Gaming PC Build... Thoughts?

[brandonkick]

I plan on building a high-end gaming PC this fall. What do you think of the specs?
This will be my first personal build.

*Includes mobo/CPU/GPU that will be out in the near future.
Prices are based on current models

314.86.....Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell
80.77.......Noctua NH-C14
399.99......EVGA GeForce GTX770 FTW
221.99......Asus Sabertooth Z87 Motherboard
27.99.......Corsair Air Series 120mm Case Fans
239.63......Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD
169.99......G.SKILL Trident X 16GB RAM
189.99......Corsair Pro HX 1050 PSU
421.99......In Win H Frame Tower
47.95........LG Blu-Ray ROM
Total: 2115.15


View attachment 3155

The GTX 670 is way more then you should pay, considering the Radeon HD 7870 (Tahiti) is available for $150 less then the 670 and is within 10% performance wise.

I personally recommend the cooler master hyper 212 + heatsink as for the $30 this thing is a real beast of a cooler supporting single/dual 120MM fan configurations. You might need a slightly different model or mounting bracket if the haswell socket is different... but you can save another $50 right there.

As far as the ram goes, 8GB should be fine in all honesty. I've used a lot of G.Skill ram and never had an issue.

I see no reason to spend over $100 on a power supply, or to spend more money on a really high wattage unit. 600W will be plenty, if your worried about noise then just make sure to select a unit with a 120MM fan.

Another vote no on the SSD's. The reliability just isn't there for me. Go for a raptor if you want, but I'd stick with a good quality western digital. I have a western digital blue in my current workstation that has been solid for going on three years now.

Why not get a blue ray burner if your going to go the $50 for a blue ray rom? They are in the same price range.

As far as the case goes, I personally would get a nice antec case. You can get a good one for nearly $300 less. It's up to you honestly, but i'd never pay $400 for that case.

You can get good quality 120mm fans cheaper then $27 each unless I misread that.

I personally found quickly that the case illumination was more of a pain and quickly became tacky for me. I ditched my 120mm fans that had blue LED's in them for some good plain 120mm with no leds.

@ the i7 chip

That's a good processor if you intend to overclock the machine and use it for a long time to come. I personally regret buying my core i7 930 and not going with an i5 unit. The difference in performance would have been negligible to me, but the difference in cost would have been a few hundred dollars. Mainly because the original i7's used triple channel memory, the chip itself was more expensive as was the board.

I spent $1200 when I could have spent $800 and got basically the same machine.

In your case you can save a few hundred and get basically the same machine.

 

[Vicenarian]

Why not just run two Crucial/Intel SSDs in RAID 1? Redundance + speed.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Why not just run two Crucial/Intel SSDs in RAID 1? Redundance + speed.

Suppose that addresses the reliability question of SSDs....but once you factor in the larger storage needs of a gaming rigs C drive (system drive), combined with the still rather hefty price tags of SSD drives large enough (256 gigers I'd wager)....you've gotta either be some rich kid still living at home and/or mooching off mom/dad....or have quite a budget to blow on toys.

 

[angry_geek]

I've gotten out of the high-performance craze. My game rig is an i-5 with 8 GB ram, < $200 ati card, 128 GB ssd, 1 Tb hdd, absolutely silent. $800, and I can play anything at 1080p. There's a lot you can do with the $1,200 difference.

Unless, of course, you just want to go crazy.

That case . . . :thumbdown:

 

[lan101]

I think samsung 840 series ssd is a good choice if you want to go the ssd route. Just pickup a sata hdd and clone it/image it every now and then for backup.

 

[frederick]

I feel your guys sentiment on the ssd. But in all honesty, if you use a ssd for the operating system, a hdd for your actual installation of programs, there is no real risk at all. The reliability for an ssd is amazing, power consumption is low, and my boot time is a fra ction compared to the time it took boot off a hdd. Use the hdd for your install locations, your paging file, and anything lse that is not os that you will be olening and closing. Windows 7 and 8 both acknowledge that there is a ssd and will not defrag it, unless you manually do it which would be the dumbest thing you could do to a ssd. The misconceptions of ssds are astonishing today. Youve used them for years (flash drives), now everyone is scared to use it in place of their hdd. Run backups (I prefer backed up images) and you will be fine. Two raptors in raid 1 for everything else and you'll be good on a backup for your hdd, as you can swap the bad one with a known good and let it rebuild

 

[ElementalWindX]

I plan on building a high-end gaming PC this fall. What do you think of the specs?
This will be my first personal build.

