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Building a Gaming PC

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I have the 1080... I have it because I wanted a no compromise system. It's a great card. Runs colder than most; it's ultra-quiet (you don't hear it), and it's the fastest graphics card on the planet other than the new Titans. I have mine overclocked to 2.1 ghz and +500Mhz mem-clock (can't remember the base clock). The fucking thing screams.

To give you an idea as to why I got a 1080, its because I'm running at 3440x1440 @ 100hz with GSync. You can only do that on high settings with a 1080 or 2x980ti's in SLI or again, the new Titans.

Whats your opinion on 2 graphics cards vs 1 high end one? What would you say are the pros and cons?
 
Whats your opinion on 2 graphics cards vs 1 high end one? What would you say are the pros and cons?

I'm almost always going to go with the 1 high-end card if the price/performance graph is roughly proportional.. SLI/Crossfire doesn't double performance, nor does it really work with all game engines. There are some power-user reasons to have more than one graphics card like virtualization; but if that's not something you're going to be doing then you're better off with a single card.

If we're talking about the 1070 vs the 1080, and you are budget constrained, then go with the 1070. Keep in mind that AMD's Vega and RyZen may release in Q1 of 2017, both of which will massively disrupt the current monopoly by Intel/nVidia; so if you wait, you'll likely see the 1080ti released sooner rather than later which will drop the 1080's price by several hundred dollars.

@TyGuy actually advised me not to buy the 980ti, and to wait for the 1080.. I didn't wanna wait - but I did.. Was great advice..

I'm not sure when Vega drops, but if both Vega and RyZen drop in Q1, you'll likely be at an advantage if you were to wait -- that's what worked for me (not getting lower prices, but, better quality product).
 
I'm caustiously optimistic about amd ryzen. This wouldn't be the first time amd overhyped and underdelivered. I really, really hope it's as good as these early Benches are saying. If nothing else to give intel a swift kick in the pants. They've been sitting in their ass for awhile basking in their huge lead.
 
I'm caustiously optimistic about amd ryzen. This wouldn't be the first time amd overhyped and underdelivered. I really, really hope it's as good as these early Benches are saying. If nothing else to give intel a swift kick in the pants. They've been sitting in their ass for awhile basking in their huge lead.

Agreed...

I will say, I find the early benches very hard to believe; essentially pacing their flagship Ryzen with the 6900k/5960x; clock for clock. Now the 5960x is the better chip given OC headroom, but, if RyZen can do all of this at only 95W TDP, then it's hard to imagine there isn't ample room for improvement to either meet or exceed the 5960x.

AMD could be pulling a fast one with this early data... We'll see though.
 
My friend is planning on building his first pc with around a 2k budget. I told him to get advice before he goes through with it.
His build :
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/c443WX

Notes:

1) Swap out the cooler for a Corsair H110i; thank me later when you see you're stable overclocks.
2) A $2000 computer with an H170 motherboard. That's no good.. ONLY get a Z170 mobo. Keep looking.
3) Why is he getting an 850 Evo over SATA bus? Nonono.. Again, get the Z170 and get an M.2 Samsung 950 Pro or wait for the 960 Pros next week (supposedly).. Nonetheless do not buy a SATA disk for a $2k build. M.2 runs over PCI x4
4) $2k build.. get the GTX 1080 for $200 more and O/C it to 2.0ghz.. ;)
5) The computer isn't $2k, you've got $500+ in the dual monitor setup.... yet another reason to want the 1080.
 
Notes:

1) Swap out the cooler for a Corsair H110i; thank me later when you see you're stable overclocks.
2) A $2000 computer with an H170 motherboard. That's no good.. ONLY get a Z170 mobo. Keep looking.
3) Why is he getting an 850 Evo over SATA bus? Nonono.. Again, get the Z170 and get an M.2 Samsung 950 Pro or wait for the 960 Pros next week (supposedly).. Nonetheless do not buy a SATA disk for a $2k build. M.2 runs over PCI x4
4) $2k build.. get the GTX 1080 for $200 more and O/C it to 2.0ghz.. ;)
5) The computer isn't $2k, you've got $500+ in the dual monitor setup.... yet another reason to want the 1080.
Good shit. I'll let him know.
 
Looking to build something within the next month or two here. I really only play Blizzard games for the most part, but I don't want it to be a weak PC. Also hoping to keep it under $800 since I just dropped $900 on a laptop. :chuckle: Any suggestions on parts?

