Tips for building a new PC

[Nurland]

Hello my fellow $wagmasters,

So I am in the process of building a new PC (not a Plague Champion so worry not, I am not planning releasing thousand plagues and pestilences on you guys... Or blessings. Depends on how you view things.) and I was wondering if any of you guys had good ideas about what components to use (mainly GPU, MB, processor, power source). My budget is roughly 1000€ not including the monitor or OS or anything apart the actual PC. I will most likely be purchasing the parts from Finland (not sure about that yet [the buying part that is. I am fairly certain that I live in Finland]).

-For GPU I was considering AMD r9 280x DD 3GB since it seems to have a decent performance for somewhat decent price (seems to beat the geforce 960 though it does consume more power)

-For RAM I will try find 8GB of something that has min 1600 frequency and as low CL as possible.

-Regarding CPU I am not sure if I should go for Intel i5 4690 or an AMD 8350 or 8370.

-For MB I have no idea what to get (apart from it being obviously the right socket).

-Hard drive I am prolly going to go for a 1TB + 120GB SSD (recommendations are welcome).

-Case I have not yet decided on... Something white (Yay! for KKK etc.) and preferably quiet. Maybe Fractal or Antec. Ofc it also needs to be large enough so I can fit the components like the GPU inside.

-I have no idea what kind of a power source I would need either.

-Most likely will get a couple extra fans, quiet as possible.

-Not sure if i should use the stock cooler for processor or get a new one?


Any help or opinions are appreciated.

[Indrid]

Use Logical Increments as a start. Finland is not supported so it won't link you directly to Finnish retailers, but choose a Euro country and you'll get a general idea for prices and components.

[Ar-Aamon]

Components are fine. For the MB I suggest a Gigabyte GA-H97-D3H or ASUS H97-Plus or ASRock H97M Pro4 for the Intel CPU.

[Indrid]

That last motherboard is mATX. They are all H97 too, I'd spend a little extra and get Z97. Allows overclocking and multi-GPU configurations..

[Sturnn]

Due to GPU - I have MSI Radeon R9 280X GAMING 3GB DDR5 . It has quite hight temperature (about 60 C) but I can recommend it for you - new Dragon Age runs on it on full settings, Evolve would too but this game has broken optimalization... but, after all, its kinda good graphics card.

[Ar-Aamon]

That last motherboard is mATX. They are all H97 too, I'd spend a little extra and get Z97. Allows overclocking and multi-GPU configurations..

Well the I5 4690 isn't for overclocking. Therefore a the Z97 chipset isn't necessary. Other story if he wants to buy the K edition. You have to ask yourself if you want to overclock your system. If you do, go for a Z97 chipset and the I5 4690K.

[Sturnn]

Question is if he needs this pc for sth more than gaming. If not, AMD CPU will be better.

[Nurland]

Just purely gaming. Pretty sure I won't be getting the i5 4690 most likely something like AMD 8350 or i5 4460 since there is most likely not much point in getting anything fancier unless I go for GTX 970 GPU. Most of the other parts are locked down but the MB/CPU/GPU combo is something I have not decided on yet.

[Sturnn]

Meh, there is no point in paying more for Intel than. AMD will be just fine to run games and is much cheapier. You can add some money to buy better cooler and just go for AMD.

[MaxPower]

Well how about getting a gtx 980 or a gtx 780 ti, prolly bit on the expensive side. But im quite satisified with my gtx 780 ti tbh.

And I would get 16 gb ram if I where you and how about an AIO watercooling system for your cpu?

Anyways I don't really like AMD so yeah, I'd rather go with Nividia and Intel (which I did).

[Sturnn]

What you just wrote My Friend doesnt sound like budget pc for gaming :> next 8 gb ram you can add whenever you want. Correct me I am wrong but 780 Ti cost almost twice R9 280X and is not much better for that price. Whole my life I had AMD CPU's and I can't say anything bad on them. My last GF burned in SC2 menu. With Radeon such thing never happend. You are not advising him to get reasonable pc but expensive monster...

[Nurland]

Would go a bit too far over my current budget. 780 ti could maybe be doable... Ofc I would go 980 if money wasn't an issue but I am a student so... Most likely I will go for the saphire r9 290 tri-x oc for GPU but not sure about the processor still. Most likely i5 4460 since it is rather affordable and seems to perform better in gaming than amd fx 8350. Also i5 4460 seems to be the recommended CPU for r9 290 in logical increments.

