I think there is a slight misunderstanding however. I do know how to build a system, however I am out of touch when it comes to the latest and greatest components out there.
I am looking for some recommendations on what to buy for the $1500~$2000 budget I have. This site seems to always have good advice for people trying to build their next big system so I thought I would look to you for some help.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. I did spend last night looking at different systems and components but now I seem to be more confused then ever.
Originally posted by Badaboom My one piece of advice is buy your computer to last and don't worry to much about future upgradability. I have built many best bang for buck systems with hopes of switching out parts here and there to keep it current but technology keeps changing so fast that it renders one part obsolete. My example is ddr2. Out came ddr3 which rendered my current ram, motherboard as extinct.
I totally agree. IMO it's always worth to build you own system but don't do it thinking about upgrading because the technology changes to fast to do so when you are going to need.
You may want to consider going to a custom pc builder website, making a build there, putting that build in their forums and here for a part by part analysis.
You could use that as a guide to which parts you need to have, to make sure you don't, say, completely forget to buy memory. But you don't want to restrict your options to the few choices offered by a particular configurator, and you also want to be able to see prices when making your choice. For example, a Corsair TX650 V2 and an XFX Core 650 W are basically the same power supply (both are actually built by Seasonic), but if one is $20 cheaper than the other, you want to get the one that is cheaper the day you make your purchase.
For power supplies, don't get too caught up in brand names. Other than Seasonic, most power supply vendors don't actually build their own power supplies. Most power supply vendors actually buy power supplies from multiple manufacturers. For example, Corsair uses Channel Well for some lines, Seasonic for other lines, and Flextronics for at least one power supply. And even from a given manufacturer, some products will be much higher end than others. There are quite a few Super Flower-built power supplies that I wouldn't recommend, but their platinum platform (e.g., Kingwin Lazer Platinum) was the best on the market for a while.
You said a $1500-$2000 budget, and I believe in respecting the budget, so I'll spend about what you said. It would be easy to cut back from this quite a bit. All prices including shipping and before rebates:
That's the standard processor for a high end gaming system, and you haven't said anything that makes it sound like you'd make good use of hyperthreading in order to justify a Core i7. And the motherboard is very nice, and somewhat high end.
You've got the budget to get a big SSD and not have to worry so much about prioritizing what goes on the SSD and what doesn't. And a Crucial M4 is very nice.
Do you even still need a hard drive, with such a big SSD? If not, then you could skip it. But if you do, then get one of whatever capacity you need. This one is 1 TB.
You don't actually have to get this if you don't want to. If the electricity that you pulled from the wall were invariably a completely stable 60 Hz 120 V sinusoidal wave form, there wouldn't be any point in a UPS. But it probably isn't, and when things go awry, a good UPS can detect it, kick in, and make sure that your computer still gets the clean power supply it wants even when things go wrong from the electric utility.
If you can't remember the last time you had a power outage or power flash or other such unwanted power event, then you don't really need a UPS. But if you get them several times per year where you live, this will greatly reduce the probability that they cause damage to your computer. It's also partially a question of how much you value reliability.
Total: $1848 including shipping, and before $25 in rebates.
I went with the i3750 because I'm not sure I really need the i7 CPU. I read that for gaming the i5 Ivy Bridge's are the way to go. And the combo is pretty good with the Motherboard.
I have a huge case right now and I never use all that space. I'm going to go to a mid tower, plus the combo with the memory looks like a great deal.
I read up on the Hybrid drive i have posted and it looks like a great product.
I choose NVIDIA because of the reviews on the GTX670
Went with a little faster optical drive.
What do you think now? Newegg says I am at $1511.19. I have some more money to play with....but do I really need to spend it or will this get me thru the next 3~4 years?
I will buy this exact system. If there is anything you would change let me know in the next day or so otherwise...It will be built.
I'm only at $1674.89...Would you upgrade anything????
I'm not sure how you calculated that total, as I added it up again and it still comes to $1848.
If you want to go for an unreasonably large processor overclock, then you'll need a better processor cooler. A more moderate overclock (e.g., 4 GHz) wouldn't require a better cooler than the one I linked.
The other upgrade that I think is obvious is to buy another monitor. About three years ago, I bought a second monitor, and within a few days, I was wondering how I ever got by with only one. It's very convenient to be able to have a game on one monitor and something else on another monitor at the same time, without having to tab back and forth.
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I went with the i3750 because I'm not sure I really need the i7 CPU. I read that for gaming the i5 Ivy Bridge's are the way to go. And the combo is pretty good with the Motherboard.
