[Iacus]

So, I decided that, with next-gen and all, this is the year to get a new desktop gaming rig/workstation.

I want to build it myself and, as opposed to my previous PC buying decisions, this time I'll try to build a high-end, reasonably top of the line machine.

I don't mind making an initial investment in the $1000-$1300 range if the thing is going to last me 7 to 10 years. That's about $185/year which is less than what I spend in videogames. Plus with a PC I always have the option to throw a bit more money at it for extra upgrades 5 years down the line.

With this said, I turn to the SBers well versed in PC hardware for counsel. I have some rough idea about what I want, but I still have a few doubts.

Desired specs are:

• Intel CPU (probably an i7 with good price/performance ratio. I don't know much about actual versions or models, but the i7-3770 looks like the sweet spot)
  
• 16 GB RAM (whatever is fastest at the moment. I hear RAM is cheap nowadays and 16GB is 4x what I have now, so I figure it would be enough to start)
  
• Nvidia GTX Card (I'm hesitant to buy the highest end model because of early adopter/overpricing syndrome, plus it will surely cause the price to skyrocket. I'd consider it if it has tangible benefits though)
  
• SSD for OS/Software paired with a HDD for other storage.
  

Possible extras:

• Video capture card (to hook up consoles and stuff for capture/streaming)
  
• Blu-Ray player (not at all necessary, but probably will consider it as a future upgrade)

Now, to the sticking points/questions:

SSD Size: 128 or 256 GB? The last few years I've been using a 128GB partition for software and OS, and it seems to be enough for me. I just install games and store documents/downloads in a separate partition or external storage, but if the SSD prices are reasonable, there's no harm in getting a higher capacity drive. I intend to dual boot Windows/Ubuntu on the thing, so extra room will definitely help.

Motherboard: I don't want a huge hulking box. I'm thinking more like a mid tower or even compact tower, so I'm considering ATX and even micro-ATX as mobo form factors. I think the main problem with smaller form factors will be to get a video card that fits while being powerful enough, but there are probably heating/expandability issues as well if I use a chassis that's too small.

PSU placement/power. I have no idea how to buy a suitable PSU. I guess it should be fairly easy to determine once you know what to look for, though. Ideally I'd want to future proof this as well.

So yeah, I'm now gathering info for the eventual purchase which would be probably at the end of the year, or maybe in the summer. Then I'll search for tutorials on building your machine since this will be the first one I'll assembre myself from scratch.
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Guayaba 2600

[CubaLibre]

Felix I summon thee
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Felix]

howdy.

for the record, your cost:time estimates are a little off. you can easily build a $600 machine to last you 5 years. beyond that point, you get seriously diminishing cost returns; building a machine to last you ~6-7 years would realistically elevate you up over $1000, and beyond 6-7 it's really not possible to make predictions (we've seen plateaus lately, but who knows if x86 will finally become not-the-norm in half a decade).

but, real quick answers to your specific questions:

a 3770 is fine. it looks like the cheap 2500ks have finally disappeared from microcenter, so I can no longer offer you something that's 3/4 as powerful for 1/2 of the price. if you want it, go for it.

16gb is also fine. don't spend more than a hundred bucks on it. 8 would be sufficient if you aren't planning to run VMs and such, but hey, maybe the current console generation will make devs very lazy about memory.

you need to spend about $350 right now to get an nvidia card without nvidia's typical mid-end handicap, and $350 is a stupid amount of money. either wait for the 700 series where they might ship a *60 with better memory bandwidth, or just get a 7870. unless you're planning on running linux. oh, you are. well then, wait for the 700 series.

I'd say a 128gb ssd is fine -- the average OS footprint these days is like 10-20GB, and that gives you enough room on the thing to store all of your productivity stuff and maybe a handful of games (though there's really very little purpose to storing games on an SSD right now, since most games are developed with optical media load times in mind, and even a 7200rpm hard drive is a speedup).

have you considered an mITX mobo? I love mine. all it chops off vs. mATX (which already chops off the second PCI-E, so no SLI, and two of the four ram slots, which you don't need anyway) are the PCI slots, which are almost all redundant with USB stuff nowadays.

