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Hi,
I'm looking to build my first gaming PC within the next month. Here's some info based on the original post that I hope will be helpful to the gurus here.
What is your budget? I've budgeted $1500 for this but of course I don't want to spend on things that aren't necessary.
What is your resolution? I've been gaming (BW/SC2) on my old Dell XPS Studio 16 laptop from 4 years ago which only barely runs SC2 on lowest. That laptop had a widescreen and played at 1920 x 1080. I'd like to continue to have a fairly high resolution of 1920 x 1200, or higher if it fits my budget.
What are you using it for? Mostly SC2 on Windows: I'd like to be able to play it on High settings. I'm also a software engineer so I'd also be using it for programming on Ubuntu Linux. I don't do any intense graphics programming though, so as long as it can run an IDE like Eclipse, that'd be sufficient. For reference, I have a MacBook Air from 2011 that is about right for all the programming stuff I do. However, I do absolutely need 2 monitors for programming.
EDIT: I already have one of these monitors: http://www.insigniaproducts.com/products/televisions/NS-26E340A13.html. I'd be looking to also get a 2nd monitor, preferably the same size and resolution. I got this one on Black Friday for $100, so hopefully I can find a similar one for a comparable price.
What is your upgrade cycle? On the one hand, I'd like this computer to last me at least 2-3 years without having to worry about swapping out parts every so often. On the other hand, I don't really tend to keep up with the newest game releases, so it wouldn't bother me too much if I fall behind in that respect.
When do you plan on building it? In the next month, preferably. If I can get a really good deal waiting another month, that's fine.
Do you plan on overclocking? I don't know too much about this, but from what little I've read/heard, overclocking tends to degrade hardware faster. If that's the case, I'd rather spend more up front to have a build that I don't need to overclock to get the performance I need.
Do you need an Operating System? For gaming, I can get a (legitimate) version of Windows 7 for free. As stated before, I do also need to be able to boot in Linux for everything else.
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire? I don't know too much about this. If it's necessary, sure, but not otherwise.
Where are you buying your parts from? Jersey City, NJ, USA.
Thanks so much for your help guys. 
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^ If you don't want to spend more than necessary you could get by with like $200-300 if you cut the right corners (only high settings for just sc2).
Because you are on 2 monitors, I'd recommend 8gb of ram.
When do you plan on building it? In the next month, preferably. If I can get a really good deal waiting another month, that's fine.
Come back the day before you are ready to build. Prices and deals occur so often that what is an awesome build on moment will literally be crap in a day. Price is king with every computer component, and in a month prices will be way different. Not to mention haswell will be out...
Do you plan on overclocking? I don't know too much about this, but from what little I've read/heard, overclocking tends to degrade hardware faster. If that's the case, I'd rather spend more up front to have a build that I don't need to overclock to get the performance I need.
I don't know where you in the world you heard that, or, you misunderstood it. Overclocking degrades hardware in the sense that your CPU will die in 15 years instead of 16 years, and/or, it doesn't significantly degrade it any more than not overclocking. Potentially, you can run a 5ghz overclock and have your chip live longer than one running at stock if you had a big air cooler on it.
What people can tell you is that there is not a single report of anyone degrading their ivy bridge from overclocking, except one guy who put 1.9v through his chip on air, and he intentionally did that and stuck his computer in a blizzard in the viking snows (RIP Franky). To put that in perspective most motherboards dont even let you put voltage that high.
Now I'm not going to tell you overclocking is 100% safe... but practically, with ivy bridge and phenoms and fx, it is. It's very simple to just be conservative with your overclock, and even with extreme overclocks it's pretty hard to damage hardware (and 'damaging' hardware just means you need an extra .01v, not exactly a dead chip). Sandy bridge was susceptible to degradation on high overclocks and ram benching but no one really recommends sandy these days.
You should definitely read up more on overclocking (avoid bad sites like tomshardware and anandtech, go to overclock.net or xtremesystems or overclockers.com) before making a decision.
Do you plan to add a second GPU for SLI or Crossfire? I don't know too much about this. If it's necessary, sure, but not otherwise.
