What's your thought on choosing X870 over B850?
Personally I would rather spend that money to upgrade the PSU to a 1000W Seasonic and check for something like Corsair Vengeance or Kingston Fury RAM that runs at 6000 instead of 4800.
edit: For a gaming PC I would recommend 7800X3D or 9800X3D over the Ryzen 7900.
What’s your thought on choosing X870 over B850?
the x870 requires pcie5.0 apparently, where the b850 doesn't - figured it'd be more upgradeable for him in the future
Personally I would rather spend that money to upgrade the PSU to a 1000W
pcpartpicker says the build would only be 400W, my understanding is that peak PSU efficiency is at ~50% load, so I went for something in the ~800W range. What benefits might 1000W provide?
7800X3D or 9800X3D over the Ryzen 7900
aside from the igpu, the improvements of those CPUs seems minimal - he's probably not going to be gaming much honestly... but he wants it to be capable
X870 / B850
You can find a B850 with PCIe 5.0 too, so that might be an idea.
PSU
The mentioning of Seasonic was important here, they're known for long lasting and high quality psus which is seen in that they usually offer 10-12 years of warranty compared to gigabytes 1 year warranty.
The 1000W was to future proof, which becomes relevant if the psu is built to be long lasting.
It's a part many brings with them into the next build.
CPU
If he's not gonna use the larger L3 through gaming then the 7900 is more than good enough.
Most games benefits from the L3 and some does so treemendously, f.e. Microsoft Flight Simulator. Here's the difference when the game is cpu bottlenecked:
Your memory choice is a bit odd considering the other parts you've specced here. Generally DDR5-6000 CL30 is what you want to shoot for with 7000 series AM5. It's also highly unlikely that a gen5 NVMe drive is necessary or will be noticeable in what he's doing, a good gen4 drive is usually more than sufficient and the money you save can go towards improving the RAM.
That seems like a great suggestion, thanks. I'll see what I can balance there.
The cpu cooler and mobo are pretty expensive (that could be because im in the states) but other then that the parts seem fine.
Seems like a decent build. Really depends on what the use case though is for your Dad. GPU pricing is just crazy. For that price id try and find a 9070xt or a equivalent Nvidia GPU. If you can get away with an igpu might be worth spending money saved on the GPU for a better CPU with an igpu and more ram.
Personally I'm trying to build something similar and an really struggling between just getting a ryzen AI 395 in a desktop with ~128gb ram and hoping that'll hold me over till discrete gpus come down in price instead of trying to buy one now. But it doesn't seem like they ever will....
Not sure if it is still relevant and i've also not kept up with all hardware releases as i'd like to. But some thoughts:
You could look into the Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE (or Peerless Assassin, think those are both fairly close). Those are just ridicolously cheap at ~$60 and if you look at reviews give much more expensive coolers a run for their money.
Not sure what the current verdict is on whether PCIe5 drives give a significant upgrade, but if not you could look at a drive like the Silicon Power US75. When i last looked at SSDs Newmaxx spredsheets and flowcharts were a useful resource and based on those it ticks the boxes for a solid drive.
As someone else also already suggested some faster RAM might also be a cheap and worthwhile upgrade
Motherboards are just way to complicated for me to make a deepdive to get up to date again. So i'll just say that imo Hardware unboxed always has some of the best video roundups. But i think there might potentially be room to get something cheaper and in return invest the saved money somewhere else. Just decide what features you actually need and imo don't get too hung up on potential future upgrades. Will your dad actually make those upgrades? And would spending $100-150 for a slightly better upgrade path now really be worth it compared to spending them somewhere else. Either on the build itself or peripherals like a nicer monitor etc.
I assume the case is already purchased based on the list? Otherwise this might be something to let him choose somewhat based on looks.
Just as a hypotherical example with all changes it would look like this atm ~$2900 vs $3300. Note that i just put in a cheaper motherboard, but didn't really read up much on it, so that would require some more investigation. This would either make it cheaper or leave room in the budget for other things like an even better GPU/CPU or on peripherals. Really depends on what he plans to do with it.