CPU

The CPU is the brains of the operation and is easily the most important component of the entire computer. There are two brands: Intel and AMD. Intel is more performant for the price right now and they generally feature a higher level of compatibility than AMD. Intel CPUs come in generations and series. There are 4 series, i3, i5, i7, and i9, which denote quality tiers (i3 and i5 are low, i7 is mid, i9 is high). Then as time moves on there are newer generations of chips in each series, with 13th gen being the latest. So the 13th gen i9 chips are the latest and supposedly most powerful intel processors. Inside of a series and generation there are only slight variations like overclockability and integrated graphics. Currently, at $440 the Intel i7 13700K is an amazing CPU. It has 16 cores which can run 24 threads so expect awesome multithreading and it outperforms 12gen i9s at a lower price. The K denotes unlocked overclocking capabilities and it has integrated graphics (the chip without integrated graphics is only $20 less). While integrated graphics seems useless with a dedicated GPU, the two main benefits are dual monitor setup and the ability to use and diagnose your pc if the GPU fails or crashes. There’s not much more to say here. Intel provides a limited set of chips so picking your price point and performance level is relatively straight forward. Some important specs of the i7 13700K that will affect the rest of the build include:

• 20 PCIe lanes
• Max DDR4 ram speed of 3400 MT/s, DDR5 5600 MT/s
• Dual Channel Memory
• LS1700 Socket

Graphics Card

There are two graphics card manufacturers: AMD and NVIDIA. While AMD’s radeon series GPUs might be tempting with low prices and high rated performance, everyone agrees NVIDIA is the way to go. For one, they have features like RTX which NVIDIA does not, two they usually outperform raw anyway even at similar rated stats, and three NVIDIA is way more compatible with all and every software whereas radeons have limited support and optimization (especially in blender). NVIDIAs cards are branded “GeForce” (similar to AMD’s radeon) and come in four series: GTX 16 ($200-300), RTX 20 ($200-700), RTX 30 ($300-2000), and RTX 40 ($2000). The most important specs are clock speed (in GHz), cuda cores (count), and memory (called VRAM) but other important features include ray tracing capabilities, tensor cores (for AI), streaming multiprocessors, ect. Out of the four NVIDIA series, the RTX 30 seems to be the best. With similar price overlap as the RTX 20 series (only exceeding $1000 at the end) but with significantly more cuda cores, hence more performance, it is the perfect series for mid and high tier builds. There are 9 different GPUs in the 30 series: 3050, 3060, 3060 Ti, 3070, 3070 Ti, 3080, 3080 Ti, 3090, 3090 Ti. The Ti stands for titanium and is usually only marginally better than its non-Ti counterpart. The main spec for rendering is cuda cores and for these GPUs we see a 1000 count increase from 3050 (2304cc) to 3090 Ti (10752cc). There are negligible increases between 3080 Ti (10240cc), 3090 (10496cc), and 3090 Ti (10752cc), however the 3090s have double the VRAM. The largest cc jump is between the 3070 Ti (6144cc) and 3080 (8960cc). Also for context the RTX 2080 Ti has 4352 cuda cores, comparable to the RTX 3060 Ti (4864cc) with all stats (however 2080 Ti scores higher by 200 in blender benchmark). The best to consider would be somewhere in the range of 3060 Ti to 3080 Ti (5 GPUs).

So analyzing this table, it seems like the performance jump between the 3060 Ti and 3070 is relatively small compared to the price gap. Additionally the 3070 to 3070 Ti, while seeing a sizable gaming perf boost, has an even more negligible modeling perf increase. Now for gaming it seems like upgrading from a 3070 Ti to a 3080 is negligible, but the raytracing / blender perf increase is enormous for a relatively low price difference. Fronting the 20% cost increase is definitely worth the 30% perf increase and the blender score is more likely around 35% (the Tom’s RT % increase) but blender doesn’t distinguish between the two types of 3080. Now moving to the grand finale, the 3080 Ti, sure there is a 18% perf boost but it comes at a 40% cost increase and almost no improvement to gaming. That said, once your getting up into really high cuda core counts, the relative increase gets smaller but this doesn’t exactly reflect the raw performance increase, so the 3080 Ti is definitely an absolute power house, just probably not worth the additional $400.

