Techie Talk Computer Build

[Slazer]

So, I'm currently purchasing parts to build a new desktop computer, and seeing as how there are a few Canterlot citizens who are bigger techies than I am, I thought I'd ask for opinions on the parts I chose and the performance I might be able to expect out of the resulting computer.

Case: Rosewill Blackhawk Mid-Tower Case

Motherboard: ASUS M5A97

CPU: AMD FX-6350

Video Card: XFX Radeon R7-260X

RAM: G.SKILL Ares Series 1866 DDR3 RAM (8 GB; 4 GBx2)

Power Supply: Raidmax Hybrid 2 RX-630SS 630W

Primary Storage: Seagate ST1000DX001 1 TB SSHD

The goal when I was picking these parts is a mid-grade gaming PC with good multitasking capability. The intended OS is Windows 7, and the optimum resolution of the monitor I will be using is 1600x900.

[Parker_Izing]

I see some weak spots.

AMD CPU's stopped being faster than intel in 2001, same happens by going Radeon instead of nvidia.

So, Intel + Nvidia is your answer, you can cut on the price tag by picking an I5 instead of an I7 (because gaming performance relies in GPU+RAM, not CPU), heck, you can even use a high grade I3...

RAM I see it quite sparse, 8GB in 64 bit are like 4GB in 32, what I have now, quite short for gaming, go for 16GB or at least 12GB

Storage, a 1tb SSD disk sounds ludicrous, also expensive, SSD are worth only for speed asking files, like O.S., drivers and core game files. so you can go fine with under half of it, this supplied with a mechanical 1000gb HD for more 'meh' stuff.

About motherboard, I never liked ASUS, in under 5 years I had actually buried two mobos of this make (and I once rescued from grave an intel board and made it work for two more years) So, ASUS can be too busted for me to work on.

[Slazer]

By and large, this was a budget build. AMD has been good to me in the past, and their components have almost always been cheaper than the Intel equivalent insofar as I've seen. Ditto for Radeon; my last GPU was a Radeon 6850, and it performed exactly as I wanted it to.

RAM I will agree with you on, but the beauty of building your own PC is that you can improve it later on. It'll be fairly simple to upgrade the RAM at a later date, when I'm not on such a tight budget; I am a heavy multitasker (one memorable time I had Skyrim, 30 Google Chrome tabs, Skype, Ventrillo, and another game open at the same time on my old 4 GB RAM quad-core rig; that was 'fun'), so I'll probably do that sooner than later.

Also, the storage unit I chose is a hybrid drive: it uses an 8 GB SSD coupled with a 1 TB HDD, and cycles frequently used files (such as the OS) onto the SSD storage to lower response lag on those programs and files. It's cheaper than an SSD-HDD combination, and you still get the faster boot times and some of the benefits of a normal SSD.

The motherboard I'm fairly confident in, and it's the best I could afford without getting a bunch of stuff I really don't need (I'm not a Crossfire/SLI guy, nor am I the type of gamer who wants to run three monitors at super-high def resolutions). I made sure to get opinions from a friend of mine who's built a number of computers before while picking out the mobo and this is what he recommended; if it does bury, at least I'll know not to listen to him anymore.

[Dio]

I see some weak spots.

AMD CPU's stopped being faster than intel in 2001, same happens by going Radeon instead of nvidia.

So, Intel + Nvidia is your answer, you can cut on the price tag by picking an I5 instead of an I7 (because gaming performance relies in GPU+RAM, not CPU), heck, you can even use a high grade I3...

RAM I see it quite sparse, 8GB in 64 bit are like 4GB in 32, what I have now, quite short for gaming, go for 16GB or at least 12GB

Storage, a 1tb SSD disk sounds ludicrous, also expensive, SSD are worth only for speed asking files, like O.S., drivers and core game files. so you can go fine with under half of it, this supplied with a mechanical 1000gb HD for more 'meh' stuff.

