The System

[Bear]

So I've come to the conclusion that I can no longer keep up with the ever expanding change in the computing universe. It seems that by the time I get the time to sit down and do some sort of piecing together of that new Rig I so eagerly want, what is and what I thought was the top tier hardware has now become mid-grade, and I am forced to take even more time out of my beloved not working time to read up on what's deemed "greatness" and what's coming up next week to take it's throne.

And that's why I've decided this. I'm just gonna ask people what's what and save the research finding-article scavanging-benchmark comparing-real world testing time - up to others. After all, a collective group can compile much more information than a single being.

Anyways, I'm planning on finally building that new PC within the next few months, and I'd like to wrap everything that would be useful in my decision making in one thread so that I can reference to it instead of all those pages of things that are scattered amongst many other websites I have to go hunting for. Basically, I need help making decisions, so that when I make that transaction later, I'll have no regrets or post buyers remorse syndrome. I don't want to have that "Should have gotten this, would have saved me x-$$$" or the equally worse "Why did I cheap out, I shoulda just spent the extra $$$ on that when I had the chance" or even the "Should have waited 2 more weeks. X came out and it turned out to be much better than what I just bought; and for the same damn price".


And before we get started. I'd like to make one thing clear. I'd like as realistic and honest of a view as possible for the products we may be talking about. I honestly couldn't care less about a product's brand name or your personal history of good report with "X-Brand" and how much you hate "Y-Brand" and therefore I should not get it. NO Fanboyisms. If you have some reason to tell me why I should get one product over another, please back it up with some sort of factual evidence of why. Not just the old waste of time "Brand A is better than B because I says so" bull.

Anyway.

The main things I have concerns over are the pieces of hardware that impact the game experience the most for now and in the future, and how it interacts with the rest of the hardware. This immediately includes CPU, GPU, and the Motherboard.

First, CPU's. My Hands down choice for CPU was going to be the 2500k i5 from Intel.. Up until today when I read that IVY Bridge is supposed to be coming out. Would it be worth the wait, and will the price in fact be the same for the "2500k" equivalent IVY bridge version as I've come to read. If so it's a no-brainer, wait for IVY bridge. If it's going to be more expensive, then by how much? If it will be a difference talking triple digits, I might as well stick to the Sandy Bridge 32nm process. I will overclock.

GPU - Plan... buy the fastest single graphics card available at the time. Currently? it seems to be the 7970 from AMD. I don't care what brand I end up with, as I've had both brands and had them both perform very reliably. Real question for now is, when will Nvidia come out with their next gen card to compete with AMD's new 28nm card? What's pricing supposed to look like? I hear rumors of an even higher powered single graphics card series soon to come out from AMD (No, not the 7990, which I hear will be Dual-GPU). I also plan to overclock, and don't plan to Crossfire/SLi in the future at all unless it ends up someone gives me a Dual-GPU to pair with my Single for a Tri-fire or Tri-SLi to minimize microstuttering found in dual setups. Highly unlikely this will happen.

Motherboard - This is where my ambiguity starts. I need to narrow down my options here and not overspend or underspend. Thoughts on PCi-E 3.0? I'd like to have UEFI-BIOS. Probably will run a combo drive setup for booting and hard disk space, using a SATA III SSD for booting and programs I need to load up instantly, and a 500GB 7200 Hard drive. Case is decidedly going to be a Corsair Carbide 500R and Will be using all front panel interfaces. Will need a USB 3.0 header and Firewire. Was looking into the ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3, but I'm still leery about spending extra coin on PCI-E 3.0.

These are the main points. I'm sure I'll need to elaborate more on what I'm trying to accomplish build-wise, but right now don't worry about cost. It's flexible at this point, and the main goal is to make a system that will last a while, play all games with settings jammed in the up position, and as much AA and AF as I can cram out of it. Eliminate waste, and get exactly what I need without any extra fat.

Thank you in advance for everyone who contributed. Lord only knows how much time you'll end up saving me in the long run. I foresee it being a derping lot of it.

