Yet another "Help me build a new pc" thread

Comments

• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,351

  May 2012

  That's an awful lot to spend on a motherboard, especially if you're not going to overclock much.

  On your budget, you really should get a good SSD.  This will work:

  http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/9974320/art/ocz/ssd-interno-agility-3-ser.html

  At least if you get it while it's €98 rather than after the sale ends.

  Do you really need a 2 TB hard drive?  Most people don't need anywhere near that capacity.  But if you do, then go ahead.

  I don't know if your power supply is any good or not.  The specs on it look modern, but that doesn't automatically mean that it's good.  I doubt that Sapphire builds their own power supplies.  Most likely, they rebrand power supplies built by someone else, but I couldn't find who actually builds that power supply, nor a review of it from a reliable source.  So it could be pretty nice, or it could be junk, or it could be somewhere in between.

  You could largely just pick a case that you like the looks of, provided it has ample airflow.  If you want me to pick a case for you that is suitable to your budget, then you could try one of these:

  http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/9878621/art/antec/caixa-pc-dark-fleet-df-35.html

  http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/9906385/art/cooler-master/caixa-pc-cm-storm-enforce.html

  For a processor cooler, how do you feel about being the first to buy a brand new product that is probably pretty nice?

  http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/10854920/art/cooler-master/ventoinha-cpu-hyper-612s.html

  I was going to link the Hyper 212, but the new Hyper 612 is only €1 more, and probably a lot better.  That site doesn't have the normal Hyper 212, and the Hyper 212 Evo is way overpriced.
• Slayra Member UncommonPosts: 24

  May 2012

   

  Thanks for the awesome input Quizzical.

   

  You are probably right, i might not need a 2TB harddrive. I mean, i'm using a 250GB one and i rarely ever get it full ^^ The thing is, i was looking throught the harddrives and the diference between the "same" hardrive, from 1TB to 2TB was really not that expensive, so i figured i'd get a 2TB one.

  I'll look into it and maybe get the SSD you mentioned and a lower capacity  harddrive instead.

   

  The motherboard, you are probably right. I might not need the Sabertooth. But the motherboard i was going for at first (http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/11913926/art/asus/p8z77-v-pro-socket-1155-c.html) is only 36€ less than the Sabertooth, and i thought it should be worth it. 

  What other motherboards should i look into?

   

  Regarding the Sapphire power supply, it's a rebrand of the Enermax Modu82+ II 625w PSU, afaik (http://www.guru3d.com/article/enermax-modu82-ii-625w-psu-review/). I got it at a really good price, wich is why i bought it a few months back.

   

  Now to the case. My main issue is the area i live in tends to be pretty hot, even during spring/fall, so i need a case with a good airflow. I mostly don't care about looks, but usually prefer slick and simple lines.

   

  Once again, thanks for the tips!
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,351

  May 2012

  That site you're buying from is so broken.  It will let me apply a filter to narrow down results, increase the number of results on a page, switch to the next page of results, or sort the results by price.  But it will only let me do one at a time, and if I try to do a second one, it resets anything else I've set.  It doesn't work right in either Opera or Chrome, and if you're incompatible with two of the five major browsers, then I'm inclined to say your site is broken, period.  So there might be good deals there that I can't find.

  For the motherboard, you could try this:

  http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/11913923/art/asus/p8z77-v-socket-1155-chips.html

  That probably has all the features you'll want, plus a lot that you won't.  Once you get into the really high end motherboards, it gets silly with what they try to add.

  The Asus Sabertooth does something weird with its "thermal armor" that means you need very different airflow from most motherboards.  Cooling the motherboard properly requires you to get good airflow underneath the thermal armor, and a typical case and fan setup won't do that at all.  If you do have a fan pointed to blow air in the right spot, then it can cool the motherboard very well.  But cooling a motherboard isn't difficult, even without the thermal armor, so I wouldn't want to mess with it.

  For storage capacity, what to get depends greatly on how much capacity you need.  My rule of thumb is, see how much you have in use now, double that, and that will be plenty for your next computer.  If 240 GB is enough space for you, then it would be nice to just get a big SSD and skip the hard drive:

  http://www.pixmania.com/pt/pt/12006943/art/crucial/ssd-interno-m4-2-5-256-gb.html

  That way you don't have to fuss with what goes on the SSD and what doesn't.  This option isn't much more expensive than getting both a ~120 GB SSD and a hard drive.  However, it's not a viable option if you need more capacity than that.

