EPT XION Gaming Series XON-310_BK Black with Blue LED Light Steel / Plastic MicroATX Mid Tower Computer Case, MSI 760GMA-P34(FX) MicroATX AMD Motherboard, AMD FX-6350 Vishera 6-Core 3.9GHz Socket AM3+ 125W FD6350FRHKBOX Desktop Processor, Thermaltake SMART M Series SP-850M 850W ATX12V / EPS12V Modular Active PFC Power Supply, G.SKILL Ares Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM, GIGABYTE GV-R736OC-2GD Radeon R7 360 2GB 128-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 HDCP Ready ATX Video Card, and the PNY - CS1100 480GB Internal Serial ATA III Solid State Drive.
Computer Build, Upgrade & Buying Resource Thread - Page 509
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When using this resource, please read the 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. | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
Since I'm using multiple retailers, I can't get it in one list, but the final cost will be about $620, not including tax and shipping on anything. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20299 Posts
Dota 2, CS:GO, SC2 It saves me about $200-300 over Intel since if I went with Intel, I'd have to get a more expensive CPU, motherboard, and case You're looking at the wrong Intel stuff if you think it costs $200-300 more than an fx6350 and can't use an matx board. This setup is not $200-300 more expensive, it's actually $90 cheaper and would drastically outperform it for sc2 and probably outperform or tie the other games PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor ($98.99 @ SuperBiiz) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H81M-S1 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($34.00 @ SuperBiiz) Total: $132.99 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-07-15 17:44 EDT-0400 I agree that the i7 is a bit too much i5 vs i7 isn't neccesarily about "the i7 is better, but it's too much" - it's that the i7 adds a feature which literally does nothing for performance in a lot of tasks and games and even where it helps, the price tag increase is disproportionately big compared to the performance gained | ||
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Shield
Bulgaria4824 Posts
Edit: DirectX 12 then after my conversation with Cyro. | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
On July 16 2015 06:32 Cyro wrote: You're looking at the wrong Intel stuff if you think it costs $200-300 more than an fx6350 and can't use an matx board. This setup is not $200-300 more expensive, it's actually $90 cheaper and would drastically outperform it for sc2 and probably outperform or tie the other games PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i3-4130 3.4GHz Dual-Core Processor ($98.99 @ SuperBiiz) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-H81M-S1 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($34.00 @ SuperBiiz) Total: $132.99 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-07-15 17:44 EDT-0400 i5 vs i7 isn't neccesarily about "the i7 is better, but it's too much" - it's that the i7 adds a feature which literally does nothing for performance in a lot of tasks and games and even where it helps, the price tag increase is disproportionately big compared to the performance gained I'm not gonna pretend like I know the difference between processors, but what would the benefits be on the Core i3 as opposed to the AMD FX6350? And what would the 3.9GHz processor as opposed to 3.4GHz mean in terms of performance? Edit: I found a better version for the same price. I'm comparing the two and I don't see how Core i3 is any better, it's 300MHz less, has a significantly lower L2 and L3 cache memory, and it would only save me $6 on the processor and $20 on the motherboard | ||
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Blazinghand
United States25552 Posts
On July 16 2015 07:24 plasmidghost wrote: I'm not gonna pretend like I know the difference between processors, but what would the benefits be on the Core i3 as opposed to the AMD FX6350? And what would the 4GHz processor as opposed to 3.4GHz mean in terms of performance? Comparing a Core i3 vs a 6300, the 6300 will have better performance on multi-threaded tasks since it has more cores (the i3 has 2 with hyperthreading, whereas the 6300 has 6). However, despite the fact that the i3 seems to have a lower clock speed, it actually performances better in single-thread processing due to intel having better architecture or something. Note that both of these have basically the same price Since most games use like 2 threads, your Core i3 will be great for gaming. It won't bottleneck you for something like Dota 2 if you have a decent graphics card. If your'e doing stuff that needs lots of threads and you're okay with worse single-thread performance, the 6300 may be better. I think at the low end, which is where you are, there might be a case for AMD but I've generall gotten intel processors and they've worked well. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20299 Posts
