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  • dosboxdosbox
    I could never afford it, that's for sure.

    EDIT: that build is going to be a powerful beast.
  • thinkpadmanthinkpadman
    In general, sounds fine though kind of hard to give feedback without knowing your budget. End of the day, you could ask 5 different people and get 5 different answers.

    Personally I'd be leaning towards a Haswell based CPU/MB combo considering your replacing the MB too. For about $15 more I'd suggest the i7 4790K. From what I've read up, the Haswell CPUs generally have marginally better performance, support additional instruction sets which may end up being an advantage in later release games, and lower power consumption compared to the Ivy Bridge. If you already have an Ivy Bridge system, it's not really worth going to Haswell I would think.

    Another option if your on a strict budget is to go down to a top-end i5 CPU and with the extra $100 or so saved, spend the extra money to upgrade the graphics. A higher-end graphics card with SSD will make more of a difference in general playability than going from an i5 to an i7.

    Based on personal experience my old i5 2550K PC, with 16GB DDR3, 2x SSDs, and a GTS 450 card plays games such as Skyrim and Sleeping Dogs at 1080p without a hitch. I never felt I should have bought an i7 instead. With a full time job and a 4 month old baby now, having time to play games has almost gone out the window which is why I haven't bothered upgrading.

    I built a home server earlier in the year based on Haswell (i5 4670K, 32GB DDR3, MSI Z97 GD-65 Gaming MB, with SSD and 10 HDDs totalling 14TB) running Windows Server 2012. The machine flies and don't have anything bad to say with choosing Haswell.

    Either way you choose, I'm sure you'll be happy with it.
  • calvinbcalvinb
    yeah, you only need the i7 if the load is mostly on CPU - games are mostly all GPU, so a nice i5 should be fine.
  • TCPMetaTCPMeta
    What do yo have in mind for storage, SSD or good old HDD?
  • KirkKirk
    thinkpadman wrote:
    Personally I'd be leaning towards a Haswell based CPU/MB combo considering your replacing the MB too. For about $15 more I'd suggest the i7 4790K. From what I've read up, the Haswell CPUs generally have marginally better performance, support additional instruction sets which may end up being an advantage in later release games, and lower power consumption compared to the Ivy Bridge. If you already have an Ivy Bridge system, it's not really worth going to Haswell I would think.

    It's funny that you specifically mention this CPU, because NewEgg just put it on sale today. It will cost me $10 more out of pocket, but NewEgg will give me a $20 gift card as a promotion. Since this processor is faster and it will work out to be cheaper, I am seriously considering it, but I will have to change my motherboard to an LGA 1150 board in order to use the processor.
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6819117369
    ampharos wrote:
    yeah, you only need the i7 if the load is mostly on CPU - games are mostly all GPU, so a nice i5 should be fine.
    Yeah I know, but I prefer on my builds to overbuild the processor a lot, and overbuild the GPU a little. My last main PC build was a Core2Quad, built over 5 years ago, and although I upgraded the RAM 1 time and the GPU 1 time, it has aged very well. I am looking for another machine which will age just as well.
  • KirkKirk
    I am going to move forward with ordering the CPU and RAM from today's NewEgg sale. I am able to get a faster CPU for less cost in the long run, and I am able to go with Kingston HyperX RAM for a lower price, which I actually prefer over GSkill anyway for brand reliability.

    I have updated the list above.

    TCPMeta wrote:
    What do yo have in mind for storage, SSD or good old HDD?
    I haven't entirely decided yet. I may do a hybrid storage solution where I have an SSD for an operating system drive, and I use hard drives for storage for game installations. On my laptop where I currently do my gaming, I have a 500GB hard drive and I am finding this to be a rather tight limit with the size of games on Steam\Origin, so I think it is almost not feasible to do SSD storage for games with the current cost of the media.

    I have some extra HP P400 RAID cards laying around at home as well, so I was thinking about picking up a few cheap 500GB, 1TB, or 2TB drives and doing RAID 1 or RAID 10 with them.
  • calvinbcalvinb
    personally, i'd go for small SSD for boot drive and games where loading times are important (open world games, mostly) and save the HD for media and fat games (cough, TF2)
  • JoshJosh
    TCPMeta wrote:
    What do yo have in mind for storage, SSD or good old HDD?
    I switched to SSD about 6 months ago and I can never go back. The performance difference is phenomenal.
  • wingzeroisminewingzeroismine
    I use a 512GB 840 Evo and a couple 3TB WD Reds for storage, I keep a 256GB Vertex 4 in there for VMs.

    My system is long in the tooth and the urge to build a new one is always burning. I haven't dared add up the cost of what I have in mind but I'm leaning towards the new Haswell-E series, probably the 5820k will suffice, I don't need the full 40 PCI-e lanes for anything. Mobos are still around $300 for this X99 chipset and DDR4 ram is super high with various timings, still waiting for all of that to settle.

