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I need Advice on a 2400$ build
Hey guys! Im building a 2400$ desktop for a late christmas present and i need some advice.
Im thinking of getting:
Intel Core i7 3rd gen 3770k
Motherboard: Asus Maximus V formular z77 motherboard
Graphics: either a Asus ROG 7970 Matrix Platinum or a Asus Gtx 680 direct cu ii TOP or 4GB edition
RAM: either a 32GB Ram @ 1600Mhz or a 16gb ripjaws @1600 Mhz
Case: HAF X or CM Storm Stryker
Everything else has been decided i just need some advice and suggestions for the above components.
Feel free to suggest other components because i have alot of time to decide ( until 31st Jan) and im losing quite alot of sleep over this build.
Comments
I have to agree with Aori.
A $2400 build on a PC alone is spending money just to spend it in most cases. If you need that uber powerful rig then spend it for sure, if its mainly just for gaming, video editing, surfing, ect. then you could drop $1500, have a top of the line rig, and spend the other $900 on cool shit like an eyeinfinity setup.
Might help if you said what your intended use of the PC will be.
Absolutely no need to waste that money. None at all.
HD 7850 - Great card. Runs anything I throw at it on max.
CPU? Any i5 / i7 will do.
MB? Just make sure it has what you need, e.g., single or dual pci-e, usb 3, sata 6, or whatever.
You can build a superb system from the ground up for less than 1000.
Anything more than $1,000 is spending top-dollar for a few extra frames. I'm on an old i7 920, and I'm a prize-winning FPS / 1v1 player. MMOs run just as good.
If you spend that money now, the system will depreciate to nothing by the time a mmo worth playing is released.
The only thing I recommend is a 120hz LCD. n00bs will claim it's ability as a placebo. Not true. The smoothness, especially in FPS, is superb. I've been pro-gaming since 2000: Unreal Tournament / Quake etc. WIthout trying to sound like a butthole, I know what I'm talking about.
SAVE IT. You will be sorry that you spent it. Invest it or put it in savings.
MMOdad has the right of it.
Buy a super sweet monitor or 3 with the extra money if its just burning a hole in your pocket.
I got the same setup as you... Bought it all when it came out, still runs every game flawlessly.
@OP
Remember Moore's law, "Computer power doubles every 18 months", so spending 2400$ is waste, unless you really need that kind of power, or, if you're planning to keep this setup until it fails at meeting games' requirements.
I like to beef up my pc as well, but I wait until my rig no longer runs games at decent looking settings, and acceptable frames, but everytime I get that urge to go and throw a crapton of money at new hardware, I then think about Moore's law, and decides that what I have can easily squeeze out another year or maybe even 2.
But whatever you do, have fun... It's your money mate.
Joined - July 2004
... spending money just to spend it in most cases...
Literally!! -Hehe
Im spending this much money because i am currently studying a cert4 in digital and interactive games design and will be following a career path in either game design or software developement and would not like to have to upgrade a year or two down the line.
Im also using an old dell alienware to fit my needs and isnt really cutting it, and with the fact that dell voids warranty apon upgrades and over-prices their graphics upgrades then i feel that i need to break away from dell and build a computer that will last me for as long as possible
While just throwing more money at a system really can't guarantee future proofing, due to newer technologies releases that were not available when you spent your fortune on that badass PC, if you are insistant on spending that kind of cash with the hopes of getting the best PC (minus any peripherals) you can buy just stick with your original build (given your line of work/study you might actually use the more expensive functions of the MB) and drop the GTX 680 for the recently announced Asus ARES II. At the time of this writing it's the most powerful pure gaming GPU "available". That card alone should run you a cool $1k (whether you can actually get your hands on one is another story). I wouldn't personally go that route but if money was not an issue then why the hell not!
You could also look into getting a MUCH higher end case that could last you until the current ATX form factor is no longer the standard. Check out Caselabs. Some of the best cases for comsumers money can buy (a LOT of money)!
No it doesn't, unless you count running at ~30 FPS adequate.
That said, 2400 USD for the box itself is totally overkill. Spend some of that money into a sweet 3 monitor setup and a big SSD drive (or two on a RAID).
If you are hell-bent on spending tons of money on the box, at least go for a SLI/Crossfire setup. Make sure you have a quality power supply.
