I'm building a PC for the first time and have a budget of around $5,000 AUD. My current system struggles with modern games, including some competitive shooters, so I want extremely high frame rates at 1080p. I also use Premiere Pro and After Effects, and I plan to start livestreaming, which is why I'm leaning toward an NVIDIA graphics card.
I'd like the system to remain useful for as long as possible and be reasonably upgradeable. I may move to 1440p later, although gaming performance at high FPS is my main priority. I'm also unsure whether this is a good time to buy, but I don't want to wait indefinitely for prices that may never improve.
My current parts list is:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D — $1,000 AUD
- CPU cooler: ARCTIC Liquid Freezer III Pro A-RGB 360 — $150 AUD
- Motherboard: Gigabyte B850 AORUS ELITE WIFI7 — $330 AUD
- Memory: Corsair Vengeance RGB 32GB DDR5-6000 CL36 — $631 AUD
- Storage: Samsung 990 Pro 2TB NVMe SSD — $650 AUD
- GPU: ASUS RTX 5070 Ti 16GB — $1,700 AUD
- Case: Lian Li Vector V100R — $130 AUD
- Power supply: MSI MAG A850GL PCIe 5 850W Gold — $159 AUD
The total comes to approximately $4,745 AUD. Are there better-value parts or changes I should consider for gaming, Adobe work, streaming, longevity, and future upgrades?
3 Answers
The 9950X3D is extremely powerful, but it may not be the best value for your use case. Adobe benchmark results suggest the 9800X3D performs very similarly in many workloads, so the roughly $400 premium may be difficult to justify unless you regularly run several demanding applications at once. A less expensive AM5 motherboard should also perform just as well; expensive boards generally do not increase CPU or gaming performance.
The 360mm cooler is a solid choice. For memory, 32GB is still enough for gaming and will run your listed software, but 64GB would be more comfortable for Premiere, After Effects, streaming, and multitasking if pricing becomes reasonable.
It has not been an especially good time to build when compared with prices from previous months and years, but there is no guarantee that waiting will improve things. If you need the system now, buying is reasonable; just avoid paying unusually high prices for parts that do not add performance.
The motherboard, case, and cooler are already sensible choices. I would prioritize the GPU, a reasonably priced SSD, and potentially 64GB of RAM over an unnecessarily expensive motherboard or flagship CPU.
That matches what I’ve been hearing. I’d rather not wait for months hoping prices drop, so I’m leaning toward building soon while making sure I’m not overspending on parts that won’t improve performance.
The SSD and graphics card prices are the biggest concerns. A 2TB 990 Pro is very expensive, and most good NVMe drives will feel the same in games and normal editing. You could likely get a larger 4TB drive with DRAM for similar money, although storage prices have been unusually high lately.
At $1,700 AUD, the RTX 5070 Ti is also poor value. If the budget allows, moving up to an RTX 5080 would make more sense for high-refresh gaming, future 1440p use, and GPU-accelerated creative work. Otherwise, look for a substantially cheaper 5070 Ti.
The extra cores could still make sense if the editing and streaming workloads are frequent, but for mainly gaming, the cheaper X3D chip is probably the smarter purchase.