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Been out of gaming several years!- Help my PC Build/knowlede gap?

Bwah?Bwah? Registered User regular
edited May 2014 in Help / Advice Forum
Hello!

I'll be short - I was big into building PCs, PC gaming, overclocking, 3dmark and etc. But I really haven't had much of a pulse on it, trying to build a new PC now and it's so difficult to benchmark what is "good" ...or even what games to grab. I'm not completely out of touch with games, just more familiar with consoles (sorry).

I'm just fielding any kind of input. Looking to spend 1k-1.2k (tops). Currently thinking I will use my 32" LCD monitor for now in an effort to save money. Much appreciated, fellows.

Here's the current list.

Case
newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811139028

Motherboard - ASUS 990FX...
http://newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131877

AMD FX8350 Black Vishera 4.0ghz (4.2t)
http://newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113284

750w Power Supply
http://newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139030

G skill 4GBx2 DDR3 1866
newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460

Samsung 250g Pro series SSD
http://newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147193

MSI Radeon R9 270x 4gig
newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127775


Any input is appreciated.

MGSsig.jpg
Bwah? on

Posts

  • SnicketysnickSnicketysnick The Greatest Hype Man in WesterosRegistered User regular
    edited May 2014
    I have almost that exact parts list built in Jan this year (I have the 990x MB, an 8320 and a 280x, but still) and it is running everything that I can throw at it maxed out. I would definitely look at squeezing a GFX upgrade if you can, to the 280 or something like an nvidia 770, just to maximize the lifespan.

    You could also look at going the Intel route, but I can't really speak for that myself. Consider posting over in the build thread in moes tavern http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/187504/computer-build-thread-bitcoiners-can-t-keep-us-down-1440p-or-bust#latest There are some good folks there full of advice.

    Snicketysnick on
    7qmGNt5.png
  • Bwah?Bwah? Registered User regular
    Snicketysnick wrote: »
    I have almost that exact parts list built in Jan this year (I have the 990x MB, an 8320 and a 280x, but still) and it is running everything that I can throw at it maxed out. I would definitely look at squeezing a GFX upgrade if you can, to the 280 or something like an nvidia 770, just to maximize the lifespan.

    You could also look at going the Intel route, but I can't really speak for that myself. Consider posting over in the build thread in moes tavern http://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/187504/computer-build-thread-bitcoiners-can-t-keep-us-down-1440p-or-bust#latest There are some good folks there full of advice.


    Thank you sir! Yes, good point...it's crazy with Moore's law, the whole relevancy thing. Thank you for identifying that.

    MGSsig.jpg
  • BlindZenDriverBlindZenDriver Registered User regular
    The PSU is totally overkill, but you really should consider going for 8 GB of memory. Also I'd suggest getting a hard drive for all that stuff you don't need fast and frequent.

    Plus do look at mice and keyboards as well. Amazing progress has been made with especially the mice when we are talking gaming.

    Bones heal, glory is forever.
  • Eat it You Nasty Pig.Eat it You Nasty Pig. tell homeland security 'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
    the PSU is overkill for that build, but (at least imo) that's a relatively cheap place to build in some forward compatibility. You could easily re-use it in a future system, or SLI radeons later or whatever

    my understanding is that intel is currently ahead performance/value wise in the ~$200 processor range (the i5 series are real ass kickers for the price), but I don't really know specifics about the newer amd chips

    hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
    that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    If you're not budget limited, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to waste money on an AMD CPU.

    It's a shame that they've let Intel get so far ahead, because they have an AWFUL lot of work to do to catch back up.

    An i5-4670K and a decent Z87 motherboard (the ASUS Sabretooth is pretty neat!) combined with a decent aftermarket CPU cooler will let you overclock to around 4.5 GHz fairly easily, and then you're set CPU wise for at least the next 5 years, I reckon. I've got an i7-3770K (last gen) and nothing troubles it. The bottleneck in my system is my overclocked GTX680, playing games at 1080p.

  • Bwah?Bwah? Registered User regular
    BlindZenDriver wrote: »
    The PSU is totally overkill, but you really should consider going for 8 GB of memory. Also I'd suggest getting a hard drive for all that stuff you don't need fast and frequent.

