Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

[Yygdrasil]

I know I tacked your names to it without saying a word, guys. I just know you're going to be among the more active people in here... so I figured I'd jump the gun.

The thread is just like the title suggests, an open discussion on Gaming (and occasionally non-gaming) PC construction. In light of the upcoming release of FFXIV: ARR, I figure a few people are likely launching the benchmark and testing their current rigs against the standards for the game. That being the case, some of your results may or may not be what you're looking for. My specs, for example, were enough to run the game consistently on high settings. That's not enough for me. I need to be able to run it on Ultra High or I'm simply not doing it right.

So here I am... as I usually am every 2 years or so... browsing the latest and greatest in affordable PC parts to tear my PC down and rebuild it from the ground up. I'm just wondering what you guys use... or WOULD use if you were going to be building up again. I'm likely capping myself off at a $2,500 - 3,000 limit... which is absurdly generous considering what I'm willing to spend on a new truck, lol.

So what are your current specs / dream specs? Within reason, of course. Try and keep your specs under $3,000... and realistic.

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To kick things off... I'm curious where you guys weigh in on cost vs. benefit of various options when it comes to constructing on a budget.

Nvidea Geforce or Radeon for your Graphics card? And do you use more than 1?

SSD or Normal (But High volume) for your HDD?

Fan or Liquid cooling? Or both?

Single, Double, Quad, 6 or 8 core?

How many gigs of DDR3 is enough for you?

What's your ideal GHz limit for your processor without being greedy?

CrossfireX?

Multiple Displays?

Multiple Desktops run through Hydra?

4, 6, 8 or more Gigs of Ram? (lets face it... 2 just won't cut it for even the simplest things anymore)

How high is your power supply?

Brands and models you stick by for peripherals? Logitech? Razor? Something else?

Whatever else you can think of. I'm curious to hear about other people's building efforts. Sometimes you guys clue me in to some stuff I never would have thought to look up.

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I'm personally torn between running a GeForce GTX 680... or Radeon HD 7970.

I want a 120Gig SSD for boot-up with a 1TB HDD for storage.

I'd love to run both Fan and Liquid cooling... but DIY liquid cooling builds always scare the hell out of me. If anything, I'd have to defer to a friend to build it in for me... or simply order out a case with detailed, foolproof DIY Liquid Cooling installation instructions for me to feel comfortable tackling it.

I want to run an AMD 8 core / 4.0GHz processor with compatible (still have to look it up... socket AM3 probably) mobo.

At least 1000 watt power supply. I run 750 right now and I still NEED MOAR POWAH!

I want 16 gigs of DDR3 memory... although I can probably cut that down substantially to curb the overall cost.

I also really don't want to have to do it... but I'll probably have to use Windows 8 (ugh...)

All in all I think that keeps my price under 1,500. If I max out the RAM like I (shouldn't) want to and double up the graphics cards... then I'm looking at about 2,000. Assuming I keep it to 1 card and curb my absurd RAM desires, I can probably squeeze in a new monitor to replace the 2 I currently use. I'd settle for something 24" or bigger if the resolution and clarity was top notch.

So let's call it $2,000. I think in all it would run me about that much... give or take. If possible, I'd also try to sell off my old monitors, Graphics Cards, Ram and spare parts to ease the cost a little bit. The HDD stays with me though... NEVER sell your HDD unless you know what you're doing and wipe that shit clean of every last scrap of info. Otherwise run a high powered magnet over that sucker, stab it through the heart with a screwdriver and set it on fire before burying it in the back yard.

[Malacite]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

Well, nVidia just launched the new GTX 780 (the 700's are out a year early!!!) and it's an absolute monster of a card. It's basically a mini-Titan for $650 instead of $1000. It's much more powerful than the 680, and for it's price point an insanely good deal if you're looking to splurge on your GPU. (Incidentally, I'm also building a new PC for myself but I'm tryign to keep it under 1500 if possible for now, skimping where I can and upgrading later)


Personally, I find SLI and Crossfire to be excessive and expensive, unless you're streaming and running 3 or more displays simultaneously.


Your storage picks are just fine. I'm still mad at myself for not taking that newegg deal back during boxing day where it was only $200 for an Intel 520 Series 240 GB SSD - free shipping too god damn it >_<


Traditional fans are just fine honestly. Liquid cooling *is* better, but not in the least necessary. You could always pay a little more to make sure you get silent fans if noise is a concern.

Why 1000? I run a 750 as well but that's because my GTX 465 requires a fair bit of juice at 200W TDP. The new 600 series cards (28 nm) have much lower TDP - the 780 is an exception as it's 250 (though it's also amazingly powerful). The card I'm looking at for myself, the 650 ti, only has a TDP of 110 (the regular 650 is 64 W).

