I’m also looking at computers and as overwhelmed as Sparky by motherboards. How do low end, mid end and high end MBs tend to differ? What does the extra money buy you?
RAM: I’m a little unclear there too about what extra RAM budget will buy in a gaming computer. Should 16 GB be enough for the next decade for gaming purposes? What programs tend to use 10+GB of RAM today?
16GB will be plenty. Get a board with four DIMM slots and buy two 8GB sticks so, if you ever do decide you need more, you’re golden to upgrade. AMD chips benefit greatly from fast memory and I’d recommend 3000 or better. You’ll likely need to unlock XMP in your BIOS/UEFI to gain the full memory speed which is as easy as a single mouse-click on modern boards. Intel chips don’t benefit quite so much (or aren’t quite as crippled by slow memory depending on your perspective) but fast memory is still better.
The difference between mid and high-end “gaming” boards isn’t nearly as substantial as the difference between low and mid end boards. Low end boards tends to have only two DIMM slots, a single PCIe expansion slot, limited SATA/USB connections, little USB 3 support, limited I/O connections and little consideration for heat management. Better boards are (obviously) the opposite of that and also offer things like M.2 slots and faster memory support; high end boards may have two M.2 slots, on-board troubleshooting displays and RGB bells and whistles. Basically stay away from the things I listed for low end boards and you’ll likely be okay. Obviously make sure your CPU is compatible.
Unless you have a strong reason for needing one, I’d definitely stay away from micro-ITX boards and try to stay away from mini-ATX boards. Standard ATX boards offer more space which translates to better cooling, often more slots/connections and general ease of access when tinkering.
No technical advice here, but just wanted to say that a father-son computer build project sounds like a great idea. I did it once against my better judgment – had never built a computer before, but did fiddle around with hardware and have a reasonable understanding of the tech – but my son insisted.
It turned out quite well although I probably got many new gray hairs worrying about the money we were spending with no guarantee of good results. It was ultimately a fun project for the two of us. The experience motivated him later to build a much more powerful one on his own. I got the old one, and until I bought my new desktop computer about a year ago, our old home-built remained the most powerful computer in my house by quite a wide margin, and is still going strong in the rec room in my basement.
Thanks for the information.
I’m going to stay away from small MBs. Is there a point to EATX and other larger-than-ordinary MBs?
Is it possible to get 1 stick of 8GB of RAM? It’s a bit on the pricey side right now.
How about coolers? Without overclocking, are stock coolers usually quiet-ish?
What are the best coolers for overclocking? What are the quietest ones? Anything to look out for?
Not really. eATX may have more expansion slots and stuff but you’re probably not running a four GPU render farm.
Yes. It will run a little slower than 2x4GB (dual channel) but you can upgrade in the future with another 8GB stick and not face compatibility issues then. Be sure to buy the exact same 8GB stick in the future since two mismatched sticks running dual channel leads to complications.
The AMD stock “Wraith” cooler is fine for stock speeds, works well and is relatively quiet. Plus it comes free with the CPU so you can’t beat that. For Intel, you’ll need to buy a cooler since the higher tier CPUs don’t come with one included. The Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo is sort of the gold standard in affordable air coolers. For overclocking, it depends a bit on what you have and how fast you’re trying to go. I use a Corsair H100i v2 AIO water cooler but I used to overclock a different chip with the 212 Evo.
Air flow in the case will also make a difference – the best cooler doesn’t help if your case is a sealed off oven. I have a personal fondness for Cougar Vortex fans to hit a sweet spot of performance and noise (or lack thereof). Other people swear by Noctua fans which cost more and are arguably even uglier than the Cougar black/orange design. I’m currently using a couple Gentle Typhoon fans for pushing air through my radiator but I don’t know if you can even buy those any longer (plus they were $25 or $30 a pop). Great combination of static pressure and low noise though.
Update still researching…
Question- onboard Wifi? I don’t see a lot of extra slots to add cards on any mobos.
I’ve done some research on graphics cards, it looks like i can get a RX580 8Gb for a fairly decent price. ~$250 CAD
I’m assuming he will want to run multiple monitors so…
Can he do this off the single card? (I believe this is what he does now)
Or… should I use his old GIGABYTE GeForce GT 610 2Gb alongside the RX580.
I believe he would use one monitor for browsing, etc… and the other for gaming.
Got a line on a Ryzen 2700X for $350 CAD… stay tuned.
You can generally run multiple monitors off one card.
