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When using this resource, please read FragKrag's opening post. The Tech Support forum regulars have helped create countless of desktop systems without any compensation. The least you can do is provide all of the information required for them to help you properly. |
That said, all else equal including cost, nobody's suggesting that they wouldn't want the better VRMs.
Slots, ports, features, support are a bigger deal, in the context of what most people need and want—i.e. no tweaking for the sake of tweaking, obsessing over one hundred Megahertz or even less.
Well that's all. VRMs aren't an issue if you aren't overclocking.
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On November 20 2012 01:27 Belial88 wrote:Show nested quote +Yes, go through lists and lists of rather inconsequential information and try to parse difficult to understand information. Again: power phases are only a problem with AMD systems. Again, a stock Phenom II X6 draws the same amount of power as an overclocked Ivy Bridge processor during load. You have to do that with most equipment. RAM, different models of the same GPU, HDD, lots of PC components that have 50 other ones selling at the same price and you have to choose which one is the best buy. If your going to pick a $100 motherboard with SLI and 6 USB slots and whatever else features that you need, atx, lga 1155, etc, pick the one with the better VRM. I'm not disagreeing with what you are saying. But the VRM IS the motherboard. I'm not saying you need to pay more for a motherboard, I'm saying that there's going to be a dozen motherboards at $75.28 with your form factor/pci-x slots/socket and pick the one with the better vrm. And you probably shouldnt buy the cheapest motherboard, ie micro-atx 4+1 nikos. Show nested quote +Even then that's not really true. Even at the low ends, it overclocks worse for the exact same reasons. Needs more voltage to get same clocks and all that. That's why the lowest end MSI boards are kind of shitty but they still work perfectly fine unless you get unlucky and the board blows. that's the VRM quality. Lower quality VRM means inconsistent power supply, more ripple, less than specified voltage reaching the chip. And it's not necessarily the chip requires more vcore, it's that the voltage isn't reaching the chip when it would on another motherboard (semantics). Heat also causes degradation of performance. Getting a higher quality VRM not only makes sure no blow-out occurs (granted, rare on intel and modern systems), it helps with overclocking. A moderate overclock might not need it, but a high end overclock will. For all i care, buy the cheapest motherboard. Just of the many motherboards at the cheapest price, pick the best VRM. I'm not saying anything controversial here, and I'm not trying to be alarmist in any way. But a motherboard is not the colors it's painted, the pci-x slots it has, how many ram slots it has. It's the VRM, and to a lesser extent the chipset. If someone wants to be an uneducated buyer that's perfectly fine. Have fun blowing a ton of unnecessary money, or getting a sub-optimal motherboard for your price point. I'm just trying to educate.
No. It seems that you are severely out of touch with the world and yes, you are being the biggest alarmist ever.
You caution against buying MSI boards even though there has not been a single wide spread incident of their Intel boards exploding. The last incident was with Gigabyte's X79 boards.
Literally no one is going to go through dozens of spreadsheets to find out how the VRMs on two different boards compare. Not even overclocking enthusiasts fucking do this.
You keep bringing up VRMs being the most important factor for buying motherboards even though this is far from fucking true. Maybe one in a million consumers will have VRMs on their list. Everyone else cares much more on shit that actually makes a difiference and are significantly easier to understand (ports, warranty / post-sale support, chipsets, BIOS, features, colour). Yes, I just said that colour is more important.
If a moderate overclock doesn't need higher quality VRMs than why the fuck bring it up at all? No one is going to be doing a high-end overclock on a bottom of the barrel piece of shit board because the BIOS is crippled and it isn't smart either.
Sub optimal? I don't know if this is a joke or just complete ignorance. Sub optimal would have more to do with everything else that you deemed to be less important than VRMs.
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Hey guys,
i'm interested in finally building myself a computer. I have owned several decent laptops over the years and now that I don't move around nearly as much I'd like to get a desktop. The focus would be on gaming and my budget is between 550 and 700 dollars.
I would like it to be able to play all current games and hopefully some of the games in the near future. I am not afraid to upgrade the gpu/memory later down the road as new games come out, but would rather avoid upgrading the motherboard/cpu.
With that said i'm not the kind of person who cares if I can run something with max graphics. For me having a smooth and stable experience without FPS lag is just as enjoyable on medium/low settings as it is on high/ultra. Obviously if I can run it on higher settings on would though!
I am confident in my ability to put the pieces together on my own, and I have several friends who could help me if need be.
Also a smaller hard drive is something I don't mind. I have only had a 500gig one for the past 2 years and have never filled it past 200~.