It's not necessary. The idea is that you own a graphics card for 3 years and instead of buying a high end one you just buy another of your old card for super cheap, but by then you are better off just selling your old graphics card to go for a new, single card instead. There are a few instances where it can be great but they are far and few between
Familiarize yourself with prices by signing up to newegg and microcenter's email list, and use this as your homepage:
http://www.overclock.net/f/327/online-deals
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I'm in the same situation as syzygy - we both have at least 9-10 yr old technology in our PC's. I bought a new monitor, and gaming at something higher then 1024 * 768 with my Radeon 9600 for me is not feasible. Running @ 1080p slowed the game down and it looked like crap. He's running a Radeon 9200 so he's in worse shape.
syzygy:
If your widescreen monitor can run 1920 * 1080 and you're happy with it, then you're ok.
As skyR says, Intel provides a heatsink/fan with the CPU you buy. You do not need to buy a fancy heatsink or watercooling system or something outrageous.
Is your 150 GB HD IDE or SATA? If it's IDE then you won't be able to use it with your new system. IDE means there is a long, narrow cord plugged into your HD. Do you have this?
The AMD 7750 draws all of its power from the Motherboard and is around $150. The AMD 7770 and above require at least one 75W 6-pin PCI Express power connector recommended. I don't know if your power supply has extra connectors.
SLI (NVidia) and Crossfire (AMD) are basically the same technology from different companies. It refers to installing multiple video cards (eg: 2 AMD HD 7950) either at time of purchase or in the future. It requires a power supply w/ enough juice to run multiple cards + a motherboard that has 2 or more slots for video cards + a case big enough to hold all of those things.
Just to give you an idea, here is a system that will cost around $800 + tax + other fees (eg: environmental fees if you live in Ontario) at regular prices in Canadian dollars. Obviously, buying the parts when they're on sale is recommended.
$125 Intel i3-3220 (Intel i5-3570 (non-k) is about $90 more)
$60 8GB DDR3 RAM @1600
$115 Asus p8h77-v (the -m version only has 2 slots for RAM) (z77 boards are for overclocking and more expensive)
$110 AMD HD7750
$75 WD Blue 1 GB
$100 Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit (or Windows 8 - non pro edition) (XP will support receiving update ~Apr 2014)
$80 Power Supply (if yours is fine, remove this)
$80 Case (probably on the high side. Don't get a massive $200+ case with 5 fans)
$30 DVD player (your old one is probably using IDE like mine. If you have an external using USB, or one using SATA then you don't need this)
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Thanks for the tips Belial88. I'll do my homework over the next week or 2 and post back here when I'm ready.
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On April 23 2013 12:45 Belial88 wrote:
Because you are on 2 monitors, I'd recommend 8gb of ram.
What the fuck? For starters, monitor resolution does not affect ram usage. Secondarily, a 1080p monitor requires about 8MB of vram to display using normal colour depth (1920x1080x4).
I have no idea why you're recommending RAM based on the amount of screen realestate he has.
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Two monitors seduce you into using more programs at the same time. You're more likely to have a browser open while playing WoW and stuff. You're very likely to get to 4 GB, and bad things happen if you go over the limit, you're battling for a minute to quit the last program you started that was too much if the page file starts to get used. Also, I didn't ever experience it on an SSD, but on the HDD in the past, it was pretty shitty filling up all 4 GB. The cache for the disks gets completely wiped and quitting a game felt a bit like rebooting Windows regarding how fast programs started up afterwards etc., so I'm pretty convinced 8 GB is a good choice.
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That's stupid reasoning. You can have a browser open while playing a game on a single monitor too, especially WoW where you can easily alt tab between queues and raid downtime.
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Whoa, people really need to chill. There's no need to say 'fucking' or 'stupid reasoning' around here, we are all on the same team guys.
No, a 2nd monitor does not use more RAM, you are quite right. But you tend to use a lot more RAM when you have a 2nd monitor as you can both game and have a bunch of tabs open. It's just not the same to have to alt tab to chrome and game, you aren't going to use your browser as much. Yes, possibly, on single screen, you can alt tab over and over and use more than 4GB of RAM, but I never used more than 4GB of RAM when I was on single monitor while on dual I routinely go over 4GB.
