New build advice please

Hi so my brothers pc needs upgrading!

He has about 600 to spend on a motherboard, cpu, ram and a cooler what would people recommend?

His main use currently is for gaming but he has also expressed that he may like to give streaming a go at some point he also uses photoshop occasionally.

Any advice would be greatly received

Thanks Baz

Give us the specs of the PC he is currently using and we can help him more

It's an old amd rig will try and find out what it is, the psu has died so seems a good time to upgrade the other parts too! The psu doesn't need to be purchased within the budget above was thinking of an rm650x for the psu

Update it had an gigabyte fm2+ motherboard and I seem to recall it having an APU CPU but cant remember what it was.

So he has a GPU already? We do need more specifics tbh.

sorry didn't think I would have to list what he had already, he's currently using my old 580 GTX with plans to upgrade around Christmas time to a newer GPU.

I would aim for a Ryzen 1600, B350 board (half decent, say £100) 16gb ram and pretty much any cooler you like. They don't run particularly hot and are not limited by temps unless you have a really poo cooler.

AMD Ryzen 5 1500X 3.6GHz Quad Core (Socket AM4)
ASUS PRIME X370-PRO AMD Socket AM4 Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x 8GB) 3000MHz DDR4

Corsair Hydro Series H100i v2 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler

Having a quick look I've put together this does it look to be ok? any recommendations?

Swap the board down to a B series and up the CPU to a 1600 and you'll be good to go

What gpu is he looking at as well?

Would be worth it to drop down to a B350 board and a cheaper CPU cooler to spend more on the GPU and get a 1600. Which will benefit him a lot for streaming and Photoshop

haven't looked at GPU's yet as it will be 6 months away before we upgrade it, but will be somewhere like a 1070 or AMD 580.

so ryzen 5 seems to be the right way to go? i5 isn't worth looking into?

the reason I'm drawn to AMD is because it seems to be performing rather well and also they don't seem to change there sockets every other year so leaves him more of an upgrade path with just a new CPU at a later date.

so just juggle those components around to see what I can get within the budget

Not at the moment.

The i5 7600k and a 1600 is about the same price. The i5 will give a few extra FPS in games.
But out of games the i5 is a 4 core 4 thread cpu. The 1600 is 6 cores 12 threads. OC the 1600 you have quite a bang for the buck beast compared to a i5

that was my thinking as well from the reviews that I've watched, struggling to find out the difference between the 1600 and the 1600x though really, is the 1600x worth going for or is the 1600 just as good when overclocked?

The Ryzen 1600 is as fast as a Intel 6850k. The 6850k costs over £400. For that much you can buy a 1600, half decent B350 board AND memory.

It's far more forward thinking. Have a look around you and you will know that people are actually buying Ryzen. In fact, just lately since the BIOS issues were ironed out a little that seems to be all people are buying.

And yes, AMD will be releasing all of their 7nm CPUs on AM4. You don't need X370 unless you are using more than one GPU (eww, gob spit) or using loads of NVME M2 drives. That is all you would ever need it for, so don't waste money on features you won't be using.

This

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-B350-T...8&qid=1495711614&sr=8-1&keywords=msi+am4+b350

Is gorgeous, well laid out and costs only £100 or less. You can also get it in white, if that floats your boat, for about a tenner more

https://www.amazon.co.uk/MSI-B350-T...8&qid=1495711614&sr=8-3&keywords=msi+am4+b350

And it's one of the best looking boards on the market too.

srs, 1600 and B350 will last him YEARS. Great threaded performance, great IPC and very good gaming performance. Then, when Intel and AMD go nuts in a few months time and start releasing 16+ cored CPUs the support will arrive.

bazskating said:

that was my thinking as well from the reviews that I've watched, struggling to find out the difference between the 1600 and the 1600x though really, is the 1600x worth going for or is the 1600 just as good when overclocked?

Click to expand...

The 1600x is only worth it if you don't want to overclock. The 1600 and 1700 are the CPUs to have by a mile. Just up the multi and up the volts, it really is that simple (and don't touch the FSB as it does weird things).

thanks for the advice alien in regards to the MSI motherboards are they similar to the Asus ones, I've only used the Asus in my sig so far,

tried doing some things on my brothers gigabyte bios and it felt horrible and the software included with the motherboard didn't actual work lol

From what I have read so far MSI have the ever so slight edge over the others and their boards post faster than any other (IE boot and start Windows).

You don't even have to use the bios if you don't want to. You can use Ryzen Master for your overclocking and skip the bios completely.

MSI's ClickBios II is actually very good, if you disable the UEFI and know your way around a bios.

Have now just been informed that we can upgrade the gpu as well!

bazskating said:

Have now just been informed that we can upgrade the gpu as well!

Click to expand...

For 1080p and entry 1440p - 1060 6gb or 580 8gb.

1440p - 1070

Anything above - Anything goes !

Yeah the Ryzen 5 stuff completely out classes Intel i5 for price/performance.

I suggest nothing less than the Ryzen 1600. Due to streaming and Photoshop requirements for him
If you need it to be cheaper, I suggest dropping to a B350 board, you won't be losing much outside of SLI support, but I doubt he would go SLI anyway

Depending on what games he plays a 1060 or 580 will do fine at 1440p. I'm using a 480 at 1440p and I'm satisfied. The most intense games I play are Witcher 3 and Total War Warhammer. Both run perfectly fine. W3 rarely dips below 40 but doesn't get much higher than that and TWW performance is great except when tons of units on screen, but that happens with any GPU or CPU

Thanks for all the advice guys, he currently plays rainbow six siege, and wants to play the newer one as well

Also he is looking to get battle front 2 when it comes out later in the year

Then a 580 or 1060 would easily play those.