Office and gaming in one PC? We build a gaming-ready office computer and marvel at Ryzen and Radeon | PC-Praxis

If you are in urgent need of a new computer, you have to put up with the extreme prices on the one hand and the limited availability of the components on the other. It’s annoying, but it’s not likely to change anytime soon. Because you can’t always choose the time of an upgrade, or the conditions never really fit 100% anyway, it’s just the way it is now. The world keeps spinning, the traders at the station and we as end users at the dripping money spigot of our own money storage.

For many reasons, today’s project is not a mind game of a bored journalist, because the PC was really needed in this form! Then it was simply a case of close your eyes and get through it, even if the financial commitment was a real hammer. Perhaps in six months’ time some people will ask themselves whether this was really necessary. Well, it was. In the following I present you a PC based on AMD-based core components and the goal was to make the system as quiet and powerful as possible and still – under the current market conditions – remain as cheap as possible.

I almost don’t dare write it, but the cost at the time of purchase (on 21/01/2021) was a whopping 2,182.10 euros at the participating German online retailer. By the way, all components were bought by own decision, a free component support by manufacturer or dealer did not take place. There was therefore no influence on the review. That’s a start. Since this PC is not my property, but belongs to my brother after the assembly, I would like to mention it at this point, because I had the PC for a few days after the assembly for this test.

Because I’m pretty sure that must have taken some doing on his part, because who doesn’t want to get started right away? The fact that not all CPUs could be tested with the same memory (or identical memory clock) is, as we know, in the nature of the three Ryzen generations. Some things just didn’t work out.

The system in detail

Let’s see what I found on my shopping list first:

Processor:	AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
Mainboard:	MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk
RAM:	32 GB (4x 8 GB single ranked) G.Skill RipJaws V 3600 MHz CL 16-16-36
SSD 1 / M.2:	1x Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500 GB
SSD 2 / M.2:	1x Crucial P2 1000 GB
Graphics Card:	16 GB PowerColor Radeon RX 6800 Red Dragon
Housing:	be quiet! Pure Base 500 (black)
Power Supply:	850 Watt be quiet! Straight Power 11 Modular 80+ Gold
CPU Cooler:	be quiet! Pure Loop 240 mm (AIO water cooling)
Other:	be quiet! Pure Wings 2 120 mm (Case fan)

First, let’s take a look at the nasty cost drivers. Since the scalper prices for graphics carts are currently no longer festive, I refrain from mentioning the sources at this point, which I have painstakingly stuffed with a lot of money. Well, with the graphics card in the form of the PowerColor RX 6800XT Red Dragon I was probably just lucky, can happen sometimes. The motherboard in the form of the MSI B550 Tomahawk is a very solid and good compromise between cost and performance, especially since it has very good voltage converters and has not shown any other weaknesses.

In addition, AMD’s Ryzen 7, which falls a bit behind the Ryzen 5 5600X in terms of price, but still offers the best compromise to the bolides with 2 CCXes, if you also have to work with it. You definitely notice the 4 more threads. The memory is rather unsuspicious and SSDs have to be simple, of course. The Samsung 970 Evo Plus as a system drive is fast enough and the Crucial P2 is certainly not a bad choice as a temporary data grave. I thankfully did without PCIe 4.0 here (also for financial reasons).

So and now comes the first cash check. Because at the end of the budget, there was still plenty of shopping list left. Buying junk doesn’t work either, of course, and it plays into my hands that my dear brother didn’t order an illuminated Christmas tree. If you limit yourself to the essentials, i.e. the unlit ones, you get decent components at a fair price, which you might not have expected at first. Considering all of Igor’s research on peak loads with high-end graphics cards and thick CPUs, I immediately went to the be quiet! Straight power 850 watt gold grabbed the biggest item.

The cabinet also didn’t need to light up the room, so it became a Pure Base 500. Solid and still big enough, in addition timelessly simple – thus perfectly suitable for longer use in the office without any optical contortions that get on your nerves after a short time. With the Pure Loop 240, I then screwed a suitable AiO water cooling on the hot Ryzen 7 5800X, is completely sufficient and does not interfere with the phone when the CPU has to slave away.

In the end it was only enough for the Pure Wings 2 as additional case fans, but as long as you don’t go full throttle here, they are better than you might think. The limit was “about” 2000 Euro, but with the best will in the world it could not be kept without lazy compromises. Better that way and durable. The price driver was of course the graphics card in the end, but close your eyes and… but we’ve been through this before. But now we leave it open, it’s time to assemble it!

AMD Ryzen 7 5800X, 8C/16T, 3.80-4.70GHz, boxed ohne Kühler (100-100000063WOF)

	Zentrallager: 5 Stück lagernd, Lieferung 1-3 WerktageFiliale Wilhelmshaven: 5 Stück lagerndStand: 25.04.24 02:00	183,00 €*Stand: 25.04.24 02:05
	Lagernd	183,63 €*Stand: 25.04.24 02:05
	am Lager, Lieferzeit 1-2 Tage	189,00 €*Stand: 25.04.24 02:02