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So I plan on building a PC after going with a laptop for far too long. I plan on spending around 1200-1500€ for PC + Monitor for games like SC2 and EUIV but also newer games like Witcher 3 (which surprisingly runs decently well on my laptop) and Star Citizen (which, unsurprisingly, doesn't run so well).
Since I don't know much about PC building I discussed this with a more knowledgeable friend of mine and we came up with a list of possible parts:
CPU : Intel Core i5 6600 4* 3.30 GHz So. 1151
Mainboard: ASUS Z170-A (90MBOLSO-MOEAYO)
RAM: 8 GB Corsair Vengeance LPX rot DDR4-2133
Graphics: 8192 MB Sapphire Radeon R9 390 Nitro
Power Supply: 550W CoolerMaster VS Series Modular 80+ Gold
Case : Corsair Carbide Series 200R Midi Tower
SSD: 250 GB Samsung 850 Evo 2.5" SATA
HDD: 1000 GB WD Blue WD10EZEX 64MB 3.5"
This comes up to just about 1000€ but is missing a monitor and a cooling system (I don't know what kind of fan I'd need, I would like to use overclocking). I am thinking of getting a 24" monitor with a 1920*1080 resolution, not sure what to get there, but prize should be around 150-200€.
I don't think I need any kind of drive, haven't used one in years but I'll need to get Windows. Is it possible to buy Win 8 new and get the free upgrade to Win 10 still? I think Win 8 is a lot cheaper at this point.
I'd love if someone here could go over this list and tell me if it sounds good or if I'd need to change something. Also I need help with choosing a cooling system and I'd appreciate some recommendations as to what monitor I should go for.
Edit: oh yeah, I will buy the parts in Germany
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United Kingdom20322 Posts
Needs a 6600k to do CPU OC. You should get ~3000c15 ddr4 too
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some of the fans i've been looking at, say liquid in the name title but they still show a spinning fan what does the liquid mean?
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On October 23 2015 00:30 Cyro wrote:
Needs a 6600k to do CPU OC. You should get ~3000c15 ddr4 too
oh yeah thanks, forgot to change the CPU in my list. Also a faster RAM doesn't seem that much more expensive, so I'll put one in. Still not sure what kind of fan I need though. I am currently looking at a bunch of fans in the 40-60€ range but I honestly can't tell the difference with most of them. Thinking of getting an 'EKL Alpenföhn Brocken 2 PCGH-Edition' which seems to be a less noisy version of the standard Brocken 2. Is one fan like that enough for what I plan on getting and with overclocking?
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I want to buy a new PC, because my Laptop died this week. I have a budget of 700€ (maybe even lower).
I have found a shop that sells prebuild PCs where you can customize some stuff.
My Problem now is that i dont know which combination of CPU and GPU i should use.
I have the following choices:
CPU
AMD: FX 6300, FX 8350
Intel: i5 4690
GPU
Nvidia: GTX 750 Ti, GTX 960
I play everything from Blizzard (except WoW) and many older games in general. That should be fine, because every option i have is much better than my old laptop.
I also would like to be able to play newer games, when investing in a new PC. The most important one here would be Street Fighter 5.
I found out that the GTX 960 is the better GPU and that the i5 is the best CPU, but this combination is also the most expensive one.
The problem i have is finding out how much better the i5-4690 is compared to the FX-8350. All the tests i read say different things and in some the difference is really big and in some relativily small.
For example:
If i compare the 2 CPUs with the GTX-960 as GPU on this site for Street FIghter 5, they are nearly equal and using the FX-8350 would be cheaper.
So my question is now, which of the combinations i should use and if it maybe better to first invest in the better CPU and latter upgrade my GPU if my budget would not be enough right now?
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On October 23 2015 12:15 Shock710 wrote:
some of the fans i've been looking at, say liquid in the name title but they still show a spinning fan what does the liquid mean?
You'd have to give an example. It could be fluid bearings on the fan, but those aren't usually notable enough to warrant being in the title.
It could be you're talking about a heatsink and the closed-loop cooler (CLC) mentioned earlier would make sense. There, instead of having a hunk of metal sitting on the CPU used to transfer heat and be dispersed by the fan you have a loop of moving water that transfers the heat through the loop. The heat is dispersed by the liquid moving through the radiator (the thing with a bunch of thin fins) while fans blow across it.
The difference there is basically just the medium used to transfer heat. Performance of a CLC is pretty similar to the performance of a heatsink, though the CLC tends to run a little more expensive. Typically, regardless of what you use you'll end up needing fan(s) for heat dispersion.
On particularly low power systems you can sometimes use a passive heatsink, which means no fan. This won't cut it for a standard desktop. There's also some pretty large external towers (radiators, I guess?) that you can connect a custom water loop to and let it be cooled sans fans, though I don't know how well that really works. And then there's the ever-famous submerge your case innards in vegetable oil. These options are more for the hardcore enthusiast, but entertaining to look at sometimes.
