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)
They were an MMO before they were a ttrpg, before they were books...