New Build - £2000 Budget

[RandomReload]

Hey,

I’m off work in a couple of weeks and I’ve decided that it will offer a good opportunity to build myself a new PC, unfortunately my old rig is around the 8-10 year mark so nothing is salvageable for the new build. Fortunately, I just so happen to have a new Lian Li o11 Dynamic case to build it in.


I’m a little out of touch with everything available these days (last build was 10 or so years ago), but ideally I want to build something that will be good for the next 5-8 years. The system will be mainly used for video editing, photography, gaming at 3440x1440, streaming and then general day-to-day type stuff.


I’m based in the UK and have a total budget of £2000 for the system (already have OS, monitor and peripherals) and would prefer to purchase from sites such as Amazon, Scan and Overclockers.


Hoping someone can help advise on what I should be looking at

Thanks in advance,
ЯR

[AGTDenton]

Firstly prices have shot up over 10 years, back then you'd have been laughed at for a £2000 budget. Now that's a really good entry point.

I don't know how specific and detailed you want us to go but I'll start an overview. Similarly you may wish to consider the 2nd hand market when GPUs are concerned.

For CPU / Mobo I would consider an 8 core AMD Ryzen now. You'd get an excellent system for the money. If you're serious about video editing then a Threadripper may be a better way forward, just higher cost obviously.
16 GB minimum on RAM these days, I'd just go for 32GB to save on future upgrading and RAM is one of the few things to have lowered it's price in recent times. Speed of RAM tends yield minimal benefits today.

For 1440p I'd go for a minimum of 1080 Ti. Some excellent deals on eBay for pre overclocked ones to help keep costs lower. I'd personally skip 20xx series. And have a butchers at the latest Radeons sometimes better towards video editing.

No more than a 850W PSU required for single GPU.

SSDs pretty much any, I get a budget one for OS and a mid-high range for some games then HDD for the rest.
Video editing may change your requirements here, I don't know what level you are at as to whether to recommend a separate box for all your storage or just a couple of massive 10TBs

[Xlucine]

I second the 8-core AMD recommendation. There's no need for a crazy motherboard, as few real-world applications need PCIe4 yet (so B450 is fine, unless you want the option for SLI).

3440x1440p is a bit harder to push than vanilla 1440p, and you've got the budget, so I recommend a 2080ti - it leaves you £800-900 ish for the rest of the build, but that's plenty (£330 for a 3700X, £100 for a decent B450 board, £100 for 16 GB 3600 Mt/s RAM, £150 for a decent 1TB NVMe SSD, and £70 for a decent 500-600 W PSU comes to £750).

You could spend more on the rest, but it'll be diminishing returns - loads of RAM is less important with SSDs (and can be easily added later), a 3800X will clock a tiny bit faster (~100 MHz for an extra £60), and a PCIe 4 SSD combined with an X570 motherboard (so it runs at PCIe 4) will perform better in synthetic benchmarks only for an extra ~£150. An over-the-top CPU cooler will get something like ~100 MHz more speed, so very diminishing returns, so the only good reason to replace the stock CPU cooler is if you want something super quiet (the stock cooler is rated for 105W, and it's a 65W chip, so it doesn't have to struggle with the 3700X)

For 1440p I'd go for a minimum of 1080 Ti. Some excellent deals on eBay for pre overclocked ones to help keep costs lower. I'd personally skip 20xx series. And have a butchers at the latest Radeons sometimes better towards video editing.

Depends on the deal, but the 1080ti's on ebay I can find are going for £500. That's too close to the 2070S (with RTX and a bit more horsepower, starting at £500 for a basic model) and too pricey compared to the £400 5700XT (which is within a fag paper of it).

No more than a 850W PSU required for single GPU.

Single GPU will happily run on half that with no issues

SSDs pretty much any, I get a budget one for OS and a mid-high range for some games then HDD for the rest.
Video editing may change your requirements here, I don't know what level you are at as to whether to recommend a separate box for all your storage or just a couple of massive 10TBs

Why not toss OS and games on one decent size SSD?

[Dashers]

I started to look at this, but 2K is a tight budget for video editing.

* AMD Threadripper 16-core 1950X ~£410. The successor is a lot more expensive with little gain in performance, just doesn't make sense when on a budget.
* Gigabyte X399 Aorus Pro ATX motherboard ~£220. One of the cheaper TR4 boards, but has 3 M.2 slots and a decent PCIe layout for expansions.

RAM and storage really depends on the video work load you're doing, but generally the more the better. 4x16GB (64GB) of Corsair CMK64GX4M4B3333C16 is the fastest support RAM for that board with 16GB modules, but you're looking at over £500 for that. A more conservative option would be Kingston HyperX hx426c16fbk4/64 which runs at 2666MHz (the official max speed for the CPU) hitting in around £290.

I think the sensible option on GFX at the moment is a 5700 XT, which is looking around £430 (be warned, AIP cooling solutions seem to mostly take up 3 PCIe slots, which is a big blow on expandability).

PSUs, you'll need to get one with an extra EPS connector to support a threadripper ideally (not mandatory). EVGA SuperNOVA 750 G+ looks good at £75 with a 10yr warranty.

You haven't mentioned cooling, with a case like yours I would imagine you're wanting to do a custom loop? If not, a 360mm AIO water cooler for the CPU comes in just north of £100.

Roughly leaving you about £500 to play with on storage. And which way you lean depends on your workloads. If you're streaming in and out large blocks of video then you don't need anything super, just a high-sustained read/write speed. If though you're doing lots of chopping around and random work then you'll want something that can deal with that. I'd be tempted to split up my storage as that increases your available bandwidth. Run your OS on a standard M.2 drive (say a 500GB Intel 660p for £65), then put in a couple of larger NVMe drives for editing (such as WD Black), though these tend to cap out at 1TB. Don't forget though you have 8-SATA ports on that board, and you can RAID-0 a bunch of standard SSDs to get decent through put for a cheap price. A couple of 2TB SATA drives will set you back less than £400 and you'll get a respectable 1GB/s through them.