I have a huge case right now and I never use all that space. I'm going to go to a mid tower, plus the combo with the memory looks like a great deal.
I read up on the Hybrid drive i have posted and it looks like a great product.
I choose NVIDIA because of the reviews on the GTX670
Went with a little faster optical drive.
What do you think now? Newegg says I am at $1511.19. I have some more money to play with....but do I really need to spend it or will this get me thru the next 3~4 years?
A Core i5-3570K and Core i7-3770K both have an unlocked multiplier, so it doesn't matter that the 3770K has a stock speed that is 100 MHz higher. The only important advantage of the 3770K over the 3570K is hyperthreading. In programs that don't scale past four cores, hyperthreading doesn't help at all, and Windows won't even use it. If a program would scale flawlessly to eight processor cores if you had them, then Intel says hyperthreading can improve performance by up to 30%. The 30% figure is realistic, but so is the "up to" part of it--meaning that many programs won't see anywhere near a 30% benefit. I once messed around with threading a simple program on my computer that trivially scaled to as many cores as you wanted, and found that hyperthreading improved performance by about 15% in that particular program.
But again, that's only in programs that would scale flawlessly to eight cores. If it's for gaming, then I wouldn't expect to see any games where four fast cores isn't good enough in the useful lifetime of your computer, unless the problem is a badly-coded, single-threaded game, and hyperthreading wouldn't help a bit there, either. So yeah, I'd get the Core i5-3570K if I were you. That's why I linked it above.
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If one optical drive is a little bit faster than another, that doesn't matter. You're not going to be reading from the optical drive in situations where speed matters, anyway. It might save you a minute in installing the OS (which basically consists of, let it start, go do something else, and check back later), and that will probably be all the benefit you'd ever see from the optical drive being faster.
The advantage of the optical drive that you linked is that it can read Blu-Ray drives. That's great if you want to watch Blu-Ray movies on your computer. And it's completely worthless if you don't. Most people don't, but if you do, then go ahead and get a Blu-Ray drive. Otherwise, it's a waste of money. And don't think it's future-proofing, either; Blu-Ray won't catch on as a replacement to DVD until they don't cost much more than a DVD burner--and if that ever happens, then it will be cheaper to buy both a DVD burner today and a Blu-Ray drive at that time than just the Blu-Ray drive today.
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Don't get the Seagate Momentus XT. The claims that it performs like an SSD are complete marketing lies.
There is really only one reason to buy a Momentus XT. If you have a laptop with only room for one drive, and need more capacity than is reasonable to get in a solid state drive, then a Momentus XT will often be faster than a simple laptop hard drive.
Perhaps I should go into an explanation of why you should get an SSD in the first place--and why the Seagate Momentus XT is nothing like the SSD you should get.
The basic problem with hard drives is that they're slow. In order to read from or write to a hard drive, you have to wait until the platter physically spins to the right spot and the drive head physically moves to the right spot. That takes on the order of 10 ms. And that means you have to wait about 10 ms before the hard drive can even start reading or writing.
You might think that 10 ms sounds fast. And if you were only going to read or write one cluster (4 KB), it would be. But what happens when you need to read or write hundreds of files at once? Then you wait 10 ms, read a file, wait 10 ms, read a file, and so forth. You end up waiting long enough that you could time it with a stopwatch. That's the main reason why many games have loading screens, and some programs take quite a while to load. You're probably used to this, and might not have imagined that it could ever be otherwise.
Solid state drives can function like hard drives, but don't have any physically moving parts. That means that solid state drives can skip the "wait for things to physically move to the right spot" step and start reading or writing almost immediately. If you want to read or write one cluster with a good SSD, it takes somewhere on the order of 0.1 ms. Multiply that by several hundred small files at once and it's still only a small fraction of a second.
The upshot is that with a good SSD, when you ask your computer to do something, it just does it, and doesn't make you wait. Or perhaps rather, sometimes you'll have to wait, but you'll wait a lot less than you would with a hard drive. On my computer, for example, after I enter the login password, it will show the Windows desktop within a few seconds. Once it does, I can immediately click on programs to launch them and they'll open. If I sit and wait for Windows to do everything it wants to do as part of booting the computer, it takes about 10 seconds for Windows to finish and let everything go idle. My SSD is about three years old; newer ones are several times as fast.
