Advice on first build

[Tech Learner]

I'm getting ready to build my first pc and I wanted everybody to look over my list to see if I need to make any serious changes to my list. 

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YjnngL

[Zando_]

For those too lazy to follow a link: 

PCPartPicker part list: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YjnngL
Price breakdown by merchant: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/YjnngL/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel - Core i7-7700K 4.2GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($308.87 @ Amazon)

CPU Cooler: CRYORIG - R1 Universal 76.0 CFM CPU Cooler  ($88.89 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: Asus - PRIME Z270-A ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($149.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LED 32GB (4 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory  ($260.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($178.89 @ OutletPC)
Storage: Western Digital - Black 6TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($269.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Western Digital - Black 6TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($269.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Video Card: EVGA - GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11GB SC Black Edition Video Card  ($719.99 @ B&H)
Case: Cooler Master - MasterCase Pro 6 ATX Mid Tower Case  ($164.38 @ Newegg Marketplace)
Power Supply: SeaSonic - PRIME Titanium 750W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($158.89 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Asus - DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer  ($18.69 @ OutletPC)
Operating System: Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit  ($89.89 @ OutletPC)
Case Fan: Corsair - SP120 RGB 3-Pack w/Controller 52.0 CFM  120mm Fans  ($62.88 @ OutletPC)
Monitor: Acer - Predator X34 34.0" 3440x1440 100Hz Monitor  ($1079.99 @ Amazon)
Keyboard: Corsair - K70 RGB RAPIDFIRE Wired Gaming Keyboard  ($139.99 @ Amazon)
Mouse: Corsair - GLAIVE RGB Wired Optical Mouse  ($59.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $4022.30
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-07-24 23:23 EDT-0400

[Zando_]

What are you doing with this build? Ryzen may be a better choice, and it's cheaper. For example, do you need 32GB RAM? We can't tell unless we know if you'll be streaming, gaming, editing, etc. 

 

Also, Just quote me so I can see your reply. 

[Tech Learner]

#Zando Bob I will be playing some games and doing some video editing and Internet surfing on the side. 

[The Sloth]

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

What are you doing with this build? Ryzen may be a better choice, and it's cheaper. For example, do you need 32GB RAM? We can't tell unless we know if you'll be streaming, gaming, editing, etc. 

 

Also, Just quote me so I can see your reply. 

didn't quote properly, @Zando Bob . 

[Guest]

Just now, Tech Learner said:

#Zando Bob I will be playing some games and doing some video editing and Internet surfing on the side. 

You seem to be getting RGB theme , why not an Asus AURA board like Z270-E and Asus Strix 1080 Ti for more RGB awesomeness

[Max_Settings]

2 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

#Zando Bob I will be playing some games and doing some video editing and Internet surfing on the side. 

It looks almost perfect. Since you are going for an RGB theme I would get the Asus Strix board. Now when it comes to Ryzen or Kaby Lake your decision comes down to this. Intel is better for gaming, Ryzen is better for video editing. Now both will do great in both tasks, but you have to decide what is more important to you, better gaming performance, or better editing performance?

[Zando_]

8 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

#Zando Bob I will be playing some games and doing some video editing and Internet surfing on the side. 

I'd get a Ryzen 7 1700 if you want better editing/multitasking performance, and want to save some money. If you don't the 7700K is still a beast of a CPU. 

[unknownmiscreant]

As has been said above, kaby lake is better for gaming due to the single thread performance, however ryzen is better for content creation due to more cores. If you are planning on playing games at higher resolutions, ryzen is probably better, as it will be able to cope with the gaming workload and give better editing performance. However if you intend to play CS:GO or similar at high refresh rates, kaby lake will be better, due to increased single thread performance. Especially when overclocked. For your situation, the 1080ti is capable of running games at the resolution of your monitor and 100fps, however you may have to overclock a ryzen cpu in order to get enough single thread performance to hit 100fps consistently.

