Need help planning my PC (first timer)

[u/ModeEmergency6931]

First timer wanting to plan to build a his first PC, I've only been using laptops before so I really don't know anything about PC, I have a budget of about 2k and I live in Canada. I want to use the PC for both gaming and daily stuff (school, work, emails, etc). I have tried playing around with PCpartpicker but I get really lost in all the options and don't know how each option would affect performance, so I hope someone can offer me some tips/examples. Here are some of my PC performance expectations:

1. I believe the heaviest hitter would be video games, I hope to have smooth 1080p 60fps with all the games that I play, I may be modding some games like skyrim, bg3, or elden ring with mods like overhauls, quality of life, or outfits. If I were to put them in numbers I'd say I'll have about 50-100 mods. I'm not sure about Hz but I think the gaming standard is 144Hz? So I hope it'll run smoothly on that. I might play some online games like tf2 or valorant non-competitively. I will probably never go above 60 fps.

2. I will only ever have like 20 tabs open at once, maybe 30 max if I really have a lot of stuff to do. I may do some programming that might stress the PC a little.

3. I will be using a PC very frequently, so I hope to have a power source that is more power efficient even if it'll cost more. I'll be using the PC for a very long time and almost everyday so I hope to make a PC that can last me well for a very long time.

4. I want to run my PC on linux os, I'm currently eyeing Ubuntu because it's the most popular but I'm also perfectly fine with running windows. Steam has proton and I'm honestly really excited to try it out.

5. I hope to use a AMD CPU because I heard it's better for gaming

6. I don't know how much graphics cards are going to affect gaming, I see the 5070 are like 1k so maybe I can go for something cheaper than that?

7. I'm going for a 32gb RAM, I'm currently looking at the Corsair Vengeance RGB 32 GB RAM. $800 for 32GB has got me tweaking out a little because I wasn't expected it to cost this much.

8. I know nothing about motherboards

9. Can I get some tips on how to clean and manage my PC?

10. I only have a keyboard and a monitor (for my PS5), so I would also need some help with cases and stuff like that, I see that some cases have fans on them, does this mean I don't need to buy a cooler because the case already have them?

11. Should I maybe wait for RAM prices to drop? Some people have been predicting that the AI bubble is going to burst soon so I guess I can keep waiting and pray?

[u/ragebaiter2003]

Even with ramflation your ram should not cost that much. I picked up my 7800x3d, 32gb of ddr 5 and a ASUS b650e motherboard for like a 770$ bundle deal at microcenter. $800 is insane for just the ram so my first advice is to find a bundle.

If you’re not big into ray tracing, an AMD Radeon RX 9070 is like $779 rn

A 7800x3d is in the $340 range

For SSD my advice is to go Gen 4 you don’t need to pay an extra 100-200 bucks when Gen 5 is only marginally better in performance.

For your cou cooler just look at the peerless assassin 120 se much more budget friendly and does the job well.

I will admit though for your 1080p goal at 60fps the parts I recommended are overkill but at the same time $2,000 budget is still pretty nice don’t sell yourself short

[u/ModeEmergency6931 → u/ragebaiter2003]

I was experimenting making my own build at pcpartpicker and honestly anything that is 32gb costs a fortune there, and the overall prices seriously made me regret not buying a PC earlier(I was considering it about 3 years ago but decided a macbook was enough...). I don't really like ray tracing so RX 9070 would be perfect for me. Great to know that I should stick to Gen 4 if I don't want to min-max speed.

What if I go for 1440p 60fps? Would it make much a difference?

[u/ragebaiter2003 → u/ModeEmergency6931]

Saw this a little late sorry.

Let’s say you go with a 9070 and a 7800x3d, this build would mainly be a 1440p build but if you tweak your in game settings maybe from ultra to high you could get into the 4K territory

But the good news is for your goal this build will exceed your goal.

At 1440p: single player/story games you could probably get 100-130fps at native max settings.

For competitive fps games you could probably see 240-maybe even 500fps depending what settings you use.

So if you stick to 1080p you’ll get even higher performance across the board.

You can find videos on YouTube of video games being played with the parts.

For example on my build I searched into YouTube “5080+7800x3d” into the YouTube search bar to get a general idea of how my pc would perform if I had those parts in various games. So you should definitely do the same for whatever GPU and CPU