Evening all,

I know little of the dark arts of PC building and suspect I will need to get Computer Lounge to build this (for reasons which will become apparent). I'm just trying to work out a sensible price/performance matrix and interested in people's thoughts. There might be some terrible obvious idiocy in the spec that I'm too dim to see, so feel free to save me!

Usage: relatively light gaming from the kids (mostly, ahem), general PC stuff i.e.Office, and getting connected to Citrix Remote Desktop, Roon and Tidal, no need for video or photo editing. We are a mainly Mac family and tend to use laptops for other stuff. Current PC is an elderly Dell SFF 9020 with an i5 3570 and a GTX1050 card so the only way is up :-) games tend to be FIFA, City Skylines with loads of mods, Civ 6, Skywalker Saga, Jedi Fallen Order, Squadrons etc and some really old stuff (AoE, Battlefront)

No need for KB/mice/display etc and have a couple of big old HDDs pulled from a NAS to do local backup.

So needs to fit in this case:https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fractal-design-north 

This is the key thing as it receives official blessing from the CFO. Everything else is secondary! As far as I can see only CL stock this model in white in NZ, hence they get the gig. 

Currently that's with:

Ryzen 7 5700X

Gigabyte X570S Aorus Elite AX mobo

32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR4-3200

Corsair MP600 GS 1Tb NVMe M.2

Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3060 OC 12G 2.0

Fractal Design ION GOLD 850

That's a not inconsiderable 2832.99.

I will be passing through UK and Texas in September so while I can't bring back big stuff I could pick up RAM and GPU etc in the US from Amazon/Newegg or whoever but would need a reliable seller as difficult to return if problems. While parts were once cheap in the UK everything is now so expensive over there that the prices are almost exactly those in NZ...So one option would be just to slip the old GTX1050 in pending an upgrade further down the track (assuming PSU cables all good). There will be no need for overclocking, RGB lighting and wifi not required. Quiet would be good as the current machine sounds like a small helicopter under FIFA or Skywalker Saga load (and often hangs if pushed hard). 

What's the feeling about the above? It's significantly over my "internal budget" (roughly 2k) but I'd like to get something that will be upgradeable very slowly over time (the Dell is all proprietary PSUs and mobos and can do little to no more).

Thanks in advance for thoughts and sorry for the long post!

b