12 replies to this topic

[Yoko Kurama]

First-time builder here and I'm looking for some recommendations for a new gaming rig. Well, not my first time per se, but my first time building for myself. I'm not very tech-savvy so I've never bought the parts, only assembled. But I've got about $1200 burning a hole in my pocket and I've been itching for a new PC for a while now. I do a lot of multitasking (as I am writing this I have two EVE Online clients, half a dozen chat windows and two instances of IE running with multiple tabs, and all from one monitor unfortunately) and I also do a lot of gaming. A lot of gaming.

So I need a rig that will strike a fine balance between both but won't break the bank. I'm currently using a $400 pre-built PC that my mother bought about two years ago (it's an ASUS build, so it runs like a champ). I threw in a cheap (read: $50) graphics card so it wouldn't bog down when I played Minecraft, and it's done me good so far. It certainly won't run Skyrim or ME3 or BF3. Hell, it barely plays MWLL (averages about 7-10fps on the lowest settings) but it got me through Portal 2 with a breezy ~24fps on medium-lowish settings.

The biggest thing I'm looking at here is multiple monitor support. I would like to have three monitors ideally so I can do everything I do without wearing out the "Alt+Tab" macro key on my G510. Peripherals aren't a big deal at the moment as I recently got myself a new keyboard and mouse, and you can throw the monitors in the "not a huge deal" category as well as I can buy them later. I figure I've made it this long Alt+Tab-ing, I can deal with it for another month or so. I'm budgeting this bit o' cash for the computer itself.

So, think you guys can help a noob out? =)

[Vulpesveritas]

I would recommend an AMD CPU given the multitasking. Others may disagree, however I would suggest the following;
Motherboard: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813157266
CPU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16819103961
GPU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814102982
PSU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817703027
RAM: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820103006
HDD: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136798
Case: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16811146081
ODD: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116986
OS: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116986
Just shy of $1200, will play anything out there at max settings, and will be great for multitasking, and if you decide to go multi-monitor later you will have no problem whatsoever.

[Murder_Hobo]

To start with what are your current machine's specs? Is your existing monitor going to be one of the three you want? You can do alot with $1200 especially if you can put it together yourself. I build machines all the time for my customers. What OS are you running and are you going to put that on your new machine?

[Deathz Jester]

Vulpesveritas, on 12 May 2012 - 10:47 PM, said:

I would recommend an AMD CPU given the multitasking. Others may disagree, however I would suggest the following;
Motherboard: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813157266
CPU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16819103961
GPU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814102982
PSU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817703027
RAM: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820103006
HDD: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136798
Case: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16811146081
ODD: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116986
OS: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116986
Just shy of $1200, will play anything out there at max settings, and will be great for multitasking, and if you decide to go multi-monitor later you will have no problem whatsoever.

Thats pretty close to my pc actually.... creepy

[Vulpesveritas]

Also if you're willing to pay a bit more on your gpu, HIS has the fastest Radeon HD 7970; http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814161412
And if you aren't planning on ever folding, bitcoin mining, or using hardware acceleration, then the 680 might also be a decent option;
http://www.newegg.co...rce%20GTX%20680
... problem being, it's hard to find in stock.

[Bianca Flowers]

I'd say you'll do far better with an ivy bridge build (i7-3770K and Z77 motherboard), easily doable in a 1200 budget
a comparision:

http://www.anandtech...duct/434?vs=551

an i5-3570K will do just a bit worse than the 3770K

[Fresh Meat]

grab a gtx 670 instead its only 400 and is very close to the 680

[LordDeathStrike]

Vulpesveritas, on 12 May 2012 - 11:31 PM, said:

Also if you're willing to pay a bit more on your gpu, HIS has the fastest Radeon HD 7970; http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814161412
And if you aren't planning on ever folding, bitcoin mining, or using hardware acceleration, then the 680 might also be a decent option;
http://www.newegg.co...rce%20GTX%20680
... problem being, it's hard to find in stock.

