Possible new PC Build
NeXuS
US Join Date: 2013-10-13 Member: 188681Members, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester
US Join Date: 2013-10-13 Member: 188681Members, NS2 Playtester, Reinforced - Silver, Reinforced - Shadow, Subnautica Playtester
I'll be selling my laptop and desktop tower soon (around tax time) and this is the build I'm hoping to get. My budget will be right at $2000 give or take a little. I know you can build a monster rig for 2k so I though I'd get some advice on the build. My plan is to purchase a high-end CPU, GPU, MoBo and RAM with middle or lower end parts for the rest. What would you recommend or is this a pretty solid build for the money? Total after taxes and shipping: $2090.55
Intel Core i7-4770K 3.5GHz
Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Asus MAXIMUS VI FORMULA ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Corsair Dominator GT 12GB (3 x 4GB) DDR3-1600
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB 2.5" SSD
Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB
Fractal Design Define R4 w/Window (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case
Rosewill Fortress 750W 80 PLUS Platinum Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
LG GH24NS95 DVD/CD Writer
Microsoft Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
Here's the link to the pcpartpicker page: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/21z1w
Intel Core i7-4770K 3.5GHz
Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler
Asus MAXIMUS VI FORMULA ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Corsair Dominator GT 12GB (3 x 4GB) DDR3-1600
Kingston HyperX 3K 120GB 2.5" SSD
Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive
EVGA GeForce GTX 780 Ti 3GB
Fractal Design Define R4 w/Window (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case
Rosewill Fortress 750W 80 PLUS Platinum Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
LG GH24NS95 DVD/CD Writer
Microsoft Windows 8.1 (64-bit)
Here's the link to the pcpartpicker page: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/21z1w
Comments
Also would just go for two sticks of 8 gig rather then three sticks of four. I could be a bit dated on this but if memory serves me right it's more efficient to have two over three. Someone feel free to prove me wrong.
Also whats your reason for the 780? It is the most powerful single card of the moment but a 290x is cheaper and has similar enough performance. With the money you could regain by lowering to an i5 you could probably get a nice crossfire setup for that.
It depends how you feel about possible micro-stutter and somewhat more hassle with crossfire profiles. Micro stutter and frame times have been drastically reduced over the last few months to be rather a moot point but you might feel this is all more hassle then its worth.
Also must note that you should not buy the 290x stock versions from AMD as they got fan issues. Wait for an aftermarket edition with proper cooling. And I'm afraid the 290x is also quite power hungry so you'll lose on energy bill. 290x crossfire is a lot of power though and if you only plan to play in 1080p resolutions at 60hz its most likely more then you'll need anytime soon.
Beyond that your CPU cooler could easily go for a big air cooler if you don't plan on overclocking. Even with overclock the air coolers perform quite similar without the risk of possible leakage. While leaks are quite rare with corsair though I must add and their customer support is awesome in such cases. I got a similar corsair water cooler myself and I'm quite pleased with it. Make sure to get the airflow right, so CPU blows hot air out of the top of your case and you draw in cool air from the side and front. Back fan blows out. Your GPU will love the extra cold air, specially if cross/sli.
On topic of HDD I'd throw in a few more bucks and get the Samsung 840 EVO 250GB. 128 gig is nothing these days and if you throw windows on it you won't be able to fit many games in there. Some games really benefit a lot from this, specially mp games it's nice to load fast.
Also I assume the Barracuda green is supposed to be your games drive? If so, ditch it for a 7200 rpm disk like the Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 ST2000DM001, 2TB
Don't use green drivers for anything but simple storage, for playing games you want the fastest possible.
EDIT: I researched a bit and have decided to do as you recommended and switched to the i5. I chose the 4670K. Would you agree?
That actually was a mistake by me. I misread it thinking it was 4x4GB RAM. Thank you for catching that. I might as well get the 2x8GB as it leaves 2 RAM slots open should I decide to add more in the future.
While I agree with you to an extent, I love nVIDIA products. I'm not a narrowed minded nVIDIA fanboy that completely rules out AMD though. The 290x is a great card with a great price. I just think nVIDIA has better quality products. As far as gaming is concerned, as of now, I only plan on playing with 1920x1080 resolution, so having the monster 780 Ti will give some great graphical detail and some smooth gameplay. Because 4k isn't quite mainstream yet, I'm going to stay with one card, but when it releases I will probably upgrade to SLi.
Some larger air cooling systems can do just about the same job, but I don't personally want to take that risk. Corsair has very high quality products and their customer service is even better. It's the mix of efficiency and quietness that draws to the H100i.
This is the part that I am completely open about. I want a decent size SSD for the OS and the games I play most, which isn't but about 3 or 4. As for the HDD, whatever has the most capacity for the cheapest price, without it being absolute crap, is what I will get. So other than the OS and my most played games, everything else will stay on the HDD.