blu-ray burners are cheap, I got a notebook-sized one (because my mITX case only takes notebook-sized optical drives) for $60. granted, that's triple the cost of a dvd-rw, and you probably already have one lying around, so unless you have form factor as an excuse, it's kind of a wishy-washy investment.

if you don't get a case that comes with a reputable PSU (don't let anyone tell you these don't exist -- they do, particularly with boutique case manufacturers, e.g. silverstone, but even when a plain jane case purports to come with a PSU > 500w, it's probably going to be hefty enough for your needs), get an earthwatts. but don't feel the need to overcompensate too heavily here. a 2500k and a 7850 would be happy on 350w; add 50w for the 3770 and 50w for a 670/760, and you're good above 450w.

[notbov]

you should give some thought to perhaps getting a used higher-end card from a previous generation, if it'll cost less than the current set. I, for instance, have a GTX 470 and after some research, came to the conclusion that I'd have to spend $200+ just from something that isn't a sidegrade, performance wise (let's not take power consumption in account, like a Fermi could ever win that battle). If you could get, say, a 570 or 6950 on the cheap (seems like they're going on ebay for ~160-200), that's roughly 7870 level there and the extra you'd be paying for new would be whatever warranty you get.
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[Iacus]

[bza]

High end video cards require space for two slots next to each other, not two separate PCIe slots. Most motherboards nowadays have space for wide cards as well as dual PCIe slots for SLI. My mATX motherboard has dual PCIe and one PCI slot that I don't use, so slimming down to mITX isn't a big issue unless you have really big hands or trouble with tight quarters. It's totally doable if you want to have a powerful but small footprint PC.

I nabbed a 7870 gHz edition for just under $200 on sale after shopping around, so always be on the lookout for deals and rebates! AMD won't be coming out with a new lineup this year, but rumor has it Nvidia is going to be coming out with cut-down versions of the GTX Titan this year.

[notbov]

In terms of case space, an 11-inch card in an average mid-tower ATX case will come to about or start encroaching on where the hard drives get mounted. It's not an issue in most regular sized cases, and any small form factor case will advertise the fact that it can hold a full-sized card.
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[another god]

Anyone expecting SSD prices to go down in the next year or two?
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interdimensional

[Broco]

[Iacus]

[notbov]

I don't think it combines the HDD and SDD into 1 logical drive, but rather uses the SDD as a cache for the system. So, like a cheaper, slower RAM disk.
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[Felix]

SSD failure rates are too darn high for me to want to get one over 128gb, the z68/z77 feature that combines them into one logical drive (which, yes, is more of a cache than a raid0 thing, because the latter would be really really unreliable) only works on windows, and the speedup, while nice, is more valuable on a notebook than a desktop

shrug

[Iacus]

So, any recommendation for brands of RAM, SSDs and motherboards?

(or conversely, brands that I should avoid buying?)
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Guayaba 2600

[Mr. Business]

Watch out for MSI. Those cats are whack and use crappy pins to mount their cooling equipment.

For those dealing with space issues on Windows with a 128GB SSD, it would be worth looking into whether or not the hibernate and page files are being housed on the SSD. If they are then disable those suckers. I speak from my own experiences with an Intel 120GB drive I had hosting Win 7. I noticed that, despite containing little real data, this drive was almost completely full on a reasonably fresh install. Even after relocating several steam games to a magnetic platter HDD I was still missing gigs of space that I could not account for. Upon examining the contents of the rapidly filling drive I discovered right away two hidden files on the C:\ root roughly the size of all the RAM in my system accompanied by another file just slightly smaller than the other. These were the pagefile and the hiberfile, which are used for swapping data out of RAM and hibernating the machine respectively.

The sum of the two hidden files I had found amounted to gigs of lost space. This machine does not likely swap much, in fact its debatable whether it has ever truly needed to swap memory at all thus far. Fortunately one can replace either of the two files. I kept the pagefile, ultimately, but moved it to my magnetic platter HDD just to keep windows from bitching excessively. If my machine ever starts swapping under my current arrangement then something is thoroughly amiss.

All this freed up gobs of space on my C:\ drive so now all my Windows stuff has room to work a bit better than it did before.

