this post was submitted on 16 Dec 2024
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Any specific reason you're going for Intel?
For that money, you can get much better CPUs for gaming or productivity from AMD but it may hold the lead in some very specific tasks.
You should also generally explain what specific purpose they need such an expensive CPU for; it's way outside what you need for typical gaming or PC usage. For gaming purposes, you usually want to spend most of your budget on GPU and monitor.
Motherboard is quite expensive; do you require special features that a more basic board wouldn't provide?
The memory is extremely overpriced. Cheaper memory can be had for >1€/GB less. You can get 48GB of the same model for less: https://nl.pcpartpicker.com/product/NTHqqs/corsair-vengeance-rgb-48-gb-2-x-24-gb-ddr5-5200-cl38-memory-cmh48gx5m2b5200c38
For memory, always sort by price/GB and choose the cheapest that has an appropriate module size and is on your motherboard's supported list.
I don't trust WD. I'd get a Samsung SSD.
Case is quite expensive but if they like the looks, that obviously trumps.
I can't believe I missed that on the RAM. Thats crazy. Thanks for the tip
I have WD and dont have any issues.
Yeah I can probably go for a cheaper case, my friend just wanted something with a transparent side panel so this fish tank looking thing looked right hahaha and he approved.
As for the mother board I dont really have an answer I just went with a recommended one for the CPU. I dont know much about motherboards so I'm sacred to get creative there
Any compatible motherboard generally works for the CPU.
With AMD, this is basically a non-issue but high-end Intel CPUs are so incredibly power hungry that a motherboard VRMs can become a limiting factor. More money isn't always better here though; a 120€ board could be better than a 300€ one. You'd have to look up the specific board.
Most important though is feature support which mostly boils down to what I/O you need. E.g. NVMe slots, expansion cards, thunderbolt, networking or even just how many USB-A ports there are.
I don't have any specific requirements here, so I've so far gone with one of the least expensive boards that isn't utter trash and I've had no issues.
I will admit I am biased towards Intel but I checked the CPU benchmarks of other AMD processors at that price range and also more cores.
My friend wants the PC for 3D rendering and VR stuff, so more cores seemed better in my eyes.
Which benchmarks? There's a notorious site out there that has "benchmarks" so biased to the point of being as good as non-factual.
Hardware benchmarks are not a simple topic, so any one number that you see presented as "the truth" will be wrong for a thousand reasons. Please always use real-world benchmarks that closely resemble your actual projected usage (i.e. the games your friend likes to play) for gauging hardware performance.
That's good to know. VR doesn't need any more CPU perf than regular gaming but 3D rendering can. It highly depends on what kind of 3D rendering your friend is doing though as you'd typically do that on the GPU; preferring GPU power even more than games.
Which specific software is this? Some software can't do GPU rendering but i.e. Blender can (and you certainly want an Nvidia GPU for that). You'd also probably want more VRAM then.
Also, are they doing this as an actual hobby; spending significant time on it or is it just a side interest? The latter use-case can be satisfied by any reasonably powerful system, the former justifies more investment.
I used this for comparing the CPUs https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleCompare.php.
My friend mostly works with unreal engine.
Its their for them to be able to work basically
Okay, at least that's not userbenchmark but what I said still applies: this number does not tell you anything of value.
Oh, that's quite something else than 3D rendering.
It's been a while since I fiddled with it it but I didn't do anything significant with it.
According to Puget systems' benchmarks, this is one of those specific tasks where Intel CPUs are comparatively good but even here they're basically only about on par with what AMD has to offer.
Something like the 9900x smokes the 14700k in almost every other productivity benchmark though.
If you care about productivity performance first and foremost, the 7950x could be a consideration at 16 high-performance actual cores which smokes anything Intel has to offer, including in Unreal. It's by no means bad at gaming either but Intel 14th gen is surprisingly competitive against the non-x3D AMD chips for gaming purposes.
Though, again, CPU doesn't matter all that much for gaming; GPU (and IMHO monitor) are much more important. (Some specific games such as MMOs are exceptions to this though.)
As in professional work? Shouldn't their employer provide them with a sufficiently powerful system then?
Thank you for all the input and information.
They dont have a job yet, just finished university.