Isn't 16gb ram bit of an overkill for gaming since most games can't even take full advantage of the 8gb? At least that is the impression I was under.

Anyway thanks for everyone who has graced me with their opinion/sage advice.

[Sturnn]

Well, Witcher 3 is going to use 8 gb ram alone So its r9 290 not 280?

[Batpimp]

I just did a recent upgrade and so did ven so we might be up to date on stuff.

If you want a just straight up gaming rig I think I can finally say that 8 cores might matter. This is because if you end up getting windows 10 you can take adv of direct x12 and further multi core optimizations that are rumored.

With this in mind there is no reason to currently get a Intel board unless you want CURRENT games to run outstanding and sort of future proof your rig. judging from your budget you might benefit from a AMD CPU and a nicer video card.

This is perfectly exemplified in the logical instruments chart that indrid posted. After 8300 series the intel CPUS are just better in everyway for games*

Newer cards, such as AMD R series will be able to also take advantage of Mantle and Dx 12.

Also as far as the video card you can sometimes find 2 for the price of one. Sometimes you will see big ass gains if you get two medium cards instead of one bad ass card. This will even make more of a difference with windows 10 taking into account doubling the Vram GB in cards. For example, in the card you metioned you have 3gb. Windows currently only reads up to 4. But with win 10 you can now add vram from each card. This means my card which is 4gb in a double GPU setting would read 8gb and so on and so forth. You could think about that too. Getting two medium cards on sale in some kind of bundle and get a BIG bang for your buck..assuming you move to windows 10.

I think right now unless you want to run games at extreme settings with no problems AMD is just fine. I do prefer Intel only because of the lower power draw and heat. I live somewhere cold though so those problems don't matter to much I literally just open the window, as you can see in my streams im cold sometimes, but I just have a beer and drink my problems away.

I currently have
PSU 750w I forget the brand.
Sabretooth 990fx Revision 1
AMD FX-8150 3.6ghz Oc'ed to 4.2
Radeon R9 290 Oc'ed 5%
http://pcpartpicker.com/part/powercolor ... 4gbd5ppdhe ..(.for 200 bucks last big sale.)
16gb of gskill 2400mhz ram
Samsung 500gb 850 EVO.

I am running bf4 ( a badly optimized game) at around 65-85 fps on full everything...100+ on low settings

This website helps me here in the states to see different variations and it also alerts me to price drops.
http://pcpartpicker.com/

-For GPU I was considering AMD r9 280x DD 3GB since it seems to have a decent performance for somewhat decent price (seems to beat the geforce 960 though it does consume more power)

My best bang for you buck, currently, without taking into account that in just a few months the R9 390 series is coming and thus would lower prices on cards even more
is
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 38566&SID=

-For RAM I will try find 8GB of something that has min 1600 frequency and as low CL as possible.
For ram heres a video that helped me decide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWgzA2C61z4
I would say from experience ddr 1866 or 1600 is fine
Get 16gb if you can though makes a huge difference.
(read the mobo notes or reviews if its optimized for dual slot or single slot or quad slot configurations)


-Regarding CPU I am not sure if I should go for Intel i5 4690 or an AMD 8350 or 8370.

if you don't care to overlock get the 4690. Always will run cooler, quieter and draw less power. Its more expensive though.
If you wanna save money and have 90% of the same CPU power get the AMD plus you can overlock it! in the future it looks like multicore, 6cores or 8 cores, will be better optimized in windows 10. Should make a difference in games especially if developers start coding their games for those amount of cores.

-For MB I have no idea what to get (apart from it being obviously the right socket).

This will depend on your cpu choice

-Hard drive I am prolly going to go for a 1TB + 120GB SSD (recommendations are welcome).

I don't save music, files or pictures on my pc, just games. So I don't have need for that much storage I can highly recommend the Samsung 850 EVO 500gb. I would say that would should be your last choice because although it helps in load times it doesn't help once the game gets running. I wish I had bought my 2nd video card instead of getting the SSD.

-Case I have not yet decided on... Something white (Yay! for KKK etc.) and preferably quiet. Maybe Fractal or Antec. Ofc it also needs to be large enough so I can fit the components like the GPU inside.

Fractals look cool! To me bigger is always better as long as you can cool it.

-I have no idea what kind of a power source I would need either.