Do you have a quality monitor? I don't know what's the lastest... high resolution IPS panel or the sort possbily with some sort or arm to pivot it and move it around. That's what you need to put money into. Possibly second cheaper monitor. Then chair and table that allow ergonomical sitting position, if you don't have them. Then mechanical keyboard that suits you. Then decent audio system. Then you can think about the rig, but it definitely doesn't require that much money, like everyone said. Almost everytime someone wants to take their PC up a notch for the first time, they go overboard and focus on completely wrong things. Also it's not wise to spend much on high end parts, because they lose value with incredible speed and you're better off upgrade every 3 years or so, which doesn't mean full upgrade. I don't know do you have power supply figured out, but hopefully you realize that is the most important part, that also trasfers to next upgrade well. I don't know about those cases, they look ridiculous to be honest, so I'm not expecting their function to be best, I may be wrong. I assume you chose them by looks.
Sorry to be frank, but people do this same mistake again and again. Some experienced people advise them and then either they reconsider their build and come up with something more reasonable, or they feel insulted and don't listen at all and waste their money, but probably won't regret though because they don't know any better so I don't know if there's that much harm done. I suggest you go to some better site than MMORPG for finding advice. There's plenty of them, Google helps.
I picked the case based on high airflow but after reading the thread i am thinking of maybe goign down to a 660 or 670, the reason it costs alot is because im ordering the parts in australia and the prices are substantially higher in some parts, i have a 23" 1080p monitor currently and will be using my 7.1 surround headset for my audio im going with a 750 watt power supply, a razer deathstalker keyboard and i should have rephrased my introductory post as i am getting it custom built as i am paying for half the price and my dad is paying the other half so he deosnt want me wasting his money on me trying to build a computer and then breaking the components. i have the chair, the table which are erganomical. Could you suggest some cases for me to look into? im also getting 2 Barracuda 2tb HDD's and a 120GB SSD for the OS drive, i admit i should have included all of this when i first asked the question, i have just been stressed and losing sleep over this thats all.
I may have been quick to judge then. Make sure you are getting quality power supply though, 750W means nothing if it's low quality. Lower quality ones are also annoyingly noisy. I've had power supply fail and it took rest of the rig with it and second time I regretted buying bit too powerless one, which I couldn't transfer to my new upgraded rig. You should check out some better forum for this stuff, people are more upto date with stuff there and can figure out a more bang-for-buck build (but still well powerful enough for you). They know better about the cases as well. I don't know what's suitable, propably hardforum.com.
And it's good to lose few sleep over it and think it through, before wasting money. That's the process most people go before buying something bigger (unless they have too much money). There's a lot of other cool things to spend money on.
If your looking at game design seriously, depending on which part of game design, you may want to shift your thinking a bit.
If your looking at a lot of 3D modeling, or manipulating art assets, you may want to consider bumping to a professional-line graphics (Quattro or FirePro). Reason being: top-end CAD programs and graphics programs get customized driver support for additional acceleration. Sure, it's mostly the same hardware as the PC graphics cards, but it's the driver support (along with double-precision floating point, that not all PC graphics cards support) that really makes the difference.
If your doing sound effects work, then all that money would be going towards studio reference speakers, microphones, and top-end DACs.
If your doing programming, all that money goes into Mountain Dew, Cheetos, and Dilbert paraphernalia, and a machine-washable keyboard.
That being said, I wouldn't do that until I was getting paid for it and knew if it would help. The hardware is expensive, and the software even more expensive, and a really good gaming computer can do a lot of that stuff pretty well, it won't do any of it as well as a machine that is tailored to it. And if all your concerned about is gaming, and not so much the design end - spend $1500 on a nice PC, and spend the rest on a nice desk, nice monitor, nice chair, nice speakers, etc.
Which power supply are you looking at? 750 W is a marketing number, not an engineering number.
Also, which SSD? The garbage ones seem to mostly be off the market, but there are some still around.
And why 4 TB of hard drive storage? Very few people need anywhere near that capacity. You could just get one hard drive up front, and later, on the off chance that you actually do need more, it's easy to add another hard drive.
The notion that 2400 dollars for the tower alone is overkill is true, but not neccesairly for a full gaming setup. If you want an awesome gaming experiance a good monitor will be around 500-600 dollars...and a good headset will be 200+, personally I don't see the point to an awesome tower without an awesome display and audio...this also means that you might consider adding a discrete sound card to your build.
But once you add those three things into the build, that number becomes much more realistic for building a awesome gaming rig.
Now...asuming that you already have an awesome display and awesome audio...then 2400 is overkill for gaming...save your money for later date upgrades.
