66 replies to this topic

[Steelo]

Havn't Built My own computer since the late 90's and i deffinatly fell behind the times in terms o technical knowlege so im playing catch up in my first major computer endevor in 15 years.

Motherboard Sapphire Pureblack fx990
Amd Fx-8150
AMD Radeon HD 7770
m-audio audiophile 2496
Corsair Vengeance 8 GB Ram
7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Internal Desktop Hard Drive Bulk/OEM - WD1002FAEX 1 tera size

The good the bad and the ugly?

[Skymech]

The biggest determining factor in a PC build is budget. You can build a rig for < $500, or spend up to $2000-3000. I really like the Tom's Hardware articles, as they give a couple of benchmarks and show you what you can shoehorn into a price point, and usually have a tip for a few small upgrades you can make if you have the extra cash. And fortunately for you, it looks like they were freshly updated last week. So have a look here: http://www.tomshardw...ld-Your-Own,16/

[Gendou]

I put together this PC build based on advice from both the Ars Technica System Build Guide and the MMO-Champion Build of the Month.

• Case: GAMMA Classic Series - $50
  
• PSU: Corsair Builder Series CX600 - $60
  
• CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K - $225
  
• M/B: ASUS P8Z68-V LE - $140
  
• RAM: 8GB Corsair DDR3 12800 - $60
  
• Vid: Sapphire Radeon 6870 - $170
  
• HDD: WD Caviar Black 1TB - $130
  
• SSD: Crucial M4 128gb - $125
  
• Opt: Asus 24x DVD/RW - $20
  
• LCD: ViewSonic VX2250WM-LED 22-Inch - $150
  
• O/S: Windows 7 64-bit Home Premium OEM - $100

Came out to just over USD$1200, and that includes everything.
Ended up building three of them (one for me, one for my wife, and one for my best mate), and they all perform fantastically well.
Everything I've thrown at them has been playable at native resolution (1920x1080) with all the details turned up.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

The motherboard you picked i can only find on one site, stupidly over priced.

Get this board http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813131736

Drop the FX 8150 down to an FX 8120

Use the saved cash on the combined above to pick up a top of the line GPU thats better than the 7770, either a 7970 or GTX 680

The rest is fine, but just a note do no skimp on a cheap PSU, pick up a decent brand PSU, Corsair,Antec etc.

Edited by DV McKenna, 11 June 2012 - 01:45 PM.

[perfectblue]

Nice thread, marking for later use.

[Odins Fist]

For a brand New Build that is not bad at all.. Considering you most likely cannot find a Phenom II x6 1100-Thuban, the next logical step would be the FX-8150, I never bought one because I already had the Thuban, but seeing as how you are limited to what you can get your hands for a "Brand New" build, you did pretty good with what you have chosen.. I'm biased to Asus 990FX series motherboards because they seem to overclock like a beast, that and every Asus mobo I have owned since 2007 is still running - M2n32-SLI Deluxe, M3n-HT Deluxe 780a SLI, Asus Evo 980a SLI, Sabertooth 990FX, and the Crosshair V 990FX.. LOL, yeah I like Asus boards, but I build with most major brands, just not M.S.I. anymore.
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FOr AMD builds when chosing RAM make sure it is on the Memoy QVL list, or find a review with the RAM you want to make sure it works well with the MOBO... Also (lower) RAM timings for AMD chips are more important than on an Intel system, for example if you have the choice between two different sets of RAM at the same MHZ and these are the timings (7-7-7-21) and (9-9-9-24) buy the lower timings set of RAM, trust me it makes a difference.
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If you are planing on going Crossfire (two video cards), then I wouldn't get less than 850 watt PSU, and forget any talk about multiple rails being better than a single rail PSU... I would recommend this ....http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139011
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A western Digital Caviar Black Hard drive 640 gb 64 mb cache Sata III is a good hard drive, an SSD would be quicker, but you will be paying out the nose for a Solid State H/D.
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Video Card choice is decent, I know someone with a 7770 and they like it just fine... I like Nvidia better, but no biggy.

[Itrosnoc]

short of it is you'll do better performance wise with a i5 and reasonably priced z68 then all that AMD stuff... used to be a AMD fan boy but nothings really optimized for their architecture and largely wont be.

