New Build

[Deverz]

Ok so since the other one fell through I'm going to custom build my own

Most likely buying from HERE because it's cheap

Thinking

CPU: i5-3550 $216

Vid: 1G Asus GTX560 $179

Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-M PRO $135

RAM: 8GB Kit 1600 ~$55

HDD: WD 1TB $95 (Can I mirror after installation or only at installation)

PSU: TBD

Case: TBD, Thinking Antec 900 $112

Costing me a bit more but it will probably be more worth it this way

 

[Denz]

why spending that much on the case, are you going to carry it all around with you? ride it? cook with it? is it going to make you more popular?

Buy some cheap box case man and add those fancy coolers and lights..

 

[Skyrider]

Regarding your case:

Ok it all start perfectly. I picked up my Antec 900 today and was so happy. I moved my system to it's new home which went fine. I then started plugging in all the cables at the rear and that’s when my world turned to shit!

You see when I went to plug my monitor in it wouldn't fit. No matter how much I moved it around I could not attached it to the video card.

Some numpty at Antec forgot to leave enough clearance around the video cards DVI outputs to actually allow you to connect your monitor to it.

Luckily for me I have an SLI mobo so I just put the video card in the second slot. Problem fixed unless I want to run an SLI rig in this so called "Gamers Case."

If you do not have an SLI mobo you have been warned.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/607713

Just found this on the internet...

 

[grOOvy]

Well there's a name I haven't seen around in ages!

I used the Antec 900 for years and it is a good case with great cooling. If you don't mind spending a bit more, the Corsair 600T White is another fantastic case; one that I personally used in my latest build.

If that 1TB hard drive is for OS and applications/games, the Caviar Black version of the WD series would be a better bet in terms of performance than the Caviar Green (which is primarily used for storage).

why spending that much on the case, are you going to carry it all around with you? ride it? cook with it? is it going to make you more popular?

Buy some cheap box case man and add those fancy coolers and lights..

People invest in good cases for more than just aesthetics. If you're using a heavy duty CPU and graphics card, proper cooling is important. So is the noise factor, silent cases are generally more expensive. The lights are mostly for aesthetics, yeah. But bells and whistles are popular because people like them - so there's nothing wrong with that. :3

 

[fuzzy]

I don't know about availability, but I've recently found that Fractal Design also makes pretty decent cases. I've got a Define Mini here for my fileserver and it's built very well with nothing rattling or loose.

The one thing you absolutely should not forget is your CPU cooler - it has to fit in the case. With tower coolers being all the rage these days, I bought a Thermalright Macho - my recommendation on this topic - but found the 140mm fan wouldn't fit between the RAM and the case's side panel.

/edit: Oh yeah, about mirroring: Do you really need a failover drive? Or do you want a backup? Because a RAID isn't backup.

 

[Deverz]

It was going to be a failure drive for my OS. Never had one before but I thought it's better to be safe then sorry

I also fixed the link in my first post for my product list.

Apart from the case is the rest looking good?

 

[Slofreak]

CPU: i5-3550

Vid: 1G Asus GTX560 $179

Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-M PRO $135

RAM: 8GB Kit 1600 ~$55

HDD: WD 1TB $95 (Can I mirror after installation or only at installation)

PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA-650 GREEN 650W - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371044

Case: 50-55$

XION XON-570 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811208043
Antec Three Hundred - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042

explanation:

I sheded the price of your case simply because i think your case is gonna sit bellow the desk all the time you wont even notice why invest so much money into something that will just sit bellow your desk, i wouldn't spend more than 60$ on a case. Anyways we shaded 57$ of that case woha! now where should we put that money into?

1. If your an overclocker person than i would spend that extra 57$ and buy Core i5-3570K instead since they overclock far better than I5-3550.
2. Buy a better heatsink and slap it on the I5-3550 (even if you don't overclock having cooler temps is definitely a plus)
3. save up 57$ and add a bit money next month and buy GPU that will serve you as physx card something like: GTS250, 9800GTX, 9600GT

Antec EarthWatts EA-650 GREEN 650W i added is good enough to run your system and for future if you ever decide to go SLI.

The rest is pretty good that GPU has good reviews and that mobo also has good reviews and has nice features. (i know that where you live you might not have a choice of buying from newegg, but there is probably similar prices on amazon or some store that is closer to you)



The sound difference between a 50$ case and 112$ case is so minimal you won't notice it. The thing is to get a Silent type of case fans, every fan has a dBA level that produces depending how fast it's spinning. Also running your fans at 100% when there is no need for it, will make far more noise difference than a case for 150$+.