So now moving on from the graphics chip, the vendor must be considered. One important factor is the vendor’s choice of PCIe gen support. All RTX 30 boards support PCIe gen 4 but some vendors only allow gen 3 for cost. Also some GPUs are labeled LHR for Low Hash Rate. This just means that the GPU is inefficient for crypto mining and has no effect on rendering or gaming. In reality, the board manufacturer doesn’t really matter, only affecting things like fans, size, and aesthetic. Most fancy features will only change performance by +-2% and generally cheaper is better. To sum up, the major manufacturer specs are PCIe gen support, board size, LHR, warranty, and price. Some manufacturers will actually add a cool important feature like automatically converting one of the DP ports to an HDMI (to have 2 HDMI ports). One last thing to consider about GPUs is that large boards that are also very thick can clash with the case, CPU cooler, RAM, and more. Also large, and consequently heavy, gpu boards might sag and cause strain on the PCIe port potentially snapping and breaking themselves and the motherboard over time. This can be battled with anti-sag brackets which support the fourth corner of the GPU.

Some good vendors:

• MSI Ventus 3X plus 12GB $790
• MSI Gaming Z Trio 12GB $850 -can be overclocked a bit more and is bigger than ventus
• MAXSUN iCraft 10GB $740 - not LHR and liquid cooling but 10GB

Memory

There are two viable types of RAM on the market: DDR4 and the newer (2020) DDR5. The two important specs of ram are capacity and speed. Capacity in gigabytes is fairly straightforward, the more the better. 16 to 32Gb of RAM seems to be a good range. 8 for just consumers and 64+ for insane computational stuff or open world game dev. Speed has two factors, CAS latency and clock frequency. So CAS Latency is kinda like the number of cycles required to process a memory request from the CPU. If the RAM can do it in fewer cycles, this will be faster. The clock frequency is the number of cycles per second. So multiply those together to get the effective latency (first word latency). Now here is where, even though DDR5 promises 5000+ MT/s, most of the decently priced (<200$) RAM modules (@ 2x16GB) have high CLs (CAS Latency), so you can get cheaper DDR4 modules with lower first word latencies. Also, while DDR5 technically goes up to 8000MT/s, and some motherboards will promise this level of compatibility (Z790 series), this is all for naught if your CPU can’t handle these speeds. The current 12th and 13th gen intel processors certainly can’t with the i7 13700K having a max speed of 5600 MT/s. Basically, you can save money ($20 RAM + $50 MB) if you opt for DDR4 and even have faster memory times. Probably in the next year or so DDR5 will start significantly surpassing DDR4 when the CL comes down and a year after that it will be a lot cheaper too. Long story short, two 16gb mid to high end DDR4 RAM cards with low first word latency are ideal. Differences between manufacturers are negligible.

Motherboard

Categorization

There are four main categories of motherboards, based on size: E-ATX (extended), ATX, mATX (micro), mini-ITX (also roughly ranging in price). Obviously with a bigger board you are going to get more features at a higher cost. It seems like full ATX (or just ATX) is the best option since it has a good price range from $100 - 400 and comes with plenty of features. Aside from features, the main benefit to size increase is CPU support. VRMs are heat / power regulators that support the cpu and more are better (more come with larger boards). The number of PCB layers also increases with size to provide more stability and power.  Motherboards are also CPU specific because different CPUs have different sockets. The Intel 12th and 13th gen both use the latest intel socket LS1700, which is supported by a variety of motherboard types. Additionally, motherboards are RAM specific between different version of DDR (the two big gens being DDR4 and the new DDR5). Given a specific intel socket and ram type, there are four categories, denoted by the letter prefix B, H, Q, Z (in order of quality). Z is the only one that supports overclocking and is generally for more performant/high quality builds. Lastly there is a number after the letter prefix which can either be 6 or 7 and this has an effect on many quality factors, 7 being better, but mainly it affects the memory controller and the speed at which RAM can be accessed. There aren’t many 7XX series DDR4 MBs because the DDR4 max speed is still in the 6XX series memory controller speed range. Currently, DDR4 is better so, putting all this together we get the best motherboard in the intel ATX LS1700 family as the ATX Z6XX. MBs are like the chassis and the CPU is the engine you could put a V8 in a monster truck or a smart car. To increase longevity of your cpu you want a big supportive motherboard. 

