PC Hardware Talk Megathread

[photon]

Hm I've never heard of cablemod, that looks interesting.

[PsYcNeT]

Good call on the Orion keyboard; I love mine. It's always really cool when you load up a new game and all of the color-coded keymaps automatically populate.

[DoubleK]

Any of you guys interested in helping me out with building a lower end gaming system?

Looking to build a box that can play World of Warcraft on a shoestring budget.

I've been using an older Dell XPS system that looked like this (upgraded the video card and RAM since then):

Studio XPS 9000
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache)
Memory: 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 6 DIMMs
Hard Drive: 1TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by DoubleK

Any of you guys interested in helping me out with building a lower end gaming system?

Looking to build a box that can play World of Warcraft on a shoestring budget.

I've been using an older Dell XPS system that looked like this (upgraded the video card and RAM since then):

Studio XPS 9000
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-920 processor(8MB L3 Cache)
Memory: 6GB Tri-Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1066MHz - 6 DIMMs
Hard Drive: 1TB 7200 RPM SATA Hard Drive

That system should be able to the meet the minimum requirements for WoW, no? Or are you looking for something a bit smoother?

[DoubleK]

I have most if not all of the settings dialed back to medium.

I've got 6 good years out of it and can't really squeeze much more out of it without upgrading the PSU

[accord1999]

Which video card do you have? That might still be a limiting point.

[DoubleK]

GTX 550 Ti. PSU limits vid card upgrade

[accord1999]

With the advances in fab technology though, modern video cards can offer significant increases in performance while using less power. For example the now relatively old 750 Ti:

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1133?vs=1130

An even better option than the 750 Ti would be the RX 460 on the AMD side

[Wood]

I have an EVGA Geforce GTX 750 Ti sitting in its box in my basement if you're interested. Probably a little dusty, but I only used it for about 10 months

[FlamesPuck12]

Originally Posted by Meelapo

It has begun!!!!!

Spoiler!

Damn, that's insane. Really nice pieces.

I looked at your PCPartPicker link and saw that it was close to my price and thought where I went wrong :P

Turns out you were missing your $800 GPU on the list.

Just curious though, why did you end up getting 1.5 TB of SSD? Did you need the disk space? Otherwise, Samsung 950 Pro would've looked real nice with the rest of your components (or Samsung 960 Pro if you were willing to wait a couple more weeks).

[Meelapo]

Originally Posted by FlamesPuck12

Damn, that's insane. Really nice pieces.

I looked at your PCPartPicker link and saw that it was close to my price and thought where I went wrong :P

Turns out you were missing your $800 GPU on the list.

Just curious though, why did you end up getting 1.5 TB of SSD? Did you need the disk space? Otherwise, Samsung 950 Pro would've looked real nice with the rest of your components (or Samsung 960 Pro if you were willing to wait a couple more weeks).

Yeah, I bought the GTX 1080 outside of this whole project. I'll add it PC Part Picker list to give a better indication of what I paid.

To answer your other question...do I need the disk space? Yes and no. I got the 512 for the OS and any applications (Office, accounting software, etc.). It's probably far too large for its purpose but I figured I might as well.

The extra 1 TB is interesting. I have a lot of games across Steam, Origin, UPlay, GoG. I wanted to be able to install them all. I'll never play them but I like to know that I have them installed. It's a weird thing but I just love collecting, installing, and never playing. The 1 TB drive allows me to fulfil my weird urge.

Edit: I've updated the PC Part-picker List: http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/g7CBvV

The only thing left is a better monitor (I bought the one listed for my parents). It sounds like Samsung might be releasing a GSync monitor next week. I'm looking at something at the 36" size. Right now I've got a BenQ 32". I saw the Predator 34" at Memory Express and while I liked the width I didn't like the smaller height (compared to my current monitor).

[PsYcNeT]

Wow. Using PCPartPicker to "build" my current setup makes me feel kind of embarrassed about the amount of unnecessary crap (and awful SSD setup...) I'm running at the moment.

http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/hkWMFd

[Meelapo]

Originally Posted by PsYcNeT

Wow. Using PCPartPicker to "build" my current setup makes me feel kind of embarrassed about the amount of unnecessary crap (and awful SSD setup...) I'm running at the moment.

http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/hkWMFd

Are your monitors side by side? I'm going to assume you aren't doing dual monitor gaming but have one for gaming and one more other things.