    I'm also intrigued and waiting for M.2 x4 SSDs to become more common. My goal for is for this to probably be all the power I'll need till the thing croaks. I've gotten 4 years out of my current i7-950 and it can keep going I just know newer things can best it, I also want to dabble with watercooling and quieter cases, granted my 460 is likely the largest noise producer...
  • BlueSunBlueSun
    I built my desktop around the time SATA3 and USB3 were coming out. Fortunately, my board did have SATA3 and I believe the chipset itself supports USB3, but it wasn't implemented on my board. So yeah, the temptation to upgrade is there...

    However, my system performance is still quite acceptable and while it would be nice to have something more modern, I can't say I've ever felt limited by my system. It's a AMD Phenom II X4 965 BE with 8 GB of RAM and a GTX 760. For the storage I have an 250 GB Samsung 830 series SSD (Again, I wound up buying it right as the 840's came out) and a couple of 2 TB Seagates.

    But yeah, once you go SSD, you never go back.

    Every computer I use on a daily basis has an SSD. My laptop, my work machine, my NUC, my server, the server at work... even my media center has an SSD.
  • TCPMetaTCPMeta
    When I go to build my Gaming system I was planing to do a hybrid setup. SSD for the primary OS and steam but have the games stored on a Raid 1 with 500GB or 1TB drives. How things are looking it is going to be a while before I can build a gaming PC so maybe by then SSD will be a lot cheaper.
  • KirkKirk
    ampharos wrote:
    personally, i'd go for small SSD for boot drive and games where loading times are important (open world games, mostly) and save the HD for media and fat games (cough, TF2)
    Yeah I was thinking about doing something like this. I could do a RAID 1 of smaller SSD's (maybe 2x128GB) for the OS and a RAID 10 of hard drives (maybe 4x500GB or 4x1TB) for game storage. Theoretically I could do this with 1 P400 RAID card.

    I usually do single SSD in my workstations and my laptop, but for machines with a lot of time investment I try to do RAID where possible. I would rather not have to reinstall all my games over a disk failure, ya know?

    On most of my machines it's not an issue, because I'm either working from remote servers or in a cloud storage environment like Dropbox, but for a gaming PC there's a lot more happening locally. On my Linux workstation environments I'm a few hundred MB apt-get away from being back up and running with minimal losses.
  • calvinbcalvinb
    last I heard, RAID on SSDs are a bad idea
  • stitchstitch
    Seems like a good build I'm not too up to speed on the latest nvidia GPU offerings so I'm not too sure about your card. Definitely go SSD if you can - even if it involves returning the i7 and getting an i5. You will notice more speed with an i5+SSD than i7+HDD.

    Also I'm not too crazy about Gigabyte these days you may want to look at other brands.

    Congrats tho. You are on your way to a beast.
  • dosboxdosbox
    If you want to overclock your cpu, ASUS is the brand to go with.
  • wingzeroisminewingzeroismine
    ampharos wrote:
    last I heard, RAID on SSDs are a bad idea
    I can't quite remember, but I think it was mostly sandforce based SSDs that didn't RAID well because of their reliance on compressible data. I think TRIM may also get disabled in RAID.
    Kirk wrote:
    Yeah I was thinking about doing something like this. I could do a RAID 1 of smaller SSD's (maybe 2x128GB) for the OS
    If you are going to do RAID 1, why not just save yourself the cost of a wasted SSD and take monthly images of the drive? Macrium Reflect even does things Ghost could never do well like live imaging.
  • scheurneusscheurneus
    May I suggest a Radeon R9 280?

    It is slightly faster and cheaper than a GTX 760, but it wil use slightly more power.
    Unless for some reason you really want NVIDIA, the 280 is a better choice.
  • stitchstitch
    scheurneus wrote:
    May I suggest a Radeon R9 280?

    It is slightly faster and cheaper than a GTX 760, but it wil use slightly more power.
    Unless for some reason you really want NVIDIA, the 280 is a better choice.

    This is actually a good decision depending on your desire to run Linux Kirk. AMD by far has the better open driver and if things like Wayland interest you you should grab this card.
  • calvinbcalvinb
    Do they support the R9 cards yet though? You may need to stick with Catalyst or a bleeding edge kernel if so.
  • scheurneusscheurneus
    ampharos wrote:
    Do they support the R9 cards yet though? You may need to stick with Catalyst or a bleeding edge kernel if so.

    I think it is supported, as it basically is a Radeon HD 7950 Boost.
  • KirkKirk
    stitch wrote:
    scheurneus wrote:
    May I suggest a Radeon R9 280?

    It is slightly faster and cheaper than a GTX 760, but it wil use slightly more power.
    Unless for some reason you really want NVIDIA, the 280 is a better choice.

    This is actually a good decision depending on your desire to run Linux Kirk. AMD by far has the better open driver and if things like Wayland interest you you should grab this card.

    I won't be running Linux on this machine at all, at least for the next 4-5 years, as it will be my gaming rig and gaming isn't well supported on Linux yet.

