I haven’t built a gaming PC for over fifteen years; I defected to PlayStation in '08 when the constant upgrading got too expensive to really justify, but now I’m looking to come crawling back.
I am finding it easy enough to find build ideas for very capable (and expensive) machines but I am that out of touch with “what’s good” that I no longer have any idea of what would be “good enough” (to play most modern games at “high” settings and at 60fps).
Basically, I would like help in avoiding an attempt at going back to my old ways and building some kind of pie in the sky setup like this:
CPU AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D
CPU fan NZXT Kraken 360 RGB
MB Asus Prime X670E-Pro WiFi 6E
GPU Gigabyte Aero GeForce RTX 4090 24GB
RAM G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB Series 64GB DDR5-6000
SSD Samsung 990 Pro 2TB
PSU Corsair RM1000x Shift 1000 W
Perhaps the could serve as a starting point - what could you cut from the above build and what would you substitute?
A steam deck works well enough for most games if you want something handheld but dockable into a full computer. Gives you that sort of console feel without a console ecosystem.
High settings for most modern games jump from game to game. I was able to keep high settings with a 1080 and a Ryzen 7 with 64 gb of RAM. I think 16-32 GB ram should be fine but I am also a game developer so I use extra RAM for debug. Nvidia sent me a 3080 for testing last year and I just installed it.