    Plus do look at mice and keyboards as well. Amazing progress has been made with especially the mice when we are talking gaming.

    Confused, did you mean MORE than 8 gig? ...good call on the HDD
    Eat it You Nasty Pig. wrote: »
    the PSU is overkill for that build, but (at least imo) that's a relatively cheap place to build in some forward compatibility. You could easily re-use it in a future system, or SLI radeons later or whatever

    my understanding is that intel is currently ahead performance/value wise in the ~$200 processor range (the i5 series are real ass kickers for the price), but I don't really know specifics about the newer amd chips

    That makes two of you, now I am wondering about the CPU...if I get a cheaper one it's just something I have to upgrade again
    chrishallett83 wrote: »
    If you're not budget limited, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to waste money on an AMD CPU.

    It's a shame that they've let Intel get so far ahead, because they have an AWFUL lot of work to do to catch back up.

    An i5-4670K and a decent Z87 motherboard (the ASUS Sabretooth is pretty neat!) combined with a decent aftermarket CPU cooler will let you overclock to around 4.5 GHz fairly easily, and then you're set CPU wise for at least the next 5 years, I reckon. I've got an i7-3770K (last gen) and nothing troubles it. The bottleneck in my system is my overclocked GTX680, playing games at 1080p.



    Could you elaborate on this a bit? the AMD v Intel? I had stopped building when 64bit kinda came out, they were on par then. You're talking about a >$200 3.4ghz processor vs a $200 4.0ghz and you are saying the Intel blows it away?


    MGSsig.jpg
  • FoomyFoomy Registered User regular
    For the $200 and above price range, equal priced AMD vs. intel cpu's will have the Intel chips giving about 15% more performance on most benchmarks.

    Ghz is a completely useless spec these days besides comparing 2 chips of the same family ie. like comparing 2 haswell i5's to each other.

    Steam Profile: FoomyFooms
  • ShogunShogun Hair long; money long; me and broke wizards we don't get along Registered User regular
    edited May 2014
    Do not base a decision on the Ghz speed of a chip.

    Do not spend $200 on that AMD chip. That is $200 on a chip that is already 2-3 years old and has questionable power usage. Piledriver is semi-strong when using multiple threads but your performance for that chip is very dependent on workload. Anything using a single thread and an Intel chip will easily outperform it. Get a Core i5.

    Shogun on
    steam_sig.png
    Shogun Streams Vidya
  • Eat it You Nasty Pig.Eat it You Nasty Pig. tell homeland security 'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
    edited May 2014
    Bwah? wrote: »
    BlindZenDriver wrote: »
    The PSU is totally overkill, but you really should consider going for 8 GB of memory. Also I'd suggest getting a hard drive for all that stuff you don't need fast and frequent.

    Plus do look at mice and keyboards as well. Amazing progress has been made with especially the mice when we are talking gaming.

    Confused, did you mean MORE than 8 gig? ...good call on the HDD
    Eat it You Nasty Pig. wrote: »
    the PSU is overkill for that build, but (at least imo) that's a relatively cheap place to build in some forward compatibility. You could easily re-use it in a future system, or SLI radeons later or whatever

    my understanding is that intel is currently ahead performance/value wise in the ~$200 processor range (the i5 series are real ass kickers for the price), but I don't really know specifics about the newer amd chips

    That makes two of you, now I am wondering about the CPU...if I get a cheaper one it's just something I have to upgrade again
    chrishallett83 wrote: »
    If you're not budget limited, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to waste money on an AMD CPU.

    It's a shame that they've let Intel get so far ahead, because they have an AWFUL lot of work to do to catch back up.

    An i5-4670K and a decent Z87 motherboard (the ASUS Sabretooth is pretty neat!) combined with a decent aftermarket CPU cooler will let you overclock to around 4.5 GHz fairly easily, and then you're set CPU wise for at least the next 5 years, I reckon. I've got an i7-3770K (last gen) and nothing troubles it. The bottleneck in my system is my overclocked GTX680, playing games at 1080p.



