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750 Gaming Desktop
Soo hello again. Second time asking for advice on these foruns.
This time i'm building my very first gaming desktop. I pretty much had no idea on what parts to pick, but i've been doing some research on what to look for in different areas, and i've come up with a build.
First of all, i live in Portugal, so no newegg for me. These are the shops i have selected:
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/home.html
Their prices aren't all that different from the items i checked. Pixmania seems to have a good search function and more hardware variety, which makes things easier for site navigation.
So now to the pc. As i said this will be mainly used for gaming. My budget is 750€. I do not need any peripherals, nor an OS license, as my university provides it's students with one for free. I will not be overclocking. Also, i should be buying this some time around early August.
This is what I'm looking at:
CPU Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge 3450 - 3,1 GHz - Cache L3 6 MB 190€
Motherboard ASUS P8H77-V LE - Socket 1155 - Chipset H77 - ATX 100€
RAM GEIL Memória PC Black Dragon 2 x 4 GB DDR3-1600 PC3-12800 42 €
Graphics SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY Radeon HD 7770 129€
Hard Drive Seagate Disco rígido interno Barracuda 3,5" - 500 GB 69 €
SSD OCZ SSD interno Petrol - 64 GB 56 €
Case Antec PC Case Three Hundred Black 55 €
Power Corsair PSU PC Builder Series CX500 V2 500 W 56 €
Optical LITE ON Gravador DVD interno DVD±RW 24x IHAS124-19 17 €
TOTAL: 715€ - Pixmania prices.
I will have to pay some transportation fees (probably around 30€) but i think i can leave that out of the budget.
Okay so, i picked the i5 3450 because i won't be overclocking, so no need for a k processor. Picked an H77 over a Z77 MB for the same reason.
Is an i5 - 3550 worth the extra 20€ on this budget or are they better spent somewhere else?
As for the GPU, i'm thinking about buying another 7770 in the future as i heard they have good crossfire performance, but again, not really sure about anything at this point. I understand it's usualy better to have a single gpu, but i think it might be worth it in this case as i'll be adding the second card on a later date, not going for a crossfire build from the start.
Also a good thing is the low power consumption on the 7770, although i'm unsure if 500w will be enough to add a second card later. Another thing i'm unsure about is the card manufacturer. I've heard good things about sapphire, but there's a VTX3D Radeon 7770 for 16€ less. I'll pay the extra 16€ if that means i'll get better quality, but if not, then i guess i can save some there.
I picked a builder series for the psu as i've seen it recommended here before, and it seems to have good ratings.
I managed to find that OCZ ssd which seems to be the cheapest one with 60 gb, but i'm unsure about it's quality.
I'm also unsure about the case quality, as i don't really know what to look for in that area. I basicly eye picked one from a brand i knew.
Okay, i think that's about it. I'm all hea- i mean, eyes for your opinions. If you need any other info that i didn't write just ask away. Thanks in advance and any help will be appreciated 
Comments
My recommendation on a processor is that you either pay what it takes to do it right and get a Core i5-3570K together with a Z77 motherboard (or at least a Core i5-3570 if you're absolutely certain that you're not going to overclock), or else save some money and go with AMD instead. The lower bins of Ivy Bridge lose too much clock speed for not enough savings on the price tag to justify them. Here's the Core i5-3570:
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/12570783/art/intel/core-i5-3570-3-4-ghz-cach.html
Or if you'd rather save some money and go with AMD:
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/4029338/art/amd/phenom-ii-x4-965-3-4-ghz.html
And you'd need a different motherboard for an AMD processor, too:
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/10430177/art/asus/m5a97-socket-am3-chipset.html
As compared to a Core i5-3570, the Core i5-3450 loses perhaps 10% of the performance to save you €25. The Phenom II X4 965 loses perhaps 30% of the performance, but saves you €130.
Note that I'm counting a cheaper motherboard as part of the savings. The reason the motherboard can be cheaper is that AMD charges less for their chipsets than Intel does. Also, if you ever want to upgrade the processor, a Socket AM3+ motherboard will take an 8-core Vishera processor once they launch, so you won't be stuck with a slower processor forever if it later becomes a problem.
