Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
New desktop advice
I recently posted about a gaming laptop and ended up being persueded into buying a new desktop anyway. So here is what I'm looking at. Trying to keep it under $1k:
- CAS: Thermaltake Commander Mid-Tower Gaming Case (Black Color)
- CD: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW Drive (BLACK COLOR)
- CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-3570K 3.40 GHz 6MB Intel Smart Cache LGA1155 (All Venom OC Certified)
- FAN: Asetek 510LC Liquid Cooling System 120MM Radiator & Fan (Enhanced Cooling Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA) (Single Standard 120MM Fan)
- HDD: 120 GB SAMSUNG 840 Series SATA-III 6.0Gb/s SSD - 530MB/s Read & 130MB/s Write
- HDD2: 500GB SATA-III 3.0Gb/s 16MB Cache 7200RPM HDD [+67] (Single Drive)
- IUSB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports
- MEMORY: 8GB (4GBx2) DDR3/1600MHz Dual Channel Memory (Corsair or Major Brand)
- MONITOR: 24" Widescreen 1920x1080 ASUS VS247H-P LCD
- MOTHERBOARD: [CrossFireX] GIGABYTE Z77-DS3H Intel Z77 Chipset DDR3 ATX Mainboard w/ IRST, 7.1 HD Audio, GbLAN, 2x Gen3 PCIe x16, 2 PCIe x1 & 2 PCI (Pro OC Certified)
- NETWORK: Onboard Gigabit LAN Network
- OS: Microsoft® Windows 8 (64-bit Edition)
- POWERSUPPLY: 500 Watts - Corsair CX500 V2 80 Plus Certified Power Supply
- SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
- VIDEO: AMD Radeon HD 7770 1GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card
Right now it is 970. Seem all right?
Comments
Thought about an IPS monitor instead of an LCD? Something like a Dell UltraSharp U2312HM for ex.
What is this systems primary use? If it is gaming you should really get a better GPU the 7770 is a low-mid card.
I would drop the SSD and spend that money on a better GPU. You can add an SSD later on when you have more money to spend.
Do you plan to overclock? If you don't, then I would probably drop the liquid cooling for an aftermarket fan.
Do you live near a microcenter? If you do, then you can pick up the cpu for a really good deal.
That would save you about a $150 that could be put towards a better gpu.
Are you buying these parts and then building the computer on your own? If so I would get the Hyper 212 evo cpu cooler and not the water cooling system you have listed ( if it is a pre-built system most of the time they don't let you change to a air cooler due to the fact that a big CPU cooler hanging off the mobo is more likely to break something when its shipped to you)
If you are using a company to build and send the computer to you, could you give us the website maybe we could help you pick the best parts (that they provide) for the price for your uses.
That said you can get good deals if you who around on 660s and 7870s too.
Given your widescreen monitor I wouldn't get a 7770, get at least a 7850. A 7770 would be your bottleneck with such a system.
Don't bother with liquid cooling,you don't need it, just get an after market cpu fan and a couple of case fans.
You could go with a cheaper monitor, Aoc make decent enough cheap monitors, they're a bit flimsy and wobbly, but the picture is pretty good.
Unless you plan on using xfire and dual carding, you could get a cheaper motherboard. You can't really dual card on that power supply anyway.
I would also get the corsair 550vx psu instead.
It's a matter of priorities, really, but I'd advise exactly the opposite. I can live with using merely high rather than max graphical settings, but don't want a computer that makes me sit and wait every time I ask it to do anything. Also, it's very easy to upgrade a video card later, while adding an SSD later to an existing system is much more of a pain to do.
This ^ an SSD isn't really going to have as much effect on your gaming as a better GPU would and since you stated it's primary focus is Gaming then this is a no brainer.
The benefits of an SSD are miniscule in comparison with the benefits of a good GPU.
When upgrading my rigs adding an SSD is always my last upgrade because it provides the least amount of gain.
A 7770 on a hd monitor is more like medium than high settings on more recent games - e.g. planetside 2, farcry 3, tsw.
Probably play something like gw2 on high though.
Let me get this straight... You are saying he is better off wasting $100-$130 on a GPU that he will need to replace soon ( for another $200-$300 more) and getting a SSD that will give him maybe a few seconds faster load on some load screens. Then spending $200-$300 on a good graphics card now and then waiting a bit to install a SSD?
You are basically telling him to spend ~$130 more for the same end results and have worse performance now......
Adding a SSD to an existing system is very easy...
As I said, it's a matter of priorities. Do you want fairly high graphical settings on a computer that is very fast and responsive, or do you want to max settings in most games on a computer that is sluggish? Which is better is a matter of opinion, but I'd take the former.
Video cards have gotten so fast that the only ways to push the higher end ones anymore are by being really inefficient, by introducing some very computationally intense effects that are easy to turn off, and by having a ton of stuff on the screen at once. And I'm not aware of any games that go the third route, as that would make the game unplayable for most of your potential customers.
Of course, if you assemble your own from parts rather than having one built to order for you from a cite like CyberPower PC, then you can have both: a faster video card (Radeon HD 7870 or GeForce GTX 660, either of which roughly double the performance of the 7770) and a good SSD.
Adding an SSD without putting anything on it is easy to do, but defeats the point of adding an SSD. Adding an SSD and reinstalling the OS and a bunch of programs on it is far more of a pain.