[notbov]

I think it's safe to say that Asus and Gigabyte are top-tier mobo manufacturers and probably make a board that fulfills your needs and/or caters to a particular price point you might be aiming for in either flavor (AMD or Intel)
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[Felix]

MCS, Biostar, Elitegroup, and the other bottom-tier mobo manufacturers are generally to be avoided. my rule of thumb for picking a mobo is to look for one of the better chipsets for whatever CPU generation you're building against (e.g. Z68 for sandybridge), then try and get something in the smallest reasonable form factor from one of the cheap-but-not-too-cheap manufacturers (Gigabyte, AsRock, ASUS).

ramwise, there's a wholesaler on Amazon called Komputerbay that's super cheap and which I've had good luck with. five years ago you couldn't really do any better than GSkill and that other brand for either price or reliability, but that's no longer quite true

[Toptube]

Mr. Business, your swap file SHOULD be on your SSD.

--------------------------------------


Iacus, if you are a user managing a ton of data and find it difficult to choose between drive types, they do make hybrid drives with an SSD cache that gives a good deal of performance boost.

I personally wouldn't mess with any mobos not made by Asus or Gigabyte, unless I was looking for some super specific feature/functionality that they for some reason didn't offer. or if I was absolutely pinching pennies and had found something good (based on reviews) for significantly less money than an Asus or Gigabyte.

The only videocard brand I wouldn't buy is PNY. I wouldn't buy PNY anything, really.

It's worth noting that ATI is doing the graphics for all of the next gen consoles. Its safe to assume that ATI cards will probably perform better in the PC ports of console games. So unless your linuxing is super serious, you might consoder an ATI card.

Also, you may want to get something above the 7870/660ti, if you want the graphics card to last the entire next console generation. Its likely those cards will be fine at 1080p with console equivalent settings for the first year or two. But late in the generation, I would expect better cards will be needed to keep up.

If you are getting an i7, you should make sure to get a triple channel ram setup.

[internisus]

Have a look at Samsung's 840 SSD series (not 840 Pro).

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-MZ-7TD250BW-Series-Solid-2-5-Inch/dp/B009NHAEXE

Samsung is the only company that makes its own controller. They are probably the most reliable SSDs you can get; in fact, I dunno what this hullabaloo about SSD failures is as I'd trust a Samsung SSD far more than a mechanical drive to not suddenly die. No need to worry about its lifespan, either, as you could write something like 30 GB per day for 10 years before needing to worry that you're close to exceeding its operations limit.

The whole point of the 840s was to bring prices down. As you can see, they are really nice, and I don't know why you wouldn't choose a 250 GB for that price. Wouldn't it be nice to play games off the thing like God intended? There was about half a year between the 830 and 840 series, so by the time you are ready to buy there might be an 850 or something, but you have to give it a little time after it's new for the prices to settle down.

I've built using both Gigabyte and ASUS motherboards and also recommend them. I love motherboards. I spent a lot of time over the past year watching feature tours for ASUS boards. That's where all the potential comes from, you know? Everything you could possibly do is implied by the motherboard, so it's exciting to compare them and pick the right one for you.

Small form factor has gotten pretty nifty recently with a few cases like the Bitfenix Prodigy or the Silverstone FT03. However, while they continue to appeal to my aesthetic sensibilities, I no longer want to build mATX computers because, as I wrote after the last one:

[Felix]

toptube makes a good point -- if you aren't ditching windows entirely, go ahead and get a 7850/7870, as they're way better engineered to the $150-250 range than nvidia's stuff, and all that you really lose in linux with an AMD card is 2D acceleration (not at all necessary with an i7) and bleeding-edge wine compatibility (but you have windows).

[another god]

http://www.engadget.com/2013/04/04/asus-geforce-gtx-670-directcu-mini-graphics-card/

How do they take 3 inches off of a graphics card?
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interdimensional

[Felix]

the thing is that the reference 670 PCB isn't even that big -- it would fit comfortably in my miniITX case if not for the fact that the heatsinks are all several inches longer than the PCB itself. why they decided to shrink the PCB (which is not necessarily that hard when you can just use fewer, larger DRAM chips, though it is generally more expensive) rather than just making smaller heatsinks, I don't know, but the fact that people are still playing with this architecture appeals to me, as I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that my next video card will be sub-$200, 256-bit memory architecture Kepler, I'm just not sure when I'll be able to get that.