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Finally, after gaming on a laptop since 2009, I am finally settled in a country I plan on staying in for a long time (forever) so I can finally justify building a gaming PC.
With the amount of time I spent on a computer it's crazy to me that I've been barely able to game on lowest settings for so long.
I plan on building this in time for LotV's release.
What's the best location for parts in Canada? ncix.ca?
What is your budget?
$1000
What is your monitor's native resolution?
24" monitor? 1920x1200?
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
SC2/D3/WOW/Heroes/CSGO/Other single players games I need to catch up on. highest settings where possible would be great.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
My wife may use it for Photoshop. But very minor image editing so almost not even worth mentioning.
Do you intend to overclock?
If it's relatively cheap and the results are worth it, sure.
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No.
Do you need an operating system?
No.
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
I'll take care of that on my end. Just need recommendations for hardware (case/Power supply/mobo/CPU/ram/HD/video card/cooling if necessary) ($1000 budget doesn't include peripherals)
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
None.
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Canada
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Probably ncix.ca unless someone says another site is better.
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United Kingdom20322 Posts
If i compare the 2 CPUs with the GTX-960 as GPU on this site for Street FIghter 5, they are nearly equal
That probably means that street fighter 5 is GPU limited on the testing settings, therefore you wouldn't see any performance difference.
Between 2011 and 2016, GPU performance will have gone up more than 5x. CPU performance will have gone up ~30% - it's much easier to buy a good CPU and then just get a GPU that's like two or three times faster later.
You do need to measure CPU performance with the games and tasks that are limited by one or both of the CPU's, though - preferably both. The reason why is this:
I play everything from Blizzard (except WoW) and many older games in general. That should be fine, because every option i have is much better than my old laptop.
Sc2, Heroes, WoW are very graphically light and CPU limited, particularly with a few settings down - WoW is the heaviest, though even with a gtx960 at times of lowest FPS, you will be CPU limited. Those three games have i5 outperform FX piledriver by like ~75% in at similar clock speeds - not because they're "intel optimized" or any BS like that, because they're extremely reliant on Singlethreaded performance which is the biggest weakness of the architecture used for AMD's 2011-2012 CPU lineup (which they have yet to replace with a new generation redesigned from the ground up coming in 2016 to be more competitive with Intel's offerings)
The i5 you have listed is last generation, you couldn't get newer stuff?
There is some reason to buy the fx6300 - but it's usually for something like a cheap dedicated video encoding/rendering rig (those areas are good on that CPU architecture) or when you're trying to play graphically demanding games on a cheap system.
With some games, either CPU is more than good enough (which is where you can buy a strong graphics card and have a good, cheap system). With others, it's not - and when that's the case, usually Intel has huge performance advantage. The CPU choice matters a lot for WoW, SC2, Heroes and some other games, usually MMO and RTS though with a few exceptions to that like kerbal space program
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@SoleSteeler:
Something like this perhaps? http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/d39G8d - I went with overclocking parts until I realized I was looking at US dollar prices and had to tone it down. It's within your budget, I might expand to 16gb if it's more flexible. Don't usually do these anymore but I had some time, Cyro will probably correct some things I'm sure.
Edit: It was only within budget because the US > CA conversion didn't include a price for the motherboard, I'm at a loss then. 
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On October 24 2015 21:34 Firkraag8 wrote:@SoleSteeler:Something like this perhaps? http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/d39G8d - I went with overclocking parts until I realized I was looking at US dollar prices and had to tone it down. It's within your budget, I might expand to 16gb if it's more flexible. Don't usually do these anymore but I had some time, Cyro will probably correct some things I'm sure. Edit: It was only within budget because the US > CA conversion didn't include a price for the motherboard, I'm at a loss then.
I appreciate it! Thanks man.
Do people just use SSDs now or people usually put some stuff on them and the rest on a regular drive? Don't think I could live with just 250 GB :O
I'm starting to do my own research now too on whether OC'ing is really worth it.
Thanks again.
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Estonia4644 Posts
yup, 250GB SSD+ 1-2TB HDD is a very common setup and a very reasonable choice these days to get both speed and storage capacity 
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SSD for your OS drive and some core programs, then regular HDDs for mass storage, especially of video. SSD will help your loading times in some games, but most of the time it's not a huge gain.
In terms of cost vs performance OCing is completely worth it.
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oc'able cpu's of the same generation are noticeably faster than locked cpu's even without overclocking, right?
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On October 25 2015 02:39 mantequilla wrote:
oc'able cpu's of the same generation are noticeably faster than locked cpu's even without overclocking, right?
