Post Pandemic PC Build

One sad side-effect of the pandemic, with a global captive audience seeking entertainment and needing to work remotely, was the stratospheric rise in PC prices. We went from a high end GPU from being 600-800 UKP to now being 1800-2000 UKP. My PC was a good twelve years out of date (my Mac is even older). It was mostly a hand-me-down from a friend that I stuck in a new case, with new fans, CPU cooler and upgraded the GPU. It was beefy in it's day, and as I don't run many modern games, I wasn't in a hurry to upgrade it. Pre-pandemic I was waiting for the release of the 30 series cards and was planning on building a nice new machine for something in the region of 1000-1200 UKP. That soon went straight out of the window.

So I watched the market go mad for the following years, eventually realising that it was never going to get any better. However as tech moves on, there are those who do upgrade and they sell their old kit. Kit that is vastly newer and faster than mine. That's when I decided to partake in a little experiment, to build a new (to me) PC that was capable of running everything I play at max settings, for as little money as possible. I set my expectations somewhat realistically making my goal a PC that is able to run 2560x1440 (a 27" 16:9 monitor) at 60Hz. I don't play modern games that require mega resolution or frame rates, which makes my choices way easier.

It's important to know what I'm coming from I suppose. It's an old non-UEFI Gigabyte LGA1155 motherboard with an Intel I7-2600K sat in it. 16GB of DDR3 memory. Some old SSD's for storage. A GTX 1070 graphics card. All of that was to be replaced. To stay was the NZXT case I put it all in, the 750W Corsair power supply, the brace of BeQuiet fans and the giant BeQuiet CPU cooler that I had all the brackets for a lot of newer processors.

it's not RGB!

What I was initially aiming for was an I7-8700K CPU and motherboard combination. What became very apparent is that they still sell for very decent money. So over the next six months or so I just watched the market to see what went for good money and researching what would work for my requirements. I came to the conclusion that a six core CPU was plenty and in value for money terms the AMD Ryzen 5 3600 was pretty much untouchable for what I was after, which gave me my first target. The great thing with AMD CPUs is that unlike Intel, who's motherboards become obsolete after around two generations, AMDs can cover many generations. Great, loads to choose from. But unlike the the Intel, that meant that the motherboards tended to hold their money a lot better, but their CPUs did not. Still get the motherboard and everything should fall into place from there as to my requirements.

So going Team Red, I settled on trying to bag an B450 AM4 board. It covered all the processors I was interested in, but wasn't so modern as a B550 or later that supports PCI-E 4 and DDR5 and what have you. All expensive stuff that I don't need. Getting one took a while. I don't like 'gaming' motherboards. It seems like pointless expense to me for no reason. Don't even get me started on RGB. What I bagged after much patience* was an MSI B450m-A Pro MAX for the grand total of 44 UKP. As far as I can tell this thing had never been used and was essentially NOS all boxed up and even the back plate was still sealed.

*Patience: This is a virtue required when buying on eBay. I've been doing it for years and yes it'll bite you in the arse occasionally, but mostly you're protected. With these purchases, they were all so low value that I was prepared to deal with some potential problems and maybe even have to take a hit on one of the items. But with care, you can mitigate a lot of that risk. More on that later when we get to the GPU. My main advice is set yourself a price and stick to it. Don't get attached to any item or you'll overpay and always be prepared to be outbid and walk away. Eventually, if you're realistic on what things are worth, you can get some good deals.

CPU next, my target was a 3600, I was watching many, but in my watch list was a guy who had a Ryzen 7 3800X. Two more cores than the 3600 and slightly higher clocks. I was lucky, and managed to get it for the sort of money I was prepared to pay for the 3600, coming in at 70 UKP.

The last two parts for the motherboard to be put together was the memory and storage. Memory I got a couple of sticks of DDR4 3200 Kingston Fury Beast (man I cringe at some of the name manufacturers give their parts. FURY BEAST!) giving me 16GB (no games I run get even close to using that) for 23 UKP. Storage I bought a 2TB Crucial P3 (PCI-E 3) NVME drive for 77 UKP. I normally wouldn't buy a drive second hand, but it only had ten hours on it as shown from CrystalDiskInfo in the listing. So as good as new and saved me 20-30 UKP in the process.

That I suppose was the scary bit, as I was sat on parts I couldn't test until they all landed. So when I got to this point, I took my old machine apart and installed the new parts with the old GPU. A fresh install of Win10AME (Win10 without all the bloat and spyware it has as standard) and I was incredibly relieved to find out everything was good and as advertised.

It's all built so these are just empty boxes

Buying a GPU on eBay is not fun. The sheer proliferation of mining cards from the era I'm interested in is not to be forgotten, and anything newer has the inflated prices we've come to expect. I could have got one cheaper on eBay, but I convinced Rod that he needed an upgrade and he should sell me his GTX 1080Ti. Knowing the card's history was worth it for piece of mind. I dropped it in there and it runs like a dream. I was concerned initially because it's a founder's edition card so a blower fan, and there were reports of some of them sounding like tornados. But this one does what it should and does so at very acceptable noise levels. Certainly the quietest blower I've ever heard. This was the big spend at 200 UKP. But as I say, piece of mind and, in theory at this point, it should be more grunt than I'll ever need.

Last but not least was the monitor. I had very specific wants for this; I wanted to replace my Dell 24" 16:10 screen with something bigger and higher resolution. This monitor will need to be easily switchable between inputs as both my Mac and PC will plug into it (something the Dell is clunky as hell at). I'm wanting it to be 2560x1440 native resolution at no more than 60Hz. The frequency limit is there because of what I do with it and the load it would put on the GPU to go higher would be unnecessary noise, heat and power I didn't need to expend. Plus the chance that the GPU might struggle to hit a higher resolution was not something I wanted to entertain.

The biggest problem with buying monitors on eBay is that no one wants to deliver them. Perfect examples pop up all the time, but they're always at the other end of the country and when you're trying to be a cheapskate, that's not the point. This easily took the longest for something to pop up at a price I was prepared to entertain. What I got was an HP 27Q for 66.50 UKP. Thankfully the seller double boxed it, necessary for an item such as this to survive a budget courier. I wish they'd spent some time cleaning it up because it came with many years of filth caked on the screen. But then for what they'll have ended up with in pocket after eBay and courier fees, I don't hold it against them. It took half a box of glasses cleaner pads to de-mank the screen, but once done, I have to say, I'm really pleased with it. The screen has no dead or stuck pixels, it as one tiny mark on it's surface you can't see unless you're looking for it, and what appears to be something like a dead storm fly under the surface up at the to that looks like a tiny shadow on the few occasions that it's visible. I can't complain at that.

In conclusion, the full spend on the build was: 480.50 UKP (reciept for the eBay bits). Today, that would buy you an RTX 4060Ti, technically a slightly above entry level GPU. To say I'm happy with what I've ended up with is an understatement. I've installed all my games and everything runs at max settings without any issue. Job done.

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