The Evolution of PC Building: A Guide to Adapters and Power Supplies

As technology advances, so do our expectations from our computing devices. One common misconception is that adapters can bridge any gap between older and newer components. However, this approach often leads to frustration and unnecessary upgrades down the line. In reality, adapters can be a temporary fix but ultimately, they may not address the underlying issue. A better approach is to upgrade your power supply when necessary, ensuring that it can handle the demands of your system. This might involve upgrading from 4-pin to 8-pin connectors or investing in a high-quality power supply that can deliver clean power to your CPU.

The Need for Power Delivery

A reliable power supply is crucial for optimal performance and longevity. As technology improves, so do our computing needs. However, older power supplies may not be able to keep up with the demands of newer components. This can lead to reduced performance, overheating, or even system failure. In some cases, the power supply might be the limiting factor in your build, even if you're not planning on overclocking. It's essential to choose a power supply that can deliver clean power to your CPU, ensuring stable operation and minimizing downtime.

The Truth About NVMe SSDs

One of the most significant advancements in storage technology is the NVMe solid-state drive (SSD). These drives offer incredible speeds, with some models reaching up to 7,000 megabytes per second read/write. However, it's essential to understand that not all situations require the speed and performance offered by NVMe SSDs. In reality, most users won't notice a significant difference between an NVMe drive and a SATA drive for standard computing tasks. Furthermore, SATA drives are often more affordable, with prices comparable to those of NVMe drives.

The Reality of Storage Capacity

While NVMe SSDs offer impressive speeds, the capacity and price point can be a deciding factor for many users. A 500-gigabyte NVMe drive may not be enough for some applications, such as large game installations or massive data transfers. In these cases, a larger storage capacity is often more valuable than the added speed of an NVMe drive. This is where SATA drives come into play, offering more affordable options with capacities that can rival those of NVMe drives.

The Benefits of SATA Drives

SATA drives have long been considered inferior to NVMe drives due to their slower speeds and limited capacity. However, recent advancements have improved the performance and affordability of SATA drives. Modern SATA drives can reach speeds of up to 550 megabytes per second, making them a viable option for many users. Additionally, SATA drives are often more affordable than NVMe drives, with prices that can be attractive to those on a budget.

The Importance of Build Planning

As technology advances, it's essential to plan your build carefully, considering the needs and limitations of each component. This involves choosing components that work well together, rather than relying on adapters or upgrading individual parts at the last minute. By taking the time to research and plan your build, you can avoid unnecessary upgrades and create a more efficient, cost-effective system.

The Rise of PC Building Again

In recent years, PC building has experienced a resurgence in popularity, with many enthusiasts and hobbyists returning to their roots. As prices begin to drop and new technologies emerge, it's an exciting time for builders. With the help of online resources like this article, users can make informed decisions about their builds, choosing components that meet their needs and budget.

The Future of PC Building

As technology continues to evolve, so will our computing needs. It's essential to stay informed about the latest developments in the industry, from advancements in storage technology to improvements in power delivery systems. By embracing these changes and planning your build carefully, you can create a system that meets your needs and stays ahead of the curve.

The Importance of Realism

One common misconception is that YouTube channels like this one promote unnecessary upgrades or expensive builds. However, our goal is to provide practical advice and guidance for users who want to build a PC that meets their needs. We promise to return to more basic budget builds in the future, focusing on creating systems that are realistic and relatable for the average consumer.