On July 16 2015 07:24 plasmidghost wrote: I'm not gonna pretend like I know the difference between processors, but what would the benefits be on the Core i3 as opposed to the AMD FX6350? And what would the 4GHz processor as opposed to 3.4GHz mean in terms of performance? 1ghz on a haswell i3 is far faster than 1ghz on an fx6350. comparing those 2 CPU's, you would expect the i3 to perform very well on tasks reliant on 1-2 CPU cores and scale a bit beyond that. The fx6350 would perform poorly on them, but scale much more into multithreaded workloads. In the end, that scaling does not matter for sc2 (while core performance is very important) and having extra weak threads for csgo and dota might help, but probably not enough to overcome simply having faster cores the 6300 will have better performance on multi-threaded tasks since it has more cores (the i3 has 2 with hyperthreading, whereas the 6300 has 6 For performance scaling, you can look at it like this approx: fx6300 core performance = 100% 3 cores = 300% 2 threads per core with ~1.68x scaling, ~500% of baseline core performance when a task is split evenly onto 6 threads i3 = 150% 2 cores = 300% 2 threads per core with ~1.2x scaling, ~360% of core performance overall having more performance on fewer cores is better because even when stuff is ran in parallel (which isn't the case for almost all of the sc2 load and many CPU loads in games due to programming and the way directx works) core scaling is not as great as most people imagine - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl's_law If you have a game that scales up to X amount of cores, like WoW for example which gets benefit 3 cores but not 4 - If you have an Intel CPU or an older AMD CPU like a phenom II, you need 3 cores for it. For a modular FX cpu, you actually need 3 -modules-, and not 3 threads, so your whole CPU is needed for the game, it acts more like a 3 core CPU than a 6 core CPU for that purpose. Excellent scaling from using the extra threads, but you need one module for every core that an Intel CPU has, at least. The fx6300 (or 6350, if it doesn't cost much more) is a pretty decent CPU especially if you do stuff like video encoding as well and want a budget CPU, it's just not good particularly for starcraft 2 (and not neccesarily cheaper than comparable/better intel options for those games) | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
Regarding L2 and L3 cache, does having more mean anything in terms of performance? The Intel CPU has significantly less than the FX6350 (6MB on FX6350 as opposed to 2x256KB on i3 for L2, 8MB as opposed to 3MB on L3) | ||
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Blazinghand
United States25552 Posts
On July 16 2015 07:50 plasmidghost wrote: Okay, I think I understand how it works now. Thanks for the information. Regarding L2 and L3 cache, does having more mean anything in terms of performance? The Intel CPU has significantly less than the FX6350 (6MB on FX6350 as opposed to 2x256KB on i3 for L2, 8MB as opposed to 3MB on L3) It's not as important as the stuff Cyro has mentioned. I'd go for the Intel CPU personally. | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20299 Posts
On July 16 2015 07:50 plasmidghost wrote: Okay, I think I understand how it works now. Thanks for the information. Regarding L2 and L3 cache, does having more mean anything in terms of performance? The Intel CPU has significantly less than the FX6350 (6MB on FX6350 as opposed to 2x256KB on i3 for L2, 8MB as opposed to 3MB on L3) Technically it matters, but they're very different CPU's. The cache and memory latencies on the FX CPU's are quite far behind Intel's current gen - the L3 is not actually very useful at all for those FX cpu's and their memory access is slower, they're quite reliant on the L2. Haswell CPU by comparison has very fast L1 cache, not much L2 cache but has pretty fast access for L3 to use instead (maybe comparable to the L2 on piledriver). I'm not sure on exact numbers, but the architectural stuff like bandwidth and latency to each level of cache is very often more important than the raw amount that they have. With two CPU's of the same architecture, like if you have two haswell i5's and one has 4MB of L3, the other has 8MB of L3 - then you might be able to compare like that (you could look at benchmarks and see when it mattered, when it didn't), but cross architecture it's pretty useless and better to just look at the performance results of the CPU overall here is a cache bandwidth benchmark, look at the 4770k vs the 8350 ![[image loading]](http://techreport.com/r.x/core-i7-4770k/sandra-bw.png) you see up to ~128KB of data (fits in L1 cache) 4770k is way faster. By 4-8MB (The fx8350's L2 cache and the 4770k's L3 cache) the bandwidth is actually quite similar. It should be pretty similar story for haswell i3 vs fx6300, same arch CPU's. That pic doesn't show latencies, only bandwidth | ||