 

As for RGB, if you get a Aura compatible motherboard, you can sync the SP120 fans with the rest of the lighting. To do this I made a custom arduino based controller. This can be expanded to individually addressable LED strips and the like for really cool effects. I can write a post with code, parts list, instructions etc if anyone is interested. But you do stand a risk of breaking stuff if you screw up (don't blame me).

 

Edit: 32gb of ram is probably overkill for your case. I manage perfectly fine with 16gb an probably heavier ram utilization than you, (I do alot of virtualization and programming). I did some reading about memory allocation, and discovered that most of the windows RAM usage is actually windows just reserving memory for programs, even though they are not using it. Creating a small pagefile (16mb - 1gb) clears around 10gb of memory, as it allows windows to keep a record of what has been reserved for different programs, without actually using the system memory.

[Tech Learner]

17 hours ago, nerdslayer1 said:

didn't quote properly, @Zando Bob . 

Sorry about that

[Tech Learner]

17 hours ago, deXxterlab97 said:

You seem to be getting RGB theme , why not an Asus AURA board like Z270-E and Asus Strix 1080 Ti for more RGB awesomeness

Are those motherboards okay?

[Tech Learner]

17 hours ago, Max_Settings said:

It looks almost perfect. Since you are going for an RGB theme I would get the Asus Strix board. Now when it comes to Ryzen or Kaby Lake your decision comes down to this. Intel is better for gaming, Ryzen is better for video editing. Now both will do great in both tasks, but you have to decide what is more important to you, better gaming performance, or better editing performance?

Wow hard decision to make 

[Tech Learner]

17 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

I'd get a Ryzen 7 1700 if you want better editing/multitasking performance, and want to save some money. If you don't the 7700K is still a beast of a CPU. 

I will definitely think on it

[Tech Learner]

17 hours ago, unknownmiscreant said:

As has been said above, kaby lake is better for gaming due to the single thread performance, however ryzen is better for content creation due to more cores. If you are planning on playing games at higher resolutions, ryzen is probably better, as it will be able to cope with the gaming workload and give better editing performance. However if you intend to play CS:GO or similar at high refresh rates, kaby lake will be better, due to increased single thread performance. Especially when overclocked. For your situation, the 1080ti is capable of running games at the resolution of your monitor and 100fps, however you may have to overclock a ryzen cpu in order to get enough single thread performance to hit 100fps consistently.

 

As for RGB, if you get a Aura compatible motherboard, you can sync the SP120 fans with the rest of the lighting. To do this I made a custom arduino based controller. This can be expanded to individually addressable LED strips and the like for really cool effects. I can write a post with code, parts list, instructions etc if anyone is interested. But you do stand a risk of breaking stuff if you screw up (don't blame me).

 

Edit: 32gb of ram is probably overkill for your case. I manage perfectly fine with 16gb an probably heavier ram utilization than you, (I do alot of virtualization and programming). I did some reading about memory allocation, and discovered that most of the windows RAM usage is actually windows just reserving memory for programs, even though they are not using it. Creating a small pagefile (16mb - 1gb) clears around 10gb of memory, as it allows windows to keep a record of what has been reserved for different programs, without actually using the system memory.

So I should just go with the ryzen 7 1700 then?

[unknownmiscreant]

11 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

So I should just go with the ryzen 7 1700 then?

I don't know. I went for the 1700x, however I do alot more in the way of CPU orientated content creation tasks than gaming. I have mine OC'ed atm.

 

It really depends on your use case. The 1700 should serve you well. However for some games, it may require overclocking to get the single thread performance required for decent frame rates. If I was building the system you have planned, I would go with the Ryzen CPU, however that is for my use case, and YOU need to choose what task is your priority: gaming or video editing.

[Tech Learner]

4 hours ago, unknownmiscreant said:

I don't know. I went for the 1700x, however I do alot more in the way of CPU orientated content creation tasks than gaming. I have mine OC'ed atm.