About motherboard, I never liked ASUS, in under 5 years I had actually buried two mobos of this make (and I once rescued from grave an intel board and made it work for two more years) So, ASUS can be too busted for me to work on.

I have to disagree. While I am an Intel guy myself, AMD is not as horrid as you make it out to be. As long as the CPU and GPU are within the last 2 generations of silicon, you should be fine. The R7 and R9 series GPUs do not benchmark as well as nVidia cards of the same tier (on DirectX), but they are still hold a good price to performance ratio and have access to stuff like Mantle. The R9 290X is almost on par with the GTX 780 Ti, but is $150 less. You should be fine with the R7.

Likewise, 8GB is sufficient for 1080p moderate setting gaming, even with multitasking. I am running an i7 3770K and a GTX 660 Ti with 8GB of RAM and I can be on a video call with my girlfriend, have chrome tabs open with Battlescreen and multiple game wiki Chrome tabs, and be running Battlefield 4 without loss of performance. Unless you are doing video editing, 3D rendering, or extreme high resolution art stuff, you will not need more than 8GB. G.Skill is a good brand, so you should be okay there.

Asus is also a good brand, at least recently. So long as the mobo and chipset isn't ancient you should be fine. Be sure you keep the packaging for RMA and run a bench test before you install it in your case just to make sure you don't have one that's dead on arrival.

I personally would prefer a separate SSD+HDD combo. The difference is night and day in terms of load times and boot times. I could never go back to using an HDD boot drive. But if two drives is not in your budget, then you can make do with a single drive or a hybrid.

The only real weak point I can see is your power supply. I would spend a few more bucks and get a Corsair CX series power supply. I trust the brand name more than I do Raidmax from what I've read.

Good luck.

[Slazer]

Thank you for your input, Dio. Unfortunately, I've always ordered the PSU...

If I buried myself because I picked a bad PSU, I'm gonna be quite irritated.

[Dio]

You will probably be okay so long as you don't plan on doing any overclocking. Also keep in mind that with that wattage of PSU, any upgrades to your GPU or CPU will likely require a PSU upgrade as well.

One more thing, I would recommend upgrading to an aftermarket air cooler for your CPU if it's within your budget. A mid-tower should be more than enough to accommodate a cooling stack. It will help keep your CPU temperatures low and let you squeeze every last bit of performance out of your hardware. Noctua and CoolerMaster are good brands to look at.

[arrowghost]

PSU wise, yes, we must always target ABOVE our needs, reach the tipping point or barely reaching it is not a good idea. We all know that when a game that requires a lot of power to draw when it "overclocks" itself for rendering special effects in-game especially, Windows can hang and freeze or it'll just shut down after an overload is occurred to prevent a total failure. Brand wise, usually it's debatable but my computer advisor told me that Corsair is more efficient than Cooler Master. Although I wonder if those 80 PLUS Gold & Platinum really matters to keep it power efficient. I notice there are other brands like Gigabyte have their own SUMO series of PSU, and SilverStone (For some reason I don't know that brand except other than it's a car tire brand it's famous for along with Michelin). Raidmax or any other funny brands as far as I know, as long as they're not super popular, the risk of failure is earlier than the best ones like Corsair, which currently using a VS series. Even the majority in my country's market where most shops sell a lot of Cooler Master PSUs while lack in Corsair's, interesting.

Graphic card wise, yeah, I notice Mantle is really promising, however, it's major drawback is still in its efficiency, I read a lot of reviews, it's still very very hot and draw a lot of power. Let's face it, those are really high end, that's why we should buy 3rd party brands like Gigabyte that is more focused on towards cooling and draws heat more efficiently. So I'll stick with the Geforce series, most games, just like in their market shares, Nvidia has the most attention that's why you see games always have options like TXAA for example and so does the PhysX. Yeah, nice try for AMD to compete well with Titan, but nope, Nvidia still did a good job when it comes to power & temperature management.