If you find reviews that compare good SSDs to hard drives and they try to include some "real world" measurements, it's likely to show loading times of various programs. The reason they measure this is because it's easy to measure. But it's really not the biggest performance benefit. If you use a web browser, it's constantly doing lots of little reads and writes. Being able to finish those faster means that the browser does what you told it to faster. It's a small difference that is hard to measure, but it's pretty obvious that it "feels" faster. Think of it as the offline equivalent of reducing your ping time by 100 ms.
So what is a Seagate Momentus XT? It's basically a 750 GB hard drive together with 8 GB of NAND flash. The hard drive will try to figure out what gets loaded a lot, and store that in the NAND flash. If you want to load something again, it checks to see if it's in the NAND flash, and if it is, it can load it very quickly, like an SSD. It's actually quite slow compared to a good SSD even in this case, but massively faster than any hard drive.
The problem is what happens if you want to do something other than read what is in the NAND flash cache. In that case, if you have to read off of the hard drive, it's slow for the same reasons as any other hard drive. And it's actually pretty slow for a 7200 RPM hard drive, even. I'm guessing that checking cache adds some latency, but that's probably not all of it. In pure hard drive tests, it loses pretty substantially to a Western Digital Scorpio Black.
And that's as compared to other laptop hard drives. Desktop hard drives are faster than laptop hard drives. A 3.5" form factor (as desktop hard drives have) means that you can read and write a lot faster than you could with otherwise equivalent technology in a 2.5" form factor. The reason is that a given rotation speed means a higher linear speed due to the larger platter radius.
And even that is only comparing read speeds. If you ever want to write to the drive, then the NAND flash doesn't help you a bit. In that case, it performs like a slow hard drive (slow even compared to other hard drives) precisely because it is a slow hard drive. If I could only have one drive and couldn't get an SSD, I'd sooner get a Western Digital Caviar Black than a Seagate Momentus XT. But in a desktop, you don't have to make that choice; you've got six or eight or whatever drive bays.
Part of the problem is consistency. What you really want is something that is always fast. A Seagate Momentus XT will be fast now and then, but will usually be pretty slow. A good SSD will always be fast, no matter what workload you give it.
You might think, the Seagate Momentus XT will figure out what files you use a lot, and then make those ones fast at least. But it can't even do that. It figures out which hard drive clusters (particular physical positions on the hard drive) get read from a lot and caches those. If you defragment your hard drive, then a bunch of data gets moved all over the place, and the cache is now worthless. It will have to start all over on figuring out what gets used a lot, and will be very slow until it does. And if you don't defragment your hard drive, then whenever you want to read something not in cache, it will be really slow.
But not all solid state drives are equivalent. For starters, you want one with a Marvell, SandForce, or Samsung controller. In particular, avoid the JMicron and Phison controllers. But it's hard to dig around and figure out exactly what is in every SSD on your own, so it's easier to just get the Crucial M4 that I linked.
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For the video card, a GeForce GTX 670 is a nice card. The card I linked is probably a good 10% faster, though.
Don't get too carried away with reading old GTX 670 reviews. For one thing, much of the enthusiasm was due to the price tag. When the comparison was a GeForce GTX 670 for $400 against a Radeon HD 7970 for $550, a Radeon HD 7950 for $450, and a Radeon HD 7870 for $350, that the GTX 670 could perform in the same ballpark as the 7970 and be much faster than the other cards was a clear win.
But prices have changed. Now you can get a Radeon HD 7970 for $414, a 7950 for $329, and a 7870 for $279, while the GeForce GTX 670 still costs $400. It's still a decent value, but no longer a dramatically better value than the competition. And now you can also get a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (basically a 7970 clocked higher) which is easily 10% faster, such as the card I linked.
Drivers have also changed. Both AMD and Nvidia have improved performance on their cards since the GTX 670 launched, but AMD has probably gotten bigger driver performance improvements. This isn't a complete shock, as AMD's new GCN architecture (Radeon HD 7000 series) is easily the biggest architecture redesign AMD has done since the introduction of VLIW5, which came five generations earlier. Kepler is a new architecture, too, but not as radically different from Fermi. Larger architecture changes make it harder to optimize drivers, as it takes a while to figure out what works well for the new architecture and what doesn't.
If you happen to prefer Nvidia to AMD, then go ahead and get the GeForce GTX 670. I don't think you'll be disappointed with it. A GTX 670 also features better energy efficiency than a Radeon HD 7970. But the 7970 is faster. It's a matter of priorities, really; they're both nice cards.
Not sure why but I show $1511.90. Hope I didn't do something wrong....
