Mid-range gaming computer specs

[ultrabiome]

I've been using Radeon - 5850s in crossfire mind you - for over 2 years and had no issues. AMD drivers are not bad. In fact, I see pretty much as many Nvidia people bitching as I do AMD people on the hardware forums I frequent. They're both putting out good quality stuff. At worst I'd fault AMD for sometimes being slow on updating crossfire support for new games.

As for a competing Nvidia card to a 7850, you'd be looking at a GTX 570 or maybe a very overclocked GTX 560 Ti. The 7850 is in the same price range as a 560 Ti, and cheaper than the 570, so it is a much better value. Plus, it consumes less power.

thanks for the comparison. i think i might go with a crossfire enabled motherboard with a 7850 and maybe look to upgrade to a dual 7850 setup in the future.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

I'll chime in because my approach seems to be a bit different from what I've read so far.

What I absolutely agree on is the power supply; you want a branded one, and I suggest you have a thorough look at the modular ones that will help you cut down on cables you (currently) don't need, while still allowing you to add stuff later without starting all over again from scratch.

A dedicated sound card tends to be a hassle these days, as the slots on the mainboard are limited, and the space in most cases is very limited. Plus, most onboard sound solutions suffice for just about anything in the consumer space (watching movies, playing games, listening to music). A dedicated, powerful sound card only makes sense when everything else is accounted for and you really think you're not happy with that 5.1/7.1/optical-out all-in-one the mb already offers.

Where my view differs is the power supply wattage - on an office/work/video/editing machine, I'd say go for a tightly calculated build... on a gaming rig, I sincerely advise you to go for no less than 750W. Why? Because, more often than not, the first thing gaming folks feel the need to buy one or two years down the road, or sometimes just after weeks or months, is the graphics card. Even if you were to just add a second one of what you already got, if you don't have some spare watts to run your personal gaming rig 2.0, you'd inevitably have to go and buy another power supply, and I just think that's not how most people want to spend their money.

As for the processor - AMD/ex-ATi deliver some awesome graphics solutions, some pretty far out and impressive, but when it comes to CPUs, it's currently just Intel all the way at the moment.

Also, if feasible, I suggest you have one not too big hard drive for the system (Win7/64 is perfect) and a bigger 1TB or 2TB for storage, but that's really just my flavour of system building.

 

[Headdrivehardscrew]

thanks for the help!

~$100 or so of that will go into labor (prices from ibuypower.com.

Are you mental? $100 for them to build it? You could do it yourself in an hour.

I'm with you on thinking it, not on saying it.

Let people have it their way, I've seen too many costly accidents to maintain my stance of wanting to assemble myself as valid for everybody.

Plus, the people assembling it get paid for it, which is good. Also, they are responsible for any and all muck-ups on their end. Chances are high everything will be fine, and if it isn't, they will want to fix it under warranty.

 

[Signa]

Also, if feasible, I suggest you have one not too big hard drive for the system (Win7/64 is perfect) and a bigger 1TB or 2TB for storage, but that's really just my flavour of system building.

quoted for emphasis.

It's a good idea to keep your OS and your important data separate, in case of a crashed hard drive, or if you need a wipe. I just had to re-install Windows on a co-worker's PC, and since they had only one drive for 200 GB of their data, I had to rip it out and plug it into my PC to back up the data. Reinstalling factory defaults (it was a Compaq) reformatted the drive without any option otherwise. Had her PC been set up like above (or mine) I could have wiped without a second thought and then all the data would have been safe.

 

[AndyRock]

Not sure how that's a mid-range pc build, a lot of those parts are quite high end. my old pc from 3 years ago is still running fine with a shit quad core, and a 5750, even manages BF3 on medium.

Otherwise, as others have already said, don't bother with a sound card, and definitely grab a SSD, biggest performance increase for £80 you can get, and get a proper psu, skimping out can cost you dearly. Also getting a slightly better card would be the best way to upgrade that, but I would only recommend nvidia's high end cards, the AMD's were quite disappointing this generation.