We'll keep ahead with 8GB for some games can use a little extra help and not always from the graphic card, I think. Plus, copying & pasting files are obviously faster with 8GB. My 4GB earlier was only a single RAM, not double, I notice it was slower. After Effects also worked like a charm. But the ones I'm using are the simple and most common RAMs we use, never those powerful types like Corsair's Dominator & Vengeance classes, I suspect like my shopkeeper said, it's for overclocking.

Storage is something it's very hard to go for when SSD can be more efficient but once it's dead someday, it brings the data along with it to the Death Zone. I also heard it has trouble reading than writing. And it's still not practical when the storage can't go as high as 1TB like the normal HDD would and cost just the same as the HDD in the market, it's soooo expensive if I want to go that way. I'm even godsmacked with this article too, http://www.techspot....spectively.html . Hitachi HDD is better than Western Digital? Holy crud!

[Slazer]

I made a few part changes after taking the advice from this thread and from some other tech-savvy friends of mine into account.

PSU: Rosewill HIVE-650 650W Modular 80 PLUS Bronze

Storage: Seagate Barracuda ST2000 2 TB HDD

I wish I had asked before I bought my PSU, as I've since heard some negative words about the model I purchased earlier from both online reviews and a couple of friends of mine- plus it's not 80 PLUS certified as I thought it was. I'm not sure how I missed that. Regardless, I'm not willing to take the chance of my Raidmax PSU frying $700 worth of hardware, so I'll bite the bullet and drop the $85 for a new PSU and keep the one I have as an emergency backup. It should be noted that the only thing keeping me from buying a Corsair CX-Series is the lack of modular cables; I HATE that sort of cable clutter in my case, and as I am not that good at managing cables, I'd rather buy a modular unit that allows me to remove the cables I don't need and save me the trouble of finding some place out of the way to shove them.

About the wattage: I do not intend to overclock, and PSU calculators I've used have indicated I only really need about 500-550W to power the build. With that in mind, 650W feels like plenty of overhead.

Insofar as the storage change, I decided against the model of Seagate SHDD I listed earlier because of similar reasons as the PSU debacle above; the difference here is I hadn't already dropped a hundred bucks on that SHDD before asking questions. With that in mind, I've decided to get a standard HDD for the time being and get more storage for less money. I figure I can always back up the drive, format it, and then reinstall the OS if I decide to buy an SSD later on down the line and use that as a boot drive. For the time being, a mechanical HDD is fine for my purposes.

What do you think of these new choices? The reviews seem to be favorable for both products, but I've learned my lesson about not asking for opinions.

[Dio]

Your PSU should be fine now. I personally am not a Seagate guy, but everyone else says very good things about the brand. I had a drive failure of my old Seagate HDD (replaced with a Western Digital black drive) within 4 months, but I'm going to chock that up to ending up with a lemon. I don't see anything glaringly wrong with either of the parts you've selected.

[SunlightHeart]

why not get a single 8 gb stick? same price. Ripjaws X series has a good 8gb stick for like 78 bucks.

PSU looks good, Rosewill is one of my favorite companies.

[Slazer]

why not get a single 8 gb stick? same price. Ripjaws X series has a good 8gb stick for like 78 bucks.

PSU looks good, Rosewill is one of my favorite companies.

My mobo is set up for dual-channel memory. If I get 8 GB sticks, I'll end up buying two- and 16 GB RAM is... uh, overkill for almost everything.

[SunlightHeart]

My mobo is set up for dual-channel memory. If I get 8 GB sticks, I'll end up buying two- and 16 GB RAM is... uh, overkill for almost everything.

I was just asking. RAM is dirt cheap and the difference between dual and single channel is barely 9% performance difference. If you bought 1 8gb stick, your build would still be adequate (you won't even notice the difference) until you bought the next stick. Mainly I'm giving you this advice because tech is getting cheaper and I tend to build for future flexibility (Plus it'll be easier to find 8gb sticks with better timings).