That's because you're adding up numbers from different parts than what I linked. I hope you didn't place the order yet. At minimum, you want a real SSD, not an overpriced laptop hard drive.
For what it's worth, an OCZ Vertex 4 will probably perform fine for you. It's based on the same Marvell controller as the Crucial M4 that I linked. But I wouldn't entirely trust the OCZ Vertex 4 yet. OCZ has been messing with firmware recently, and there might well be some showstopper bugs that they haven't out. Crucial has been selling their M4 SSDs for a year and a half now, and having hundreds of thousands or millions of them out in the wild means that bugs that were going to show up probably would have by now.
I'm guessing that you looked at benchmarks and say that the OCZ Vertex 4 is faster than a Crucial M4. What you probably didn't catch is that that doesn't matter. If one SSD is 70 times as fast as a hard drive in some particular situation, and another SSD is 100 times as fast as a hard drive, then both are fast enough that you don't have to wait on the SSD. Synthetic benchmarks can tell the difference, but real-world usage won't.
Again, the OCZ Vertex 4 will probably work fine for you. But it has a substantially greater chance of giving you trouble than a Crucial M4 or other SSDs that have been on the market for a long time by now. And SSD firmware trouble can mean lost data, not just that a game doesn't run very well until you get a video driver update.
For what it's worth, an OCZ Vertex 4 will probably perform fine for you. It's based on the same Marvell controller as the Crucial M4 that I linked. But I wouldn't entirely trust the OCZ Vertex 4 yet. OCZ has been messing with firmware recently, and there might well be some showstopper bugs that they haven't out. Crucial has been selling their M4 SSDs for a year and a half now, and having hundreds of thousands or millions of them out in the wild means that bugs that were going to show up probably would have by now.
I'm guessing that you looked at benchmarks and say that the OCZ Vertex 4 is faster than a Crucial M4. What you probably didn't catch is that that doesn't matter. If one SSD is 70 times as fast as a hard drive in some particular situation, and another SSD is 100 times as fast as a hard drive, then both are fast enough that you don't have to wait on the SSD. Synthetic benchmarks can tell the difference, but real-world usage won't.
Again, the OCZ Vertex 4 will probably work fine for you. But it has a substantially greater chance of giving you trouble than a Crucial M4 or other SSDs that have been on the market for a long time by now. And SSD firmware trouble can mean lost data, not just that a game doesn't run very well until you get a video driver update.
With his budget, why not suggest a SSD with a PCIe interface? Are they really that unreliable?
With his budget, why not suggest a SSD with a PCIe interface? Are they really that unreliable?
Too expensive for no real advantage over SATA SSDs. A lot of them are just multiple SATA SSDs in RAID with a chip to convert the SATA signal to PCI Express. If you wanted that, you might as well just get multiple SATA SSDs and RAID them (which is a bad idea for consumers, by the way). If you want a single, high end controller without the RAID, then you're looking at thousands of dollars or more.
I've built maybe 4 or 5 computers, and its not quite the "no brainer" alot here have made it out to be. there can be many pitfalls. you will get better at it, but dont expect your 1st go at it to be smooth.
1) bad parts from suppliers, requiring big hassles, wasted time, and hidden costs with returns (read the fine print about the 10% restocking fee, lol)
2) parts not fitting or cramped, most likely from an incompatable case, or one too big
3) necessary wiring breaking
4) cables too short or cables too long, creating unnecessary clutter
5) nitemare cable management. easy to wind up with a rats nest inside your comp. It looks messy and inhibits good airflow...yes, you can build a very tidy computer, but its not that easy. you willl have to know beforehand the perfect lengths for cables, where the vendors prob have that all done.
6) and so on and so forth, lol
Yes, you can save money by DIY, but will it be worth it? Virtually ALL vendors let you customise just about every component with their computers, so that arguement isnt valid. All vendors include tech support. Even though you can pretty much count on a store bought comp booting up and working correctly, your own DIY may not. If everything isnt perfect, your comp wont do shit. troubleshooting may fix the prob, but on occasion it may be truly baffling.
You can also compromise. some vendors will ship just a case, with motherboard and cpu already installed. you're on your own to plug in the rest.
The boutique vendors, digital storm, alienware, etc. have high markups, but others do not. you'd be suprised how some have very little profit margin once you've priced it all out and compared.
I want to have a new built computer by the time school starts...this give me 2 weeks and a 1000$ budget unless corber wants to send me his left overs..lol
Anyways I would really need the same advice if anyone has a particular build. I too already own a monito, mouse, keyboard, and speakers... I also already own a copy of an O/S.