In a perfect world, he’d be hooked up via Ethernet but, if that’s not happening, then generally PCIe Wifi is slightly preferable to onboard largely because you can upgrade/replace it. Onboard is preferable to a USB Wifi adapter. If you do go USB, get something that’ll run off the 3.0 port and not the old 2.0 slot. I wouldn’t buy a board just for the extra PCIe slot but I’d buy one with onboard over using an adapter.
Any half decent modern card will run multiple displays and yours certainly will. It has multiple output port for precisely that reason.
OK,
So, I picked up a Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 580 for $250 CAD. Looks Awesome BTW!
My son has decided that he could sacrifice some higher end items to lower the cost and go for a cool look.
I’m going today to view a partial system that would nail a couple birds with one stone for an good price.
I already have plans to upgrade the PS to the EVGA 750 G3 to accommodate the RX 580.
Any advice or input is appreciated.
I’ve owned a couple Sapphire cards (my last card before my current one was that brand). They make good cards for the price.
Yeah, I’ve owned several Sapphire cards (7950 & R9 290X) and they’re all still in use, generations later.
Make sure the M.2 used NVMe so you’re not just filling the slot with a SATA drive. Otherwise, you could get a 120GB SATA drive for $25.
Is there a reason you’re going with the 1700X? The 2600X is about $100 cheaper for virtually the same performance. Unless you have a great lead on a 1700X; I’m just going off Newegg pricing. If they’re about the same price, the 1700X is better, at MSRP the 2600X is a better value by a good mark. You’re not going “wrong” with either.
Edit: Wait, you’re looking at a system? That’s different – I assumed you were still building. If you’re going for a prebuilt with those specs, the stuff I mentioned isn’t enough to say it’s “bad” in any way even if it’s not how I’d configure it myself.
Yes, I’ve changed tack a bit. (with some direction from my wife 
)
While we began looking at something on the higher end of things, the parts cost was starting to get away from our initial budget of ~$1000. My son also was interested in something that looked cool with the RGB case, fans, etc…
The revised plan is to get something up and running, then we can upgrade specific components as we see fit. We always planned it as a learning exercise so this way the project can continue with this one or even a new one.
Here is the new cost breakdown
Sapphire Nitro+ Radeon RX 580
$250 CAD ~$190 USD
EVGA 750W SuperNova G3
$100 CAD ~$75 USD
for a total of $750 CAD or ~$560 USD
That’s about half of what the custom system I had planned would have cost.
Once we’ve put it through its paces, we’ll see where we’re falling short. I suspect RAM
will be the next purchase.
I have 3 kids, so I maybe doing this again …and again…
Looks really good, especially for the price. And, yeah, looking at more RAM would be my first upgrade.
Do you think that he might want a larger SSD, if he’s going to be gaming on it a lot? I have an older 250 GB SSD, and it gets crowded with the OS and all of the games I want to store on it. I imagine a 120 GB drive would be even worse.
Haven’t upgraded to an Nvme-PCI 3.0 express drive, but when I do, I was looking at something in the 500 GB to 1 TB range for that reason.
I have the 1700x—it’s about a year old now—and I like it a lot. It gets hot quickly, even with the Arctic air cooler I have. I probably could have better case air management though. OC ing is supposed to be easy, though I haven’t really noticed much difference when I did, so I stopped, and it plays nice with the DDR4-3200 RAM sticks.
He’ll want an extra, larger, SSD but that’s a trivial upgrade and more memory will probably have a more immediate effect. If he didn’t even have a SSD boot drive, that would be different. Storing games on the HDD for a while won’t kill him 
I don’t know if i mentioned it here or in another thread so I’ll risk repeating: A hybrid drive is well worth the extra money over an HDD. It runs your most often used programs nearly as fast as an SSD and will last longer.
I just wanted to say thanks to all of you (especially Jophiel tips hat) for all the input and discussion. I used a lot of your input to narrow down my options but more importantly, where I’ll go with this system and future builds.
I’m really stoked that I was able to put this together before Christmas, we had initially planned to build it more gradually. Now I gotta get all these parts wrapped and under the tree! We’ll put it together and get software sorted out over the holidays. As I said, this is a learning exercise for my 13 year old son who is not sure what he wants to do when he grows up. Maybe this will pique his interest.
I’ll keep you all updated on how it goes and future upgrades… and stay tuned for Sparky’s Gaming Computer 2.0 coming in a couple of years for my next son!
Best of luck and I think he’ll have a lot of fun with it. It’ll be a good system for a long while to come. Make sure it’s him doing the ‘work’ when it comes time to slide a couple more RAM sticks or hook up a new SSD in there 
Edit: Oh, and do check to make sure XMP is turned on. It might not be as a default from whoever built the system.
Instructions on how to check/do it in case you weren’t sure. Ok, I’m done!
Wow! Thanks again!