 

[Z Power]

Never mind.

 

[fuzzy]

CPU: i5-3550

Vid: 1G Asus GTX560 $179

Mobo: ASUS P8Z77-M PRO $135

RAM: 8GB Kit 1600 ~$55

HDD: WD 1TB $95 (Can I mirror after installation or only at installation)

PSU: Antec EarthWatts EA-650 GREEN 650W - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371044

That config needs 400W, tops. So a 450W PSU will do nicely. Also, nearly no-one needs SLI or anything dual GPU, ever. Power consumption is also not likely to rise significantly any time soon.

 

[Slofreak]

That config needs 400W, tops. So a 450W PSU will do nicely. Also, nearly no-one needs SLI or anything dual GPU, ever. Power consumption is also not likely to rise significantly any time soon.

That depends on whatever if he will ever overclock his CPU or GPU or both. Also if he ever decides later on to go SLI he wont need to spend more money on a new PSU. This way with a decent PSU he safe for many years to come even if he decides forever reason to go SLI or get a phsxy card or in the end with more powerfull single GPU. 400-450w is too close for comfort he can definitely run it on 500w+ good quality PSU

bellow is a chart of relative power consumption. Again, the Wattage shown is the card with the GPUs stressed 100%, showing only the peak GPU power draw, not the power consumption of the entire PC and not the average gaming power consumption.

 

[fuzzy]

I've got my 2500K at 4 GHz and a GTX 460 and can assure you, the whole PC only ever needs 398W under absolute full load with Prime95 and Furmark.

Your chart also clearly shows what I said: No increase in power consumption, but an enormous decrease instead. No need for a strong PSU. Better get a quality one with high efficiency. While I'm sure the Antec will perform just fine, there's still room for quality improvement.

 

[Slofreak]

If you wont go SLI or get another GPU for physx, than like fuzzy said you can get away with 400-450w PSU with high efficiency.

Antec NEO ECO 520C 520W
SeaSonic M12II 520 Bronze 520W

Bouth of them are around 60$

We sheded another 20$ from a PSU. If your not really planing to overclock like crazy the I5-3550 will do you just fine.

So if you wont spend 57$(we got from a case) on a CPU you can add those 20$(from PSU) = 77$. So instead of getting a GTX 560 for 179$ you can add those 77$ = 256$ and get a

EVGA GeForce GTX 570 - 265$

Yes a bit more but im sure getting 9$ aint a biggie.

 

[Deverz]

I don't plan on overclocking or going SLI and a good case does more then look pretty

Also the 570 is twice the price of the 560 and the power difference isn't worth the cost in my opinion

 

[Slofreak]

I don't plan on overclocking or going SLI and a good case does more then look pretty

Also the 570 is twice the price of the 560 and the power difference isn't worth the cost in my opinion

Antec 300:
http://img.hexus.net/v2/chassis/Antec/ThreeHundredTwo/graph-1.jpg
http://img.hexus.net/v2/chassis/Antec/ThreeHundredTwo/graph-2.jpg

Antec 900:
http://img.hexus.net/v2/cases/antec/900/thermals.load.png

NOTE: in that test Antec 300 is only using 2 fans and was tested with GPU 6970 while the Antec 900 has 3 fans and it was tested with GeForce 6800 256MiB Ultra. Also the Antec 900 was tested with Intel Pentium Extreme Edition 840 wich is a Dual core and Antec 300 was tested with Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Edition which has 6 cores.

Even tough Antec 300 had system that produces higher temperatures it was still able to get temps lower than antec 900. So i dont see why the need to dish out 112$ for a case when a 55$ case does it better and you save 57$, wich is why i listed you options to invest that 57$ eather in CPU or Heatsink or GPU. Also Antec 300 still have plenty of space to attach extra Case fans, case fans arent that muc 5-10$ depending wich one you get.

For Noise level more dependent on the type of fans. If you take any case and put Noctua fans in it it will be very quiet, but the CPU and GPU fans will still be very loud, the case wont contain that noise even with Antec 900.

Ofcorse you can invest your money into wherever you want its your PC, you wer looking for opinion on your build and i gave you mine.