Which way to go depends on how much you're willing to spend.
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A Corsair CX V2 series power supply is adequate on a severe budget. But you're not on a severe budget, so I'd get something better. Fortunately, it doesn't have to cost much more to get something significantly better:
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/9864953/art/antec/fonte-de-alimentacao-para.html
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I distrust OCZ Petrol SSDs. It was a short-lived controller that didn't perform very well, and racked up a rather alarming number of negative reviews on New Egg.
Also, 60 GB is rather small, as the OS will want about 30-40 GB of that to itself. You want to have room to run other stuff on it, too. Here are some good options on the SSD:
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/11863242/art/sandisk/ssd-interno-extreme-120-g.html
http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/11827479/art/samsung/ssd-interno-830-series-12.html
I see, thanks for the help.
Considering your advice i now have this build:
CPU Intel Core i5 3570 - 3,4 GHz - LGA1155 215€
Motherboard ASUS P8H77-V LE - Socket 1155 - Chipset H77 - ATX 100€
RAM GEIL Memória PC Black Dragon 2 x 4 GB DDR3-1600 PC3-1280 42 €
Graphics SAPPHIRE TECHNOLOGY Radeon HD 7770 129€
Hard Drive Seagate Disco rígido interno Barracuda 3,5" - 500 GB 69 €
Case Antec PC Case Three Hundred Black 55 €
Power Fonte de alimentação para PC HCG 520-EC 520 W 56 €
Total: 666€
(NOTE: i took out the optical drive because i spoke with my brother and he has one i can use.)
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I haven't decided what to do with the rest of the budget though.
A - I could get maybe a gtx 560 ti instead of the 7770 and forget my crossfire idea, getting the SSD at a later date. I would prefer a 7850 but that goes a little over budget, unless i get the OEM version.
B - I could get a 120 gb ssd and keep my 7770 crossfire idea.
C - Something else. Cookies maybe? I like cookies.
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Does the Z77 have anything else the H77 doesn't have besides the possibility of overclocking? According to this, the p8h77 also provides a crossfire possibility.
Anyway one thing i think i'm pretty sure about right now is the case. I checked it's specs better and i like the amount and size of the fans.
An H77 motherboard nominally allows CrossFire, but doesn't allow you to do it properly. The motherboard has a single PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot. Ideally, in order to do CrossFire or SLI, you'd like to split that bandwidth into two PCI Express 3.0 x8 slots. A Z75 or Z77 motherboard lets you do exactly that. A Z77 motherboard lets you further split it into one PCI Express 3.0 x8 slot and two PCI Express 3.0 x4 slots. (They're all physical x16 slots, but wired with x8 or x4 bandwidth.)
An H77 chipset doesn't let you split the bandwidth like that. Rather, the chipset also makes available bandwidth for a PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot and some PCI Express 2.0 x1 slots. A Z77 or Z75 motherboard does this as well, which is why motherboards can have several PCI Express slots. Slots with reduced bandwidth are fine for add-in cards that don't need a lot of bandwidth, such as a network card or sound card. But they'll cripple video card performance, though just how badly depends on the card and varies wildly from game to game.
A PCI Express 2.0 x4 slot has only 1/8 of the bandwidth of a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, or 1/4 of the bandwidth of a PCI Express 3.0 x8 slot. That's not as bad as it may sound, as a PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot has more bandwidth than any video cards really need, with the possible exception of ultra high end dual-GPU cards like the GeForce GTX 690 and the upcoming Radeon HD 7990. But you'd rather have too much bandwidth than not enough.
Nvidia and AMD take different philosophical approaches on SLI and CrossFire here. Nvidia says, if a motherboard can't do two x8 slots, then we're going to disable SLI through drivers--and not let motherboard manufacturers claim that it supports SLI. If people are going to do SLI, then we want them to get a good experience from it, and don't want people looking for a high end gaming computer to be tricked into buying a motherboard that can't handle it.
