Help me finalize my build

[seiny]

Ok so after revising, the G3258 may not be the best option (even for experimenting).

 

Intel i3 4150

Asrock Z97 Pro 4

G.skill F3 2x4GB 1866mhz

Fractal Design Define R4 windowed

R9 280x power color 3GB

Crucial mx100 256GB

Western digital caviar blue 1TB

Seasonic M12II Evo bronze 520watt

Windows 8.1

 

This build - $1230

This build plus R9 290 (instead) - $1450

Rationale:

The i3 is for more of a place-holder until broadwell comes along, really not interested in any current "K" processors.

The z97 because it's cheap, h87/h97 are like $25 less so why not right? and I want to eventually add a "K" to this.

 

The R9 290 power color psc+ 4GB is $220 more than the 280x i chose, should I consider? I'm going to be on 1080p for a while.

It's to my understanding the 290 is best suited for 1440p?

 

Also, the R9 290 sapphire tri-x 4GB is an option, only $20 more.

 

R9 280x power color 3GB - $340 (for reference)

The noctua is gone!

All prices are for where I live, converted to USD for convenience.

 

 

Your input is welcome

@ForsakenLive

@CoolBeans

@SparkySamZa

 

And all others as well.

[CoolBeans]

What is your budget and location? a pentium and a 280x is a bad coice

[seiny]

What is your budget and location? a pentium and a 280x is a bad coice

Did you even read the post.

[lani100]

What is your budget and location? a pentium and a 280x is a bad coice

If you overclock this thing it will get close to i5 performance, I can't wait to get my hands on one next month

[DarrenP]

So I put this together, after extensively juggling the components I'm confident in this but just need a second opinion on certain matters.

 

Intel G3258

Asrock Z97 killer

Kingston hyperX fury 2x4GB 1866mhz

Noctua NH-D14

Fractal Design Define R4 windowed

R9 280x sapphire duel-x 3GB

 

Things I'm not sure about:

 

1TB western digital caviar blue

or

1TB seagate barracuda

Both look the same to me, I don't know.

 

Seasonic M12II-520 evo bronze 520watts - $70

or

Corsair CS550M - $120

I know both will supply enough power for what I want but just don't know if I should spend the extra on the corsair?

 

Are Asrock boards a good choice? Should I refine this decision? Let me know of a better alternative I'm open to suggestions.

 

Please don't question my choices on the noctua and the define R4

 

I'm buying the noctua because they're extremely rare in my country and I want to own one of the best air coolers, oh and if I don't grab it I might not ever get it.

The define R4 because I love the clean design and silence optimized, and every other case doesn't look good enough.

 

So why the pentium 3258? Because it's the anniversary and I'm not really interested in this years devils canyon, rather looking forward to broadwell.

 

Oh and I should mention that this is kind of a budget build

Asrock boards are fine. HDD brand choice doesn't matter. PSU wise go with the seasonic. And for the love of god, why are you buying a pentium and 280X? That's a terrible decision. What's your budget and we'll spin you a better build up. 

[DarrenP]

If you overclock this thing it will get close to i5 performance, I can't wait to get my hands on one next month

A dual core with no hyperthreading getting close to the same performance as a quad core... Doesn't sound right to me. 

[seiny]

If you overclock this thing it will get close to i5 performance, I can't wait to get my hands on one next month

I have to overclock it man

[seiny]

Asrock boards are fine. HDD brand choice doesn't matter. PSU wise go with the seasonic. And for the love of god, why are you buying a pentium and 280X? That's a terrible decision. What's your budget and we'll spin you a better build up. 

Please read the end of the post.

[lani100]

A dual core with no hyperthreading getting close to the same performance as a quad core... Doesn't sound right to me. 

It is you no watch linus video

[DarrenP]

Please read the end of the post.

Buying something because it's special edition is stupid. Down right. Also you don't have to go devils canyon, As there are only 3 CPU's that are classified as Devils canyon, 1 i wont reccomend for a build of this budget, and the other 2 are too expensive. Haswell will do better than a G3258

 

It is you no watch linus video

I did see his benchmark video... You're the one who wasn't "watching"

[seiny]

It is you no watch linus video

lets help him

 

@DarrenP

[seiny]

Buying something because it's special edition is stupid. Down right. Also you don't have to go devils canyon, As there are only 3 CPU's that are classified as Devils canyon, 1 i wont reccomend for a build of this budget, and the other 2 are too expensive. Haswell will do better than a G3258

 

I did see his benchmark video... You're the one who wasn't "watching"

Ey it's my choice I only really came asking about the board, psu, hdd.