Conclusion

Building a PC can be an overwhelming experience, especially with the numerous options available. However, by understanding the importance of adapters, power supplies, NVMe SSDs, storage capacity, and build planning, you can create a system that meets your needs and stays within your budget. As technology continues to evolve, it's essential to stay informed and adapt to the changing landscape. With this guide, we hope to have provided valuable insights and practical advice for users looking to build or upgrade their PC.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enone of the biggest lies you've ever been told in computers is the fact that you need a big expensive one so today we're going to combat that with some actual information on where to kind of like yeah we've done this video before but we have to do it again because things are always changing designed to bring a balance of performance and cost to gamers the bg5 m.2 ssd from keoxia is an obvious choice the bg5 ssd utilizes kyoccia's fifth generation 112 layer by cs flash 3d memory and uses a dram list architecture leveraging host memory buffer technology to maintain affordable power and efficiency and for those needing a more robust storage and professional use geoxys cd7 features pcie gen 5 and 32 giga transfers per second perfect for enterprise and data center solutions to see the complete list of storage options from kyoccia whether it be for everyday use in pc gaming or professional enterprise and data center solutions follow the sponsored link in the description below we'll start with processors here uh you know it's fun to have a big powerful processor to count all your cores just be like yeah look at that one go most things are not really hyper-threaded these days i mean they are or multi-threaded depending on what you do but you know with games and such you'll notice if you get a high core count cpu they're not being utilized they're not all being utilized especially an intel cpu that has hyper threading twelfth genocide because e core p core thing is is still very new in the way that it's all working together but you know when when we were getting 10 core 20 thread you know 100ks and stuff you would notice that the actual physical core itself is doing stuff but the hyper-threaded equivalent core is most most of the time sitting there dormant not doing anything um games are starting to use more cpu than they did in the past but i'll tell you right now having a even a 24 core 48 thread threadripper for gaming is complete overkill and a waste of money and a huge diminishing return on something you spent that you're not going to get your your your money back for in terms of use if you're not doing any professional tasks that use that kind of cpu there's a reason why the longest time intel stuck with the four core eight thread hyper-threaded approach and that's because that's all you needed now things are using a little bit more cpu like we've got eldon ring that just came out that is definitely gonna be a more cpu intensive game um but if you're playing shooters or anything that renders a map and everything stays within that map and you don't have any world popping in and you know free roam kind of sandbox play then cpu is something that you don't have to spend a lot of money on my recommendation quite honestly and no it's not a core i3 this is just a i have not opened this this is a 7100 that shows you how long ago we got this so brand new in the box because i'd intended on doing a similar video to this where i showed how the bottom dollar build would still get you somewhere um things had moved on before i had a chance to make that video so maybe we will make that video with this cpu to see how it performs today anyways i digress anything that is around four core eight thread is still plenty for today's uh games and tasks six core 12 thread on ryzen tends to be more that middle stream because they kind of moved up above the four quarry thread a long time ago same thing on intel a 12 900 k although it sounds like fun and you know pretty hot but you know the 12 700k or even the 12 600k is more than enough for today's game the core speed definitely makes up for the core count in almost all of these situations and games and titles are not utilizing high core counts so don't overspend and give yourself a huge diminishing return on performance by over specking your cpu graphics cards are very similar we all love the idea of a 3080ti or 3080 or 3090 in our system or the unicorn 30 90 ti which i think might have been scrapped actually because if you notice that nvidia announced it and then it just sort of never happened let's hope that that's the case everyone wants a 3080 3080 ti of course why not that's like saying would you like more performance or less performance oh less performance please you know that's that's never the case but if you think about the resolution at which you play games in that's the determining factor that what kind of graphics card that you need ray tracing dlss nvidia reflex all that sort of stuff that's all fluff on top of what it is that you're paying for those are features that are not going to necessarily make or break your experience dlss is something that is designed to make high resolution gaming as buttery smooth as lower resolution gaming like 1080p without a perceived fidelity loss in the upscaling if you were playing at something like 1080p the lss becomes a lot less of a feature to concern yourself with because usually 1080p is the baseline resolution for dlss that's being upscaled so depending on the resolution you're playing at 1440p or 4k that would determine whether or not you need a higher-end graphics card i can tell you right now 90 of people out there don't need anything more than around a 2060. now 2060 would be something like a 1070 ti of course 2060s who do have dlss and ray tracing don't worry about those features on this card worry about rasterization performance most people are not going to turn ray tracing on still because of the performance hit i'm one of those people that has a very select few games that i'll turn on ray tracing not just because i want to see the eye candy as i'm going around um dying light 2 is one of them for phil that game is obviously control in cyberpunk um he's playing on a 6900xt so it looks a lot more cinematic than it did in nvidia but uh he wants to see the eye candy it's less about the actual high frame rates and it's more about the fidelity of the way that the scene looks we would