It's EASY to spend too much on PC parts... Here's where to save money!

js2 cents

here

we are going to talk about computer

parts

today and how not to over

spend

. Now sure t

here

are seven or eight main components when it comes to building a computer, but we are going to focus on the main four, which are the CPU motherboard. graphics card memory because they are easily the most expensive

parts

of your system, as well as the easiest areas to over

spend

and get nothing for that

money

. Let's start with CPU, uh, there are two main players, obviously, there are only two players when it comes to building a personal computer that is AMD and Intel, uh, it's one of those things

where

it's becoming very difficult to recommend Intel these days just because they haven't been very innovative, they haven't really pushed the boundaries, they really haven't. changed somewhat, in fact they are on the same 14 meter process that they have been on for years and years and years, while AMD on the other hand has been very innovative in boosting the number of cores you can get on the same package running the same motherboards, their ipc is significantly better than intel, although their core clocks are a bit behind, it's

easy

to get caught up in core count and think core count is king when it comes to building a computer, now let's assume that the people who build a computer right now watching this video are thinking about building a gaming computer and there is nothing wrong with that because I have said over and over again that computers that are designed to handle the latest games they can handle pretty

much

any type of productivity task you do at home, I mean I'm sure there are corporate uses and there are very atypical types of use cases

where

you're going to need floating point precision performance and all that kind. of things, but that's not what most people watching this video are going to do, so we're assuming you're building a gaming computer.

Keep in mind that although games now take advantage of more cores than ever. In the past they are still not going to take advantage of high-core CPUs to their full potential; In fact, we have seen that some high-end CPUs perform worse than low-end CPUs simply because of the number of cores and the way they work. It's used with ccx and the like on the AMD platform, so it's one of those things that a person might be interested in learning about because of how robust it is in supporting virtually all software and all games, but if you're the kind of person who wants their computer to have a little bit of backwards compatibility and note that I use backwards compatibility and not the term future proofing because there is no such thing as future proofing when it comes to computers in the who might be very interested.

Due to the fact that as games and programs use more cores, you get more cores per dollar on AMD than you do on Intel. Now which CPU is right for you will again depend on what you want to do with your CPU, we found the 5600x to be a really good sweet spot for not spending too

much

on your CPU and also getting a high enough core count to be able to multitask live streams, make games still usable, get a high enough core clock to feel like you have got a really high end system without spending a lot of

money

on high end, not long ago where to get the amount of cores that you could get in a 5600x, and by the way, this is actually 5800x, if you notice the seven you would have.

You had to spend a thousand dollars about five years ago to get the same amount of performance, core clock, and core count as the 5600x today in 2020. Now, this is all hypothetical, assuming you can get it due to its popularity. of computers right now and stay-at-home orders and people building home offices and gaming computers and things like that, we assume you can get your hands on them, but things are going to normalize, you'll be able to get your hands on them. However, going forward, information is increasingly difficult to recommend these days simply for the reasons that at the beginning of this segment they didn't, they haven't been innovating at all and they are still holding on to their core base, which is how I like to overclock and you know what most people don't do on their everyday computers, they're just not pushing the limits like we do for fun here, um, but when it comes to both, uh cpus you have You have to connect them to something and that is motherboards and this is where it is extremely

easy

to waste money unnecessarily now, obviously the motherboard you choose will depend on the CPU you choose, so you need to make sure that the socket type is correct, obviously this is not a how-to guide on how to match all that up, we're going to assume you know that if you're running an x570 motherboard you have to use an x570 compatible CPU and vice versa when it comes to Intel, however the chipset will determine which GPU you can put in there because there's really no backwards compatibility when it comes to Intel, but there are different motherboard tiers that make it very easy to overspend, this is extreme. rampage board I only have this here because it's like a 700 or 800 motherboard this is due to Intel's x299 extreme platform this here uh it doesn't really give you much more than some of the inferior ones like let's say strix motherboard yeah this is an x470 but they are strix for Intel and AMD vice versa, they are somewhat compatible with each other as far as the tiering structure of how the naming scheme works, but this is just an easy way to overspend, there are very little things, very few . things that a 700 motherboard would get out of the way that a 700 motherboard can do that a 150 motherboard generally can't do, the difference here will be in the build quality, it will be how many layers the PCB has, how many, what is the content of gold in socket how many USB do you have?