16 gigs is excessive. 12 is about the maximum you'd want for gaming in all honesty. More important than the size is the speed of the memory - at least 1333 Ghz, ideally 1600 though. I've got a sweet deal on the quote for my new PC for a new kingston model that's got a 2080 Ghz speed.

The most expensive parts will typically be your SDD, the GPU and your Motherboard + Processor. Intel has a new 4000-series coming out in Q3 this year that will boast a whopping 12 cores. They'll probably be super expensive as well, but I'm hoping it'll drive the price down on some of the current high end 3800+ series.


EDIT: A few good brands;

For nVidia cards, EVGA can't be beat.

For peripherals, Logitech is usually quite reliable, and priced well - Razor is amazing but super expensive.

For RAM, either Corsair or Kingston.

And if you want a good gaming PC, do like me and do NOT skimp on your motherboard or processor or you will just be bottlenecking yourself down the road.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

I'm still not sold on the "duct tape all your video cards together" feature. It just doesn't get universal support and can lead to problems in some cases, so I like to just stick in a single beefy graphics card. You could make a case for multiple cards if you're running enough monitors I suppose. That said, I'm still getting by on a GTX 460 as I've been waiting for the cards to advance and come down in price enough for picking up a new one to be worth it.

At this point everyone should be investing in at least one SSD if their budget allows for it. It speeds things up quite a bit and you should be dumping all your excess media into a RAID anyway so the reduced capacity doesn't really matter. I'd say a 256GB SSD is a pretty solid choice.

A while back Raydeus pointed out to me that liquid cooling has the potential to literally hose your entire system if something goes wrong. High maintenance and high risk does not justify whatever increases in performance it might offer in my eyes. If a fan goes then the case just becomes slightly hotter and replacing it's much easier. If liquid cooling goes, your entire system goes with it. Besides, a good case will do half the work for you(and a bad case will make everything worse).

re:perpherals: Logitech or GTFO
I've heard nothing but tragedy when it comes to Razer. Quality control on their products is shit.

RAM is dirt cheap, 8GB should be minimum at this point. I'm rocking 16GB myself. I would have gone with a full 32GB but the heat sink is blocking the slots on my motherboard.

I've read that you don't necessarily want to just get the biggest power supply on the market. There's an optimum level for it to run at but you basically want it to be running closer to a full load rather than using only a fraction of what it can put out. I don't pretend to understand it and I certainly didn't account for that when I built my own rig, but it's something folks might want to look into.

For CPUs the last I heard Intel was the way to go for the time being. AMD hit a bit of a slump, but they might be over that now. I haven't bothered to keep up to date on that. I went with an i7 that was unlocked for overclocking later because why the hell not? I hear a lot of folks saying the i5 series is perfectly adequate for gaming needs and that i7 doesn't offer much if you aren't running specialized software that's designed to take advantage of it, but fuck it I don't like replacing CPUs so I just went with the best I could get and I will ride it until it burns out.
Also what Mal said. My last PC got bottlenecked pretty hard on the CPU when I tried to run Guild Wars 2 but ran other stuff just fine. CPU is going to be an important factor for a lot of MMOs.

Don't get Windows 8. You're building this yourself so you get to pick which OS goes on it. You'll thank me later.


And since we're talking building PCs for MMOs, you should all invest in a Logitech G600. I can't go back now, it's simply made all my PC gaming too convenient. It is absolutely worth the price tag in my experience.

Bah, enough rambling in circles. Time to go take a shower.

[Malacite]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

Yeah Windows 8 is a bad time... I'm getting 7 Home Premium on my next machine.

I honestly didn't know (though suspected) Liquid Cooling could go that wrong, wow... just pay the extra for quiet fans I suppose.

And screw the people who say i7 is overkill, because guess what, a lot of really important shit like rendering multiple NPCs in a game is handled by your CPU and not your GPU so don't bottleneck yourself.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

Well, nVidia just launched the new GTX 780 (the 700's are out a year early!!!) and it's an absolute monster of a card. It's basically a mini-Titan for $650 instead of $1000. It's much more powerful than the 680, and for it's price point an insanely good deal if you're looking to splurge on your GPU. (Incidentally, I'm also building a new PC for myself but I'm tryign to keep it under 1500 if possible for now, skimping where I can and upgrading later)


Personally, I find SLI and Crossfire to be excessive and expensive, unless you're streaming and running 3 or more displays simultaneously.