all love to spend money on a 380 ti it's harder to say that it would be a waste of money only because the higher end graphics card at the lower resolution will remain relevant longer into the future than say a graphics card that barely meets your needs now but this is from the perspective of i don't have the extra money to spend should i should i try and get the money to spend it so the graphics card might be the only place it makes sense to overspec a little bit and that's just about about future you know relevance in terms of being able to maintain that minimum 60 fps requirement for most people in games at your current resolution longer into the future the problem is as graphics card techno technology and performance scales up so does the demand of the titles uh as they come out later on like cyberpunk i think realized maybe a lot of people realize i need to upgrade because even 1080p was chugging along for many people under 60fps because the game was just so demanding that's an area where it makes sense to spend a little more but it's also an area it's easy to really overspend because if you get yourself a 3080 ti and then you pair it with a super low end cpu the high frame rates can be limited by your cpu unable to draw the frame fast enough so there's a balancing act that has to happen there memory y'all remember this stuff memory is another one of those areas where companies started they really started having to make it stand out aesthetically to make people want it with computer cases now having side panel windows and just about all of them it's hard to find a case these days it doesn't have a side panel window they exist but they're rare companies have really started adding a lot of flashy features big giant heat spreaders rgb strips on there and crazy designs like this t-force t-group d-force memory at the end of the day it's the spec it's the nand it's or the the the chips themselves the controller their speed and their timings that make memory valuable not the other stuff that's thrown on there so you could have a basic kit of memory like this this is an eight gigabyte kit of patriot signature line green pcb basic black heat spreader nothing special it is only 2 400 megahertz dim this would definitely be a bargain bin type of ram for today and i'm not talking about ddr5 i mean almost everyone's still running ddr4 so it's still very relevant the memory speed is an area that's also very easy to overspend and get caught up in the hype five thousand megahertz dimms do exist in ddr4 we have 52 or 5100 megahertz dims in ddr4 from our crucial ballistics i there's only one cpu i could get that to run at and that was actually the 11 900k was able to run the that speed uh because to run that speed you're overclocking the memory controller built into the cpu and it's not guaranteed that it will run most p i get i get a lot of emails from people that say i enable xmp and my system boot loops or crashes and won't post and then when they send me their specs it's because they have something like a an amd ryzen cpu that they're trying to enable 4 000 megahertz dims on well the problem is that that puts the memory infinity fabric above its 1900 or 1800 megahertz safe range where then it becomes unstable and so they paid for memory speed that they can't utilize so it's very important to make sure that you don't overspend on on ram speed because that speed is only going to be important to people that use programs that need fast memory photoshop cad drawings 3d 3d rendering video editing all touch ram in a different way but more ram is more often more important than the speed of the ram so i would highly recommend 16 gigabytes right around 3 000 megahertz that's kind of like the sweet spot that will just about run on every cpu i've never had a 3000 or 3200 dimm kit not be able to run docp slash xmp settings and it's you don't unless you need 32 gigabytes or more 16 gigs is perfect for the guy that wants to do live streaming maybe render some basic youtube videos without a ton of transparencies and layers and you're not gonna you're not gonna notice that you're running out of ram just don't get caught up in the hype because we're talking like a forty five dollar set of ram versus a two hundred dollar set of ram or 184 dollars when this was new so that's something to keep in mind with memory it's really easy to overspend 16 gigabytes 3 000 megahertz from a reputable brand company a ram company that's you know crucial corsair g skill uh team group is now much more known than it was it's definitely a reputable brand and if you stick with those major brands i mean even patriot but patriots really kind of slowly been disappearing over the years you're gonna be set just make sure if you're running an amd cpu that it does say it's xmp or docp and ryzen certified that way you know the timings will work intel it almost works every time we've talked about cps we've talked about gpus it's about coolers this is one of those areas where you can quickly and easily rack up the budget i mean you could have a 200 aio or a 24 air cooler and not gain anything out of the extra expense of the water cooler this particular vitru vitro v5 cooler we showed on amazon we've sold it out many times because i this is still my favorite air cooler for the price we've done videos on this you should go and check it out um it's not a sponsor they didn't send this to me i bought out a bunch of them online because when we did our first video they sold out forever and when they restocked they didn't up the price so i bought like five more in white and black because whether or not i used it on amd or intel it was able to keep our systems well within their turbo clocks for their expected time to run those turbo clocks without throttling no matter what the workload was we threw it it's a great cooler for the price and as long as you're able to maintain the advertised speeds of your cpu without thermal throttling your cooler is doing its job in a previous video i talked about the stock cooler being much better today than it ever was in the past any box cooler that comes with the cpus and depending on your workload and your ambient temperature in your environment you very rarely need more than that my recommendation is if you want to go above the box cooler now we're pretty much talking ryzen here intel hasn't included box coolers in years with their cpus once they broke away from the four core non-hyper-threaded like layout because the i7 with hyper threading typically didn't come with the