KitGuru’s PC Buying Guide 2020

1. Introduction2. Basic Systems: Budget £6503. Low-Mid Tier Systems: Budget £8004. Mid Tier Systems: Budget £12005. High-end Systems: Budget £20006. Extreme Systems: Budget £30007. Ultimate & 'Money's No Object' Systems8. Pre-Built Systems9. Budget Peripherals Bundle10. Mid-Tier Peripherals Bundle11. High-End Peripherals Bundle12. Closing Thoughts13. View All Pages

The Ultimate System: Budget £5000

• CPU – AMD Ryzen 9 3950X 3.5 GHz 16-Core
• Motherboard – Gigabyte X570 AORUS XTREME EATX AM4
• Memory – 64 GB (4 x 16 GB) G.Skill Trident Z Neo DDR4-3600
• Graphics card – EVGA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB KINGPIN GAMING
• CPU cooler – EK Water Blocks hard tube custom loop with 360mm radiator
• Storage:
  • SSD – 2 TB Corsair MP600 Force Series Gen4 M.2-2280 NVMe
  • HDD – 8 TB Toshiba X300 3.5″ 7200RPM
• Case – Phanteks Evolv X ATX Mid Tower
• Power Supply – Seasonic P​RIME PX 85​0 W80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular

Our last two systems are just for a bit of fun really, to see what you could build with any budget purely as an afterthought. For the Ultimate system, we have combined the best gaming graphics with the most high-performance desktop CPU available currently. A combination of the AMD Ryzen 3950X processor and the EVGA RTX 2080 Ti KINGPIN Gaming graphics card should keep hardcore gamers happy for years to come.

The Gigabyte X570 Aorus Xtreme motherboard is the perfect platform for enthusiasts to tinker with performance and overclocking while offering huge expansion possibilities to extend PCIe Gen 4 storage. Even with a £5000 to play with, it’s amazing to think that we could only fit one 2 TB Corsair MP600 PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD into the system budget, however, the 8TB Toshiba X300 HDD should offer enough additional storage for those less critical applications.

Since this is our ultimate system, a simple AIO or CPU air cooling solution was not going to cut the mustard. We chose to go with an EK Water Blocks custom hard tube cooling loop, however, the budget would only stretch to CPU cooling. Luckily the EVGA RTX 2080 Ti KINGPIN Gaming card has its own water cooling to help keep the temperature under control when overclocking.

This ultimate system costs just shy of £5000 and, in our opinion, it should be a great overall performer. Gamers, content creators, streamers and professional video editors/3D designers should find that this setup fulfils their needs. The only step up from this would be a high-end desktop system which didn’t fit into our £5000 budget.

Total Cost: £4,976.96

Millionaires System:

• CPU – AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 2.9 GHz 64-Core Processor
• Motherboard – Asus ROG ZENITH II EXTREME ALPHA EATX sTRX4 
• Memory – 256GB (8×3​2GB) Trident Z Royal​ DDR4-3200​MHz CL16
• Graphics card 1 – Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB AORUS XTREME
• Graphics card 2 – Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB AORUS XTREME
• Graphics card 3 – Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2080 Ti 11 GB AORUS XTREME
• Sound card – 
• System cooling – EKWB complete system hard tube custom water cooling
• Storage:
  • M.2 SSD – 5 x 2 TB Corsair MP600 Force Series Gen4 M.2-2280 NVMe
  • SATA SSD – 4 x 4 TB Samsung 860 Pro  2.5″
• Optical drive – Pioneer BDR-209DBK Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
• Case –  Phanteks Enthoo Elite ATX Full Tower
• Power supply – Corsair AX​1600i Digital 80 PLUS TITANIUM​ Fully-Modular

Our final system, we have called the ‘millionaires’, and it is is actually more like my own personal dream setup. If I were to win the lottery this weekend this is what I would be planning. Even though most gamers and PC enthusiasts, including myself, would probably never use the full potential of the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3990X processor with 64 cores and 128 threads, there is a fair bit to be said about the bragging rights you get with this CPU.

Three Gigabyte RTX 2080 Ti Aorus Xtreme graphics cards, yeah why not? High FPS 4K gaming would be a breeze. The AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3900X CPU is a content creators or professional editors dream and would carve through video production and photo editing workloads like nothing else. We also added 256 GB of G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4 memory because, why not?

Obviously, with all that video content you have just edited, you are going to need plenty of fast storage, so we have thrown in five high speed 2 TB Corsair MP600 PCIe Gen 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs, three in the Asus ROG Zenith Extreme Alpha motherboards integrated M.2 slots and two more on the included DIMM.2 riser card.

Just in case you fill up those PCIe Gen 4 M.2 SSD drives. More high-speed storage is available via the four 4 TB Samsung 860 Pro 2.52 SATA SSDs. Of course, in the Millionaires system, there are no mechanical HDDs.

This wouldn’t be a true dream machine without custom liquid cooling, so we have added a full hard tube custom water cooling system from EK Water Blocks with one EK-CoolStream CE 420mm radiator and two EK-CoolStream XE 360 radiators. All three graphics cards are water-cooled, as well as the Threadripper 3990X processor with one of EKWB’s EK-Quantum Velocity D-RGB – AMD Nickel + Plexi CPU water blocks. That should take care of cooling pretty nicely.

Total Cost: £16230.84

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