 

[DrOswald]

Intel processors are more reliable

How so?

Generally I have noticed that computers with Intel processors crash less often. Once again, I know this only from the practical experience I have had. I may be wrong.

The power supply you have chosen looks good, but check if you can the length of the cables. I have seen power supplies have cables that are just a little too short when you have to stretch them over a large video card, and that sucks. Also, I wouldn't go any lower on the wattage, I saw a suggestion to go 550, but I have seen major stability issues come with a power supply that wasn't good enough. Better to spend the extra $20 and have a part that works than to toe the line and get burned.

If the OP doesn't overclock his system, he's looking at ~200 watts AT THE WALL in maximum power draw during gaming, i.e. realistic load. He might hit 250 if he does stupid "enthusiast" shit like running 4 instances of Prime95 and Furmark.

The last generation of Radeons has a feature called powertune, which aggressively limits the power draw of the card. In the case of the 7850, that limit is 155w. The Core i5-3870k is rated by Intel as a 77w part, it's common knowledge that Intel is way too conservative with this. A single hard disk, the mainboard/RAM and some fans are maybe adding another 50w of theoretical peak. This system couldn't break 300w in theory.

If he overclocks the i5, he might get it up to 100w. Increasing the powertune limit of the Radeon 7850 might get it up to 200w. So if he primes/furmarks it then, he'd see 350w at worst. We're still looking at power usage where a good 500w PSU will start reach it's peak efficiency.

PSUs are one of those voodoo components where people go all Tim Taylor.

Theory doesn't always match up with reality. I don't know what to tell you, my practical experience is a 500 watt power supply can cause stability issues in a gaming machine. I have seen it happen in 2 different machines. Once again it is about aging parts. Your machine may be ok for a year or two and then it will have problems. Or maybe never at all. I may be wrong about this, but I still think spending $20 extra to get a better PSU than you need is a good idea. Plus it is good to have if you want to add extra parts. It only adds 1-2% to the cost of the machine.

I have noticed that the larger the drive the slower the part reads as it ages. I am not sure what causes this but I have seen it consistently. Maybe it has to do with fragmentation?

If only there were tools to counteract the effects of hard disk fragmentation...

I have been an IT guy for 4 years, I know about defrag tools. This is after defrag (which, by the way, you can never get a partition 100% fragmentation free). I am just guessing here, there are all sorts of possibilities. It might be that there is more physical space to search on the disk and and as the part slows down with age it is more noticeable. It might be that larger drives over heat more easily (and therefore wear down more quickly) because they has more disks spinning. It might be that larger drives have more parts and are therefore more likely to have a single part wear out in the same space of time. Once again, I don't know what causes this, but I have noticed it. It really isn't that significant, like I said.

I would not go with a radion card. I have used 3 radion card personally in the past and everyone of them has had significant problems gaming (crashing, frame rate, texture problems, etc.) and each were the first part to fail in the rig they belonged to.

I've used nVidia and AMD interchangeable, whichever was better priced at the time. Never had a video card fail on me.
So ... maybe the problem is you?

It certainly is possible that the problem is me, but how? I guess it might be that I am using it wrong? I treat the cards the same, and Nvidia cards don't fail while raidon do. Maybe radion cards are more susceptible to over heating and I am not paying enough attention? Or they require more maintenance than a Nvidia card? I do tend to use my computer in a way that would cause long periods of high stress on the video card. It may have to do with usage patterns. I don't overclock so it can't be that (unless, of course, Nvidia cards are more reliable at factory settings.)

What kind of usage patterns are normal for you? I tend to play games in large chunks, such as a 6+ hour gaming marathon on a Saturday. I also do tons of multi tasking, like running 2 video games at once, one on each of my two screens (usually a single player game on my secondary screen and a multiplayer game on my main screen) plus several instances of google chrome in the background, Itunes, and fraps, maybe netflix and my minecraft server. But I don't think anything but the games (and maybe netflix) would really effect the card.