Comments
See Bigrocks build a few posts up
I totally agree. IMO it's always worth to build you own system but don't do it thinking about upgrading because the technology changes to fast to do so when you are going to need.
Get ssd for operating system partition.
And 2 same hdd in striping raid mode. For everything else.
Also Grab cooler for graphic card too, stock ones are so noisy.
Also rember that intel cpu alone cost same as same performance amd cpu+ motherboard. Saved money willl get you much better graphics card.
You could use that as a guide to which parts you need to have, to make sure you don't, say, completely forget to buy memory. But you don't want to restrict your options to the few choices offered by a particular configurator, and you also want to be able to see prices when making your choice. For example, a Corsair TX650 V2 and an XFX Core 650 W are basically the same power supply (both are actually built by Seasonic), but if one is $20 cheaper than the other, you want to get the one that is cheaper the day you make your purchase.
For power supplies, don't get too caught up in brand names. Other than Seasonic, most power supply vendors don't actually build their own power supplies. Most power supply vendors actually buy power supplies from multiple manufacturers. For example, Corsair uses Channel Well for some lines, Seasonic for other lines, and Flextronics for at least one power supply. And even from a given manufacturer, some products will be much higher end than others. There are quite a few Super Flower-built power supplies that I wouldn't recommend, but their platinum platform (e.g., Kingwin Lazer Platinum) was the best on the market for a while.
Hang on and I'll pick out some parts.
You said a $1500-$2000 budget, and I believe in respecting the budget, so I'll spend about what you said. It would be easy to cut back from this quite a bit. All prices including shipping and before rebates:
Processor/motherboard combo deal: $395
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1033220
That's the standard processor for a high end gaming system, and you haven't said anything that makes it sound like you'd make good use of hyperthreading in order to justify a Core i7. And the motherboard is very nice, and somewhat high end.
Power supply: $200
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151111
Because it's the best that money can buy. You could also get something very good for substantially cheaper if you preferred.
Case/memory combo deal: $159, before a $10 rebate
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1020813
Right specs on nice memory, together with a very nice case with all of the modern amenities.
Solid state drive: $210
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148443
You've got the budget to get a big SSD and not have to worry so much about prioritizing what goes on the SSD and what doesn't. And a Crucial M4 is very nice.
Hard drive: $75
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185
Do you even still need a hard drive, with such a big SSD? If not, then you could skip it. But if you do, then get one of whatever capacity you need. This one is 1 TB.
Optical drive: $18
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106289
Most people have no plausibly use for a Blu-Ray drive, so I'm guessing you won't, either. So any old DVD burner will work fine for you.
Operating system: $100
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986
Because a lot of games don't run that well on Linux.
Processor heatsink: $33, before a $15 rebate
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181012
If you're looking to overclock the processor to the moon, then you'd want a better heatsink than this. But for most uses, this will be plenty.
Video card: $478
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125439
You've got the budget to fit the top of the line, and a 7970 GHz Edition means that AMD has binned it out as one of the best Tahiti dies.
Uninterruptible power supply: $180
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16842102133
You don't actually have to get this if you don't want to. If the electricity that you pulled from the wall were invariably a completely stable 60 Hz 120 V sinusoidal wave form, there wouldn't be any point in a UPS. But it probably isn't, and when things go awry, a good UPS can detect it, kick in, and make sure that your computer still gets the clean power supply it wants even when things go wrong from the electric utility.
If you can't remember the last time you had a power outage or power flash or other such unwanted power event, then you don't really need a UPS. But if you get them several times per year where you live, this will greatly reduce the probability that they cause damage to your computer. It's also partially a question of how much you value reliability.
Total: $1848 including shipping, and before $25 in rebates.
Thank you very much Quizzical.
I will buy this exact system. If there is anything you would change let me know in the next day or so otherwise...It will be built.
I'm only at $1674.89...Would you upgrade anything????
Corber
Ok Quizzical. I did some reading and I came up with a couple modifications to what you recommneded.
Let me know what you think of this:
Optical Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827135247
Hard Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148837
Video Card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121637
Power Supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151111
Cooling: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181012
Case Memory Combo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1020813&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10446076&PID=4176333&SID=94tggic4fzz7
CPU/Motherboard Combo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1033220&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10446076&PID=4176333&SID=yu28fde7bm00
OS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986
I went with the i3750 because I'm not sure I really need the i7 CPU. I read that for gaming the i5 Ivy Bridge's are the way to go. And the combo is pretty good with the Motherboard.
