Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Ground up PC build, help need advice on building it
I need some help.
Figured it was time to build a new computer, but Ive been lazy and havent kept up on the latest mobo's, CPU's, v-cards, memory.
So heres the deal. I have budget of $1200-$1400,
I will only use Intel cores and Nvida cards, Ive only ever had AMD and ATI (multiple times) fail on me,
I need a case and power supply, an OS (not W-8), I dont want to run SLi, I need harddrives (plan on frapsing quit a bit (solidstate, whats that?)), and a good chunk of memory, mobo and CPU (prefer a quadcore).
I already have my keyboard, mouse, two 24" monitors.
Last time I bought a mobo-cpu combo I went Tiger Direct since they flashed to the most current bios and tested before they ship out my stuff. But Ive heard bad reviews from a few different websites. Anyone have an opinion on this?
Otherwise I have a Newegg account and plan on buying everything thru them.
Ive been playing around on Newegg, but like I said its been awhile and Im not sure if what Im getting is the best and most current I can buy for my budget.
I should say Ive been eyeballing this on Tiger, but its only a 3.1GHz, is this still a decent Mobo
ASUS P8Z77-V LE Intel 7 Series Motherboard and Intel Core i5-2400 3.10 GHz Quad Core Processor and ADATA Premier Srs 4GB DDR3 Desktop Memory Module Bundle
...like I said Ive been away too long and Black Friday is winding down.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Comments
Just hang tight for a bit and I am sure that Quizzical will be by. He's as in touch as anyone with current parts and the sweet spots for deals.
Your budget is plenty, especially if you don't need a monitor so you should be happy with what you end up getting.
All time classic MY NEW FAVORITE POST! (Keep laying those bricks)
"I should point out that no other company has shipped out a beta on a disc before this." - Official Mortal Online Lead Community Moderator
Proudly wearing the Harbinger badge since Dec 23, 2017.
Coined the phrase "Role-Playing a Development Team" January 2018
"Oddly Slap is the main reason I stay in these forums." - Mystichaze April 9th 2018
I've had good experience with the builds I get here:
http://www.hardware-revolution.com/computer-systems/gaming-pc/
littlemonkey
Here you go:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.1033223
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103065
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231489
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106289
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151119
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139008
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125423
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167127
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148834
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986
That comes to $1231, including shipping, and before $80 in rebates. You didn't mention a surge protector or speakers, though if you're re-using other peripherals, I'm guessing you'll reuse those, too.
You said no Windows 8, so I linked Windows 7. Windows 8 is actually cheaper by $20, and I'd get it over 7 even if it were the same price:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416550
But it's your computer, so it's up to you, really.
With ~223 GB of SSD capacity, do you really need a hard drive? Some people would and some wouldn't. If you do, then get a hard drive of whatever capacity you need. I've linked one for your convenience.
A Core i5-3570K is pretty much the gaming enthusiast standard processor. The motherboard and heatsink I linked should be fine for moderate overclocking, but you'll need something robust for more extreme overclocking.
On your budget, the only Nvidia card that makes much sense is a GeForce GTX 670. The GTX 680 is too expensive for not much more performance, the GTX 660 Ti gives up too much performance for not enough price savings, and the GTX 660 and lower are below your budget range.
You probably don't actually need 16 GB of system memory. But for $50, why not?
The power supply is high end quality, and 550 W is enough for you if you're a single-GPU guy (which is completely sensible, by the way), unless you're into extreme overclocking.
Thanks for the response Quizz, and everyone.
Quizz what are your thoughts on this setup? (was using it as a refference for my power supply and memory needs), but it looks like a great deal performance and price wise -
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3487656&CatId=333
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130824
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167127
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832116986
This puts me at roughly $1434.96
But I' get an i7 3775k core at 3.5GHz, case with 700w power supply (from what I read of reviews it seems reliable), other stuff, and I was thinking for just $100 more I get a 4GB video card vs a 2GB (but Im seriously thinking about going with your suggestion on the Gigabyte).
Im not overly thrilled with the memory that comes in the bundle, but its a brand I reckonise and its gotten decent reviews.