I suppose I could just be really unlucky and I got 3 lemons in a row. or maybe you were really lucky and got the best parts in the lot. How often do you replace your cards? I tend to build an entire new computer every couple of years and pass my current rig onto my wife or a friend, so parts never get replaced until they fail. It might just be that you never keep a card long enough for it to fail.

You know, my experience with 500 watt PSU's failing for me might have to do with usage patterns as well. Maybe larger PSU's can handle that level of constant use more easily than a 500 watt? I do use my computers far more aggressively than most.

 

[ultrabiome]

Case ( NZXT Phantom 410 Gaming Case - White ) Still undecided.
Processor ( Intel® Core? i5-3570K Processor (4x 3.40GHz/6MB L3 Cache) - Intel Core i5-3570K )
Processor Cooling ( Certified CPU Fan and Heatsink )
Memory ( 8 GB [4 GB X2] DDR3-1600 Memory Module - Corsair or Major Brand - FREE Upgrade to G.Skill Ripjaws )
Video Card ( AMD Radeon HD 7850 - 2GB - Single Card )
Motherboard ( Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H -- 1x PCI-E 3.0 x16, 4x USB 3.0 )
Power Supply ( 650 Watt - Corsair CMPSU-650TXV2 - $20 to upgrade to 750 Watt Corsair CMPSU-750TXV2)
Primary Hard Drive ( 2 TB HARD DRIVE -- 64M Cache, 7200rpm, 6.0Gb/s - Single Drive )
Optical Drive ( 24X Dual Format/Double Layer DVD±R/±RW + CD-R/RW Drive - Black )
Sound Card ( 3D Premium Surround Sound Onboard )
Network Card ( Onboard LAN Network (Gb or 10/100) )
Operating System ( Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit )

-i think i'm sold on the AMD 7850 GPU, with the option to crossfire with another 7850 later.
-going to go with the intel core i5 though
-no sound card, i'm sure for me it will be fine, especially if i play on my HD TV over HDMI.
-no SSD, i realize its value, so it will be a consideration for upgrading, but i'm still worried about hardware longevity.

for reference, i'll be using a HD TV and a small HD resolution monitor. and given my old machine, i'm pretty used to only running one game at time with little in the background (i have TVs and a smartphone and a laptop if i really need it). i'm not going to OC so should be ok on heat dissipation.

seems at this point, the arguments are over brand, not so much graphics horsepower. seems this machine will run me about $1100-$1200 (including windows 7 pro 64-bit for $100) and it looks like i will be happy with it for years.

 

[ResonanceSD]

OP: That's a really good PC. Better than "mid range" IMO.

No, it's mid range.

3500 intel chip, 7000 AMD GPU, liquid cooled.

That isn't mid ranged dude XD


And if it is, what do you consider the high end to be? A CraY computer?

seems this machine will run me about $1100-$1200 (including windows 7 pro 64-bit for $100) and it looks like i will be happy with it for years.

God I hate prices in Australia, we'd be paying quite a lot more than that.

 

[RubyT]

Generally I have noticed that computers with Intel processors crash less often. Once again, I know this only from the practical experience I have had. I may be wrong.

You've been an "IT guy" for four years. How often do system crash in your vicinity? I haven't had computers crash regularly on me since XP SP1 or so. If they do crash, do you keep a log? Do you investigate how and why? If you can blame the CPU (more likely the chipset), do you keep a note of that?

I don't know what to tell you, my practical experience is a 500 watt power supply can cause stability issues in a gaming machine.

A 1000w PSU can also cause instability. Shitty power supplies are shitty, no matter what number was printed on them.

but I still think spending $20 extra to get a better PSU than you need is a good idea.

550w is already better than the OP needs. He would get away with a *good* 400w PSU, I can guarantee this.

Rather than telling someone to look for the number on the label, it would be better to recommend them to buy a PSU from Seasonic, Corsair (mostly relabeled Seasonic anyway), Enermax, Super Flower or Antec.