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Glad_
France3 Posts
On July 16 2015 04:17 Geiko wrote: When you say overpriced, do you mean that I don't need to pay that much to have a good gaming PC or that they are selling it for too expensive ? I looked at every component of the PC and took the average price at stores like materiel.net or priceminister and the total seems about the same thing. +100€ because they assemble it themselves and 40€ shipping but that's reasonable. I agree that the i7 is a bit too much but then again, if I want to upgrade in a couple of years, I'll be able to keep the proc... Just change the graphics card and DDR3. 980 Ti does seem tempting, but since I also need to buy a monitor I fear that i'll be over my budget... Like most prebuilt, they're spending too much on the CPU and not enough on the GPU. An i5 + 980Ti will last you longer than an i7 + 980 and is only about 100€ more. Also you can get a cheaper motherboard, case, power supply, and only 8Gos of ram and the rig will work the same for a much lower price. 140€ for building and shipping is expensive, but if you really want a prebuilt, at least consider one with an i5 and 980Ti as that will be better for gaming. | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
Here's my current build, it says estimated wattage is 237W, so what size power supply should I get? I want enough to leave some room. Also, is going modular worth it? | ||
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3FFA
United States3931 Posts
 I would recommend going for it if your budget allows for it. Also, in terms of wattage, someone might correct me here, but I think anywhere from 450W-500W would be optimal for your power supply. It would also leave some wiggle room for a bit of upgrading. If you want more wiggle room while sacrificing efficiency grab a 550W or 600W PSU. | ||
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IceHism
United States1903 Posts
On July 16 2015 09:29 plasmidghost wrote: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/f8jtFT Here's my current build, it says estimated wattage is 237W, so what size power supply should I get? I want enough to leave some room. Also, is going modular worth it? I'd go maybe 200-300 over. 450-500 should be perfectly fine I think the best thing to do is just research a good PSU You can start with this image https://i.imgur.com/tgrbCnr.jpg Regarding Modular, it is a bit more expensive but it is WORTH it. You won't have cables in a mess everywhere in the box and you will improve the ventilation. It's also quite customizable since all the cables can be attached or taken off | ||
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plasmidghost
Belgium16168 Posts
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B.I.G.
3251 Posts
*slams head into wall repeatedly Stay tuned for actually powering this thing up xD | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20299 Posts
On July 16 2015 19:48 B.I.G. wrote: So everything is assembled. The only mistake with buying I see I made now is that my monitor only has VGA and so cannot directly connect to my graphics card + Show Spoiler + *slams head into wall repeatedly Stay tuned for actually powering this thing up xD If your graphics card has a dvi-i connection (there's multiple types of dvi so it's confusing) then you can use a passive adapter from dvi analog to vga. VGA is terrible though  | ||
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B.I.G.
3251 Posts
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Cyro
United Kingdom20299 Posts
On July 16 2015 21:33 B.I.G. wrote: OK so now the problem is that everything works fine, except for when i insert the graphics card. I just get black screen.. I see that the fans are moving so there is some electricity going there but no lights (if there should be) burning. Could this be because I only have the VGA connection or am I incorrectly installing the graphics card? You're probably using the display output on the motherboard and not the one from the graphics card | ||
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B.I.G.
3251 Posts
Guess I'll just start installing windows etc and add the graphics card when the converter arrives in the mail. Is it possible to deactivate the graphics card without removing it (by taking out the electricity for example)? I prefer not too mess around with it too much... | ||
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Cyro
United Kingdom20299 Posts
otherwise just leave it out | ||
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