Should also be noted that I am not including monitor, mouse, or keyboard in the budget. I have access to all of those already.
I like to order from newegg! But if there's somewhere better I would go elsewhere.
Thanks in advance, I really appreciate all the work that you guys put into finding components and getting deals.
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Literally no one is going to go through dozens of spreadsheets to find out how the VRMs on two different boards compare. Not even overclocking enthusiasts fucking do this.
lol? If you got a price point, pick the motherboard with the better VRM quality, and do a simple google search to see if there's issues with the motherboard. Everyone at OCN does this, everyone who's trying to figure out what parts to buy does this.
You keep bringing up VRMs being the most important factor for buying motherboards even though this is far from fucking true. Maybe one in a million consumers will have VRMs on their list. Everyone else cares much more on shit that actually makes a difiference and are significantly easier to understand (ports, warranty / post-sale support, chipsets, BIOS, features, colour). Yes, I just said that colour is more important.
Yes, but all of those features generally don't cost more or less. You can find a blue or red motherboard at $50, it's not like you have to pay $20 more for blue. Warranty and post-sales support is generally a brand issue. Chipset is just the ability to overclock and SLI, and isn't a huge conflict in price either (z77 vs z68, basically no difference between the two when put on a motherboard, even memory rating can be higher with a z68 on a certain motherboard).
It'd also be stupid to pay $30+ for a motherboard when it's got a shitter VRM than a cheaper motherboard (comparing 2 motherboards with equivalent SLI/overclock features and holes or lack thereof). You'll also have people buy a motherboard because of something silly like 8 ram slots instead of 4 and pay much more for it when its got a worse vrm, and that's a bad choice.
If anything, I'd just conclude that buy the cheapest motherboard you can with 1155 as long as its got the right holes, considering intel's tdp's.
You also make it out that 1155's never fry out the VRM, which is not true at all.
Hey guys,
i'm interested in finally building myself a computer. I have owned several decent laptops over the years and now that I don't move around nearly as much I'd like to get a desktop. The focus would be on gaming and my budget is between 550 and 700 dollars.
I would like it to be able to play all current games and hopefully some of the games in the near future. I am not afraid to upgrade the gpu/memory later down the road as new games come out, but would rather avoid upgrading the motherboard/cpu.
With that said i'm not the kind of person who cares if I can run something with max graphics. For me having a smooth and stable experience without FPS lag is just as enjoyable on medium/low settings as it is on high/ultra. Obviously if I can run it on higher settings on would though!
I am confident in my ability to put the pieces together on my own, and I have several friends who could help me if need be.
Also a smaller hard drive is something I don't mind. I have only had a 500gig one for the past 2 years and have never filled it past 200~.
Should also be noted that I am not including monitor, mouse, or keyboard in the budget. I have access to all of those already.
I like to order from newegg! But if there's somewhere better I would go elsewhere.
You can play all of today's games and be just fine for the future with a $400 or cheaper computer, easily (if not below 300, 200). You can find tons of parts cheap on ebay, as well as used/refurbished/open box (not just from ebay, but newegg, amazon). I've also found wal-mart.com and amazon.com to be cheaper than newegg about 10-20% of the time. Just build the computer off newegg, and then price check the parts on amazon, wal-mart.com, and/or use something like pricegrabber.com which does a quick check off the internet to find the lowest prices (where newegg generally is, but it's not uncommon at all to find the same parts for cheaper elsewhere).
I'm not really sure how important budget, value, and performance are to you though. If you want to make a great gaming rig for the cheapest possible, just get a pentium g860 or 2120. i3 would be a bit more high-end, and i5 would just be the best gaming system ever. But you can make an i5 build with a strong gpu off a 500-600 budget, so are you trying to save money where you can, or do you not mind spending $500-600?
Gaming doesn't really require much power, relatively. You could make a computer that just crushes the xbox 360 in performance, for example, for under $200 (and the biggest expenses are things that generally don't change if your building a cheap as shit or budget pc, ie case, always get a quality psu, ram). The xbox360 plays today's games just fine, with basically a $40 cpu and $10 gpu. Obviously, you'll want more than an xbox 360, it's terribly outdated, but gaming is not folding@home or CAD.
The problem with laptops (and pre-built PCs) is that they always have a terrible GPU attached (compared to the CPU). There's equipment out there that allows you to hook up a GPU to a laptop (if you were interested in that) for a major gaming performance boost.
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Err... please show me a PC that crushes XBOX 360 games for under $200. And five-finger discounts don't count.