It might be that there is more physical space to search on the disk and and as the part slows down with age it is more noticeable. It might be that larger drives over heat more easily (and therefore wear down more quickly) because they has more disks spinning. It might be that larger drives have more parts and are therefore more likely to have a single part wear out in the same space of time. Once again, I don't know what causes this

So how did you notice that? In your four years of IT experience, did you benchmark new drives and then kept logging their performance over time, always observing usage patterns, and then compare the data of larger drives with data of smaller drives?
Or is it more "Hm, this 2 TB drive seems slow and I noticed that Steve's 2 TB is slow too... must be something about big drives then"

I suppose I could just be really unlucky and I got 3 lemons in a row. or maybe you were really lucky and got the best parts in the lot. How often do you replace your cards? I tend to build an entire new computer every couple of years and pass my current rig onto my wife or a friend, so parts never get replaced until they fail. It might just be that you never keep a card long enough for it to fail.

I don't know, I keep my PC running all the time, if I game, it's long hours, I've build a cute little Small Form Factor System that most people would believe is impossible to assemble due to its size.
Lian Li PC-Q07 case w/ "minor" casemodding, Intel i5-2500k w/ Corsair H60 watercooling, GeForce 560 Ti w/ aftermarket cooling (Thermalright Shaman), Silverstone ST450SF psu.
Everybody tells me it must be running hot (it isn't) and that the 450w PSU can't power it hardware (it can). Build it in March 2011.

I've got a lot of experience in building system against "conventional wisdom" - which is mostly build upon web forum dogma. I've modded fanned PSUs for fanless operation, build my first watercooled system Christmas '01, when radiators were industrial parts and pumps were for aquariums.
The PSU hype started in 1999, when AMD recommended 300w PSUs for their then new Athlons. That was at a time, when PCs had 150w PSUs. They did it for the same reason that nVidia is recommending 750w PSUs for basically any gaming grade card: there are shitty power supplies out there and chances are that even a shitty 750w PSU will deliver 300w stably.
That doesn't mean we should be telling people to get shitty 750w PSUs, we should tell'em to get quality 500w PSUs.

I keep my hardware around for 2-3 years, then I pass it to my brother, then he passes it to my parents. The oldest system around was my 2006 rig (oc'ed Core 2 Duo, Radeon X1950XT). It was replaced two weeks ago with an Asus Nettop, since it was overkill for my parents and drew a shitload of juice.

Honestly, if hardware fails after 4 years or so, I wouldn't care, since it would be relatively worthless anyway. A PC is not a car.
Still, I had one motherboard fail me, and one hard disk. In 15 years of building PCs.

If RADEON (!) cards would fail all the time, don't you think that would have made the rounds by now? I mean, there are just two manufacturers out there (that matter), if one was producing 50% lemons, it should have come up.

 

[madster11]

Again, paying for windows 7 means you're spending $100 you don't need to spend. Installing windows 7 and installing drivers is piss easy my 50 year old dad who doesn't understand computers at all can do it. Hell, with windows update these days it'll install 1/2 the drivers you need if you get lazy.

This $100 could be (much) better spent on an SSD. Run the OS on the SSD, and when you understand just how good it is, wait impatiently like everyone else with an SSD for 500gb ones to be cheap.

Keep the TX-650. I have a TX-750 and it's simply nowhere near needed, even if i did crossfire.

Grab a cheap aftermarket heatsink. I have a CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 Evo, it being the cheapest good heatsink available at the time, and it's good enough that at 4.5ghz my CPU doesn't go above 55 degrees and it actually stuck with my i5 when i had it at 5.2ghz.
An extra $20 for 10-20 degrees less heat and higher overclock headroom is worth it.

 

[DrOswald]

Generally I have noticed that computers with Intel processors crash less often. Once again, I know this only from the practical experience I have had. I may be wrong.

