Hello everyone, I've created this thread for all members like myself who intend to self assemble their own PC system this year. Unfortunately as most of you will be aware there's a so called "great chip shortage" which has created unprecedented demand, electronic component shortages with deliberate economic price inflation levels never seen before. Of course the bitcoin mining craze and scalpers have also manipulated graphics cards almost impossible to get hold of at recommended retail prices. To make matters worse huge tech companies are now taking advantage of this shortage situation creating a budget graphics card market to meet the demand intently releasing cut down graphics cards with less memory, less memory BUS bandwidth, less or no video encoders and features than similar priced cards released six year ago. Shocking example shenanigans of this behaviour are the newly released awful AMD 4Gb Radeon 6500XT and the just released Nvidia 8Gb RTX 3050.

So for everyone desperately looking to assemble an affordable Audio DAW/Multimedia creation PC system this year, what options are there without the availability of an affordable discrete graphics card component to include inside our new system build within a sensible price budget? That's the main purpose of this thread to create an increasing resource of information where knowledgeable friendly community members come together to share our previous computer assembly knowledge. To help one another with advice, discussions, tips and suggestions in an always friendly geeky atmosphere through these difficult times.

Currently Available Assembly Options To Consider

We could buy all secondary components and exclude the most expensive main components Motherboard, Memory Modules, CPU, and Graphics Card. By doing so this would give ourselves more build options to choose either an AMD or Intel system while sitting out the GPU shortage storm a little and see how the market goes. Though this isn't an option for those desperately needing a system soon to work with.

We could also jump the gun to alleviate the GPU shortage problem altogether by going the integrated graphics APU route, with the current fastest APU option being the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G. The 5700G though only supports older slower PCIe3 interface speeds, with half the Level 3 cache of the Ryzen 7 5800X CPU which also supports the newer faster PCIe4 interface speed. An option is to buy a temporary cheap PCIe3 motherboard for the 5700G though personally I see no benefit in doing so. A better option would be to buy a more expensive faster PCIe4 B550 or X570S chipset motherboard though this would increase the price dramatically buying faster PCIe4 M.2 NVMe SSD and graphics card components to match. The problem of this more expensive option is again finding a graphics card solution to match.

There's also the Intel option with their newly released Alderlake big little hybrid processors using Efficiency and Power core technology. Alderlake Z690 motherboards are the first on the market to make use of the new next gen PCIe5 interface which delivers double the bandwidth throughput speed of PCIe4. This is a very useful future proof feature though right now is useless without PCIe5 components on the market and the price for PCIe5 interface graphics cards and PCIe5 interface M.2 NVMe SSD's will be extortionate.
The bad news is that Alderlake motherboards aren't cheap and Alderlake processors are designed to take advantage of Windows 11 operating system utilising newer advanced processor scheduling although Windows 10 can still be used. Another more worrying problem to Intel Alderlake CPU's are curvature design flaws which makes a CPU cooler heatsink not completely sit flat with the top surface of the CPU. Even with a completely thin perfectly level good thermal paste. Some motherboards have been found to be bending also with large CPU coolers attached. The good news for an Alderlake system is motherboard options to still make use of cheaper DDR4 Memory with DDR5 being so expensive and not much faster yet.

My Thoughts Of Future Systems

AMD are releasing their next generation Ryzen 7000 series processors as well as AM5 Socket Motherboards sometime in the second half of this year with all new system architecture advancements making use of faster DDR5 memory and PCIe5 interface support just like Intel's Aderlake though I think faster USB4 may also be included which Alderlake doesn't support. The bad news unfortunately will be significantly increased component prices to fully take advantage of these advanced new technologies which will be well out of reach for many of us. Ryzen 7000 system components motherboards, CPU's, DDR5 memory modules, USB4 devices and especially PCIe5 SSD's and future PCIe5 Graphics Cards will be extortionately expensive costing an arm and a leg and a lung especially with the announcement of a 20% price hike from Intel, AMD and NVIDIA on high performance CPU's & GPU's in 2022. Also future PCIe5 graphics cards with all new 12 pin power connectors attached will consume and cost a hell of a lot to run with estimated 600 watt+ power needed just for a future graphics card is insanity. The only good news confirmed from AMD is that our expensive AM4 platform CPU coolers will be the only component to remain compatible saving us all a few pennies.

Intel also have their first discrete graphics cards named Arc Alchemist featuring the new Xe-HPG (High-Performance Graphics) architecture releasing some time later this year for desktop systems. With their flagship being the ARC Alchemist DG2-512 featuring 512 execution units, 4096 shader unit (Cores), up to 32/16 GB GDDR6, 14/16/18 Gbps memory speeds, 256-bit memory bus, and around 225 to 300 watts TGP power. Early benchmark news of this card's performance is around the same speed of NVIDIA's RTX 3070 Ti and AMD's Radeon RX 6700 XT. If Intel could bring this to market with sensible cheaper pricing and stock levels this will greatly make a difference to the current discrete graphics card market shortage.

Intel will also bring out their 13th Gen Rocket Lake CPU's some time around the end of this year which may or may not make a difference to future competition.

I only see a future of increasing inflation and pricing of PC technology which I hope will calm down one day.

Finally The End Phewwwww

This thread post has taken a lot of my time and effort to write and I hope it will be of help to others.

Please let me know your thoughts guys and girls and post what you consider to be the best reasonable budget system component choice options right now. I will soon post my thoughts and the system components of a system I'm considering to build very soon, including current price listing.

I'm not a complete newbie having assembled my last three computer systems myself so I do have experience. Let's help others and each other and have a good discussion thread which hopefully the moderators will allow to continually build and be an excellent helpful community resource.

Thx