[Warfeli]

There is a lot to be said, but it looks to me like you may have already bought the parts? So I am going to provide one very important criticism - do NOT skimp on the graphics card. Especially sacrificing graphics power for insignificant things like a dedicated audio card, I would highly suggest putting at least 200$+ in GFX. Otherwise I promise you will regret it... one good thing though is that the 7770 can be a beast if crossfired with itself, so there is hope yet... =D.

Gendou's build from fist glance already looks stronger. If you give us a budget and a bit more background, we can get you a parts listing....

[Renan Ruivo]

My advice is always "don't get too excited". If you have a 24'' screen or smaller an entry-level gfx card will perform just as well as a top-level one. Same goes for CPU and RAM. Don't bother with SSD's if you can't afford them, they are not worth it.

My rig is a 5 years old Athlon X2 5200 with 6gb of DDR2 ram, 1tb Sata drive and a GTX 260 Core 216 edition. Can play any PC game currently on the market with near maximum (some high, most very high or ultra) at above 30fps average.

As for Crysis 2, it can play on the maximum settings with almost 40FPS average. 1680x1050 resolution on 22'' screen.

Mind you, though, i'm not telling to build yours with the components i built mine. I'm just saying that, when i bought those components, they were considered "entry-level" or "mid-level" at best.

Edited by Renan Ruivo, 11 June 2012 - 02:01 PM.

[Lyteros]

I'd give you the basic advice on the components:

Intel chips are going way better then AMD for gaming. More cores does not actually yield more performance in games (most games are capped at 2 or 4 cores atm)
The intel CPUs are quite a bit more expensive tough.
A good choice is the i-5 series, especially the 2500k is often mentioned as it has a good price / performance ratio.
[Rougly 200 on cpu]

Dont overreach the RAM speed, the RAM can not go faster then the CPU allows it. e.g. the I-5 2500k only has a FSB of 1333, so RAM which goes at 1600 does not really yield you any benefit then one with 1333.
8 GB should be fine, a combination of 4+4 is nice, since most good boards offer 4 RAM lanes, so you can easy just add more... if you get 4x2 you'll end up throwing 2 bars away if you want to upgrade. Kingston HyperX, Corsair, Crucial... all well known and good.
[Rougly 100 on RAM]

For the board: get some well known Board (like ASUS, Gigabyte...) and dont be cheap about it, make sure it is ATX standard (not these µATX boards for office computers), a sound card is not really neccessary (most good boards come with 5.1 or 7.1 anyway and the soundchips these days are really good)
[Rougly 100 - 130]

For the graphic card I recommend something in the 180-220 bucks range. Normally these ones have the best ratio of price to performance and you dont end up paying insane prices (of course you can put in two cards for a total of 800, but is 4 times the price worth 180% of the performance?)
[180 - 220]

Harddisk: WD caviar black are their performance plates, from Seagate the Barracuda does it as well. If you have to much money - get a 1 TB of those and add a SSD as System drive, for immense speed increase on anything that hase to do with Harddisk reading and writing (a Lot of ram helps to minimize this anyhow). Overall that should NOT be an issue. SSD's are just "minmaxing" there. Once all the stuff from the games is buffered into the RAM, you wount notice the difference.
[Rougly 100]

If you play alot I recommend getting a 80+ Powersupply. On the long run the higher efficiency pays off against the slightly higher base cost. you'll need about 600-700 for a basic setup, +200 more if you run 2 graphic cards.
[Rougly 100]

Leaves Case + Optic, which go (together) for around 70-100.

you can get a very good gaming machine for 800-900 bucks. Thats what I typically aim for. Plays everything on the highest settings for around 2 years, then you have to slowly turn down the AA / Shader settings (or invest in a newer graphic card)

My Rig (6 Months old):
AMD Phenom II x6 1090T (3,2 GHZ x6) [Doing alot besides gaming and using the additional Cores there... for pure Gaming => INTEL]
8 GB DDR 3 G-Skill Ripjaws @ 12800 (4x2)
GA-990FXA-UD3
GF GTX 560 TI

I personally see no point int dumping 2000 € or $ in a single rig, when I can get one for 800 now and in two years another one for 800, which will beats the 2k rig from then by far.

edit: typos

Edited by Lyteros, 11 June 2012 - 02:05 PM.