You've been an "IT guy" for four years. How often do system crash in your vicinity? I haven't had computers crash regularly on me since XP SP1 or so. If they do crash, do you keep a log? Do you investigate how and why? If you can blame the CPU (more likely the chipset), do you keep a note of that?

With my department being responsible for around 80 laptops, 40 desktops (factory built), about 14 custom built desktops, and 15 servers, and with me being in charge of reactive maintenance for the department, I see crashes all the time. Most crashes never go reported and I rarely directly follow up on crashes unless I happen to be near by or it is a case of repeated crashing. To give an example of frequency, I have investigated 1 crash this week, non repeating. I dealt with one issue of repeated crashing last month, it turned out to be video card drivers causing the problem.

In the case of repeated crashing problems, I have been able to determine the direct cause was an AMD processor 3 times and an Intel processor once (the part required replacement in each case, and in each case it solved the issue) even though we use roughly equal amounts of each brand. Beyond that, I have had many discussions with the 15 or so computer experts that I work with on a regular basis (who all build their own machines as well, most for much longer than I have) and the consensus is that Intel processors are more stable than AMD processors. This hardly constitutes proof, however, just a general trend. I may still be wrong about this. And it is not a big deal, I still use AMD processors in my personal machine. But when someone asks my personal opinion on Intel vs. AMD, I am going to tell them my personal opinion on Intel vs AMD.

I don't know what to tell you, my practical experience is a 500 watt power supply can cause stability issues in a gaming machine.

A 1000w PSU can also cause instability. Shitty power supplies are shitty, no matter what number was printed on them.

but I still think spending $20 extra to get a better PSU than you need is a good idea.

550w is already better than the OP needs. He would get away with a *good* 400w PSU, I can guarantee this.

Rather than telling someone to look for the number on the label, it would be better to recommend them to buy a PSU from Seasonic, Corsair (mostly relabeled Seasonic anyway), Enermax, Super Flower or Antec.

Buying quality parts is a given. If you buy shitty parts you can expect a shitty computer. But I have seen a quality 500 watt psu cause stability issues. It was a Antec psu, I believe (I have only ever bought antec and corsair PSU's, on the recommendation of my boss, so it was one of those.) I replaced it temporarily with a 450 watt we had around the office (not sure on the brand) and it still had issues. I then got a 700 watt corair and the computer has run fine since. The 500 watt was then put into a non gaming machine and it did just fine until we retired that computer. It is entirely possible I got a slightly bad PSU, I admit that. But that is my point. Unless you can absolutely prove the part is defective and it is still under warranty, then you have to pay for a new part. Better to spend an additional $20 dollars buying a net than hoping everything works out. It is only %2 more. And if you want to add parts it is nice having a larger PSU than needed.

It might be that there is more physical space to search on the disk and and as the part slows down with age it is more noticeable. It might be that larger drives over heat more easily (and therefore wear down more quickly) because they has more disks spinning. It might be that larger drives have more parts and are therefore more likely to have a single part wear out in the same space of time. Once again, I don't know what causes this

So how did you notice that? In your four years of IT experience, did you benchmark new drives and then kept logging their performance over time, always observing usage patterns, and then compare the data of larger drives with data of smaller drives?
Or is it more "Hm, this 2 TB drive seems slow and I noticed that Steve's 2 TB is slow too... must be something about big drives then"

About a year and a half ago we (the programmers and IT department) decided we needed to speed up the process of compiling, the programmers were wasting way too much time waiting. So we all did a bunch of compiling tests on about 40 different machines we considered programer quality machines (each of us taking 2-3 machines), compared notes, and put together a build guideline for new machines. One of the oddities that we discovered was that larger hard drives were slightly slower, about %5-%10 slower, than smaller hard drives but only in cases where the computer was not brand new (we of course did standard maintenance like virus sweeps and defraging before we did all these tests so we could get as accurate results as possible with our very limited sample size.) Once again, these results are not conclusive, I may be wrong, but it is the best conclusion I can draw from the information I have.