*fixed links
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
1200-1400 is more then enough especially if you already got the monitor(s). i7 CPU with mobo will be around 550-600. 2 SSD in a raid 0 128GB a piece OCZ vertex 4 (Got 4 of these myself and my games are running smooth like a heaven's cloud!) which is about 100$ each. For graphic cards , check out a benchmark site and get a GPU that offers good quality over price. What I mean is that you'll currently see a dozen Nvidia cards being top 10 in benchmarks but with barely no difference in performance BUT with up to 600$ price difference. The GPU will be the most intensive study/home work you'll have to do. As for memory , Kingston HyperX are amazing and so cheap at the moment!! 16GB Kingston HyperX (4x4GB DDR3) for barely 100$. And if you're a serious gamer , I suggest investing in liquid cooling the whole thing and live/play like a God!
I got my CPU and GPU liquid cooled , during the Holidays since I'm off for a month I will expand my liquid loop so I can liquid cool my memory also with a brand new reservoir!! Liquid cooling drops temperatures off parts like crazy , My GPU used to reach 55-60 celcius with the stock fan when gaming. Once I removed the fan and slapped a water block on it , I rarely pass 40 celcius when gaming those same games!!
Ive thought about liquid cooling, but have always been leary. Something bad happens and youre stuck buying a new CPU and maybe a Mobo.
I used this on my Q6700 (current system) and it performs damn good, even though the fan rattles on start up.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835106102
I was hoping to find something similar to it again.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Anyway as quiz says 3570k is your standard highish end gaming processor, I would par with a 7870 or 7950, but seen as your a) against AMD and b) in the usa where nvidia are more reasonably priced 670gtx is the card you want.
I wouldn't go all ssd. As ssd have a shelf life. 120gb is the sweet spot with ssd, if you want more get 2 * 120 and raid them (ssd love being raided), dont buy a single 240. I would also have a normal hd like a spinpoint for keeping your family photos, music, email etc.. on so a) you are less likely to loose your important stuff and b) your ssd is reserved for stuff that benefits from it like Windows, mmos and heavy system requirements games.
Get something bigger than a 550W Power Supply. The card Quiz linked requires that at a minimum, and you don't want to be sitting at minimum specs for a gaming computer. Spend the money on a good 850W or higher, and you won't have to worry about replacing the PSU because you have too much power draw in your system.
Remember, a lot of things that plug into USB slots use up power (phones, printers, hubs, some speakers, etc). Don't get stuck with a cheap 550W.
You make me like charity
Also, for the graphics card, you might want to consider the GTX 480 rather than the 670. You can get it for around $200 and it's not too far behind the 670.
http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce+GTX+480
It runs everything out right now at max settings and I don't see that changing anytime real soon. With the 670, you're basically paying twice as much for 25% more power. That may or may not be worth it to you, but I thought I'd bring it up, especially on a part that is easily replaceable down the road.
You make me like charity
Compared to what I linked, you'd pay more by a little over $200. And for what?
The motherboard you linked is probably about as good as the one I linked. The hard drive is a hard drive, so you could call it a wash if you don't need the extra capacity. The memory you linked is perfectly nice, but 8 GB as opposed to the 16 GB that I linked. Your case is bigger, but may or may not be nicer. Basically all DVD burners are equivalent, anyway. You would end up getting the same SSD and OS license as I linked. So let's call all of that a wash and look at other things.
You probably think that the advantages of what you linked are the processor and the video card. I say that the differences matter for neither of those.
For gaming purposes, the only meaningful difference between a Core i5-3570K and a Core i7-3770K is the price tag, so you might as well save the money. If a game is meaningfully processor bound (processor bound at 200 frames per second is not meaningful) today or in the near future, it will almost invariably be because the programmers didn't make it scale to enough processor cores. And if the problem is that it can't even put four cores to good use, then hyperthreading won't benefit you at all.
Eventually, programmers will likely be willing to assume that you have more than four cores, and then the 3770K will have a meaningful advantage over the 3570K. But that's not likely to happen in the useful lifetime of your computer, and it would take a world in which eight cores is a little on the low side for even a netbook or tablet. Whether or not that ever comes depends on how long Moore's Law survives.
