Advice for Building a Gaming Computer

[Zenophilious]

Thought I might as well ask you guys for a bit of help, since I know next to nothing about building computers, much less gaming computers.  I've had some advice from my more experienced friends, but I thought I might as well ask you guys here on Fuwanovel, too.  Anything that this guide doesn't cover?  I'm going to be building a gaming desktop around the price of $1.2-1.5k, and I'm hoping to make either a good medium-level computer or a low high-end computer.  Is that viable?  Any brands I should stay away from?

 

My PC Part Picker List: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Zenophilious/saved/46pG

 

I'll list the individual parts here if it's requested, but since I'm fairly lazy, I don't want to do that right now.

[solidbatman]

I used a KBMOD build guide and tweaked it a bit to suit my needs. Good choice for getting a basic idea of what you can get in certain price ranges. 

https://kbmod.com/category/build-guides/

[Guest hairybumslapper]

Don't cheap out on the PSU. make sure you purchase a decent one. Some good ones to look out for are made by Corsair, Seasonic, Cooler master etc.

 

That said, i highly recommend you have a look on tom's hardware for advice on computer building. that site has a ton of threads on the same topic, and would give you better insight on building a decent PC since there are a lot of tech guru's on there.

[Steve]

Indeed, tom's hardware is an awesome site.

 

I will also one one small tip (if everyone adds one small tip, you will soon know everything xD)

 

Like hairy said, don't buy cheat PSU, and same thing goes for case.

You want one with some good cooling and air flow, you can get those in a rage of like 100-200$ (that is if you don't want some quiet one, if you want good cooling and quiet, it will cost more, but the noise reduction is not worth it anyways, let it be loud ).

But no matter what, don't buy those bad 50-100$ cases, those have problems even cooling HDDs and you risk losing important data that way.

[SakuraFreak]

i5 With haswell-DT architheture is the best choice for a low priced processor.
I would recommend Gigabyte mob, is made of good material and has more lifespan than others.
Before buying an especial edition of any DDR3 you need to see which memories are compatible with the mob you're going to buy, if not, will read as 1333 instead 1600 for example.
Never buy AMD processor, due awful support, and lack of techonology... Their chipsets are bad as hell also.

A techonology that you should invest your money is SSD, you can buy a 64GB one, and make a hybrid with your system HDD, 
using your SSD as cache. (improves at least 4x the reading/writting time. to put simple faster boot, loading etc..)

Video Cards deppends in which game you wanna play... best thing is seeing Tom's hardware benchmark as hairybumslapper linked earlier.


Ah,Try buying a Motherboard that has a dedicated audio driver. The sound quality improvement is a LOT, and not expensive.
(MOB's with dedicated audio drivers has 7.1 channel input, SPDIF etc...) is just look at audio jack and see if has jacks with Black, orange and gray. sometimes the colors are different tho lol
If you are an audiophile i recommend buying an offboard audio card, but is quite expensive.
But an onboard dedicated audio driver is quite good with theirs 110db- quality and 35 ohms support (bluray reproduction, improvement with sound quality, and high improvement with great headphones)
 

[Flutterz]

I really like http://pcpartpicker.com/ because it can point out most mistakes you've made, such as incompatible parts and stuff like that.

Don't cheap out on the PSU, it may seem like it's not as important as a good GPU or CPU, but if there's anything that can burn everything in your computer if it breaks, it's the PSU.

If you're planning on getting an Nvidia card you'll want an i5 processor, and if you have enough funds you might want to pick up a 128 GB SSD to put your system and 1-2 of the games you play the most on it, so that they load instantly.

 

http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/b/Mb0

Here's a computer I put together not too long ago, although it's not a gaming computer and it was built to work on Win XP, it's a good machine overall, although that price doesn't include the cost of the OS. If you're going to be putting it together yourself you'll probably want to get an OEM Windows 7, because they are cheaper, or you can just pirate it.

Also that case is really good. Only cost me $120 and it has a really awesome system inside which allows you to hide almost all the wiring and it has really god airflow.

