I have spent way to long on this, please help.

Zarkil

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).

https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/custom-pc-builder.aspx?load=a7a56bba-82df-4f7b-9994-2a8350e12905 

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 😉

TSTonyV

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. 

Scottyg420

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.  

Scottyg420

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. 

PowerSpec_MichaelB

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. 

650W is plenty of power for all 5700XT's, short of custom VBIOS power mods/shunt mods. Under the ATX/PCI-SIG standards, an 8 pin connector is to pull no more than 150W of power, while 6 pin connectors are to pull no more than 75W, with the PCIe slot itself providing up to 75W of power. If we assume the worst case scenario of two 8-pin connectors, this would be 375W total for the card, leaving you roughly 275W of power for the remainder of your platform. As long as you are not pairing your system with a high-power consumption platform (X299 Intel, AMD Threadripper), 650W should be fine. 

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.  

The brand of cards have nothing to do with driver stability. All 5700XT's use the exact same silicon designed by AMD and fabricated by TSMC, the board partners simply design their own PCB and cooling solutions for non-reference designed cards. The drivers themselves simply dictate how the cards interact with your OS. As far as stability goes, that will depend entirely on the applications being ran, and whether any errata is listed for them in the driver release notes. Understand that this is not an AMD issue, as Nvidia has their fair share of driver errata as well. You can find these issues mentioned on the driver download pages for each respective driver: https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/rn-rad-win-20-7-2. Here you can see a list of fixed and known 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).

https://www.microcenter.com/site/content/custom-pc-builder.aspx?load=a7a56bba-82df-4f7b-9994-2a8350e12905 

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 😉

I agree with @TSTonyV 's recommendation, though mostly due to the fact that newer TV's are starting to provide FreeSync support via HDMI, and you'll definitely see a difference in your gaming experience with adaptive sync enabled. May I ask which TV you plan to use for gaming? Most 4k 120hz TV's allow 1440p 120hz mode via HDMI on PC's, and you can also use FreeSync if they support it. My Samsung NU8000 55 inch and LG OLED B9 55 inch TV's support operation in these modes, and both support adaptive sync technology. This, combined with the low input lag in their respective game modes makes for an incredible couch gaming experience, especially in RPG's, which I am a fan of myself.

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.