So, I want to build my first gaming PC

[Mike Laserbeam]

Hi there Escapiads.

I've been a gamer for bloody ages now (Approx. 18 years) and I've played LOADS of PC games.
But I recently noticed, I can't run about half of my Steam library. And the other half doesn't run at all well.

So, what does one do in that situation?

Build a gaming PC.

Now, I am a complete idiot with these sorts of things, so getting to the point I'm at now took ages.
But, I've put together a list of components and stuff that I'd like to buy.

Thing is, I've no idea whether these things will work together. Or whether they'll be any good for me...
I have a budget of just over £1000.

I would really appreciate it if anyone could take a look at my list and tell me whether:

1) A computer built using my choices would work
2) That computer would run games well (e.g. run Skyrim on the highest settings)
3) I've missed anything
4) I could have chosen better components

Seriously, if anyone even pays any attention to this, THANKS IN ADVANCE.

My list is linked to below for your perusal:

My lovely eBuyer list [http://www.ebuyer.com/lists/list/8539]

 

[oplinger]

You can ditch the heatsink and the arctic silver. May as well up to an i7.

Unless you really screw it up, the processor should come with a heatsink rated for it under a full load.

But, not a bad build. I'd say a little too expensive, but I have no idea about prices over there.

Everything should work well together.

 

[Mike Laserbeam]

I would drop to a 7850, the extra power for £50 isn't worth it in my eyes.

750W is hilariously overpowered. Drop to 500W, crossfire isn't worth it.

Change to an IPS monitor.

You may want to get a cheaper motherboard and change to a 670.

So there isn't much of a difference between the 7870 and 7850?

Seriously? 750W is too much...?
I have to admit I was just trying to be safe with the high amount, I'm glad to hear I don't have to go that high!

IPS huh? I'll look into that!


Thanks, both of you!

 

[Xpheyel]

Heh. I just built a rig using the same motherboard, processor, psu, and a hyper 212 evo+. Thus far performance has been admirable, I haven't tried to push it very hard yet in terms of clock settings and benchmarks (laziness). Skyrim is pretty forgiving, even my old computer could play it with ultra-textures.

The arctic silver is probably redundant, Coolermaster's paste is was fine for my Evo. I don't know if their directions have gotten better, though, so I suggest watching a video on how to install your heat sink. The aftermarket heat sink alone is probably overkill unless you're going to overclock.

The P8Z77-V had a couple of minor pitfalls:
1) It took a ridiculous amount of force to get the mounting screw out of the wifi card's bracket the first time.
2) For the price, it lacks a debug read out. Those can be particularly helpful. Instead you get a handful of LEDs and beep codes to debug errors.
3) Speaking of which, I encountered a bizarre hardware component failure error during set up. Re-seating my video card fixed it.

Purely on me, the RAM slots actually have a nice system which I misunderstood. In any event, it's easy to leave the bottom of a DIMM slightly unseated (which will get you a memory bad LED during POST), you have to look closely to see it. It turns out it has a clip on the bottom that moves out of the way, so some mild additional pressure will cause the DIMM to seat fully and the clip to snap in place after you've latched it in on top.

Otherwise, the motherboard has been fine. The software, including the driver for the built in Wi-Fi card, in particular has worked great with Windows 7. A relief as I've been plagued by Wi-Fi driver and reception issues with Linksys/XP/Vista.

I would guess that 750W is overkill for what is listed unless you want to leave Crossfire open as an upgrade option. The modular cables are great. Even so, cable management is a pain when building for the first time. I managed to get all mine tucked out of the way in my Arc Midi but even it needed some pressure to get the side plate back on. Probably, being willing to deal with cable ties will solve that. I avoided them due to the hassle I had of cutting them in my old rig to replace parts.

One thing I will advocate is some kind of dual storage. I've currently got a 64-GB SSD as my system/boot disk (also makes some use of the new SATA ports on the P8Z77) while the games live on a regular HD. The SSD (and all the saves in my user folder) is automatically backed up to that. I've actually lost a hard drive (stupid Barracuda 720.11 firmware bug). Also, the boot time is fantastic.

 

[ohnoitsabear]

I would ask yourself, do you really need a blu-ray drive? They're probably five times as expensive as a DVD drive, and rewritable Blu-rays are waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too expensive to be practical for back-up (plus, external hard drives work far better for back up than optical disks), leaving the only real use for them being watching Blu-ray movies.

If you plan on using your computer as your primary movie watching device, I would say go for the Blu-ray drive. However, if you don't, they really aren't worth it. Plus, if you do find that you are in serious need of a blu-ray drive, it's pretty much the easiest upgrade you can do.

Then, you can use the money you save from the blu-ray drive into a better graphics card.

Also, regarding graphics cards, they really don't need to have any more than 1GB of RAM (and even that's probably pushing it, but good luck finding a decent card with less). Once you have enough RAM for something, adding more won't increase performance (this applies to all RAM, not just video RAM).

 

[oplinger]

I would drop to a 7850, the extra power for £50 isn't worth it in my eyes.

750W is hilariously overpowered. Drop to 500W, crossfire isn't worth it.

Change to an IPS monitor.

You may want to get a cheaper motherboard and change to a 670.

So there isn't much of a difference between the 7870 and 7850?

Seriously? 750W is too much...?
I have to admit I was just trying to be safe with the high amount, I'm glad to hear I don't have to go that high!

IPS huh? I'll look into that!


Thanks, both of you!

You could run 2 7870's on 750W quite comfortably.

You can overclock a 7850 to stock 7950 levels, the 7870 isn't that much better. Not worth £50 extra anyway.

Though don't rule out downsizing your build and getting a 670. Doing things like downsizing your PSU, switching to a DVD player, maybe getting a cheaper case or a cheaper motherboard and you could easily get a GTX 670.