[SakuraFreak]

Lol posted at same time. I didn't know about this link( ´,_ゝ`) kinda life saver since won't need to read the motherboard manuals as i always do.. SSD is much better hybrid im happy with my 3TB hybrid

[cryofrzd]

Prioritise

1. A good motherboard that is ATX not smaller (so that your graphics card doesn't block things), it should have the latest socket / ram-standard etc. for being future proof. 
2. Good graphics-cards and processor (as they are expensive and have to be replaced instead of extended)
3. Buy normal hard disks after storage+backup need as you can have several and they are cheap. Use a SSD that can hold system + programs. Extend RAM after need.

[Guest loppez]

cpu is not the most importnat thing if you want a gaming computer but some tip:

 

CPU - always intel > amd. always, always and always. don't even think about amd processor. amd does not count there anymore. 

if you pick amd, you have to spend more money on better PSU and cooling. even if you do that intel > amd.

 

it is not like you should focus on cpu more than gpu. just don't waste your money on shit, don't buy amd cpu, it's better to spend 50-100$ more and get 30-50% of quality and energy efficiency.

 

GPU is the point here. you better think about that carefully. better to buy less memory (you can just buy more at any time) and save that money on gpu.

PSU worse than 500w would be stupidity.

if you think about ssd then 64gb is not good enough. waste of money. you need at least 128gb.

[Steve]

CPU - always intel > amd. always, always and always. don't even think about amd processor. amd does not count there anymore. 

if you pick amd, you have to spend more money on better PSU and cooling. even if you do that intel > amd.

 

it is not like you should focus on cpu more than gpu. just don't waste your money on shit, don't buy amd cpu, it's better to spend 50-100$ more and get 30-50% of quality and energy efficiency.

 

Actually you cannot say that anymore for a gaming PC, intels are more energy efficient and I've been using intel for past many years, but I would highly reconsider now and look at tests of the newest amd CPUs.

One of the main reasons is that the new consoles run on amd CPUs so the new games and console ports will be better optimized for 8 core processors.

So if you want raw maximum power, amd is probably the better pick these days.

 

And since Zeno lives in California, I heard from lot of people that there you don't really even care about saving energy as it is cheap there so having energy efficient computer is not important for him and amd can give you more raw power.

So yeah, probably actually go amd.

[SakuraFreak]

so many redundant posts that is giving me headache lol

[Nayleen]

Compare parts on Logical Increments, mix and match according to needs/compromises you're willing to make.

 

I'm in the always buy Intel camp as well, AMD APUs are not what they're claimed to be and Mantle, ironically enough, benefits AMD mostly since both their CPU and APUs are way behind in terms of processing power, which is where Mantle helps out in comparison to DirectX. Don't buy AMD CPUs/APUs.

 

imo: Stick with Intel and NVIDIA, Haswell i3/i5 + any board + 8GB of RAM and tweak price and overall performance accordingly by picking one of the GPUs in the 7XX family. ATX will be cheaper and foolproof overall.

[Steve]

Well, back to useful tips and not arguing about stuff and derailing this topic.

Share your useful tips and Zeno can read the tips on the websites and decide for himself on what brand to buy.

[Zakamutt]

While loppez recommends prioritizing the GPU over the CPU, note that for a lot of general uses (for example, playing them most hardcorest anime encodes) you need a decent bit of CPU power. You'll probably have enough either way, but...

Also, if you ever want to start playing an MMORPG CPU > GPU erryday (at least in WoW).

[Steve]

Yes, I would agree with Zaka, depending on what kind of game you want to play, MMOs in general are very high demanding on CPU and it is usually the bottleneck (planetside 2, wow, pso2 and few others from the ones i played). So if you play lot of MMOs, you might consider investing into a better cpu with good overclock potential.

[Bolverk]

Depending on you wanting to upgrade your PC later, I'd reccommend getting a big chassis. Makes it a lot eaiser when you start shoving more stuff into it, even more so if you have a high capasity PSU which tends to have a lot of cables. Also having a good PSU is a good idea. You won't have to pay much more and you can have a PSU for years that you don't have to worry about having too little power or the PSU crashing your pc for some reason.