I imagine your setup would at LEAST need 750. 1k would be close to overkill. it depends if you plan to overlock and if you plan to get a double GPU setup.

-Most likely will get a couple extra fans, quiet as possible.

Noctua fans are the shit! or so I read
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835608026


-Not sure if i should use the stock cooler for processor or get a new one?

These are good cpu cooling ideas.
http://lifehacker.com/five-best-cpu-coolers-1677306362

I plan to buy that Swiftech H220-X N
Mostly because it will future proof my rig for a while.

I have this cooler myself its awesome!
http://www.coolermaster.com/cooling/cpu ... r-212-evo/

[Atlas]

Posting as well since I also recently got an upgrade.

I have the Z97-AR. the i7-4790K and the Geforce GTX 970. which are some parts that I see have been talked about already. On the Logical chart, they all hit around the "Outstanding" section. This is a desktop PC and since I just transferred my old hard drive, optical drive etc etc I was able to go for a close-but-not-complete upgrade for sub-$1000.

There's still some parts for upgrading that I'll be doing slowly over time, but as of right now it plays all of my games on high/ultra even with streaming at the same time just fine. I haven't overclocked it but that would come after I buy extra fans. Florida be hot :<

These parts seem to be a little bit higher than what you're looking at, but if you're just looking to play your games on high I don't think you need to go for the hottest thing. I was looking into something for streaming on top of being able to last for a while so I sprung a bit higher, but in terms of performance I think the components you listed will do just fine Nurland.

[Indrid]

I would recommend what Atlas has: an Intel CPU (4690k is fine), Z97 board and a GTX 970. With a good third-party CPU cooler you can pretty easily hit ~4.3GHz - get a good motherboard and it will do it for you. You must be able to get that for €1,000, but I'm not sure. You can certainly get it for around £1,000. I would steer clear of last generation GPUs like the 780. For the PSU there are many, many good choices these days. It's not like it was ten years ago. Corsair are always solid, but there are loads of good brands now that use good platforms. ~600W would be fine. 8GB RAM is fine. Get 2x4GB and you'll have space to add 8GB more in the future if you wish. If you can link where you are going to get the components, this would be a lot easier to help with.

Intel CPUs are generally way better for games (see here), which is why gamers are willing to pay more for them.

Source: I used to build PCs for a living.

[PhatE]

For the PSU you generally want silver ratings above 80. Those are the economy side of things and will do the right stuff for you. There are PSU calculators that you can use that have up to date parts lists where you can see what kind of power you're going to draw. The ideal power consumption you're after is around 75 to 80% and not to go too heavy on the watts.

For games just get something like an i5 or i7. They do the job. If you want something that can be turned into a server then try to find a Xeon processor or something like that that has the right number of pins for the mobo of your choosing.

If this is going to be for games then the GPU does a lot of the grunt so if you're torn on whether to beef up the CPU or GPU the answer is the GPU. A GTX 970 or 980 does great.

RAM timings are a load of bull in this day and age for gaming machines. Research showed that the latencies really didn't give you all that much benefits when it came to games and neither did frequency (negligible number of FPS). 1600mhz is pretty cheap these days so you can get 12GB for something reasonable but if you have some extra cash then 1866 to 2000 is fine too, but imo it's a waste of dollary doos.

The case is obviously your swag factor. Something with 200mm fans will keep it quiet and cool. Stock heat sinks are ok but tend to wear out after a year or so (probably the thermal compound not being something of decent quality). As well as the CPU is aging so it heats up a bit more as time goes on. My recommendation is the get some thermal compound of your own, cleaning solutions 1 and 2 and a heatsink of your own. Dust filters if you're worried about dust

The mobo I wouldn't cheap out on either. You can get some really shitty performance out of a shitty board regardless of the rest of the specs. mATX boards are prefectly fine. All they are are ATX boards with less features.

Once you go for a SSD you'll never go back. Get 2 drives. 1 for system the other a standard sata drive so something like a Cav black which is a standard 7200RPM HDD since it has the space requirements. The SSD I'd say go for Samsung 850 Pro Series 128GB SSD. After seeing its predeccessor more or less make a celeron laptop run as if it's brand new and better than a brand new I5 machine with far better specs, I'll swear by that flash drive. I give it the Phat stamp of approval.

Just look stuff up. Base it off mid range price. There's no harm in choosing a machine that's second best.