No offense, but you are out of your mind if you're suggesting to someone that a gaming PC under $400 (or 300, 200) is acceptable. It's possible but not without many limitations and requiring tweaking expectations.
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Well my old pc, for starters:
$55 athlon ii x3 450
$30 biostar a770e3 or any combo board or anything
$20 GPU (well I have a $35 4850 1GB, a small cut in GPU for a better CPU)
$10 2gb RAM (Kingston hyperx blu)
$30 PSU (Antec earthwatts 430d)
$30 any case (nzxt gamma)
$20 HDD
$195 An APU from AMD would cause a significant drop in price for a computer that would still beat an xbox 360.Maybe a celeron or pentium, for more performance. Tons of older generation GPUs that are quite powerful that can be had for cheap used, that are many times over stronger than Xbox's 7800. Or integrated graphics. Or, an amd apu (eww, but still much more powerful).
2gb ram because you can't exactly surf the web while playing Halo either.
It'd be a 'bad' PC, but it's still better than an xbox 360. It just goes to show how out of date the xbox 360 is and how little you need to play video games on decent graphics on 720.
Xbox 360 = 7800 512mb gpu. Technically it's a 3.2ghz tricore, but it's a terribly outdated chip so it's going to be clock for clock, lower than the athlon ii. Although the athlon ii is outdated too.
Buy these parts used or off ebay, it'd be even cheaper. You could also cut corners, like no case, and you could easily cannibalize some parts like HDD, PSU, case, RAM possibly. You could also go for an 'outdated' DDR2 system, that'd be dirt cheap on the motherboard, core, and RAM, and you could easily find a computer to tear apart for that. For an extra $100-200 you'd just have something that murders xbox 360's, ie pentium, phenom ii, i3, $100 for a really high quality GPU.
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Do you really think that system you listed will be able to play any current Xbox 360 game decently. You warp so much reality to make a point that is beyond practicality.
Telling someone it's ok to build a $200-300 gaming computer is really bad especially if most of the parts are used. Unless they tell you I only have $200-300 but really want to play.
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Why are you so stuck up on VRMs? There are caps and shit elsewhere that's just as important as the VRM. If anything, the VRM on most mid end motherboards right now are overpowered rather than underpowered.
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On November 20 2012 06:52 Belial88 wrote:
Well my old pc, for starters:
$55 athlon ii x3 450
$30 biostar a770e3 or any combo board or anything
$20 GPU (well I have a $35 4850 1GB, a small cut in GPU for a better CPU)
$10 2gb RAM (Kingston hyperx blu)
$30 PSU (Antec earthwatts 430d)
$30 any case (nzxt gamma)
$20 HDD
$195 An APU from AMD would cause a significant drop in price for a computer that would still beat an xbox 360.Maybe a celeron or pentium, for more performance. Tons of older generation GPUs that are quite powerful that can be had for cheap used, that are many times over stronger than Xbox's 7800. Or integrated graphics. Or, an amd apu (eww, but still much more powerful).
2gb ram because you can't exactly surf the web while playing Halo either.
It'd be a 'bad' PC, but it's still better than an xbox 360. It just goes to show how out of date the xbox 360 is and how little you need to play video games on decent graphics on 720.
Xbox 360 = 7800 512mb gpu. Technically it's a 3.2ghz tricore, but it's a terribly outdated chip so it's going to be clock for clock, lower than the athlon ii. Although the athlon ii is outdated too.
Buy these parts used or off ebay, it'd be even cheaper. You could also cut corners, like no case, and you could easily cannibalize some parts like HDD, PSU, case, RAM possibly. You could also go for an 'outdated' DDR2 system, that'd be dirt cheap on the motherboard, core, and RAM, and you could easily find a computer to tear apart for that. For an extra $100-200 you'd just have something that murders xbox 360's, ie pentium, phenom ii, i3, $100 for a really high quality GPU.
Just for the record...
Athlon II x3 450: 70$. link. Sure, it's on sale right now, but you can't prove a point with a temporary sale.
Motherboard: 40$ -minimum- Link here. I'm not picking one out because I don't know AMD. But the one you listed is out of stock and not for sale.
GPU: 30$ minimum Here. And iirc, a 5450 isn't as powerful as the xbox GPU. (I read somewhere that it was like low end, like a 6550 or something? I don't even know if that's a part lol, but it's around there.)
You can actually get 2GB Ram for 10$
30$ Antec earthwatts 430D? You mean the one that is 1) out of stock, and 2) Listed at 55$. Closest you can get is the Antec Earthwatts 380D here, but that is 45$. Sure, this (Cooler master elite 460) is 30$ on sale, but again, it's on sale. That's the closest you can get for a power supply that doesn't suck.