 

What kind of CPU and GPU and money you would like use I'd reccommend to search up what kind of games you play and compare them to.

As for CPU I'd reccommend going for Intel because they are more fitted for gaming. If you make more 3D modeling and such might get consider a 8 core Amd orsomething like that though. There are loads of comperisations online to look at to find what fits you.

 

My personaly experience with GPU's is that Nivida tends to be slightly pricer, more stable all around and the developers gives out patches more often. AMD tends to be cheaper and have some issues with bad performance on some games and it might take a month or two before that's fixed. <- This is really mostly the case with newly released GPU's.

I tend to go with AMD, but I'd recommend Nivida.

 

In your case though, (I totally forgot what you said in your OP..) Getting a somewhat big case, and good PSU not too much capasity though. A Nivida GPU and Intel CPU will prbly do you well.

What is most needed a good CPU or a good GPU really depends on what kind of games you play though. CPU market haven't really been improving in prossessing so much lately because Intel owns the market lol. They are focusing on taking the tablet and phones right now. So if you put money in it now you might not need to upgrade it later, just your GPU.

[Tom]

wish i had those extra 2k to spend right now for a better PC (which i dont even need)

[Zenophilious]

Okay, sorry for not replying for a while, I was camping for about two days, and I felt like death from lack of sleep when I got back.

 

Generally, I think I'm going to stick with Steam.  I have a few old GOG games, like Fallout 1-2 and Tactics, but that's about it.  Right now, the most graphics-intensive games I know I'm going to play on the PC are Fallout 3, Skyrim, Mirror's Edge, Just Cause 2, and The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings.  I'm almost sure to get more games, but those are the few right now that I know I'm gonna be playing that (I think) have decent graphics requirements.  Most of the other games I have are indie pixelated games, or are games that I could pretty much run on a toaster, like The Binding of Isaac or Terraria.  Also going to be playing League of Legends on it, but I doubt that'll be a problem.

 

Outside of gaming, I'll be using my computer to surf the net, play a flash game or two, type documents, and read VNs.  That's about it.  I might dabble in coding, but nothing serious.

 

I'll edit my original post to list the parts I'm looking at, and all the parts I have on my list.

 

EDIT: A few friends of mine told me to pick the power supply and motherboard last, since the size and variation depends on the other parts I'm getting.  They were stumped about the WiFi card and what monitor I'd need.  I'm not sure if I'll need a water cooling system, and I don't know if I need extra fans, or how many I'll need if I do.

[DrKleiner]

I see that you've decided to go with an i7. Please don't do that. If you're going to be playing games on it the i5-4670k is going to be enough: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116899 (the i7 is only if you want bragging rights tbh, and it's not even an unlocked one). The money you save (about 70 bucks) you'll be able to use to get a better PSU or something (also you can find a lot of simple overclocking utilities on the internet so you can even get more power out of your CPU, just make sure to get an aftermarket cooler). With the cases you might want to go with more known brands like Fractal Design (have their Define R4 Arctic case and it's excellent) or Cooler Master (the HAF series). For the motherboard I'd suggest going with a board that has a higher frequency supported for the RAM since you'll be upgrading it. The "best" brand, as they call it, is Asus. But I highly recommend going with Asrock or Gigabyte mostly because I've had numerous Asus boards before and they've all failed for numerous reasons while my Gigabyte board is still going. For the PSU I'm gonna link you to this:

 

http://www.eggxpert.com/forums/thread/323050.aspx

 

