Building a high-end gaming computer

[MisterBob]

I know there's a lot of discussion here in tech support on PC building, but the info is too spread-out (and it often becomes outdated very quickly!)

Anyways bg, I'm looking to build a gaming PC, something I've never done before. Let's say my budget is ~$2500, although I find it unlikely that I'll need to go that high.

Any suggestions?

[MisterBob]

Created this wishlist to start:
http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/Pu...Number=8939132

what does bg think?

[Epical]

Looks good so far.

I'd upgrade your video card to a 4870 (possibly 2, depends how serious you are (if you did this you'd also might need to bump up your PSU to 1kW)), get higher speed RAM (or DDR3 if you're feeling frisky), and the Antec 1200 case.

[MisterBob]

Will I need to change the motherboard/processor if I upgrade the video card?

[Shuemue]

Looks pretty sweet to me.

[Epical]

Saw you changed your card to an HIS 512MB 4870, you might want to look at this version, especially if you plan on playing on 1680x1050 and higher resos (which I assume you will with a gaming machine of this caliber).

Also, yeah, you'll want a new mobo. I'll try to find one with RAM expandable to 16GB and possibly DDR3-compatible.

[Zoelef]

As someone who's also looking into building a PC, I'd like to share some of my reference points:

Defusing the motherboard confusopoly, plus bits-and-pieces on other parts:
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.ph...97&postcount=2

Case recommendations, $60-$120:
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.ph...75&postcount=2

Corsair PSUs, highly-regarded at their cheapest vendor by far: http://www.provantage.com/scripts/se...x=0&Submit.y=0

---
I'd look into the ASUS P5Q-Pro (x8/x8 Crossfire if that's your thing) & C2D E8400 combo from NewEgg - it's at $265 combined w/a $20 MIR on the motherboard.

[MayorBee]

Honestly coming from someone who has made their own PCs for 10 years what I've found myself doing lately instead of building a new machine from scratch is to take a low end Dell or HP or other pre-built econo PC and replacing video card, upgrading ram and hard drive. This works great especially if you don't aren't going to be doing any over clocking and just want to use it for straight up gaming. Then again I'm just lazy and jaded from building PCs for so long lol.

[Cephius]

There are a few problems with your build, mostly with the motherboard selection.

First is why are you getting a 780i if you're using a ATI card? Obviously it'll work, but if you decide to do Crossfire later you couldn't. It makes more sense to get a board that supports Crossfire especially if you're looking to make a 'monster' machine.

Secondly, the 780i has issues with SATA optical drives. It hasn't been fixed yet, but supposedly they're close. I've had the 780i for about 8 months now and I love it, but I don't see it working well with your build.

I'd also include a 150GB raptor drive for your OS if you don't have one already, installing the OS on a separate, faster drive does have a nice positive impact on your performance.

The RAM is fine, I don't think DDR3 is worth it yet for the price, but check the compatibility lists of whatever mobo you end up buying and make sure it's on there. If it's not, choose something off the list to avoid problems.

[levish]

to your cart to round out your budget i'd add

~500$
http://www.buy.com/prod/5805-raid-8c...207469283.html
~115$
http://www.buy.com/prod/adaptec-abm-...204219617.html
2x of (approx $460 total)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820227360

run SSD's raid0 and run relevant backup jobs to the 750GB drive in your cart
the Battery Backup Module is because I suspect the Adaptec card disables write cache without it (the SSD's have a sucky random write rate, which is what will benefit you most in the adapter)

can also run sata CD/DVD/BlueRay drives off the adaptec if you so wish.

You also might like to consider a 4870x2 since it scales beautifully and is my 1st time reccomending a dual GPU card.

[Zosi]

SSDs are cool and all, but that has to be one of the worst price/performance ratio upgrades I've ever seen suggested. Get a VelociRaptor or a single SSD for your OS drive, you can get a 300gb 2.5"-in-3.5"-form-factor VelociRaptor for under $300. Spending $1k on 60gb of SSD space is the kind of thing you do if you have a $5k+ budget, not $2.5k with a goal of spending less.

Edit: Here's the best review I could find comparing a VelociRaptor to a SSD. The OCZ drive you linked is pretty new, haven't seen many reviews of it. If you want a SSD that'll really trash HDDs, wait for the brand new Intel ones to get down to the $200 range, but it'll be a long while, since they're nearly $600 now.

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2008/09...ociraptor_hdd/

[Tymon]

SSDs are cool and all, but that has to be one of the worst price/performance ratio upgrades I've ever seen suggested. Get a VelociRaptor or a single SSD for your OS drive, you can get a 300gb 2.5"-in-3.5"-form-factor VelociRaptor for under $300. Spending $1k on 60gb of SSD space is the kind of thing you do if you have a $5k+ budget, not $2.5k with a goal of spending less.

^

also, for the RAM, yours is fine but you can go a little bit better for not much more money.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145214 - awesome, one of the best DDR2's on the market if not the best


http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820145215 - not QUITE as awesome, but it's almost the same and good if you aren't savvy at overclocking.

