Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 467

On March 18 2015 01:22 Cyro wrote:
It's just sometimes good for very cheap stuff because paying $100 for an OS on top of $250-350 of parts can be a lot. If you get the OS in other ways, it's fine to build if you want to do it. The OEM prebuilts usually have bottom tier psu's, cases and motherboards, though with some other parts, an i3 4340 is an i3 4340 no matter what system it's in. The companies like Dell and HP just get mass windows licenses at a small fraction of the price that we would pay IIRC. I don't recommend paying full price on OS on any build that's either low budget or otherwise starved for cash, but there are other ways to obtain OS even if you can't use your old win7 license (pretty sure you can)

For your build, you should be fine with a ~pentium g3220 (the "pentium" name is the same, but modern pentium's are Haswell and basically just an i3 with a few things disabled, they're dual cores and very fast, capable of competing with older quad cores for example.. they come in very cheap too, they are intel's cheapest parts to buy new) OR one of the AMD APU's - i'm not sure which models are the most cost efficient there.

Like you said, most important part is having a good SSD, and a modern chipset and sata controller to connect it to (even cheap motherboards should have that) so that it runs properly. Enough RAM (though 4GB is plenty for most casual non-gaming uses it might not be enough always, it's not a huge amount in 2015) and there's not much else to it, aside from having an alright case, a quiet fan or two and a PSU that's not a fire hazard :D

On March 17 2015 17:11 Cyro wrote:
I don't really know any of the MKX performance information, how hard it is on CPU or GPU etc and it's not released for another month so that info is probably not the easiest to get a lot of ATM. It's unreal engine 3 though.



z87 mobo and CPU cooler is for overclocking setup, the 4440 can't overclock. If you're going to do CPU OC, you should have a 4690k and a z97 board (refresh of 4670k/z87 that's a little better and more recent). If not then you don't need the CPU cooler (there's a stock cooler in the CPU box) and you can get a cheaper motherboard, h97 will run everything, but you can use h81 or b85 with a Haswell CPU from before they released the refreshed ones, and they're basically exactly the same thing - the 4690k and 4790k are the only changed parts, vs the 4670k and 4770k. Those h81 and b85 boards can have a newer bios to run the refresh CPU's as well - but they're usually not guaranteed to, and if you don't have a newer CPU then you can't easily update them yourself.

If you're getting OC setup and z97, then you can often get ~2133c9 - 2400c10 etc memory for barely any price increase. It helps for some tasks and even some games (sc2 + heroes of the storm engine is one of them), usually a small performance improvement like ~3-5%, but it can be literally the same price or barely marked up over 1600c9 RAM.

660 is out of date GPU, that price is alright but you should probably get a 750ti instead if that's the tier of GPU that you want from Nvidia.


For the build overall, i don't know if it's best. I'm thinking that you'd probably want a locked i5 (4570-4690) and a stronger GPU. High end GPU's are already 3-5x faster than the 660 and 750ti.

Getting an i3 now would likely be a bad idea. Intel doesn't drop their prices, yet their CPU's lose value over time. If you bought an i3, you'd likely have to resell it at a significant loss, in order to then pay full price on an i5 that's already available today. Intel's next gen, releasing in around 5 months, will not use the same motherboards or CPU socket so you can't upgrade to them.

On March 18 2015 08:10 Myrmidon wrote:
Looks like the Cooltek is the Jonsbo QT01, so you can probably find reviews under that name too. For the price that looks pretty good.

I didn't price check individual components, but nothing looks out of line.

There are cheaper motherboards you could use with the same performance, but they might have fewer expansion slots, RAM slots, etc. (if you might use any of those), and the cost there already is not that high on what you picked.

I guess if you don't need modular power supply cables, you can take a look at the XFX TS 430W for some savings and slightly higher quality (and probably a little higher noise levels, with more of a differences at the kinds of wattages you'll never see with a Core i5 / GTX 960 kind of system).

On March 19 2015 11:24 skyR wrote:

Skylake won't be supported by any current motherboard as it will be using a new socket along with DDR4.

If you have a TigerDirect nearby, I would go look at what their liquidation sales are like.

600w power supply isn't necessary, you can save yourself $10 and get the 500w variant instead.