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On May 23 2012 05:29 XenoJesus wrote: yo d00dz, wanna help me out? I hope I put this in the right place.
What is your budget? $1000-1100.
What is your resolution? I currently have a Dell XPS M1530 at 1200x800 but I'll be getting a new monitor obv.
What are you using it for?
Gaming, normal stuff. No editing or other stuff.
What is your upgrade cycle?
I could do either, what would you recommend with hardware trends nowadays? 1 or 2 years?
When do you plan on building it?
ASAP.
Do you plan on overclocking?
Nah, brah.
Do you need an Operating System? Nope.
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire?
Is it worth it? I really only play Starcraft and Steam games. Prolly not.
Where are you buying your parts from? Newegg. I live in Brooklyn. Fast shipping.
I am gonna repeat my advice since i think its awesome
CPU: I would go with a i5-2500K or i7-2600K. Yes you dont want to overclock, but you hardly pay anything to be able to do so, and in the future a overclocking might push your system to not having to be upgraded for another year. Considering the 4year replace cycle it might be worth going for the 2600K, but the 2500K is the best -value- CPU out there. The main diffrence is only hyperthreading which isent used much in games. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115072&Tpk=2500k http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115070 220$ (i5-2500K)
RAM: The thread states that 8 GB RAM is an "overkill" but considering you want it to last long and considering just how cheap 8GB 1600MHZ RAM is I the obvious choice is just that. Im choosing Kingston because its a quality brand. Any other non-noname brand is also okay. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104262 50$
Motherboard We want a motherboard to our 1155 socket. I think the obviuos choice falls on the Z68 chipset. With this chipset u get things like SRT (smart responce technology) between a SSD harddisk and ur normal HDD so that you can buy a small 120GB SSD and have a 1-2 TB harddisk as storage - while stile having the fast loadtimes from the SSD (it caches all the files you use the most in the SSD). I have been lookin at some diffrent boards to resonable prices. The second one got some bad reviews about boot problems, but I have that exact board in my PC and have had no problems whatsoever. These motherboard also have intelligent tweaker which makes the overclocking very simple. Simply change the multiplier. I currently have mine running at 4.5 Ghz stable http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128506 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128512 140$ (GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3)
CPU Cooler: There are a million diffrent choices here. Aslong you use a quality brand and look what people say about the product you should be fine. I am currently using a coolermaster V6 GT which have a big heatsink with many copper pipes and 2 fans with Push/blow. It also comes with a molex connector for some fancy light in red, blue or purple. Any other good brand should be good also (Noctua, thermaltake, corsair) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103089&Tpk=coolermaster GT
47$
can be skipped if you do absolutely for the life of you will not overclock (even though its very easy with intelligent tweaker on Z68)
PSU What we are looking for here is a quality brand so it doesnt die after 2 years and enough Watt to fitt your requirements. I personally use a 600W Corsair, but this 750W is cheap and also gives you oppotunity to expand a little more (2 GPU's if wanted) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139021 109$
HDD Personally I would just go for a standard 1TB HDD with 7200 RPM and good transfer speed. I myself have a 1TB samsung HDD, but i guess it doesnt really matter. SSD does help with loadtimes, but doesnt help anything once ingame so I guess thats optional. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533 120$
So we managed to hit the 1000$ budged just nicely. You could use a 2600K if you feel thats nessecary, but keep in mind its around 60$ more.
DVD drive Optional: I dont use it myself since I can download my games. If needed I have a USB dvd drive though.
SSD Optional: SSD's are a great way to increase loadtimes and with SRT on the Z68 chipset you will gain the full potential of it even with a small 120gig SSD where u install your OS. However SSD's are expensive and not nessecary for games so I leave that out since we dont want to go over 1000$ and there is no way we are slacking requirements on the other facets of the computer just to get a SSD. I dont use a SSD myself either and my computer allready have pretty nice loadtimes (19second boot into windows with everything loaded)
If you want to look at preformance / price yourself on CPU's and GPU's you can check this site out just keep in mind these benchmarks are for all cores and a CPU will proberly get higher scores because of more cores(calculation power), but will proberly not be better for gaming because most games use 2 cores. It is still a good site for rough guideline on what to buy: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
On May 23 2012 08:32 Shauni wrote: Why would anyone consider a 480? Are you trying to make him burn down his house?
