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First time building a PC... Help!
Hello my friends! I come here hoping to find some advice and get some questions out of the way to ease my mind!
First things first : I'm making this PC as an upgrade to my 2.8ghz/ Geforce 7300/ 4gig DDR1 computer from 2000 as I havent been gaming on PC for quite some time.
The games I'm hoping to be able to play are Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and Final Fantasy XIV on High/Medium settings with little to no lag. After some searching I found some people who suggested these parts to me.
I just want to see if these parts are all compatible with eachother, I also would like your opinion on the build itself. so here we go!
Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
CORSAIR CMPSU-650TX 650W ATX12V / EPS12V SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply
Windows 7 64 Bit
iHAS DVD Burner
a case with 3x fans (1 x 200mm Red LED front fan
1 x 200mm top fan, and 1 x 120mm rear fan )
GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-768I GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) 768MB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model F3-10600CL8D-4GBHK
ASUS M4A785TD-V EVO AM3 AMD 785G HDMI ATX AMD Motherboard
AMD Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache Socket AM3 125W Quad-Core Processor HDZ955FBGMBOX
I'm sorry for the wall of text, but I desperately need some help. I can get all the parts, shipping included for 1,008$
What do you all think? The website I used to search these items was newegg.ca
Please help me!
Comments
Hello! While you can never completely guarantee compatibility, I am 99.99% sure you will be OK. The main thing is to make sure your Mobo and CPU are compatible (both AMD or both Intel). Other than that I say go for it. Anything that doesn't work could be returned or RMA'd. I took the plunge in Dec 2007 and built my first. It's a ton of fun!
They're both AMD. Sweet! Haha , I'm SO excited to start! Thanks a lot for the reply!!
The Western Digital green are economy drives, these are good for storage and saving money, but they are not good gaming drives. You want to go for the blue (standard) or preferably black (fast).
Looks fine otherwise though.
Oh I didn't know that. I'll update my cart asap ; thanks!
The point of the 785G chipset is the integrated graphics, which you won't use if you're also getting a discrete video card. If you found a great price on it, then go ahead and get it. You might be able to save money by getting a motherboard with the 770 chipset, or the more modern 870 chipset.
It wouldn't hurt to list the exact case, though pretty much any case with three fans, including two really big fans, should have plenty of airflow.
Nice power supply, but it's overkill for your needs unless you think you might upgrade to a far more powerful (i.e., higher wattage, not just faster) video card later on. If you found a great deal on it, then go ahead, but you could probably save some money by getting a high quality power supply rated around 500 W.
As someone above said, don't get a Caviar Green hard drive unless you don't mind constantly having to sit there and wait for your computer. Hard drives are an intrinsically slow technology, but 5400 RPM hard drives are slower than most desktop drives, even. It looks like you probably don't want to make room for a solid state drive on your budget, but if you're going to get a hard drive, at least get a Caviar Black.
Not a bad build, other than the hard drive. People are saying that Final Fantasy XIV is really demanding, so I don't know how well that rig will run it on high settings, but it should handle most games just fine at high settings.
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For what it's worth, the specs you describe on your old computer didn't exist in 2000.
You don't mention a monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, or surge protector. If you're keeping them from your old computer, that's fine, but don't forget about them entirely.
Depending on whether you're ready to buy right now, you might try this shell shocker combo deal:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.482122
That deal will probably expire within hours, though. If you don't get that but want to buy from New Egg Canada, I'd say to get this power supply:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151096
Slightly better quality than the Corsair unit you picked (which, incidentally, is also made by Seasonic), and it gives you essentially the same price after rebate while letting you skip the hassle of the rebate.
That shell shocket is pretty awesome... I'll have to seriously consider it..
Price really isn't a problem ; I'd rather overkill it so I dont have to upgrade every few years then save a few bucks here and there. My original budget was 1300 and I got this whole setup for 1000 ( Or will be getting )
But that shellshocker is a real turn on, considering my current case is a boring black with a red fan in front.. Hmmm...
If you've got room in your budget to spend more, than one obvious upgrade would be to get a better video card. At minimum, a 1 GB version of a GeForce GTX 460 is substantially better than a 768 MB version. The extra video memory doesn't matter much, but the extra memory bandwidth and ROPs do. They're different bins of the same GPU chip, and giving them the same name was flagrantly deceptive on Nvidia's part. Someday someone is probably going to release a 1.5 GB version of the GTX 460 hoping that people won't know that it's markedly inferior to the 1 GB version.