I have a huge case right now and I never use all that space. I'm going to go to a mid tower, plus the combo with the memory looks like a great deal.
I read up on the Hybrid drive i have posted and it looks like a great product.
I choose NVIDIA because of the reviews on the GTX670
Went with a little faster optical drive.
What do you think now? Newegg says I am at $1511.19. I have some more money to play with....but do I really need to spend it or will this get me thru the next 3~4 years?
Corber
I'm not sure how you calculated that total, as I added it up again and it still comes to $1848.
If you want to go for an unreasonably large processor overclock, then you'll need a better processor cooler. A more moderate overclock (e.g., 4 GHz) wouldn't require a better cooler than the one I linked.
The other upgrade that I think is obvious is to buy another monitor. About three years ago, I bought a second monitor, and within a few days, I was wondering how I ever got by with only one. It's very convenient to be able to have a game on one monitor and something else on another monitor at the same time, without having to tab back and forth.
Not sure why but I show $1511.90. Hope I didn't do something wrong....
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I think I just drooled on your order, Corber. Sorry about that.
Best of luck in putting your monster together - and thumbs up to Quzzical for once again showing that he's really freakin' good at this stuff.
Agreed. Quizzical is a great source!
Corber
A Core i5-3570K and Core i7-3770K both have an unlocked multiplier, so it doesn't matter that the 3770K has a stock speed that is 100 MHz higher. The only important advantage of the 3770K over the 3570K is hyperthreading. In programs that don't scale past four cores, hyperthreading doesn't help at all, and Windows won't even use it. If a program would scale flawlessly to eight processor cores if you had them, then Intel says hyperthreading can improve performance by up to 30%. The 30% figure is realistic, but so is the "up to" part of it--meaning that many programs won't see anywhere near a 30% benefit. I once messed around with threading a simple program on my computer that trivially scaled to as many cores as you wanted, and found that hyperthreading improved performance by about 15% in that particular program.
But again, that's only in programs that would scale flawlessly to eight cores. If it's for gaming, then I wouldn't expect to see any games where four fast cores isn't good enough in the useful lifetime of your computer, unless the problem is a badly-coded, single-threaded game, and hyperthreading wouldn't help a bit there, either. So yeah, I'd get the Core i5-3570K if I were you. That's why I linked it above.
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If one optical drive is a little bit faster than another, that doesn't matter. You're not going to be reading from the optical drive in situations where speed matters, anyway. It might save you a minute in installing the OS (which basically consists of, let it start, go do something else, and check back later), and that will probably be all the benefit you'd ever see from the optical drive being faster.
The advantage of the optical drive that you linked is that it can read Blu-Ray drives. That's great if you want to watch Blu-Ray movies on your computer. And it's completely worthless if you don't. Most people don't, but if you do, then go ahead and get a Blu-Ray drive. Otherwise, it's a waste of money. And don't think it's future-proofing, either; Blu-Ray won't catch on as a replacement to DVD until they don't cost much more than a DVD burner--and if that ever happens, then it will be cheaper to buy both a DVD burner today and a Blu-Ray drive at that time than just the Blu-Ray drive today.
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Don't get the Seagate Momentus XT. The claims that it performs like an SSD are complete marketing lies.
There is really only one reason to buy a Momentus XT. If you have a laptop with only room for one drive, and need more capacity than is reasonable to get in a solid state drive, then a Momentus XT will often be faster than a simple laptop hard drive.
Perhaps I should go into an explanation of why you should get an SSD in the first place--and why the Seagate Momentus XT is nothing like the SSD you should get.
The basic problem with hard drives is that they're slow. In order to read from or write to a hard drive, you have to wait until the platter physically spins to the right spot and the drive head physically moves to the right spot. That takes on the order of 10 ms. And that means you have to wait about 10 ms before the hard drive can even start reading or writing.
You might think that 10 ms sounds fast. And if you were only going to read or write one cluster (4 KB), it would be. But what happens when you need to read or write hundreds of files at once? Then you wait 10 ms, read a file, wait 10 ms, read a file, and so forth. You end up waiting long enough that you could time it with a stopwatch. That's the main reason why many games have loading screens, and some programs take quite a while to load. You're probably used to this, and might not have imagined that it could ever be otherwise.
Solid state drives can function like hard drives, but don't have any physically moving parts. That means that solid state drives can skip the "wait for things to physically move to the right spot" step and start reading or writing almost immediately. If you want to read or write one cluster with a good SSD, it takes somewhere on the order of 0.1 ms. Multiply that by several hundred small files at once and it's still only a small fraction of a second.
