I'm upgrading a PC I originally built around 2017 and would appreciate feedback before buying more parts. I mainly use it for gaming—including heavily modded Minecraft and Vintage Story—streaming games to a Steam Deck, hobby game and mod development in Godot and VSCodium, creative applications such as Krita, Blender, Reaper, Aseprite, Blockbench, and VSModelCreator, plus Linux on an Arch-based distribution.
My current system has an ASUS Z170-A motherboard, Intel i5-6600K, Hyper 212 Evo cooler, GTX 1070 SC, 16GB of DDR4-3000 memory, a 750W EVGA SuperNOVA Gold G2 power supply, and an NZXT Phantom 530 case with a few fans.
The planned upgrade is a Gigabyte Z790 Eagle AX or another DDR5-compatible Z790 board, an Intel i7-14700K, a suitable air or liquid cooler, an MSI RTX 4070 Ti Suprim X—which I already bought at a good price—and either 32GB of DDR5-6400 CL32 or DDR5-6000 CL36. I'm planning to replace the current power supply with a modular 850W model within about a year, although I won't heavily stress the existing unit in the meantime. The case will remain unchanged.
I'm buying parts gradually and often second-hand to manage the budget. My goal is to have enough performance for demanding games, heavily modded titles, creative software, and development for several years without needing another major upgrade too soon. One suggestion was to consider an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D instead of the i7-14700K. Would that CPU pair well with the RTX 4070 Ti, and are there any major compatibility or platform considerations I should know about?
1 Answer
For a build that’s primarily focused on gaming, the Ryzen 7 9800X3D is worth considering instead of the i7-14700K. Its gaming performance and large cache can be especially useful in CPU-heavy or simulation-style games, including heavily modded titles. It will also work perfectly well with an RTX 4070 Ti—there’s no general problem with pairing an AMD processor and an NVIDIA graphics card. The old advice to avoid that combination is outdated. Just remember that switching to the AMD CPU means using an AM5 motherboard rather than a Z790 board, so compare the total platform cost and make sure the board has the features you need for your Linux, development, and storage setup.
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