Sorry for anyone that wasn't able to open this thread before, it turns out the pretty-url generator doesn't like apostrophes and/or exclamation marks in topic titles!There's no TL;DR here so apologies for the wall of text, I hope its helpful. I actually just replaced my basically decade-old rig before Christmas (and I'm still not using it fully yet as it's taking me an age to migrate my setup and data over onto new drives and such). Hard to believe it, but
my last full build was back in 2012! Just upgrading the graphics and SSDs, that's good innings.
Your motherboard will definitely need to be replaced if you want some future-proofing, in fact there's probably little that you might want to salvage other than any SSDs and your PSU, as that's beefy enough. Cases now are lighter, better and cheaper generally too, I would just build a new rig. I actually don't have the time to build one, so I haggled a deal on a prebuilt system from Palicomp. I've not been dissatisfied with their service as despite being absolutely swamped with build orders over Christmas they did a very good job and all the parts were correct, though a few accessories were missing when everything was delivered - like the case screws for mounting HDD/SSDs - as they don't supply you all the original packaging; I got the motherboard box with bits in but that was it really. I emailed them and they sent me out some generic screws, I've also contacted GameMax to see if they can source the case accessories from their UK disty for me, waiting to hear back...
My new rig (approx £1500):
GameMax F15 case - very well reviewed and affordable case with excellent cooling
Asus Prime Z690-P DDR5/PCIe 5
Intel Core i5-13600K Raptor Lake
BeQuiet! Pure Rock 2 air cooler (BeQuiet! are highly regarded for coolers and cases)
32GB 6000Mhz DDR5 (2x16GB - dual channel is a
must)
1TB PCI-E NVMe boot drive
nVidia RTX 3070 8GB graphics card
It came with a 650W ATX 2 PSU that I will be swapping out for a 1kW one I bought some time ago on a deal. I plan on swapping out to 64GB RAM soon too.
Personal findings/reasoning for me, from what I read up on getting back into the upgrade loop:
- Everything now is RGB Gaming something or other, it's almost unavoidable in the premium line components. People are taking that sh*t real serious again
Some components will be a bit cheaper without all the RGB stuff. - There are some crazy expensive super premium motherboard options available, honestly this was the biggest minefield for me. Have a baseline of what you need in mind and maybe don't get sucked in by cool sounding stuff like 2.5GB Ethernet unless you really can or plan to make use of it.
- Between Ryzen and Intel there are great chips from both vendors and performance is generally solid across the board. Though people were favouring Ryzen systems berfore for value/gaming - especially their new X3D line which has a huge cache layer benefitting certain games - I went Intel because they are on beast mode with the latest Raptor Lake CPUs and they are pricing really aggressively to win back market share. Intel's Raptor Lake chips drop into the same LGA 1700 interface as the previous-gen Alder Lake chips, and Intel has one more generation coming to market for this platform, while thee latest AM5 platform is expected to be supported past 2025. I plan to keep my rig for a long time again so will probably be moving to a new platform when that happens anyway.
- You might want to start using NVMe drives instead of SSDs, especially for your boot drive. They are 3x faster or more and the prices have dropped to the levels now where they are very affordable, nearly the same price as SSDs, so really if you're upgrading and your board supports them there's no reason to use SSDs unless you're moving them over from an old system. Between NVMe drives themselves though, you don't have to go for uber spec ones as in real world terms you will hardly ever get the max performance out of them unless shifting massive files like 4K movie rips around. More important is making sure an NVMe that you buy has DRAM cache!
- Same for memory, its been dropping in price across the board. DDR5 is the latest standard and can be much more expensive but the latest AMD Ryzen chips demand it and perform better with the fastest memory possible. Its less crucial for Intel CPUs (which can still support DDR4) but there can still be performance gains. I opted for a Z series modern mobo with DDR5/PCIe 5 anyway to pair with my 13th gen Intel chip, because I see a bit more future-proofing in it. I plan to upgrade to 64GB soon as it can now be had for around £250 for high performance 6000Mhz DDR5 RAM. You might see RAM listed in MT/s instead of Mhz but the two terms are basically interchangeable. We will be looking at 8000Mhz RAM hitting the market in the coming year!
- With graphics, 4000 series nVidia cards are hugely overpriced, the market on these is awful. I'd stick with 3000 series, 3070 or less if not doing 4K max everything gaming. The 3070 seems to be a price/performance sweet spot and should have some longevity, hence I opted for it. I haven't mentioned AMD cards because I don't really rate them these days. They're power hungry, missing features like RTX raytracing and their drivers are still flaky/dire, so colour me an nVidiot
- The new ATX 3 PSUs are in their infancy, more expensive and are pretty unnecessary unless you want a monster top end graphics card. My new system, although its DDR5, PCIe 5, etc is still using ATX 2. The new cables the ATX 3 PSUs require have been causing issues if not connected properly, drawing too much power through arcing and melting. Very unlikely to happen, but I just wouldn't bother with one right now. I have a 1kW Platinum Plus PSU so wasn't going to replace it and you can get adapter cables for them if you really need to. It's worth reading up on the new spec and making your own decision though.
My screen of choice is an Ultrawide, I've just bought an LG 38GL950G 37.5" 3840 x 1600 144Hz Nano IPS with G-Sync to replace my old Dell Ultrawide as it had developed dead pixels, so its going to be grand for both gaming and productivity. The 3070 in my system is going to be able to push the pixels on most games for that with very high settings for a long time I reckon. Not that I get to game that often but I don't want to be upgrading the graphics card in a year's time, regardless. So you will be fine with a lower end graphics card if only gaming in Full HD or thereabouts.
Whatever you buy on a modern platform is going to feel so much faster than your current rig even if you don't go top spec, and if you're not gaming heavily you don't really need to.
Happy to try and help with more specifics if you have some direct questions, as I say I've not been keeping up on hardware like I used to so couldn't tell you specific makes and models of things worth buying off my noggin' but I don't mind looking up and dropping a few ideas down if no one else more knowledgable comes along.