[Fors]

I would get atleast a z68 board with a 2600k, cheap and time proven. If you have a microcenter or frys near you then you will get all your parts extremely cheap. As for graphics card I would not get a 7770, this is cry engine 3. You cant even crank crysis 2 ( same engine ) up to max on a gtx 480 without some serious FPS issues in spots. As suggested earlier about a 680, do not waste your money. The 670s cost 100+ less and perform within 5FPS of the 680. RAM is cheap, 8 gigs is plenty. SSD's are cheap now for boot drives, they can be had for 60 and under.
A budget would be great, as then we can choose whats best for the price. If your going to be upgrading you might as well not half-*** it and then regret it later when you want to turn the eye candy up and cant.

[Bitslizer]

Steelo, on 11 June 2012 - 01:30 PM, said:

Havn't Built My own computer since the late 90's and i deffinatly fell behind the times in terms o technical knowlege so im playing catch up in my first major computer endevor in 15 years.

Motherboard Sapphire Pureblack fx990
Amd Fx-8150
AMD Radeon HD 7770
m-audio audiophile 2496
Corsair Vengeance 8 GB Ram
7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Internal Desktop Hard Drive Bulk/OEM - WD1002FAEX 1 tera size

The good the bad and the ugly?

a couple things

1) Do you have a microcenter near you? if you have one I recommend going with the i5 + z77 combo discount they sell it at cost or lost leader making it very cheap, much much cheaper than even newegg or amazon and elsewhere, but the discount is instore only and not applicable to their website. the i5 is in most case still faster than the AMD

2) Do you need the storage? if not getting a 128GB or 256GB SSD (Solid state drive) is a very good choice, it make booting up windows and loading game very very quick, its one of the biggest performance booster recently.

3) Do you really need the soundcard? that sound card you pick is PCI, some new motherboard don't even have PCI slot anymore, and the onboard integrated sound card on the motherboard do a passable job now a day, unless you are big on audio quality or need it for specialize reason

[Bitslizer]

Renan Ruivo, on 11 June 2012 - 02:00 PM, said:

My advice is always "don't get too excited". If you have a 24'' screen or smaller an entry-level gfx card will perform just as well as a top-level one. Same goes for CPU and RAM. Don't bother with SSD's if you can't afford them, they are not worth it.

My rig is a 5 years old Athlon X2 5200 with 6gb of DDR2 ram, 1tb Sata drive and a GTX 260 Core 216 edition. Can play any PC game currently on the market with near maximum (some high, most very high or ultra) at above 30fps average.

As for Crysis 2, it can play on the maximum settings with almost 40FPS average. 1680x1050 resolution on 22'' screen.

Mind you, though, i'm not telling to build yours with the components i built mine. I'm just saying that, when i bought those components, they were considered "entry-level" or "mid-level" at best.

I've to disagree regarding the SSD, its a huge performance booster, booting up Win7 in 7 seconds vs 30seconds to a min+, loading most game super quick and no more stuttering while playing in game while game files are being stream/loaded is well worth it. Price are also getting very affordable now with alot of very good SSD going for below $1 per GB

[Renan Ruivo]

Bitslizer, on 11 June 2012 - 02:05 PM, said:

I've to disagree regarding the SSD, its a huge performance booster, booting up Win7 in 7 seconds vs 30seconds to a min+, loading most game super quick and no more stuttering while playing in game while game files are being stream/loaded is well worth it. Price are also getting very affordable now with alot of very good SSD going for below $1 per GB

It needs to be said though. For most people, the gain with loading times do not compensate for the cost. Especially older people, who are used to waiting up to one minute for the system to boot.

Don't get me wrong, they are a fine piece of tech. But are still overpriced. They don't cost that much more to manufacture than ordinary hard-disk drives.



In any case, thats just my opinion. If my client absolutely feels that the high cost will be worth it for the gain in performance, then go ahead and buy them. But i'd rather spend that money on something like a better CPU, or power supply.

[pistolero]

hi !

i am no so called "expert" but since i think about building up a new system too i have read a lot of stuff

as far as i know intel cpu is better for gaming and nearly the same price
i would look for an "Intel® Core™ i5-3570" in combination with a motherboard using "Intel® Z77" chip ( supports Lucid Virtu Universal MVP )

for gfx i would take nvidia .... yes i know Radeon got great cards for great prices .... but only nvidia got "PhysX"

well this are my 2 CBills

[Blastcaps]

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7
System RAM: 4094 MB
CPU Name: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
CPU Speeds: 2700
Physical CPUs: 1
Virtual CPUs: 2
Video Card Description: NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT
VRAM: 1024 MB
Windows Experience Index Rating: 4.1

this is what i'm currently running so it'll be interesting seeing how it runs MWO.

