Help me pick a gaming PC for Sim Racing

I recently built a new sim PC and spent right around $1200. It's a Ryzen 5 3600X and a 2060 Super. 

My understanding is you really want to stick with the nVidia GPUs for iRacing and the like. The Radeon cards have a bad reputation for less-than-stellar stability and compatibility with iRacing. My rig will drive VR or triple 1080 monitors all day long at 90fps with quality settings pretty much maxed out.

Actually, checking some prices, you could probably duplicate my setup for a bit less than I paid. I'll put together a parts list and post it here soon.

In reply to ProDarwin :

True, I guess I was only talking about the CPU side. VR is (potentially) less graphics card intensive but much more CPU intensive. It used to be that you needed a monster CPU regardless of anything else (because basically the entire game, physics, and graphics were run though one CPU core regardless of how many were available) to have a hope of running VR well. Now that's gotten a lot better to the point that a CPU that's a little bit overkill for great triples is probably good for decent VR.

Here's basically my entire list. I could have saved a few bucks here and there, like with pirated Windows, but I didn't eed the hassle:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/vMBtjp

JG Pasterjak said:

I recently built a new sim PC and spent right around $1200. It's a Ryzen 5 3600X and a 2060 Super. 

My understanding is you really want to stick with the nVidia GPUs for iRacing and the like. The Radeon cards have a bad reputation for less-than-stellar stability and compatibility with iRacing. My rig will drive VR or triple 1080 monitors all day long at 90fps with quality settings pretty much maxed out.

Actually, checking some prices, you could probably duplicate my setup for a bit less than I paid. I'll put together a parts list and post it here soon.

When did this start, because that's unfortunate. Years ago I had no problems with a 4gb R290 running Trips @1080p consistently north of 85-90 fps.

I'm about out the door and won't be able to look closely at the specs 'til later (by which time they're not unlikely to have sold out), but woot.com's doing a selection of MSI gaming desktops today... https://computers.woot.com/plus/msi-gaming-desktops-1

At a glance, the CPU and video card look good for the price, I think, but I haven't had time to verify they're not connected by cut-rate garbage. I haven't even searched for MSI reputation...

Holy crap... I was just looking into this again, nudged into action by some nieces and nephews who are getting interested in building gaming PCs. The video card alone from JG's link above is up to $1200, taking the total build over $2200!!

I'll do some more poking; I have an irrational hope that that card's been replaced, and the high price is due to autopricing with artificial scarcity because it's not current and the new version is priced more like the old one. BUT... I suspect this is just pandemic two weeks before xmas...

There was JUST a release of new versions of video cards and shortages of those.  I think what you are seeing in that link is related to the shortage of the new cards.  It should eventually push the older ones down though. 

People were dumping their 2080Tis for a ridiculously low prices due to the fact that the 3080 and 3090 are both better and yet come in at a cheaper MSRP.

A lot of things, if available, are being sold by third-party sellers who are massively price gouging.

This shortage is what has prevented me from upgrading my machine, but that 2600K at 5GHz and two 980Tis still manages okay in gaming; workloads are different story.

At this point, make the jump to Zen 3 AMD chips if you're fine with team red. The IPC uplift due to the re-engineering of the die design is pretty damn good. The less latency you have when your components communicate with one another, the better.

As for MSI, avoid them. They have decent products (mainly mainboards, their GPUs are another story), but their customer service and their ethics as a company are questionable.

Intel still manages to keep the crown in certain games or applications that favor faster core clocks versus core count, but in most cases the uplift is within a few percent, not worth going with an already drawnout 14nm process that still doesn't support PCIe4, and has less PCIe lanes (to be shared between GPU and other PCIe devices like Optane SSDs and the like) compared to AMD's offerings.

I'm sure it's just a matter of parts having changed by now and thus some parts just having jacked up automated pricing due to lack of availability of an outdated part, but I still did a bit of a spit-take when I checked JG's pcpartpicker link to see where we were at...

$5734.24

Apart from using parts that you'd probably swap out now anyhow, I assume we're also still living in about the worst possible time to buy anything containing a video card. Or chips.