Yeah, you can get a 30$ case, but it's pretty bad most of the time.
The lowest hard drive on Newegg is 50$. And no, I'm not looking EVERYWHERE. A quick look at ncix shows the same thing.
You might have gotten sales and stuff etc. when you built that PC, but you have to plan in today's pricing. Hard drives don't cost 20$ anymore, unless you buy off ebay.
So, new total:
70$ CPU
40$ Motherboard
30$ GPU
30$ PSU (And any normal 30$ PSU at this price is a 350W)
30$ Case
10$ RAM
50$ HDD
15$ ODD
Total: 275$ For a terrible PC in general.
Even if you get the Athlon for 55, and the HDD for like 25$, you're STILL over 200$. Now, sure. You could get ALL of this off of ebay. Then you'd be under 200$. But who in their right mind would go get a used, sub 200$ PC with probably worse performance than that xbox 360 you are trying to "beat"?
Ebay prices: (lowest price + shipping)
Athlon: 50$ +7.50 shipping
Motherboard: not sure what to shop for, so I'll take your word for it that you can get a proper one off ebay for 30$
GPU: A used 4850 from 15-26$
PSU: Don't buy one from ebay. lol (I'll use 30$ again)
Case: NZXT Gamma has sold for 30$
10$ Ram
Hard Drive: You can get a used 120GB Hard drive for like 5$ off ebay it seems
ODD: I'll assume they're 5$ on Ebay
So yeah. An ebay PC will be around 165$. But who in their right mind would do that? (Also: I didn't check for whether they accepted returns or anything)
TLDR: Not possible to get a new PC with xbox 360 performance for under 200$. Used is possible barely, but a really bad idea.
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^ of course. Generally the other parts aren't as common to blow or susceptible, and good quality boards are going to have good caps and chokes and pwms, but that's totally true. I'm not hung up on anything, if you want to buy the cheapest board possible, get the one of a couple choices with the better VRM, and don't pay much more for a board with worse VRM.
Yes, an athlon ii/pentium system with a 4850 or 3870 will play any xbox game decently. The xbox 360 is using a tricore 3.2ghz cpu with terrible architecture and a 7800 gpu, a 3870 and athlon ii or $60 APU is considerably sronger in performance and the xbox is doing just fine. Its not to say such systems are good, its to say the xbox is shit and games don't require much at all. For streaming HD, folding, graphic design, photoshop, those builds will just die, just like the xbox 360 would, but if you want xbox 360 graphics, or a system to play todays games passably on medium on 720 HD, there you go.
Id never recommend such builds, unless, someone was asking for a very cheap build.An APU is terrible qhen you compare it an i5, of course, but if you want to play bf3 or sc2 with lowered settings, there you go.
People think that consoles are the way to go to play games for cheap, or that PCs are expensive, which is just not truel You see people enter this thread saying they need a seriously budget build, or that they "only" have $500.
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On November 20 2012 07:43 Belial88 wrote:
^ of course. Generally the other parts aren't as common to blow or susceptible, and good quality boards are going to have good caps and chokes and pwms, but that's totally true. I'm not hung up on anything, if you want to buy the cheapest board possible, get the one of a couple choices with the better VRM, and don't pay much more for a board with worse VRM.
Yes, an athlon ii/pentium system with a 4850 or 3870 will play any xbox game decently. The xbox 360 is using a tricore 3.2ghz cpu with terrible architecture and a 7800 gpu, a 3870 and athlon ii or $60 APU is considerably sronger in performance and the xbox is doing just fine. Its not to say such systems are good, its to say the xbox is shit and games don't require much at all. For streaming HD, folding, graphic design, photoshop, those builds will just die, just like the xbox 360 would, but if you want xbox 360 graphics, or a system to play todays games passably on medium on 720 HD, there you go.
Id never recommend such builds, unless, someone was asking for a very cheap build.An APU is terrible qhen you compare it an i5, of course, but if you want to play bf3 or sc2 with lowered settings, there you go.
People think that consoles are the way to go to play games for cheap, or that PCs are expensive, which is just not truel You see people enter this thread saying they need a seriously budget build, or that they "only" have $500.
Yeah, but you can't get under 200$ without buying like strictly from ebay >.> and a 30$ GPU (new) is a 5450, which (at least compute wise) not equal to the xbox GPU.
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Just because the hardware "can" doesn't mean it will because you need windows. Playing a recent Xbox 360 game on an Athlon ii, 2gb ram, and a 5450 is going to be not very fun even on 720p.