*Includes mobo/CPU/GPU that will be out in the near future.
Prices are based on current models

314.86.....Intel Core i7-4770K Haswell
80.77.......Noctua NH-C14
399.99......EVGA GeForce GTX770 FTW
221.99......Asus Sabertooth Z87 Motherboard
27.99.......Corsair Air Series 120mm Case Fans
239.63......Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD
169.99......G.SKILL Trident X 16GB RAM
189.99......Corsair Pro HX 1050 PSU
421.99......In Win H Frame Tower
47.95........LG Blu-Ray ROM
Total: 2115.15


View attachment 3155

That is pretty much exactly what I was going to build with mine except I was going to use an Asus ROG series motherboard, and diff cpu cooler and dual 600 series GPUS. DO IT. You will not regret it. You will certainly not regret those ssd hard drives. I only use SSD for everything these days. Even my own nas has 5 256GB samsung 840 pros.

 

[brandonkick]

I must be doing something very wrong, because I don't have anywhere near that amount of disposable income!

Anywho, I still don't see the need for the solid state disks... especially when the price per GB is still so high. The "speed difference" is getting up on the point of becoming more of a bragging right then a good argument to using SSD's vs HDD's.

I can wait the sixty seconds for my computer to boot up, and the extra twenty seconds for my starcraft II campaign save to load. Especially if it means saving hundreds of dollars.

Regular hard drives fail all the time, but the difference is the cost of replacement. An array of 256GB SSD's could cost enough to buy a used car, and an array of HDD's (much bigger HDD's) could be had for two or three hundred dollars.

I guess a good comparison would be CPU's. Sure you could buy that core i7 extreme for nearly $1000, but why would you when the $200 chip is right at it's heels? Now I realize the performance difference is higher between the SSD and HDD compared to the two difference CPU's but that takes me back to "Is it really that important that your PC starts in 10 seconds?"

 

[ElementalWindX]

I must be doing something very wrong, because I don't have anywhere near that amount of disposable income!

Anywho, I still don't see the need for the solid state disks... especially when the price per GB is still so high. The "speed difference" is getting up on the point of becoming more of a bragging right then a good argument to using SSD's vs HDD's.

I can wait the sixty seconds for my computer to boot up, and the extra twenty seconds for my starcraft II campaign save to load. Especially if it means saving hundreds of dollars.

Regular hard drives fail all the time, but the difference is the cost of replacement. An array of 256GB SSD's could cost enough to buy a used car, and an array of HDD's (much bigger HDD's) could be had for two or three hundred dollars.

I guess a good comparison would be CPU's. Sure you could buy that core i7 extreme for nearly $1000, but why would you when the $200 chip is right at it's heels? Now I realize the performance difference is higher between the SSD and HDD compared to the two difference CPU's but that takes me back to "Is it really that important that your PC starts in 10 seconds?"

It is important that my computer can start in 10 seconds. It's even more important if it can start in less than 1 second. /end of argument.

People buy Ferrari's and various other super cars not caring about the price tag. They buy it because they can. How do you think Alienware got away with selling such over priced computers the way they did? They were the Ferrari of computers, just like I build mine to be the same way. Alienwares marketing budget and methods are greater and better than mine though lol


Seriously. Why would you spend $3k just in water cooling the parts? Certainly not to get a performance gain. It's purely for show, simply because that person can do it.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I feel your guys sentiment on the ssd. But in all honesty, if you use a ssd for the operating system, a hdd for your actual installation of programs, there is no real risk at all. The reliability for an ssd is amazing, power consumption is low, and my boot time is a fra ction compared to the time it took boot off a hdd. Use the hdd for your install locations, your paging file, and anything lse that is not os that you will be olening and closing. Windows 7 and 8 both acknowledge that there is a ssd and will not defrag it, unless you manually do it which would be the dumbest thing you could do to a ssd. The misconceptions of ssds are astonishing today. Youve used them for years (flash drives), now everyone is scared to use it in place of their hdd. Run backups (I prefer backed up images) and you will be fine. Two raptors in raid 1 for everything else and you'll be good on a backup for your hdd, as you can swap the bad one with a known good and let it rebuild

SSD's do not have an amazing reliability record...search many of the threads around these forums about their excessively high failure rate. Yes we've used flash/USB drives for many years...and we also replace them quite regularly because they croak quite a bit.

Gamers don't care about bootup times...our systems run 24x7x365.