If not, I'd suggest looking at an IPS monitor, sennhieser headphones and/or a good 5.1 speaker setup, along with a discrete sound card.
After that's taking care of, the money left over should be about right for what you need for a good gaming rig.
Redwall: The Warrior Reborn
What is the hardware in your old computer, and why isn't it good enough?
If you need high end hardware to play your game, then everyone else who wants to play it will need high end hardware, too, and that's not a formula for commercial success. A very fast processor that lets you compile and load your game faster to see if you've fixed some glitch can be nice to have, but a high end video card as opposed to merely something decent doesn't particularly matter.
Then again, my experience with creating game artwork is probably rather atypical: I create my artwork by typing out source code. I'll probably make a GUI for portions of it eventually. Still if you only need to see one model at a time when creating your artwork, that doesn't take much GPU performance if players are going to need to be able to see hundreds of models at a time running smoothly on lower end hardware.
For the SSD im going with the OCZ vertex 4 128gb SSD, my audio is my 7.1 tritton headset with my maximus V inbuilt 7.1 but i am thinking of getting a xonar 7.1 essence STX.
I also did Further research on the graphics card i was going to buy and in australia, the ROG matrix 7970 platinum is 80$ cheaper than a gtx 680 direct cu ii top and the CU ii top costs 689$ australian dollars whereas the 7970 plat costs 599.
so thats 80 bucks for a difference in 2 frames which isnt cost effective. for power supply i am going for the XFX 750 watt core edition.
This whole pc would only cost around 1500 if i was in america >_> which i wish i was at this point because australia ramps the price of much of the hardware. The direct cu ii on amazon is 549$ while in australia on average its up near 700$
which is why it deos cost that much and not near 1500-1800
In all honesty, if you are running only one video card, 500w is all you need.. (Provided its a quality brand and is 80+ Certified)
My little Shuttle XPC is running an i7 3770k, 16GB 1600 Adata RAM, Gigabyte 660 2gb, and a 500gb Velociraptor with power to spare. (I'd have no qualms about adding in another HDD, a Blu-Ray drive, and a mPCIE ssd)
For the most efficient use of your power supply you want something that will be using around 90% of the rated maximum. While its nice to have the overhead, its mostly wasted and also ends up costing more in electricty, unless you plan to add a second video card.
As for the case, I'm going to assume that many parts of Australia can get fairly dusty.. Heck, I don't consider it to be dusty here in NYC, but .. it gets dusty.. So unless you're going to invest on getting alot of fans, which in turn makes alot of noise, I wouldn't use a HAF X.
The dust buildup inside HAF cases can get pretty bad if there is a lack of airflow, and then theres the issue of the noise.. If neither of those are issues, then go for it. Otherwise I'd suggest something eaiser to move to clean. Such as a Bitfenix Prodigy, its mITX form factor, but it has plenty of room in the case and is also much easier to clean due to its size and horizontal motherboard placement.
In the mITX form factor, you're likely to be limited to 16gb of memory for alot of motherboards just due to the memory slot constraints, however, asus makes extremely good mITX motherboards as well. You shoul dhave no issues with overclocking with mITX, as you can fit a large cooler into a Prodigy, as well as the fact that you aren't doing LGA2011 which would require a case the size of the HAF X for all the fans.
Edit: I just noticed the part where you said you're getting it custom built. Most of this wont apply, since most places won't offer mITX.. Oh well, I tried =D
I looked at the prices and they really aren't THAT much higher that you would need a $2400 budget to make a decent workstation/gamer PC unless the majority of that is going into Labor costs.
PCs these days are really easy to build, there are videos all over the internet showing you what to do. You could easily do with $1400 rather than $2400 when considering parts alone. I doubt labor costs $1000 to put a PC together, if it does, then someone is trying desperately to rip you off.
Edit:
Keep in mind that if you plan to expand ATX is always the better choice, but personally, I only run one video card, and I don't need obscene amounts of memory, so mITX is great for my uses.
As always, take ANYONES advice with a grain of salt.
Unless you're planning on a 3rd graphics card (or need a 3rd PCI-E slot for an expansion) I'd get the Gene.
If you want to go with 3 Graphics cards you'd want to go for a LGA2011 build over a LGA1155 anyway because the 1155 doesn't have enough PCIE Lanes and the graphics cards will bottleneck.
Edit: Just a small tidbit, ALWAYS choose a powerful single card over dual cards, this shouldn't be an issue with your budget though.