I got tired of manually updating my spreadsheets every time a friend of mine wanted to build a pc and wanted to know what the best price to performance parts were. So I’m slapping together this little website. It’s not up yet, but I have the url reasonablegamingpc.com. I’m utilizing open benchmark data for the relative performance of cpus and gpus, and plan on updating prices daily from any retailer that will let me. No ads, no tracking on my end, just affiliate links to pay for the upkeep. Ideally I want the landing page to just be a list of all parts necessary to build a complete computer, with each part being the best for the price in the category based on the days prices. That way you don’t need to crawl through a ton of reviews for each part.
CPUs and GPUs are pretty easy to compare, but other parts are a bit more fuzzy. It really doesn’t look like there is a ton of performance to be gained by fast ram, contrary to popular opinion. The difference in testing between DDR5 4800 and 6000 with the same timing looks to be about 3%, which really doesn’t justify the extra cost of the higher speed ram, despite 6000 being the consensus sweet spot for AM5. I suspect that differences in timings would yield similarly minimal differences.
Motherboards are another tricky part. They make very little difference to performance, so instead I’ll probably put together a minimum spec list of features and components, and toss up whichever board is cheapest that meets that criteria. PCIE Gen4 is the current cut off, as that really does make a significant difference in performance; particularly with GPUs utilizing only 8 lanes, which is going to be most low and midrange cards these days.
Cooling probably falls into a similar category as mobo and ram. If the cpu comes with a stock cooler I probably won’t recommend getting anything more than that, and whichever fan cooler meets the thermal requirements at a reasonable cost will be recommended if not.
Storage will stick to NVME Gen4 x4 as that does have significant impact on load times and performance when gaming. Whichever part has the lowest price per GB while meeting the minimum spec will be recommended.
The common recommendation is not to cheap out on your power supply. As such I will have a minimum cut off of efficiency, probably 80+ gold, and a white list of manufacturers that haven’t caused any fires recently. As such the part recommended will be the cheapest that meets those requirements and the estimated peak wattage of the above parts plus 10% rounded up to the closest 50w.
I genuinely have no idea what to recommend for cases. As I build out the parts database I intend to do size checking to make sure the recommended parts fit in whichever case is recommended. But as far as ports, features, minimum included fans, sizing, etc I really need some feedback as to what the minimum spec should be.
Anyway let me know what you think, whether you’d use or recommend a site like this, and what the must have aspects of pc parts (particularly motherboards and cases) are.
(all the information in the screenshot is for mock up and testing purposes and not intended for actual advice)
Did you purposely misspell ‘reasonable’?
I didn’t, good catch
If this is more than a hobby and you want it to be competitive, you’re going to have to use a lot of reliable hard data. E.g. the trends on PC part pickers site. Subjective decisions on parts will be scrutinized to a ridiculous level, so best to just stick to the numbers whenever you can, unless you have some actual data you could use to back up some deviation from the norm.
If it needs to be accurate you may also want to get into scraping, it’s pretty easy to scrape pricing data live, just need to pay for proxies to do it at scale, or pull from an existing API if you trust them to be accurate.
In general I think you’ll find most people already use PC part picker who have this problem, I’ve been using them for 14 years. But it sounds like you may want to automate the shopping experience they offer?
Oh, I already have the scrapers up and running. I should be able to update prices at least every 24 hours at launch and I am exploring a webhook based system for adhoc updates for flash sales and things like that.
I definitely utilized pc part picker for each of my past builds, and see them as the shoulders I’d be standing on. The big advantage that I’m hoping to bring that they’ve dabbled a bit in but not really seized on is the integration of the relative performance metrics. Beyond that, having more of a one stop view, such that you don’t have to go hunting for each part in a category. One is suggested, which you can swap out if you want something more powerful or less expensive which should be a little less overwhelming for new folks than the volume of options available on pc part picker.
Nice.
Mmmm I can say AMD Zen 5 likes 6000Mhz.
In fact, the 7000s share the same internal memory controller as 9000s. So beyond 6000mhz, is actually sillly at the moment. Zen 6 should like faster speeds.
I went for tighter timings Instesd on my 9950X3D at 28 CAS vs 32 CAS on my 7950X build.
I actually didn’t know DDR5 went lower but then I learned Intel has DDR4/slower-DDR5 on some motherboard’s @.@
In my testing, the difference between 6000mhz and 6400mhz is about two percent in fps, but with currently a 15% price difference. Currently the price difference between CL 30 and 36 6000mhz memory is about 11%, with probably a similar 1ish percent difference in actual performance.
Currently by the p2p metric the 6000mhz CL36 memory is the best deal today, but obviously that will move around depending on pricing.