box cooler it was the i5s that did once they went they broke that mold of the four core setup they are like you're on your own for the cooler i would recommend if you want to upgrade your ryzen cooler or if you have an intel cpu the vitro v5 i really really would again not sponsored uh they've even reached out wanted to sponsor videos and i basically was like thanks but no thanks we already did videos on it there's no reason to like accept sponsorship on it highly recommended water coolers and aios going bigger than this makes sense if you want to start overclocking your cpu now overclocking is going to come down to its limiting factor more so being the silicon lottery what voltage and the asic quality your cpu requires to try and pump more uh well you have to pump more voltage usually to get a higher core clock if you have a silicon lottery winner you may not have to that's going to determine how far you go before your cooler typically because you can have the world's biggest cooler and have an air conditioner hooked up to it but if it requires a ridiculous amount of voltage the thermal transfer between the cpu ihs and the cooler itself is never going to happen fast enough to keep the cpu from thermal throttling now water coolers and aios with screens and stuff on them like you can see right here right this has the the little lcd screen that you can put a gif on and whatnot show all sorts of telemetry that's cool to have but it's completely unnecessary because you can do and see all the same stuff on your screen with a ton of free software hardware monitor um ada64 technically has a free version but it's very locked down versus what the purchase license annual license will get you you can create all of this get yourself a little lcd panel from like a raspberry pi and do a sensor panel like we showed you guys how to do for much cheaper than the difference in price between a basic cooler like this and an aio and you would still have all the display if you really want that it'd be a lot cooler than what you can typically get uh visible on these small screens built on your cpu so you can see now if you if you took this this philosophy and you didn't spend as much on your cooler because you didn't need to go as far and there's a there's a huge range of air coolers between this and this that you could consider as well there's single tower coolers you know you've got your be quiet coolers you've got your noctua coolers your single tower your dual tower dual tower your down fire all sorts of coolers that would do the job and keep the system cool and overclocked long before you needed anything water wise so if you saved money on the cooler and you didn't go as high on the cpu as you thought you did you kept it down maybe one or two tiers you didn't overspend on your ram means now you might be able to go from something 2060 range up until like a 2070 2070 ti or 70 series card as an example or maybe even get up near an 80 series card depending on what prices are like when you're building your system so you can see how you can easily change around and move parts the last bit of this i want to talk about here is power supplies and i did talk a bit about this too in the um the video about advice that aged like fine milk this is a fairly basic power supply from rog uh from asus even though it's strix moniker it's a 650 watt gold now it's got other features and stuff built into it like zero rpm fan uh you know it's it's got um other features in there we won't necessarily need to go into it gets the job done right this is an 850 watt g6 from evga and this is also an 80 plus gold remember how i told you how the 80 plus 80 plus bronze and 80 plus silver were like all but dead this is an example of that 80 plus gold is like the gold standard now it's like where everything starts you don't need to over spec your power supply these days the old adage of over speccing your power supply so you stay within the efficiency curve where it's most efficient before it drops back down once as it starts to reach its max output that's kind of over now because that curve is much more flat at the top and that's because of the the build quality and the components used now and the fact that just about everything is 80 plus gold now you might be inclined to go well i want to get a platinum or i want to get a titanium you pay exponentially more money for those components over anything in the gold rating and what you're gaining out of it is potential longer life of the psu which means it could survive several upgrades before you need to change it but i've i've never had an 80 plus gold power supply die on me before a platinum or titanium and to be fair i've never had any gold or platinum power supply die on me period i still have i still have ones over there that are sitting at the bottom of my shelf that we've used off and on for 10 years and they're still running perfectly fine so it's one of those things where you can easily overspend an 80 plus gold power supply built from a reputable company that's not living its life at its edge will last you longer than your system in most instances which means it'll survive upgrades and the only time people typically needed to upgrade their sys their power supply for their system is because it maybe didn't have enough connectors you know it didn't have enough connectors where uh you have now your your triple pci express cards which have three power plugs and maybe yours only has two and they don't have pigtails you only have two cables so then you're starting to use adapters and that's never a good idea so you might have to upgrade your power supply because the times changed which made your power supply obsolete in terms of its connectors before the actual power delivery system became a problem so i've experienced that a couple of times over the years where i just had to beef up the power supply because maybe the system i was building and needs 2 eps power 8 pin power because we want to do overclocking and stuff we want nice clean delivery to the cpu well the power supply came with an 8 pin and a 4 pin or just an 8 pin so stuff like that might be your limiting factor before it ever becomes power delivery the last thing i want to talk about here which i don't have on the table is people's ideas that they need an nvme ssd nvmes are nice they truly are they're plug and play right they plug right on the motherboard or the nvme card depending on the kind of motherboard that you have they're fast if it's pc gen 4 you're getting up to 7 000 