I suppose I could just be really unlucky and I got 3 lemons in a row. or maybe you were really lucky and got the best parts in the lot. How often do you replace your cards? I tend to build an entire new computer every couple of years and pass my current rig onto my wife or a friend, so parts never get replaced until they fail. It might just be that you never keep a card long enough for it to fail.

I don't know, I keep my PC running all the time, if I game, it's long hours, I've build a cute little Small Form Factor System that most people would believe is impossible to assemble due to its size.
Lian Li PC-Q07 case w/ "minor" casemodding, Intel i5-2500k w/ Corsair H60 watercooling, GeForce 560 Ti w/ aftermarket cooling (Thermalright Shaman), Silverstone ST450SF psu.
Everybody tells me it must be running hot (it isn't) and that the 450w PSU can't power it hardware (it can). Build it in March 2011.

I've got a lot of experience in building system against "conventional wisdom" - which is mostly build upon web forum dogma. I've modded fanned PSUs for fanless operation, build my first watercooled system Christmas '01, when radiators were industrial parts and pumps were for aquariums.
The PSU hype started in 1999, when AMD recommended 300w PSUs for their then new Athlons. That was at a time, when PCs had 150w PSUs. They did it for the same reason that nVidia is recommending 750w PSUs for basically any gaming grade card: there are shitty power supplies out there and chances are that even a shitty 750w PSU will deliver 300w stably.
That doesn't mean we should be telling people to get shitty 750w PSUs, we should tell'em to get quality 500w PSUs.

I keep my hardware around for 2-3 years, then I pass it to my brother, then he passes it to my parents. The oldest system around was my 2006 rig (oc'ed Core 2 Duo, Radeon X1950XT). It was replaced two weeks ago with an Asus Nettop, since it was overkill for my parents and drew a shitload of juice.

Honestly, if hardware fails after 4 years or so, I wouldn't care, since it would be relatively worthless anyway. A PC is not a car.
Still, I had one motherboard fail me, and one hard disk. In 15 years of building PCs.

If RADEON (!) cards would fail all the time, don't you think that would have made the rounds by now? I mean, there are just two manufacturers out there (that matter), if one was producing 50% lemons, it should have come up.

In my case, it would be %100 lemons. But, like you said, that would be ridiculous. I don't know. Maybe I have terrible luck. I can only report what I observe. 3 failed radeon cards after a short period of time, no failed Nvidia cards.

I do seem to have a much higher hardware failure rate than you, which makes sense. It looks like I stress my computers much harder than you do. I mean, if you don't even know your usage patterns well enough to give them to me then you obviously don't use it that consistently, where as I am using mine for high stress activities around 3 hours a week day and longer on weekends. I'll be the first to admit that I beat the shit out of my computers.

Seeing as you use after factory cooling and I don't, that may be it. Perhaps radeon puts crappy fans on their cards and it just can't stand up to the aggressive use I put them through and Nvidia puts better fans on their cards?

 

[newwiseman]

I've been using a AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition processor for 4 years and I upgraded my video card to a 2gb Sapphire 6970 last year, Only reason I upgraded was one of my 4950's in crossfire started failing but two of those did 1080 for 3 years.

My two cents, If your concerned about money you'll get more bang for your buck from AMD; the x6's are great for the money, just stay away from bulldozer processors (such a let down). Go Intel if you want a more performance but for gaming the video card is way more important.

Check [a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/"]tomshardware.com[/a] for how the cards stack up with each other, toms does excellent benchmarking.

Sound cards are useless for anyone but sound engineers at this point and I doubt you'll invest in the speakers that will out do the quality of on board sound. Go for at least 8GB of RAM, unless you never quit apps you'll never use more than 6GB. Unless your doing crossfire/sli or are using a RAID the stock PSU will be more than enough.

It's a lot easier to decide how much you want to pay and they look for whats best in that price range than trying to hit a performance mark.