As for the video card, you would be paying an extra $108 (shipping costs are real costs, too!) for basically the same card, except with not as good of a cooler and likely better warranty service. The reason you seem to be considering it is 4 GB of video memory rather than 2 GB. By the time you come across a game where that extra video memory matters, there's a decent chance that the $108 difference would buy you an upgrade over even the 4 GB GTX 670. (For comparison, $108 today would buy you an upgrade over a GeForce GTX 260 that was $450 in 2008.)
There are two ways that video memory gets used. One is for buffering various data that will be needed in the process of playing the game. There are a lot of different things that can be buffered, but textures typically take most of the space. The other is for operational memory used to store the internal steps of computations as the video card works to compute exactly what color each pixel should be.
For the first one, a game can really only use so much. And the amount it needs has to be set such that that lower end cards can handle it. If a game wants to buffer 1 GB of data in video memory, then the game is unplayable to everyone who has a video card with 1 GB or less of video memory. If games have normal textures plus an optional high resolution texture pack, then that allows video cards with extra video memory to put more to use for the high resolution textures. But how many games actually do this with high enough resolution textures that even a 1 GB card today would be problematic? Skyrim, yes. Can you name another?
The amount of video memory used for doing internal computations mostly scales with the monitor resolution, as twice as many pixels on the monitor means that any stages in the graphics pipeline after rasterization have to be run twice as many times. If you were going to play games in Eyefinity or Nvidia Surround spread across three monitors at 1080p or higher, then maybe you think about getting the 4 GB card. But on a single monitor? And if it's 24", it's not likely to be a huge resolution, either. How long do you think it will be before games are willing to say, this game flatly isn't playable on a 2 GB video card at 1080p? None are willing to do so for even 1 GB today.
Actually, if you really wanted the extra video memory, the thing to do would be to grab a Radeon HD 7970.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161412
But if the difference between 2 GB and 4 GB doesn't matter for you, then the difference between 2 GB and 3 GB doesn't, either.
Finally, we come to the power supply. The Seasonic G-series gets you high end quality. It's basically Seasonic's effort at bringing high end power supplies down to lower wattages, which is something I strongly approve of. I think it's ridiculous when power supply vendors create a high end line that starts at 800 W or 1000 W or whatever, as hardly anyone has any plausible use for anything over 650 W. It's probably less than 1% of desktops with any plausible use for over 650 W, and even most of that 1% has no plausible use for anything over about 800 W.
How good of quality is the unnamed power supply that comes with the bundle you linked? If it were really great, do you think they'd keep it a secret and surprise you by giving you something a lot better than you reasonably expected? Or do you think they'd explicitly tell you, because that would be a selling point? It's probably a Thermaltake power supply, but some Thermaltake power supplies (Purepower, TR2) are junk. If you bought that bundle, the sensible thing to do once you found out what power supply it was (well, other than returning the bundle for a refund) would likely be to toss the new power supply in the garbage and buy a different one--such as the one that I linked. And you're going to pay an extra $200 for that?
There are two different things that you could possibly mean by a "shelf life" for an SSD: NAND flash eventually loses the ability to hold a charge (about 10 years or so), or that the SSD has finite write endurance. If the latter is your concern (which for most consumer use constitutes paranoia), then double the capacity means double the write endurance, so that's a reason to go larger on the SSD.
RAID is a bad idea with SSDs. RAID 0 means that you have two SSDs that could fail instead of one, and if either does, you lose all of your data. That doubles your chances of failure even before considering that something could go awry with the RAID array. RAID also means you lose access to TRIM, which you'd really want for garbage collection. Even if you were going to buy two SSDs, I'd run them as two separate drives.
A single 240 GB SSD is considerably cheaper today than two 120 GB SSDs, too. It's the same amount of NAND flash either way, but two 120 GB SSDs means you implicitly have to buy twice as much of everything else.
All drives have a shelf life. Don't kid yourself into thinking that mechanical hard drives live forever just because they don't have a rated number of write cycles.