megabytes per second read write which is also a very marketing um it's very much marketing because only certain read write situations on the side the larger the file the faster the read if you have a lot of small files that's having to search for it's obviously a lot slower than that but it's faster than a spinning drive of course but a lot of folks think they need that over a sata ssd now sata ssds are are capped we are moved well beyond the saturation of of the sata cable interface and the amount of speed that the drive can transfer the drives exceed that now which is about 550 megabytes per second on sata six and the new standard is nvme because that's direct pci express lanes all right pci expert i said pci express express express lanes that's for you know when you have an express lane and then you have another lane for those that are like high occupancy express i don't know whatever i've seen those lanes before i digress completely besides the point most people believe it or not will not know the difference between a 550 megabyte per second drive and a 5 000 megabyte per second drive in standard computing if you're not moving around large files if you're not doing huge data transfers you would never know in fact i feel like that would be a fun blind taste test is to see if we can identify the say the drive versus the the nvme drive system where they're identical otherwise but try and say is this nvme or s or sata and the thing is you can get some killer deals on state of drives would you rather have a 500 gigabyte nvme ssd or a 2 terabyte sata drive so the only thing the only downside people have now regarding satas and it's the reason why i tend to not use them in builds anymore it's just cleaner you don't have to have a state of power going to it and you don't have to have a sata connector going to your motherboard so it's just cleaner but i would much rather have multiples of sata drives if i had to make the choice one smaller nvme or a much larger storage capacity because here's the reality you can get a two terabyte sata drive for about the same price or less than a 500 or 480 gigabyte nvme drive and i'd much rather have the capacity over the extra speed which i'm not going to notice in day to day anyway especially with how big games are today games exceeding 100 gigabytes that 480 ain't going to go very far once you have your windows partition on there so anyway i hope this video has given some food for thought as prices are starting to get better on things people are building again i'm getting a lot more requests for for build see i could always tell when people weren't building or watching these videos because i i would just never get messages asking me hey jay can you provide me with a like a pc part picker list here's my price range i was getting those messages dozens of times a day and then for months maybe a year i get like one a week now i'm getting multiples a day again which tells me things are improving people are building and now they're watching and hopefully this information saves someone some money where they could shift it around in their build to make it make sense don't believe the lies that youtube channels like mine tell you where we build big ass expensive computers unnecessarily that's a problem i've contributed to the issue by building these crazy systems which are completely unnecessary where i promise you we're gonna get back to more basic budget builds that is much more realistic and relatable for the average consumer all right guys thanks for watching we'll see in the next oneone of the biggest lies you've ever been told in computers is the fact that you need a big expensive one so today we're going to combat that with some actual information on where to kind of like yeah we've done this video before but we have to do it again because things are always changing designed to bring a balance of performance and cost to gamers the bg5 m.2 ssd from keoxia is an obvious choice the bg5 ssd utilizes kyoccia's fifth generation 112 layer by cs flash 3d memory and uses a dram list architecture leveraging host memory buffer technology to maintain affordable power and efficiency and for those needing a more robust storage and professional use geoxys cd7 features pcie gen 5 and 32 giga transfers per second perfect for enterprise and data center solutions to see the complete list of storage options from kyoccia whether it be for everyday use in pc gaming or professional enterprise and data center solutions follow the sponsored link in the description below we'll start with processors here uh you know it's fun to have a big powerful processor to count all your cores just be like yeah look at that one go most things are not really hyper-threaded these days i mean they are or multi-threaded depending on what you do but you know with games and such you'll notice if you get a high core count cpu they're not being utilized they're not all being utilized especially an intel cpu that has hyper threading twelfth genocide because e core p core thing is is still very new in the way that it's all working together but you know when when we were getting 10 core 20 thread you know 100ks and stuff you would notice that the actual physical core itself is doing stuff but the hyper-threaded equivalent core is most most of the time sitting there dormant not doing anything um games are starting to use more cpu than they did in the past but i'll tell you right now having a even a 24 core 48 thread threadripper for gaming is complete overkill and a waste of money and a huge diminishing return on something you spent that you're not going to get your your your money back for in terms of use if you're not doing any professional tasks that use that kind of cpu there's a reason why the longest time intel stuck with the four core eight thread hyper-threaded approach and that's because that's all you needed now things are using a little bit more cpu like we've got eldon ring that just came out that is definitely gonna be a more cpu intensive game um but if you're playing shooters or anything that renders a map and everything stays within that map and you don't have any world popping in and you know free roam kind of sandbox play then cpu is something that you don't have to spend a lot of money on my recommendation quite honestly and no it's not a core i3 this is just a i have not opened this this is a 7100 that shows you how long ago we got this so brand new in the box because i'd intended on doing a similar video to this where i showed how the bottom