Or you could upgrade further beyond the GTX 460 and get a Radeon HD 5850 like this:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127500
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The other big upgrade to consider is a good solid state drive. A good SSD usually won't improve your frame rates in games, but it will make everything else you do on the computer (including loading games and zoning within games) much, much faster. A quick explanation of why SSDs are awesome:
Approximate latency for the CPU to get information from or send information to:
L1 cache: 1 ns
L2 cache: 4 ns
L3 cache: 15 ns
System memory: 50 ns
Video card: 50 ns
Hard drive: 15000000 ns
One of those things is not like the others, no? You're never going to get latencies in the tens of nanoseconds through a SATA cable, but most of that latency is just because hard drives are an intrinsically slow technology. A good solid state drive can perform the same functions as a hard drive with a latency around 100000 ns. So that you don't have to count zeroes, the latency on an SSD is often under 1% of that of a hard drive.
When your computer makes you sit and wait for something, it's nearly always waiting to send information to or from the hard drive. With a good solid state drive, it just reads or writes the necessary information without making you wait much. You know how when you click to open a program, you sit and wait a bit a while and then the program finally opens? With a good SSD, for most programs, you click to open the program and it just opens, fully loaded and ready to use, in under a second. Really big programs (e.g., many games) take substantially longer, but still typically around 1/3 of the time that it takes on even a relatively fast hard drive.
You're probably used to constantly having to wait whenever you want a computer to do anything, even little things, so you don't entirely realize that the pause is there. With a good SSD, you don't have to wait for most things. It doesn't take five minutes to realize, aha, this is how a computer is supposed to work. Well, five minutes from the time you start using it, that is; it will take longer than that to install Windows.
Other advantages of solid state drives are that with no moving parts, they have no moving parts that can break. So for example, if you drop an SSD on the ground, it doesn't matter. (This is really great for laptops.) They also make absolutely no noise whatsoever, so you can sometimes be rid of the annoying humming of a hard drive. They also use virtually no power, which is nice, but really only matters in laptops.
So why doesn't everyone get solid state drives? The problem is the price tag. They're typically around $2-$3/GB. Still, even if you need 1 TB of storage, you don't need a 1 TB SSD. You can get a small SSD and put the OS and your major applications on it, and then movies, music, pictures, and so forth on a hard drive. Everything on the SSD will be fast, and everything not on it will be slow, but if the files on the hard drive are only lightly accessed, the slow speed doesn't matter much.
Be warned that, while there are some really good solid state drives out there, there are also some really bad ones. The NAND flash memory is most of the cost, so you can't necessarily distinguish between them by the price tag. Anyway, here's a good deal on a really good SSD if you're interested:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148358
If you get that one, you should probably get a SATA 3 motherboard to plug it into so that you don't bottleneck it on a SATA 2 connection; any AMD motherboard with an 800 series chipset supports SATA 3.
I'm actually a bit surprised to see the RealSSD C300 that cheap, as Crucial had been charging more of a price premium, since it's faster than the Intel or Indilinx drives, let alone the junk ones with controllers from Samsung, Toshiba, JMicron, etc. Maybe they figured they had to undercut SandForce drive prices.
Be warned that if you buy an SSD, you should check to see if it needs a firmware update (before installing Windows!) and update the firmware if appropriate. It's kind of like a driver update, but sometimes it wipes all data on the drive, which is why you do the update before installing anything on it.
One can get larger or smaller capacities, of course, and that changes the price tag accordingly.
Well that's a good bit of infermation I never new before, thank you!
If I replace the HDD to a SSD and replace my current graphic card with the one you suggested, will they be compatible with the rest of the system? I'm sure they will be as evidently you're a pro and know your stuff, but I just got to double check.
I really think I'm OK with what I got. I mean it'll run the games I want perfectly and it's not like I'm one of those people to constantly upload videos/pictures. I'll just be using the PC to game and do whatever research i'll need this semester.
The SSD seems like a no brainer though, i'll probably replace the two now.
Virtually all modern video cards are PCI Express 2.0 (or 2.1, but the difference doesn't matter) and virtually all modern motherboards are also PCI Express 2.0 or 2.1. You'd have to go out of your way to get something weird for there to be an incompatibility issue there. There are a handful of AGP or PCI video cards for people with really old motherboards who want to upgrade their video cards, but those tend to cost a lot more than comparable PCI Express video cards (because they're such low volume parts) that there's not much risk that you'll get one by accident.
Yes, the SSD would be compatible with whatever you want to get, as it uses SATA, as every nearly modern motherboard does. SATA is backward compatible, so if you stick a SATA 3 drive in a SATA 2 port, it will work, but merely be capped at SATA 2 speeds. For the particular SSD I linked, it's a difference in sequential reads of about 350 MB/s in a SATA 3 port or 270 MB/s in a SATA 2 port. The Crucial RealSSD C300 is the only SSD on the market currently able to take advantage of SATA 3 speeds, and even it only benefits in reads; its writes speed wouldn't be bottlenecked by SATA 2 at all.