Promoting buying used parts for someone who already doesn't know much about computers is really dangerous.
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As i'm finding parts for the computer above i'v gotten to the motherboard and cpu.
What do you guys recommend? the intel i series ? (i3/i5) or an AMD one?
I don't anticipate doing a massive amount of multitasking, usually if I am playing a game I am not doing much else at the same time.
With that in mind - what will get me the most bang for my buck?
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On November 20 2012 07:42 Alryk wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2012 06:52 Belial88 wrote:
Well my old pc, for starters:
$55 athlon ii x3 450
$30 biostar a770e3 or any combo board or anything
$20 GPU (well I have a $35 4850 1GB, a small cut in GPU for a better CPU)
$10 2gb RAM (Kingston hyperx blu)
$30 PSU (Antec earthwatts 430d)
$30 any case (nzxt gamma)
$20 HDD
$195 An APU from AMD would cause a significant drop in price for a computer that would still beat an xbox 360.Maybe a celeron or pentium, for more performance. Tons of older generation GPUs that are quite powerful that can be had for cheap used, that are many times over stronger than Xbox's 7800. Or integrated graphics. Or, an amd apu (eww, but still much more powerful).
2gb ram because you can't exactly surf the web while playing Halo either.
It'd be a 'bad' PC, but it's still better than an xbox 360. It just goes to show how out of date the xbox 360 is and how little you need to play video games on decent graphics on 720.
Xbox 360 = 7800 512mb gpu. Technically it's a 3.2ghz tricore, but it's a terribly outdated chip so it's going to be clock for clock, lower than the athlon ii. Although the athlon ii is outdated too.
Buy these parts used or off ebay, it'd be even cheaper. You could also cut corners, like no case, and you could easily cannibalize some parts like HDD, PSU, case, RAM possibly. You could also go for an 'outdated' DDR2 system, that'd be dirt cheap on the motherboard, core, and RAM, and you could easily find a computer to tear apart for that. For an extra $100-200 you'd just have something that murders xbox 360's, ie pentium, phenom ii, i3, $100 for a really high quality GPU. Just for the record... Athlon II x3 450: 70$. link. Sure, it's on sale right now, but you can't prove a point with a temporary sale. Motherboard: 40$ -minimum- Link here. I'm not picking one out because I don't know AMD. But the one you listed is out of stock and not for sale. GPU: 30$ minimum Here. And iirc, a 5450 isn't as powerful as the xbox GPU. (I read somewhere that it was like low end, like a 6550 or something? I don't even know if that's a part lol, but it's around there.) You can actually get 2GB Ram for 10$ 30$ Antec earthwatts 430D? You mean the one that is 1) out of stock, and 2) Listed at 55$. Closest you can get is the Antec Earthwatts 380D here, but that is 45$. Sure, this (Cooler master elite 460) is 30$ on sale, but again, it's on sale. That's the closest you can get for a power supply that doesn't suck. Yeah, you can get a 30$ case, but it's pretty bad most of the time. The lowest hard drive on Newegg is 50$. And no, I'm not looking EVERYWHERE. A quick look at ncix shows the same thing. You might have gotten sales and stuff etc. when you built that PC, but you have to plan in today's pricing. Hard drives don't cost 20$ anymore, unless you buy off ebay. So, new total: 70$ CPU 40$ Motherboard 30$ GPU 30$ PSU (And any normal 30$ PSU at this price is a 350W) 30$ Case 10$ RAM 50$ HDD 15$ ODD Total: 275$ For a terrible PC in general. Even if you get the Athlon for 55, and the HDD for like 25$, you're STILL over 200$. Now, sure. You could get ALL of this off of ebay. Then you'd be under 200$. But who in their right mind would go get a used, sub 200$ PC with probably worse performance than that xbox 360 you are trying to "beat"? Ebay prices: (lowest price + shipping) Athlon: 50$ +7.50 shipping Motherboard: not sure what to shop for, so I'll take your word for it that you can get a proper one off ebay for 30$ GPU: A used 4850 from 15-26$ PSU: Don't buy one from ebay. lol (I'll use 30$ again) Case: NZXT Gamma has sold for 30$ 10$ Ram Hard Drive: You can get a used 120GB Hard drive for like 5$ off ebay it seems ODD: I'll assume they're 5$ on Ebay So yeah. An ebay PC will be around 165$. But who in their right mind would do that? (Also: I didn't check for whether they accepted returns or anything) TLDR: Not possible to get a new PC with xbox 360 performance for under 200$. Used is possible barely, but a really bad idea.