RAM

At this spec level you won’t see much variation in RAM support as pretty much all MBs have four slots, support up to dual channel, and have a max capacity of 128gb. In addition to capacity, speed must be considered. Most MBs have a speed limit greater than the DDR4 range anyway (~5000 MT/s) but obviously it is crucial to check this and make sure that the RAM you get isn’t faster than the MBs speed limit or that is a waste of potential. Also, out of the box RAM will not perform at its marketed speed. You must manually overclock it which can be done by special algorithms that can come on the MB such as Gigabytes Autoboost, but there is an intel standard overclocking profile called XMP which allows the MB to utilize faster RAM speeds so XMP is a must.

PCIe + Network

PCIe headers are used to connect high speed peripheral devices to the cpu including: GPU, SSD, network card, sound card. These have two factors: number of lanes and gen. The number of lanes controls bandwidth so obviously more lanes is better and PCIe comes in x1, x2, x4, x8, x16. Accordingly different devices require different bandwidth (GPU: 8-16, SSD: 4, ect). The generation of the PCIe can be <3, 4, 5 which affects the speed of the lanes. One last thing to consider about PCIe lanes is that they can go to the CPU directly or through the chipset. Direct to the cpu will be faster but your cpu can only handle a limited number of pcie lanes so dont get a motherboard with 2x PCIe x16 gen 5 lanes connected to the CPU if your CPU only does 20 lanes. In the MB spec range, most boards come with one PCIe x16 gen 4/5 that goes straight to the CPU and is pretty much exclusively for the GPU. They might also have up to 3 additional x16 gen 4s that go to the chipset if you really wanted more GPUs. They will also often have 1 x4 gen 4 PCIe lane going direct to CPU for an nvMe SSD, as well as other x4 gen 4s to the chipset for more ssds, wifi, or sound cards. This makes for a perfect combo since many CPUs can handle 20 lanes which is one beefy x16 gen 5 GPU and a x4 gen 4 SSD for max perf. Note that no NVIDIA gpus support pcie 5 yet so having this feature on the gpu port does not increase value. Even still there are a few rare MBs that have gen 5 on the x4 PCIe for the SSD to get blazing fast SSD speeds but reviews say the speed increase is negligible for now. Also these usually come at the expense of other features (ASRock boards). Another thing to consider here is if you will need a network card (wired or wireless or both) or if the motherboard already has one integrated. Unless upload/download times are super critical like a server or web scraper or something, it doesn’t seem that reasonable to get a MB without a network card. An MB with a network card will be more expensive but not really any more than an equivalent cheaper MB + NIC (network interface card), plus the more expensive MB usually has a higher quality + other features. If you are buying a network card, it will likely use USB, PCIe x1, PCIe x4 (cheapest to best). For sticking to integrated networking, you can get wired, wireless, or both. Wired comes in different speeds of LAN with 10GbE being the highest. Wireless comes in WiFi 5, WiFi 6 and WiFi 6e, each with different speeds (1Gb, 2Gb, ect). The WiFi 6e comes with the ability to operate on 6Ghz network so on networks with congested bandwidth, this could be an essential, but this is mostly likely not the case with a desktop and would be more beneficial in a laptop. Also bluetooth is a feature which might be offered with WiFi. The quality of bluetooth is probably negligible and just its presence is a plus unless you plan to exclusively use wireless headphones or something. 

IO

There are many types of IO and most are superfluous but might come in handy in different situations. Starting with the essential: USB. There are multiple gens of USB: USB 2.1 / 1, USB 3.2 gen 1, USB 3.2 gen 2, and USB 3.2 gen 2x2 (in order by speed). Usually USB 3.2 gen 2 and down are type-A (traditional usb plug) and the USB 3.2 gen 2x2 might be a type-c. 