AMD, on the other hand, says, you've got whatever hardware you've got. If you get two AMD video cards based on the same GPU chip, we'll let you try to run CrossFire with them on whatever motherboard you've got. If it works well, then great. If not, then oh well; have you considered a motherboard with an AMD 990FX chipset (which means an AMD processor)? But we won't artifically CrossFire it if you didn't.
That's why the motherboard says it supports CrossFire, but doesn't say it supports SLI. AMD will let you try to use CrossFire with it, but it won't be ideal.
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I'd advise against going the CrossFire or SLI route. CrossFire and SLI are really only for people who say that one high end video card isn't good enough, so they want two of them. Two lower end cards in CrossFire or SLI are just a bad idea. The Cape Verde chip in a Radeon HD 7770 can loosely be thought of as the Pitcairn chip in a Radeon HD 7870 cut in half. (The 7770 has half as many shaders, TMUs, and ROPs as the 7870, and they're all at the same clock speed. The 7770 also has half of the memory channels, though its memory is clocked a little lower.) A 7870 will tend to perform about twice as well as the 7770.
If everything scaled perfectly with CrossFire or SLI, then two 7770s in CrossFire would be about as good as a single 7870. In games where CrossFire works well, if you look at average frame rates, then the CrossFire 7770s might not trail a single 7870 by much in average frame rates. But that's deceptive, as the CrossFire 7870s will also be stuck with much higher latency (time gap between when a game is a particular state and when that appears on the monitor) and microstutter (inconsistent frame rates). Even in games where CrossFire works the best that you could possibly hope for, a single 7870 will get you a much better experience than two 7770s in CrossFire.
And that's when CrossFire works. AMD and Nvidia put a lot of work into tweaking CrossFire and SLI to make sure they work with the high profile, big budget releases. If you make a habit of never playing any games that sell fewer than a million copies, and never playing any games within a few months of release, it will probably work pretty well for you. But if you like to play newly launched games before AMD has a CrossFire profile available, or if you like to go play lesser-known games that AMD doesn't specifically optimize their drivers for, you're likely to run into situations where two 7770s in CrossFire aren't much better than one. Or some situations where CrossFire gets you worse performance than a single 7770.
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Whether to put more money into a faster video card, or to put the money into an SSD instead, is a matter of personal preference. If you're an "I have to play everything at max settings!" type of guy, and will refuse to play any game that you can't run well at max settings, then put the money into the video card. If you just want games to look nice, and think that high graphical settings are plenty good enough without having to act as though the goal is to make your hardware choke, then a Radeon HD 7770 will be good enough for you. If you think the first option sounds crazy, then so do I, but there are a lot of people like that.
Also, it's easy to add an SSD when you buy the computer. It's not so easy to add it a year later. You want your OS and main programs on the SSD, but if that drive has more space than can fit on the SSD, it won't be easy to copy stuff over. You could probably plan ahead, figure out what size of SSD you'll buy eventually, and partition your hard drive so that the OS partition is no larger than the SSD you'll get, and then copy that over later. If you don't do that, then you'll probably be looking at wiping the hard drive and reinstalling everything in order to add an SSD later.
Personally, I'd much rather have an SSD and a Radeon HD 7770 than a GTX 560 Ti and no SSD. For that matter, I'd rather have an SSD and a Radeon HD 7770 than a top of the line Radeon HD 7970 or GeForce GTX 680 and no SSD. I don't mind high but not max graphical settings. But I want the rapid response times that an SSD brings, rather than constantly having to sit and wait for the computer to do something. But as I said at the start of this section, that's a matter of personal preference.
First of all, thanks for that first explanation! I didn't really know anything about how dual GPU configurations worked, and I did wonder why the H77 mentioned crossfire but not sli.
About the GPU, yeah i'm definitely not the ultra high quality type of guy. After having a low budget laptop as my personal computer for 3 years, i'm just glad i'll finally be able to play recent games. I was more inclined for option B: going with one 7770 and an SSD right from the start, for the same reasons you mentioned about the hassle of adding an SSD later.