*** is bitcoin mining, sounds like a mega scam.

[Vulpesveritas]

LordDeathStrike, on 13 May 2012 - 01:25 AM, said:

*** is bitcoin mining, sounds like a mega scam.

Okay in what way exactly?
let me quote this quickly

Quote

http://virtuallyshoc...and-not-a-scam/[/url] ]

Bitcoin is a scam – Everything about bitcoin is out in the open, unless someone is telling you it will give you a guaranteed return on investment. Bruce Wagner doesn’t count, he just gets excited. Bitcoin is a p2p ponzi scheme – The bitcoin enterprise is existent, and there’s no payout guaranteed by the system, fed by later investors’ money. It’s a commodity and the value may fluctuate, and who knows whether you or someone else will make gains. Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme – Basically the same as a ponzi scheme, except there’s not even any pretension of a real enterprise (like Madoff’s fake investment fund). Again, bitcoin doesn’t require you to go recruit people and get paid a cut of what they invest in return. Bitcoin is a real thing and that’s easy to verify.

See, bitcoin are designed to be a peer-to-peer digital currency, currently functioning as an easily-transferable commodity. The bitcoin system has a few key characteristics:

• There is a fixed and gradually decreasing rate of monetary inflation (money creation)
  
• It is very difficult (and rapidly getting more difficult) to make fraudulent bitcoin payments
  
• It is cheap and very easy to send bitcoins anywhere in the world, in seconds
  
• If used properly, the system can be anonymous, allowing financial freedom analogous to freedom of speech. An example of where this is useful would be the financial choke-off of Wikileaks.

The system is secured by people doing a certain kind of work with their computers. This work has been called a complete waste of electricity, but it’s not. It secures the network from fraud. (Think for example on how much money and energy is spent securing banks. Is bitcoin’s energy use larger?) As an incentive, the people doing this work (mining) are paid some bitcoins. However, the rate of total payouts is maintained approximately constant by the network, so the more people mine, the more difficult mining becomes. This system of rewards and difficulty is the first example I’ll give of the clever incentives built into bitcoin.

Let me explain.

I heard about bitcoin, investigated it, saw that it had potential. I bought some and set up some hardware to mine for bitcoins. As difficulty went up, along with the value of bitcoins, I realized it was worth my while to keep investing in mining hardware, electricity to power it, etc, so I did, as did others. This made the network more secure, and drove difficulty up again. People became more confident in the system, and more people heard about it, driving up prices. This caused people to bring more mining hardware online, security and difficulty of mining increased, etc. This continues to happen at an exponential rate. At one time there was a risk that someone with a botnet could easily overtake the network. That risk is now minimal and getting (exponentially) smaller every day, especially as bitcoin miners are eagerly buying up the world’s supply of the most efficient mining hardware.

This mining work is essential to the security and functionality of bitcoin. The people putting in the effort to mine are being paid by the network, yes, and this has been criticized as a scheme to make early adopters rich. However, if bitcoin never catches on for anything, the early adopters will be out all of this time, effort, and some of the money they spent on mining hardware. They are taking a risk based on their understanding of the technology and their ability to harness it for return on investment. If this risk pays off they will make a profit. This is the essence of entrepreneurship.

We are seeing a lot of ‘sour-grapes’ griping from people who dismissed bitcoin early on, didn’t buy in, and missed some early appreciation of the currency. You hear similar things from people who failed to buy a stock that subsequently skyrocketed.

There’s a second component to the idea that bitcoins (which have a fixed supply) will become more valuable as more people want them. More people will only want them if bitcoin is useful, and has a community around it, especially a community of merchants willing to sell goods and service for bitcoin. By giving the early adopters bitcoins when they are not yet very valuable, they are given an incentive to build a community and a market around bitcoins. There is no company behind bitcoins. There’s no marketing budget. There are no representatives to go give sales pitches to merchants. There is only the community of bitcoin users. Therefore, for bitcoins to get off the ground, it’s actually very important that the early adopters have a strong incentive to evangelize bitcoin. And really, there’s nothing wrong with them (us, I guess) doing so. We bought in, spent time analyzing, discussing, and running the bitcoin network early on. We think bitcoin is a worthwhile project. We recognize that if we don’t evangelize bitcoin, it’ll fall by the wayside. The value of our bitcoins will be reduced. Most importantly, a technology that we find inspiring, interesting, and useful may become a simple endnote in the history of the Internet. So when you hear bitcoin users extolling the virtues of the project, you can bet your *** it’s because we want the value to grow. Why wouldn’t we? But it’s not so we can cash all of our bitcoins out and leave you holding the bag. It’s so the whole community can benefit as bitcoin grows, and you (the new user) along with it.

