Planning a new gaming PC.

Thanat0ast · October 14, 2015

((~~Warning, I talk a lot.~~))

After much convincing from several of my friends, I have finally decided to invest in building a custom desktop PC that will primarily be used for medium to large gaming.

Here is the semi-final draft of my build, after several revisions over the past few days. I say "semi" since I obviously need a bit of help/input about what I have chosen here.

Now, for the base questions.

1. Budget & Location

My preferred budget is $1,400, and my location is in the USA.

2. Aim

I will primarily be using this desktop for PC gaming, mainly focused on medium to large games.

The medium games that I plan on running include Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO, and the large games that I plan on running include Payday 2, Killing Floor 2, Skyrim, Evolve, Thief (2014), Universe Sandbox 2, Subnautica, Grand Theft Auto V, Elder Scrolls Online, and Star Citizen. Maybe the Assassin's Creed series, as well.

As a side note, I most likely will not be running any of those games beyond a 1600 x 900 window resolution, and I will not have any of their possible quality settings turned up into any extreme areas (so no "ultra" quality settings or any other ridiculously high settings like that). As long as the game looks and runs great and I can tell what I am looking at without the game stuttering/lagging/freezing at random or my PC going absolutely nuts trying to keep up with everything that is currently happening, I am just fine with it.

I also do not plan on overclocking my PC now or ever.

3. Monitors

I plan on using just one monitor. I do not plan on ever going past one monitor, half because that is way too much for me to focus on at once, and half because I do not have that much desk space to dedicate to multiple monitors.

That one monitor is an Acer P205H, with a native resolution of 1600 x 900 and a widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio.

4. Peripherals

I do need a keyboard, mouse, mouse pad, and speakers. However, I plan on buying all of them from Amazon.

I plan on buying this keyboard, this mouse, this mouse pad, and these speakers.

I will also need an OS, and for that, I would prefer to use Windows 10 Home.

5. Why are you upgrading?

I am upgrading because my laptop — my only computer — is quickly approaching its last legs. It used to handle many games and tasks just fine, but nowadays, I can hardly run anything (games, programs, videos, etc.) on it without the fan screaming and the laptop itself quickly heating up (unless I keep it attached to a USB laptop fan at all times, which still does not help out as much as I would like it to). I have cleaned my hard drive, made tons of space, defragged/optimized it many times and scanned my laptop for viruses and other detrimental bugs inside and out, but no matter what I do, my laptop always winds up falling back into the pattern of being bad, unreliable, and unpredictable.

Also, lately, my laptop has has been giving me randomly-encountered error messages warning me that the cooling system had an error and that I need to shut down my laptop immediately before it overheats and possibly fails. When this happens, the fan will stay running as fast and hard as it can possibly go and the laptop itself will rapidly heat up until I shut it down. It has literally never done that before in the ~3 years that I have owned it. It did this for the first time back in about July of this year, and it has been slowly happening more and more often as of late. I would like to upgrade straight up to something that is much more powerful so I will not have to worry about encountering this sort of issue for quite a long time (or, preferably, ever again).

That and, considering that above list of games that I would like to play, my laptop literally cannot even touch any of them, minus Payday 2 and Skyrim. Even for those two, I have to run them in a 1280 x 720 window or smaller and turn down the graphics as low as possible in order to have even a mediocre performance level, which will still involve laptop fan screaming, overheating, and random freezing/frame drops at often inconvenient moments.

In short, this upgrade is necessary since this laptop is blatantly obsolete at this point in time.

6. Side notes

That desktop case is necessary, as I do not have much space to work with on my desk.
If you can find a ball bearing CPU cooler that will not produce that "may be incompatible" message between it and the case, I will accept that (if it does not cost way too much).
I typically do streams via Twitch, so having enough power/memory to run a large game and a stream at once will be necessary (although I can and most likely will wind up turning down the resolution and graphic settings if needed).