Also about the crossfire configuration, I hadn't thought about the software part of it. It does make sense what you said about the performance depending a lot on the game and driver optimization. I would indeed prefer to have a single 7870 over two 7770 (for example). My only question was whether it would be worth it to add a second 7770 later since i'd only be paying another ~130€ instead of the ~270€ if i wanted to upgrade from a 7770 to a 7870, but you've made that clear now.
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So with that said i believe i'll keep that last build i posted and add in the SSD.
And again, thank you very much for the help Quizz!
Don't plan on adding a second video card in CrossFire later. By the time "later" comes, the Radeon HD 7770 will probably be discontinued and long gone, and the reasonable thing to do will be to buy a different card entirely that is a few generations newer.
I would have to disagree with Quiz, but this is personal preference.
In the budget you have i would certainly go for a higher spec video card rather than a SSD. What Quiz is very true and people love to get very top end gfx cards to play games on super high ultra settings. And if we were talking about getting an 7870 or a 7950 then i would agree getting a SSD and a 7870 would be a better option for me.
However if we are talking a 7770, what i would consider the lower end of the video card market, and a 560ti which is high-medium then i would get the 560ti as this wont be the difference between Ultra and High settings as in the 7870 and 7950, but most likely high and medium/low, which is quite a big imo.
Like i have said this is just my opinion.
Which hardware to get certainly is a matter of personal preference, as you said. But I think you're greatly overestimating the difference between a Radeon HD 7770 and a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. The GeForce GTX 560 Ti is certainly a faster card in most situations, but the Radeon HD 7770 typically offers about 70% of a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. If you go by chained percentage differences, then the gap between any two consecutive cards on this list is roughly equal:
GeForce GTX 680 (or Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition)
Radeon HD 7870 (or GeForce GTX 580)
GeForce GTX 560 Ti (or Radeon HD 6950)
Radeon HD 7770 (or GeForce GTX 460)
Radeon HD 7750 (or Radeon HD 5770 or GeForce GTX 560 Ti)
Radeon HD 6670 (with GDDR5)
GeForce GT 630/440 (or DDR3 version of Radeon HD 5570)
(empty hole where no card is)
Radeon HD 6450 (or GeForce GT 610/520)
That's too many steps down from the top end of this generation to the bottom of the previous generation to say that among two consecutive steps, one is high settings and the next medium/low, or that one is high-medium end and the next lower end. Because otherwise, what else do you have to describe the rest of the scale?
Yes, in fact i'm not even sure how long cards stay on the market. When i said later i was thinking maybe around 6 months after purchasing the computer. However i'm no longer thinking about the crossfire configuration.
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About what you said simon, thanks for the input.
On one hand i would certainly value the gaming power the gtx 560 ti provides, but on the other hand i do also want to have an overall faster pc for everyday stuff, not to mention the fact that the 7770 is a much newer card, with a lower power consumption.
That being said, i feel more comfortable with the 7770 + the ssd.
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So my final decision is I will be adding the 7770 + the SSD with plans to upgrade the GPU maybe 1 year later. By then certainly current high end cards will have dropped a bit in price and other newer options will be available.
As always, thanks for the help guys
Well this is more how i work and how i rate certain things.
Basically anything lower than a 7770/550ti i do not consider as a gaming cards. I know you can play games on lower i just general wouldnt advise it. Hence my table of cards is a little difference to yours being:
680/7970 - Ultra
670
7870
560ti
560
7770/550ti - Minimum i would suggest for gaming purposes
Anything lower i general feel are glorified video players
Thats cool mate
Good luck with the build and any questions just ask!
Except that a Radeon HD 7850 is faster than a GeForce GTX 560 Ti, so it surely doesn't belong a tier lower. And a Radeon HD 7770 is a lot faster than a GeForce GTX 550 Ti. The nearest competitors to a GeForce GTX 550 Ti are a Radeon HD 6770 and a Radeon HD 7750, both of which are much slower than a Radeon HD 7770. By percentage difference, the 7770 isn't much nearer to a GeForce GTX 550 Ti than it is to a GeForce GTX 560 Ti.