Yes, they come with higher clock out of the box + Show Spoiler [example] +6700K has 4.0GHz base and 4.2GHz turbo, while 6700 is 3.4GHz turbo to 4.0GHz
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United Kingdom20322 Posts
On October 24 2015 21:45 SoleSteeler wrote:Show nested quote +On October 24 2015 21:34 Firkraag8 wrote:@SoleSteeler:Something like this perhaps? http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/d39G8d - I went with overclocking parts until I realized I was looking at US dollar prices and had to tone it down. It's within your budget, I might expand to 16gb if it's more flexible. Don't usually do these anymore but I had some time, Cyro will probably correct some things I'm sure. Edit: It was only within budget because the US > CA conversion didn't include a price for the motherboard, I'm at a loss then. I appreciate it! Thanks man. Do people just use SSDs now or people usually put some stuff on them and the rest on a regular drive? Don't think I could live with just 250 GB :O I'm starting to do my own research now too on whether OC'ing is really worth it. Thanks again.
There's a line for some people where SSD-only storage is "enough"
Advertised capacities are not actually accurate almost all of the time for HDD's/SSD's - they use a different system for measurement where "120GB" means 120*1000*1000*1000 bytes, rather than 120*1024*1024*1024. That means a "128GB" drive is actually 119 Gigabytes by the more useful definition and the way the operating system displays it.
"64GB" = ~59GB
"128GB = ~119GB
"256GB" = ~238GB
On top of that, there needs to be free space for overprovisioning. Some drives include that by default, some don't. The useful space on my "250GB" 850 evo is about 210GB.
Subtract 20GB for operating system, that's 190GB - so 190GB to store files, while a size down would mean having only 71GB to store files. That's a lot, 45% of your drive lost to the different way of defining gigabytes, the space that Windows takes and the reserved space for overprovisioning. Going from "128GB" to "256GB" brings that ratio down to only about 25-30% of your drive lost to those things while also improving the gigabytes per £ that you get, so it's a strong choice.
I've seen some people use only a 128GB SSD. It's much easier to use a 256 or 512GB as your only drive if you're buying that much SSD storage and HDD's are pretty cheap anyway. You can get this SSD (850 evo "250GB") for ~£66 in the UK while four years ago, a decent drive of that capacity cost about 5 times as much and was way slower.
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I only have a 240GB SSD and can have a dozen decently sized games installed at once. Unless you're storing a ton of media files I don't see how it should be an issue.
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so i was trying to figure out the difference between SSD and HDD, and what i got from it was that SSD is better because they use flash memory chips instead of flash memory usb (which is in HDD) and the chips are faster than the usb thing.
So i guess thats good? Fast is better
but than the article goes on to talk about metal coating and how its stored in there, im not sure i really understand, is there no real advantages for HDD then? Should i just buy only SSD for my like "hard drive" to store files?
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The jist of it is that SSDs are much faster at random reads, meaning accessing many different small files. For OS usage this represents the vast majority of operations which is why people advocate using one for your OS drive. An HDD has a spinning head that has to physically move to the location on the disk where the requested data exists/is destined ("seek time"). An SSD has no moving parts and therefore doesn't need to wait on the spindle to move. Similarly, because there's no seek time on an SSD there's no concept of fragmentation and no need to perform defrags (and in fact you should avoid defragging SSDs due to causing excessive writes; see below).
When SSDs do writes, they can't write a single bit and instead have to write an entire "block" of bits (basically it writes all the others to the same as they already were while changing what it needs). This amplifies the cost of doing writes. An SSD has a "limited" number of writes for technical reasons. This number is very high and unless you're doing something that's doing an exceptional number of writes you're not likely to run into it any sooner than the normal lifespan of an HDD.
It's been a few years since I really dug into speeds on an overall scale, but it used to be sequential reads and especially writes could be faster on HDDs than SSDs. That said, the vast majority of real world uses are not sequential. The difference is generally "is this many smaller files or one large file."
Obviously the degree of differences varies from model to model of both SSD and HDD, which is where benchmarks come into play.
The benefit of an HDD is that you can get more capacity at less cost. My understanding is that when they fail it tends to be more predictable, as you start seeing SMART errors occurring or actually hear the drive making noises (clicking, whirring, etc.). Power-consumption seems to be pretty similar since HDDs are a very mature technology and a lot of R&D been put into them.
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Okay this is less of a building question but i keep hearing that BIOS upgrades are really dangerous, except my sister recently brought a new desktop prebuilt, it came with windows 8.1 which we assumed we could upgrade to windows 10, we did end up getting the message to upgrade to windows 10.
However during the update it said that the BIOS needed an upgrade, so i went on line on the website for drivers and there was a bios update but it wasnt one of those .exe u just dl and double click. So i rang up tech support and they said the computer was compatible with windows 10 and they didnt know why it couldnt upgrade until i mentioned i found a bios update that had a sidenote on it mentioning windows 10.
Problem was the tech support guys said they couldnt do a walkthrough to do the bios upgrade cause something bad can happen and the computer will just die, (they wont cover it if it breaks).
So i wondered if i could do it myself, and a website mentioned i just need to put the file into a usb plug it into the USB flash BIOS port, which the desktop does have a usb slot labelled. Just turn it on and the upgrade will happen.
So should i do this? My sister spent quite a bit of money on the computer was pretty disappointed that for a new model she cant even upgrade to windows 10 when her like 7 year old Toshiba laptop can.
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EPT