There is a big question of how much capacity you need. Personally, I have a 120 GB SSD (OCZ Agility) and no hard drive at all. You can check how much space you have in use on your current to get some idea of how much space you use. If you're never going to use 100 GB of space, then you don't particularly need a 1 TB hard drive. If you do load up in pirated movies or however people manage to fill those huge drives, then you do need a lot of space.
One other comment about an SSD: never defragment it, as it will shorten the lifespan. Defragmenting is something designed for hard drives to try to partially mitigate the reasons why they're so slow, but solid state drives don't benefit from defragmenting as they don't have the same problem in the first place that defragmenting is desgined to solve.
On the other hand, you can only write to a given SSD cell about 10000 times before it wears out and stops accepting new writes. (You can still read the data just fine, so there isn't potential data loss issues.) For typical desktop use, that probably takes centuries, or at least decades. If you defragment every day, that's a ton of reads and writes for no good reason, so it can be a problem. This is really only a major problem for servers that want to aggressively write to the drive constantly (reads are not a problem), which can wear out an SSD in several months or years.
If you happen to want a larger SSD, then try one of these:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226152
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148348
If you look through the site, there are some other SSDs that are a little cheaper for about the same capacity. Don't get them, as they have vastly inferior performance. It's not worth saving $20 to lose 98% of the random write performance.
Or if you want something smaller and cheaper, then these ones are good:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167025
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227510
These last two have poor sequential write performance, which will make some big programs take a little longer to install, but that doesn't otherwise matter.
If interested in an SSD, then one big decision is whether you want both an SSD and a hard drive, or just the SSD and no hard drive.
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If you get a Crucial RealSSD C300, I'd get a motherboard with SATA 3. Any motherboard with an AMD 800 series chipset has SATA 3 in the chipset. 870 is probably the right chipset for your needs, but if you can find an 880G or 890X or whatever that happens to be cheaper and still from a good brand, then go for it. The motherboard you picked above has a 785G chipset and only SATA 2.
If you get any other SSD, then SATA 3 won't matter, as other SSDs only use SATA 2.
I'll probably just use the SSD, but I'll take your advice and look for a SATA3 instead of the SATA2 I have. You're very helpful, and its a great first impression of the field
That's so great, I'll be searching Newegg for the complete materials I need based on your recomendations
I've got an 80 gig intel SSD and I got to say, it's great for boot times, but if you are playing most games, it doesn't really do much more then add $$$.
Once you start a game it is going to be CPU video card and memory that do all the work. Most games will have brief loading screens but other then that you won't notice any difference if you didn't have an SSD.
My windows 7 boots really really fast, but like i said, the games themselves. No difference.
The Stranger: It's what people know about themselves inside that makes 'em afraid.
One other thing I should warn you about is, don't plan on filling up an SSD all the way, or you kill the performance. The SandForce ones (e.g., Mushkin Callisto linked above) don't suffer from this, but the others do. If you get a 64 GB SSD, don't count on putting more than about 50 GB on it.
Hard drives lose performance when they get near full, too, though for very different reasons. But filling up a 64 GB SSD is a lot more of a concern than filling up a 1 TB hard drive, simply because it's a lot less space.
If you haven't done it yet, go use your old computer again for simple things like web browsing and e-mail. You'll be shocked at how slow it feels once you're used to the SSD.
Yes, it doesn't help your frame rates, but how big of a deal the faster loading is varies wildly from one game to another. The quicker loading times are very, very nice for Guild Wars with the constant map travel, for example. But yeah, they wouldn't matter much for a game like WoW where you rarely have to zone, especially if you only play one character rather than jumping between them a lot.
Really, though, it depends on what you do with the computer. The extra speed of an SSD is very, very nice if you do a lot of web browsing, for example.
Dude, honestly I would stay away from the other ssd's because the intel ssd's are the best. And if money isn't an object then I would suggest a complete different build.