This is what a friend put together for me: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/jRQv2R but I have no idea what Micro ATX is or why he went with that. I also wouldn't mind something a little cheaper than even that, since that Micro ATX requires a new case as well which adds more money. I think I'm fine with my current case to be honest.
 
Looking to build something within the next month or two here. I really only play Blizzard games for the most part, but I don't want it to be a weak PC. Also hoping to keep it under $800 since I just dropped $900 on a laptop. :chuckle: Any suggestions on parts?

This is what a friend put together for me: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/jRQv2R but I have no idea what Micro ATX is or why he went with that. I also wouldn't mind something a little cheaper than even that, since that Micro ATX requires a new case as well which adds more money. I think I'm fine with my current case to be honest.
Micro ATX is just a smaller form factor, so instead of having a huge PC, you would have a smaller one. It's probably a little cheaper to go bigger and you also get more options. Oh, and it is way easier to build/improve a PC built in a larger case.

16gb of RAM seems like it might be a little overkill.

EDIT: Here's a good visual comparison of form factors:

xcomputer-case-sizes.jpg.pagespeed.ic.LglmnVI5Qh.jpg
 
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Looking to build something within the next month or two here. I really only play Blizzard games for the most part, but I don't want it to be a weak PC. Also hoping to keep it under $800 since I just dropped $900 on a laptop. :chuckle: Any suggestions on parts?

This is what a friend put together for me: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/jRQv2R but I have no idea what Micro ATX is or why he went with that. I also wouldn't mind something a little cheaper than even that, since that Micro ATX requires a new case as well which adds more money. I think I'm fine with my current case to be honest.

A MicroATX motherboard will generally fit into larger cases, FWIW...

However, if you don't need the PC right away; you would save tremendously by waiting until mid-March. GTX 1080 Ti releases; and people will be dumping their 1080s and 1070s to upgrade. Ryzen releases in March, and AMD Vega will be coming out in May.

Ryzen and Vega will start a price war with Intel & nVidia both -- this is why competition is a good thing.. we haven't had any sort of competition in this space for years.

Expect prices in March/April to be 20-30% less than they are now, and in May, quite a few things will be a great deal cheaper... But 5-6 months is an eternity.
If it were me though, I wouldn't build a PC right now.. The AMD Ryzen chip looks like a gamechanger. Not that it'll be more powerful than Intel Xeon's that many people are using now (including myself), but it looks like it's kind of shitting on Skylake and Kaby Lake chips. So...... given AMD's track record, we might be entering a new Athlon-era of dominance in the PC market with AMD having the best offerings for 90% of users as they did in the original AMD K5 and Athlon 64 days.
 
@Chris

That PC build is no good... don't buy it.

1) The CPU is fine but games these days CAN use hyper-threading.. People haven't caught up to this notion yet.. I'm not sure the difference in price point for the i7, but, I wouldn't buy an i5 these days unless I had no alternative. Check out an i7 Kaby or evenn Skylake instead. For the Skylake it's slightly slower single-threaded performance per clock but you'll get 30% more performance multi-threaded.

2) The motherboard is garbage. Pass. Only get a Z170 for reasons I'll make clear later.

3) Not sure why you'd want to get such a great processor and RAM that is so slow? You're literally getting JEDEC spec'd DIMMs while getting a CPU that can easily be overclocked. The price/GB here is important.. You could get faster RAM for your overclock and get real performance gains with negligible price increases.

4) Not sure why people are buying SATA based HDDs any more... ? The hard drive is the biggest bottleneck on the PC; so you want it to be the fastest component you can afford.. Don't go with 2.5" SATA disk, get an M.2 NVMe Samsung 960 Pro from Amazon. This is one of the bigger reasons to get the Z170 instead of the H-class since you'll have DMI 3.0 which means your HDD will have R/W speeds hitting the max bus speed of 3.6 GBytes/sec on certain workloads.... Thank me later. ;)

And if you wanna save some money; get the 960 Evo.. wanna save some more money, get the 950 Pro... wanna save some more, get the 950 Evo... Don't buy a SATA disk unless it's for truly mass storage. I treat SATA disks these days like fucking tape backup. :chuckle:

5) The 1060 is a ripoff.. Do not buy this graphics card.. Never buy GFX cards in this class unless you're talking about a laptop.. Either spend the additional money on a new 1070 or buy a used 980 Ti.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-GeForce...108217?hash=item3d30957cb9:g:ZaAAAOSw5cNYeqCQ

That's $325 and will run circles around the $260 1060 you have here.

