Keen to get your hands a new gaming PC powered by a latest and greatest next-gen RTX 3000 series GPU? Well of course Australia’s #1 custom PC retailer will have them ready for order on day one. All you need to do is sort out the rest of the build and get ready to lock in your order on September 17th.
Getting the balance right
Nothing is worse than sinking a lot of money in to a high powered GPU only to have your in game frame rates bottlenecked by other factors of your build! Getting this right is essential but not overly difficult once you know the basics. Matching the right CPU to your GPU is going to be the first and most important step. You’re mileage will vary from game to game as to where the exact bottleneck lies, but a 6 core, 12 thread CPU with a nice high turbo clock like the Intel 10600K or AMD 3600XT is great value for high end gaming.
This is especially true when gaming at high resolutions like 1440p or 4K where the CPU is less of a bottleneck in general. If you’re the type of gamer that prefers ultra high frame rates over higher resolutions, stepping up to a 10700K or even the 10900K if it’s within your budget might be worth the extra spend to you.
Not going overboard
The #1 thing to avoid when customising a new PC is over-spending on components that won’t actually add any additional functionality or performance, and under-spending on critical core components that might bottleneck the performance of the others.
The most common examples of over-spending we see here at Evatech is customers selecting anything above 32GB of RAM and going overboard on the power supply. Unless you have a very specific memory-hungry use case beyond gaming, 16GB is generally plenty, and being able to supply 1000w to a system that is only capable of drawing half that number is just a waste. Our custom PC builder will track the max potential system power draw and display it just above the power supply selection options for you to help you decide.
Making sure it fits!
The RTX3080 is behemoth of a GPU that takes a behemoth of a cooler to keep it under control, and as such, they’re pretty damn BIG! Much bigger than your average RTX2080. Unfortunately this means some cases won’t quite cut the mustard. One of our go favourites we’ve recommended in the past, the Corsair 220T falls short by a couple of centimetres. You won’t have to worry about this as our our online PC builder will let you know if you run into any compatibility issues as you configure your system. But if you’re buying the parts to build it yourself, it’s definitely something you need to keep in mind! Gone are the days you could take it for granted that your GPU will simply fit in a mid-tower ATX chassis.
Keeping your cool
These latest RTX 3000 series cards come with some pretty beefy higher power coolers to keep up with the heat generated from the GPU. That’s great right? Well, yes and no. Yes it’s great the cards already come with a big fat high powered cooler built in, but the heat that’s getting kicked out of that cooler is still has to get out of the chassis.
This generation getting a good high airflow case could make the difference between your new GPU hitting its peak possible performance, or getting thermally throttled. Again, this is an easy one to solve once you’re aware of the problem.
The easiest way to go about it is to simply select a case with plenty of visible ventilation. All solid aluminum and tempered glass panels? Far from ideal. Big mesh air grills or intakes and a couple of fans on the front panel? Perfect.
There’s plenty to choose from but you can’t go wrong with the Corsair 275R Airflow in either black or white. As the name suggests, designed with great airflow in mind and rocks plenty of ventilation and three 120mm fans right out of the box. If you prefer the bling of RGB, stepping up to a Corsair iCue 465X (also in black or white) will get you where you need to go without sacrificing the all so important airflow.
Storage Speed Matters Now?
General consensus used to be that faster storage didn’t really affect game performance at all but was great for boot times, game load times, and general overall system responsiveness as you launched apps, copied around files and pretty much went about any non in-game activities. Well with DirectX 12 ultimate and RTX3000 comes what Nvidia is calling RTX I/O. Think of it as a direct line of communication and dedicated hardware on the GPU to handle data transfers from the storage drive to your GPU memory. Ultimately allowing for much higher bandwidth transfers between the two.
Does this mean in-game performance will benefit from faster storage? Well, theoretically maybe? We’ll have to wait and see exactly how games start to utilise it. It will probably be most noticeable still in load times, or possible in some big open world games that stream world content in and out as you play. As for how it may or may not affect frame rates, only time will tell.
Now you’ve got the general idea, time to customise!
To get started simply head on over to our store page (linked here) and browse our range of pre-configured or fully customisable gaming PCs.
The RTX 3080 will appear on launch day (17/09) with RTX 3090 a week later on the 25th. Remember, stock in first shipments are expected to be very limited with such high demand so get your orders in early as stock will be allocated on a first-in first-out basis.
Don’t forget our sales and support team are always standing by to help, so if you have any questions this article didn’t cover just jump on our contact page (here) and shoot us a message.