Need help which PC to buy.

Lawrence_SoCal

Active Member
There are a number of recent threads in this forum on this topic
Your post doesn't reference any goals/constraints (budget, size, etc) so you aren't likely to get much of a useful response

Quick thoughts, assuming desire is for value, and decent (4+ year) life
- Ryzen 3 is low-end, and not likely to be a strong performer. As I've noted elsewhere, my minimum today would be 6c/12t, with 8c/16 thread or higher be desired for a system with a 4+ year life. I'm working on a PC with an 11 yr old 4c/8t CPU, 32GB of RAM, and multiple SSD... works fine except for photo/video editing (I don't game).. yes system to be replaced very soon... hoping for a Ryzen 9 5900X based system
- I'd recommend looking up why the GTX 1650 Super (with Turing / NVENC ) or higher is recommended for video encoding [GPU offload being more important with low-end CPU)
- 8GB RAM is on the low end, I'd recommend more (but easy to add)
- a HDD for certain data storage is fine, but I wouldn't run the Operating System off one for over 5 years. A SSD is better, but NVMe SSD would be strongly recommended
- further, I never recommend consumer grade systems as they save a little in short run, and rarely are built/last like business class systems (I prefer to pay 25-40% more and get 2->3X the life)

Realize video encoding is really hard work for a PC. So figure out what you need, then add a significant buffer (extra resources) to handle OBS encoding/streaming/recording on top of that. The less spare resources you have, the more time you have to spend optimizing your setup (and possibly making compromises you don't like). And assuming you aren't going to replace the PC every year or two, make sure you have room for what you want to do now, but also might do in a few years
 
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