[Iacus]

Oh, man. I didn't even think about heatsinks. I was just going to use the stock fan. How important is a heatsink in one of those builds?

I've researched some mini-ITX cases and I think they are not for me.
micro-ATX could work, but its hard enough to find cases that I like that can also house all the necessary components in that form factor...
I think I'll end up being boring and build on a mid tower.
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Guayaba 2600

[Felix]

I've always used stock cooling and always gotten a solid 25%-ish overclock out of whatever CPU I'm using

[internisus]

An aftermarket heat sink is not strictly necessary but is always a good idea. You don't have to spend $80 on a Noctua one. You can get something for like $30 or whatever that will still be an improvement over the piece of junk that comes with Intel chips.

[thestage]

I thought these days the stock intel one was considered pretty good

[Monochrome]

BIOS won't post with this Powercolor HD7750 in it. Everything else including my old video card works fine. Thought my trusty but aging 450W PSU might be the problem -- new card claims to need 400W but that's cutting it close especially since the 12v connector is a 4-pin with a converter -- so I upgraded to a new 550W. Still nothing. Any ideas before I RMA?

[Felix]

a 7750 would definitely run on 450w. unless you're just up and forgetting to plug in the PCI-E power, it's probably toast.

[a pair of gators]

i'm toying around with the idea of building a computer maybe? http://pcpartpicker.com/p/PQyI

i haven't built a PC since like 2005 so feel free to tell me how wrong all of this is

[Toptube]

[internisus]

Yeah, you should definitely dump a little more money into your PSU.

I have a question about this triple-channel memory configuration thing. I've already bought just about all of my PC parts, and I never even heard of this until a couple of weeks ago. The RAM I got is 2 pairs (4 sticks total) of 4 GB at 1866 MHz. My motherboard has 4 slots total, not 3 or 6. And looking into it now, I'm seeing people say that there appears to be little benefit to triple-slot memory at this time. Have I sabotaged myself? Did I even have the opportunity to do things differently given my motherboard?

[Felix]

380w is totally fine when it's a respectable brand like that, provided you switch to an i5 and a 7850. if you have a microcenter anywhere nearby, get your CPU from them, they are way cheaper.

and that'd be my recommendation! the 660 is a lopsided card, and even though it's no longer overpriced, the only reason to get it over a 7850 is a) a bit of raw power you can make up in overclocking, and b) the usual nvidia advantage in opengl (whether it's scientific computing or gaming in linux). also most mATX boards only have two memory slots, check that, you probably don't want four ram sticks (komputerbay is an amazon seller that makes supercheap memory, I got 2x8gb from them about nine months ago for $70). you're overpaying for the mobo too, look for a z68 board on clearance somewhere (check ncix's ebay shop) for <$100. case is also a little pricey even for silverstone, I got a mITX one from them including a 450w psu for only $110.

[notbov]

[internisus]

[Felix]

oh, and 2TB is sort of the sweet spot for a hard drive nowadays, you can find one of those for $100 without too much trouble

[parker]

What's the best stereo speaker setup for a desktop and is it worth pirating windows 8 when I get a new pc or just stick with win 7. Also whoever had said "no more restarting for updates all the time with win 7" was full of shit.
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[Felix]

Honestly if you want to "move on" to something new from Win7 using a traditional desktop (for the purposes of this conversation, that'd be x86 and no touching), use Linux.

[parker]

I'd like to give microsoft the finger but not enough to become a programmer science man person if that's what it takes. What's the deal with games in linux, I don't even know how that works. I got to be able to play my old sierra games or Max Payne 2 or whatever at a moments notice. Mostly I use my pc to horde every movie ever made and watch them on my nice tv I could afford by never paying for movies. I'd have to figure out all the bit perfect sound and 24fps playback horseshit out all over again.
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[remote]

i've still got this i3, 4gb ram, gtx 460, etc. it still serves me well enough, but maybe this summer/fall i should start implementing some upgrades.
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letterboxd | last.fm | steam

[spinach]

parker, here's a thing felix did
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[parker]

Shit that's exactly what I was looking to read. You're a champion of the people felix.
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[spinach]

also yeah you can play sierra games flawlessly on linux since forever
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