I'm interested in buying a desktop mainly for pio and mkr. I'm fairly amateurish with pc parts/building pc's. I plan on buying the parts locally and paying a store to put the pc together. Hoping to be pointed in the right direction.

Should i be looking at cpu's for workstations? How high do i go on the ram, is 64GB sufficient? Anyone feel strongly about water cooling vs just using fans? Is graphics card quality irrelevant if no gaming will be done? I ideally want to be using gtotrainer in pio and solving preflop situations in mkr.

Any advice appreciated, thanks.

For PIO the important things are processing speed and memory. Memory determines how big your game tree can be and processor determines how fast it solves.

I had a 10th Gen i9 and a solve took 5-10 min depending on how complex it was. I now have a 13th Gen i7, which is faster, but I haven't done a solve on it yet.


For Memory, 32GB is the minimum, 64GB is required for 100bb+ solves with several bet sizes. 128GB is need if you want to get in preflop solving, or so I hear.

Graphics card is irrelevant for PIO. The integrated graphics will probably be fine if you dont mind super low resolution. If you just want the desktop to be 1080p and stream video, then a GTX 1050 (or AMD equivalent) will get the job done.

Graphics cards are so dirt cheap second hand nowadays, chuck in 50 more and get something like a GTX 1660.

Also dont cheap out on the power supply. Get a 750W 80 plus gold from a good brand like evga, Corsair or Seasonic.

Well if he's not going to be getting a super hungry GPU then he doesn't really need that much wattage unless he gets a really powerful/inefficient CPU, but yeah, get a decent brand/quality

Thanks for the advice ya'll.

Leaning on getting 5950x w/ AK620 cooler. 4x32gb ddr4-3200 memory. (does that 3200 metric matter much? I see also 2666, 3600 and 4000. Also First Word Latency I assume ireelevant?) samsung 980 2tb ssd. 6650xt for the graphics card might be overkill for me but only 260 and seemed like good value and may want to stream video up to 2k or 4k, seems relatively cheap since last time i bought a graphics card. x570s mb, read random article good with cpu. corsair 4000d case.

Pcpartpicker estimates wattage at 486W, so prob gonna leave some wiggle room and get a good brand 750w/850w/1000w.

Thought was interesting windows 11 home cheaper by $20 then windows 10.

Don't buy Windows from formal sources. There are plenty of sources where you can get a license for Windows at 15$ or so. Example is vip-scdkey, but there are plenty of others. Tech channels often recommend them with an additional discount, for example https://youtu.be/fD8A1uwv8qg?t=61


If he is building a PC for solving, the CPU is going to consume a significant amount of power. The Ryzen 5950X consumes 200W.


About memory: I think the price between a 3200MHz and 3600MHz kit is pretty low, so might as well get that fast RAM.

I would go for the Ryzen 9 7950x or Ryzen 9 7900 instead of 5950x. Those processors have an integrated GPU that is decent and should be plenty for poker and driving 4K screens (even for Aurora on Stars). The 7950x would be good for all out performance and solving, but it is a 170w part and the Ryzen 9 7900 only uses 65w ... and you get just over 75% of the performance with a lot less power usage. The 7900 is slightly more powerful than the 5950x as well. According to Passmark the iGPU has a bit more oomph than a 1050 Ti, which is by no means a powerhouse but I used one (the 1050ti) and it ran Stars smoothly while multi tabling up to 12 tables. I'm actually about to do a rebuild myself and upgrade from the 5900x to the 7900 ... after I sell all my current PC parts it will only cost me a little

That would save the cost of buying a graphics card, although you would need DDR5 RAM which might offset those savings. Still, I think it's a better deal even if you have to spend (slightly) more compared to the 5950x, but I think it will actually cost the same or maybe a little less. Plus, Zen 5 is supposed to use the AM5 socket when it comes out, so you could upgrade 1 more time if you wanted without having to buy a new motherboard (assuming AMD sticks to that plan...)

+1 on just buying a cheap Windows key

BTW OP, u don't need to spend a fortune to use a solver effectively. This business with running every solve with 5 sizes per street and multiple raise options etc is not useful imo. If u're really curious about this stuff, get the cheaper sub to gtowizard or maybe gtobase has very detailed solves, that one's free.

To run practical solves in any solver u need no more than 16gb and a decent modern cpu, because they're done so quickly. It's only if u plan to solve the entire 1755 flops in every spot then it adds up but I would argue that's a poor use of ur time, seeing as gtobase has it all there for free.

If u're talking of monker solver (u said mkr?), then I suggest u switch to Simple Preflop, a lot more resource friendly. I solved 6max for 200 , 150 and 100bb with 64 gb of ram and even then the preflop and postflop trees I used were more complex that they really needed to be. If u're using it to solve isolated incidents, such as a 3b spot at a certain stack depth in a tournament, no more than 32gb is needed.

All that being said, ram is cheap nowadays, so no biggie if u go overboard and get more than u need. But don't overspend on Ryzen 9 and expensive motherboards and 1000w psu in fancy watercooled cases. 64gb is max u're going to get before switching platforms to Threadripper and it's cheap enough so whatever, stick with 32 or 64 max. And get a Ryzen 5 or 7 and like I said, don't overspend on the rest of the system, mid range parts. GPU u don't need. Integrated or cheap dedicated, maybe second hand if u want cheap.

GL

I would argue the ~$130-$200 price difference between the lowest Zen processors and the Ryzen 9 7900 is well worth it. Especially if you’re going to try and create a library of solves for a lot of different spots. You definitely won’t need a high output PSU with that processor (65w) and the fact it has an iGPU… unless you add a really power hungry GPU. 400w or 500w should be fine, and still have some room in case you want a GPU. The 7900 processor supports up to 128gb of RAM. It’s true you can stay under 32gb for 100bb or less stacks in almost all spots if you don’t use a lot of bet sizes. Preflop solving you can easily need over 32gb for cash game spots, not sure about MTT.

Just under $900 pretax.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/C8Vhfv