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by Meelapo

Are your monitors side by side? I'm going to assume you aren't doing dual monitor gaming but have one for gaming and one more other things.

They are. The second monitor is usually just there for secondary junk. I have a 30ft RedMere HDMI cable running to my tv (LG 60UH7700) and another 30ft running to my non-4K receiver (H/K AVR 1650)(because I have issues chaining 5.1 though the TV to the receiver and I can't chain 4K from the receiver to the TV, even though the TV supports 5.1 through ARC no problem with apps...it's dumb).

Multi-monitor surround configs never really interested me.

[Coys1882]

If I had say $500-$700 to throw at this - what would you guys do?
UserBenchmarks: Game 55%, Desk 57%, Work 35%
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K - 69.4%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 770 - 61.5%
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250GB - 44.4%
HDD: WD Blue 640GB (2008) - 44.6%
HDD: WD Black 1TB (2010) - 47.4%
RAM: Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB - 52.5%
MBD: Asus P8H67-M LX

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by Coys1882

If I had say $500-$700 to throw at this - what would you guys do?
UserBenchmarks: Game 55%, Desk 57%, Work 35%
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K - 69.4%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 770 - 61.5%
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250GB - 44.4%
HDD: WD Blue 640GB (2008) - 44.6%
HDD: WD Black 1TB (2010) - 47.4%
RAM: Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB - 52.5%
MBD: Asus P8H67-M LX

2500k is still a good gaming CPU, so the answer is always going to be "videocard" in bright neon letters, with maybe "another 1x/2x sticks of RAM" because 8 more GB of ram would be like 60 bucks for DD3.

[AcGold]

Originally Posted by Coys1882

If I had say $500-$700 to throw at this - what would you guys do?
UserBenchmarks: Game 55%, Desk 57%, Work 35%
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K - 69.4%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 770 - 61.5%
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250GB - 44.4%
HDD: WD Blue 640GB (2008) - 44.6%
HDD: WD Black 1TB (2010) - 47.4%
RAM: Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB - 52.5%
MBD: Asus P8H67-M LX

I'd get a 4gb 960 and 32gb ram if that mobo can handle it (ddr4 on that mobo?). Don't cheap out and get low latency ram. CPU matters very little in comparison to gpu, ram, ssd. How are your partitions set up? What windows are you running? At 1080p you're good for a few years, a 4gb 960 will be more than enough for a good while at 1080p. Witcher 3 runs around 45-50fps at max. Recommend heavy optimization through minimizing unnecessary services and running driverbooster. Ultra shadows are the most resource draining least necessary gfx options. (Not insinuating you don't know this but it's the basics just in case). NCIX, Amazon.ca, PCPartPicker, memoryexpress cross correlate prices. A 970 won't get much better results if you optimize it well, probably shouldn't spend too much and save up for a $900-1400 pascal in the future. Good luck.

[DoubleK]

Originally Posted by DoubleK

GTX 550 Ti. PSU limits vid card upgrade

Originally Posted by Wood

I have an EVGA Geforce GTX 750 Ti sitting in its box in my basement if you're interested. Probably a little dusty, but I only used it for about 10 months

I mispoke last night. I have a 750 Ti in my machine right now.

[110%]

Originally Posted by Coys1882

If I had say $500-$700 to throw at this - what would you guys do?
UserBenchmarks: Game 55%, Desk 57%, Work 35%
CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K - 69.4%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 770 - 61.5%
SSD: Samsung 840 Evo 250GB - 44.4%
HDD: WD Blue 640GB (2008) - 44.6%
HDD: WD Black 1TB (2010) - 47.4%
RAM: Corsair CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 8GB - 52.5%
MBD: Asus P8H67-M LX

Put your 500-700 bucks in the bank and save it for a year or two. That PC is totally fine still. If you are dying to spend the money then get a gtx1070 or gtx1080 because you can at least bring that over to your next build. A 960 is a very minor upgrade and not worth the money for the slight performance increase you are going to get.

[AcGold]

960 is not a minor upgrade imo. The 4gb VRAM and 32gm ram will take a struggling pc to maxing games at 1080p for a good while. 400$ for a few years of top notch gaming is a pretty good deal if you consider that's less than a ps4 would be over the same time with psn included.