Not really a pain to transfer to your SSD. Most use Windows 7 which has the capability of doing so built in. You clone the HDD onto the SSD, format the HDD and BAM done lol. Any novice can do it without to much trouble.
Granted it use to be a pain and could even be expensive, that simply isn't the case anymore lol.
Buy a GPU that you will replace soon that will serve no purpose after so that you can get an SSD now, or remove a redundant step and buy a good GPU now and pick up an SSD later?
Not to mention you will already have an HDD for storage now that will prolong the life of your SSD ontop of preserving the random write speed thanks to waiting on the SSD.
Have fun with a straightforward cloning of 300 GB of data onto a 120 GB SSD. If you're not going to use more data than the SSD offers, then just skip the hard drive and buy an SSD only.
And who says you have to replace the video card soon, anyway? A Radeon HD 7770 is a plenty capable card if you're not the sort of person who has to max settings in everything.
Or you could just work on the side, save up $400 , which can easily be done in 1-2 weeks if you are resourcful, and not make any comprimises .
But maybe thats just my way of thinking, since I find it easy to work 70+ hours a week to save for my toys and house
I did battle with ignorance today, and ignorance won.
To exercise power costs effort and demands courage. That is why so many fail to assert rights to which they are perfectly entitled - because a right is a kind of power but they are too lazy or too cowardly to exercise it. The virtues which cloak these faults are called patience and forbearance.
Theres a bigger performance gain from a better GPU than with an SSD lol so I wouldn't go the "A 7770 is plenty capable..." because most HDD's fall into the same category lol but offer a lesser performance difference.
As far as your cloning concerns go... I would hope you as a fellow system builder know the process for this lol. If not I can explain it in detail for you.
Really it depends on what performance metric your talking about.
FPS - sure, GPU wins there, because an SSD doesn't do anything for FPS.
But there is more to gaming, and computing, than just frames per second.
I consider the 7770 the entry level card for gaming. It is capable enough to play pretty well every game out there at 1080p at some varying degree of graphical settings. It can max out a lot of popular games, it can play all the latest games (albeit with a few reduced settings) and still look great. It has enough power to be able to handle games for the next couple of years at the least, before it just won't be able to handle a game and force a reduction in resolution or require an upgrade.
Sure, a more expensive video card will get you more graphics settings, or better FPS, or some combination of both. But only in video games.
SSDs help with ~everything~. Windows boot times, game load times, map load times, zoning delay times, application response times, texture load times, and even small things that you wouldn't think would be related, like right click contextual menus and Start menu response, get huge response benefits from an SSD.
SSDs also have the added benefits of being completely silent, very cool running, requiring little interior space inside the case, and having nearly infinite shock resistance.
The only time I would not recommend an SSD would be on the most extreme (<$700) budgets, where your already cut down to the 7770 and an AMD processor and barely squeaking by on the budget with that. Personally, I won't even quote or spec out a build without an SSD in the mix any more, and haven't for the past year - and when the budget is tight, I take the money from the GPU budget, because an SSD adds more value to a computer (even a computer used primarily for gaming) than an equal amount of money added to an entry level GPU (of which I say a 7770 is entry level).
Let's look at some numbers:
The difference between a 7770 and 7970 Passmark scores:
2053 vs 5009
TFLOPS:
1.28 TFLOPS vs 4.3 TFLOPS
So depending on the metric, we see around a 2.5 and 3x performance increase, going from a ~$130+ GPU to a ~$400+ GPU. A ~3x cost increase... that more or less stands to reason.
Let's look at an SSD (Samsung 840 Pro) vs a 10k RPM VelociRaptor (fastest consumer platter drive)
4k Random Read:
281 MB/s vs 1.9 MB/s
129k Sequential Read:
372 MB/s vs 144 MB/s
(http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/665?vs=182)
Depending on the metric, a 150x increase (no typo there) in random reads (most of what your hard drive does anyway), and a bit more than double in sequential reads. Writes are similar, but I didn't compare because a hard drive doesn't spend most of it's time writing, we tend to read the same data over and over.
The price difference there? $249 for the 256G SSD (as tested) vs $179 for the 600G Raptor (as tested). Even if you need 600G (spread across multiple SSD drives), your still at a cost of about 3:1, for a performance increase of 150:1.... and that's going ridiculous: most people get by very nicely on a 120G SSD drive, and a second lower cost traditional drive for bulk data - but we are talking strictly performance here and I wanted to throw out some apples to apples numbers.
So yeah... drop down from a 7970 and put that extra money towards an SSD... the numbers even point to that if you want to talk about "lesser performance difference", especially if you put it in terms of performance per dollar for GPU performance versus HD performance.
The problem is the degree that an SSD helps out in this specific case vs. the increased cost of getting the SSD now and skimping on the GPU only to upgrade it later. An SSD is beneficial, that isn't really the debate. The OP is planning on getting a 7770 now and upgrading it later. You are talking about $130ish now which he will then upgrade later making the purchase redundant. With the primary focus being gaming and looking at the rest of his selection the only upgrade he will need to make with his build over the next several years would be the GPU.
Getting the GPU now and grabbing the SSD later = an automatic $130 savings. Better gaming performance now and another boost to loading times and such when he gets the SSD later.