prefer going nvme. Outside thst it frees up a sata connection and less wires, and less used space/cleaner looking on cases with windows.

They're some long load times, I don't play that game. In BF 1 SATA SSD seems just fine, I bothered to do some experiments now and I timed 10-15 secs for map to load from clicking Join Server button, don't know how long that would take with NVMe, but doesn't really need to be quicker.