I think he thinks hes awesome so value/efficiency doesn't mean much to him. There are a few holes in his advice. First he states that this thread thinks 8gb ram is overkill but doesn't realize the OP hasn't been updated for ~7months and the RAM he linked is 1.65v which is shit. Second he suggests a 600w PSU for a single gpu build. Yeah a 600w PSU might be required for a single GPU build 5 years ago. Third he suggests that a 560Ti is good value. Yeah it is if you can find one under 190. Forth, he suggests a Cooler Master GT as a CPU cooler but doesn't see that the 212+ is $20. Fifth, He suggests a Caviar Black, which is the biggest gimmick ever.
RAM: The thread states that 8 GB RAM is an "overkill" but considering you want it to last long and considering just how cheap 8GB 1600MHZ RAM is I the obvious choice is just that. Im choosing Kingston because its a quality brand. Any other non-noname brand is also okay. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104262 50$
Motherboard We want a motherboard to our 1155 socket. I think the obviuos choice falls on the Z68 chipset. With this chipset u get things like SRT (smart responce technology) between a SSD harddisk and ur normal HDD so that you can buy a small 120GB SSD and have a 1-2 TB harddisk as storage - while stile having the fast loadtimes from the SSD (it caches all the files you use the most in the SSD). I have been lookin at some diffrent boards to resonable prices. The second one got some bad reviews about boot problems, but I have that exact board in my PC and have had no problems whatsoever. These motherboard also have intelligent tweaker which makes the overclocking very simple. Simply change the multiplier. I currently have mine running at 4.5 Ghz stable http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128506 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128512 140$ (GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKnTlryLpI8
CPU Cooler: There are a million diffrent choices here. Aslong you use a quality brand and look what people say about the product you should be fine. I am currently using a coolermaster V6 GT which have a big heatsink with many copper pipes and 2 fans with Push/blow. It also comes with a molex connector for some fancy light in red, blue or purple. Any other good brand should be good also (Noctua, thermaltake, corsair) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103089&Tpk=coolermaster GT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDkORpfFGo 47$
can be skipped if you do absolutely for the life of you will not overclock (even though its very easy with intelligent tweaker on Z68)
PSU What we are looking for here is a quality brand so it doesnt die after 2 years and enough Watt to fitt your requirements. I personally use a 600W Corsair, but this 750W is cheap and also gives you oppotunity to expand a little more (2 GPU's if wanted) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139021 109$
HDD Personally I would just go for a standard 1TB HDD with 7200 RPM and good transfer speed. I myself have a 1TB samsung HDD, but i guess it doesnt really matter. SSD does help with loadtimes, but doesnt help anything once ingame so I guess thats optional. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533 120$
So we managed to hit the 1000$ budged just nicely. You could use a 2600K if you feel thats nessecary, but keep in mind its around 60$ more.
DVD drive Optional: I dont use it myself since I can download my games. If needed I have a USB dvd drive though.
SSD Optional: SSD's are a great way to increase loadtimes and with SRT on the Z68 chipset you will gain the full potential of it even with a small 120gig SSD where u install your OS. However SSD's are expensive and not nessecary for games so I leave that out since we dont want to go over 1000$ and there is no way we are slacking requirements on the other facets of the computer just to get a SSD. I dont use a SSD myself either and my computer allready have pretty nice loadtimes (19second boot into windows with everything loaded)
If you want to look at preformance / price yourself on CPU's and GPU's you can check this site out just keep in mind these benchmarks are for all cores and a CPU will proberly get higher scores because of more cores(calculation power), but will proberly not be better for gaming because most games use 2 cores. It is still a good site for rough guideline on what to buy: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
Radeon 7850 is currently the best price/performance GPU @ 250~ USD.
If he don't want to overclock, he don't want to overclock. If he wants to O.C the best price/performance CPU cooler is the Coolermaster 212 to easily take it to ~4.5ghz.
Coolermaster HAF 912 is the best and most updated case there is.