[DarrenP]

lets help him

 

@DarrenP

http://youtu.be/evXpqpNhu_Y

Yes because i see an i5 being benchmarked there. I happen to see an i7-4790K and a G3258 being benchmarked together in SINGLE THREADED applications. When you start gaming and doing basically anything other than internet browsing you'll see a huge difference between a G3258 and an I5. 

[DarrenP]

Ey it's my choice I only really came asking about the board, psu, hdd.

Alright, build it that way than. When it preforms like shit. Don't come crying about it. 

[seiny]

Yes because i see an i5 being benchmarked there. I happen to see an i7-4790K and a G3258 being benchmarked together in SINGLE THREADED applications. When you start gaming and doing basically anything other than internet browsing you'll see a huge difference between a G3258 and an I5. 

It's only temporary man, I'm most certainly not gonna live on a pentium.

[seiny]

Alright, build it that way than. When it preforms like shit. Don't come crying about it. 

Yeah I wont cry to you.

[Manny Calavera]

A dual core with no hyperthreading getting close to the same performance as a quad core... Doesn't sound right to me. 

well you just raise the bottleneck with overclock

 

i still think going straight unlocked i5 is best, and rather cheap out on other components. get rid of noctua or buy it later, cheaper ram, cheaper case, cheaper gpu if its still too low budget, but i think if you use stock cooler for a while, you wont need to cheap out on GPU

 

thats what i would do.

 

and you still have better performance than pentium even if you dont overclock

[SparkySamZa]

What is your budget and location? a pentium and a 280x is a bad coice

 

Did you even read the post.

yes i have, and he is right. That cpu will bottle neck  THE 280X big time, and a D14 with a pentium unless OC which i know you will then meh go D15 . Also where is the ssd ??? 

[SparkySamZa]

So I put this together, after extensively juggling the components I'm confident in this but just need a second opinion on certain matters.

 

Intel G3258

Asrock Z97 killer

Kingston hyperX fury 2x4GB 1866mhz

Noctua NH-D14

Fractal Design Define R4 windowed

R9 280x sapphire duel-x 3GB

 

Please don't answer questions that haven't been asked!

 

Things I'm not sure about:

 

1TB western digital caviar blue

or

1TB seagate barracuda

Both look the same to me, I don't know.

 

Seasonic M12II-520 evo bronze 520watts - $70

or

Corsair CS550M - $120

I know both will supply enough power for what I want but just don't know if I should spend the extra on the corsair?

 

Are Asrock boards a good choice? Should I refine this decision? Let me know of a better alternative I'm open to suggestions.

 

Please don't question my choices on the noctua and the define R4

 

I'm buying the noctua because they're extremely rare in my country and I want to own one of the best air coolers, oh and if I don't grab it I might not ever get it.

The define R4 because I love the clean design and silence optimized, and every other case doesn't look good enough.

 

So why the pentium 3258? Because it's the anniversary and I'm not really interested in this years devils canyon, rather looking forward to broadwell.

 

Oh and I should mention that this is kind of a budget build

so wait your just buying the d14 for the flash, to make you different cause you can ? Which the money itself could be spend better in other places like the cpu and getting an Asus motherboard?

[seiny]

yes i have, and he is right. That cpu will bottle neck  THE 280X big time, and a D14 with a pentium unless OC which i know you will then meh go D15 . Also where is the ssd ??? 

Well if it does then I'll replace the cpu, I don't think it will, we'll see, ssd is coming soon.. D15 is not available locally and might never be?

[seiny]

so wait your just buying the d14 for the flash, to make you different cause you can ? Which the money itself could be spend better in other places like the cpu and getting an Asus motherboard?

NO I want it for the performance, and I'm sure I'll be using it on my next cpu

[seiny]

well you just raise the bottleneck with overclock

 

i still think going straight unlocked i5 is best, and rather cheap out on other components. get rid of noctua or buy it later, cheaper ram, cheaper case, cheaper gpu if its still too low budget, but i think if you use stock cooler for a while, you wont need to cheap out on GPU

 

thats what i would do.

 

and you still have better performance than pentium even if you dont overclock

Yeah well where I live prices are different.

[ForsakenLive]

We are just trying to save you the hassle of not being able to use the full potential of the hardware, just for the choice of components.

Regarding your questions, hard drive manufacturer doesn't make a difference, picking Seagate, WD or Toshiba on the same price and type of product is the same (if you compare a Barracuda drive with a WD SE, there is a difference). An SSD will improve the build a lot, even a Kingston SSDNow V300 120gb is a good upgrade.

The Asrock Killer is a very nice motherboard, Asrock may not have Asus' massive marketing and publicity, but it's a good motherboard manufacturer.