You don't really browse and game as much with a single monitor, with dual you'll tend to have way more tabs up, more programs up, etc. I wouldn't necessarily recommend 8GB of RAM unless you plan to go dual monitor.
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On April 23 2013 16:38 LFHaunt wrote:Does anyone have this CPU? I3-3225 Ivy Bridge http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116774My question is can this CPU play SC2 on low and stream (at least 240P) with no problem? It comes with Hyper-Threading which i hear is very good for streaming. This CPU seems like the perfect budget piece.
Where do you live? If you order from microcenter, you can get it for $120 - $40 = $80, provided you buy a motherboard to go with it. You can always sell the motherboard online as brand new.
The same bundle deal applies for the i5-3570k, which comes down to $190 - $50 = $140.
Tax and shipping apply. plus you should factor in the time of selling the motherboard, shipping that out, and some paypal fees. or u can sell it locally in person.
i can't answer your question about streaming, but i can give u some information regarding the chip.
If you already know all this, ignore it. I'm partially doing it to solidify what i learned. teaching is a great way to learn, they say.
i3 is dual core with hyper threading, allowing each core to do another process in parallel. this effectively makes it 4 "threads", but the overall computing power is limited to 2 cores - two threads of a core share "resources" with the other thread.
i5 is 4 core without hyperthreading. 4 threads, just like i3, but effectively more computing power b/c it's actually 4 cores. It also has a slightly faster stock frequency, but the real value is in overclocking the i5-3570k to get roughly +1GHz. exact statistical distribution unknown, but that's a good number.
i7 is 4 cores with hyperthreading, giving you 8 threads. you don't need to bother with i7 unless you're doing super heavy graphics gaming, animation, or CAD rendering (anything with really intense graphics).
if you don't go with i3-3225, the only real other option that is cost effective right now is the i5-3570k. ones ending in 'k' can be overclocked and ones starting with '3' in the 4 digit ending (i5-3570k overclock overclock well, so you'll get a lot of bang for your buck.
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Thanks Waffing.
The reason I'm going with the motherboard on Newegg is because they have a promotion right now where I can get 2 free 4GB RAM stick with that motherboard. About a $50 value so it comes out to about the same as buying from microcenter. Maybe I will buy from mircocenter, look for RAM on Ebay for cheap.
Also about the CPU and hyper threading, I didn't know that so thanks.
Heres what Im gunna go with
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/SuC5
+ the 2 stick or ram that come with the Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820313353
(or maybe look for RAM on Ebay.)
Case and Power supply off my old computer
And if anyone has and i-3 3225 and can play sc2 on low and stream on at least 240P please let me know your experience.
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On April 23 2013 14:33 Belial88 wrote:
Whoa, people really need to chill. There's no need to say 'fucking' or 'stupid reasoning' around here, we are all on the same team guys.
No, a 2nd monitor does not use more RAM, you are quite right. But you tend to use a lot more RAM when you have a 2nd monitor as you can both game and have a bunch of tabs open. It's just not the same to have to alt tab to chrome and game, you aren't going to use your browser as much. Yes, possibly, on single screen, you can alt tab over and over and use more than 4GB of RAM, but I never used more than 4GB of RAM when I was on single monitor while on dual I routinely go over 4GB.
You don't really browse and game as much with a single monitor, with dual you'll tend to have way more tabs up, more programs up, etc. I wouldn't necessarily recommend 8GB of RAM unless you plan to go dual monitor.
been on dual monitor for over a year, never went short with my 4gb, and that's while streaming sc2 dans having other programs open too so....
i actually don't understand how "common" people could more
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On April 23 2013 19:40 Rachnar wrote:Show nested quote +On April 23 2013 14:33 Belial88 wrote:
Whoa, people really need to chill. There's no need to say 'fucking' or 'stupid reasoning' around here, we are all on the same team guys.
No, a 2nd monitor does not use more RAM, you are quite right. But you tend to use a lot more RAM when you have a 2nd monitor as you can both game and have a bunch of tabs open. It's just not the same to have to alt tab to chrome and game, you aren't going to use your browser as much. Yes, possibly, on single screen, you can alt tab over and over and use more than 4GB of RAM, but I never used more than 4GB of RAM when I was on single monitor while on dual I routinely go over 4GB.
