I would like some feedback on my PC parts.

Budget: $2,000
Primary Use: Multi-tabling poker with multiple poker software running for multiple sites.
Secondary Use: Gaming, Watching Videos
Possible Use: Solver work
Main Concern: Durability and reliability. I want something good that will hold up for a few years.

I have never built my own computer. My brother has and he will be helping me. He is not into poker though.

I've never used multiple monitors. Would you suggest two smaller ones over one that size?

Am I spending my money in the right places? I'm open to changing anything and everything. All suggestions are welcome and appreciated!

I was going to say that's a lot of money for a poker machine, even with some gaming. But I see you have a monitor within budget and unlike most people who price builds you've remembered you need to pay for Windows.

What I would say is that you are very very light on storage. I suspect prices are low enough for you to factor in at least 500Gb of SSD, and I would want more HDD space too. My main rig is I think 7 years old now (the joys of an overclocked i5-2500k paired with a GTX 1070) and the main upgrades other than that video card and RAM have been storage - 750Gb across 2 new SSDs in addition to the original 120Gb SSD plus 2x2Tb of HDD. Plus various external drives for backup. 250Gb + 1Tb just seems nowhere near enough, especially if you want to run games (with Steam or whatever) from your SSD.

Thanks for that feedback.

At this point it will be vastly more for poker than gaming. I do plan on doing some gaming and wanted to get something that will run those games well if I get more into it.

I could easily upgrade the SSD to 500Gb and HDD to 2Tb for about $50 total. The reason I went low at first is because I figured those would be an easy add if I needed more space. If you think that it's a good idea to get more right away then I'm willing to do it.

At that point I'm starting to run over budget and would likely downgrade in another area of the PC. What component would you suggest I downgrade for the sake of more hard drive space?

If it's just $50 (and your original build is $125 under budget) I wouldn't sacrifice anything else for it unless it is a deal-breaker. You have components you've chosen, and you won't always feel that you short-changed yourself on the machine you wanted.

If you have to you could probably drop 100W from the PSU, etc, but that's unlikely to make much difference and you certainly shouldn't sacrifice PSU quality (even if you sacrifice power).

Can you get a 1060 or equivalent for a bit less than $300? That seems as though it could be pretty steep.

The other option is to wait for sales/coupons, which could easily save you $200 or more, depending on your patience. Black Friday is the obvious one but prices fluctuate generally. Your chosen RAM is dropping at the moment, for example, and was way cheaper (as was all RAM) a year ago: see here.

I just meant it would be getting over budget if you think more than 500Gb SSD and 2Tb HDD would be better and I would look at downgrading some other components at that point. I will definitely get at least that much.

I'll check into other video card options when I get some time later today.

I wish I had the luxury of waiting until Black Friday, but my current system is a POS and I think I might lose my mind trying to use it for that much longer.

I appreciate the help thunderbolts!

You need to define gaming

I'd suggest swapping the 2.5" SATA SSD for an m.2 NVME drive.
970 EV0
500GB for $170 or 250GB for $100
NVME drives are faster and your motherboard will have a slot for it.

I don't think the monitor you've selected matches with some of the other specs. If you're gaming enough (and specifically into competitive multiplayer enough) to justify the spend on a 144Hz monitor, you'll need to also spend more on the GPU to run games at 144+ FPS. If gaming is less hardcore than that (nothing wrong with that at all) a lower refresh rate monitor will fulfill your needs at a lower price point, allowing for more spend elsewhere in the build or even a cheap secondary monitor.

1060 class GPU prices should be falling in the next few months when the 20xx series parts finally start hitting the street. The Radeon 580 is a bit less performant than the 1060 but is finally back down in price. Either a 1060 or a 580 would be pretty good for moderate gaming.
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/QvG...rx580aorus-8gd

RAM wise, 32GB is a good amount. While Ryzen+ (2xxx models) are less picky about RAM, you're still safest to pick a memory kit that is on the QVL for your motherboard to ensure it runs at full spec speed. The kit you've selected doesn't currently appear on the QVL for this motherboard. You may hit full DDR4 3000 but it might have to fall back to 2666 or have weird compatibility issues.
MSI QVL for this board

Thanks for the feedback headtrauma!