Z68 chipset... idk... Asrock P67 PRO3 will save you 40$ if you want to overclock. Other then that a H67 board will save you close to ~70$ compared to the 140$ (GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3)
you can drop keep the SSD with a 2500k+p67 and you would still be under 1100$
B75 motherboard supports overclocking. So buying an i5 you can make it run its turbo frequency all the time, giving you a 400mhz OC for an extra $10($5 if you want mATX). DDR3-1600 is dropping like a rock price wise. I've found a few 8gb 1.35v cas9 kits for $45.
RAM: The thread states that 8 GB RAM is an "overkill" but considering you want it to last long and considering just how cheap 8GB 1600MHZ RAM is I the obvious choice is just that. Im choosing Kingston because its a quality brand. Any other non-noname brand is also okay. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104262 50$
Motherboard We want a motherboard to our 1155 socket. I think the obviuos choice falls on the Z68 chipset. With this chipset u get things like SRT (smart responce technology) between a SSD harddisk and ur normal HDD so that you can buy a small 120GB SSD and have a 1-2 TB harddisk as storage - while stile having the fast loadtimes from the SSD (it caches all the files you use the most in the SSD). I have been lookin at some diffrent boards to resonable prices. The second one got some bad reviews about boot problems, but I have that exact board in my PC and have had no problems whatsoever. These motherboard also have intelligent tweaker which makes the overclocking very simple. Simply change the multiplier. I currently have mine running at 4.5 Ghz stable http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128506 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128512 140$ (GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKnTlryLpI8
CPU Cooler: There are a million diffrent choices here. Aslong you use a quality brand and look what people say about the product you should be fine. I am currently using a coolermaster V6 GT which have a big heatsink with many copper pipes and 2 fans with Push/blow. It also comes with a molex connector for some fancy light in red, blue or purple. Any other good brand should be good also (Noctua, thermaltake, corsair) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103089&Tpk=coolermaster GT http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDkORpfFGo 47$
can be skipped if you do absolutely for the life of you will not overclock (even though its very easy with intelligent tweaker on Z68)
PSU What we are looking for here is a quality brand so it doesnt die after 2 years and enough Watt to fitt your requirements. I personally use a 600W Corsair, but this 750W is cheap and also gives you oppotunity to expand a little more (2 GPU's if wanted) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139021 109$
HDD Personally I would just go for a standard 1TB HDD with 7200 RPM and good transfer speed. I myself have a 1TB samsung HDD, but i guess it doesnt really matter. SSD does help with loadtimes, but doesnt help anything once ingame so I guess thats optional. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533 120$
So we managed to hit the 1000$ budged just nicely. You could use a 2600K if you feel thats nessecary, but keep in mind its around 60$ more.
DVD drive Optional: I dont use it myself since I can download my games. If needed I have a USB dvd drive though.
SSD Optional: SSD's are a great way to increase loadtimes and with SRT on the Z68 chipset you will gain the full potential of it even with a small 120gig SSD where u install your OS. However SSD's are expensive and not nessecary for games so I leave that out since we dont want to go over 1000$ and there is no way we are slacking requirements on the other facets of the computer just to get a SSD. I dont use a SSD myself either and my computer allready have pretty nice loadtimes (19second boot into windows with everything loaded)
If you want to look at preformance / price yourself on CPU's and GPU's you can check this site out just keep in mind these benchmarks are for all cores and a CPU will proberly get higher scores because of more cores(calculation power), but will proberly not be better for gaming because most games use 2 cores. It is still a good site for rough guideline on what to buy: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
Radeon 7850 is currently the best price/performance GPU @ 250~ USD.
If he don't want to overclock, he don't want to overclock. If he wants to O.C the best price/performance CPU cooler is the Coolermaster 212 to easily take it to ~4.5ghz.
Coolermaster HAF 912 is the best and most updated case there is.
Z68 chipset... idk... Asrock P67 PRO3 will save you 40$ if you want to overclock. Other then that a H67 board will save you close to ~70$ compared to the 140$ (GIGABYTE GA-Z68XP-UD3)
$200 TN monitor isnt a good price, any 1920x1080 monitor at around ~150$ will be fine.
B75 motherboard supports overclocking. So buying an i5 you can make it run its turbo frequency all the time, giving you a 400mhz OC for an extra $10($5 if you want mATX). DDR3-1600 is dropping like a rock price wise. I've found a few 8gb 1.35v cas9 kits for $45.