  You're set on the power supply, as that one is pretty nice.  I use an Enermax Pro 82+ 525 W power supply myself.  (Pro rather than Modu meaning that it's not modular.)  Though it does strike me as odd that the Enermax Modu 82+ is 80 PLUS Bronze certified (hence the 82+ in the name), while the Sapphire rebrand of it only gets the basic 80 PLUS certification.
• ShakyMo Member CommonPosts: 7,207

  May 2012

  You need a hd with a ssd. It's very foolish to have a ssd only system. Plus its overkill for storing your email, temp files, recycle bin, word docs etc..
  
  You want a hd for storing ALL your data, photos, mp3s, email etc..
  
  Then ssd for windows itself (if your on 7 its,smart enough to put recycle bin and backups on your hd) and select games with big load times like mmos and high end fps.
• ShakyMo Member CommonPosts: 7,207

  May 2012

  Also 120gb is the optimum point on ssds for price/byte/performance. If you want more ssd space, raid 2 ssds together
• Quizzical Member LegendaryPosts: 25,351

  May 2012

  Originally posted by ShakyMo
  You need a hd with a ssd. It's very foolish to have a ssd only system. Plus its overkill for storing your email, temp files, recycle bin, word docs etc..
  
  You want a hd for storing ALL your data, photos, mp3s, email etc..
  
  Then ssd for windows itself (if your on 7 its,smart enough to put recycle bin and backups on your hd) and select games with big load times like mmos and high end fps.

  Your recycle bin is probably several GB.  Word documents is probably under 1 GB.  So is e-mail.  I'm not sure how big temp files gets, but I'd be surprised if that's more than a few GB.  There's no sense in buying a hard drive and only putting 10 GB of stuff on it.  A hard drive costs a lot more than a pro-rated extra 10 GB of SSD capacity would.

  The real question is what goes in that "etc.", and that varies wildly from one person to the next.  Personally, I have a 120 GB SSD and no hard drive.  That's plenty of capacity for me.  Next time I buy a new computer, I'll probably make it about a 240 GB SSD and still no hard drive.

  As for your other post, RAID 0 with SSDs is really dumb unless you have very unusual needs.  Normally, the point of RAID 0 is to increase performance, but a single good SSD is so fast that more performance simply doesn't matter.  RAID 0 does bring decreased reliability for several reasons, however:  you lose all your data if either drive dies, RAID tends to disable TRIM, and RAID arrays can be finicky.  Add in that one larger SSD is probably cheaper than two smaller ones and the only plausible reason to go with a RAID 0 array of SSDs is if a single good SSD isn't fast enough for you.  And in that case, I want to know what you did before SSDs.
• Ridelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

  May 2012

  ---

  Originally posted by ShakyMo
  Also 120gb is the optimum point on ssds for price/byte/performance. If you want more ssd space, raid 2 ssds together

  ---

  This does give you more capacity, but by sacrificing reliability. SSDs do have some inherent features that make them a bit more safe (mostly in laptops, where inertia is a big killer), but they are far from foolproof.

  RAIDing a pair of SSDs to double your capacity (either RAID 0 or JBOD) effectively cuts your reliability rate in half. Or to look at it in a different way, it doubles your chance of a hard drive failure resulting in a loss of data / loss of use of the machine.
• Ridelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

  May 2012

  ---

  Originally posted by ShakyMo
  You need a hd with a ssd. It's very foolish to have a ssd only system. Plus its overkill for storing your email, temp files, recycle bin, word docs etc.. You want a hd for storing ALL your data, photos, mp3s, email etc..Then ssd for windows itself (if your on 7 its,smart enough to put recycle bin and backups on your hd) and select games with big load times like mmos and high end fps.

  ---

  I have many machines, of various operating systems, that are SSD-only with no secondary drive.

  I typically recommend that users estimate for about 40G of capacity for their OS (Vista seems to be the heaviest, Win7 a bit lighter, OSX and XP just under that even). That gives you plenty of space for a default installation, with room for cache files, recycle bin, a very limited Restore Point capacity, temporary file space, and 10% reserve.

  You are right, a lot of those things don't necessarily need to benefit from speedy SSD storage - but at the same time, there is no reason to get a standard hard drive just for them either.

  If you need more storage, you need more storage, and that's the point where you evaluate if that storage should be solid state or traditional - and for most people, 120G of solid state storage is enough for everything that benefits very well from it (games, core OS files, etc), and anything that is required on top of that (bulk data, like you mentioned) can go on the traditional HD. But if you are under 120G storage requirement (or whatever the size of your SSD is), then there's no reason to even mess with a second drive.