[Odins Fist]

SSD drives are "BEAST", but their price makes me (the cheapskate that I am) cringe... I have seen games/levels/maps that are installed on an SSD load 4 times faster than on other systems with similar CPU & Mobo combinations... But the Price makes me want to vomit. All SSDs have a limited number of writes before they wear out, on a SSD you don't need to defrag since it's all memory sending data through the chips and not needing moving parts thus making it a lot faster and making it unnecessary to defrag. Defraging will actually shorten the life span of your ssd since a ssd life cycle is based on the amounts of writes. So it is highly recommend not to defrag a ssd ever, there is maintenance software for triming the garbage out of SSD drives.

[Skymech]

Blastcaps, on 11 June 2012 - 02:17 PM, said:

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7
System RAM: 4094 MB
CPU Name: AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 5200+
CPU Speeds: 2700
Physical CPUs: 1
Virtual CPUs: 2
Video Card Description: NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT
VRAM: 1024 MB
Windows Experience Index Rating: 4.1

this is what i'm currently running so it'll be interesting seeing how it runs MWO.

I think your video card might be getting a little long in the tooth. You could probably pick up a good upgrade for < $150.

[Koshadows]

Steelo, on 11 June 2012 - 01:30 PM, said:

Havn't Built My own computer since the late 90's and i deffinatly fell behind the times in terms o technical knowlege so im playing catch up in my first major computer endevor in 15 years.

Motherboard Sapphire Pureblack fx990
Amd Fx-8150
AMD Radeon HD 7770
m-audio audiophile 2496
Corsair Vengeance 8 GB Ram
7200 RPM 64 MB Cache Internal Desktop Hard Drive Bulk/OEM - WD1002FAEX 1 tera size

The good the bad and the ugly?

The good: The 8150 is a solid cpu, may have to take suggestions from around the forum and say downgrade to an 8120 cause its a better valued cpu for around the same performance.
Love the corsair rams, they're quite solid. HDD isn't bad either, it won't ever reach a full SSD but it'll do quite nicely

The bad: I would go with one of the above posters and say the asus mobos may be better. Milage may vary since i'm not as in the know for AMD as intel for products.
Don't know why the sound card is there. Most mobos these day have a good enough built in sound card and the card itself just takes up extra graphics space if you ever get a dual slot graphics card.

The ugly: Gotta wail on the HD 7770. Its such a powerful system you have marked on there with a not so powerful graphics card. If you can save $60 downgrading that cpu to a FX-6100 then you can probably afford a 7850 on sale. And that 7850 will be quite a bit more powerful with an almost 14 fps increase for crysis engine. http://tpucdn.com/re...2_1680_1050.gif

[Steelo]

DV McKenna, on 11 June 2012 - 01:43 PM, said:

The motherboard you picked i can only find on one site, stupidly over priced.

Get this board http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813131736

Drop the FX 8150 down to an FX 8120

Use the saved cash on the combined above to pick up a top of the line GPU thats better than the 7770, either a 7970 or GTX 680

The rest is fine, but just a note do no skimp on a cheap PSU, pick up a decent brand PSU, Corsair,Antec etc.

The motherboard i got cost me 30$ less than the motherboard you listed

Koshadows, on 11 June 2012 - 02:37 PM, said:

The good: The 8150 is a solid cpu, may have to take suggestions from around the forum and say downgrade to an 8120 cause its a better valued cpu for around the same performance.
Love the corsair rams, they're quite solid. HDD isn't bad either, it won't ever reach a full SSD but it'll do quite nicely

The bad: I would go with one of the above posters and say the asus mobos may be better. Milage may vary since i'm not as in the know for AMD as intel for products.
Don't know why the sound card is there. Most mobos these day have a good enough built in sound card and the card itself just takes up extra graphics space if you ever get a dual slot graphics card.

The ugly: Gotta wail on the HD 7770. Its such a powerful system you have marked on there with a not so powerful graphics card. If you can save $60 downgrading that cpu to a FX-6100 then you can probably afford a 7850 on sale. And that 7850 will be quite a bit more powerful with an almost 14 fps increase for crysis engine. http://tpucdn.com/re...2_1680_1050.gif

THe soundcard is there, because this computer is not only for gaming, it is also the new base for my studio as i have a home studo that i use to produce demos etc for people in my local music community