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I'm ready to buy
I'm just worried that my Antec Kuhler H20 1250 CPU cooler will be obstructed by the motherboard or ram when in the H440?
Comments
If you plan on upgrading like me in the future to a dual discrete gpu build, make sure your motherboard is crossfire compatible or sli compatible if you go NVidia.
The other thing is if you aren't going to upgrade to use 2 gpus in the future, then its fine using an amd 8 core cpu no matter which gou you use but if you plan on crossfiring in the future like I do, then you might have to go intel because the powerconsumption of those amd cpus is through the roof.
Even with an intel cpu at 74 watts power usage, taking into account all my other pc parts, I had to get a 1000 watt power supply unit in order to power 2 top level gpus in crossfire.
Make sure that you don't just check compatibility, check your power requirements as well not for your starting pc but for your end game pc like I did.
I factored in all my components plus enough power for another top level gpu in crossfire at full capacity so that my psu doesn't have to throttle power and not use the entire capability of my gpus in crossfire.
I highly doubt I will be picking up a crossfire card in the future, so I figured I could save money on the mobo.
This is the build as it currently stands http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/YDWxWZ
I have found some slimmer profile ram however I am still worried it will interfere with the cooler.
You don't need a water cooler for this CPU its quite stable, my girlfriend has one. Unless you plan to break the 5GHz barrier with this beast, i wouldn't spend the money on the cooler. I bought her the same motherboard because its cheap and its a good chipset but its not overclocking motherboard. I wouldn't think twice about that choice.
Also to answer your question, I doubt your cooler will obstruct your RAM or motherboard. The size is pretty generic. The case is nice, you can attach the fans on the top with PSU at the bottom for good airflow. Yeah i think you are golden. However I believe a better than stock air cooler will be just as good.
To put your mind at rest, you could watch some vids of this cooler to get real idea of its size. It's not as massive as on this picture it fits well in the socket.
Also from experience i just have to tell you that 2133MHz RAM has nothing better than 1600MHz infact you won't notice a difference, you'll just pay more. Also check if you can go for Samsung EVO or Intel 5xx as your SSD vendor. When I was getting my SSD i was getting mixed reviews about Crucial.
Also once you assemble this beast do let me know (private message is okay) what temperatures you have on the GPU when gaming at ULTRA. I can't seem to lower my PowerColor R9 290X below 88-90 unless i play DAI. Considering water block for that card because those temps are really scary
Ok thanks, I kind of want a water cooler just because it's fun and I've never used watercooling on a build and would kind of like to try it. Especially considering it's not really that much more expensive at the end of the day.
I will have a look at the SSDs and try and find something with positive reviews.
Ye I heard it runs hot, I will let you know how hot it runs when I get it. I had a look at various different cooling blocks in passing. How much would an entry level watercooling setup for the gpu cost?
The other guy is right.
You are better off sinking your money into your components rather than getting a water cooler for vanity reasons. An air cooler will be fine and any money you save, you can sink into a gpu, a cpu or even a hdd with a bigger cache.
Edit: Btw ssds are notoriously bad value for money at the present. Your pc looks like it is a decent mid range build, rather than wasting money on a ssd, you are better off upgrading your other components like I said previously. a 1 tb hdd with 128 mb cache is about 60 to 70 pounds now, a 1 tb ssd is close to 400 pounds. You could upgrade your gpu, cpu, motherboard to make it crossfire compatiable and have pcie 3 slots or a decent hdd with higher cache or even higher rpm (unnecessary and bad value) for that amount.
By going for an air cooled cpu I'm only going to save about 15-20 quid so I will probably not be able to upgrade that much.
I forgot to mention that I already have a good 1tb HDD that I will be using, the SSD is for the OS and maybe CAD and games with high loading times. I'm sure I will never be using Crossfire so that is not an issue.
A computer without an SSD is slow, no matter what else it has. Advising against getting an SSD on that budget would be ridiculous.
If you're not going to buy two GPUs for CrossFire up front, then it's silly to spend an extra $100 or so on a better motherboard, power supply, and case just to have the option to do so later. CrossFire, like SLI, has sharply diminishing returns as time passes. It's very, very driver dependent, and while AMD and Nvidia will make the driver optimizations necessary for high profile games in their latest generation of cards, they'll stop with those optimizations on older generation cards long before you get rid of the GPU.
Sure, it's ridiculous to pay a large price premium for 2133 MHz memory. But it's a question of how much extra you're paying for it. If it's the same price as 1600 MHz, then you might as well get it. He had initially picked 1333 MHz memory, and I said to get something faster than that. Especially if you're going to push eight cores, that can take a lot of memory bandwidth.
For the SSD brand, Crucial won't benchmark as well as some other brands, but the only place you'll notice that difference is in synthetic benchmarks, anyway. Outside of a handful of bad SSDs that are mostly off the market now, choosing an SSD should be based on price, capacity, and reliability, not speed. Reliability can be hard to gauge, but Crucial has a pretty good track record there. Granted, Samsung and Intel also do, but you'd be paying a considerable price premium for no real reason in particular.
The Samsung 840 EVO in particular uses lower quality TLC NAND flash. That means you can get the same capacity for 1/3 less cost of producing the NAND--and the NAND flash is most of the cost of an SSD. That seems like an obvious way to save a lot of money in production. Samsung has been using TLC NAND in their SSDs for over two years now, and only recently has any other SSD vendor been willing to touch TLC NAND with a ten foot pole. That makes me leery, and I'd say fine if the 840 EVO were the same price as the competition. But I wouldn't pay a price premium for it, no matter how it benchmarks.
