New build for 2017 -- starting advice appreciated

angerbeaver

Hi All,

I built my last two PCs which both lasted 5+ years. I'm hoping #3 lasts me the same amount of time but I figured I would do more research this time around.

I am a gamer and that will be the primary reason for the PC. Other functionality would be connect to work, watch Youtube videos, and streaming. Regular stuff really.

I would like a machine capable of playing current games on Max settings, Streaming, and watching my TV on PC monitor and watching my PC from my TV screen.

In this build I would like to also add a few of things I have not done. Use dual graphic cards (if significantly beneficial using current cards), liquid cooling (or whatever the best methods are today), additional audio (I have always used onboard) and use SSD for games while an HDD for normal storage.

Are there specific Motherboards/CPU/Video Cards that people believe I should be using? I used to read about Sandybridge and I don't know what has come after that or what benefits that has to its predecessors.

I know there is a lot going on here, but I'm just looking for any starting advice.

Thanks all!

Quizzical

What's your budget?  That has an enormous impact on what makes sense to do.

How soon are you going to buy?  There's a difference between needing to have the money spent by the end of the year and just starting to think about something you'll probably buy next summer.  AMD's Ryzen (CPU) and Vega (GPU) are coming reasonably soon; AMD has promised Q1 2017 for Ryzen.  Intel's Kaby Lake CPU is also coming soon, but it's basically Sky Lake plus a couple hundred MHz or so.  That doesn't do you any good if you really want something new this week, but could be important if you're inclined to wait a few months.

Multi-GPU for gaming is generally a bad idea unless one high end card just isn't good enough for you, and so you get two high end cards.  I could understand getting two GTX 1080s for SLI, but for two of anything less than that, I'd sooner go with a single faster card.  And that puts you well over $1000 on GPUs alone.

If you want to do liquid cooling for the fun of it, I won't try to dissuade you unless you're on a small budget.  But don't get the idea that you need to go with liquid cooling for performance reasons unless you're aiming for an unreasonably high overclock of the sort that is likely to damage hardware.

If you're a serious audiophile of the sort that can hear the difference between a $300 set of speakers and a $100 set of speakers, then maybe you look into a discrete sound card.  But for most people, the only real point of getting a discrete sound card is if the onboard sound fails and you'd rather not replace the motherboard entirely.

If you have the budget for the other frills you're talking about, then you definitely want an SSD.  Depending on how much capacity you need, it may make sense to go SSD only and skip the hard drive entirely.  That's certainly the case at 500 GB, and also at 1 TB on a large enough budget.  But if you need 6 TB of space and will actually use that much, then that's what hard drives are for.

Ridelynn

Sandy Bridge is Intel's second generation Core processor. (the 2000 series). They are up to the "7th" generation now (Kaby Lake, due to have desktop SKUs released very soon). Despite the jumps in generations, Intel CPUs haven't got all that much faster, so a Sandy Bridge is still competitive today if you have one. Skylake is the currently sold generation (6th), and for all intents and purposes, it's the same CPU as Kaby Lake (the 7th), just with worse on-chip graphics (which most gamers don't use anyway) -so if Kaby gets delayed for some odd reason, for gaming purposes Skylake is essentially the same thing.

That being said, if your going to be dropping $350 on a new CPU, and a Sandy and Kaby cost roughly the same, there aren't a lot of reasons to go with Sandy over Skylake/Kaby.

There are also the "Extreme" processors that go into Socket 2011 slots. They are the higher-core count CPUs (4 to 10 core), they don't have onboard graphics and use quad-channel RAM. For gaming purposes, they have more PCI lanes, which helps them support multi-GPU a bit better. But aside from costing a lot more they won't really run games any faster than the consumer chipsets (as core counts go up, clock speed tends to go down, which means some of the 8 and ten core CPUs actually game slower). Also, the X edition CPUs usually run a generation or two behind whatever the consumer CPUs are being sold as. Some gamers with money to burn will invest in this type of setup.

AMD's newest CPU, Ryzen, is due out soon. There have been a lot of tantalizing leaks about it's performance, but not a lot of official numbers. I don't know that I would hold my breath on this - if it does end up being competitive it ~could~ shake prices up a bit, but AMD's recent history has been to way over-hype their products and the real-world performance ends up being somewhat lacking, which has more or less delegated recent AMD CPUs to budget builds. Maybe Ryzen will be different...

