I'm upgrading a PC I 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, and creative work with tools such as Krita, Blender, Reaper, Aseprite, Blockbench, and VSModelCreator. I also primarily use Arch-based Linux distributions.
My current system has an ASUS Z170-A motherboard, Intel i5-6600K, Hyper 212 Evo cooler, GTX 1070 SC, 16GB of DDR4-3000 memory, an EVGA SuperNOVA 750W Gold G2 power supply, and an NZXT Phantom 530 case with a few fans.
For the upgrade, I'm considering a Gigabyte Z790 Eagle AX or another DDR5-compatible Z790 board, an Intel i7-14700K, a suitable AIO cooler, 32GB of DDR5 memory around 6000–6400 MT/s, and my existing case. I've already bought an MSI Suprim X RTX 4070 Ti after finding a good price. I may replace the 750W power supply with a modular 850W model within a year, but I won't heavily stress the system before then.
I'm buying parts gradually and second-hand where possible, while being careful about questionable listings. The goal is to have enough performance for several years without overspending or needing another major upgrade too soon. Is this a balanced parts list, or would another CPU and platform make more sense for my mix of gaming, development, and creative workloads?
1 Answer
For a system that is primarily gaming-focused, I'd seriously reconsider the i7-14700K and look at AMD's Ryzen 7 9800X3D instead. Its gaming performance and efficiency make it a particularly strong option, and it would give you a newer platform to build around rather than investing in a late-generation Intel socket.
Would the 9800X3D pair well with the RTX 4070 Ti? I was once told that AMD processors should not be paired with Nvidia graphics cards, but that advice may have been outdated—or simply wrong.