A GeForce GTX 670 has a TDP around 200 W. Either a Core i5-3570K or a Core i7-3770K has a TDP of 77 W. Add in a little bit for various other things and consider that you rarely actually pull the full TDP from a device and he may or may not ever pull 300 W from the power supply at stock speeds. Give everything an unreasonable overclock and maybe he can pull 400 W or maybe not. Occasionally touching 400 W of power draw on a high end 550 W power supply is perfectly safe.
Lots of devices each pulling a little tiny bit of power through USB ports doesn't add up to much. USB 2.0 is rated as being able to deliver 2.5 W of power. USB 3.0 bumps that to 4.5 W. An external hard drive might pull most of that, but a keyboard or mouse will probably only pull a tiny fraction of a watt. All but the lowest end speakers will have a separate power plug and not even pull their power through the USB port. Printers likewise tend to have a separate power plug and not pull power through the USB port.
You don't need 850 W. But you do need tight voltage regulation, good ripple suppression, high quality components, high energy efficiency, and various other measures of delivering power well. That's where the Seasonic G-series delivers. There are some 850 W power supplies that are very good on those measures, too. But there are many that aren't, and you're likely looking at around $150 if you want an 850 W power supply that can match the Seasonic G-550 in quality.
A small correction. You can run SSDs in RAID 0 and keep TRIM if you have compatable mobos. I know the Intel series 7 chipset allows this.
A GeForce GTX 480 can roughly hang with a Radeon HD 7850 in performance. The 7850 is cheaper, though. And the 7850 will use less than half as much power to deliver about the same performance.
Above, I said that a 550 W power supply is plenty. Well, maybe not if you get a GTX 480 that pulls 300 W all on its own. If you plug in two monitors, a GTX 480 will use about as much power at idle as a Radeon HD 7850 does under realistic gaming loads. It's a big enough gap that if comparing prices, you need to add the extra cost of buying a stronger power supply to handle the GTX 480, as well as the increased electricity bills of running it. When it's more expensive to begin with, and then you add a lot more cost for both of those, you're looking at considerably higher total cost of ownership than a Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660 that outperforms it handily.
And then there is the problem of reliability. All of that extra power draw turns into extra heat output. The cooler on a reference GeForce GTX 480 simply cannot handle the card. It will get unreasonably noisy just trying to keep GPU temperatures in the mid-90s. Getting too hot every single time you play a game will take its toll over time. Oh, and that's assuming that you can manage to keep your case 100% dust free; if you can't, that makes it even worse.
That the GTX 480 is still around more than two years after being discontinued is because no one sensible wants one. It was a bad card the day it launched and hasn't gotten better with the passage of time.
Ivy Bridge chipsets can finally pass TRIM through to a RAID array? That's good news if it's true. Can you give me a reference on it?
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=21407
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6161/intel-brings-trim-to-raid0-ssd-arrays-on-7series-motherboards-we-test-it
All the other reasons to really consider if you want to really run RAID0 still apply though. You can't seriously talk about lack of demonstrable SSD reliability on one hand and then even consider RAID0 with anything on the other.
But for benchmark speed at the cost of all else, you can't beat it. Real world gains, YMMV: http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?p=1039012515
Ah, so it didn't happen until far after the chipsets originally launched. That explains why I didn't catch it. Thanks for the links.
Well except for a slightly bigger power supply and the 4GB video card (that will be my Christmas splurg), I built it according to your recomendations.
Thanks as always Quizz
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."
Don't just buy a higher wattage power supply at random, as it's likely to be markedly worse than the one I linked. New Egg's site seems to be down at the moment, so I can't link you one right now.
If you want more wattage on the power supply, then here you go:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151088
I picked one off of Tiger
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3276567&Sku=ULT-LSP750
Had a good instant rebate, reviews, and lifetime warranty. Should easily supply my power needs for the next 4-5 years, till I build another system.
Edit*
Hmm, I'll try and cancel the Tiger one, since Im on the PC all the time wasting an extra 100W-150W can not only get kinda expensive it can generate more heat that I want.
Thanks again Quizz.
"I understand that if I hear any more words come pouring out of your **** mouth, Ill have to eat every fucking chicken in this room."