SSD - yes. No question about that. You want one. Even if it's "only" SATA3.

Graphics - You might be in the price range where nVidia makes the most sense today - AMD doesn't have anything yet that competes with the 1070/1080/TitanX (the $400+ budget range). Again, AMD has a something new on the horizon (Vega) that may shake things up a bit, but my same advice from AMD about CPUs applies here. AMD is very competitive in the mid and low range markets though - their RX470 and 480 are very good performers versus nVidia's similarly-priced 1060s.

Past that your build is mostly a matter of preference.

Malabooga

1. "all current games on max settings" is somewhat of fools goal. Theres no GPU that can do that at 60FPS. Why? Various bottlenecks and broken/unoptimized games are in abundance. So in that light recommending anything but highest GPU that costs 1200$....OTOH if you are aware of these things, and are willing to make compromises in few games, RX480 4GB for 190$ will suffice for 1080p. Then in 2,5 years you buy new GPU in same price range and youll be much better off than shelling out 400+$ for GPU today. And with Freesync monitor, everything between 30/40-60 FPS will be buttery smooth.

2. Theres new CPUs just around the corner, Intels Kaby Lake (although not any better than Skylake from what weve seen so far) and AMDs Ryzen which for now looks promising. Its worth to wait month or two to see whats cooking especially if youre buying long term

3. SSD is great, 500GB SSD+1TB HDD is good combo.

4. Liquid cooling is easy today, plenty of decent AIO offerings that wont break the bank, i like NZXT Kraken or Arctic Cooling liquid freezer. Just make sure your case can house 2 fan radiator (generally space for 2x120/140mm fans). I dont recommend liquid cooler for GPU as you void warranty if you do that.

5. mobos, well, you need certain platform for certain CPU, not much to think about in that departement, just which manufacturer and how much youre willing to pay for motherboard. Generally high end montherboards are not worth the money unless youre interested in extreme overclocking.

6. stick to 1080p. Going higher resolutions makes expenses for hardware go up exponentionally.

Muke

Quizzical said:

What's your budget?  That has an enormous impact on what makes sense to do.

How soon are you going to buy?  There's a difference between needing to have the money spent by the end of the year and just starting to think about something you'll probably buy next summer.  AMD's Ryzen (CPU) and Vega (GPU) are coming reasonably soon; AMD has promised Q1 2017 for Ryzen.  Intel's Kaby Lake CPU is also coming soon, but it's basically Sky Lake plus a couple hundred MHz or so.  That doesn't do you any good if you really want something new this week, but could be important if you're inclined to wait a few months.

What pricerange is that Zen gonna be in?

Ppl still don't know how it is gonna perform, so will have to wait till the reviews come in.
(I don't jump on hypetrains created by the owners)

Plus the Zen is compared to a $1000+ Intel CPU, is the Zen going to be a $1000 range CPU too? Plus the hype will be shortlived in that case. Very few ppl buy a $1000 CPU.

Or are there going to be stripped cheaper versions of it as well, like Intel's I3 and I5 CPU's?

What about the fewer memory lanes?

How is it going to perform competing with those cheaper Intel CPU's?

Does AMD have the motherboards to back it up? Also a very big problem in the past with AMD CPU's.

All things to consider.

If the OP wants to buy NOW: Skylake is still a very good CPU, if he/she can wait for 3-4 months; just wait till Zen is out (all possible versions) and wait for (unbiased) reviews to come in. And possible wait for Intel's reaction. (better CPU's/cheaper prices etc)

The CPU does look very promising and let's hope it will be a -affordable- contender to Intel's supremacy on the CPU market.

Quizzical

Muke said:

Quizzical said:

What's your budget?  That has an enormous impact on what makes sense to do.

How soon are you going to buy?  There's a difference between needing to have the money spent by the end of the year and just starting to think about something you'll probably buy next summer.  AMD's Ryzen (CPU) and Vega (GPU) are coming reasonably soon; AMD has promised Q1 2017 for Ryzen.  Intel's Kaby Lake CPU is also coming soon, but it's basically Sky Lake plus a couple hundred MHz or so.  That doesn't do you any good if you really want something new this week, but could be important if you're inclined to wait a few months.