The upshot is that with a good SSD, when you ask your computer to do something, it just does it, and doesn't make you wait. Or perhaps rather, sometimes you'll have to wait, but you'll wait a lot less than you would with a hard drive. On my computer, for example, after I enter the login password, it will show the Windows desktop within a few seconds. Once it does, I can immediately click on programs to launch them and they'll open. If I sit and wait for Windows to do everything it wants to do as part of booting the computer, it takes about 10 seconds for Windows to finish and let everything go idle. My SSD is about three years old; newer ones are several times as fast.
If you find reviews that compare good SSDs to hard drives and they try to include some "real world" measurements, it's likely to show loading times of various programs. The reason they measure this is because it's easy to measure. But it's really not the biggest performance benefit. If you use a web browser, it's constantly doing lots of little reads and writes. Being able to finish those faster means that the browser does what you told it to faster. It's a small difference that is hard to measure, but it's pretty obvious that it "feels" faster. Think of it as the offline equivalent of reducing your ping time by 100 ms.
So what is a Seagate Momentus XT? It's basically a 750 GB hard drive together with 8 GB of NAND flash. The hard drive will try to figure out what gets loaded a lot, and store that in the NAND flash. If you want to load something again, it checks to see if it's in the NAND flash, and if it is, it can load it very quickly, like an SSD. It's actually quite slow compared to a good SSD even in this case, but massively faster than any hard drive.
The problem is what happens if you want to do something other than read what is in the NAND flash cache. In that case, if you have to read off of the hard drive, it's slow for the same reasons as any other hard drive. And it's actually pretty slow for a 7200 RPM hard drive, even. I'm guessing that checking cache adds some latency, but that's probably not all of it. In pure hard drive tests, it loses pretty substantially to a Western Digital Scorpio Black.
And that's as compared to other laptop hard drives. Desktop hard drives are faster than laptop hard drives. A 3.5" form factor (as desktop hard drives have) means that you can read and write a lot faster than you could with otherwise equivalent technology in a 2.5" form factor. The reason is that a given rotation speed means a higher linear speed due to the larger platter radius.
And even that is only comparing read speeds. If you ever want to write to the drive, then the NAND flash doesn't help you a bit. In that case, it performs like a slow hard drive (slow even compared to other hard drives) precisely because it is a slow hard drive. If I could only have one drive and couldn't get an SSD, I'd sooner get a Western Digital Caviar Black than a Seagate Momentus XT. But in a desktop, you don't have to make that choice; you've got six or eight or whatever drive bays.
Part of the problem is consistency. What you really want is something that is always fast. A Seagate Momentus XT will be fast now and then, but will usually be pretty slow. A good SSD will always be fast, no matter what workload you give it.
You might think, the Seagate Momentus XT will figure out what files you use a lot, and then make those ones fast at least. But it can't even do that. It figures out which hard drive clusters (particular physical positions on the hard drive) get read from a lot and caches those. If you defragment your hard drive, then a bunch of data gets moved all over the place, and the cache is now worthless. It will have to start all over on figuring out what gets used a lot, and will be very slow until it does. And if you don't defragment your hard drive, then whenever you want to read something not in cache, it will be really slow.
But not all solid state drives are equivalent. For starters, you want one with a Marvell, SandForce, or Samsung controller. In particular, avoid the JMicron and Phison controllers. But it's hard to dig around and figure out exactly what is in every SSD on your own, so it's easier to just get the Crucial M4 that I linked.
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For the video card, a GeForce GTX 670 is a nice card. The card I linked is probably a good 10% faster, though.
Don't get too carried away with reading old GTX 670 reviews. For one thing, much of the enthusiasm was due to the price tag. When the comparison was a GeForce GTX 670 for $400 against a Radeon HD 7970 for $550, a Radeon HD 7950 for $450, and a Radeon HD 7870 for $350, that the GTX 670 could perform in the same ballpark as the 7970 and be much faster than the other cards was a clear win.
But prices have changed. Now you can get a Radeon HD 7970 for $414, a 7950 for $329, and a 7870 for $279, while the GeForce GTX 670 still costs $400. It's still a decent value, but no longer a dramatically better value than the competition. And now you can also get a Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition (basically a 7970 clocked higher) which is easily 10% faster, such as the card I linked.