Athlon ii x3 has sat at $70 for a while, I imagine the $55 will become a permanent price soon. And if you are building a budget build, ebay is probably going to be a big part of where you buy parts from. Getting stuff from ebay doesnt preclude them from their warranty policies, either, but obviously it's a case by case basis.
I went off new prices, for the most part, obviously your going to have a hard time finding a 3870 or 4850 new these days, but if you are building a budget build, it's seriously worth paying only $10-20 for a GPU that performs more inline with $60 new, and all the of the $60 GPUs. Also a problem is that place like newegg is going to sell shit GPUs for $60, and not carry older gen cards that are many times over stronger. An $80 460 used is going to far outperform a $100 new GPU on newegg that's $100 because it's new gen.
GPUs advance at a faster rate than any other tech, so using an 'outdated' GPU is a great way to get very strong performance for cheap. Software and even the rest of the hardware isn't going to 'catch' up too soon.
Yea the PSU you want a quality one. Cant exactly get an older, decent PSU for $10-20, so that's going to be an expensive part of the build. But I'm sure you can find an older used one, cannibalize one, for a low price.
$10 ram, yea, i had 4gb listed originally but edited it.
Of course this is a 'terrible 'computer, but an xbox 360 is a piece of shit too, relatively, but in reality, the xbox 360 is great, in that it's a lot of fun and can play a lot of games decently. It looks good.
You aren't going to be hitting any benchmarks or doing any good sort of folding on these PCs, but you can play video games on them, and that's all people want to be doing here (hell, if you want a general usage PC or low graphics only PC, cheap!). And an athlon ii or pentium build is going to be 'shit' compared to an i5, but it's a good pc in that it gets the job done and plays games well, and, it's a good value. You spend $200-300 on a PC today, your going to be able to play all of today's games, and then spend $200-300 in 1-2 years, and you'll have a better PC than someone who spent $400 today.
An i5, and even an i3, is going to play games today at just way more power than you'd need. Even i5's and i3's are relatively inexpensive, under $600 easily for such builds, so if you got the money, go for it. But an athlon ii system, an APU, a pentium or celeron, they will play today's games fine on 720 with medium or high graphics. You might not hit ultra, and you won't have AA, but you'll play games for half the price of an i5 system. I'd say that's a pretty good deal. Of course i3 or pentium or athlon ii is going to be 'shit' compared to something twice the price.
And, you can do some streaming on an athlon ii, phenom ii, pentium, phenom system, provided your just at 720, and will definitely do 480.
You can definitely make better or similar to an xbox 360 for the same price of an xbox 360. You aren't overclocking, so a celeron or pentium, athlon ii or APU, and some cannibalized or ebay'd parts, and you got a quick, cheap as shit, gaming system that will play games pretty well. It won't be playing Ultra, and you might struggle with 1080 or 1200, but your online. Not everyone is looking to play starcraft2 or modern games on ultra settings, a lot of people just want to play on medium or even low, and there you go.
I wouldn't call it a 'terrible PC'. I'd call it a "$200-300 PC that will play games"
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To start things off, I'm in Canada and have tried to find the cheapest prices for parts using newegg, ncix, tigerdirect, and amazon.
Well there's a lot more to building a PC than I thought. I plan on buying parts and making one this week, and here's my general idea:
+ Show Spoiler +
I plan on streaming (480p ish) with OBS, listening to music, having a few Chrome tabs open, and running StarCraft II on medium or high.
I feel like the parts I've picked are way overkill. I am legitimately 100% lost with motherboards (I picked one that is by Intel, has the necessary ports and is compatible with my case and LGA1155 CPU), but it's pretty pricey.
I picked an i3 2100 Sandy Bridge...which is $120. I don't know what to look for in a CPU. I read Belial's guide and he says it's optimized for dual core @~3.0GHz, so I picked one of the few Intel processors that meet that expectation.
Is 2.7GHz okay? I have a 5 year old computer with 3.1GHz, so either we're going backwards with progress/pricing or there's more than clock speed to a CPU. Is Sandy Bridge worth it? My price range is hopefully <$600 including shipping, so I'd like to bring down the motherboard, CPU, and GPU. What's a good processor and motherboard you'd recommend for fairly cheap?
