Alternatively processors last a long time and by the time you would notice a difference between the i5 or i7 there will be 6 new generations of processors and you can just upgrade to the newest i5.

The stronger argument for i7 is just that it benchmarks 5% higher for games on userbenchmarks and is particularly useful for esports (that will get to cpu bottleneck sooner).

Then you decide if that 5% now (and probably a little more later) is worth 80.

I don’t think it is because for the titles you play, you’ll be st 100+ consistently anyway but I wouldn’t fault anyone for playing it safe or wanting to get every FPS they can afford.

If it’s just about gaming performance though, a better cooler keeping you from getting throttled May yield you more than moving to i7.

wat.

Basically the 8700k has tiny bit more turbo and the hyperthreading does become helpful in some situations.

I recommended a build with an i5 because I think it's kind of meh for $100usd/80GBP but people may decide otherwise.

I don't know if it will affect your decision or not, but processors with an in-silicon fix for Spectre and Meltdown should be out late this year or early next year.

Have we seen benchmarking on those? Curious if the patches really do affect performance so much that waiting would be beneficial.

Also, there’s a 6-core i9 out now. What is this i7 weaksauce?

I think desktop i9 starts at 10 cores with 20 threads and are a LOT more expensive. The 6 core i9-8xxxHs are for laptops, probably ultrahighend gaming laptops. Most gaming laptops will use i7-8750H.

I think its really subjective to a persons budget for how they should plan an upgrade path. Some people are broke (me) and realistically will not go back to upgrade periodically. Therefore a bundled lower end then try to upgrade one part at a time approach is better.

If you are in the middle budget wise below hardcore gamer, you should really watch specials closely. You may be able to get a really sick deal on an i7, with a low end graphics card/disk that can be upgraded those later when you have more to spend. Likewise, the best deal may come for a lower end processor but a video card that you can take with you when you upgrade to an i7 for <$500 by buying your own motherboard in a year.

Yeah I've been keeping a eye out for deals on pre builds but from what I see it's far better value for money to build, I thought this wasn't the case anymore since the last time I built my computer, but apparently it still is.

Still haven't decided on a I7 or a I5 yet, Will do some more research and see whats the best value for money and if I can get a decent deal on a I7 somewhere.

It’s only "far better" depending on who you buy from. Some of the up and comers don’t charge such a massive markup and let you pick components from a list of compatible, quality parts.

Letting a pro do all the assembling, testing, and warrantying is worth the extra hundred dollar markup or whatever it was when I got mine built. Single point of contact in case something goes wrong and I can’t isolate what that something is? Yes, please.

I specced one out on cyberpowerpc.co.uk and it looks like about 100 pounds premium for what you specced out, and that’s with more premium components than what you picked.

I think that’s well within acceptable premium for single point of warranty service, expert (at least experienced) installation and pre-testing+overclocking if you want it.

Unless of course you enjoy fiddling with computers and get enjoyment out of it.

My home current rig is on borrowed time but in all honesty has performed quite admirably. Built in 2011: Antec 300 case, i3-2120T, Radeon HD 6850, 8gb RAM. Only addition I made was probably 3-4 years ago, threw in an Intel SSD which was the best decision ever. Part of why I haven't updated is I haven't recently had time to do too much intensive gaming on it, just standard multitasking and some Hearthstone. Powers two Dell U2212HM monitors. Anyways I'm not super cost sensitive so going to do another build from scratch again. Current rig is still running USB 2.0 and I don't think I have used my optical drive in years.

Man prices are high. Funny to come back to the component market after a few years with all the mining going on to see SSD pricing vs GPU/RAM has inverted. SSDs are so cheap now.

Anyways just looking for general current good practices wrt home builds. AMD was always more cost prohibitive and offered the best value -- still the case with Ryzen? Still the case with GPUs? I'm inclined to lean towards an Intel CPU with AMD GPU but that's what I used on builds 6 years ago and they all ran well.

Really have not much clue on current chipsets and MBs so need to look up that stuff.

Also might upgrade to a pair of 27". Saw an LG model at Costco for $199 which seemed like a steal.

I've been looking at ebay to find some decent deals. Obv need to do a little research on who you are buying from but is there any general advice? Mainly looking at buying a GPU a SSD and maybe some RAM/Mobo

Manage to buy everything today should all come within this week. Decided to go with the I5 instead of the I7 other than that everything is the same. Looking forward to putting this together.

glhf

Managed to put it all together today. Seems really good compared to what I was on. I haven't messed around with any settings on any of the games so everything is basically set to high and it's really nice and smooth. Really happy so far

Btw Thanks for your input guys, really appreciate it!

If that's the feeling you get from your first impression of the system then I think you made the right choice. Enjoy!

Ugh, finally get into a new game, and it crashes on me. Picked up Titanfall 2 a while ago, but never played it until this week. Got through the first 5 missions fine. The sixth missions just crashes on me. It's happened three times now--had to restart the mission because the checkpoint is corrupted, then it crashes 20-25 minutes into the mission.

At first, I thought it was a random glitch, restarted the computer and tried the mission again. After the next crash, I updated my Nvidia graphics card drivers and lowered the graphics settings. It still crashed a third time.

Any other things I should try?

Silly Q but have you Googled for any similar reports?

Whats your setup?

Didn't bother to read the story b/c I don't have one, but I saw an article about the latest Nvidia update causing problems for 1060 GPUs????

I havent had any issues yet

I ended up turning down the buffering of textures. It was allocating 8 GB of VRAM for that. Some forums said that could be an issue, even if you have 8 GB of VRAM (which I do have on my 1070 GTX). Turning it down to 4 GB allowed me to complete the mission. Which is cool, because I didn't like the multiplayer mode very much.

Looking to upgrade my monitor, Currently I have the Asus VG248 24" 144hz .... I'm looking to upgrade to a minimum 27 inch, 2560x1440, 144hz monitor. I'm finding these fairly expensive.

I did however come across a company "AOC" and wondering what you guys think about them? Are their monitors actually decent? I can get the "AOC AG271QX" for around £350.
Compared to a monitor like ASUS ROG Swift PG278QR will cost me between £50-£100 more.

The AOC monitor has free sync which I won't be able to use because it's AMD based. The Asus monitor has G-Sync which I will be able to use. Given all this though I don't really know what Free Sync and G-Sync actually does and how often I take advantage of it.

The main games I spend my time on are CSGO/Fornite/PUBG.

Any input would be great

Thanks