The pc I built two years ago (admittedly lo-spec) can't run latest games (e.g. red dead redemption 2) at all even on lowest settings, it struggles a bit on Far Cry 4 & 5 with settings dialed well down, notably display resolution.  :-S

AMD's recent CPUs are amazing, and so much better value than Intel. I recently got a Ryzen 5 3600 with a motherboard for £263 from ADW-IT (never heard of them before but PC Part Picker said they were the cheapest) and picked up 16GB of 3600Mhz RAM from Amazon. It's amazing. 6 cores, so handles running a VM, Photoshop, IntelliJ and other stuff at the same time easily, and for games it's only slightly slower than much more expensive Intel systems.

Nvidia are still great for their GPUs, especially the top end, but probably more expensive than AMD. Although, something like a GTX 1660 is great for the price, but no ray tracing, if you're into that sort of thing. I got a 2070 Super because my VR headset requires lots of pixel pushing.

The only thing that isn't as good as my old 2500K is the stock AMD Wraith Stealth cooler. It's definitely on the loud side, so I decided to swap it for something better.

What motherboard?

MSI B450 Tomahawk MAX. I did order the non-MAX which was £5 less, but they sent me a MAX, which was nice. The MAX has Zen 2 compatibility out of the box, whereas the other one requires a BIOS update to support it, which you can do from a flash drive without needing a CPU in the board.

I've had a couple of MSI boards, they're pretty solid & well-supported.

Oh wow, that's a full atx board, haven't had one of those since I was running NT4 on an original Athlon in a humongous tower case with 7 drive bays.

It's a decent board. Not the brand spanking new chipset but it handles the new CPUs just fine. The only issue I have with it is the graphical BIOS goes weird if I select UEFI mode, so I have to leave it in compatibility mode.

I'm still using a full tower case from 12 years ago. Do you have a mini one? Lots of nice mini ITX systems out there now.

Nah I stuck an mATX budget board into an old mid-tower. It's bigger than my previous build case, which is good because it's much less prone to overheating. Also the build was way easier with lots of room.

Yeah, it's funny the way that Intel was great and a few companies like Cyrix and AMD produced budget copies then AMD was the best for ages then Intel for even longer and now AMD seem to have taken the lead with their Ryzens and Threadrippers and 7 nano-metre  technology and 64 core CPUs.

I think if I was building a new computer now, I'd follow Chris and go down the AMD path.

For drives, certainly the system drive, you definitely want an M.2 NVME drive rather than SATA SSD. They're up to 7 times faster and getting faster and cheaper all the time. Most modern boards support this anyway. 

Personally, I would include an optical drive but that's mainly because I do a lot of ripping for my Plex and music libraries. 

Also, what Peter said about Ebuyer and Scan and Quiet PC. I've also bought stuff from them without a problem. 

Thanks all, lots to start looking at now. I'll definitely take a look at the NVME SSD drives - putting a SATA SSD in my current system was one of the best things I ever did. I'll be taking the approach of having a moderately sizeable SSD for the OS and whatever games I'm currently playing, and a traditional drive for media storage - possibly my existing one (think it's 2Tb and where near full) for starters, using the money I save for MOAR MEMORY.

Sounds like it's easier to get a case without an optical drive slot and go USB there.

Cooling and stuff - is that still a big deal? Fans still, yeah? Water cooling never quite managed to hit the mainstream, right?

I recently put a 512GB NVME drive in my laptop (ADATA SX8200PNP) which was under £60. It wasn't the big change that swapping a SATA HDD for an SSD was a while back, but it is generally snappier and seeing as that price is comparable to a 512GB SATA SSD of similar quality...

As for water cooling: I have this in two separate PCs. Easy to fit and very effective. I put one in my main Plex and backup PC which runs 24x7. It uses an elderly i7 860 in a relatively small case along with 6 drives. There isn't room for a big air cooler and it was idling around 50C and regularly getting up to 80C. That's within spec but I wasn't comfortable having that in an unattended PC. With the water cooling, it idles around 28C and seldom goes above 40C. 

My main desktop was worse. I put a great big Gelid heatsink/fan thing onto its i5 4690K and didn't really think about temperatures which was scary, because I just happened to check when I was doing some video transcoding and found that all the cores were getting within a couple of degrees of 100C. With the Corsair thingy, temperatures now get to about 55C maximum.

The pump and case fan aren't silent, but they're pretty good.

All In One (AIO) water coolers are pretty good. I've got the Corsair H80 I think, which is like WilliamA's except a little bit more, I guess. Very straightforward to fit (well, about the same as normal ones) and not as gigantic and heavy as the air cooling ones, which I feel is good for these tower cases even if I intellectually know they must be fine.

If you're interested in water cooling I'd recommend spending a little more than I did on the Corsair H55. The cooling performance is excellent, it's well made and easy to fit, but it has a couple of issues. It was designed to be small and quiet, but to a price. This means, for instance, that the supplied fan is not PWM controlled out of the box and runs at one speed. On my Backup PC this is fine and the whole thing runs very quiet indeed. On the other PC, the fan could only be fitted at one point which seemed to be the sweet spot for case resonance and noise. After about 3 months of irritation I fixed it by replacing the fan with a better one from Corsair. 

One thing that did interest me. I saw that Chris built his PC on a full ATX board. Did you have any thoughts about this? Having just built a full-fat Windows PC on a tiny mini-stx board and leaving aside all the obvious jokes about size mattering, are you going for anything in particular?

Agreed, I went with a Corsair AIO water cooler when I built my Ryzen rig a couple of years back, it's been solid ever since and is nice and quiet. Mine is the H110i, it is PWM and can be controlled very easily from an app within Windows.

Personally, I'd also go the Ryzen route. AMD's current CPUs are very competitive in terms of performance, and usually much cheaper than Intel's chips as well. I have the Ryzen 7 1700X (8 core, 16 thread) and it's been great so far. Reliable and handles everything I throw at it with ease.

Another thing to consider is www.quietpc.com - decent site and plenty of bits that are designed/chosen to be nice and quiet. I bought my case, fans and CPU cooler from them, then eBuyered the other bits.

Only part I had a problem with was my original motherboard - I went for an MSI one and it had an intermittent fault with the SATA controller that caused some of my mechanical data drives to randomly disappear and re-appear. In the end I managed to RMA it and replaced it with a Gigabyte Gaming 5 motherboard which has been rock solid - I do also like that it has an LED character display on the board, so if it fails to boot at all, it is easy to look up the code in the manual and see where the issue is.

A lot of coolers now are huge. I was looking at Be Quiet and Noctua coolers and most are so tall they wouldn't fit in my tower case.

I did end up buying a smaller Noctua that's much quieter than the stock AMD but the bigger ones would have kept it a bit cooler.

On a account of Win 7 going unsupported last week & MrsD. needing online banking, we decided to do her a Win 10 + 'new' [refurb] pc twofer:

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=7_158&item_id=123156


(& I get a server upgrade out of it)

Looks pretty decent and very good value at that price.

This'll be the 3rd refurb hp SFF we've bought for MrsD. in the past ~15-years. Usually better value than a home build for sub-gaming stuff, considering the OS is 'free'.

'budget copy'? u na fneek ect 

lol, I do enjoy a gag that takes that much effort to get in.

I wonder whatever happened to WeeDave.