Thunderbolt

The type-c might also be a thunderbolt port which supports power, data transfer, and video (this could be useful for a plug-in artist tablet). Thunderbolt can run DisplayPort so any monitor with a displayport can get input from a thunderbolt and a displayport to hdmi adapter will make any monitor run from thunderbolt. Also thunderbolt can run ethernet so you could connect two computers together in a super fast p2p network for large data transfer or something. You can even run PCIe over thunderbolt to connect to an external graphics card. You can also get a thunderbolt dock which splits up the single thunderbolt cable into multiple usbs, hdmi, ethernet, audio ect. Lastly, a cool idea for thunderbolt is connecting a video capture device to record or stream with extremely minimal performance cost. Make sure to check the type of thunderbolt (1, 2, 3, 4) as this affects its capabilities. If a MB doesn’t come with thunderbolt already, it could still be upgraded using a PCIe slot under the gpu with a thunderbolt card, exposing all the IO under the GPU IO. 

For USB, most mid range ATX boards will come with 4+ 2.1 / 1s, 1-2x 3.2s, and maybe a 3.2 2x2. You can plug in all mice / keyboard to USB 2.1 / 1 ports as they require low bandwidth. You need to find a pretty special use case where a usb 3.2 is necessary (usb mic maybe). Moving on from USB, most MBs will have an HDMI and/or DisplayPort. These are for utilizing the integrated graphics of your CPU which, although is obviously less performant than the GPU, it could be good to utilize the integrated graphics for dual monitor setups so having a HDMI port for the integrated graphics is a nice feature to have. If the MB has integrated networking, there will also be an ethernet port and or wifi antenna port(s) on the IO. The last main IO feature is audio. Motherboards support various qualities of audio based on the codec. Anything less than 1000 is generally bad with ALC 1020+ being good. Higher codecs like ALC 4080 have additional features associated with headphone interface. Also, some MBs just have audio out, some have mic in, some use different types of audio jacks, these are all important considerations. One last thing about IO is that all MBs have the IO shield which faces out the back of the computer, but they also have several IO ports on the MB that can be exposed through connectors in the front of the case, so frequented USB devices, mics, headphones, or a fancy thunderbolt port, might be nice to have exposed in the front of the case rather than on the IO shield. The next major consideration is cooling / power. All MBs have VRMs which regulate power and more are better, usually something like 16+1+1 (with amp ratings like (70A, 60A, 60A). VRMs power cores and affect performance of multicore processing and overclocking. Also MBs are made of layers of copper and more are better for strength and heat. Heatsinks are important but not super quantitative. Every MB company has a special term for their “revolutionary” heatsink designs. That said, having a heatsink on the fast PCIe M.2 SSD is almost a must. 

Cooling

Fans are where most of the cooling happens. There are two types of cooling, CPU and general. The CPU needs to be specially cooled with a device that mounts directly through surface contact to the CPU to remove heat as fast as possible. The fans, however, that power the CPU cooler are the same as any other fans. You can also use liquid cooling to remove heat from the CPU. This all affects the motherboard in fan headers. There are 3 pin (DC) and 4 pin (PWM) fan headers. PWM is more efficient and most MBs have all 4 pin headers but can auto detect whether the fan is PWM or DC, it just comes down to what fans you get. The important factors are how many fan headers there are and how much power they can supply. You can hook multiple fans to the same fan header, but this means your MB can’t control each fan individually and they have to split the power. Having higher power rater for each fan header obviously means more powerful fans and more cooling. Most MBs come with one dedicated CPU FAN header, possible A CPU OPT (optional) additional fan header, and then four or more general FAN headers around the MBs perimeter. Your MB will do all the fan calculations for you per the profiles selected in the BIOS and to do this it needs temperature data so another thing to consider is how many internal and external thermometers exist on the MB. Most MB brands have their “revolutionary” AI cooling algorithm with “max” customizability and performance optimisation. 