How many USB CS or Thunderbolt? If you're on Intel, we find that most of the time, let's talk about Ryzen here for a second, most of the time running the 50 series motherboard. much more beneficial to the cost of your system than running a 50 series motherboard. 70 series, so the x470 motherboard, if you're going to pair it with a 5000 series CPU, really the only thing you're giving up is pcie gen 4 capabilities and if Other than that, we're not running a pcie gen 4 gpus storage because they aren't using all pcie gen 3 16 x yet let alone need pcie gen 4. You could save some money by going with the x470 motherboard and making sure it has the latest bios. run a 5000 series CPU and get a very good deal because they like to have blowouts because they are compatible with the latest CPUs, they are still making them and you can still find them on the shelves, now there are other things that you will find on motherboards. have a sturdy armor do they have plastic covers on the back plastic covers on the front how many m.2 storage devices can you plug in and these are areas where it's very easy to overspend because you're not changing anything in terms from the quality of the motherboard itself, from the number of those devices you have, you may find that if you find a lower tier motherboard, whether it's a strix versus a crosshair for example, which tends to make These motherboards are different in price.

It's the build quality in terms of your vrms, how many inductors and capacitors you have, what the phase of the vrm is and these are things that will only really matter to people who are trying to overclock their CPU, add more voltage. more heat adds more load to the vrms. Things that if I say this and you have no idea what I'm talking about clearly don't belong to you right now, that doesn't mean you can't play with them. some overclocking like a strix motherboard or a lower level motherboard. Typically these motherboards will have built-in protections so that you don't overextend or overextend the power deliveries on these motherboards, but that doesn't mean you can't, but if you'd like to play around with adding a couple hundred megahertz here and there or even getting into Ryzen Master and doing a little bit of overclocking there, you can do it with pretty much any of the motherboards that are currently on the market for AMD. cpus because they are all unlocked, unlike intel where if you don't use a k-sku cpu or a kf or f cpu as well, which simply means there is no igp built in, then you won't be able to overclock it because the cpu itself is going to be locked, while AMD still offers the value of having every CPU unlocked.

The only thing that limits how far you can go is really the silicon lottery and the motherboard itself, but I wouldn't recommend spending 500 on a motherboard to put one on. 300 CPUs in there, that's a complete waste of money, there's no return on that investment and it's nothing more than diminished results, you'll get extra features that you probably won't care about, so I think generally spending anywhere between the price of the CPU or less seems to be about the right 150 main motherboard, look at the reviews, see what the general response has been to the new egg on Amazon and then make your best decision there, but although the motherboard is responsible for everything being connected in She is one of the easiest areas to overspend.

Another area that is easy to overspend is your memory. There is an old saying that the computer runs slow. I think I need more memory. It goes back to when I was a kid. In fact, I think about when I was a kid, we were talking about the 286 commodore 64 and that RAM was something that held you back, but that's not the case today and you see more and more of these kits like 32 gigabytes of dominator platinums or 32 gigs from you know, vengeance pros 4000 megahertz 4 400 megahertz or 5100 megahertz, as we see with some of our crucial things that we have around here, these are areas that are just going to suck up your budget and really not give you any tangible return.

We've done videos in the past where I've talked about what the sweet spot for gaming RAM speed is, both on Intel and AMD, and we found that around 3000 megahertz is where we scale performance, so between 2133, which is what these RAMs, these RAMs, these RAM devices, these attenuators will boot. right out of the box without enabling xmp or docp which are their extreme profiles for intel and amd they will give you more performance and more fps up to about 3000 rpm 3000 rpm wow car stuff up to about 3000 megahertz and then beyond that it just stops scaling so that people do well, then why the hell do they sell these four thousand megahertz and five thousand megahertz stimulators?

Well, extreme overclocking, you start pushing the CPU hard enough that the memory has to keep up and it doesn't really make any difference. the average consumer, the other thing is capacity, no one building a gaming rig needs 32 gigabytes of memory, someone right now got upset when I said that, but the reality is that 16 gigabytes is still the sweet spot and you. We'll notice that it tends to be 2 4 8 16 32 64 because obviously multiples of 8 will always be multiples of 8 times 2 because of the double channel, so you'll basically see them scale in that kind of mathematical order. 16 gigabytes of ddr3000 from any reputable brand, be it corsair g, crucial skill, patriot, uh, these, what's the other one out there?