[Mitchpate]

Anyways, I'm planning on finally building that new PC within the next few months

In a few months both Ivy Bridge and the Nvidia GTX 600 series will be available.  It would be wiser to wait until you're ready to buy as anything we recommend now will be overshadowed by the time you're ready to actually pull the trigger on this.

[Freeborn_Toad]

Ivy Bridge is a few months away and will be priced roughly the same as the Sandy Bridge chips they will be replacing. Power consumption is going down, and performance is going up (by about 10%, clock for clock, if current reports are accurate). They shouldn't OC any worse, but may not OC much better; early tests don't have them doing much better than current chips, despite the die shrink. Nothing wrong with going Sandy Bridge if you don't want to wait. Ivy is an evolution, not a revolution.

No one really knows for sure when Kepler (NVIDIA's next architecture) will be out, how it will really perform, or how much it will really cost. Rumor has it that they will be out in February and that they will perform better than AMDs equivalent. How true this is, I do not know.

PCI-E 3.0 isn't going to make any difference in graphics performance for at least a few generations, and certainly not with a single card config.

[Bear]

thanks and thanks. I was planning on building it in March, hence the thread now and not months ago. That is until I heard Ivy Bridge was coming out in April and was wondering if I should wait. If it ends up only being 10% better (I heard supposedly 20%, but I suppose we can't confirm until it's out) but more than 10% cost, I don't see it being justifiable.

And by in February, you mean this month I hope.

I was hoping Ivy Bridge would come out sooner so that I could make a better decision when the time comes. I have a hard time buying anything at launch anymore without first hearing from the "Guinea" buyers on how their launch buy went and if the hype meets the reality.

[=KoS= Tripod]

thanks and thanks. I was planning on building it in March, hence the thread now and not months ago. That is until I heard Ivy Bridge was coming out in April and was wondering if I should wait. If it ends up only being 10% better (I heard supposedly 20%, but I suppose we can't confirm until it's out) but more than 10% cost, I don't see it being justifiable.

And by in February, you mean this month I hope.

I was hoping Ivy Bridge would come out sooner so that I could make a better decision when the time comes. I have a hard time buying anything at launch anymore without first hearing from the "Guinea" buyers on how their launch buy went and if the hype meets the reality.

yeah same

the thing is MWLL is pretty much the only game I can't run on max settings (Besides any of the ArmA games but to them optimization isn't even in their vocabulary) so I don't really wanna rush into updating AGAIN anyway and If I do I'll probably just grab another 460 and SLI it

[Mitchpate]

The best time to buy is the summer.  Usually by then everything that's going to come out pre-winter season is already out.  Buying in the spring usually leads to tears and regret.

[Bear]

Alrighty, summer it is then 

So, I've taken some time to piece together my "If I were forced to buy today" Scenario and what it would look like. Hopefully, I've done a good enough job that not much will have to be changed, but if anything sticks out at you that makes you go "Huh?" because I've chosen outdated or possibly am paying too much for no extra gains, please feel free to enlighten me. Any strangeness otherwise in my choices I'll be glad to explain. I've linked a list below using Newegg. I'll also list everything by category if you can't see the link.

HERE IS THE LIST OF HARDWARE

Hardware
Case           -      Corsair 500R
PSU             -      Corsair Pro HX650
M-B              -     ASUS P8Z68-V LE
CPU             -     Intel Sandy Bridge i5 2500k
GPU             -      XFX Radeon HD 7970 D.D.
RAM             -      Corsair Vengeance DDR3 8GB
Boot            -      Corsair Force Series 3 90GB SSD
Storage       -      Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 6Gb/s
DVD/CD       -       ASUS SATA 24x DVD burner
CPU Cooler  -      Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus
Misc Fans     -      Rosewill BL 120mm Fans (x11)


If I left out anything important... Let me know. Didn't do much Comparison shopping, just FYI.

[Freeborn_Toad]

Looks decent, though you don't need a Caviar Black for a storage drive. They are, in all honest, very overpriced.

[Bear]

In all honesty, is 6Gb/s even necessary for a mechanical drive? And really how much does the Cache size impact performance?