You don't really browse and game as much with a single monitor, with dual you'll tend to have way more tabs up, more programs up, etc. I wouldn't necessarily recommend 8GB of RAM unless you plan to go dual monitor. been on dual monitor for over a year, never went short with my 4gb, and that's while streaming sc2 dans having other programs open too so.... i actually don't understand how "common" people could more
A stream open, dota2, music and some tabs sends me to nearly 5g used. I don't think having all these things open is so unusual.
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United Kingdom20328 Posts
I'm at 3.8gb from sc2 (1.9gb), firefox with 5 tabs(250mb), skype (130mb) and less than 200mb total from all other processes - just windows running. That's with 3 days uptime though. I have no "free" RAM - the remaining of my 6gb is used by windows for caching stuff and on standby if demanded etc
To the guy suggesting a new build is not worth it for an athlon 64 1.8ghz (and to get 1920x1080 monitor) - i5 is like, four times faster per core and quad core. It's so much faster that i have no idea how much faster it is.
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Yeah so Haswell pricing update:
$327 for i7-4770K and $227 for the i5-4670K, so not looking all that different from IvyB launch pricing.
Real question is the difference in cost at Microcenter - will the i7 only be $40 more than the i5 K model? What concerns me is if the release of the PS4/720 indicate a shift into dramatically better threaded games that would justify the slight expense of buying an i7, especially for those that can afford it heh.
Piledriver owners usually reference PCGHW's numbers for Crysis 3 (despite it being tested at an extremely low-res of 720p).
Assuming MC keeps the diff at only $40 (less than 2hrs worth of work), it is something I'm considering :p
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United Kingdom20328 Posts
Assuming MC keeps the diff at only $40 (less than 2hrs worth of work)
If i could make $20/hour i'd be able to get more than $250/year of stuff =P
I think it's important to seperate GPU from CPU when comparing CPU's, to have a worst-case and a real-world test.
Starcraft 2 though will sadly pretty much always be singlethreaded - it caps one core and a second is only at low (quite far under 50%) load..
If they somehow patch the game so that the main thread can run on 3 cores instead of 1 perfectly, then min framerates on OC'd haswell will go from like 40fps in 1v1 to 100+ and it won't really be relevant any more (whaa i have only 100fps in big fights and 300fps in midgame) which is good, just from aging of the game and advancing hardware..
Single threaded performance will be more important for some games, multi threaded for others. In the Crysis 3's that can abuse the 8-cores of piledriver/steamroller to come out ahead of 4-core i5 or even i7 ivy bridge/haswell at OC vs OC, good for them. Great for them - both sides will fight, and have the games/applications they are better at, which is a great result
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I still contest your SC2 using almost 2GB of RAM 
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United Kingdom20328 Posts
Do you want a screenshot?
It uses very little RAM on the menu screen but after you actually have stuff loaded (which you have to keep loaded.. you can't restart sc2 because it takes like 3 games vs each race to actually reload all of the models etc properly, because the game does not load stuff at start to have faster load times, and it shows itself through stuttering and lag when you play the game but if you want to see the effect, more notably when you x8 replays (load a replay, x8 it, watch ram - you have low ram at start, crazy stuttering and hangs, video lag - after a playthrough, RAM is like 300mb higher and you can x8 it again perfectly smoothly)
I mean it's not there (bordering 2gb) all the time, but i am pretty sure i see 1.8-1.9 really regularly and i think i have seen it over 2gb on multiple occasions (like 2,030,000K in task manager)
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If you can get a screenshot it'd be cool. It's just that every time I check it's meet been higher than 1.6. Your mentioning of the loading of models etc after playing through is definitely a factor, though. I'm temporarily playing on my older cpu and hdd (instead of my 3570k and SSD) and the stuttering is noticeable even though my system is perfectly capable of running the game (Phenom II).
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United Kingdom20328 Posts
Well its at 1.66 now and i didn't actually play the game, il get a shot when i do
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EPT