 

It really depends on your use case. The 1700 should serve you well. However for some games, it may require overclocking to get the single thread performance required for decent frame rates. If I was building the system you have planned, I would go with the Ryzen CPU, however that is for my use case, and YOU need to choose what task is your priority: gaming or video editing.

I will be doing both. I have decided to go with Ryzen 7 1700. 

[unknownmiscreant]

2 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

I will be doing both. I have decided to go with Ryzen 7 1700. 

Cool, good luck. Just a tip from my build experience, if you run into BSOD issues with the drivers on clean windows installs, exit OneDrive.

[Tech Learner]

Just now, unknownmiscreant said:

Cool, good luck. Just a tip from my build experience, if you run into BSOD issues with the drivers on clean windows installs, exit OneDrive.

What is one drive and BSOD?

[unknownmiscreant]

16 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

What is one drive and BSOD?

 

One drive is microsoft's cloud file sharing service. (they preload  it onto win 10, and leave it running at startup to slow your pc down)

BSOD = Blue Screen Of Death.

 

The errors I found where memory issues, they occurred very repeatably during chipset driver installation. If you run into that, exit one drive 1st. (Its in the taskbar as a cloud icon)

[Tech Learner]

4 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

 

One drive is microsoft's cloud file sharing service. (they preload  it onto win 10, and leave it running at startup to slow your pc down)

BSOD = Blue Screen Of Death.

 

The errors I found where memory issues, they occurred very repeatably during chipset driver installation. If you run into that, exit one drive 1st. (Its in the taskbar as a cloud icon)

I won't don't do the recommend install procedure when I first install Windows 10. I will choose the custom install instead 

[unknownmiscreant]

1 minute ago, Tech Learner said:

I won't don't do the recommend install procedure when I first install Windows 10. I will choose the custom install instead 

Never heard of that before. Care to elaborate?

Is it just the "custom fresh install option" in the setup that takes you to the drive selection?

[Tech Learner]

Just now, unknownmiscreant said:

Never heard of that before. Care to elaborate?

Is it just the "custom fresh install option" in the setup that takes you to the drive selection?

I think so. Cause when your ask to choose Windows recommendations or custom it should show up during the setup process

[unknownmiscreant]

4 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

I think so. Cause when your ask to choose Windows recommendations or custom it should show up during the setup process

There is the upgrade or custom install options. Upgrade only works from within windows, and there must be a working copy of windows already installed on the machine. Custom install only works when you boot from a USB or CD drive, and is what you need to do for a new computer, as there is no existing windows installation. This option still installs all of the bloatware and everything, its pretty straightforward. But still look out for the OneDrive issue, as you have to do some hacking to have windows not install it by default. I spent a few days screwing around with that, ended up reinstalling windows 15 odd times.

[Tech Learner]

12 minutes ago, unknownmiscreant said:

There is the upgrade or custom install options. Upgrade only works from within windows, and there must be a working copy of windows already installed on the machine. Custom install only works when you boot from a USB or CD drive, and is what you need to do for a new computer, as there is no existing windows installation. This option still installs all of the bloatware and everything, its pretty straightforward. But still look out for the OneDrive issue, as you have to do some hacking to have windows not install it by default. I spent a few days screwing around with that, ended up reinstalling windows 15 odd times.

Wow that's alot of times. I wish there was an easier way to disable one drive

[unknownmiscreant]

3 minutes ago, Tech Learner said:

Wow that's alot of times. I wish there was an easier way to disable one drive

You can't disable onedrive during installation. I have outlined the easiest way to disable it below:

 

Expand the tray icons, look for a grey cloud icon, right click --> exit. This disables it until you shutdown/restart the machine.

To disable it permanently: open task manager (ctrl + shift + esc) --> click on "more details" --> click "startup" tab. Look for "one drive" in the list, Right click --> disable.

 

That is what I do to disable it, then it wont slow down your machine by running at startup anymore.