    Could you elaborate on this a bit? the AMD v Intel? I had stopped building when 64bit kinda came out, they were on par then. You're talking about a >$200 3.4ghz processor vs a $200 4.0ghz and you are saying the Intel blows it away?


    the difference recently has been that while AMD's processors manage multi-core related tasks well, intel's single-core performance is much better. Right now what games are concerned about is 90% the performance of the one core that's handling the task of running the game engine. So the advantage is going to intel chips, especially with how tolerant the i5s are of moderate-to-high overclocking. This might change in a few years if more games implement better multicore support, but at this point it feels like people have been saying that for years and the consensus is still intel.

    ed: in terms of upgrading, right now I have an i5-2500k clocked up to 4.0 and it eats up most gaming-related tasks pretty easily (except for fucking planetside 2, yeesh.) And that's an ooooolddd i5, at this point. One of the newer ones could be taken up to 4.5 quite reasonably with a solid cooler, and that'll probably outlast whatever medium-budget graphics card you'd buy right now in terms of running games at high-to-max settings.

    Eat it You Nasty Pig. on
    hold your head high soldier, it ain't over yet
    that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    Bwah? wrote: »
    BlindZenDriver wrote: »
    The PSU is totally overkill, but you really should consider going for 8 GB of memory. Also I'd suggest getting a hard drive for all that stuff you don't need fast and frequent.

    Plus do look at mice and keyboards as well. Amazing progress has been made with especially the mice when we are talking gaming.

    Confused, did you mean MORE than 8 gig? ...good call on the HDD
    Eat it You Nasty Pig. wrote: »
    the PSU is overkill for that build, but (at least imo) that's a relatively cheap place to build in some forward compatibility. You could easily re-use it in a future system, or SLI radeons later or whatever

    my understanding is that intel is currently ahead performance/value wise in the ~$200 processor range (the i5 series are real ass kickers for the price), but I don't really know specifics about the newer amd chips

    That makes two of you, now I am wondering about the CPU...if I get a cheaper one it's just something I have to upgrade again
    chrishallett83 wrote: »
    If you're not budget limited, there is absolutely no reason whatsoever to waste money on an AMD CPU.

    It's a shame that they've let Intel get so far ahead, because they have an AWFUL lot of work to do to catch back up.

    An i5-4670K and a decent Z87 motherboard (the ASUS Sabretooth is pretty neat!) combined with a decent aftermarket CPU cooler will let you overclock to around 4.5 GHz fairly easily, and then you're set CPU wise for at least the next 5 years, I reckon. I've got an i7-3770K (last gen) and nothing troubles it. The bottleneck in my system is my overclocked GTX680, playing games at 1080p.


    Could you elaborate on this a bit? the AMD v Intel? I had stopped building when 64bit kinda came out, they were on par then. You're talking about a >$200 3.4ghz processor vs a $200 4.0ghz and you are saying the Intel blows it away?

    To put it simply, AMDs current microarchitecture and controls mean that their current chips do less per clock cycle than the comparable Intel chip. The way they count their 'cores' is also disingenuous, where their quad-core is more like two & two half-cores when compared to Intel.

  • azith28azith28 Registered User regular
    I am of the opinion that PC's are currently ahead of the curve of 'necessary' technology. Not saying you dont need a decent video card, but unless you are going after bleeding edge you can get a very good experience with a 100-130 dollar video card.

    Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
  • Donovan PuppyfuckerDonovan Puppyfucker A dagger in the dark is worth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered User regular
    azith28 wrote: »
    I am of the opinion that PC's are currently ahead of the curve of 'necessary' technology. Not saying you dont need a decent video card, but unless you are going after bleeding edge you can get a very good experience with a 100-130 dollar video card.

    Hmm. There's a pretty gigantic jump between $130 video cards (for instance an Nvidia GTX 750), and the common standard-recommend 'enthusiast' gaming card, the Nvidia GTX 760. And I don't just mean the $100 price difference. You're looking at the difference between playing a recent release AAA game (like Far Cry 3) at a choppy 25-35 fps on normal settings, and a much smoother 50-60 fps on high settings, both at 1080p.