[levish]

SSDs are cool and all, but that has to be one of the worst price/performance ratio upgrades I've ever seen suggested. Get a VelociRaptor or a single SSD for your OS drive, you can get a 300gb 2.5"-in-3.5"-form-factor VelociRaptor for under $300. Spending $1k on 60gb of SSD space is the kind of thing you do if you have a $5k+ budget, not $2.5k with a goal of spending less.

There was 1k left in the budget and I'm happy with mine (getting about 20ms lower latency in WoW, unfortunately I still suck at PVP).

furthermore the 1k was 600$ on a controller that is absolutely amazing and has connectivity for 8 drives of SAS or SATAII type and the raid0 storage would be 120GB (2x drives for 239 each reads would be approximately 300MB/sec sustained and around 380MB/sec burst, writes I'm not sure of but I'm proposing enabling write cache and there's 512mb there) and drive latency would be around 0.1-0.2ms (velociratpors clock in around 6.5-7.5ms).

[Zosi]

There was 1k left in the budget and I'm happy with mine (getting about 20ms lower latency in WoW, unfortunately I still suck at PVP).

Fast hard drives do not change network latency.

furthermore the 1k was 600$ on a controller that is absolutely amazing and has connectivity for 8 drives of SAS or SATAII type and the raid0 storage would be 120GB (2x drives for 239 each reads would be approximately 300MB/sec sustained and around 380MB/sec burst, writes I'm not sure of but I'm proposing enabling write cache and there's 512mb there) and drive latency would be around 0.1-0.2ms (velociratpors clock in around 6.5-7.5ms).

The problem is that none of that makes two shits worth of difference for gaming. If you're running a database server, sure, having blazing fast random read performance is great (and maybe worth the stuff you quoted), but for a gaming rig, it's absolutely pointless. Also, the numbers you quote are vastly overestimated. As the benchmark I linked showed, a single WD Raptor gets a little under 250MB/s burst speed, while the single SSD is left sitting in the dust at 113MB/s. Average read, they're extremely close at 105MB/s and 113MB/s respectively. Now, the OCZ drive might have better performance, but from the NewEgg reviews, it's a MLC drive, which means it's not going to be substantially better.

You can go on quoting impressive-sounding stats all day, but the real-world tests just don't bear them out.

[levish]

Fast hard drives do not change network latency

ok, it did however lower mine and moving the WoW folder to the SSD was the only change I made. I'm not quoting impressive sounding stats, I own one and am planning on adding a 2nd and a caching controller card for christmas :3

my own personal benches
OCZ CoreV2 - 60GB - WinXP
http://www.twilightstars.org/levish/oczcore260gb.JPG
WD Velociraptor - 80GB - WinXP
http://www.twilightstars.org/levish/vr80-1gbRam.JPG

[Zosi]

I hope you realize that you're comparing a 4 year old obsolete WD drive to a brand new SSD...

[Epical]

The WD VRs are neither 4 years old or obsolete...

[levish]

^^ the 300GB retail VR is 2-3 months old, the 150 and 74/80GB models are not yet retail AFAIK. Mine came bundled with a Dell.

I do suggest the Velociraptors as a SSD alternative though <3 awesome "normal" drives compared to the other ones i've tried and a definate step up from the 1st gen 36GB Raptors and by all accounts even a solid step up from the Raptor X 150.

Although at that price point and assuming you invest in that caching controller I'd say just skip to a nice 15k RPM SAS drive for even lower access times and higher transfer rates across the board.

Unfortunately i don't have any (personal) 15k RPM SAS to share but storagereview.com did a fair review of them.

[Zosi]

Sorry, I had posted that as I was running out the door for lunch, didn't have time to look closely. As you noted, the 74/80gb VelociRaptors aren't available retail, so I assumed you were comparing to the old 74/80 Raptors, which are indeed several years old. My bad.

By your benchmarks, the OCZ drive is indeed faster, but as I've said repeatedly, the price/performance for them is still absolutely atrocious. Either way, I think we've both given MisterBob plenty of input on the storage section of his PC, I think he's perfectly capable of evaluating which of our suggestions is best for his usage.

[levish]

By your benchmarks, the OCZ drive is indeed faster, but as I've said repeatedly, the price/performance for them is still absolutely atrocious. Either way, I think we've both given MisterBob plenty of input on the storage section of his PC, I think he's perfectly capable of evaluating which of our suggestions is best for his usage.

if you are looking at price / storage space i agree with you that the value there is atrocious

if you are looking at price / performance compared to run of the mill 7200rpm drives I strongly disagree heck they even give 10,000 rpm and 15,000 rpm drives a good run for their money (EXCEPT! for sustained random 4k writes where you should be looking at SLC based drives or a Caching Controller to go with these Drives).

I do agree 100% with you that its up to the individual to decide if a faster storage setup is worth the extra cost.