Drivers have also changed. Both AMD and Nvidia have improved performance on their cards since the GTX 670 launched, but AMD has probably gotten bigger driver performance improvements. This isn't a complete shock, as AMD's new GCN architecture (Radeon HD 7000 series) is easily the biggest architecture redesign AMD has done since the introduction of VLIW5, which came five generations earlier. Kepler is a new architecture, too, but not as radically different from Fermi. Larger architecture changes make it harder to optimize drivers, as it takes a while to figure out what works well for the new architecture and what doesn't.
If you happen to prefer Nvidia to AMD, then go ahead and get the GeForce GTX 670. I don't think you'll be disappointed with it. A GTX 670 also features better energy efficiency than a Radeon HD 7970. But the 7970 is faster. It's a matter of priorities, really; they're both nice cards.
That's because you're adding up numbers from different parts than what I linked. I hope you didn't place the order yet. At minimum, you want a real SSD, not an overpriced laptop hard drive.
Done.
$1661.89 now.
Corber
Final build....
Graphics Card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121637
CPU/Motherboard combo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1033220&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&AID=10446076&PID=4176333&SID=1dvwpq7ze7pen
Graphics Card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121637
Case/Memory combo: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1020813
SSD: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227792
Hard Drive: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152185
Cooling: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835181012
Power Supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151111
OS: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986
Thanks for all the help.
Corber
For what it's worth, an OCZ Vertex 4 will probably perform fine for you. It's based on the same Marvell controller as the Crucial M4 that I linked. But I wouldn't entirely trust the OCZ Vertex 4 yet. OCZ has been messing with firmware recently, and there might well be some showstopper bugs that they haven't out. Crucial has been selling their M4 SSDs for a year and a half now, and having hundreds of thousands or millions of them out in the wild means that bugs that were going to show up probably would have by now.
I'm guessing that you looked at benchmarks and say that the OCZ Vertex 4 is faster than a Crucial M4. What you probably didn't catch is that that doesn't matter. If one SSD is 70 times as fast as a hard drive in some particular situation, and another SSD is 100 times as fast as a hard drive, then both are fast enough that you don't have to wait on the SSD. Synthetic benchmarks can tell the difference, but real-world usage won't.
Again, the OCZ Vertex 4 will probably work fine for you. But it has a substantially greater chance of giving you trouble than a Crucial M4 or other SSDs that have been on the market for a long time by now. And SSD firmware trouble can mean lost data, not just that a game doesn't run very well until you get a video driver update.
With his budget, why not suggest a SSD with a PCIe interface? Are they really that unreliable?
Too expensive for no real advantage over SATA SSDs. A lot of them are just multiple SATA SSDs in RAID with a chip to convert the SATA signal to PCI Express. If you wanted that, you might as well just get multiple SATA SSDs and RAID them (which is a bad idea for consumers, by the way). If you want a single, high end controller without the RAID, then you're looking at thousands of dollars or more.
I've built maybe 4 or 5 computers, and its not quite the "no brainer" alot here have made it out to be. there can be many pitfalls. you will get better at it, but dont expect your 1st go at it to be smooth.
1) bad parts from suppliers, requiring big hassles, wasted time, and hidden costs with returns (read the fine print about the 10% restocking fee, lol)
2) parts not fitting or cramped, most likely from an incompatable case, or one too big
3) necessary wiring breaking
4) cables too short or cables too long, creating unnecessary clutter
5) nitemare cable management. easy to wind up with a rats nest inside your comp. It looks messy and inhibits good airflow...yes, you can build a very tidy computer, but its not that easy. you willl have to know beforehand the perfect lengths for cables, where the vendors prob have that all done.
6) and so on and so forth, lol
Yes, you can save money by DIY, but will it be worth it? Virtually ALL vendors let you customise just about every component with their computers, so that arguement isnt valid. All vendors include tech support. Even though you can pretty much count on a store bought comp booting up and working correctly, your own DIY may not. If everything isnt perfect, your comp wont do shit. troubleshooting may fix the prob, but on occasion it may be truly baffling.
You can also compromise. some vendors will ship just a case, with motherboard and cpu already installed. you're on your own to plug in the rest.
The boutique vendors, digital storm, alienware, etc. have high markups, but others do not. you'd be suprised how some have very little profit margin once you've priced it all out and compared.
Anyway, food for thought...good luck!
I want to have a new built computer by the time school starts...this give me 2 weeks and a 1000$ budget unless corber wants to send me his left overs..lol
Anyways I would really need the same advice if anyone has a particular build. I too already own a monito, mouse, keyboard, and speakers... I also already own a copy of an O/S.