New gaming/virtualization build

btramer

Junior Member
Mar 17, 2009
7
0
61
Hi, it's been almost exactly 5 years since my last build, and it's basically falling apart so that means it's time for me to dig back into the hardware/rig building game. I generally like to do a whole new build every 5 years or so, so I'm happy with how this one has lasted.

Per the sticky, here are the answers to the questions to help narrow down choices/recommendations:

  1. I work remotely as a part owner in an IT consultancy, as such I do a TON of virtualization (locally in addition to cloud based stuff), and I want to be able to play the latest/greatest games when I have spare time (not that often these days, but I like having the option available).
  2. Budget for just the PC is about $2000, although I could probably justify going up to $2500 if necessary and it makes sense. As I'm not counting the monitor in the figures I just listed, I see the high end gaming monitors start around $1000+, so that will be a separate purchase (although recommendations there are also welcome).
  3. Will likely be buying all my stuff online from US vendors (I live in the US), NewEgg/Amazon, etc etc. I'll likely wait until Black Friday once I know exactly what components I'm going to purchase, and see if I can get some deals since we're almost in November anyway.
  4. n/a
  5. No brand preference, just want the best performance I can get for the $$, although historically I've stuck with Intel for processors, but graphics cards I usually go with whatever the latest and greatest is at the time and have jumped back and forth between all the major players.
  6. Not intending to use any current parts except external USB drives for storage. Current internal hard drive is a Samsung SSD 840 Pro 250GB drive which was hot back in 2012 when I bought it, I'm sure today's drives blow this away so I most likely won't reuse it unless maybe a secondary drive, but even then it's pretty small from a storage standpoint, especially for late 2017.
  7. No plans to overclock, I want high end stuff that performs without having to tweak a whole lot, when I was younger and had more time than budget I was more into this sort of thing.
  8. Resolution, I'd like it to be capable of whatever the top end games/cards run at these days, I'm sure there is a sweet spot (just don't know what it is) for the more demanding modern games, so I want something capable of running them.
  9. Plan is to buy all the parts on/around Black Friday, and build it as soon as I get the parts, so about a month from now give or take.
  10. Will need a Windows 10 pro license, everything else, Office 365/etc I charge through my company so nothing else to buy right now.
 

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
Aug 25, 2001
56,554
10,171
126
For a gaming-oriented build, you're going to want to go with an Intel Coffee Lake 6C/12T 8700K CPU. For VMs, you might want to explore going with an AMD ThreadRipper / TR4 / X399 platform.
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
126
The Coffee Lake 8700K should also be great for virtualization unless you need to run more than 6 high-load VMs that are all active at the same time.

The sweet spots for gaming are 1080p - 1440p. You can game at 4K (2160p) if you really want to but that hammers even the fastest single graphics card the GTX 1080ti. What resolution is the monitor that you plan to use with this?

How much disk I/O do your local VMs use, light or heavy? How much disk space do you expect to need?

Samsung M.2 NVME drives (960 EVO, 960 Pro) are much faster than 6GB SATA drives like the 850 EVO/Pro, but they are also much more expensive. Today you can get a 1 TB 850 Evo for $275 from Newegg, while the 1 TB 960 EVO M.2 is $435.
 

btramer

Junior Member
Mar 17, 2009
7
0
61
How much disk I/O do your local VMs use, light or heavy? How much disk space do you expect to need?

Probably more on the lighter side, production VMs which I run in either cloud or customer owned hardware I/O is more important, for my home build not as important as these are mostly for testing and so I have a variety of OS's at my fingertips at all times should I need them.

Storage, my primary/OS drive wouldn't have to be so big, and would be the disk where speed would probably be the most important factor. Maybe say 1TB? This is flexible right now though, I have a lot of external/slow storage that I use for just data storage.
 

DaveSimmons

Elite Member
Aug 12, 2001
40,730
670
126
If you plan to install the VMs and other applications on the boot drive, then you would benefit from the 960 Evo M.2 drive if the budget allows for it. 1 TB is the largest size for the Evo so there you go.

If you're fine with gaming at 1080p resolution then a GTX 1070 or 1070 ti will save you a lot of money over the GTX 1080 ti.
 
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