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LF new computer
I've finally accumulated a decent amount of money and I'm now looking to buy a gaming computer. Preferablly a preassembled one, but I'm cool with building one myself.
It'll be built to run mainly Rift and possibly Guild Wars 2...
With a budget of $2000 NZD ($1572 USD), what's the most efficient thing I can get? Thanks in advance.
P.S I forbid liquid cooling
Comments
Do you need new peripherals (keyboard, mouse, speakers, surge protector, monitor), or are you going to reuse those from an old computer?
If you don't need new peripherals, then do you have any unusual requests that you want that most high end gaming systems wouldn't have? You could go with a three monitor Eyefinity setup and spread your game window across three monitors. If you don't want to do that, then you might want to consider not spending the full $2000.
Also, how do you feel about waiting six days so that you can get a Radeon HD 7970? That will be by far the fastest (single GPU) video card on the market when it launches, as is already known because the reviews are already out. It will probably remain the fastest on the market for much of the year, and could conceivably still be the fastest a year from now.
On that budget, I'll just send you the same build that I posted on another thread. See post #6 here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion2.cfm/thread/337081/new-to-gaming-computers-need-help.html
There's some stuff you could cut if you wanted to. Not much sense in spending more unless you're one of the rare people who actually needs (as opposed to merely thinking you need) more than 1 TB of storage capacity. Or unless you want to go for Eyefinity.
I'll need new periphials. Everything new.
Could I get a preassembled computer, take out the video card and put in a Radeon HD 7970?
And really, I'll stick to one monitor for now
Thanks
I would recommend building one personally. After doing some research on price vs. performance, I just recently built a new PC.
- Intel i5 2500k (overclocked to 4.4ghz)
- ASUS p8p67 Deluxe Mobo
- 8GB GSkill 1866 ram
- 120GB OCZ Vertex 3 SATA III SSD
- 620w Seasonic PSU
- MSI GTX 560 TI Twin Frozr 2GB vid card
- ASUS 24x DVD-R
- Corsair Graphite 600T case
- Cooler Master 212 Hyper Evo CPU cooler
- Windows 7 64 bit OS
That setup seemed to be the best bang for the buck. It should have no problems whatsoever running GW2 wide open. I ended up paying around $1250 after rebates, not including tax and shipping.
With your $2000 budget, something like that would still allow room for a nice 27" HD monitor, and some good gaming peripherals.
If you just don't want to build one yourself, you could try a similar configuration on the AVA Direct website. They have reasonable prices, and I have heard really good things about the company.
Good luck, I hope it helps.
Where did you get the parts from?
Aside from the video card (and even then you could only spend about another $250 and bump up to either a 580 or *soon* the 7970), you really can't build a much faster computer than this one for gaming purposes. And the benefits of the faster video card get mitigated if you are only looking at single monitor resolutions or older games.
You can spend a whole lot of money and go with the X79 and 6-core Extreme Edition CPU's, and it will benchmark a lot faster, but it won't really play games any better.
I got everything from Newegg. I've always had good luck with them.
If you want to compare what I linked on the other thread to tomtom's build:
1) Exactly the same processor
2) Tomtom's motherboard is two steps higher in the same line. They're both high enough end that hardly anyone would notice a real world difference other than the price tag.
3) Tomtom's memory has higher specs and was probably more expensive. The real world performance difference would amount to a rounding error outside of synthetic memory benchmarks.
4) Tomtom's build has a faster and more expensive SSD. Mine has a larger and more reliable one. The speed difference would rarely be noticeable outside of synthetic benchmarks. The reliability difference is "works versus doesn't work", and both would probably work just fine, but mine would be less likely to cause problems for you.
5) Mine has a much higher end power supply. Tomtom's is probably a Seasonic S12II, which is fairly nice, but hardly high end. It's the sort of thing I might recommend if your budget were $500 less.
6) Mine has a much faster video card. If you do want to save money on a video card, you might want to look at a GeForce GTX 560 Ti or Radeon HD 6950--and preferably a 1 GB version of those cards for a single monitor, not 2 GB.
7) The optical drives are equivalent, as are any other DVD burners. Pick an optical drive on the basis of the price tag, that is, whichever is cheapest (including shipping!) the day you make the purchase.
8) Both have nice, large cases. You could argue that tomtom's case is a little nicer, though aesthetics are a matter of opinion. His is certainly more expensive.
9) Tomtom's CPU cooler is a little nicer.
10) They have the same OS.
That doesn't mean you have to go purely with one person's build. You can mix and match parts, and in fact, could choose any arbitrary combination of parts from his build and parts from mine, and it would all work. You could also pick a different video card or a different case or whatever.
Speaking of which, I'd encourage you to go through the cases on New Egg, find one that you like the looks of, and post a link to it here. A large fraction of $100+ cases would work nicely for you, so you could pick one that you think looks nice.
Quiz is right. Builds will often vary depending on sales, rebates, personal preference, etc. You just have to get a general idea of what you're looking for and do some research.
For example, the only reason I got that motherboard is because it was part of a combo deal with the CPU, it was basically a free upgrade to the Deluxe. If not for the combo deal, I would have gotten the cheaper priced Pro instead. Most of the other parts - ram, SSD, PSU (M12II, by the way), video card - were either all on sale, had a rebate, or both. Most of my choices were simply based on keeping the build within the price range I had set for it.
As Quiz said, there's really no way to justify that entire budget on a single-monitor system, short of special requirents (say, a really nice sound setup, for instance, and even then...).