Your storage picks are just fine. I'm still mad at myself for not taking that newegg deal back during boxing day where it was only $200 for an Intel 520 Series 240 GB SSD - free shipping too god damn it >_<


Traditional fans are just fine honestly. Liquid cooling *is* better, but not in the least necessary. You could always pay a little more to make sure you get silent fans if noise is a concern.

Why 1000? I run a 750 as well but that's because my GTX 465 requires a fair bit of juice at 200W TDP. The new 600 series cards (28 nm) have much lower TDP - the 780 is an exception as it's 250 (though it's also amazingly powerful). The card I'm looking at for myself, the 650 ti, only has a TDP of 110 (the regular 650 is 64 W).

16 gigs is excessive. 12 is about the maximum you'd want for gaming in all honesty. More important than the size is the speed of the memory - at least 1333 Ghz, ideally 1600 though. I've got a sweet deal on the quote for my new PC for a new kingston model that's got a 2080 Ghz speed.

The most expensive parts will typically be your SDD, the GPU and your Motherboard + Processor. Intel has a new 4000-series coming out in Q3 this year that will boast a whopping 12 cores. They'll probably be super expensive as well, but I'm hoping it'll drive the price down on some of the current high end 3800+ series.


EDIT: A few good brands;

For nVidia cards, EVGA can't be beat.

For peripherals, Logitech is usually quite reliable, and priced well - Razor is amazing but super expensive.

For RAM, either Corsair or Kingston.

And if you want a good gaming PC, do like me and do NOT skimp on your motherboard or processor or you will just be bottlenecking yourself down the road.

Good solid suggestions in there. It does interest me that you have a preferance on Ram brands. I personally like Corsair myself... but that being said, I haven't seen any real noticable difference in performance, longevity or stability of any one brand over another. I simply like the name "Corsiar" more. I suppose it just boils down to vanity.

I totally agree with nVidia EVGA cards. Of all the makers, their seem to simply work the best and install the easiest. Not sure why... but it's always been my go-to company any time I buy.

I do think I'm going to cut down to 12 gigs of Ram, though... which will still require an upgrade from my current of 8. In addition, I may as well stick with my 750 Watt power supply based on the research that your and Cid's advise have prompted me to do. I will be taking it out of the system completely for a thorough cleaning before installing it into something new though.

- - - Updated - - -

I'm still not sold on the "duct tape all your video cards together" feature. It just doesn't get universal support and can lead to problems in some cases, so I like to just stick in a single beefy graphics card. You could make a case for multiple cards if you're running enough monitors I suppose. That said, I'm still getting by on a GTX 460 as I've been waiting for the cards to advance and come down in price enough for picking up a new one to be worth it.

At this point everyone should be investing in at least one SSD if their budget allows for it. It speeds things up quite a bit and you should be dumping all your excess media into a RAID anyway so the reduced capacity doesn't really matter. I'd say a 256GB SSD is a pretty solid choice.

A while back Raydeus pointed out to me that liquid cooling has the potential to literally hose your entire system if something goes wrong. High maintenance and high risk does not justify whatever increases in performance it might offer in my eyes. If a fan goes then the case just becomes slightly hotter and replacing it's much easier. If liquid cooling goes, your entire system goes with it. Besides, a good case will do half the work for you(and a bad case will make everything worse).

re:perpherals: Logitech or GTFO
I've heard nothing but tragedy when it comes to Razer. Quality control on their products is shit.

RAM is dirt cheap, 8GB should be minimum at this point. I'm rocking 16GB myself. I would have gone with a full 32GB but the heat sink is blocking the slots on my motherboard.

I've read that you don't necessarily want to just get the biggest power supply on the market. There's an optimum level for it to run at but you basically want it to be running closer to a full load rather than using only a fraction of what it can put out. I don't pretend to understand it and I certainly didn't account for that when I built my own rig, but it's something folks might want to look into.

For CPUs the last I heard Intel was the way to go for the time being. AMD hit a bit of a slump, but they might be over that now. I haven't bothered to keep up to date on that. I went with an i7 that was unlocked for overclocking later because why the hell not? I hear a lot of folks saying the i5 series is perfectly adequate for gaming needs and that i7 doesn't offer much if you aren't running specialized software that's designed to take advantage of it, but fuck it I don't like replacing CPUs so I just went with the best I could get and I will ride it until it burns out.
Also what Mal said. My last PC got bottlenecked pretty hard on the CPU when I tried to run Guild Wars 2 but ran other stuff just fine. CPU is going to be an important factor for a lot of MMOs.

Don't get Windows 8. You're building this yourself so you get to pick which OS goes on it. You'll thank me later.