Gamers want their games to load quickly, maps and levels to load quickly, maps and levels to change quickly, all that stuff..hence we install games on fast drives, not just a standard HDD. Dunno why you'd have a tiny SSD to bootup quickly...when you boot the system just several times a year, yet you load your games multiple times a day?

C drive (%system%) and games installed on a larger fast drive....I'll stick with Raptor 10K drives, I've installed a truckload of those over many years and have that huge amount to see a reliable track record of their enterprise grade life expectancy and reliability.

Two gaming rigs ago I actually had a pair of Seagate Cheetah X15 15,000 rpm SCSI drives in her....talk about spoiled by speed...back then when SSD's weren't even on the horizon.

 

[KompuKare]

Actually for gaming, SSDs are an easily justified if you play anything which has dynamic loading (Skyrim for example especially with lots of mods). Even a 120GB with a good use of junctions (there's a tool for Steam which automates this) you should be able to have the most used games on the SSD.

Although, since some (most?) games are still only 32 bit binaries, they can actually only use 4GB (plus what ever the OS and the GPU driver do by the way of mapping etc.) it should be possible to make a script/batch to use a ramdisk. A good way to justify 32GB of RAM but not a good place to save to

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

The "speed difference" is getting up on the point of becoming more of a bragging right then a good argument to using SSD's vs HDD's.

I don't think i can ever go back to a regular HDD as my primary. It's not just about the transfer speed but also the super fast access time.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

To be honest I had an ssd when I had windows 7. After the windows 8 upgrade my ssd died. Honestly I don't see much performance difference as the coding of windows 8 seems to make it boot and run at a decent speed. The high dollar CPUs aren't worth all the money intel wants. My amd 8 core does everything I want and overclocks nicely.

 

[brandonkick]

It is important that my computer can start in 10 seconds. It's even more important if it can start in less than 1 second. /end of argument.

People buy Ferrari's and various other super cars not caring about the price tag. They buy it because they can. How do you think Alienware got away with selling such over priced computers the way they did? They were the Ferrari of computers, just like I build mine to be the same way. Alienwares marketing budget and methods are greater and better than mine though lol


Seriously. Why would you spend $3k just in water cooling the parts? Certainly not to get a performance gain. It's purely for show, simply because that person can do it.

I guess it's just my frame of mind then. I'm a highly logical and highly frugal person, it's how I've always been. I'll walk through the grocery store looking at canned vegetables and think "why buy these peas when those peas are 8 cents cheaper per ounce" or "why would I buy this brand of paper towels when the other brands are twice as cheap per roll". I guess there will always be the people in the world who spend money just because they can.

 

[compnet]

I guess it's just my frame of mind then. I'm a highly logical and highly frugal person, it's how I've always been. I'll walk through the grocery store looking at canned vegetables and think "why buy these peas when those peas are 8 cents cheaper per ounce" or "why would I buy this brand of paper towels when the other brands are twice as cheap per roll". I guess there will always be the people in the world who spend money just because they can.

Well why stop there?? A P4 2.4 with 512 ram, ide hard drive will do what most people need. Sure it takes 5 minutes to boot, and 20 seconds for IE to pop up, but you're just wasting money on a new computer.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Well why stop there?? A P4 2.4 with 512 ram, ide hard drive will do what most people need. Sure it takes 5 minutes to boot, and 20 seconds for IE to pop up, but you're just wasting money on a new computer.

Without going to extremes which are blown out of proportion...what we're talking about here is something I call the "law of diminishing returns".

Now..an old pre-H/T 2.4 with 512 megs will not run most of todays popular games....since I think we can be fairly realistic and assume that we're talking about "current" popular games with todays harder core gamer. Just in case you thought you'd be sharp and throw in "Well lots of people play Solitaire or Minefield..that's a popular game!"

Law of diminishing returns....
Spend another 100 bucks...get a 25% increase in performance..perhaps worth it.
Spend yet another 100 bucks...get a 20% increase in performance...perhaps worth it.
Spend another 300 bucks...get a 10% increase in performance...may or may not be worth it...hard to say.
Spend another 700 bucks...get a 3% increase in performance...99% of people will probably determine it's not worth it.

Can you find where the law of diminishing returns comes into play here? There can be more than 1 answer...depending on the person....their lifestyle, their budget, their priorities.

 

[brandonkick]

Well why stop there?? A P4 2.4 with 512 ram, ide hard drive will do what most people need. Sure it takes 5 minutes to boot, and 20 seconds for IE to pop up, but you're just wasting money on a new computer.

Exactly as StoneCat has said.