So, I'll go with you on the i5, because the power differences between some i5s and i7s are negligible. Though you'd never the less get better performance out of an i7.

I can't really agree on downgrading his power supply, for 2 reasons. 1 at 750 watts, he can take whatever he can throw at it, if he should ever need to upgrade.
2. If he ends up using 400 watts of a 500 watt power supply, it will degrade much faster than a 750 watt PSU, so the longevity of using the 750 watt makes it a far superior purchase.

Also downgrading the video card? No.

The 7850 would handle things fine, but 50 dollars for a significant upgrade in fillrates and FLOPS (especially texture filrates) they use about the same wattage, so the 7870 is more efficient, getting more GFLOPS/w.

You also say he can overclock the 7850 to 7950 levels. Big deal. The extra Hz you get from overclocking is not what gives you performance in a video card. The architectures differences bring out more performance than just a few Hz. (What you're saying is 50 Hz in memory speeds is going to give him an almost a 39% increase in performance. And that's with lower core clock speeds.)

 

[octafish]

I notice a lack of storage in your list. Carrying over the HDD from your current PC I'm going to assume. You have an overclocking chip so I assume (again) you will overclock it? If so, that heatsink will do nicely and you won't need the Arctic Silver the supplied paste will be fine I think you'll even be fine with a single fan on it with Ivy Bridge (They run cooler than the Sandy's and don't overclock as high).

Other people's advice regarding GPUs is good, don't buy the fastest single card in a line-up, buy the second fastest and overclock it. Try to get a good non reference cooler version, they will be quieter and allow easier OC'ing.
I'd say get a 600ish PSU in case you want to add a bunch of discs, sound cards and tv tuners and the like later down the track. But I always over compensate with PSU's after having lost a couple of PCs due to dodgy ones.

I've just switched from onboard sound and a logitech 5.1 speaker set to a Asus Xonar sound card and ATH AD700 headphones and WOW. The pseudo surround is better than the actual 5.1 setup, if a little light in the bass.

 

[Mike Laserbeam]

Jeez.
I didn't expect this much help!

I really wish I had time to respond to you guys before work, but I'll have a read and reply this evening!

Thanks a lot guys!


P.s. I have an HDD sitting around I can use, and I've got a 2TB external harddrive

 

[TrevHead]

Spoiler: HP prebuilt rant

The next PC I get I will be going back to building, the last 2 were prebuilt, the first a Median was quite good, my current PC an HP6320uk is the worst POS i've ever seen, underpowerd GPU, loads of crappy software / trials and an 1TB Hd with just C: drive and back up, no win7 instalation disk but then again it's my fault for not correctly doing my homework because my old PC had failed and I needed a new rig ASAP. Damn PC World salesman flat out lied to me aswell telling me the i5-650 was a real 4 core processor when infact its 2 cores and 4 threads with a waste of space on chip gpx.

Anyway rant over, I sort of have a question myself (I don't mean to hijack the OP's thread but i'm thinking it might be info useful to him aswell)

From what I understand is that most PCs don't make use of the features of PCI express 3.0, would that be down to the chipsets in some 3.0 mobos or CPUs?

I would rather buy a GPX card with 1 DVI and 1 VGA output, so I can also plug in to my TV or my old 19" CRT for retrogaming, would I lose any picture quality if I just plumed for a x2DVI card and DVI to VGA adaptor?

 

[Ravesy]

As people have said, you wont need the Arctic Silver. If your not overclocking, you can drop the heatsink too, the stock heatsink does just fine.

If you did want to save some money, then maybe a 650 watt one would be better, its more than you need and still gives a little breathing room in case you need it in future, and im saying this out of experience.

In most tests at 1920x1080 theres around 5-10 fps more for 7870's v 7850's so there isnt a lot in it, but that said, 5fps can make a big difference if its from 25 to 30.

If youve got the money, stick with the 7870 or better, if you think you might be wanting a couple of good nights out and the £50-80 take Matthews advice and get the 7850 instead, theres no massively bad option where your going to wake up in the morning and scream "Oh god what have i done!" unless all the money goes on alcohol that is...

EDIT: As someone else mentioned, given your getting all high quality stuff, it might be a good idea to spend £70 on a SSD to use for your boot drive, no point in only doing half a job .

 

[Mike Laserbeam]

You could run 2 7870's on 750W quite comfortably.

You can overclock a 7850 to stock 7950 levels, the 7870 isn't that much better. Not worth £50 extra anyway.

Though don't rule out downsizing your build and getting a 670. Doing things like downsizing your PSU, switching to a DVD player, maybe getting a cheaper case or a cheaper motherboard and you could easily get a GTX 670.

You can overclock, but overclocking inevitably shortens life, even with after-market cooling.

Although I would recommend carrying out these changes. I would recommend this motherboard: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Z77-Extreme4-Motherboard-Supports-CrossFireX/dp/B007KTY4A6/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1343135827&sr=8-1

Of course it's going to shorten the life of it but the cards last for ages anyway, you'll still get well over a generation out of it.

Hell, we have a card lying around so long that we've forgotten where it ever came from. Still works though.

Our X1300 Pro still works and is being used in our i5 machine while our 7850 gets repaired.

I was thinking of going for a 7850, but now I've seen this:

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Graphics+Cards+-+GPUs/Graphics+Cards+-+AMD/Radeon+HD+7950

Am I being an idiot, or would these be better than either the 7850/7870?
Plus, would they fit my current selections?

 

[Mike Laserbeam]

Oh man, way to double post!

May as well use this one to ask what anyone thinks of this slightly updated version of my list
http://www.ebuyer.com/lists/list/8539?%20UGC