It's going to be complicated to answer this question. Each brand have multiple skus for each tier of graphics cards. So you need to do research on specific tier of graphics cards tier you are eyeing. Then look up reviews online for them. Gamer Nexus are excellent source since their testing is very through and consistent. Also like you would expect, the higher end GPU of a specific tier are usually more expensive, but also preform noticeably better then entry level GPU even of the same type. This is due to better cooling and better ability for the GPU to boost clock speed. But the big brands like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA , and Zotac will usually have good preforming GPUs regardless of the tier.
Considering the street prices of the 9900ks, you are paying almost twice the money for similar gaming performance. If you are doing more then gaming In would recommend going with a 3700x because the extra 150 over the 9700k is not worth it for the regular 9900k let alone the 9900ks.
Is the 3700 an AMD chip? I've always been wary of them as it seems Intel stuff just plays better and is more compatible. Or maybe I'm thinking of Nvidia over AMD for GPUs. Is the 2080ti still the way to go if I make a build in March, or will something be just around the corner from then? What about motherboard and memory recommendations? ~$3000 budget. Need to upgrade from my 2011 build with i7 2700k and dual 980s.
No. Amd has catched up to Intel with their latest CPUs and are arguably a better value for the money. In multithreaded applications, the 3700x gets really close to the 9900k and beats the 9700k. But the latter is still noticably better at gaming then anything amd has to offer. The 9900k just excels at everything but you have to pay for it. So if you are only gaming and want a high end CPU, get the 9700k. If you are doing any thread heavy workloads, considering the 3700x. If you don't want to spend a lot of money on CPU, consider the 3600.
Agreed. HDDs are obsolete.
Yes, it is still the best gaming chip; it has 16 threads too. But the 9700K is still the best VALUED gaming chip you can get for your money at $299.99. It's easily the recommended purchase for most people building a new rig specific to gaming, today.
If you're waiting for March then I would wait until the next round of graphics cards releases sometime next year. The 2080 Ti is already over one year old and not good value at this point. I'd find a way to get by on something else until then, and then you can buy next year's best graphics card which should be a big improvement.
A few things add up to the price like Micron TLC probably being cheaper than Smasung's, but the main things are the DRAM cache and controller chip. The 2TB 970 EVO has 2GB LPDDR4 (twice as much as the 1TB model), and I believe the 2TB SX8200 Pro has 1GB DDR3 (same as the 1TB model). But that is not something one takes advantages of unless you are transferring several gigs on the background at the same time that you are playing.
Yeah the 970 EVO is only a bit faster than the SX8200 in terms of reading, its advantages comes to more prosumer uses. In the hypothetical scenario that games next gen took advantage of really fast SSDs, like say PCIe gen 4 nvmes, then both 970 EVO and SX8200 Pro would be still about the same.
Simlpy put, StoreMI. A cheap $30 SSD plus a relatively inexpensive 4-6TB hard drive gives you an impressive amount of storage space that can be accessed at surprisingly fast speeds. If you have a separate SSD as a boot drive, even better!
For $200 I would recomend the ASUS TUF Gaming X570-Plus (Wi-Fi); and for $150 the Asus Prime X570-P is pretty decent if you are fine with fewer ports.