The reference coolers on the Radeon R9 290 and R9 290X were problematic. But willo isn't looking at getting a reference cooler. The cooler on his card will probably be considerably better than that.
You obviously don't use an SSD. An SSD is far from a waste of money. It is the single most noticeable upgrade you can make in a computer. They have come down in cost and are most definitely worth the investment. While it only effects load times in a game, it improves the everyday use of computer experience in such a way that it is difficult to going back to life without an SSD.
OP, I would take the advice you get on this board with a grain of salt unless it is from someone like Quizzical or Ridelynn. There is a lot of bad information passed along on these boards by some of the posters.
James T. Kirk: All she's got isn't good enough! What else ya got?
There is no notable difference between 2133 and 1600mhz memory in gaming, but you are right if we are talking about the same price. The bigger the better as they say.
There are some durability tests and Intel SSDs seem to be one of the most durable ones. Closely followed by Samsung Pro series.
And yeah those reference coolers are shit. I made the mistake to buy a reference board because I couldn't wait for other vendor versions. Although I was in a little bit of luck, after my purchase the price of that particular GPU skyrocketed because of bitcoin farm
but things seem to have been settled down by now. Which is nice. Even though this card gets really loud, in terms of price/performance i would recommend it to anyone. You just have to keep it cool
Im sorry but i 100% disagree with this guy. I've been building my own PC's since the days of the original pentium (and tinkering with them backin the 386 days). BY FAR the biggest/best upgrade i ever did was to get an SSD.
Now, that being said, you dont need a 1tb SSD, thats just wasting money. What i would do is get 2 ssd's, get a 128gb and use that as your windows drive, and get a seperate 256gb drive for games. Then grab a 1 or 2tb standard HDD for storing stuff that you dont need the speed. I.e. pics, videos, etc.
But having an SSD for your system and game drive is bloody fantastic, best thing i've ever done. Its one of those things that once you experience it, you will never go back.
Also, you dont need the high end "pro" ssd's. Those are really designed for database/server applications. Stuff like the samsung EVO series, or the m550, etc, are absolutely perfect for a gamer/enthusiast pc.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I wouldn't call Intel 5xx series a databaser/server ready drive. They have special series for that.
But yeah, any SSD would blow RAID 0 hard drive array out of the water and its a really really noticeable difference. The thing is though, that those cheap SSDs usually have faulty firmwares and they fight the user in certain tasks. Not to mention that some lack to provide tools for managing the said SSD or as much as best tips oh how to squeeze the maximum life of the said drive.
Not to mention that some of those just die without giving you a signal or any SMART errors prior to the failure. I've had a faulty Intel before and it was alarming me that its nearing a fatal error. I guess that is why i recommend Intel SSDs to all the people. They are certainly not the fastest drives, but they are reliable. I like reliable.
SSDs - Quiz is right, base them on reputation, price, and size. Speed doesn't really even come into the equation. Reliability does, but not necessarily that associated with write endurance.
http://techreport.com/review/27062/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-only-two-remain-after-1-5pb
The Intel drive was actually one of the first to go - although I agree it was probably an overly-conservative error rather than a real failure. The Samsung based on TLC failed relatively early as well.
But take that with a grain of salt - endurance failures didn't start popping up until after 700TB worth of writes. That's a lot of data, and some of these drives are out double that already. The earliest failures (Intel, TLC Samsung, and a SandForce drive with compression disabled) would be like writing the entire contents of a 200G drive twice a day, every day, for a typical 5 year life span. Most consumer users, even heavy gamers who stream or encode video captures, won't come anywhere close to that amount of data writes.
So I think it's safe to assume that write endurance just isn't really an issue with consumer SSDs. Firmware reliability, yes. Overall drive reliability, yes. But wear leveling/write endurance - no.
Also, with regard to water cooling.
I am a water cooling advocate, but that comes with some asterisks.
Water cooling is more expensive. It is not necessarily "better", although it can be. The biggest benefit of a water cooler isn't that it can really cool your CPU - your still cooling it with air in the end, so your still limited by whatever you ambient temperature is. The biggest benefit is that you can directly control where the heat is exhausted to: an air cooler your dumping it inside the case, and you have to use fans to pull if off the heat sink, and then more fans inside the case to pull it through and out the case. A water cooled rig you put the radiator wherever you want, and your using that fan to dump that heat directly to where you want it (outside the case). It keeps your other components at a lower temperature and can significantly benefit your overall interior cooling. That being said - the heat load on a modern CPU isn't so great, and the density isn't so great, that water cooling is by any stretch of the imagination a requirement, even for extreme overclocking.
A side benefit is that a water cooler can put in large radiators, which can allow you to use larger fans and make the system more quiet - even fanless if you go large enough (Zalman Reserator, for example). Air coolers, your stuck to whatever you can fit on top of the CPU and inside your case. Liquid coolers you get however long you want to run the tubing, and the radiator can be whatever size you are willing to put up with.
If you just want to play around with it, I encourage people to do so. The AIO units are good starting places, they are relatively easy to install, bulletproof, and they have a very low chance of leaking all over the place. But go in knowing that they aren't necessarily going to perform better than a $30 heat pipe cooler, and they are going to cost twice as much. But if you have some particular requirement (noise or density), sometimes they are a good fit for the project. And I always encourage people to "just because" install stuff for the benefit of experience or knowledge, as long as they are comfortable with the potential drawbacks as well as the benefits.