dollar build would still get you somewhere um things had moved on before i had a chance to make that video so maybe we will make that video with this cpu to see how it performs today anyways i digress anything that is around four core eight thread is still plenty for today's uh games and tasks six core 12 thread on ryzen tends to be more that middle stream because they kind of moved up above the four quarry thread a long time ago same thing on intel a 12 900 k although it sounds like fun and you know pretty hot but you know the 12 700k or even the 12 600k is more than enough for today's game the core speed definitely makes up for the core count in almost all of these situations and games and titles are not utilizing high core counts so don't overspend and give yourself a huge diminishing return on performance by over specking your cpu graphics cards are very similar we all love the idea of a 3080ti or 3080 or 3090 in our system or the unicorn 30 90 ti which i think might have been scrapped actually because if you notice that nvidia announced it and then it just sort of never happened let's hope that that's the case everyone wants a 3080 3080 ti of course why not that's like saying would you like more performance or less performance oh less performance please you know that's that's never the case but if you think about the resolution at which you play games in that's the determining factor that what kind of graphics card that you need ray tracing dlss nvidia reflex all that sort of stuff that's all fluff on top of what it is that you're paying for those are features that are not going to necessarily make or break your experience dlss is something that is designed to make high resolution gaming as buttery smooth as lower resolution gaming like 1080p without a perceived fidelity loss in the upscaling if you were playing at something like 1080p the lss becomes a lot less of a feature to concern yourself with because usually 1080p is the baseline resolution for dlss that's being upscaled so depending on the resolution you're playing at 1440p or 4k that would determine whether or not you need a higher-end graphics card i can tell you right now 90 of people out there don't need anything more than around a 2060. now 2060 would be something like a 1070 ti of course 2060s who do have dlss and ray tracing don't worry about those features on this card worry about rasterization performance most people are not going to turn ray tracing on still because of the performance hit i'm one of those people that has a very select few games that i'll turn on ray tracing not just because i want to see the eye candy as i'm going around um dying light 2 is one of them for phil that game is obviously control in cyberpunk um he's playing on a 6900xt so it looks a lot more cinematic than it did in nvidia but uh he wants to see the eye candy it's less about the actual high frame rates and it's more about the fidelity of the way that the scene looks we would all love to spend money on a 380 ti it's harder to say that it would be a waste of money only because the higher end graphics card at the lower resolution will remain relevant longer into the future than say a graphics card that barely meets your needs now but this is from the perspective of i don't have the extra money to spend should i should i try and get the money to spend it so the graphics card might be the only place it makes sense to overspec a little bit and that's just about about future you know relevance in terms of being able to maintain that minimum 60 fps requirement for most people in games at your current resolution longer into the future the problem is as graphics card techno technology and performance scales up so does the demand of the titles uh as they come out later on like cyberpunk i think realized maybe a lot of people realize i need to upgrade because even 1080p was chugging along for many people under 60fps because the game was just so demanding that's an area where it makes sense to spend a little more but it's also an area it's easy to really overspend because if you get yourself a 3080 ti and then you pair it with a super low end cpu the high frame rates can be limited by your cpu unable to draw the frame fast enough so there's a balancing act that has to happen there memory y'all remember this stuff memory is another one of those areas where companies started they really started having to make it stand out aesthetically to make people want it with computer cases now having side panel windows and just about all of them it's hard to find a case these days it doesn't have a side panel window they exist but they're rare companies have really started adding a lot of flashy features big giant heat spreaders rgb strips on there and crazy designs like this t-force t-group d-force memory at the end of the day it's the spec it's the nand it's or the the the chips themselves the controller their speed and their timings that make memory valuable not the other stuff that's thrown on there so you could have a basic kit of memory like this this is an eight gigabyte kit of patriot signature line green pcb basic black heat spreader nothing special it is only 2 400 megahertz dim this would definitely be a bargain bin type of ram for today and i'm not talking about ddr5 i mean almost everyone's still running ddr4 so it's still very relevant the memory speed is an area that's also very easy to overspend and get caught up in the hype five thousand megahertz dimms do exist in ddr4 we have 52 or 5100 megahertz dims in ddr4 from our crucial ballistics i there's only one cpu i could get that to run at and that was actually the 11 900k was able to run the that speed uh because to run that speed you're overclocking the memory controller built into the cpu and it's not guaranteed that it will run most p i get i get a lot of emails from people that say i enable xmp and my system boot loops or crashes and won't post and then when they send me their specs it's because they have something like a an amd ryzen cpu that they're trying to enable 4 000 megahertz dims on well the problem is that that puts the memory infinity fabric above its 1900 or 1800 megahertz safe range where then it becomes unstable and so they paid for memory speed that they can't utilize so it's very important to make sure that you don't overspend on on ram speed because that speed is only going to be important to people that use programs that need fast memory photoshop cad drawings 3d 3d rendering video editing all touch ram in a different way