With 2019 comes a new year and a new rig! I upgrade to a 1070 SC card recently and realized my second gen Xeon Sandy Bridge wasn’t cutting it (3.3GHz quad core, e3-1245). I was only using about 20-40% of the GPU under the heaviest load so the CPU was a massive bottleneck. It went downhill from there.
I spoke with a couple of my friends who know hardware more than myself about the latest generation of CPUs/GPUs/etc. I ended up going with the following:
- Case: Cooler Master MasterCase H500 ATX Mid-Tower, tempered glass panel, two 200mm RGB fans
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 2600 Processor with Wraith Stealth Cooler
- Motherboard: MSI Performance Gaming AMD X470
- RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance RGB PRO 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3200MHz C16 LED Desktop Memory – Black
- SSD Boot: Kingston Digital SA1000M8/240G A1000 240GB PCIe NVMe M.2 2280
- SSD Games: 1TB Kingston SATA 6GB/s
- PSU: Corsair Modular 550W
- GPU: EVGA 1070 SC
- Monitor: 1440p, overclocked to 88Hz
This thing has been a monster. I was blown away at the speed difference a true NVME drive can make even against an SSD. So far, I’ve been able to run just about everything on High/Ultra at 1440p and maintaining 90FPS or higher to keep up with the overclocked monitor. GTA V is stunning now and runs incredibly smooth. Another added benefit: I can now stream without some of the hiccups from the CPU I’d seen previously.