You don't even have to spend some of what's been spent on some of these builds necessarily (for instance, if you don't overclock, save on getting the nicer CPU cooler). Just get something like what Tomtom built, swap in a 7970, and then use the left over money to get a bunch of games, or take a vacation, or buy a really big cheeseburger...
If you are dead set on spending $2000 on a Gaming Rig, I would suggest spending most of it on the actual user experience instead of the internal performance of the machine. At $1000 you can make a rig that can play any game under the sun.
.Would the difference between a 1GB and 2GB vid card be noticable on a single monitor?
Would I be able to run GW2 on highest graphics settings and achieve a decent framerate? Say 45fps? -with a 1GB
.I forgot to mention earlier that my $2000 budget is in NZD, which comes around to $1572 US. Would you recommend tomtoms power supply now?
If you decide that you want a prebuilt after all, here is a pretty nice one for $1600: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883229267
Add a Samsung 24" screen and you are good to go.
Building it yourself do give you a slightly better price and do so you can focus on the stuff you really need but you said you prefered to a prebuilt, so I at least should link to one, you can compare it to Quizz parts that are a great deal of course (but remember that you get Windows 7 included here as well as a few other nice features...
Good luck anyways.
2GB means you do get some more memory for textures and similar things, but the GPU speed is actually more important there.
My 480 GTX with 1 GB can easily max out any game I tried (I have 8 GB ram and a AMD 6x3,0 CPU). GW2 is coded by Strain, I am sure I will be able to max it out as well with a good framerate.
On a single monitor at a resolution of 1080p or lower, the difference between 1 GB and 3 GB doesn't matter. The difference between Tahiti and GF114 does, on the other hand. If all you wanted were 1 GB of video memory, then you could get that cheaply:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814131338
But as you can probably guess, that's not a good gaming card.
I would, however, suggest that if you're going with a single monitor and don't want to go high end on the video card, maybe you shouldn't spend $2000 on the computer. There's nothing wrong with saying that you could spend $2000, but can get what you want for $1500, so that's all you're going to spend.
If you do want to scale things back like that, then there are some other parts in the build I linked that can also be scaled back, if you're not trying to support high end graphical hardware.
A Radeon HD 7970 might be perhaps 80% faster than a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. That means that it will probably have a longer useful lifetime for you, before you go looking for better performance. On the other hand, if you could buy a $220 card today, and then another $220 card two or three years from now that is as fast as the 7970, that gets you the same eventual lifetime without having to spend $550.
For what it's worth, if you're looking to save some money on the GPU and don't want a $550 card, you should probably look at a Radeon HD 6870, GeForce GTX 560 Ti, and Radeon HD 6950. The "Ti" on the GTX 560 matters (hooray for confusing naming conventions?), and a GeForce GTX 560 without the Ti is about as fast as a Radeon HD 6870, but more expensive.
Your GeForce GTX 480 doesn't have 1 GB of video memory. GF100 had six memory channels, so it must be 1.5 GB or 3 GB, and usually the former.
Also, the prebuilt that you link isn't $1600 anymore after you've replaced the power supply and added an SSD, as you'll need to do if you want a nice computer.
I've edited post #13 (red). Just saying unless you never notice
If you're in New Zealand, then a lot of parts that are avaiable in the US might be simply unavailable there. You'd have to give a link to a site that sells parts so I could see what was there.
www.tomshardware.com
All you need to know. They do 2000, 1000, and I think even 500 dollar PC builds! So, pick the 1000 and add/remove parts to reach that 1500 budget you're aiming for.
Does Newegg not ship to New Zealand?
First, they probably don't. And second, even if they did, the shipping would likely be so expensive that it would be cheaper to just buy parts locally.
New Egg has a separate site for shipping to Canada, even, with different prices and different inventory available, and that's much closer to the US than New Zealand is. Different countries have different laws, and it's hard enough to comply with just one country's laws, let alone trying to keep straight the laws in dozens of countries.
Thanks for pointing that out. I did an engine search and got www.ascent.co.nz
I'm just looking if they have any of the parts I've picked out. Thanks for all your help
Which parts you should get depends on the prices. If I see two parts that are equivalent, and one is $80 and the other is $100 that day, I'll recommend the one that is $80. If the prices are reversed on a different site, I'd recommend getting the part that is cheaper on the other site.
Intel processors cost about the same nearly everywhere (before taxes), so I use that to try to gauge how expensive everything else is on a given site. I'll have a look at the site and see what's there.
I'm just looking at their CPU coolers but they don't seem to have any 120mm ones. Is 92mm (2800rpm) good enough?
It looks like after taxes, your $2000 NZ comes to about what you can get for $1200 US. That's still enough to get you something nice, but just not nearly as nice, especially when you still need peripherals.
Anyway, here's your power supply, since a lot of people have trouble picking that out:
http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=391405
On your budget, you're going to have to either:
a) go with a cheaper AMD processor, rather than an Intel Sandy Bridge quad core, or
b) skip the SSD
Option (a) probably won't make much of a noticeable difference for gaming in the near future, but may mean you're capped at perhaps 40 or 50 frames per second in some games a few years from now. Option (b) will rarely make a difference to frame rates in games, but will make everything else in the system more sluggish.
Also, you should probably look at either a GeForce GTX 560 Ti or Radeon HD 6950 for the video card, or maybe a Radeon HD 6870 if you want to save a bit of money there.