  • azith28azith28 Registered User regular
    I play at 1900x1200 on a quad core 3ghz dell and the junky 730 Nvidia that came with it. While im sure there are games that would strain it if i jacked up all the settings, at this point its bleeding edge and beyond is my point. not against you having the best you want to spend money on, thats cool, Just saying I think a lot of the video cards coming out right now, while they may be more powerful, are not really having that extra power be used by 99% of the PC games on the market right now.

    Stercus, Stercus, Stercus, Morituri Sum
  • Bwah?Bwah? Registered User regular
    Figure i'd bump and let everyone know what I got, thanks for the recommendations. I am aware I short changed on the ram but there are still slots for more, MOBO I know isn't the best. Still probably need to get an aftermarket heatsink/fan combo to OC the processor.

    Thanks fellas.

    Monitor - ASUS VE247H Black 23.6" 2ms Full HD HDMI LED BackLight LCD
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236112

    Processor - Intel Core i5-4670K Haswell 3.4GHz LGA 1150 84W
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116899

    Mobo - MSI Z87-G45 Gaming LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130693

    SSD - Corsair Force Series GS CSSD-F240GBGS-BK 2.5" 240GB SATA III
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233312

    Vid Card - MSI R9 280 GAMING 3G 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127789

    Memory - G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460

    KB - MS Sidewinder
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823109191

    MGSsig.jpg
  • Jebus314Jebus314 Registered User regular
    edited May 2014
    Bwah? wrote: »
    Figure i'd bump and let everyone know what I got, thanks for the recommendations. I am aware I short changed on the ram but there are still slots for more, MOBO I know isn't the best. Still probably need to get an aftermarket heatsink/fan combo to OC the processor.

    Thanks fellas.

    Monitor - ASUS VE247H Black 23.6" 2ms Full HD HDMI LED BackLight LCD
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236112

    Processor - Intel Core i5-4670K Haswell 3.4GHz LGA 1150 84W
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116899

    Mobo - MSI Z87-G45 Gaming LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130693

    SSD - Corsair Force Series GS CSSD-F240GBGS-BK 2.5" 240GB SATA III
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233312

    Vid Card - MSI R9 280 GAMING 3G 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127789

    Memory - G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900)
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231460

    KB - MS Sidewinder
    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823109191

    The ram is fine and unless you're doing some heavy computation stuff (not gaming) it should last you several years. You will definitely need an aftermarket heatsink to do any overclocking. The 212 evo used to be the fan favorite. Nowadays I think the noctua NH-D14 reigns supreme. Of course if you're a little hesitant to strap a gigantic heavy heatsink to your tiny flexible motherboard you can always go closed loop water cooling with something like the corsair h100i.

    At any rate, good luck with the build!

    Jebus314 on
    "The world is a mess, and I just need to rule it" - Dr Horrible
  • Bwah?Bwah? Registered User regular
    Jebus314 wrote: »

    The ram is fine and unless you're doing some heavy computation stuff (not gaming) it should last you several years. You will definitely need an aftermarket heatsink to do any overclocking. The 212 evo used to be the fan favorite. Nowadays I think the noctua NH-D14 reigns supreme. Of course if you're a little hesitant to strap a gigantic heavy heatsink to your tiny flexible motherboard you can always go closed loop water cooling with something like the corsair h100i.

    At any rate, good luck with the build!

    Thanks! I wish you could reassure me on the vid card but it doesn't look like it was the smart play (vs 270x 4g and 280x) lol.

    Again, thanks

    MGSsig.jpg
  • Great ScottGreat Scott King of Wishful Thinking Paragon City, RIRegistered User regular
    edited May 2014
    Everything looks good, but I would make one comment since you haven't built any PCs in a while:
    memory speed is utterly irrelevant now. It means little for gaming and absolutely nothing for general computing.

    What does matter, since memory controllers are now on-CPU, is voltage. Try to get DIMMs that take 1.5v (or below).

    Don't overpay for RAM MHz. DDR3-1600 is completely fine for any PC with a dedicated PCIe video card. If you're concerned with overall memory performance you could try to get some with the lowest CAS available, but that's not crucial. See this article for details: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7364/memory-scaling-on-haswell/7

    Great Scott on
    I'm unique. Just like everyone else.
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