    In 4-5+ years either Steam games and everything will start being ported to Linux, or I will likely want to build a new machine for gaming, so then it may become a Linux box.

    It will take a lot more than this suggestion to convince me to buy a Radeon card. I have owned 3 across the course of my life, 2 of them caused system crashes requiring a reboot whenever certain games (Battlefield 2 especially) were opened... and the 3rd one had a fan failure within a few years. All of my EVGA\nVidia cards are still chugging along and I've had no major issues with one ever. All of my ATI cards either were garbage or quickly turned into garbage, but I suppose I haven't had one since AMD bought them. I don't really like AMD processors either though.
  • BlueSunBlueSun
    Normally, I would have been quick to defend AMD, but lately, I'd have to agree with you. They've never had really great drivers, but lately it seems they've sucked a little more.

    My work machine had multiple BSODs caused by the AMD display driver and Catalyst Control Center is a useless piece of shit that I would normally never allow near my machines, but unfortunately it was required to fix scaling issues with HDMI. I had it crash a few times.

    I've recently switched to nVidia cards in all of my desktop systems and I have no regrets. No driver crashes (yet) and very decent performance.

    I've had a few fan failures over the years with my AMD cards, but then I've had fan failures in just about every component with a fan. PSU, CPU, case... fans failures are probably the most common thing I've had in terms of hardware failures. So I wouldn't blame that on AMD.
  • KirkKirk
    BlueSun wrote:
    I've had a few fan failures over the years with my AMD cards, but then I've had fan failures in just about every component with a fan. PSU, CPU, case... fans failures are probably the most common thing I've had in terms of hardware failures. So I wouldn't blame that on AMD.
    Yeah I can't blame that on AMD, especially since it was a pre-AMD ATI card, but it was an ATI branded card so they chose the components, including the fan that didn't last.

    There are definitely fans that last and fans that don't. I bought a bunch of Rosewill fans when I built my first big fileserver, and all 4 failed within 1 year. I replaced them with CoolerMaster fans that were twice the price, and those things have been spinning 24/7 ever since.
  • calvinbcalvinb
    I've never had problems with AMD/ATI drivers, even during the worst era, the Rage cards. On Linux, you can just use the free drivers and they're far better anyways.
  • SkoraSkora
    Can i recommend a SeaSonic PSU? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151108&cm_re=seasonic_m12ii-_-17-151-108-_-Product
  • stitchstitch
    TheOfficialSkora wrote:
    Can i recommend a SeaSonic PSU? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151108&cm_re=seasonic_m12ii-_-17-151-108-_-Product

    Except 850W is entirely overkill for such a setup. The modern Haswell systems are far more power efficent than the earlier generations and same with the graphics cards as the dies shrink further.

    To put it in perspective I have the following desktop:
    * 2x Xeon 5310's with an OC'd bus.
    * 20GB FB-DIMM
    * Radeon 6850 PCI-E
    * 4x HDD with a SSD and CD-ROM
    * ext. sound card and RAID card

    and I'm still only sitting here consuming 400W according to the kill-a-watt. Kirk's planned build would probably idle around 250W and unlikely to peak at full load any past what I pull at idle.
  • KirkKirk
    TheOfficialSkora wrote:
    Can i recommend a SeaSonic PSU? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151108&cm_re=seasonic_m12ii-_-17-151-108-_-Product
    I have seen too many SeaSonic PSU's fail at work, I am steering clear of them for now.
    stitch wrote:
    Kirk's planned build would probably idle around 250W and unlikely to peak at full load any past what I pull at idle.
    If I move forward with a RAID setup like I am considering doing, it may be closer to your build than to 250W, but yeah it's a bit overkill. A 500W or 600W PSU will probably do the trick but I was thinking I'd get a 750W anyways.
  • SkoraSkora
    Here's a 500w EVGA. It's only $40, and isn't junk. I'm looking at using it in my own build.
    http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-80PLUS-Certi ... =evga+500w
  • stitchstitch
    Kirk wrote:
    TheOfficialSkora wrote:
    Can i recommend a SeaSonic PSU? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817151108&cm_re=seasonic_m12ii-_-17-151-108-_-Product
    I have seen too many SeaSonic PSU's fail at work, I am steering clear of them for now.

    I can only assume the "poo-poo pile" still exists in the inner bowels of the NOC?
  • KirkKirk
    I decided to go with this power supply, since it's on sale and should meet my needs for this build.

    EVGA 600 B 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified 600W Active PFC ATX12V Power Supply

    I decided on this case for a similar reason, but I also like the 6 hard drive bays and the fans right there for keeping them cool, as I was thinking about doing that RAID 10 in this machine.

    Antec Three Hundred Illusion Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

    stitch wrote:
    I can only assume the "poo-poo pile" still exists in the inner bowels of the NOC?
    I haven't seen it recently, I think they tossed a few and put a few back into circulation because they tested good on the power supply tester. I haven't seen a PSU failure very recently.
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