I just got another 8gb stick, and I really don't notice the difference. But I enjoy the future flexibility of having more than I need.

[Slazer]

You raise a valid point, but I don't think it's necessary for my purposes at the moment- plus I already bought the RAM for this particular build. I'll keep that information in mind if I have a bit of disposable income laying around sometime.

[SunlightHeart]

You raise a valid point, but I don't think it's necessary for my purposes at the moment- plus I already bought the RAM for this particular build. I'll keep that information in mind if I have a bit of disposable income laying around sometime.

When you get your system built, let us know how well it serves you. I have two desktops built, both pretty solid. I don't PC game anymore, but I just like to have cool stuff.

[arrowghost]

I personally avoid Seagate if I were you, there are TONS of reports and complaints when Seagate HDDs tend to fail so soon like crazy, I've seen some died out in just a year only. Read this one, http://www.techspot....spectively.html

Go get a Western Digital or Hitachi as well, just remember to avoid Seagate, their bad product reputation speaks for itself.

I hope you can still switch at the last minute, don't worry about data losses or unnecessary reformats again, the earlier you do it before your major usage the better. (Major usage in terms of using for at least 1 month full of general things we do & gaming) More importantly, HDDs die without warnings, so you better change it earlier so you can extend the lifespan. Having a soon to died out Seagate HDD is far more painful when you count in your precious un-backed-up data than just hours of reinstalling Windows programs and stuff.

As far as extra RAMs go, it'll depend, because the motherboard will be upgraded too in the process, it's only a matter of time. Our DDR3 will one day gets phased out with DDR4 and Intel's Broadwell will be coming one day. Geforce has made it to Maxwell via GTX 750 already, good work, and I'm surprised! Overall, it depends how long you can wait till you get the upgraded stuff.

[Noedig]

I'd feel jelly for your computer... but but I think my bro has a better one that that. :c

I'M JELLY OF HIS COMPUTER!!! D:

Because smooth gameplay.

[Slazer]

I have my eyes on a Western Digital 1 TB Blue, but I am rather intrigued by the reviews on Hitachi HDDs. The problem is, I'm having trouble finding them for sale from a decent vendor; Newegg only seems to sell a couple of models, and all of them are well over $100. If someone could find a Hitachi for around $50-70 and point me there, I'd much appreciate it. Otherwise, I'm going to go with the WD I linked to above.

[arrowghost]

Hitachi is definitely hard to find of course, but still, do keep an eye on the other top brands, just Seagate is not one of them.

WD is good, just don't aim for Green, it's not worth it as the reviews also mention for its early failure. Blue & Black are fine, not sure of Red.

I have a Black because it has 5 year warranty whereas Blue is only 3 or less. Well, it depends on your shops' catalogue, ask them on the warranty too.

[moonshineTheleocat]

You can go with AMD products if you like. While yes, AMD is not as fast as intel, the speed difference is generally unnoticeable and for some reason AMD doesn't hold as much as a range loss as Intel does when it comes to newer and newer games.

The rule of thumb is, If you are going to have a lot of things going at once, and maybe run a server. Go with AMD. AMD works real well as a power chip rather than a speed demon. The current processor I have will let me run four AAA games at once, and a server with a 100 users of minecraft on it. No OC.

If you really need a four frame difference or so. You need to squeeze out the very best. You plan on doing competitive playing. Go Intel. The chip is generally very reliable for single core applications, which games tend to use. AMD can work for this, but not if you want bragging rights.

Plus generally competitive players play on REALLY low settings no matter their build.

For Hard Drives.

WD is a really nice brand. I personally have a black 1tb in my system. It's fast, won't let me read loading tips (believe me... you want to. Especially in thief when they DON'T tell you half the **** you need to know in the tutorial.) But it's loud. Like really loud. It's louder than my chassy fans. I can even hear it boot.