You wanna stick to that for the most part and go as low as 2b since that's the boundary between good and bad. NEVER BUY A PSU THAT IS NOT 80+ BRONZE. The 80+ bronze thing is a guarantee from the maker that the PSU will provide 80% or over of it's designated power output (if the PSU doesn't have that, or gold, stay away from it. Just because it has the 700W or 600W written on it doesn't mean it'll definitely deliver it.) Never go cheaper on the PSU, use the money you saved on the CPU for a better PSU. For the GPU if you can go for the 770 go for it. But I'd recommend going with the Asus version that has DirectCU II because it's a really good cooling system. Also a note: When buying a case make sure to check out the supported GPU width of that case (to make sure your GPU isn't too long so it can't fit into the case). About the hard drive: If you can shell out some money (or have extra) go with an SSD and a HDD (Somewhere around a TB or 500GB for the HDD). This is because if you buy only one hard drive, and you install Windows and keep all of the files (music, games, etc) on it it'll impact performance because it'd be running Windows and at the same time try to do something else you're doing which really impacts multitasking. Also because SSDs are really fast and it'll literally load Windows within seconds. If you can't buy an SSD and HDD, try going with a hybrid then. Also the brands of HDDs you wanna stick with are Seagate and WD. For the SSDs Samsung I guess.

[Nayleen]

Seconded Doc's recommendation for an i5 instead of i7 - it's an easy thing to save money on since you won't be needing HyperThreading (which isn't of much use, and in some cases detrimental, to gaming performance) and the additional stock performance is not worth the $80 markup.

 

Just saw your price limitations, so I'll give this a try according to some recent PCs I've built for my cousin's friends:

 

http://amzn.com/w/2WGZYGEIVF3PX (~$1275)

 

There's still some room for savings here (about $70 for non-water CPU cooling), but this is a pretty tight-knit bundle.

 

That list features everything but a monitor, the mainboard comes with WiFi included. If you want to up that go with a 120GB Samsung EVO SSD + 2TB WD Green, which is only marginally more expensive. Adding a monitor to that would put you at around $1400. I can go change up a few things or explain my choices if needed. 8GB of RAM are more than enough for everyday usage, still.

[Flutterz]

Thirding the i5, like I said in my previous post if you're mainly planning to use it for gaming and not stuff like rendering video, an i5 is what you need.

[Zenophilious]

I see that you've decided to go with an i7. Please don't do that. If you're going to be playing games on it the i5-4670k is going to be enough: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116899 (the i7 is only if you want bragging rights tbh, and it's not even an unlocked one). The money you save (about 70 bucks) you'll be able to use to get a better PSU or something (also you can find a lot of simple overclocking utilities on the internet so you can even get more power out of your CPU, just make sure to get an aftermarket cooler).

 

 

Seconded Doc's recommendation for an i5 instead of i7 - it's an easy thing to save money on since you won't be needing HyperThreading (which isn't of much use, and in some cases detrimental, to gaming performance) and the additional stock performance is not worth the $80 markup.

 

Thirding the i5, like I said in my previous post if you're mainly planning to use it for gaming and not stuff like rendering video, an i5 is what you need.

Thanks for the recommendations.  I know pretty much nothing about hardware, so, really, I appreciate all the help I can get.  I edited my main list, which is on Google Drive, and I'll replace the i7 on this list with the i5.

[Zenophilious]

Oh, I forgot.  Does the type of monitor really matter that much?  I mean, I was gonna get an LCD monitor, but other than that, I'm not quite sure what I need.

 

Also, would a water cooling system only really be a good idea if I have some extra cash to blow?  It sounds a bit excessive to me.

[Flutterz]

Oh, I forgot.  Does the type of monitor really matter that much?  I mean, I was gonna get an LCD monitor, but other than that, I'm not quite sure what I need.

 

Also, would a water cooling system only really be a good idea if I have some extra cash to blow?  It sounds a bit excessive to me.

Dunno about the monitor, besides the fact that you should get 1920x1080, but you don't need a liquid cooling system unless you're planning on overclocking an i7 or something, and I've heard that setting it up can be a big hassle. Generally if the i5 comes with it's own fan and you're not planning on doing anything fancy with it, it should be enough.

[solidbatman]

I'm using an i5 with stock fan and no overclock and have no issues with very basic streaming. Actually, my upload speed is the only thing that ruins my quality. That and me commentary.

 

Dont bother with water cooler. Just get a typical cpu cooler if you want to replace the stock.