Like NedStar said waterleaks are quite rare I agree but only at the starting months.. Good luck after that
That wont be a big problem, but quality wise..
For memory 2*8gb stick always, cpu memory controller will thank you for better overclocks
Yup, give that thing a nice OC with your water-cooling solution and you'll be golden, ns2 will run as smooth as butter.
I'd go for the ssd and hdd I've listed. The sammy is pretty much the best ssd you can go for and has a reasonable price. I had a 128 gig ssd myself but quickly felt needing for more space, some games like BF series will eat up space like candy. So I now have a 128 + 250 solution myself.
The 7200 rpm drive I've listed from seagate is practically the same price as the green drive but 2 tb and won't be bottle necking your pc in certain games like a green drive would.
Also a few more things to note out.
Psu: Really no clue about the Rosewill Fortress but personally I'd pick a nice corsair PSU like the ax760. Simply because I've had experience with corsair RMA and it's absolutely fantastic customer service. They also got open customer support forums where they help people with RMAs. I've come to love corsair for their quick and friendly service.
Also noticed the PSU you picked is not modular which is a big downer right there.
Motherboard: First of all ASUS customer support is the worst I've had to deal with in recent years. In the end they did get me my money back for one of their faulty products but it took me over 6 months! This is with weekly contact, they are that bad.
Asus bashing aside, the motherboard is quite over priced. I'd get something like the MSI Z87 mpower.
Still high end mind you, has awesome debug leds and shows CPU temps on the motherboard so you can glance through the case and spot the temps right of the bat. Also comes with OC warranty, meaning if you blow your motherboard with OC, they will refund the mobo.
More importantly, MSI customer support is ACE just like corsair and has open customer service forums.
I assume you were going for the ASUS because of the better on board sound-card? Don't bother with those and simply get a separate sound-card like the Asus Xonar DGX
Put this as far away from the GPU as possible and I will dare claim it gives you much better sound quality then the one that comes with the ASUS mobo. More distance will also ensure RFI interference is to an absolute minimal.
Sound-card is entirely option-able though and really depends how high quality your sound setup is whether you'll benefit or not.
"What ASUS, but you just bashed them!" Sadly for sound-cards there is simply not that much choice and creative sucks. On the plus side ASUS has awesome community drivers. Their own drivers are rather crappy in comparison.
That should about sum it up
For example, to play anything using OpenGL you need to use win7 drivers, and even with those you won't be able to play half-life engine games and such (yea, there are some fixes to that but none worked for me). That's why I chose win7 for my new PC instead of 8, I like the look I'm used to, the new start menu was completely useless for me and all win8 did was make things more difficult for gaming, so if you don't want extra work to get some games working I'd say stick with win7.
NOTE: I'm keeping the OS off of the price for a reason and I don't really need an optical drive.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/22HBN
I run the 3770k @ 4.2ghz and honestly it's perfect! paired with a gtx 680 I can reach 120 fps and above on basically everything for the 120hz monitor at 1080p!.. some games I tone down certain settings which I don't care for/harm performance too much like anti aliasing/depth of field/motion blur and etc
I'm not sure how the 780 performs but if it's similar to the 680 you'll love it! Btw check out if gigabyte has a 780 model, they use a custom PCB/heatsink and have 3 fans, plus they use a 6 + 8 pin connector to bring extra power to the card..... I think they have the best nvidia model cards out; and they are factory OCed (I never tweak gpus)
Avoid Green hdds like the plague. At some point about 1 week out of warranty it will fail. I have a separate nas I built which backs up nightly to a mate's nas box in his house (and his to mine), we've both had too many hdds die over the years. Server grade hdds are all I consider now, eg Black range.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-channel_memory_architecture
Some i7 boards support tripple channel mode, and in that case, you want memory sticks by three (3 or 6) to take advantage of it. If you put 3 memory sticks in Dual Channel board (2 + 1), the dual channel mode is disabled, but if you remove that one extra chip, it will be enabled as long as sticks are in the right banks.
That said, the advantage of this differs in relation with usage scenario - if you store and read large blocks of data, the advantage is maximized, if you access short bits of information irregularly, the advantage can be negligible. If you can, take advantage of it, otherwise don't worry too much about it.
I agree with "avoid Green disks", they perform badly under stress and are not durable. They are designed for browsing/office PCs that use disk only sparingly. I have seen some in servers and they break down fast under stress.
I also agree that the i7 premium over i5 is wasted money for a gamer.
Every PC I build gets a SSD for OS + programs and some HDDs for storage.
If you don't forget about your 2 case fans, HDDs will make their 3-5 years easily.
My decision to go with i7 is because when I get my rig I want to start casting pugs or lower div NSL matches.