WD Blue is economical. Unless you plan on raiding, it won't do you much good. They do real well in servers though.

WD Green is the lower end. Provides decent speeds at low price. It's also energy efficient.

Avoid Seagate. I have no idea what happened, but they have gone down in quality lately. Plus the use of Glass disk adds a risk of failure if it jars or comes close to a magnet other than the ones in the drive it's self.

Samsung is an incredible brand. If you can find some of the original drives... get em. You won't regret it. But they are rare now ever since they stopped making them.

GPUs. I do recommend staying with AMD though. However, boost your option to the HD7950. If I remember, the price difference between the two models is minimum but the HD7950 performs better.

AMD GPUS are also the choices used for the Next Gen Consoles. So... most games will be pre optimized to work on AMD GPUs. My best guess why Thief is not working on Nvidia systems as well as it does on ATI.

Oh... and you won't need 16 gigs of ram for gaming. 8 gigs will do you just fine. When I turn my computer, it never shoots past 2 gigs. Of course there is a lot of unneeded processes running in Windows 7. In windows 8.1, you will only see maybe 1.3 being used up. A game generally requires 4 gigs of ram available preferably more.

I haven't seen anything shoot past 6 gigs yet... and I am running everything on ultra. The only time I have maxed out my 16 gigs of ram was through a Creator Engine Modding Project, and only because I also had Blender open at the same time with some sculpted stuff loaded in.

Also 1333 mghz ram will be plenty. I never noticed a difference with the ram speed anyways.

BUT. If you happen to find a steal for 16 gigs, and it's some how cheaper than buying 8 gigs of ram... Go for it. It won't hurt anything.

[Slazer]

You can go with AMD products if you like. While yes, AMD is not as fast as intel, the speed difference is generally unnoticeable and for some reason AMD doesn't hold as much as a range loss as Intel does when it comes to newer and newer games.

The rule of thumb is, If you are going to have a lot of things going at once, and maybe run a server. Go with AMD. AMD works real well as a power chip rather than a speed demon. The current processor I have will let me run four AAA games at once, and a server with a 100 users of minecraft on it. No OC.

If you really need a four frame difference or so. You need to squeeze out the very best. You plan on doing competitive playing. Go Intel. The chip is generally very reliable for single core applications, which games tend to use. AMD can work for this, but not if you want bragging rights.

Plus generally competitive players play on REALLY low settings no matter their build.

For Hard Drives.

WD is a really nice brand. I personally have a black 1tb in my system. It's fast, won't let me read loading tips (believe me... you want to. Especially in thief when they DON'T tell you half the **** you need to know in the tutorial.) But it's loud. Like really loud. It's louder than my chassy fans. I can even hear it boot.

WD Blue is economical. Unless you plan on raiding, it won't do you much good. They do real well in servers though.

WD Green is the lower end. Provides decent speeds at low price. It's also energy efficient.

Avoid Seagate. I have no idea what happened, but they have gone down in quality lately. Plus the use of Glass disk adds a risk of failure if it jars or comes close to a magnet other than the ones in the drive it's self.

Samsung is an incredible brand. If you can find some of the original drives... get em. You won't regret it. But they are rare now ever since they stopped making them.

GPUs. I do recommend staying with AMD though. However, boost your option to the HD7950. If I remember, the price difference between the two models is minimum but the HD7950 performs better.

AMD GPUS are also the choices used for the Next Gen Consoles. So... most games will be pre optimized to work on AMD GPUs. My best guess why Thief is not working on Nvidia systems as well as it does on ATI.

Oh... and you won't need 16 gigs of ram for gaming. 8 gigs will do you just fine. When I turn my computer, it never shoots past 2 gigs. Of course there is a lot of unneeded processes running in Windows 7. In windows 8.1, you will only see maybe 1.3 being used up. A game generally requires 4 gigs of ram available preferably more.

