I'm planning a roughly £2,900 PC centered around a Ryzen 9 9950X3D and an RTX 5070 Ti. The system includes a Gigabyte X870E AORUS ELITE WIFI7 motherboard, a 360mm Arctic Liquid Freezer III Pro cooler, 32GB of DDR5-6000 CL36 memory, a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe SSD, a Lian Li Vector V100R case, and a 1000W Corsair SF1000 Platinum SFX power supply. I'll mainly use it for Blender, video editing, and other creative workloads, with gaming being secondary. Is the component selection and price reasonable, or would it make more sense to save on the CPU and upgrade another part?
3 Answers
A few parts are worth double-checking. The 990 Pro is already a very fast PCIe 4.0 drive, so a newer flagship SSD may not make a noticeable difference unless your workload regularly moves very large files. Also, the SF1000 is an SFX power supply while the case is an ATX mid-tower, so make sure the case includes the correct mounting bracket and that cable reach is suitable. The 5070 Ti should be fine for your stated gaming needs, but a 5080 would provide more GPU acceleration in some Blender and video workloads if the extra cost is acceptable.
The build looks powerful, but the motherboard may be more feature-rich than you need. A less expensive X870 or B850 board could free up money without hurting performance, provided it has the connectivity, VRM quality, M.2 slots, and PCIe layout you actually need. Check the manual carefully because some M.2 slots can share bandwidth with the primary graphics slot on certain boards.
For Blender and video editing, the 9950X3D makes more sense than a gaming-focused 9800X3D because the extra cores can help with rendering and other CPU-heavy work. Since gaming is not your priority, keeping the stronger workstation CPU and the 5070 Ti is a reasonable balance. I’d seriously consider 64GB of RAM, though, because 32GB can become limiting with large Blender scenes, high-resolution footage, or several creative applications open at once.
That’s my thinking as well. I’m treating this more like a workstation that happens to play games, so I’d rather keep the stronger CPU and put any remaining budget toward more memory.
Motherboard features are the part I’m least familiar with, so I’ll compare the lane layout and storage options before deciding.