General question

[Stephen M]

I am beginning to think about getting a desktop, it is still a way off (most likely next generation of CPUs) but would like to start thinking about what I need as can prepare a reasonable budget (sorry cannot be exact on this but will pay for quality). At the moment it is just GPUs and Monitors I am looking at. The GPU will wait until I order from here as there will be changes before then, but I can get ideas from what is about now, whereas the Monitor may well be bought soon as I will hook it up to one of my laptops for the time being.

I will not be gaming but want to watch high quality DVD and Blu-Ray plus will be video editing. I will also be connecting the final version up to a decent audio set up so looking for a home cinema size screen, although do not want to pay silly money just for an extra few centimetres of screen space. Any thoughts appreciated.

 

[Oussebon]

I'm not up to speed on the fine details but iirc Intel is expected to release the Z390 chipset with 8-core consumer CPUs in the 2nd half of 2018. Ryzen will also get a refresh (February?), before the (more major?) refresh in 2019.

How those pan out will affect your budget, as will PCS pricing at the time, but I'd expect ~£300+ for the CPU and £150+ for the motherboard. An 8-core Intel or Pinnacle Ridge (Ryzen Refresh) would seem likely to cost at least that much, and I guess you'll want that for video editing.

If you're not gaming, the monitor you get now won't really affect the price of your eventual system I guess. I'd quite possible that for your viewing needs, integrated graphics will be more than enough. But you'll presumably want a GPU for video editing. Possibly a GTX 1060.

Are you looking at 4k UHD content, or just 1080p bluray?

Do you need to transcode media on the fly? e.g. you have it stored in X format but are streaming via Plex, Serviio, etc, but the TV doesn't take the format you have it in so your media PC needs to transcode it?

I believe Plex has some kind of beta for GPU transcoding, which would probably be useful for 4k video streaming, but that it's a paid-for features.