What pricerange is that Zen gonna be in?

Ppl still don't know how it is gonna perform, so will have to wait till the reviews come in.
(I don't jump on hypetrains created by the owners)

Plus the Zen is compared to a $1000+ Intel CPU, is the Zen going to be a $1000 range CPU too? Plus the hype will be shortlived in that case. Very few ppl buy a $1000 CPU.

Or are there going to be stripped cheaper versions of it as well, like Intel's I3 and I5 CPU's?

What about the fewer memory lanes?

How is it going to perform competing with those cheaper Intel CPU's?

Does AMD have the motherboards to back it up? Also a very big problem in the past with AMD CPU's.

All things to consider.

If the OP wants to buy NOW: Skylake is still a very good CPU, if he/she can wait for 3-4 months; just wait till Zen is out (all possible versions) and wait for (unbiased) reviews to come in. And possible wait for Intel's reaction. (better CPU's/cheaper prices etc)

The CPU does look very promising and let's hope it will be a -affordable- contender to Intel's supremacy on the CPU market.

Zen is much more of an unknown than Kaby Lake, of course.  That said, it would be absolutely shocking if AMD doesn't have any intentions of competing in the sub-$1000 CPU market.  Part of why those Intel CPUs are priced so high is that Intel has monopoly pricing power on that portion of the market.  There's a ton of room for AMD to undercut that and still have something highly profitable.

If AMD's history is anything to go by, there will surely be cheaper salvage parts, too.  I don't know how they plan to do this, but having 4-core, 6-core, and 8-core variants would be consistent with what they've done in the past.

The reason Intel gave their higher end CPUs such a wide memory bus is that they had ambitions of putting a 22-core CPU in the same socket:

http://ark.intel.com/products/96899/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2699A-v4-55M-Cache-2_40-GHz

There's a good case to be made that dual channel DDR4 is enough bandwidth to feed an 8-core CPU for most uses.  That's a much weaker case for a 22-core CPU.

In the past, Intel generally hasn't slashed prices to compete with AMD.  Until fairly recently, AMD's production capabilities were limited that, no matter how good the Athlon 64 was, they couldn't sell any more than they could produce.  So while Intel didn't have a true monopoly, they were guaranteed to have something like 90% of the market and could price their CPUs accordingly.  Once AMD finally had greater production capability via Global Foundries, they simply weren't competitive on performance.  Hopefully Zen will have neither of those problems, and Intel will have good reason to slash prices to compete for the first time ever.  Which doesn't mean they will.

PsYcHoGBR

I would wait a couple months as the new AMD Ryzen is looking good. Even if you still want Intel this release will probably push Intel's prices down.

https://mspoweruser.com/leaked-benchmark-shows-amds-new-ryzen-is-comparable-to-intels-1000-core-i7-6900k-processor/

Ozmodan

I would be very careful about overclocking.  Good way to shorten the life of your system.  I would limit your overclocking to 20-25% at most.  Most games don't use the cpu that heavily either, you won't notice much difference with a i7 clocked at 4ghz than one at 5.  There is nothing worse than trying to figure out what broke in an expensive gaming computer without expensive testing equipment.  Even my serious overclocking friends have scaled back because their expensive computers eventually fail before they are ready to build another.

Personally I like a multi-monitor set up and if you want better than 1080p that can get very expensive.  You really don't need a sli setup for 1080p.  For me, I really don't see much difference in the high resolutions unless playing on a really big screen.  Just a lone 1080 will do wonders for your games, adding a second one will not double the speed.

As everyone has said, your budget will determine what you will build.  

Cleffy

The mobo and CPU are doable now, but not really the GPU. The Core i5 6500 and mobo run about $200 ~ $250 which won't really change with AMDs Ryzen. As far as GPU this generation I would avoid nVidia. They need an architecture update to have a competitive product. They may roll out with a more competitive architecture around the same time as Vega. The 1000 series might play last generation games well, but you will regret buying a $600 GPU when its shown they do dismally on current generation games. From the recent Titan it looks like they corrected some issues with their architecture that will make their next generation much more worthwhile.