I have spent way to long on this, please help.
The goal of my PC is 1440p at 60 fps on high (not super ultra type) quality and it’s only for gaming. I will be playing on a TV instead of a monitor. I basically play RPG type games and tend to heavily mod them (thus the 2TB SSD). I use WIFI only and would prefer Bluetooth 5 over 4.2, I know I can add both with a $50 card. I’m not big into overclocking, just minor adjustments to GPU with Afterburner type stuff (wait, I DO plan to enable XMP so I guess I AM hardcore after all).
So my main questions/concerns are;
Should I go with B550 or get a cheaper B450 and add WIFI\Bluetooth with card? If so what one? The 3600 is good enough now but options are nice, on the flip side a year from now B550 will probably be cheaper and have more options.
How much does CL on ram matter? Should I stick with the CL18 3600 or is it worth the $20 extra for CL16 3600?
The RX 5700 XT is stable now right? Most people seem to think so and it preforms better than the 2060 super that was my original choice.
Do I need the 650W PSU or would 550W be ok? It’s only $20 more so I played it safe.
Thank you for the help! I was a loyal PC gamer that got married, had kids, and my job turned into a career so I turned to consoles for my gaming needs (yes I’m ashamed of myself). Grabbed a HP OMEN laptop on sale a few years ago and remembered what I was missing. Been a surprisingly great laptop but the girl is showing her age now so time to move on. I figured it would be simple to upgrade but my God has everything changed! Hope everyone is doing well and again, thank you for any help because this is driving me crazy 😉
Comments
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In your case, since you specifically want Bluetooth 5.0, I'd stick with the B550 board since the Bluetooth 5 cards we carry start about $40. If you chose a cheaper B450 and then bought a card it'd be about the same price, but the B550 has other features that you may want to utilize in the future like PCIe 4.0 capabilities.
The RAM speed discussion is a little complicated. Others could weigh in on this more than me, but CL16 is technically faster than CL18 because it will have lower latency. I don't know how much of a difference it would make though, so whether it's "worth it" I can't really say. If that money would be better spent elsewhere on your build I wouldn't worry about it, but if that extra $20 isn't going to otherwise make a difference on your build, I'd personally probably go for the CL16.
I've heard the stability of the drivers with the 5700/XT cards has improved. Some people's 5700XT's have worked flawlessly since day one even when the drivers were known to be poor. I say unless you specifically want to have access to the NVENC encoder on the RTX cards, go for the 5700XT. If you find you're having issues, GPU's do come with a 30-day return policy.
I'd stick with 650W for the PSU. It's a good sweetspot to match up with mid and high-end video cards. -
Drivers are stable? Is that a joke? They still are having a ton of issues, it depends on the brand of cars you get.Make sure you do a lot of research on the 5700xt. I just got an ASUS ROG 5700xt and it fried my 750w gold evga powersupply. After doing research ASUS issued a notice stating to bring the card to a ASUS authorized repair place so they can fix an issue. Something with pins not being long enough.
of course a microcenter employee recommend a open box one to me that haven’t been fixed. Thank god my powersupply was the only thing the card broke. Put my old 2060 and 500w bronze in and no issues. -
650W is not high enough for most 5700xt. That’s the recommended minimum but your gonna have issues. The manufacturer of my card list that as the minimum but recommendeds higher.
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Scottyg420 said:650W is not high enough for most 5700xt. That’s the recommended minimum but your gonna have issues. The manufacturer of my card list that as the minimum but recommendeds higher.Scottyg420 said:Drivers are stable? Is that a joke? They still are having a ton of issues, it depends on the brand of cars you get.Make sure you do a lot of research on the 5700xt. I just got an ASUS ROG 5700xt and it fried my 750w gold evga powersupply. After doing research ASUS issued a notice stating to bring the card to a ASUS authorized repair place so they can fix an issue. Something with pins not being long enough.
of course a microcenter employee recommend a open box one to me that haven’t been fixed. Thank god my powersupply was the only thing the card broke. Put my old 2060 and 500w bronze in and no issues.
You'll find a similar list for Nvidia as well, albeit with different issues/resolutions: https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/451.67/451.67-win10-win8-win7-release-notes.pdf
There exists no drivers free of issues in terms of performance and stability. Human error will always find itself in everything we do, so it's important to keep that in mind.
If you find issues that are not listed in the driver release notes/errata list for the drivers you are using, I would recommend reaching out to AMD to report the issues. If you are aware of design flaws with a particular card, I would would like to see a source documenting those issues so I can better educate myself for future reference.Zarkil said:The goal of my PC is 1440p at 60 fps on high (not super ultra type) quality and it’s only for gaming. I will be playing on a TV instead of a monitor. I basically play RPG type games and tend to heavily mod them (thus the 2TB SSD). I use WIFI only and would prefer Bluetooth 5 over 4.2, I know I can add both with a $50 card. I’m not big into overclocking, just minor adjustments to GPU with Afterburner type stuff (wait, I DO plan to enable XMP so I guess I AM hardcore after all).
So my main questions/concerns are;
Should I go with B550 or get a cheaper B450 and add WIFI\Bluetooth with card? If so what one? The 3600 is good enough now but options are nice, on the flip side a year from now B550 will probably be cheaper and have more options.
How much does CL on ram matter? Should I stick with the CL18 3600 or is it worth the $20 extra for CL16 3600?
The RX 5700 XT is stable now right? Most people seem to think so and it preforms better than the 2060 super that was my original choice.
Do I need the 650W PSU or would 550W be ok? It’s only $20 more so I played it safe.
Thank you for the help! I was a loyal PC gamer that got married, had kids, and my job turned into a career so I turned to consoles for my gaming needs (yes I’m ashamed of myself). Grabbed a HP OMEN laptop on sale a few years ago and remembered what I was missing. Been a surprisingly great laptop but the girl is showing her age now so time to move on. I figured it would be simple to upgrade but my God has everything changed! Hope everyone is doing well and again, thank you for any help because this is driving me crazy 😉
As for the memory debate, definitely go with the CL16. $20 difference is worth it in my opinion, especially when you factor in the quality of the IC's if you ever plan to do any manual overclocking in the future. AMD's Robert Hallock did a fantastic job documenting the difference in frequency/timings and their impact on gaming performance if you were looking for an interesting read: https://community.amd.com/community/gaming/blog/2017/07/14/memory-oc-showdown-frequency-vs-memory-timings. I wish you the best of luck with your setup, let us know if you have any further questions.
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