When adding the 500Gb 970 EV0 to my parts list I'm getting a Compatibility Check Warning. I'm not sure if it's anything to worry about. It says

I'm still looking into some of the other stuff.


You know Minesweeper, Freecell, Jezzball, and Solitaire. Perhaps even some multiplayer games like Hearts and Spades.

Obviously I mean multiplayer video games like shooters, GTA, Madden, etc. I just won't be getting too invested in playing them at first, but I do like to play some video games every now and then. Perhaps I'm just not proficient enough in this area to understand what you are asking of me.

The M.2/ SATA 6 Gbps port comment will be a non-issue for your planned config. Upon further reading, it only comes in to play when you fill the second M.2 slot. You would only be looking at 1 M.2 device for now and would want to put it in slot M.2_1 as those are version 3.0 lanes directly connected to the CPU which have higher max bandwidth and lower latency than the chipset connected 2.0 lanes plumbed to slot M.2_2

In the event you want to add a second M.2 device, one of the 6 SATA III/ 6 Gbps won't be able to be used, but you can still add 5 SATA drives. The motherboard manual will tell you which port is unusable when the M.2_2 is in use.
RE: Gaming
It's a matter of what the "good enough" mark is for how you want to game. If you need to run max res, max AA, max settings, super high FPS on all the latest and greatest games, you'll need to sink more money in to the GPU, likely at the expense of other areas. A GTX 1080 system with only 16GB of RAM and a SATA SSD will deliver better gaming than a GTX 1060 system with 32GB and a NVME drive. So some of it is a balance of how much the system is used for each task and what your minimum acceptable perf bar is for each of your use cases. The second example above would be snappier doing basically everything other than gaming.

A GTX 1060 should be good for pretty high settings and FPS for current games up to 1920x1080 (FullHD). As you go above that, you'll have to make more compromises on game settings. If you're good rolling at medium detail or just go with the auto-set options, a 1060 should be plenty.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/10540...s-strix-review

1. Operating system should be Window 10 PRO IMO.

2. Instead of a Western Digital Black as a secondary drive, I would be getting another SSD. The Evo 860 1TB is a fine choice, as prices on those have been dropping.

3. In general, you should think that the secondary drive is where all of your data go, so if you want to reinstall the OS at the main drive you can do so without sweating about losing any of your stuff. You need to put some work to it though.

4. This also applies to your HUD database, if that's what you re using. My full database is 125GB or something and it's a big hassle trying to back up and restore in the main smaller drive because there isn't enough space. That's why when you install Postgresql, you might want to look at installing to the bigger secondary drive.

5. The main reason to get an nvme IMO is Pokertracker/HEM performance, otherwise, I don't see a benefit that could be noticed in other day to day applications. Perhaps, it could be worth getting a bigger NVME drive, like 512GB, use it as the main one and install the PT/HEM database there.

Obviously all of the above depends on the size of your database.

6. Beyond this, you might want to look into getting a 3d mechanical hard drive, internal or external for backing up all of your stuff. That drive could be 2TB or 4TB and you could simply use acronis backup to backup whole drives on it and have relative peace of mind should something go wrong.

7. There are a lot of people who love Phantex cases, I am afraid to say I am not one of them, as I prefer simpler lines. Have you taken a look at the NZXT cases like the H500? I also like the Fractal Refine R6 as I think is possibly the most functional case I ve ever seen that can fit everything I can potentially throw at it.

Don't cheap out on the case. If you like it well enough, you will be able to use it in future builds and that's true of many other parts like the PSU.