And since we're talking building PCs for MMOs, you should all invest in a Logitech G600. I can't go back now, it's simply made all my PC gaming too convenient. It is absolutely worth the price tag in my experience.

Bah, enough rambling in circles. Time to go take a shower.

The more I look into Liquid cooling, the more fearful I get of the rest of my PC. The benefits simply do not outweigh the risks for me. I think I'll just invest in a Full Sized Coolermaster tower and be careful to clamp and run my cables in the most conservative way to allow for free flowing air from the half-dozen fan's in one of those puppies.

I support the opinion of throwing Windows 8 to the lions completely. That OS is nothing but junk... and anything that it potentially does to streamline the system itself is counterbalanced (and then some) by the haphazzard and retarded "User Friendly"ness it trys to boast. User friendly my ass. I attempted to demonstrate to a friend how using a thumb drive can boost your ram in a laptop when I was confronted with the issue of navigating the Windows 8 OS to find the goddamn control pannel.

As for the G600... it looks strangely similar to the Naga to me... but yet far more appealing because of the associated brand name. I can attest ot having nothing but problems with Razor produc... ok wait no thats not fair... I haven't had any problems with the low-cost Razor peripherals. The problems I regularly faced before giving up on the brand were always with their high ticket items. The $40 headset I use for D&D is perfect for what it is and I haven't had a single problem with it... as long as you don't count having to tie up the mile long cord that it comes with so I don't run over it with my chair.

Also: i7 is totally the way to go. I agree with Mal completely. That being said... I need to find a good mobo/processor combo in a half decent price point for what I want to do. I'm not shooting for top of the line... but 1-2 tiers below it is always a solid choice. Most, if not all, have seen enough use in their time on the market to come with rock solid references and reviews.

Any suggestions on a Socket AM3 MOBO?

- - - Updated - - -

Lastly: I'm going to invest in the 120GBSSD + 1TBHDD Combo. I'm not completely sold on the 240 yet. A few more days to think about it and I may change my tune.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

And screw the people who say i7 is overkill, because guess what, a lot of really important shit like rendering multiple NPCs in a game is handled by your CPU and not your GPU so don't bottleneck yourself.

The way I read it, it didn't matter because people aren't coding games to take advantage of whatever boosts the i7 offers, so it's mainly for highly specialized software that does take advantage of the new tech. You are bad at reading.

- - - Updated - - -

As for the G600... it looks strangely similar to the Naga to me... but yet far more appealing because of the associated brand name. I can attest ot having nothing but problems with Razor produc... ok wait no thats not fair... I haven't had any problems with the low-cost Razor peripherals. The problems I regularly faced before giving up on the brand were always with their high ticket items. The $40 headset I use for D&D is perfect for what it is and I haven't had a single problem with it... as long as you don't count having to tie up the mile long cord that it comes with so I don't run over it with my chair.

It's like the Naga if it were built by a competent company. The Naga is all flat buttons but the G600 is shapely and has little "home key" nubs so you always know where your thumb is at, which makes navigating it pretty easy. There's still a two or three day learning curve to it, but after that it's just the best goddamn mouse I've ever owned. If you do any amount of PC gaming, I would strongly encourage you to look into hunting one down.

On harddrives: Get on the RAID bandwagon you fool.

I'd also like to point out that on a relatively fresh install with only 3-4 games installed I'm currently sitting at 99GB of used space on my SSD. That's after dumping all the My Documents stuff onto the secondary hdd. If you've got the budget for it, I would go with something a little bigger than 120GB just so you have some wiggle room.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

There must be something I'm missing here. Someone else take a look. I've been staring at components for the better part of 5 hours this morning doing comparisons and i think things are just blurring together.

I'm trying to ultimately decide between Intel and AMD for my processor... which will drastically influance my choice of MOBO. I've boiled it down to a quad core Intel vs an 8 core AMD. The 8 core at a glance just looks superior... but still costs less. I know I'm just missing something.

AMD:
AMD FD8350FRHKBOX FX-8350 Eight-Core 4GHz AM3+ Processor - AM3+, Eight-Core, 4GHz, 16MB, 125W, Unlocked at TigerDirect.com

Intel:
Intel Core i5-2500K BX80623I52500 Unlocked Processor - Quad Core, 6MB L3 Cache, 1MB L2 Cache, 3.30 GHz (3.70 GHz Max Turbo), Socket H2 (LGA1155), 95W, Fan, Retail at TigerDirect.com

[Malacite]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

The way I read it, it didn't matter because people aren't coding games to take advantage of whatever boosts the i7 offers, so it's mainly for highly specialized software that does take advantage of the new tech. You are bad at reading.