One hears complaints about speculators affecting market prices. It’s true that some speculators bought when prices were low, and will sell when prices are high, taking their money and leaving. The speculators are not doing anything bad, however – speculation is something that occurs whenever you have a free market. Speculators provide a useful function in helping to set appropriate prices, by incorporating future expectations about the value of an asset. (We’ll leave further discussion of the utility of speculation, if needed, to a future post.) In the minds of many, the price is not high at all, compared to what it will be if bitcoin succeeds in gaining traction. This is what speculators are betting on, and pricing into the market.

The incentives are working. Bitcoin users are collecting on the forums to set up bounties for useful things (like Android apps — I paid 1000 BTC for something that met my requirements). Bitcoin users invest time and effort in developing tools for other users of the network (see bitcoincharts, bitcoin monitor, bitcoin block explorer). We hang out in #bitcoin-dev and #bitcoin-otc on freenode IRC and explain to newbies how to get miners up and running, how to back up their bitcoin wallets, and answer their questions on the (admittedly) complex system that makes bitcoin work. We help out merchants with information on how to set up for accepting bitcoins for their products and services, write documentation on various aspects of bitcoin, and release open source code to make bitcoin integration easier.

That’s one other thing I want to say. Bitcoin is complicated. Taken alone, any one of its parts (fixed rate of inflation, ease of money transfer, potential for anonymity, proof-of-work and blockchain for peer-to-peer accounting, public key cryptography, SHA256 hashing to hit a target numeric threshold, etc) is not that novel or compelling. What makes bitcoin so cool is the combination of all of these parts into one system. It’s much easier to glance over bitcoin, say, “Oh, it’s just like (dead e-money project X), it’ll just flop”, and post, “bitcoin is a scam, LOL, maybe I can exchange my Flooz for them”, on Twitter than it is to write a long explanatory blog post like this one. Twitter and Facebook have trained us into a “too long; didn’t read” (tl;dr) mentality that doesn’t allow for nuanced dialog.

[Oderint dum Metuant]

Less off topic rubbish more system building guys.

Case + CPU
http://www.newegg.co...st=Combo.937510

PSU
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817153136

Motherboard + Ram
http://www.newegg.co...st=Combo.907541

HDD
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822148697

GPU
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814127662

Monitor
http://www.newegg.co...N82E16824236176

Total = $1347

That is a little over budget, but solid with a second new main monitor included to go with the one you already have.
You don't mention what Operating system and bit version you are running so i have left a copy of windows 7 64 bit out for now.

If you need a copy you can drop the monitor pick up windows 7 x64

[Yoko Kurama]

Vulpesveritas, on 12 May 2012 - 10:47 PM, said:

I would recommend an AMD CPU given the multitasking. Others may disagree, however I would suggest the following;
Motherboard: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16813157266
CPU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16819103961
GPU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16814102982
PSU: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16817703027
RAM: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16820103006
HDD: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136798
Case: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16811146081
ODD: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116986
OS: http://www.newegg.co...N82E16832116986
Just shy of $1200, will play anything out there at max settings, and will be great for multitasking, and if you decide to go multi-monitor later you will have no problem whatsoever.

This is pretty much what I am looking for, actually. Like I said, monitors I can save for later. Also, your ODD link went to the OS. =)

[Vulpesveritas]

Yoko Kurama, on 13 May 2012 - 11:02 AM, said:

This is pretty much what I am looking for, actually. Like I said, monitors I can save for later. Also, your ODD link went to the OS. =)

linkfail. ah well. basically, any random disk drive will do, though lite-on has the best available on newegg spec wise, though a lot of people swear by Asus ODD's.

[Violation]

I own a lite-on; never gave me any problems