Build Help

Welcome back!

Okay, you do understand the Velox case alone adds $174 to a Lumos build, and $290 to a Lynx case build. Those numbers are going to impact everything else down the line in your budget.

That said, here's what I recommend at your budget:

https://www.digitalstorm.com/configurator.asp?id=4367523

The CPU is plenty powerful to edge out the Ryzen selections, but the Intel i9 brings nothing more for gaming. 32GB of RAM is in the budget, will be helpful for multi-tasking, and may become needful before this rig ages too much.

The storage is all M.2 NVMe. The 980 is plenty for your primary drive, and 3 x faster than the DS NVMe. it's PCIe gen 4. The DS drive is about 4x faster than a SATA SSD. It's PCIe gen 3. You can migrate over or add several more SSDs or HDDs at your leisure.

The 3070 will power your monitor very well. Here's how it stacks up to the last gen "supercard" which NO ONE was recommending be wasted on 2K:

https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-RTX-3070-vs-Nvidia-RTX-2080-Ti/4083vs4027

The 3060 Ti might be enough if you're mon doesn't get really high framerates. Your call.

Triple fan coolers are 50% better than dual fan coolers, and it's in the budget. 'Nuff said.   

Whatdya think?

If you're fine with expanding the budget for more storage, all is well. I'm not a big fan of HDDs these days, but they are cheap. If you have a large library of videos, photos, and old docs you want to bring to this machine, and you don't don't trust migrating an HDD from an older rig, I get it. If you want more storage to load from in real time, a SATA SSD is about 4-5 times faster, and has no moving parts to break down. You may easily add one of those when the need arises. The cabling will be there from DS behind the mobo.

None of the current batch of GPUs are "worth the additional cost" IMHO. It's just really unfortunate what has struck us in this time just when GPUs actually began to perform spectacularly well for their MSRPs. the 3070 shoulda/woulda gone for $499, but actually costs here about $825. Believe it or not, that's a competitive price.       To pay any more for a slight improvement you may never be able to appreciate is something I wouldn't do. The 3070 Ti rates out a 10% bump from the 3070, which as I showed is just as strong as the 2080 TI except MORE with upgraded ray tracing and better DLSS. I think it's the right card, but it's not my dough.
If your monitor doesn't get framerates much above 110, it's a waste. Remember DLSS, when used on games you play a lot, will improve images while it improves framerates.