 

[Hellion_Blade]

The one rule above all rules when building a new rig: design the system for what your are going to be doing with it. Many people just go for all the nice parts or try to budget and then when they run the software they intended to use on it in the first place, the system is either overbuilt so you wasted your money or underbuilt so you wont get the most out of it because you tried to penny pinch too much. Decide what you will be doing with this system then configure the system depending on the requirements of your system usage. For example if you want to go straight gaming pick a CPU and GPU geared towards such or if you want a more generalist machine that can balance any type of processing instead of just gaming pick components geared towards that. for straight gaming I'd recommend an AMD CPU and a NVidia GPU because they work better together when it comes to gaming than an intel cpu with AMD gpu or any other combonation. Intel CPU and AMD GPU will give you a very balanced system so if you want to do things like modeling and photo editing or converting the intel CPU is the way to go. For gaming the Nvidia cards and AMD processors work well together because the way AMD CPUs send information to the GPU while gaming is like a constant stream which is something that Nvidia cards are built to take. You'd think AMD CPU and AMD GPU would be better but theres some issues there with the way they work with each other that AMD needs to figure out. Something about overheating if i remember correctly. Anyways, like i said a generalist machine your gonna want to go intel CPU because they have more power to do all the multitasking that is required by the generalist machine. And since the AMD cards are built with general power in mind they are great for all the modeling applications and what not. NVidia can't keep up just because they are geared only towards gaming.

 

[Deverz]

The one rule above all rules when building a new rig: design the system for what your are going to be doing with it. Many people just go for all the nice parts or try to budget and then when they run the software they intended to use on it in the first place, the system is either overbuilt so you wasted your money or underbuilt so you wont get the most out of it because you tried to penny pinch too much. Decide what you will be doing with this system then configure the system depending on the requirements of your system usage. For example if you want to go straight gaming pick a CPU and GPU geared towards such or if you want a more generalist machine that can balance any type of processing instead of just gaming pick components geared towards that. for straight gaming I'd recommend an AMD CPU and a NVidia GPU because they work better together when it comes to gaming than an intel cpu with AMD gpu or any other combonation. Intel CPU and AMD GPU will give you a very balanced system so if you want to do things like modeling and photo editing or converting the intel CPU is the way to go. For gaming the Nvidia cards and AMD processors work well together because the way AMD CPUs send information to the GPU while gaming is like a constant stream which is something that Nvidia cards are built to take. You'd think AMD CPU and AMD GPU would be better but theres some issues there with the way they work with each other that AMD needs to figure out. Something about overheating if i remember correctly. Anyways, like i said a generalist machine your gonna want to go intel CPU because they have more power to do all the multitasking that is required by the generalist machine. And since the AMD cards are built with general power in mind they are great for all the modeling applications and what not. NVidia can't keep up just because they are geared only towards gaming.

Sorry but that is an unreadable wall of text. Consider paragraphs?

From what I could read here's my answer. It's going to be mostly gaming and media viewing. I've always been an Intel and nVidia fanboy so that's what my build will always contain regardless of speciality

 

[Slofreak]

The one rule above all rules when building a new rig: design the system for what your are going to be doing with it. Many people just go for all the nice parts or try to budget and then when they run the software they intended to use on it in the first place, the system is either overbuilt so you wasted your money or underbuilt so you wont get the most out of it because you tried to penny pinch too much. Decide what you will be doing with this system then configure the system depending on the requirements of your system usage. For example if you want to go straight gaming pick a CPU and GPU geared towards such or if you want a more generalist machine that can balance any type of processing instead of just gaming pick components geared towards that. for straight gaming I'd recommend an AMD CPU and a NVidia GPU because they work better together when it comes to gaming than an intel cpu with AMD gpu or any other combonation. Intel CPU and AMD GPU will give you a very balanced system so if you want to do things like modeling and photo editing or converting the intel CPU is the way to go. For gaming the Nvidia cards and AMD processors work well together because the way AMD CPUs send information to the GPU while gaming is like a constant stream which is something that Nvidia cards are built to take. You'd think AMD CPU and AMD GPU would be better but theres some issues there with the way they work with each other that AMD needs to figure out. Something about overheating if i remember correctly. Anyways, like i said a generalist machine your gonna want to go intel CPU because they have more power to do all the multitasking that is required by the generalist machine. And since the AMD cards are built with general power in mind they are great for all the modeling applications and what not. NVidia can't keep up just because they are geared only towards gaming.

That isn´t making sence. The cpu dosent have any preference of the GPU. CPU just needs to be fast enogh to keep the GPU feeding with information it needs. If you have to slow CPU it will bottleneck your GPU but sence we are talking about i5 here there is no bottleneck here.

Best GPU´s for the money: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-graphics-card-review,3107.html
Best CPU for the money: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-4.html

My suggestion is to check out the benchmarks and test done by people who do this for years and pick something based on that, that was acctually tested. I like to get the most out of my money. So when i check the benchmarks i won´t look at it and see a CPU or GPU that was 50 or 20% cheaper and had better performance than what i payed for.