Special Features

Lastly there are several random features which can be useful to have in a MB. Flashback is the ability to update the BIOS without a CPU, ram, or GPU installed. This just requires putting a memory stick into one of the USB ports with the bios on it and powering up the MB in flashback. This can be useful because some MBs have older BIOS version that are incompatible with new CPU gens so if flashback is not present, you can never update the bios since you cant run the CPU with the old bios and you need the CPU to update the BIOS. Some MBs have a noise detection feature to monitor noise levels from fans which factors into the fan algos and fan profiles. There are some nice-to-haves such as screwless GPU or SSD installation, positioning of fan or other port headers, and some MBs have two digit led numbers which can display error codes related to boot issues for troubleshooting. Also some MBs have dual bios or crashless bios to protect MB from a failed bios flash. 

CPU Cooler

All CPUs will heat up to their own death without a cooler to effectively regulate their temperatures. High core CPUs, especially when overclocked, can reach extreme temps. The general rule of thumb is that >100C is death for a CPU. The two main factors that go into a CPU Cooler is how much heat removal it can provide (or how low of a temp it can keep the CPU at) and how loud it is (obviously quite is better). The main priority is cooling and all coolers use fans so loudness is very secondary. There are two types of CPU Coolers: Air and Liquid. Air coolers or fan coolers do all the cooling right on the CPU. They conduct air through many metal pipes into large heatsinks above the CPU with zero or more fans attached to the heatsinks blowing air through them. The goal is to pull the heat from the CPU into the heatsinks as quickly and efficiently as possible and then remove it quickly too to allow more heat to keep flowing out. More fans at higher powers, speeds, diameters, all move heat away faster. Larger heatsinks with more surface area, copper pipes, and optimized geometry suck more heat out of the CPU. Liquid coolers work by pulling the heat from the cpu into water and then pumping that heat to a radiator (basically same as heatsink) with fans blowing the heat off the radiator. Liquid coolers are essentially just air coolers that don’t do the cooling directly above the CPU but instead off load it to a location of your choosing and to a radiator with potentially more room and more fans. Note that both air and liquid still use the same technique of pulling heat from the CPU with a highly conductive (copper) heat plate with thermal paste between the two. The main pros of air cooling is that it is usually cheaper than liquid cooling and can be great if you have a lot of case room, want more airflow inside of the case, and don’t expect your cpu to get too hot. The main downside is that air coolers are large and bulky with no maneuverability, to achieve the same performance of liquid coolers means matching their radiator sizes right smack in the middle of the case. Some air coolers can obstruct ram, GPUs, or just not fit into certain cases because of their designed size and orientation. Also, heavy air coolers can flex the motherboard and cause it to warp or even break overtime, whereas liquid cooler pumps are compact and lightweight. The benefits of liquid cooling are more customizability and options of where you put the radiator and what components you can fit into the case. Liquid coolers have different radiator sizes corresponding to the fans pushing air through them (120mm, 240mm, 280mm, 360mm) and the larger the radiator, the faster the cooling. Liquid cooling also is easier to build and looks aesthetically more pleasing. The main downsides are that it is more expensive and can fail more catastrophically than air coolers. For a cpu as intense as the i7 13700K air cooling is the way to go. In addition, the narrow case and beefy RTX 3080 would probably come in contact or at least be very close to a beefy CPU fan like the Noctua D15. Small profile liquid cooler pumps leave tons of room for airflow throughout the case and the radiator fans also contribute to case airflow.

Case

The case just needs to house everything and most cases differentiate themselves based on looks only but there are a couple important specs to look for in a case. Obviously compatibility is the first checkbox and some important specs that need to line up are: Motherboard size, Max GPU width and length (make sure that length includes the front fans), Max cpu air cooler fan height (if using air cooler cpu), and max radiator size (depending on install location) for liquid cooler setups. Airflow is probably the most important aspect of the case so make sure that there are adequate slots for case fans and plan out the desired airflow pattern ie front & bottom: intake, top and back: exhaust. Another major important feature is dust filtration. Having a case with a removable filter over front, bottom, or top panels is super helpful for maintaining a PC’s longevity.

Parts List

Intel Core i7-13700K - $440

16 cores speaks.