[Nurland]

Thanks for the tips. Going for 4690k + GTX 970 with the rest of the parts + case might cost me around 1,1 or 1,2k€. But it does sound like the best option (something I originally considered as well)

A Techquickie test they did with a high end gaming mobo and the cheapest mATX mobo gave almost identical performance the difference was neglible. Though the high end mobos have better sound cards and nice extra features etc. Will most likely get something from price range of 80-100€

[Indrid]

mATX boards are just smaller, not worse. They still use the same chipsets in general, just made for generally SFF PCs or HTPCs.

You pay more for boards that have better power regulation (extra phases), better components and extras. Power regulation helps in overclocking, general stability and longevity. Extras are preference; how many connectors you need for HDDs etc, better integrated audio, on-board LED read-outs and switches. All that stuff. Stick with ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and ASRock with the Z97 chipset and you can't really go wrong. You can get budget Z97 boards for like ~£60 now.

See if you can get the MSI Z97 Gaming 3 for €80-€100.

[Batpimp]

bang for buck monitors.

don't necessarily have to choose any of these but the differences that they explain is what is useful

Part1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnpASmjWPB0

part 2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqp9TdLNNfs

part 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0aCbBABFaM

[Batpimp]

If you have NOT decided on cases check these out. I am getting the luxe

Best Full Tower of 2014 - Phanteks Enthoo Pro Case Review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBhmn21ylkc




.



Phanteks Enthoo Luxe PC Case Review
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQOPK-OgvnM

[Batpimp]

Thanks for the tips. Going for 4690k + GTX 970 with the rest of the parts + case might cost me around 1,1 or 1,2k€. But it does sound like the best option (something I originally considered as well)

A Techquickie test they did with a high end gaming mobo and the cheapest mATX mobo gave almost identical performance the difference was neglible. Though the high end mobos have better sound cards and nice extra features etc. Will most likely get something from price range of 80-100€

did you see the issues with the gtx 970? I would hesistate lol

Nvidia Slapped With False Advertising Lawsuit for GTX 970 Card

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/nvidia ... 0-6425481/

[Nurland]

The GTX 970 seems to perform well in games though. Better than the r9 290 not costing much more.

Will most likely order the parts during mid-late March from here http://www.mindfactory.de/ (or if someone knows a reliable site with better prices and delivery to Finland). Seems like I will be ordering the stuff from Germoney due to it being roughly 20% or so cheaper than getting the stuff from Finland. Delivery times are also quite decent.

[Nurland]

Well... I just ordered my parts a few days ago so huge thanks for those who commented on the topic and helped me pick out the parts (speshul thanks for Indrid since he spared me some of his time for expert consultation).

So for those of you who are interested with what i ended up with, here are the parts (ended up going a bit over budget):

Motherboard: Asus Z97 -Pro Gaymer
RAM: 8GB Corsair Vengeance LP (1600mhz CL 9), going to get another 8GB a bit later on.
CPU: Intel i5 4690K
CPU cooler: CM Hyper Evo 212
GPU: MSI GTX 970 Gaming 4G
PSU: Cooler Master V550s (550W)
SSD: Crucial MX-100 256 GB
HDD: WD Blue 1 TB
Case: Fractal R5 Grey Titanium

[Batpimp]

NICE!

pics?

[Nurland]

I haven't still gotten all dem parts. Should get them next week. I am also having issues procuring a Fractal R5 white case. Since apparently they fucked up their production line and I'd have to wait a few weeks to get one so I might need to just do the build temporarily using my old Antec case.

[Ven]

are you sure that power supply will be enough? 550W for a 970 is pushing it tbh.

also not sure where you got the idea of the 970 being only slightly more pricey than the R9 290. my R9 290 was £200, the cheapest 970 i could find was £280.
they are fairly similar cards in terms of performance though.

but other than the power supply i dont see any problems with the parts and i hope none of the parts are DOA (Dead on arrival)

[Indrid]

It's plenty for a GTX 970; you're looking at <300W system draw under load with a single card. The R290 under load would draw almost 100W more, be up to 30°C hotter and ~10dB louder assuming reference models. There's a reason why the GTX 970 is more expensive.

[Nurland]

+1

Also I get a free Witcher 3 with the Nvidia card so that's basically 50-60€ off the price since I was gonna get the game anyway.

[Nurland]

Alright. It's aliiiiveee! I had a wrestling match with the components last night and I emerged victorious. Seems to be working fine so far