8. As far as GPUs are concerned, I am not an expert as I am like you. I play games that don't need the greatest and latest and I have a 1080p monitor which helps a lot because it doesn't need a premium GPU to drive it. Take a look at the games you ll be playing. If it's sports simulators or strategy games, they aren't going to be the most demanding. If they are the latest and greatest open world elaborate world shooters, then yeah, your GPU is going to be a bottleneck.

Btw, that's why you need to ask yourself what you re looking for in a monitor. A 144hz monitor is useful to a dedicated gamer who who wants the highest FPS. If you just want to fool around, maybe that's an overkill.

I really appreciate all of the info you've provided so far, especially the above about the RAM. I would have had no idea because PCPartPicker did not give me a warning for a potential compatibility issue. I've since found something that was listed in the link you provided.

The monitor and video card connection info was also enlightening. I'm still contemplating the direction I want to go with them. I did want to go higher than 1080p resolution mainly so that I could fit more tables on the screen when multi-tabling poker. The Hz I chose was because I read that it was better for gaming and that higher Hz is easier on your eyes, but I don't think I'm looking to pay for the higher end video cards at the moment.



Thank you for the suggestions!

Win 10 Home Vs Pro Features
Main Pro features are Remote Desktop, Domain Join, Bitlocker and Hyper-V support (install an optional feature to be able to create and run VMs on your desktop).

I use Pro at home for the ability to RDP between my different computers and Hyper-V to run some Linux VMs on my desktop. If you need/want any of these features, Pro is great. If not, Home will be just fine.

Enterprise Mode Internet Explorer (EMIE) could also be of interest on a poker only PC (super locked down, secure version of IE) but I'm not sure if it works with current sites. It would probably be painful as a primary browser on a general purpose desktop due to all the disabled features and restrictions for security purposes.


RE #2: The main point of an SSD is to access data more quickly, especially random access usage. A secondary SSD would be faster than an HDD but you'd have to pinch your budget somewhere else. A fast boot drive plus a secondary spinner is a perfectly reasonable config here.

Backup is a separate concern you should address. It is preferable to write your backups to an external or network drive that is not connected when not being actively used for backups. Quick version would be get a 2TB USB 3.0 drive and back up to it once a week. Keep it in a drawer in between backups. Better version is to get 2x 2TB USB 3.0 2TB drives and alternate which one you back up to each week. if you can keep one of the backups offsite, so much the better. I like to add a cloud layer for my pictures and docs. Office 365 annual subscription comes with 1TB of OneDrive storage, you can also consider Google or DropBox.

RE QVL: Part of the issue is that JEDEC specs have not kept up with the RAM speeds that are commonly in use. The rated speed of most RAM these days is based on its XMP profile and is technically overclocked. RAM on the QVL means that the motherboard manufacturer has tested that kit with the board and confirmed the speed it will work at. Other RAM may work just fine and will almost always work at the fallback JEDEC speed (probably DDR4 2666).

I want windows 10 pro because it gives you the option of when to install updates; if it's buggy or alpha or whatever, you can wait a few months. I also suspect that Microsoft is moving into making the basic editions of windows into fremium software that serves you ads and I prefer something that I pay and have full control over.

As far the case is concerned, if space is what guides the decision, I can't say anything. It's a looks thing for me and functionality second. But again, don't be afraid to spend an extra $50-100 for that thing. You re going to have it -open it, change parts, look at it- for years.

Does Windows 10 Pro allow you to easily disable Windows Defender? If so, it may be worth it just for that. It's such an annoyance using my low profile system with Windows 10 Home. I never found an easy way to completely disable it. I was able to make it slightly less annoying with some Google/YouTube advice.

At this point I think I will hold off on puchasing the monitor. I will check for deals for that and higher end video cards around Black Friday. I can just use the monitor I have until then.

I will probably just look for a cheap video card that can do the basics for now. I'm not in any rush to start gaming on it. That can wait.

The time you guys took to respond is very appreciated and has helped me make much better decisions about the direction I want to go. Thank you all very much!