I'm planning a new Windows 11 PC for gaming, college work, Blender modeling, game development, and video editing. My current parts list includes a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Thermalright Phantom Spirit cooler, Asus X870 motherboard, 32GB DDR5-6000 memory, a 1TB Samsung 990 Pro SSD, Radeon RX 9070 XT, 850W power supply, and a Lian Li LANCOOL 217 case. The build costs about $2,369 before tax and roughly $2,500–$2,600 after shipping and taxes.
I have around $2,500 available from a $2,000 college refund and selling my current PC, but I'd prefer to stay close to $2,000 if possible. I don't care about appearance, so I'm happy to change parts for better value. Would this build be suitable for my workloads, or should I choose an Nvidia graphics card for Blender? I'm located in Georgia and would appreciate suggestions for reducing the cost without giving up too much performance.
4 Answers
The Samsung 990 Pro is a very good drive, but it usually isn’t worth paying such a large premium for gaming, development, or general editing. A solid midrange NVMe drive will feel nearly identical in everyday use. Also check the memory pricing carefully—$469 for 32GB is extremely high, and that is one of the easiest places to save money.
A Ryzen 7 7800X3D could save additional money while still being an excellent gaming CPU. The 9800X3D is faster, but putting that money toward more storage or keeping the total within budget may be more useful for your mix of schoolwork and creative projects.
For gaming, the RX 9070 XT offers much better value than similarly priced Nvidia cards and has plenty of VRAM. Nvidia is still the safer choice if you expect to do a lot of Blender Cycles rendering because CUDA and OptiX can make a major difference there. For game-development modeling, animation, Unity, Unreal, and Eevee, the Radeon should be perfectly usable, so I’d stay with AMD unless Cycles rendering becomes a major part of your work.
There’s quite a bit of extra cost in the motherboard, memory, SSD, and power supply. You can keep the 9800X3D and RX 9070 XT while switching to a less expensive B850 motherboard, a reasonably priced 32GB DDR5-6000 kit, a different quality 1TB PCIe 4.0 SSD, and a cheaper 850W Gold-rated PSU. Those changes should bring the build much closer to $2,000 without a meaningful gaming-performance loss.
My 3D work is mainly for game development, with shorter animations rather than long rendered films. I’m leaning toward keeping the Radeon since the Nvidia options are much more expensive.