Part of my response was bitter towards the people who (not necessarily on this website) have money shooting out their behind. It's not hard to feel that way when you work 65 hours per week and have to ask yourself whether each two or three dollar transaction is really necessary.

Most of my response though was just as StoneCat pointed out, the law of diminishing returns.

If the OP has stacks of cash to burn, and can only roll with the best of the best, then sure why not spend the money he has laid out for the parts he wants to use. My suggestions were simply an explanation of how he can get a system very close in performance to what he has outlined for a much lower cost.

Your kind of blowing things out of proportion with your "P4" comment.

It is really up to him, the system he has designed is really quite good. It's a nice fast system that will serve him well. I just think he could get a lot more bang for his buck should he be interested in doing that.

To the OP:

I hope you don't take what I posted as a dig at you. The parts list you have will work great. If you have the money to spend on these parts, and you want to stay towards the top of the current market regardless of expense, then what you have listed is great.

Please take my advice as just that, advice.

 

[compnet]

Without going to extremes which are blown out of proportion...what we're talking about here is something I call the "law of diminishing returns".

Now..an old pre-H/T 2.4 with 512 megs will not run most of todays popular games....since I think we can be fairly realistic and assume that we're talking about "current" popular games with todays harder core gamer. Just in case you thought you'd be sharp and throw in "Well lots of people play Solitaire or Minefield..that's a popular game!"

Law of diminishing returns....
Spend another 100 bucks...get a 25% increase in performance..perhaps worth it.
Spend yet another 100 bucks...get a 20% increase in performance...perhaps worth it.
Spend another 300 bucks...get a 10% increase in performance...may or may not be worth it...hard to say.
Spend another 700 bucks...get a 3% increase in performance...99% of people will probably determine it's not worth it.

Can you find where the law of diminishing returns comes into play here? There can be more than 1 answer...depending on the person....their lifestyle, their budget, their priorities.

I mean, the case is a little over the top price wise, throw in a 100 dollar case and his build comes closer to 1800.. I highly doubt a computer for 1100 dollars will only be 3% slower/less fps/lower resolution playing games.

4-5 years from now, when games properly deal with 4 cores with HT, I highly doubt a $800 computer will be even 50% as good.

Don't get me wrong, my gaming rig cost me under 300 out of pocket, core2quad, 8gb ram, 6770 video card, used case a customer left here.. Its good for my needs, but I definitely wouldn't mind upgrading to something like the OP has mentioned, and have plans to in the near future.

And I'm really not blowing anything out of proportion.. Get a 30" IPS monitor, turn a new game up to full settings, and the difference between the OP's computer and a "budget gaming rig" will be about the same as a "budget gaming rig" and a p4 POS. hint: both the p4 and the budget rig will both be unplayable.

 

[ElementalWindX]

Without going to extremes which are blown out of proportion...what we're talking about here is something I call the "law of diminishing returns".

Now..an old pre-H/T 2.4 with 512 megs will not run most of todays popular games....since I think we can be fairly realistic and assume that we're talking about "current" popular games with todays harder core gamer. Just in case you thought you'd be sharp and throw in "Well lots of people play Solitaire or Minefield..that's a popular game!"

Law of diminishing returns....
Spend another 100 bucks...get a 25% increase in performance..perhaps worth it.
Spend yet another 100 bucks...get a 20% increase in performance...perhaps worth it.
Spend another 300 bucks...get a 10% increase in performance...may or may not be worth it...hard to say.
Spend another 700 bucks...get a 3% increase in performance...99% of people will probably determine it's not worth it.

Can you find where the law of diminishing returns comes into play here? There can be more than 1 answer...depending on the person....their lifestyle, their budget, their priorities.

After building several $10,000+ gaming rigs for people, I can easily say the law of diminishing returns is somewhere between $2,000-$3,000. Anything past that and it is purely for show and tell.

 

[ohio_grad_06]

I would suggest likely lower even.

My system

AMD fx8120 8 core
8gb gskill ddr3 1600
Ultra LSP 650 watt power supply(carried from previous system until I can upgrade).
AMD Radeon 7850 2 gb
250gb standard sata drive for boot(my ssd died within a few months)
1tb drive for storage(mostly steam games lol.)
CM Storm Scout case(the original one not the newer ones.)
Cooler Master v6 gt for cooling. Think of the hyper 212 with 2 120 mm fans for push/ pull. Does nicely.

I'm not setting speed records but CPU is clocked at 4ghz, it runs pretty well. Does what I want.