I'm putting together a new gaming PC with a budget of roughly £2,000–£2,500. It'll mainly be used for competitive FPS games, with some AAA titles as well. I currently have a 1440p 144Hz monitor.
The build includes a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, Radeon RX 9070 XT, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL30 memory, and a 1TB PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD. Before ordering, I'd appreciate some advice:
- Do I need to buy additional case fans, or will the included fans be sufficient?
- Is the Corsair DDR5 kit reasonably priced, or are there cheaper alternatives with similar performance?
- Is the Sapphire Pulse a good RX 9070 XT model, or should I choose a different version?
- Are there any other parts where I'm overspending or could get better value?
The listed total is about £2,071, although the power supply price wasn't included. I also have another 1TB SSD from an older PC that I may use as secondary storage.
4 Answers
The RAM is definitely overpriced. DDR5-6000 CL30 kits from brands such as Klevv or other Corsair ranges should cost much less, with no noticeable gaming difference. You could put the savings toward a 2TB SSD or simply keep the money. The Sapphire Pulse is a perfectly good 9070 XT; different models usually perform within a couple of percent of one another, so compare price, cooler reviews, size, noise, and the display outputs you need.
The Pure Base 501 DX should have adequate airflow with its stock fans, so extra fans aren’t essential. Add one only if temperatures or noise end up being poor. Some cheaper mid-tower cases include three or four decent fans already, so it may be worth comparing complete case options rather than buying fans separately.
I was mainly looking at mid-tower cases because I don’t want a huge case taking up too much desk space, but I’ll compare the included fan setups.
You can get more storage and a better-balanced build for around the same money. The 1TB Crucial T500 is very expensive for a gaming system, since a cheaper 2TB PCIe 4.0 drive will feel basically identical in games. A TLC-based drive is preferable if you expect lots of large writes, but you don’t need an expensive DRAM-equipped SSD just for gaming. Also make sure the PSU has a listed price and is a good-quality 850W ATX 3.1 model.
The overall platform is strong, but several parts are priced too high. A less expensive B850 motherboard, cheaper 6000 MT/s CL30 memory, and a lower-cost 9070 XT such as the PowerColor Reaper or XFX Swift could save roughly £100 or more. The performance difference between those GPU versions is tiny; the main differences are cooler quality, noise, dimensions, warranty, and aesthetics. Since you already have another 1TB SSD, keeping the current 1TB drive is reasonable, although 2TB of fast storage is convenient for a modern game library.
Thanks, I wasn’t sure what normal DDR5 pricing looked like these days, so that’s helpful.