For the PSU Seasonic > Corsair, it will last you a long time.

 

About what everyone was telling you about the Pentium, the point is, that the 2 core part does perform quite impressively on single threaded applications if you can reach a good OC (remember silicon lottery is still a fact, you don't know how high your CPU will go, it might just get stucked at 4.0ghz). When we talk about a multi-threaded load, we are not only talking about games that are well optimized, but also about compute tasks and multitasking; when you are on a game and at the same time using your browser, your media player, skype, Microsoft office and downloading files, all those applications that require CPU power can use different threads. if you run all with only 1 or 2 cores, performance will go down. Even a weaker 4 core, like the Athlon X4 760k might behave more evenly on that type of loads.

Another reason to rethink your decision is the GPU and CPU that you are mixing together, while 70%+ of the gaming load depends on the GPU, it is the CPU that gives the workload to the GPU, we call a bottleneck when the CPU is doing so many things at the same time, that it delays his requests for the GPU, causing for example, a situation where the CPU is at 100% load and the GPU only at 30%.

[seiny]

We are just trying to save you the hassle of not being able to use the full potential of the hardware, just for the choice of components.

Regarding your questions, hard drive manufacturer doesn't make a difference, picking Seagate, WD or Toshiba on the same price and type of product is the same (if you compare a Barracuda drive with a WD SE, there is a difference). An SSD will improve the build a lot, even a Kingston SSDNow V300 120gb is a good upgrade.

The Asrock Killer is a very nice motherboard, Asrock may not have Asus' massive marketing and publicity, but it's a good motherboard manufacturer.

For the PSU Seasonic > Corsair, it will last you a long time.

 

About what everyone was telling you about the Pentium, the point is, that the 2 core part does perform quite impressively on single threaded applications if you can reach a good OC (remember silicon lottery is still a fact, you don't know how high your CPU will go, it might just get stucked at 4.0ghz). When we talk about a multi-threaded load, we are not only talking about games that are well optimized, but also about compute tasks and multitasking; when you are on a game and at the same time using your browser, your media player, skype, Microsoft office and downloading files, all those applications that require CPU power can use different threads. if you run all with only 1 or 2 cores, performance will go down. Even a weaker 4 core, like the Athlon X4 760k might behave more evenly on that type of loads.

Another reason to rethink your decision is the GPU and CPU that you are mixing together, while 70%+ of the gaming load depends on the GPU, it is the CPU that gives the workload to the GPU, we call a bottleneck when the CPU is doing so many things at the same time, that it delays his requests for the GPU, causing for example, a situation where the CPU is at 100% load and the GPU only at 30%.

I understand and thanks for your input, I'm by no means going to "live" on the pentium, I'm simply curious about it and what it could do, I intend to replace it as soon as a more interesting cpu comes, thinking of broadwell. And if all else fails, I'll never really be stuck, I'll retire the pentium, the board I chose is versatile for what I'm intending yes?

[ForsakenLive]

I understand and thanks for your input, I'm by no means going to "live" on the pentium, I'm simply curious about it and what it could do, I intend to replace it as soon as a more interesting cpu comes, thinking of broadwell. And if all else fails, I'll never really be stuck, I'll retire the pentium, the board I chose is versatile for what I'm intending yes?

The good thing of having a good product variety is that anyone can customize their setup according to performance needs and plain preferences. For example, where I live I don't see Athlon X4 760k, I could get it shipped and have it, but I don't know why none of the retailers around has that CPU on stock. If one of this days I see one around I'd probably buy it, maybe use it in a build, even if it's not mine, or on a server project, or whatever, even if it doesn't make that much sense.

 

With gaming and personal builds, where there is no need of a high end CPU, there is no intensive application to be run, and it's been worked around a budget; even if the user might consider upgrading on the future, the best thing to do is grab what's better out there for price/performance and be done with it.

For your build I'd just pick a locked i5 4590 (clocks don't really matter that much on this builds), the cheapest mobo I could find from a trusty manufacturer (get away from me ECS!) that has the basic needed stuff (PCIe x16, Sata 3, USB 3, decent ethernet and audio), put it all inside a decent looking case (case are more of a personal choice anyway) add a PSU with enough wattage from a good brand and series, and pair it all with an R9 290 (beast GPU, great price, who needs more for 1080p). The CPU cooler is completely optional here, the locked i5 doesn't put out much heat so It'd be just for noise and looks, replacing your case fans with more and better ones is always preferred. In 2 years or so if you want to go for a bigger resolution, or need better a CPU/GPU to start doing some heavy workloads, you can just keep what still makes sense from the current build and buy what's best for the money then.