So a friend of mine's parents is going to buy a gaming laptop for him. The most they'll spend is $1400 (USD). Does anyone have a recommended site to buy laptops online? Newegg? Something else? I've been looking at the Dell website, not sure if that's a bad idea or not. :/
The two machines I'm looking at for him:
XPS 17: $1299
"Processor 2nd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-2760QM processor (2.40 GHz with Turbo Boost 2.0 up to 3.50 GHz) Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64-Bit, English Display 17.3" FHD (1080p) with 2.0MP HD Webcam Memory3 8GB3 Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz Hard Drive 1TB 5400 RPM SATA Hard Drive Optical Drive 8X Tray Load CD/DVD Burner (Dual Layer DVD+/-R Drive) Video Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 555M 3GB graphics with Optimus Warranty 1 Year Premium Protection Package - America's Best Standard Protection Weight 7.57 lbs"
and
Alienware M14x: $1399
"Processor 3rd Generation Intel® Core™ i7-3610QM (6MB Cache, up to 3.3GHz w/ Turbo Boost 2.0) Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium, 64bit Display 14.0" High Def+ (900p/1600x900) with WLED backlight Memory3 8GB3 Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz Hard Drive 750GB 7,200 RPM SATA 3Gb/s Optical Drive Slot Load Dual Layer DVD Burner (DVD+/-RW) Video Card 1 GB DDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 650M with Optimus™ Warranty 1 Year Basic Plan Weight 6.45 lbs"
Seems the Alienware has better hardware, but a smaller screen. I'll ask him today whether or not the bigger display is a big factor for him. Plus I've always been a little weary of Alienware, but I'm sure they work fine. He says he just wants to play D3 for now, but he hopes it'll last him for 5ish years, playing games later on minimum settings. Currently his machine is 6 years old, which lets him play WoW at low-medium settings but that's all. He's been happy with that for this long, so...
Anyway, if anyone has advice on the best place to look to order online, or some specific model/brand that's really good these days, please let me know!
Really? newegg details pages are often wrong, and product descriptions are often wrong. Not that I trust them either, but you can see that one of the product reviews even says it doesn't support overclocking.
Anyway, if H77 doesn't even support overclocking, why would the business SKU support overclocking?
On May 23 2012 12:01 XenoJesus wrote: Wow, great tips. Thank you!
What's the story with PCIe 3.0? Is it worth it to get a board with this right now?
no because no GPU(not yet) will saturate/fully utilize, it's just for marketing
I just read on the ASRock website that PCIe 3.0 has a higher Encoder efficiency(97.5%) than PCIe 2.0(80%).
I missed this earlier and am really late here, but do you realize what they're referring to? They're just talking about the line code on PCI Express 2.x. PCIe 2.x uses 8b/10b encoding, so for every 8 bits of information, it's transmitting 10 binary symbols over the interface. Hence 20% loss. PCIe 3.x uses a different scheme with less waste.
So that's just about how effectively the data rate for PCIe 3.x is higher, effectively more than twice of PCIe 2.x because the raw signaling rate is twice as high and the overhead is less.
Why did you want to bring this tidbit up, anyway? Tests of current-generation graphics cards have shown very little difference running on a PCIe 3.x interface as opposed to 2.x, for gaming. For compute, it's a different story.
Hey all. This is my first time making a pc from scratch and I was just wondering if I could get some help going over the parts. Just wanted to make sure I'm not buying stuff that won't work together properly when they arrive.
Hey all. This is my first time making a pc from scratch and I was just wondering if I could get some help going over the parts. Just wanted to make sure I'm not buying stuff that won't work together properly when they arrive.
The games I mainly play are Starcraft 2, LoL, and Dota 2. I hope to be able to run Diablo 3, Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Battlefield 3.
My budget was about $1000 Canadian, i think i hit about $1150 with shipping which I'm ok with.
I'd like the computer to last 1-2 years.
I also plan to overclock.
If anyone has any advice or recommendations i'd be glad to hear them!
According to myrmidon B75 doesn't support OC. I'll take his word over Newegg's. How about NCIX, prices are lower and shipping is ALOT cheaper because NCIX is a canada based supplier.
EPT