I'm looking into a replacement as I type this, but what would be a competent solution for my storage woes? To make it more clear, I will be using the SSD for the boot drive only, and very limited amount of programs in which I use everyday that I need to load up really fast. Other than that, the Mechanical drive will be doing the rest. I'm really not needing anymore than 500GB. Honestly, I have a 500GB HD in my current tower... It's all I've ever needed. I think I just now broke the 270GB mark and I've had it since 07'. I load what I need, clear out the garbage I've downloaded over the year at the end and don't do much downloading in the first place.

There's two drives I'm eyeballing right now after looking a bit. One's a Seagate Barracuda and the other a WD Caviar Blue. Honestly, They're only a few $$ apart with nearly Identical specs. The seagate just doesn't tell me much about it such as warranty info, and if $5 gets me another year of free RMA then I'm cool with that difference. Otherwise, It looks like the better candidate with the less expense and free shipping.

Or maybe there is something you can suggest? I'd like to learn more about what makes a fast reading hard drive and the reasons for 6Gb/s over 3 with current technology and the like so I'm taking shots in the dark. I've read somewhere 7200rpm drives don't even take up the entire bandwidth of 3, so what's with the 6?

[Mitchpate]

I use WD Black for boot and storage.  The only time a slower drive is needed is for backup.  With short term transfers Blue and Black have about the same performance but when you're running Windows and playing games from them the performance is night and day.  The price difference between Blue and Black used to be $10-20 and by summer it should be again.

And yes, 6Gbit (SATA3) is noticably faster.  It shouldn't be but it is so just run with it.

If you're waiting for summer, HD prices should steadily decrease back to their pre-flood rates.  Back then you could get a 1TB WD Black for around $100.

[KingLeerUK]

I won't go into the story of why because it should be fairly obvious but in my opinion you should offload any long-term storage from your primary machine to either a NAS with RAID1 (preferable) or externalise the backup harddrive in an eSATA or USB3.0 enclosure.
 
My prefence is an external NAS as it means my files are on my home network even when my PC is offline; as such I can get to [them] from my laptop, my media streamer boxes, phone, etc.
 
Also, if you have files worth storing, it's worth having a RAID 1 mirror to put them on.  Hard drives die easily and having to pay for data recovery is usually beyond the means of the average consumer, buying a decent NAS is not.
 
My "working files" for MWLL are on my workstation in a RAID1 mirror of two 500GB WD Blacks, but I regularly push a backup to my QNAP NAS box which has 2x 1.5TB WD Blues.

[Bear]

I was planning on buying an external device for backup in the future. I didn't include it in the build as a part that would necessarily impact it's performance per-say, but losing all data is definitely a performance hit. Not to mention a degrading soul killing machine.

I've heard conflicting arguments over HDD speed and whether or not it impacts gaming at all. Besides boot times, I don't see how a slightly faster HDD like a WD black would gain me any performance gains in game once everything is loaded onto RAM and VRAM. I have heard some say faster hard drives can net faster in game performance, but to me it seems negligible at best. Maybe in the first 20 seconds of a match if that.

[Mitchpate]

You're confusing the argument between a SDD and HDD.  The difference between a fast HDD and meh HDD is definately noticable, even after the level is loaded.

[Bear]

You're confusing the argument between a SDD and HDD.  The difference between a fast HDD and meh HDD is definately noticable, even after the level is loaded.

yes, I'm confused. Explain if you have the time.

As far as waiting for summer, I now plan on it. I now need to just educate myself on the intricacies of specific components and how their performance affects the system as a whole. So far, it looks like I need to brush up on Hard drives, Motherboards, and RAM. One thing I don't quite understand yet is how 2 similarly spec'd HDD can perform so differently like a Blue from a Black. I'm sure it has to do with processing speed and the like, but what that all entails I'll need to find out.

[Gremlich]

@Bear

Don't belabour your computer choices so hard.

I have an AMD 3.2 GHz quad with 8 GB DDR2 RAM on an AM2 gigabyte MOBO, and a GTX 460 - I can play well any game I want on a 2 year old system. Pick your upper limit for $$$ (say $1,100) and buy based both on that and future upgradeability. Worry about it too much and you'll never build your system or have enough money for the biggest bestest brightest.