Also, the point of low graphical settings is to be able to run games on either very old gaming cards, or video cards that were never meant to be gaming cards. If a game released in the near future is stuck at low settings on a Radeon HD 7770, then that game is going to have a very small market and probably be a huge commercial failure.
Also, I sometimes recommend a DDR3 version of a Radeon HD 6670 to people who want a cheap (< $70), low power card (so they don't need to replace a case or power supply) if it's a huge upgrade over what they have. Though I'd agree that it's not what you'd want to buy in a new computer.
Usually video cards don't drop in price all that much. Instead, they get discontinued, and newer, faster cards fill the same price slots as before. I'd expect to see a Radeon HD 8000 series of cards launch early next year, at which point most or all of the 7000 series will be discontinued. Tahiti (7900 series) will certainly be discontinued at that time, though it's plausible that Pitcairn (7800 series) and/or Cape Verde (7700 series) will have a longer lifetime, the way that Juniper (5700 series, rebranded as 6700 series) did.
As the first chip on a brand new process node, Tahiti has some problems that seem to be fixed in Pitcairn and Cape Verde. AMD could surely fix the problems in Tahiti by doing a respin, but it's a waste of money if the fixed chip shows up only a few months before it gets discontinued to make way for a replacement. Whether Pitcairn and Cape Verde stick around depends on how much improvement AMD figures out how to make without moving to a smaller process node (though they could conceivably move from TSMC 28 nm HPL to TSMC 28 nm HP or (less likely) Global Foundries 28 nm something). If AMD figures out how to improve performance per mm^2 by 20% (unlikely but it could happen) and performance per watt by 20% (which would be nearly miraculous), they'll surely replace both Pitcairn and Cape Verde. If they only figure out how to improve the chips by 2% in each of those categories, the development work to replace them so soon would be a waste of money.
On the Nvidia side, they'll presumably launch a mid-range card at some point. I mean, surely their business plan isn't to tell customers, either pay $400+ or buy from our competitor, which is the current situation if you want a 28 nm card. And surely their business plan isn't to keep selling hot, expensive 40 nm cards forever. Nvidia is also working on a super high end GK110 chip that will probably be way out of your budget.
IMO getting the 7850 is worth it. I have mine running at 1100 core EZ, and I can push it to 1200+.
AMD FX 6100 recently dropped in price and can be easily overclocked. (I know you say it's for a build you're not overclocking but not to use the extra potential of your system is a completely foreign concept to me.) So I would pair the 6100 with a nice cheap tower heatsink that you can reuse indefinately and bump up the multiplier a couple steps.
The 7850 is leaps and bounds better than 7770 or 560 and overclocks to 1050 safely. You would enjoy the added graphics far more than a slightly better processor or SSD.
Besides as Quiz said Vishera is comming so upgrading the CPU to Piledriver would increase the longevity of the system for gaming purposes. And since the next Xbox is reported to have many cores and AMD graphics it might be wise to plan for more multithreading and get a 4 moduele Piledriver down the road, and get a Radeon.
Thanks for the advice.
I did indeed consider stepping down the CPU in order to get a 7850, but one of the reasons i chose not to is something i forgot to mention in my original post: the monitor i'll be using is a 19" samsung hd tv, with a 1366x768 resolution. Although a 7850 would certainly improve my gaming experience, it would probably be more noticeable in a 1080p screen.
This way, i'll save a bit more money and try to upgrade both my monitor and GPU at the same time.
About the AMD Visheras, i don't feel very comfortable investing on their upcoming CPUs since i've googled a bit and didn't really find any info on them. I've also heard mixed opinions about the bulldozers, some saying they're were pleased with their performance and some saying they weren't good enough compared to previous AMD cpu's. But again, that's just stuff i heard, i haven't had any experience with them.