I've currently chosen the Radeon HD 6770, I feel like that's a good choice? I'm not sure what resolution my monitor will be, probably in the realm of 1920x1080, give or take a few hundred either way. Is the 6770 overkill? It's fairly expensive, and I'm not sure I need it, but I really don't want to cop out (5 year upgrade cycle). I'm thinking this is a good choice, but if anyone knows of a better option then I'm all ears 
Do these parts come with cables? Like I have enough computer knowledge to know that there's a ton of cables connecting HDD->Mobo, PSU ->Mobo, and probably a few more. I haven't seen anything at all about cables, so yeah a little lost there too.
Finally, how many fans do I need? I have literally no idea :D
Thanks a ton for any and all help! It's my first time building a PC and I know there will be plenty of silly mistakes (I tried to make sure the parts were compatible lol)
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On November 20 2012 07:54 Alryk wrote:Show nested quote +On November 20 2012 07:43 Belial88 wrote:
^ of course. Generally the other parts aren't as common to blow or susceptible, and good quality boards are going to have good caps and chokes and pwms, but that's totally true. I'm not hung up on anything, if you want to buy the cheapest board possible, get the one of a couple choices with the better VRM, and don't pay much more for a board with worse VRM.
Yes, an athlon ii/pentium system with a 4850 or 3870 will play any xbox game decently. The xbox 360 is using a tricore 3.2ghz cpu with terrible architecture and a 7800 gpu, a 3870 and athlon ii or $60 APU is considerably sronger in performance and the xbox is doing just fine. Its not to say such systems are good, its to say the xbox is shit and games don't require much at all. For streaming HD, folding, graphic design, photoshop, those builds will just die, just like the xbox 360 would, but if you want xbox 360 graphics, or a system to play todays games passably on medium on 720 HD, there you go.
Id never recommend such builds, unless, someone was asking for a very cheap build.An APU is terrible qhen you compare it an i5, of course, but if you want to play bf3 or sc2 with lowered settings, there you go.
People think that consoles are the way to go to play games for cheap, or that PCs are expensive, which is just not truel You see people enter this thread saying they need a seriously budget build, or that they "only" have $500. Yeah, but you can't get under 200$ without buying like strictly from ebay >.> and a 30$ GPU (new) is a 5450, which (at least compute wise) not equal to the xbox GPU.
Well you aren't exactly going to find a 7800 new either these days, and $30 for a GPU that's 2-3x as strong is a great deal. Anyone building at that budget will probably want to check out ebay. No one exactly should be trying to find an athlon ii or 4850 new and paying new prices for them.
Get a computer to meet your needs. Playing video games does not have many needs, as evidenced by the existence of consoles. An i5 build for under $600 is also pretty fucking awesome.
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I noticed in the specs for the GPU it says it needs a min or a 500w power supply, the one you put in there is 400w, will it still be okay? or better to go bigger?
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http://secure.newegg.ca/Shopping/ShoppingCart.aspx?submit=ChangeItem
How's this build? I know its all on the overkill side per part, and I do plan on running only 1900x1200, but with a second monitor. I have the money to spend, and I just want longevity, and flawless performance.
Some information about me in general; I play heavy graphic intensive games, stream for my friends and on twitch tv at 1080 (luckily my bandwidth is capable of this) and I have experience overclocking CPUs, and have no plans to get a second GPU due to how much of a bitch cross fire was for my previous build.
edit.
heres the build:
Antec Twelve Hundred V3 Black Steel ATX Full Tower Unbeatable Gaming Case
Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply
Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge 3.5GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4000 BX80637I73770K
EVGA 02G-P4-2670-KR GeForce GTX 670 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-16GBXL
ASUS P8Z77-V PRO LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
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On November 20 2012 09:24 Mavvie wrote:To start things off, I'm in Canada and have tried to find the cheapest prices for parts using newegg, ncix, tigerdirect, and amazon. Well there's a lot more to building a PC than I thought. I plan on buying parts and making one this week, and here's my general idea: + Show Spoiler +I plan on streaming (480p ish) with OBS, listening to music, having a few Chrome tabs open, and running StarCraft II on medium or high. I feel like the parts I've picked are way overkill. I am legitimately 100% lost with motherboards (I picked one that is by Intel, has the necessary ports and is compatible with my case and LGA1155 CPU), but it's pretty pricey. I picked an i3 2100 Sandy Bridge...which is $120. I don't know what to look for in a CPU. I read Belial's guide and he says it's optimized for dual core @~3.0GHz, so I picked one of the few Intel processors that meet that expectation. Is 2.7GHz okay? I have a 5 year old computer with 3.1GHz, so either we're going backwards with progress/pricing or there's more than clock speed to a CPU. Is Sandy Bridge worth it? My price range is hopefully <$600 including shipping, so I'd like to bring down the motherboard, CPU, and GPU. What's a good processor and motherboard you'd recommend for fairly cheap? I've currently chosen the Radeon HD 6770, I feel like that's a good choice? I'm not sure what resolution my monitor will be, probably in the realm of 1920x1080, give or take a few hundred either way. Is the 6770 overkill? It's fairly expensive, and I'm not sure I need it, but I really don't want to cop out (5 year upgrade cycle). I'm thinking this is a good choice, but if anyone knows of a better option then I'm all ears Do these parts come with cables? Like I have enough computer knowledge to know that there's a ton of cables connecting HDD->Mobo, PSU ->Mobo, and probably a few more. I haven't seen anything at all about cables, so yeah a little lost there too. Finally, how many fans do I need? I have literally no idea :D Thanks a ton for any and all help! It's my first time building a PC and I know there will be plenty of silly mistakes (I tried to make sure the parts were compatible lol)
You only need to get into fans and extra cooling if you plan to overclock, and Intel being the bastards they are (and can be because the bastards that are AMD), you can't really get into overclocking unless you buy an i5 k series, which is $200+.
