Planning on building this gaming PC. Any tips? Just let me know :)

[Maxaah]

Hello Everybody,

I'm planning to make myself a nice, sort of 'high end' gaming PC. I will describe the parts list below here, feel free to suggest me to make some changes. That's why i made the topic in the first place :P

I Will also give an explanation why i chose these parts.

The Specs will probably be:

CPU: Intel i5-3570k (Which will be overclocked to probably 4.0 or 4.3 GHz since the turbo boost will allready bring it till around 3.8)

CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper212 Evo (I read some reviews on the site, and they all seemed satisfied with the cooler even when their CPU was overclocked)

MoBo: ASRock Z77 Extreme4 (I Chose this board mainly, because i've found alot of people who also used this board (for overclocking))

GPU: MSI GTX660 TI PE (First i thought of the ASUS GTX 660, but since i wanted this build to be a little bit 'Future Proof' i went with a higher end GPU)

SSD: Crucial M4 SATA 600, 64GB. Read 550 Mb/s Write 90Mb/s (Since this is gonna be my Boot SSD and some other programs i don't really care about the writing speed)

HDD: WD Caviar Blue, SATA 600, 500GB (I will use this one for all my games and music and all the additional programs

RAM: GeIL 16 GB DDR3-1600 Kit. (I'm also gonna do some video and photo editing so i thought this might come in handy)

Optical Drive: Some random LG one (Since i'm not really gonna use it, Just in case i wanna burn a DVD or CD)

Case: Sharkoon T9 Value Edition, Blue (I thought it looked really nice with the Blue LEDs and since it has 2 intake fans and 1 outtake fan allready installed it should have some good airflow)

PSU: XFX PRO 550W Core Edition (I don't know if it's enough, But it should be fine i guess)

Total Price (From the webshop that i am buying it from: 961,- Euros

If you have any tips or Recommendations just tell me!

thanks in advance :)

btw. sorry for my bad english

Sorry for my bad english

[Guest]

Drop to 8GB of RAM and go to a Seagate Barracuda for the HDD - more reliable and faster speeds. You also won't really need 16GB of RAM either.

[Maxaah]

Drop to 8GB of RAM and go to a Seagate Barracuda for the HDD - more reliable and faster speeds. You also won't really need 16GB of RAM either.

You have a point, Al tough i have heard from several people that seagate isn't that reliable. but maybe they had just one faulty drive and a lot of bad luck

[A32m]

I really think you should invest in a Liquid cooling solution (Brand built) for your CPU, especially since you are OC'ing. The Thermaltake Bigwater 1.0 or 2.0 is great and will also keep things quiet in your PC. Bump up the SSD to 128GB for future head room (Fujitsu SSD is good for price but Intel SSD will probably be good for reliability), keep the SSD for native programs and the HDD for heavy programs such as gaming and architecture 3D applications. Also try and used a tad larger PSU, 600+ would be excellent, you never know if you want to add another GPU when prices drop for the 660TI's.

Also, seagate is reliable :)

[RuecanOnRails]

I'd recommend changing out your GPU for an AMD card better bang for your buck.

*My pricing is taken from current top results searching on ncix.com PRICES IN CANADIAN DOLLAR*

Performance wise the 660ti and the 7870 are almost identical with each trading wins on various games, but remaining within typically 10fps of each other.

660Ti = $294.99

7870= $209.99

7950=$289.99

Already that's saving $85 while keeping the same performance. The only games that the nvidia card pulls ahead are ones that use PhsyX.. The same ones where the publisher was paid off to ensure a landslide in fps towards one brand *cough*

If you want to keep the SAME price you can get a 7950 for only $289.99 which will outperform the 660ti in nearly every way. Plus with the current driver updates amd has been putting out, the gap between amd and it's competitors is widening with every update.

As for your comment about seagate, I can assure you in my experience they are very reliable I have never had a seagate drive fail *knocks on wood* At the moment in my main gaming and media rig I have 6 Seagate drives, four of which are their 3tb barracudas. Seagate is also Linus's trusted storage partner.