I haven't seen anything shoot past 6 gigs yet... and I am running everything on ultra. The only time I have maxed out my 16 gigs of ram was through a Creator Engine Modding Project, and only because I also had Blender open at the same time with some sculpted stuff loaded in.

Also 1333 mghz ram will be plenty. I never noticed a difference with the ram speed anyways.

BUT. If you happen to find a steal for 16 gigs, and it's some how cheaper than buying 8 gigs of ram... Go for it. It won't hurt anything.

First off, I appreciate the amount of feedback I've been getting. I knew there were a fair few techies on this site, but I didn't think there were this many well-read computer hobbyists here. I'm impressed and very grateful.

I've always been a fan of AMD parts, and my old Phenom II 955X Black performed admirably back in my old rig. I was able to multitask as I wished on that unit, though my stupid decision to skimp on the RAM (4 GBs for a gaming machine, a-doy) meant I had some bottlenecking issues when I did crazy things like run Skyrim, two other games, Skype, Steam, and about fifty Chrome tabs at once on a 5400 RPM HDD. The fact that I didn't have problems until I started getting ridiculous like that has given me a fair bit of confidence in AMD CPUs and GPUs as multitasking engines, which is what I'm really looking for right now.

I don't particularly care about super 60FPS performance on superultra settings right out of the box. With Skyrim, I actually took the time to tweak and edit the .ini file until I found the performance and look I wanted, so I'm not averse to messing with settings if I need to. Besides, 3.9 GHz base clock speed on each core in a hexacore processor isn't anything to sneeze at, certainly an improvement over my 3.4 GHz base clock quadcore in my old machine (RIP). That's plenty of speed for single-core applications, in my opinion, at least with how I run my programs (processor affinity is your friend).

Yeah, I've heard pretty good things about WD, my self. I really want a Black, but... $150 for a 1 TB Black HDD? That's nearing three times the cost of the Blue I linked to before. I know the phrase "you pay for what you get", but that's still ridiculous in my eyes. If you know of a cheaper site than Newegg that's still trustworthy for a WD Black HDD, please let me know.

I've heard very good things about the R7 260X, and I've purchased (and in fact have on standby) the card already. The nice thing about the GPU, though, is that it's relatively easy to upgrade that particular component later on down the line, just behind the RAM in ease of installation unless it's out of the range of my PSU. For now, I can work with my R7; it'll do fine for my current cache of games.

The bit about AMD GPUs being the current standard for consoles was something I was honestly not privy to. All the more reason it's a great day to be an AMD fanboy.

Also, I'd be inclined to say the same about the RAM, but I had one of my other friends (who works building computers for a living and helped me pick out most of the initial batch of parts) threaten to throttle me if I dared to use 1333 RAM with the CPU and mobo we selected. I bought 1866 DDR3, and have it on standby like the GPU, so I'm already set there.

UPDATE: I feel dumb, if I just found what I think I found. Is this a decent WD Black?

[arrowghost]

You know how to customize and stuff? Well, it's up to you on you buy it. Me? I've done it all through the shop as I can't assemble my new Desktop PC myself back in July after my laptop was traded.

[moonshineTheleocat]

Where are you finding blacks that cost 150 for a terrabyte? The one I got was from fries for 78, while the ones on Newegg are normally always on some kind of sell.

EDIT: OH DEAR AND NOT BLACKS AS IN BLACK PEOPLE D:

[arrowghost]

Be careful of what you write, mate. Just say the WD Black when you refer to it, blacks can be refer to the Africans. I already recognize it but to others, they might be confused.

[moonshineTheleocat]

I am african. But I realize not a lot of people would know this. Erm anyways...'

Try looking online or something. You shouldn't be finding WDs that cost 150 dollars.

[arrowghost]

Usually it's best on quality rather pure low cost. Pure low is something fishy. Sure, SSD is more stable but it does have other types of pros and cons and not to mention still just as expensive.