1) Fuck you

2) Maybe not every game, but there are enough of them out there that do (most notably BF3 and Skyrim) FFXIV: ARR included. And upgrading your CPU is a much bigger pain in the ass than a GPU.


@ Ygg: The size of the SSD you want depends on what you're doing with it. If you want to have your OS on it (makes for drastically faster booting up) and your games, bigger is better, but you're going to be paying for it. SSDs are still really expensive. Windows 7 is only 16~20 GB (depending on 32 or 64-bit versions) which will leave you 100 GB left for games, which may or may not be enough I don't know. It's plenty for me as I don't run too many games on my PC, but if you're planning on installing a lot of games you'll want a bigger one which can easily go over $300. I'm not terribly familiar with SSD brands, but from what I've read the Intel 520 series are extremely reliable. The biggest problem with SSDs is they can fail - literally just stop working and become completely unusable. I honestly don't know what causes it, only that certain brands are more prone to failure than others and Intel's stuff seems to be the sturdiest (and also rather pricey sadly).


ASUS has pretty good motherboards I believe. I'm looking to get an Ivy Bridge on mine - USB 3.0 the works etc. (don't really care if I have thunderbolt or not though). As for your RAM questions:


Best PC Gaming Ram 2013 DDR3 Memory Reviews

- - - Updated - - -

The AMD is better - faster, more cores etc.

One of my buddies who builds PCs for a living swears by AMD, though I still prefer Intel - the i7's are the best on the market right now and like I said, they've got brand spanking new 12-core models coming out in just a few months. They're likely to cost a small fortune, but who knows - I'm still hoping it'll drag down the prices of other models. Same reason I'm hoping to see more of the GTX 700 series soon. The 780 just came out and is clearly a high end card, but I'm hoping for some mid range cards that will either be cheap, or drive down the cost of the 670 to under $300 as the 670 is one of the best cards on the market currently in terms of power per dollar.

EDIT: Wow, that AMD one has a lot more cache over the Intel as well...

EDIT: More interesting reading material - Large Caches: Performance Or A Business Decision? : Does Cache Size Really Boost Performance?

[Firewind]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

Going to second Liquid Cooling being a bad thing. I have a Cooler Master tower with two fans, one at the front and back and also a side vent with a side vent and sort of funnel. Basically I have a Wind Tunnel effect with the dust and heat from the CPU being blasted out of the side.

Quick note about Logitech and Razer gaming mice: those things are fucking tiny. I would strongly advise actually testing one before buying one. Both Logitech and Razer gaming mice are too small for my hands and causes a lot of pain and discomfort in the thumb used to click the side buttons. Very few of their mice are also ambidextrous so if you injure your right arm or wrist, you're shit out of luck. Basically for peripherals you want to go for comfort first. If you're going to give yourself RSI from using something that is clearly not comfortable to use then don't do it.

As for multiple displays. Not every game supports them and it is a bitch to set up properly in games that do support them. I prefer to just say have a game up on one screen and a wiki up on another or something. When playing D&D I have the roll20 screen up on one screen then my character sheet and PDFs (I like to turn rulebooks into PDF format so I can take them everywhere with me without having to lug a heavy rulebook everywhere) on another screen.

And AMD FX-Series CPUs are actually better than the Second Generation i7's (Sandy/Ivy Bridge) in some situations, mostly involving multi-threaded operations. That said they are overall about level in performance so I would simple go for the CPU and Motherboard that you can get the better price for. The FX-Series CPUs do have a higher core count but thie word-length is the same and Address Space in both the FX and i7 CPUs are limited to 48 bits even though both have 64 bits. Clock Speed is higher for the FX-Series but meh Clock Speed tells you nothing.

Also for CPUs, clock speed is not something you want to look at. Clock Speed is not a measure of performance.

The clock simply synchronises the different components within the CPU so that everything operates in proper order. The higher the clock speed, the more quickly these components operate. But this is far from the only thing that determines the CPU's performance. The design of the components themselves is a much more important matter. CPUs perform operations on data to get results; some operations take multiple cycles to perform, others can be performed multiple times in a single cycle. How fast it can do this varies between CPU types so you can have CPUs of identical clock speeds but have completely different performances. It's like how two cars with the same Horsepower can have completely different performances.

When you put the clock speed together with the operations per cycle, and also consider the 'bit size' or data word length, you get a fairly decent estimate of performance. Also, a processor can't just instance go from one operation to another. There is a latency between them. This is an issue with processors, but also with GPUs and even more with RAM (Both of which also have a clock speed). Latency means that there are times when the hardware sits there doing nothing and it only gets worse with poorly synchronised hardware and it is also one of the main causes of bottlenecks. Usually the latency only lasts for a fraction of a second but with VERY complex programmes like video games, you can't ignore latency because it all adds up quickly.

