Advice please for a approx £2,750 budget

[Speedman]

Hi,

Grateful for any advice, I have a budget of approx £2,750 - £3,000 for a gaming PC. Have read through the various posts and have come up with the design below. I know some may say that some items such as 32GB memory are excessive but my employer has given me a budget for home working which is meant to include desk, chair, monitor etc but I already have all these so can use the budget for a great gaming PC. For info I already have a Dell 1440p monitor. Happy to spend a bit more if views are that a better motherboard etc would be worthwhile - would like to know if the system below has any 'bottleneck' that could be upgraded. Also, as the motherboard is wifi ready, does this mean I don't need a wifi adapter to use it wirelessly?

Thanks

Case
COOLERMASTER K350 GAMING CASE
Overclocked CPU
Overclocked Intel® Core™i7-7700k Quad Core (4.20GHz @ up to 4.8GHz)
Motherboard
ASUS® ROG STRIX Z270E GAMING: LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GB, Wi-Fi - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3600MHz (4 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti - HDMI, 3x DP GeForce - GTX VR Ready!
1st Hard Disk
4TB WD BLACK 3.5" WD4004FZWX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
2nd Hard Disk
4TB WD BLACK 3.5" WD4004FZWX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)
M.2 SSD Drive
1TB WD BLUE™ M.2 SSD (up to 545MB/s R | 525MB/s W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
16x BLU-RAY WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW & SOFTWARE
Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
Power Supply
CORSAIR 750W CS SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
CoolerMaster Hyper 212X (120mm) Fan CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Extra Case Fans
1x 120mm Black Case Fan (configured to extract from rear/roof)
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Firewire
2 Port IEEE 1394a Firewire PCI-E Card (2 x 6 pin)
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Google Chrome™
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 6 to 8 working days
Quantity
1

Price £2,748.00 including VAT and delivery

 

[SpyderTracks]

Anything over 16gb will literally never be used in the life of the pc, it's not that it's overboard it's literally throwing money down the drain, will not bring any improvement to the build whatsoever.

Your primary ssd is slower than a sata ssd, you'd be better off with a Samsung nvme drive.

On a build like that I'd suggest going for an rm850w psu as they're seriously good and quiet.

Strange to see a fire Waite port... do you have any FireWire devices?

What refresh rate is your monitor? If you don't know, what model is it?

 

[Speedman]

Hi,

Thanks for the comments.

On the drives, I was looking for a primary drive that is fast and has the OS plus a few games and the conventional 4tb would be used for anything else. Will look at the drive you have suggested.

Monitor is a Dell U2515H - 60hz

On the memory, I have read on here other comments that agree with yours about not bothering with more than 16GB - the reason i went for the 32gb is that when I looked at the recommended specs for xplane 11, is suggests 16-20 ram so bit confused on this one.

Does my motherboard look ok - that was the one I really didn't understand which one to chose?

Very grateful for your time.

 

[Speedman]

Sorry, forgot to add, will change the PSU as your suggestion. On the firewire question, I have a lot of old camcorder tapes I want to transfer to the PC/DVD.

 

[mantadog]

If your employer has given you a budget for home working, what kind of work will you be doing?

Going by the budget it must be something fairly beefy?

If You do any kind of video or maths simulation work then you may benefit from 32gb RAM. Otherwise games like xplane probably won't go too far above 16gb, and if they do you can add more ram in about 5 minutes yourself.

 

[Oussebon]

Consensus seems to be that 16gb is fine and you won't come close to using that much unless you deliberately try to get the game to use as much RAM as it can:

[–]dpny 1 point2 points3 points 4 months ago (0 children)
16-24GB is the outside use case if you're really trying to stress the sim.
X-Plane keeps a lot of stuff in application memory: a copy of every texture in use, the scenery mesh, etc. If you run the sim with high rendering options and all of the extras which use more memory—third-party sceneries, third-party planes, the Ultra HD meshes—you can push the sim's memory budget pretty high. Someone did the math and figured out with maxxed rendering settings and all of the Ultra HD mesh, you could push X-Plane 10 to about 24 GB of RAM usage.
If you're not going to do that, don't worry. I don't have any of the HD or Ultra HD meshes, and I don't think I've ever pushed v10 past 7 GB of RAM. I think—THINK—the physics-based rendering in v11 uses more RAM, but not double.



https://www.reddit.com/r/flightsim/comments/5o626b/xplane_11_ram_usage/

Also, as the motherboard is wifi ready, does this mean I don't need a wifi adapter to use it wirelessly?

That's correct.

The WD Black drives are incredibly expensive. 2x 4TB WD Blacks are £171 more expensive than 3 x 3TB 7200rpm regular HDDs are.