Still.. You'd be much better off with the 1070 and having no regrets for the additional $150... Skimp somewhere else; but not on the graphics card.

6) Do you use CDs?

7) Take this $100 for Windows out... I'll explain how you can get a valid Windows license for about $15 instead of $100. I'm using a 100% genuine, auth'd Windows 10 Pro system and I paid $12 for the (dual) license. Can explain later.
 
@Chris

That PC build is no good... don't buy it.

1) The CPU is fine but games these days CAN use hyper-threading.. People haven't caught up to this notion yet.. I'm not sure the difference in price point for the i7, but, I wouldn't buy an i5 these days unless I had no alternative. Check out an i7 Kaby or evenn Skylake instead. For the Skylake it's slightly slower single-threaded performance per clock but you'll get 30% more performance multi-threaded.

2) The motherboard is garbage. Pass. Only get a Z170 for reasons I'll make clear later.

3) Not sure why you'd want to get such a great processor and RAM that is so slow? You're literally getting JEDEC spec'd DIMMs while getting a CPU that can easily be overclocked. The price/GB here is important.. You could get faster RAM for your overclock and get real performance gains with negligible price increases.

4) Not sure why people are buying SATA based HDDs any more... ? The hard drive is the biggest bottleneck on the PC; so you want it to be the fastest component you can afford.. Don't go with 2.5" SATA disk, get an M.2 NVMe Samsung 960 Pro from Amazon. This is one of the bigger reasons to get the Z170 instead of the H-class since you'll have DMI 3.0 which means your HDD will have R/W speeds hitting the max bus speed of 3.6 GBytes/sec on certain workloads.... Thank me later. ;)

And if you wanna save some money; get the 960 Evo.. wanna save some more money, get the 950 Pro... wanna save some more, get the 950 Evo... Don't buy a SATA disk unless it's for truly mass storage. I treat SATA disks these days like fucking tape backup. :chuckle:

5) The 1060 is a ripoff.. Do not buy this graphics card.. Never buy GFX cards in this class unless you're talking about a laptop.. Either spend the additional money on a new 1070 or buy a used 980 Ti.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/MSI-GeForce...108217?hash=item3d30957cb9:g:ZaAAAOSw5cNYeqCQ

That's $325 and will run circles around the $260 1060 you have here.

Still.. You'd be much better off with the 1070 and having no regrets for the additional $150... Skimp somewhere else; but not on the graphics card.

6) Do you use CDs?

7) Take this $100 for Windows out... I'll explain how you can get a valid Windows license for about $15 instead of $100. I'm using a 100% genuine, auth'd Windows 10 Pro system and I paid $12 for the (dual) license. Can explain later.

Thanks. I've been out of the PC parts game for an eternity. None of this means much to me. :chuckle: But I am definitely willing to wait a few months to build, at least I think so. My PC has been acting like trash for months now and I've even formatted it multiple times but to no avail. Don't have a ton of patience to sit down and price shop and do a shit load of research which is why I posted here since I know there's people here with that knowledge base like yourself who know a hundred times as much as I do about this stuff.

Keep in mind I'm really not looking to throw a ton of money into this. I play Blizz games, that's it. And if you know them, you know they aren't terribly demanding. Doesn't mean I want a potato obviously, but you get my drift.
 
So my laptop lately is pixelating and then crashing.. if I try immediately to turn it back on its black screen. If I wait sixty seconds, it'll load again.



Pattern I've found is that it's really quick if I stream something (no cavs :() and 50/50 if I'm watching a downloaded video.


Research I've done say graphics card.. the battery falls out easily, I'm thinking maybe power problem also might create problem.. another issue I read is that it's related to ram..

Opinions?
 
So my laptop lately is pixelating and then crashing.. if I try immediately to turn it back on its black screen. If I wait sixty seconds, it'll load again.



Pattern I've found is that it's really quick if I stream something (no cavs :() and 50/50 if I'm watching a downloaded video.


Research I've done say graphics card.. the battery falls out easily, I'm thinking maybe power problem also might create problem.. another issue I read is that it's related to ram..

Opinions?
Sounds like the graphics chip could be going out. Do you know if it's intel, nvidia or amd?
 

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