High latency hardware is either best left out of the system entirely, or reserved for processing that doesn't involve something important like graphics like physics or AI, which you can afford to have some latency with.

Basically Second Generation i7 or AMD FX-Series should do you fine for CPU.

As for GPU there is literally very little separating ATi and nVidia right now. Usually the top end nVidia card is the best but way more than you need. I wouldn't dismiss the top end ATi cards and would strongly advice looking at the specs of the GPU itself and also checking out benchmarks online. Tom's hardware is a great website for this.

Yes it's another specs essay, this time for GPUs

A misconception that's finally dying down is that the amount of Video RAM indicated the GPU's performance. Basically this started around 1999/2000 during the transition to 32-bit colour. At the time RAM was pretty expensive and 32-bit colour take up a ton of memory, so you kind of needed a lot of VRAM. But as we all know, RAM became cheaper and you ended up in a situation where even junk GPUs and the dreaded "Onboard Graphics Chipset" had more memory than faster performing GPUs. Its why you no longer see "DX Compatible Card with X RAM" thing on recommended system specs anymore. The whole thing was made redundant by RAM becoming cheaper.

3D performance relies more on the GPU design itself, How many processing units it has, how fast those units are clocked, and finally, how fast they can access memory. Basically more and faster processing units = more things happening at once and quickly = better performance. The thing is, for all but the most demanding tasks, normal SDRAM is fast enough for 3D rendering, and the amount of RAM needed isn't huge unless there are a LOT of textures involved.

2D performance is more or less as good as it is going to get no matter what card you have since even a shitting onbeard graphics card can handle all 2D processing. It has been since 1999. Even a GPU that's obsolete for 3D gaming will still be able to handle 2D all the way up to displaying on a 1080p TV and possibly even more.

Basically Mal is technically right in his recommendations, but his suggestions will cost you money on things you don't even need.

[Yygdrasil]

Re: Cid and Yyg's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

1) Fuck you

2) Maybe not every game, but there are enough of them out there that do (most notably BF3 and Skyrim) FFXIV: ARR included. And upgrading your CPU is a much bigger pain in the ass than a GPU.


@ Ygg: The size of the SSD you want depends on what you're doing with it. If you want to have your OS on it (makes for drastically faster booting up) and your games, bigger is better, but you're going to be paying for it. SSDs are still really expensive. Windows 7 is only 16~20 GB (depending on 32 or 64-bit versions) which will leave you 100 GB left for games, which may or may not be enough I don't know. It's plenty for me as I don't run too many games on my PC, but if you're planning on installing a lot of games you'll want a bigger one which can easily go over $300. I'm not terribly familiar with SSD brands, but from what I've read the Intel 520 series are extremely reliable. The biggest problem with SSDs is they can fail - literally just stop working and become completely unusable. I honestly don't know what causes it, only that certain brands are more prone to failure than others and Intel's stuff seems to be the sturdiest (and also rather pricey sadly).


ASUS has pretty good motherboards I believe. I'm looking to get an Ivy Bridge on mine - USB 3.0 the works etc. (don't really care if I have thunderbolt or not though). As for your RAM questions:


Best PC Gaming Ram 2013 DDR3 Memory Reviews

- - - Updated - - -

The AMD is better - faster, more cores etc.

One of my buddies who builds PCs for a living swears by AMD, though I still prefer Intel - the i7's are the best on the market right now and like I said, they've got brand spanking new 12-core models coming out in just a few months. They're likely to cost a small fortune, but who knows - I'm still hoping it'll drag down the prices of other models. Same reason I'm hoping to see more of the GTX 700 series soon. The 780 just came out and is clearly a high end card, but I'm hoping for some mid range cards that will either be cheap, or drive down the cost of the 670 to under $300 as the 670 is one of the best cards on the market currently in terms of power per dollar.

EDIT: Wow, that AMD one has a lot more cache over the Intel as well...

EDIT: More interesting reading material - Large Caches: Performance Or A Business Decision? : Does Cache Size Really Boost Performance?

1: Woah... chill. Open discussion man... no need for dropping the F bomb on Cid.

2: I didn't really ask a question about your ram choice so much as I made an observation that I found interesting. I do however... enjoy reading... so that artical was actually a good one. I'm glad I'm bias toward the best, I guess.

3: Thats what I figured when I was looking at the AMD... but the prices seemed off... and I guess they are. I jsut didnt think that a Processor that was twice as good would cost 20% less. I'm glad I'm not seeing things. That doesn, however... change my socket choices for mobos. Back to the drawing board on that.