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 240 - $92

Downright sexy looking pump and high quality fans, perfect for top vents of case. Also need Prolimatech PK-2 Nano Aluminum High-Grade 1.5 g Thermal Paste for cpu heatspreader.

Gigabyte Z690 AORUS ELITE AX DDR4 - $250

• 16 @ 70A + 1 @ 60A + 2 70A VRM
• 30.5cm x 24.4cm
• 6-layer 2X copper PCB
• M.2 PCIe 4 x4 SSD support (one to CPU, three to chipset)
• 2 extra PCIe x16 (on chipset)
• ALC1220-VB
• RAM
  • Up to 5333 MT/s
  • XMP
• IO
  • USB-C (3.2 2x2) (rear)
  • 2x USB 3.2 (rear)
  • 1x USB-C 3.2 (header)
  • 3x USB 3.2 1 (rear)
  • 2x USB 3.2 1 (header)
  • 4x USB 2.0/1.1 (rear)
  • 4x USB 2.0/1.1 (header)
  • mic and lineout
  • HDMI
  • DP
  • 2 wifi antenna
  • ethernet
• Network
  • Wifi 6
  • 2.5GbE LAN
  • Bluetooth 5.2
• Cooling
  •  CPU, CPU-OPT, 4x other
  • 24W (12V) per fan header with overcurrent protection
  •  6 internal temp sensors for fan algo
• Special Features
  • Bios Flashback (QFlash Plus)
  • Built in IO shield
  • Smart Fan 6
  • Fast Boot
  • Smart Backup
  • System Information Viewer
  • Thermal Guard II on M.2

Overall nothing looks bad about this motherboard, super solid! There is a 690 version that only supports up to 6000 DDR 5 speeds but has a ALC 1220-VB (maybe the 790 has this but they forgot to mention it)

close ASUS runner up a bit cheaper

ASRock with pcie5 ssd but no wifi and worse others  -  same with this one

TEAMGROUP T-Create Expert 32 GB - $75

Budget RAM with First word latency of 10ns and clock speed of 3200 MT/s

Samsung 970 Evo Plus 1 TB - $110

Cheap for 1TB of SSD and samsung is name brand, no complaints, price variation is minimal, NVMe and PCIe 3.0 x4 directly to CPU

MSI VENTUS 3X PLUS OC GeForce RTX 3080 12GB LHR - $790

The cheapest manufacturer of 3080 but that doesn’t really matter.

Fractal Design Meshify C ATX Mid Tower Case - $98

Great airflow, filters on all intake fan vents, some internal bays, velcro straps for cable management, basement for PSU, support for liquid cooler, sleek design with nothing obtrusive or bold. Comes with two fans.

Thermaltake Toughpower GF1 PE 850 W - $105

80+ Gold Standard! Full Modular in case I decide / need different cables, good headroom above expected power consumption (737W). Cheap!

Thermaltake TOUGHFAN 58.35 CFM 120 mm Fans 2-Pack - $30

Total: $1996

Post Build

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYYoCXh2gtw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNZimwyfroo - ek aio ls1700 adapter

TODO: Driver stuff (links, compatibility, ect)

Check for warranty and possible warranty registration on all parts Always plug pc into surge protector

Post Mortem

Make sure RAM is ==compatible== and explicitly states as so with motherboard down to exact ram number in mobo spec compatibility sheet Cooling unit was not powerful enough and CPU hit 100C before maxing out potential, had to hard limit mobo to cap CPU at ~80C to maintain longevity but not able to use full CPU 😢 GPU maybe a bit overkill ram and cpu much needed, compile times are fast case was best overall component need to consider how to transport computer easily dual monitor support helpful no built in speaker is sometimes a pain wifi is a must insane USBc or thunderbolt or usb 3.2 is not that important double disk is the play and sabrent is super fast and good for os but the aux disk should have been like 2tb or more (or just get 3 disks) cuz i want mass video storage nvidia is nice but sometimes being on latest drivers pains blender or UE PSU is solid goat beast small computer vacuum is nice! ended up getting a different MOBO cuz i panicked hardcore