The team group is now a brand that has really made a good name for itself. 16 gigabytes, 3000 megahertz dual channel, if you are running a dual channel CPU or if you are running a quad channel like Threadripper or Extreme Intel, make sure you have at least one attenuator per channel, so you will need four devices, that will be enough now, the other side of that argument. it's going to be single bank versus dual bank and I'll tell you right now that for the most part it doesn't matter if we take a gaming PC if we build one that was with single bank RAM and dual bank RAM and no, that's not single channel, dual channel, they are not the same.

We haven't made a video about this because I really don't want to cause more confusion for people. If you want to know what your system is, you can download the CPU. z go to the memory tab there is another tab or to the right of the memory tab there is one more camera it's called it will tell you which bank your RAM is running on if we did a blind taste test with just one bank and a double bench. identical side-by-side systems everywhere else, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference just if you benchmarked and found the extra two or three fps you might find in a single-bank versus dual-bank ramp. area where it's easy to spend too much extra lights and things here are all ways to increase the cost of RAM without changing performance, so our recommendation, honestly, is 16 gigabytes, 3000 megahertz dual channel, call it a day If you listen to our advice that leaves you more. money for the fun part of your system and that being gaming PCs with a graphics card, your performance is 90 dictated by your graphics card, if it's a CPU bound title that has a large open world sandbox then yes your CPU may matter,but your graphics card does.

It's still responsible for over 90 percent of your gaming performance, and saving money in these areas will allow you to get the best graphics card you can afford. Now, this is the only time you'll hear me recommend getting the top-tier product. that you can afford in this category, the only thing that will really hold back the potential of how high you can go is your power supply, so you'll want to make sure the power supply you pair with your graphics card at least meets the recommended rating. for the graphics card, whether it's 750 watts for a 30 live 30 series card, 550 watts for a 2080 ti or whatever, and make sure it's from a reliable power supply brand that you won't go for.

If you are having trouble supplying power to it, keep in mind that those ratings are usually greatly overrated because they want to make sure you have power available and higher than what the system needs, so a power supply rated at 550 watts is recommended for a 550 watt graphics card. the card is actually more than what you need, which is good, the only other thing that's going to dictate, honestly, your graphics card here is your CPU, as long as you don't spend the least amount of money you can spend on one CPU. and when trying to pair it with a high end gpu you don't really have to worry about bottlenecks especially with Ryzen processors and the latest info their core clocks are high enough their ipc's are high enough that It is actually quite difficult to create a bottleneck.

GPU these days, we've made some videos proving that you really have to spend a lot of money to start bottlenecking your GPUs these days. The other area also where you can easily spend too much on the graphics card is the level of graphics card you use. We have their reference edition cards, which are the ones that are just based on the basic AMD and Nvidia design, and then you have their custom cards, like our special edition Strix White 2080 ti, which probably costs 150 more than a reference 2080 . If this isn't necessarily going to give you a lot more performance, very little performance, actually the base clock side of these and the boost clocks that come with these special edition cards are typically 20 to 50 megahertz higher than a reference, the difference is these cards.

They are based and designed for overclocking and if you don't plan on overclocking that is an additional area where you can waste money, we still found that in terms of the best graphics card value for money in our opinion, of AMD's current offering is the 6800 non-xt because we know we are going to have new midrange rdna 2 cards, that's why we don't recommend 5700 xt which is an older architecture at the moment or even something like a 2060 super or next gen 2070 super yes obviously graphics cards right now are an extremely hard to find product, out of stock across the board of all generations, they are back in stock due to the popularity of people building computers right now due to personal entertainment staying at home. games and things like that, we found that again we're talking about hypothetical situations if you can get them, but if you've done everything right and saved money in other areas of your build, then you have more money left over for the fun stuff that really has an impact on which will be your overall experience with your computer now, of course, there are other things that can affect your case, your power supply, your refrigerator and all that kind of stuff, but we found that these areas here are the easiest places to save money and spend it correctly without having to worry about getting terrible diminishing returns If you think we've missed something or you think there's something really important we didn't say that we should have that you think might help someone in the comments below, then write your best tip for saving money on building or upgrading a new computer in the comments and then we'll review and pin the best ones that way we can make sure people see them guys if you're building a new computer here have fun don't have fear.

I know a lot of people are afraid of wasting money if you've never built a gaming PC before saying you'll probably get hooked on one. Needless to say, it's a new hobby and probably extremely low-key, but enjoy it if you're building it, make sure you Share it with us on social media on Twitter or on Twitter at js2cents on Twitter, show us your builds and as always guys. See you next time talking about compilations. We'll probably start judging yours here very soon, so get your photos ready.