Please review my son's first build

GaryP

Hi,
My son is looking to build his first gaming PC. My Pc experience goes all the way back to 5 1/4" floppy disks and 20 Meg hard drives, so although I have some knowledge of PC's I'm not in tune with the needs of a PC gamer. So, if you could review his list and let me know what you think, that would be greatly appreciated.
https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/custom-pc-builder.aspx

Some things not on his list include his 27" LG Gaming Monitor (144 Mhz), Red Dragon gaming keyboard, Rival 600 Steel series mouse. We will also move his 320 GB SSD that will run the OS, a Samsung Evo 1 TB SSD for most games, and Seagate 2 TB HD for games not played frequently. The more graphically intense games he plays include Modern Warfare, Rust, GTFO, Arma 3, and Metro Exodus. He also plays other games like Minecraft, Terraria, and Sea of Thieves to name a few. 

My questions include:

1. The motherboard (X570) is not available in many places. Should he consider another or wait till his choice or a suitable alternative is available (suggestions for alternatives are welcome).
2. The CPU comes with a cooler which I've read is quite capable. Is the liquid cooler really necessary now or potential upgrade if needed later?
3. My understanding of video cards is that there could be many variations of the same card. Outside of the cards RAM, number of fans, and overclock ability, how do you decide? What do you think of his choice?

Thanks for the advice,
Gary

TSTonyV

Hello @GaryP! Welcome to the Community. 

The link you posted doesn't actually link to your build, so we can't see the parts. On the build configurator you actually need to click "share" first, then click URL to copy the specific URL for your build. 



Once you do that and paste the link, we'll be able to see your parts!

GaryP

Sorry for the mix up. Here's the proper link:
https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/custom-pc-builder.aspx?load=e6b80118-365e-4c5c-af1d-0d525779a84d

PowerSpec_MikeW

The build looks good overall and he shouldn't have any issues. I'd bump the G.Skill kit up the 3600Mhz version. I believe they're only about $10 apart in price, you're getting faster memory and it matches the default infinity fabric clock. That's the optimal RAM speed for Zen 2. If the mclk and fclk are asynchronous you take a latency hit for that.

TheITDad

To answer your GPU question yes there can be many many different sku's of the same card.  And there are just a few questions you need to ask yourself.
1. Do you plan to overclock your card
2. Do you care about overclocking your card
3. Do you trust the brand?
4. Does the power of the card demand more cooling.
For the tier of card you are shopping at varying amounts of ram on the cards isn't really a thing.  All 20 series RTX cards I believe just have 1 set amount of ram ( the 2060 may have 6 and 8 variants but don't think so).  So if overclocking is something you like to do and mess around with then go for a non OC card and save a few bucks and see what you can squeeze out of the card.  If you want the most performance out of the box then a card listed as OC from the manufacturer is the best option because they will put it at essentially the highest stable performance possible by that card.  Next pick a brand you like/trust.  Find one visually appealing to you and from a brand that has good reviews (which you have, Gigabyte is a solid gpu brand).  Finally for cooling it really depends on how powerful the card is.  Personally anything above say a 2060 really should have a 3 fan setup on it, and even for 2060's a 3 fan setup isn't a bad idea.  Because the more powerful the card the more heat it is going to put off, so a triple fan setup on the heat-sink will help keep temps controlled.  You also will want to make sure you have good case airflow even with your CPU being cooled by an AIO that gpu is gonna throw a pretty good bit of warm air into the system.  So a good intake and out-take fan setup will be necessary to keep your other components from running to hot.  So for your case I would suggest 2 120/140 mm fans at the front pulling air into the case, your one rear fan as out-take to exhaust that warm air.  And as for the AIO I would suggest mounting the fans on top of it and having them pull air from outside the case and onto the radiator and have just your one exhaust fan.  There might be better fan setup and you can experiment and see what works best.  Hope my long winded explanation helps and enjoy your build.

GaryP

Thanks for the advice. It was very helpful for me. We were able to find the motherboard in stock in Chicago and made the drive down to pick up as much as we could. Picked up an extra fan for the front of the case so I matches your thoughts of having two fans on the front. Wouldn’t you know the power supply wasn’t in stock nor were any compatible supplies. So, we have everything but the power supply. The build will have to wait. Hoping that stock shows up somewhere soon.