This may be a bit too expensive but this is probably the best build you're gonna get in this price range, and this will ensure you can take most games at max graphics. However, some newer DX11 games will be too much for a single gpu at a 1920x1080 resolution to get max fps at max graphics, but you should still be good. I'm not getting to put as much information as I wish for you because I'm in the process of moving but here's some help.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119213
Cooler Master Haf 932 - One of the best air cooling cases you can find.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131642
Asus Rampage III Extreme Mobo - Supports Tri-sli or tri-fire, if you're planning to upgrade it has two PCIE x16 slots for maximum bandwith of the GPU. But, if its too expensive you can bump down to an LE Mobo by EVGA with SLI Compatibility and you will just sacrifice a tad bit of performance and possibly some bandwith depending on which board you get, but that is also another minor performance cut.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115225
Intel Core i7 930 cpu - Best cpu on the market besides the core i7 980x but thats truly overkill, and this cpu responds to overclocking much better than the amd counterparts.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167023
Intel X25 80gb SSD - Intel makes the best ssd's right now, and 80gb is all you need out of an ssd. All you need to do is run your OS on this baby, your apps, and the main games you are playing, then just load the rest on a datadrive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136337
Western Digital Caviard Black 1tb data drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130552
Nvidia Evga Gtx 480 gpu - best single card gpu and will ensure that you are playing those games you listed at max settings.
http://www.newegg.com/Shopping/ShoppingItem.aspx?ItemList=N82E16820226133
6 gb Mushkin Ram 1600 mhz - now you can get some cheaper ram than this, the only reason to ever buy performance ram is if you are going to be seriously overclocking to the max and trying to benchmark. Other then that for just getting a decent OC most ram with the same timings will do the same.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608019
Noctua Heat Sink cooler- the other coolers are out of stock, but this is the best heatsink you can buy and out does most of the cheap wannabe liquid cooling out there.
This is a great build for your games, and if you need it cheaper I can definitely help you do so.
You don't have to worry about losing performance when filling up an intel ssd. And what one of the guys up above said is true, SSD's only help with write speeds, and boot times. When you're in the game you won't notice the difference between an hdd or an ssd, except for of course when you are on loading screens.
First, you should note that he's looking at New Egg Canada. Presumably he lives in Canada, not the US.
"Cooler Master Haf 932"
Nice case, yes. But $180 for a case? Sure that's appropriate if you're trying to dissipate 600 W on air cooling, but ridiculous for most purposes.
"Asus Rampage III Extreme Mobo"
$390 for a motherboard? What is this? An unlimited budget build? Yes, nice motherboard for people who want super high end builds. But that's ridiculous for most purposes.
"Intel Core i7 930 cpu - Best cpu on the market besides the core i7 980x but thats truly overkill"
The Core i7 870 is a better CPU for most purposes than the 930, with its integrated PCI Express controller, more aggressive turbo boost, and much lower power consumption. They're about the same price for the CPU, and the 870 takes a much cheaper chipset, too. Regardless, a Phenom II X4 is plenty good enough.
"Intel makes the best ssd's right now"
No, the Intel SSDs are way behind the Marvell and SandForce controllers at pretty much everything. The Intel SSDs might win at random writes on a Windows XP system that breaks the 4k alignment of the newer controllers, but that's about it. They're all fast enough to be in territory where benchmarks can easily separate them, but there isn't a noticeable difference in normal use, though. Intel is hoping to be competitive on performance again with the launch of Lyndonfield next year, but until then, they're mostly hoping to drum up some sales on brand name recognition and FUD. They could get some sales from fire sale prices, but Intel doesn't do fire sale prices.
"Nvidia Evga Gtx 480 gpu - best single card gpu and will ensure that you are playing those games you listed at max settings."
Until it overheats and dies, that is. The reference GTX 480 gets dangerously hot at normal gaming loads, and can also be obnoxiously loud. The Zotac Amp edition and EVGA's waterblock version seem to be the only versions of the GTX 480 on the market with a cooler that can handle the card--and the latter requires a liquid cooling loop, which adds hundreds more dollars to the cost.
You can get about 90% of the performance of a GTX 480 while saving about 20 C on the load temperature and 150 W on the load power consumption by going with a Radeon HD 5870 instead, like this:
http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150490
And the 5870 is considerably cheaper, too.
But that versus a 5850 or GTX 460 or Radeon HD 5770 is really just a question of how much performance you need and how much you're willing to pay.
One other upgrade that you might consider if you don't already have it is a second monitor. It's tremendously convenient to be able to see two programs at once without having to alt+tab between them and without either being scrunched. You can run a game maximized on one and show a wiki or forum on the other to figure out what you're doing in the game. Or a spreadsheet on the other monitor to keep track of what you're doing in the game. Or some web page unrelated to the game for some reading material while waiting for something to happen in the game. A second monitor is also very convenient for transcribing things from one program to another when copy and paste can't be done. It's convenient for being able to look at two different places in a long document at once without having to scroll up or down to lose the place. There's also the security of knowing that even if one monitor does die, it doesn't mean you're without a computer until you can replace it. And it's very nice for a lot of other purposes, too.