4: As much as i7 appeals to me... the price tag simply doesn't do it for me. I can't find a single one that I would be willing to pay the price for when compared to the i5 and their incredibly affordable choices.

Find me an i7 for under $300 that puts the above AMD 8-core to shame and I'll reconsider my options. I'm aware that ARR will be capable of utilizing the full capacity of an i7... but as Cid has mentioned... and I'm inclined to agree... just because it can doesn't always mean it needs to. If the difference would ultimately be only moderately noticable with stock i7 as it would with a semi-maxed i5, I'd just as soon save the money.

Again... feel free to provide examples of how I could (and because it's you... you've already determined that I am... and Cid is also) wrong.

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Going to second Liquid Cooling being a bad thing. I have a Cooler Master tower with two fans, one at the front and back and also a side vent with a side vent and sort of funnel. Basically I have a Wind Tunnel effect with the dust and heat from the CPU being blasted out of the side.

Quick note about Logitech and Razer gaming mice: those things are fucking tiny. I would strongly advise actually testing one before buying one. Both Logitech and Razer gaming mice are too small for my hands and causes a lot of pain and discomfort in the thumb used to click the side buttons. Very few of their mice are also ambidextrous so if you injure your right arm or wrist, you're shit out of luck. Basically for peripherals you want to go for comfort first. If you're going to give yourself RSI from using something that is clearly not comfortable to use then don't do it.

As for multiple displays. Not every game supports them and it is a bitch to set up properly in games that do support them. I prefer to just say have a game up on one screen and a wiki up on another or something. When playing D&D I have the roll20 screen up on one screen then my character sheet and PDFs (I like to turn rulebooks into PDF format so I can take them everywhere with me without having to lug a heavy rulebook everywhere) on another screen.

And AMD FX-Series CPUs are actually better than the Second Generation i7's (Sandy/Ivy Bridge) in some situations, mostly involving multi-threaded operations. That said they are overall about level in performance so I would simple go for the CPU and Motherboard that you can get the better price for. The FX-Series CPUs do have a higher core count but thie word-length is the same and Address Space in both the FX and i7 CPUs are limited to 48 bits even though both have 64 bits. Clock Speed is higher for the FX-Series but meh Clock Speed tells you nothing.

Also for CPUs, clock speed is not something you want to look at. Clock Speed is not a measure of performance.

The clock simply synchronises the different components within the CPU so that everything operates in proper order. The higher the clock speed, the more quickly these components operate. But this is far from the only thing that determines the CPU's performance. The design of the components themselves is a much more important matter. CPUs perform operations on data to get results; some operations take multiple cycles to perform, others can be performed multiple times in a single cycle. How fast it can do this varies between CPU types so you can have CPUs of identical clock speeds but have completely different performances. It's like how two cars with the same Horsepower can have completely different performances.

When you put the clock speed together with the operations per cycle, and also consider the 'bit size' or data word length, you get a fairly decent estimate of performance. Also, a processor can't just instance go from one operation to another. There is a latency between them. This is an issue with processors, but also with GPUs and even more with RAM (Both of which also have a clock speed). Latency means that there are times when the hardware sits there doing nothing and it only gets worse with poorly synchronised hardware and it is also one of the main causes of bottlenecks. Usually the latency only lasts for a fraction of a second but with VERY complex programmes like video games, you can't ignore latency because it all adds up quickly.

High latency hardware is either best left out of the system entirely, or reserved for processing that doesn't involve something important like graphics like physics or AI, which you can afford to have some latency with.

Basically Second Generation i7 or AMD FX-Series should do you fine for CPU.

As for GPU there is literally very little separating ATi and nVidia right now. Usually the top end nVidia card is the best but way more than you need. I wouldn't dismiss the top end ATi cards and would strongly advice looking at the specs of the GPU itself and also checking out benchmarks online. Tom's hardware is a great website for this.

Yes it's another specs essay, this time for GPUs

A misconception that's finally dying down is that the amount of Video RAM indicated the GPU's performance. Basically this started around 1999/2000 during the transition to 32-bit colour. At the time RAM was pretty expensive and 32-bit colour take up a ton of memory, so you kind of needed a lot of VRAM. But as we all know, RAM became cheaper and you ended up in a situation where even junk GPUs and the dreaded "Onboard Graphics Chipset" had more memory than faster performing GPUs. Its why you no longer see "DX Compatible Card with X RAM" thing on recommended system specs anymore. The whole thing was made redundant by RAM becoming cheaper.