Also, 8TB in addition to your 1 Tb SSD is an insane amount. If you're storing loads of ripped DVDs / blu rays you might be better off looking at network storage for that purpose. Maybe a NAS with a couple of 6TB drives. If you're not, what are you storing that will need so much space?

If you do actually need the space and you have leftover budget, perhaps a NAS would be a good way to spend it.

Monitor is a Dell U2515H - 60hz

The 1080 ti is pretty excessive for that. A GTX 1080 ought to be more than fine.

The case is cheap and limited in its options. You really want something better to hold and help cool all that hardware.


Case
FRACTAL DEFINE R5 BLACK QUIET MID-TOWER CASE
Overclocked CPU
Overclocked Intel® Core™i7-7700k Quad Core (4.20GHz @ up to 4.8GHz)
Motherboard
ASUS® ROG STRIX Z270E GAMING: LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GB, Wi-Fi - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM)
16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 3200MHz (2 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
8GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 - DVI, HDMI, 3x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!
1[SUP]st[/SUP] Hard Disk
3TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
2[SUP]nd[/SUP] Hard Disk
3TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
3[SUP]rd[/SUP] Hard Disk
3TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE
M.2 SSD Drive
1TB SAMSUNG PM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3000MB/R, 1700MB/W)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
16x BLU-RAY WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW & SOFTWARE
Power Supply
CORSAIR 850W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Processor Cooling
Noctua NH-U14S Ultra Quiet Performance CPU Cooler
Thermal Paste
ARCTIC MX-4 EXTREME THERMAL CONDUCTIVITY COMPOUND
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 2 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Firewire
2 Port IEEE 1394a Firewire PCI-E Card (2 x 6 pin)
Operating System
Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence
Operating System Language
United Kingdom - English Language
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Browser
Microsoft® Edge (Windows 10 Only)
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 6 to 8 working days
Quantity
1

Price £2,280.00 including VAT and delivery

Unique URL to re-configure : https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/saved-configurations/intel-z270-overclocked/TqWXTu6DjW/

 

[Speedman]

Hi and thanks for the comments.

To explain on the budget/use issue, for work the pc will only be used for word/excel/office/internet etc so complete overkill from that point of view, but our office is relocating and moving to a hot-desk system so to encourage home working, everyone has been given a budget of £3,000 to spend on desk/chair/pc/monitor etc - whatever is needed for home working. All I need is a new pc.

Will look at the hard drive cost again - I only need 1 4tb (or smaller but the extra size is cheap) the second is for backup.

Will have a look at the case. Cooling was something that I was concerned about. In addition to the case should I be looking at any other cooling options - I see one change in the spec above and I had added an extra case fan so guessing that should be enough.

The reason I went for the 1080ti is for heavy graphic use in flight sims.

This forum is so useful - I have reasonable PC knowledge but mainly on the use side not on the build/spec side

 

[Oussebon]

It's not just about the number of fans, but the quality of the fans, the airflow / design of the case etc. Cheaper cases can be more obstructed by the HDD cages at the front of the case, limiting airflow. The 1080 ti runs hotter than the other Pascal cards so if you are insistent on getting one then something like the R5 would be a good idea.

For backup you may want to consider a 2nd external HDD or backing up to a NAS. Make more sense than backing up to another disk that lives inside the same PC.

 

[Speedman]

Hi,

Good point on the HDD issue, better to go for an external store that can be kept separately.

On the cooling issue, I was thinking of adding the 2 cooling fans in the case option for better airflow as they are only £9 and the pc will be under a desk with not much airflow - I presume these would help?

 

[Tony1044]

Agree with the NAS. Get a good one such as from Thecus and you could benefit from all sorts of extra goodies built in like streaming. Not to mention built in RAID

 

[Oussebon]

Get a good one such as from Thecus and you could benefit from all sorts of extra goodies built in like streaming. Not to mention built in RAID

If those were the only features you wanted and you were lazy you could get that from a WD My Cloud.

A word on GPUs:
http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/114741-xp11-gpu-fps-test -comparison/
This seems to be the main community benchmarking thread for Xplane 11. It seems quite limited by CPU performance rather than GPU. I'd be very surprised if you got much / any benefit off a 1080 ti at 1440p 60hz.

On the cooling issue, I was thinking of adding the 2 cooling fans in the case option for better airflow as they are only £9 and the pc will be under a desk with not much airflow - I presume these would help?

The fractal's stock cooling ought to be fine. The better solution is to not stuff the PC where it will just be breathing in its own hot air.

You can add case fans but it's not going to fix that problem.