I play and stream 720p@45fps on OBS/Xsplit/Fsplit (i prefer OBS because Jim is awesome and the program is slightly better, but they are all pretty similar in performance frankly, people say one or the other 'blows X out of the water' because people are idiots and compare FFsplit with no preview screen by default with Xsplit which has a huge preview screen by default, a more apples to apples comparison is just turning off or minimizing the preview screen as much as possible and minimizing send buffer size) ...
...on an Athlon ii x4 3.4ghz, 4GB RAM, 2k/2k vbv/max buffer (i have 5mb/s up but my connection to server is lower) with ultra graphics (graphics/gpu isn't a factor in streaming) system. My minimum fps is 20 in huge 200/200 battles, but my average is generally 50+, and it's always very smooth and playable (ie 30+). You can check out the vods at twitch.tv/belial88 (you'll have to dig a bit, i was tweaking a ton of settings on that account, its my test account, so not all the vods are smooth, due to upload issues, not hardware issues).
Streaming, ie video encoding, is probably the only application where AMD multi-core chips outperform comparably priced Intel. I'm not sure how well an i3 will stream 720 - even though an i3 is much, much stronger than phenom ii/athlon ii for gaming/dual thread applications, it might perform equally or worse with streaming. Everyone makes it out that you need an i5 or i7 to stream, but I'm sure you can find someone speak about how well they could stream with an i3.
You can't read CPUs by clock for clock rate unless they are same architecture. For example, a Bulldozer 8 core at 4ghz is going to perform worse than a i3 dualcore 3ghz when it comes to gaming. A phenom ii x4 at 4ghz beats a bulldozer at 4.5ghz when it comes to gaming. What CPU do you have?
The parts will come with the necessary cables. Only cables you would need is to connect your monitor to your computer, and maybe the power cable if your PSU doesnt come with it (which you probably already have a couple power cables anyways, any pc power cable).
Your PSU is terrible. You should try to get 80% "Bronze" efficiency. I only recommend this because at $50 you should be able to find one. That PSU is more like a 360w PSU, not a 550w PSU. That's why wattage on a PSU means nothing, and why every manufacturer, like GPU companies, say you need a balls out PSU wattage when in reality, a quality 300w PSU would work. Unless you are doing SLI, there's no reason to have anything more than 400w PSU... but it has to be a quality PSU. Basically, there's multiple 'rails' that supply power, the 12v rails supply the CPU and GPU, while the lower rails like 5.5 and 3w power things like sata, hdd, usb. Back in the day, these rails used to power everything, but nowadays they dont. Standards changed, and nowadays companies need to apply by new standards and use the 12v rail, but some shitty companies will sell PSUs made from the old, outdated 3.3/5w design and market it as a modern PSU.
Definitely change the PSU you buy. Just look up a quality, 80% bronze PSU (most quality PSUs are higher than 500w, so it might take some research to find a quality psu at less than 500w, but there are shit PSUs at every wattage, if that makes sense).
HDD is a weird choice... that's a mobile HDD,not desktop. Samsung spinspoints are just fine HDD, just fine a SATA 7200rpm HDD of a decent brand (samsung, wd, seagate).
Case is a little on the expensive side. Just look up like 'budget case round-up', you should be able to find a good case for under $50, if you are so inclined. Or not, really doesnt matter.
You should look up "Falcon's incremental buying guide", shows some great options and lists some quality products, if just to check out what's worth looking at.
You could probably find cheaper RAM, not a big deal.
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EPT