A side note with your ram, I would DEFINITELY stick with 16gb of ram. I now consider 16gb the minimum for any decent rig. While it is excessive and I agree games do not and will not for awhile use much ram.

With that said your ram can be used for a lot of different things, photo and video editing/rendering will eat up a lot of that ram, you can also make that ram work for you. Create a Ramdisk a sort of virtual flash drive based on your ram and able to read/write at speeds incomparable to anything. Use the ramdisk to store apps to speed them up, games that are heavy on hdd reads/writes. Or any files that are constantly in use being read and written to.

Using Symbolic Links and you can easily set individual files of programs currently installed to use the ramdisk without moving the entire folder. Great for games where you can throw the level data into ramdisk while keeping all of the menu's and video files in their original location.

Do not underestimate the usefulness of ram.

[Maxaah]

I really think you should invest in a Liquid cooling solution (Brand built) for your CPU, especially since you are OC'ing. The Thermaltake Bigwater 1.0 or 2.0 is great and will also keep things quiet in your PC. Bump up the SSD to 128GB for future head room (Fujitsu SSD is good for price but Intel SSD will probably be good for reliability), keep the SSD for native programs and the HDD for heavy programs such as gaming and architecture 3D applications. Also try and used a tad larger PSU, 600+ would be excellent, you never know if you want to add another GPU when prices drop for the 660TI's.

Also, seagate is reliable :)

I still don't like the face that there is some sort of liquid flowing around in your PC, especially with the custom made water cooling systems. And since my budget is only around 1000 Euros, i would probably have to cut down at some parts. I guess your right with the PSU, if i want to add another 660 TI later i would also have to replace my PSU. Thanks for the tip!

[Maxaah]

I'd recommend changing out your GPU for an AMD card better bang for your buck.

*My pricing is taken from current top results searching on ncix.com PRICES IN CANADIAN DOLLAR*

Performance wise the 660ti and the 7870 are almost identical with each trading wins on various games, but remaining within typically 10fps of each other.

660Ti = $294.99

7870= $209.99

7950=$289.99

Already that's saving $85 while keeping the same performance. The only games that the nvidia card pulls ahead are ones that use PhsyX.. The same ones where the publisher was paid off to ensure a landslide in fps towards one brand *cough*

If you want to keep the SAME price you can get a 7950 for only $289.99 which will outperform the 660ti in nearly every way. Plus with the current driver updates amd has been putting out, the gap between amd and it's competitors is widening with every update.

As for your comment about seagate, I can assure you in my experience they are very reliable I have never had a seagate drive fail *knocks on wood* At the moment in my main gaming and media rig I have 6 Seagate drives, four of which are their 3tb barracudas. Seagate is also Linus's trusted storage partner.

A side note with your ram, I would DEFINITELY stick with 16gb of ram. I now consider 16gb the minimum for any decent rig. While it is excessive and I agree games do not and will not for awhile use much ram.

With that said your ram can be used for a lot of different things, photo and video editing/rendering will eat up a lot of that ram, you can also make that ram work for you. Create a Ramdisk a sort of virtual flash drive based on your ram and able to read/write at speeds incomparable to anything. Use the ramdisk to store apps to speed them up, games that are heavy on hdd reads/writes. Or any files that are constantly in use being read and written to.

Using Symbolic Links and you can easily set individual files of programs currently installed to use the ramdisk without moving the entire folder. Great for games where you can throw the level data into ramdisk while keeping all of the menu's and video files in their original location.

Do not underestimate the usefulness of ram.

In my opinion 10 FPS is a big difference, Especially when your play BF3 at 50 and it makes it go down to 40 which in my eyes in makes it sort of unplayable because i'm someone who likes a steady Frame rate. I think i will switch to the 7950 After reading various topic which card is better. I'm still not sure if i should cut down on the Mobo and not overclock my CPU to save some money for the GPU or any other part. Or i just need to increase my budget :p. Anyway thanks for the tip mate!

I will now, create a new configuration with all the parts and see how much that will cost me.

*edit* I think i'll go with the MSI R7950 Twin Frozr 3GD5 V2, good choice? cheaper and probably better than the GTX660 TI PE