but more ram is more often more important than the speed of the ram so i would highly recommend 16 gigabytes right around 3 000 megahertz that's kind of like the sweet spot that will just about run on every cpu i've never had a 3000 or 3200 dimm kit not be able to run docp slash xmp settings and it's you don't unless you need 32 gigabytes or more 16 gigs is perfect for the guy that wants to do live streaming maybe render some basic youtube videos without a ton of transparencies and layers and you're not gonna you're not gonna notice that you're running out of ram just don't get caught up in the hype because we're talking like a forty five dollar set of ram versus a two hundred dollar set of ram or 184 dollars when this was new so that's something to keep in mind with memory it's really easy to overspend 16 gigabytes 3 000 megahertz from a reputable brand company a ram company that's you know crucial corsair g skill uh team group is now much more known than it was it's definitely a reputable brand and if you stick with those major brands i mean even patriot but patriots really kind of slowly been disappearing over the years you're gonna be set just make sure if you're running an amd cpu that it does say it's xmp or docp and ryzen certified that way you know the timings will work intel it almost works every time we've talked about cps we've talked about gpus it's about coolers this is one of those areas where you can quickly and easily rack up the budget i mean you could have a 200 aio or a 24 air cooler and not gain anything out of the extra expense of the water cooler this particular vitru vitro v5 cooler we showed on amazon we've sold it out many times because i this is still my favorite air cooler for the price we've done videos on this you should go and check it out um it's not a sponsor they didn't send this to me i bought out a bunch of them online because when we did our first video they sold out forever and when they restocked they didn't up the price so i bought like five more in white and black because whether or not i used it on amd or intel it was able to keep our systems well within their turbo clocks for their expected time to run those turbo clocks without throttling no matter what the workload was we threw it it's a great cooler for the price and as long as you're able to maintain the advertised speeds of your cpu without thermal throttling your cooler is doing its job in a previous video i talked about the stock cooler being much better today than it ever was in the past any box cooler that comes with the cpus and depending on your workload and your ambient temperature in your environment you very rarely need more than that my recommendation is if you want to go above the box cooler now we're pretty much talking ryzen here intel hasn't included box coolers in years with their cpus once they broke away from the four core non-hyper-threaded like layout because the i7 with hyper threading typically didn't come with the box cooler it was the i5s that did once they went they broke that mold of the four core setup they are like you're on your own for the cooler i would recommend if you want to upgrade your ryzen cooler or if you have an intel cpu the vitro v5 i really really would again not sponsored uh they've even reached out wanted to sponsor videos and i basically was like thanks but no thanks we already did videos on it there's no reason to like accept sponsorship on it highly recommended water coolers and aios going bigger than this makes sense if you want to start overclocking your cpu now overclocking is going to come down to its limiting factor more so being the silicon lottery what voltage and the asic quality your cpu requires to try and pump more uh well you have to pump more voltage usually to get a higher core clock if you have a silicon lottery winner you may not have to that's going to determine how far you go before your cooler typically because you can have the world's biggest cooler and have an air conditioner hooked up to it but if it requires a ridiculous amount of voltage the thermal transfer between the cpu ihs and the cooler itself is never going to happen fast enough to keep the cpu from thermal throttling now water coolers and aios with screens and stuff on them like you can see right here right this has the the little lcd screen that you can put a gif on and whatnot show all sorts of telemetry that's cool to have but it's completely unnecessary because you can do and see all the same stuff on your screen with a ton of free software hardware monitor um ada64 technically has a free version but it's very locked down versus what the purchase license annual license will get you you can create all of this get yourself a little lcd panel from like a raspberry pi and do a sensor panel like we showed you guys how to do for much cheaper than the difference in price between a basic cooler like this and an aio and you would still have all the display if you really want that it'd be a lot cooler than what you can typically get uh visible on these small screens built on your cpu so you can see now if you if you took this this philosophy and you didn't spend as much on your cooler because you didn't need to go as far and there's a there's a huge range of air coolers between this and this that you could consider as well there's single tower coolers you know you've got your be quiet coolers you've got your noctua coolers your single tower your dual tower dual tower your down fire all sorts of coolers that would do the job and keep the system cool and overclocked long before you needed anything water wise so if you saved money on the cooler and you didn't go as high on the cpu as you thought you did you kept it down maybe one or two tiers you didn't overspend on your ram means now you might be able to go from something 2060 range up until like a 2070 2070 ti or 70 series card as an example or maybe even get up near an 80 series card depending on what prices are like when you're building your system so you can see how you can easily change around and move parts the last bit of this i want to talk about here is power supplies and i did talk a bit about this too in the um the video about advice that aged like fine milk this is a fairly basic power supply from rog uh from asus even though it's strix moniker it's a 650 watt gold now it's got other features and stuff built into it like zero rpm fan uh you know it's it's got um other features in there we won't necessarily need to go into it gets the job done right this is an 850 