3D performance relies more on the GPU design itself, How many processing units it has, how fast those units are clocked, and finally, how fast they can access memory. Basically more and faster processing units = more things happening at once and quickly = better performance. The thing is, for all but the most demanding tasks, normal SDRAM is fast enough for 3D rendering, and the amount of RAM needed isn't huge unless there are a LOT of textures involved.

2D performance is more or less as good as it is going to get no matter what card you have since even a shitting onbeard graphics card can handle all 2D processing. It has been since 1999. Even a GPU that's obsolete for 3D gaming will still be able to handle 2D all the way up to displaying on a 1080p TV and possibly even more.

Basically Mal is technically right in his recommendations, but his suggestions will cost you money on things you don't even need.

Lots of good stuff in there. Much of it I already knew, but some chunks of info (particularly on the history of RAM) were interesting to know. I also really like this Tom guy and his nifty website I knew nothing about until now. Thanks.

Also... colour.

[Firewind]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

Thanks, I used to work in a store that made Custom PCs so knowing that info is pretty helpful when helping people build a Custom PC. I also helped write the stuff on TvTropes about Computer Specs so a lot of the stuff in the spoiler tags were pulled from my own notes that I still have on here.

The prices on Tom's Hardware are in £ so if you want to know how badly we get gouged over here, as of today £1 = $1.51 so multiply each price by 1.5 to see what those things cost over here. Thankfully it should all be cheaper for you if you just look up the prices in the US.

Honestly if you want to stay within your budget the AMD FX-Series is the way to go and to be honest it is hard to justify throwing down the extra money for the i7 when the FX-Series really aren't behind at all in terms of performance. It is a similar situation with ATi vs nVidia: the nVidia cards tend to be ahead on the benchmarks and then you look at the price tags and ask yourself if you really need that tiny bit extra.

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This is a VERY good guide on what are currently the best GPUs.

Best Graphics Cards For The Money: May 2013 - Best Graphics Cards For The Money, May Updates

The guide is strictly Price/Performance so if you're wondering why some cards are missing then they simply aren't worth the money.

There's an SSD one too that is a few months old: Best SSDs For The Money: March 2013 - Best SSDs For The Money, March Updates

There's also some guides on building a PC with different budgets:

System Builder Marathon, Q1 2013: $600 Gaming PC - Gunning For Gold At $600 - $600 Budget
System Builder Marathon, Q1 2013: $800 Enthusiast PC - Building A PC: What Do We Get For $800?- $800 Budget
System Builder Marathon, Q1 2013: $1000 Performance PC - Can $1,000 Buy A High-End PC?- $1000 Budget
System Builder Marathon, Q1 2013: $1,600 Alternative PC - The Magic Of Anticipation- $1600 Budget

[Malacite]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

he insulted me first.

Also, yeah Cache is far more important than clock speeds.

I guess I have my own bias towards i7 as I intend to eventually be doing video editing and streaming while gaming, so that's going to require an i7 - you probably can get by just fine with an i5 and really fast RAM. My only concern with the AMD processor is how that cache is setup - if it's a global cache that's fine, but if it's divided among each core (and since a lot of apps currently don't use more than if even 4 cores) that's basically a bunch of wasted memory, and probably why people tend to favor Intel models more since pretty much all of them work on a unified cache.

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o.o ooo, there's a 770 out this month as well? nice to know.

I just checked it out, it's not that much weaker than the 780, and uses 20 less watts too. If I had to guess, I'd wager it around the $500 range - which I'm hoping translates into a price drop on the 670 which honestly is the best nVidia card on the market right now (without destroying your wallet anyway).


I'm going for a 650 for myself right now because it's only like $110 and still vastly outstrips my old 465 - as I said, GPUs are easy to replace. Motherboards and processors aren't.

[cidbahamut]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

I went with an i7 over an i5 because I intend to use this PC for a good 4 to 6 years and I have no intention of ever upgrading the CPU. It sounds like your turnaround time on a tower is shorter than mine so the i5 is probably a better choice for you.

[Malacite]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

5 years is the average isn't it?

I've had mine since about 2007 I think (might have been late '06 I honestly forget) and the piece of crap's held up just fine with only 2 upgrades the entire time I've had it - my GTX 465 and the power supply both of which I got right before XIV came out. So altogether that's like $1800 I spent on this machine over the course of 6~7 years. Fairly decent investment, though a painful reminder of why I tend to prefer console gaming over PC.

[Firewind]

Re: Yyg, Cid and Mal's Gaming PC Construction Thread (open discussion)

With the development of hardware outstripping the demands of games, honestly it seems more efficient to just build something that will last for longer than 5 years.