watt g6 from evga and this is also an 80 plus gold remember how i told you how the 80 plus 80 plus bronze and 80 plus silver were like all but dead this is an example of that 80 plus gold is like the gold standard now it's like where everything starts you don't need to over spec your power supply these days the old adage of over speccing your power supply so you stay within the efficiency curve where it's most efficient before it drops back down once as it starts to reach its max output that's kind of over now because that curve is much more flat at the top and that's because of the the build quality and the components used now and the fact that just about everything is 80 plus gold now you might be inclined to go well i want to get a platinum or i want to get a titanium you pay exponentially more money for those components over anything in the gold rating and what you're gaining out of it is potential longer life of the psu which means it could survive several upgrades before you need to change it but i've i've never had an 80 plus gold power supply die on me before a platinum or titanium and to be fair i've never had any gold or platinum power supply die on me period i still have i still have ones over there that are sitting at the bottom of my shelf that we've used off and on for 10 years and they're still running perfectly fine so it's one of those things where you can easily overspend an 80 plus gold power supply built from a reputable company that's not living its life at its edge will last you longer than your system in most instances which means it'll survive upgrades and the only time people typically needed to upgrade their sys their power supply for their system is because it maybe didn't have enough connectors you know it didn't have enough connectors where uh you have now your your triple pci express cards which have three power plugs and maybe yours only has two and they don't have pigtails you only have two cables so then you're starting to use adapters and that's never a good idea so you might have to upgrade your power supply because the times changed which made your power supply obsolete in terms of its connectors before the actual power delivery system became a problem so i've experienced that a couple of times over the years where i just had to beef up the power supply because maybe the system i was building and needs 2 eps power 8 pin power because we want to do overclocking and stuff we want nice clean delivery to the cpu well the power supply came with an 8 pin and a 4 pin or just an 8 pin so stuff like that might be your limiting factor before it ever becomes power delivery the last thing i want to talk about here which i don't have on the table is people's ideas that they need an nvme ssd nvmes are nice they truly are they're plug and play right they plug right on the motherboard or the nvme card depending on the kind of motherboard that you have they're fast if it's pc gen 4 you're getting up to 7 000 megabytes per second read write which is also a very marketing um it's very much marketing because only certain read write situations on the side the larger the file the faster the read if you have a lot of small files that's having to search for it's obviously a lot slower than that but it's faster than a spinning drive of course but a lot of folks think they need that over a sata ssd now sata ssds are are capped we are moved well beyond the saturation of of the sata cable interface and the amount of speed that the drive can transfer the drives exceed that now which is about 550 megabytes per second on sata six and the new standard is nvme because that's direct pci express lanes all right pci expert i said pci express express express lanes that's for you know when you have an express lane and then you have another lane for those that are like high occupancy express i don't know whatever i've seen those lanes before i digress completely besides the point most people believe it or not will not know the difference between a 550 megabyte per second drive and a 5 000 megabyte per second drive in standard computing if you're not moving around large files if you're not doing huge data transfers you would never know in fact i feel like that would be a fun blind taste test is to see if we can identify the say the drive versus the the nvme drive system where they're identical otherwise but try and say is this nvme or s or sata and the thing is you can get some killer deals on state of drives would you rather have a 500 gigabyte nvme ssd or a 2 terabyte sata drive so the only thing the only downside people have now regarding satas and it's the reason why i tend to not use them in builds anymore it's just cleaner you don't have to have a state of power going to it and you don't have to have a sata connector going to your motherboard so it's just cleaner but i would much rather have multiples of sata drives if i had to make the choice one smaller nvme or a much larger storage capacity because here's the reality you can get a two terabyte sata drive for about the same price or less than a 500 or 480 gigabyte nvme drive and i'd much rather have the capacity over the extra speed which i'm not going to notice in day to day anyway especially with how big games are today games exceeding 100 gigabytes that 480 ain't going to go very far once you have your windows partition on there so anyway i hope this video has given some food for thought as prices are starting to get better on things people are building again i'm getting a lot more requests for for build see i could always tell when people weren't building or watching these videos because i i would just never get messages asking me hey jay can you provide me with a like a pc part picker list here's my price range i was getting those messages dozens of times a day and then for months maybe a year i get like one a week now i'm getting multiples a day again which tells me things are improving people are building and now they're watching and hopefully this information saves someone some money where they could shift it around in their build to make it make sense don't believe the lies that youtube channels like mine tell you where we build big ass expensive computers unnecessarily that's a problem i've contributed to the issue by building these crazy systems which are completely unnecessary where i promise you we're gonna get back to more basic budget builds that is much more realistic and relatable for the average consumer all right guys thanks for watching we'll see in the next one\n"