building a new comp

[Bokrug]

I'm beginning to build a new high-end gaming pc, and I am in need of assistance as this will be the first comp built personally. I need a good list of components, maximum budget of 5500. http://www.newegg.com/

[mavrick_nav]

wut teh hell.... amd quad phenom black edition. 4 gigs ram vista x64 and a crossfire 4870 x2 or some shit

[copulatingduck]

[table]
[tr][td]CPU[/td][td]$190[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]nicer CPU[/td][td]$550[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]CPU Cooler[/td][td]$27[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Thermal Paste[/td][td]$6[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]GPU[/td][td]$420 ($390)[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]RAM[/td][td]$138 ($108)[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Mobo[/td][td]$215[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Case[/td][td]$140[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]PSU[/td][td]$240[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]DVD Drive[/td][td]$28[/td][/tr][/table]

190 (550) CPU1 or (CPU2)
027
006
420
138
215
140
240
028
===
1404 (1764)


There's a suggestion. Feel free to ask questions. I didn't recommend any sound cards/monitors/etc because I honestly don't know the first thing about picking decent ones, so feel free to run with whatever. If you want to spend more... Well, honestly I wouldn't know what else to spend all the money on.

[Bokrug]

Any suggestions for a full tower case (or is that unneccessary), blu ray drive, and hard drive?

[copulatingduck]

Full Tower Case

As for blu ray. Your guess is as good as mine. I'm not a fan of blu ray; just get something name-brand, like sony, samsung, etc

edit: Oh, uhhh, hard drive. Pretty much anything Seagate or Western Digital (I prefer Seagate) will work, though I suggest sticking with 500GB drives and having at least one drive for actually storing your data, separate of the OS drive.

[mavrick_nav]

with his max budget @ 5500 why not shoot for a 2400 buck computer?

[copulatingduck]

If you want to spend more... Well, honestly I wouldn't know what else to spend all the money on.

Like I said, I wouldn't know what else to spend it all on. Spending money just for the sake of spending money and having parts that are only fractionally better than this is not my bag. Sure, he could have 3 video cards, and buy a $1500 CPU with a $600 Mobo and $400 RAM, but as it is a build like this will eat almost any game alive. To spend 3x more is a waste of hard-earned cash. Imho, if you really need to burn all that cash, buy a large monitor, nice headphones and soundcard (supposedly you just never get the same from speakers unless you've got a studio, but don't ask me I'm not an expert). Take what you got leftover, and spend it on delivery for the next year or something. :-\

tldr; I'm not going to pretend I'm knowledgeable enough to suggest parts for a $5000 PC, or even anything approaching $3000. A good start would be to buy a SSD hard drive, or go with watercooling for a really-high end PC, and overclock everything, but I don't know shit about any of that, so I'm just gonna keep my mouth shut on all that. :-\

[Blues]

[table]
[tr][td]CPU[/td][td]$190[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]nicer CPU[/td][td]$550[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]CPU Cooler[/td][td]$27[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Thermal Paste[/td][td]$6[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]GPU[/td][td]$420 ($390)[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]RAM[/td][td]$138 ($108)[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Mobo[/td][td]$215[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]Case[/td][td]$140[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]PSU[/td][td]$240[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]DVD Drive[/td][td]$28[/td][/tr][/table]

190 (550) CPU1 or (CPU2)
027
006
420
138
215
140
240
028
===
1404 (1764)


There's a suggestion. Feel free to ask questions. I didn't recommend any sound cards/monitors/etc because I honestly don't know the first thing about picking decent ones, so feel free to run with whatever. If you want to spend more... Well, honestly I wouldn't know what else to spend all the money on.

First CPU is a bottleneck, and at this point, a bad buy regardless of system (E8500 is same price, cooler, more energy efficient, and runs just about the same. Other, more expensive processors are better. Old chipset is old). The PSU is INCREDIBLE overkill for that system with no second video card, as well as being a randomly picked OCZ model that's not even modular for that price. Case is overpriced for what it is, you can pick up a Centurion 534 for half the price and it's the exact same case. Also, OCZ RAM is not generally worth it. Great stuff, but a LOT of problems with stock mobo settings, and for a novice comp builder, not the best route to choose.

This cart is a good choice for a system with your money limitation in mind. However, I honestly feel that buying a ~1k system is always the best route to go. It's arguable, and based on preference. Think of it this way. If you buy a 1k computer now, smartly, it will run all your games with minimal upgrades for the next 3-6 years easily (maybe 1k more if you upgrade a lot, 500 more if you only do it when necessary). If you buy a more expensive computer, it will last you longer, and you won't need the upgrades that most people would need with a 1k system, but for that reliability you've paid double the price they have in the end. Also, can you depend on every part in your system to last through wear and tear for those 5+ years? It's a computer, and unless you are INCREDIBLY understanding of everything about it, and attentive to care above that of a normal person/gamer, your parts are eventually going to burn out. They might take 5 years, they might last 10, but something is eventually going to break, and possibly take other parts with it, and you've already paid way more than the guy with the cheaper computer did who's still chugging along fine because his comp got upgraded slightly after 3 years.

Even ignoring all that, systems and standards change. Imagine being someone who paid 5000$ for a computer right before PCI-E was standardized. Wouldn't you feel like an ass when you went to upgrade your comp a few years down the road, and instead of dropping a few hundred bucks to get back on the top you're throwing down for a whole new system. Same with the people who started the SLI/crossfire e-peen growing right before the 8 series/DX10. WHOOPS!

Anyways, tl;dr version, he's a gg cart for way too much money. If you want I'll do another cart with a cheaper system that will be just as reliable without the extra few thousand dollars. I assumed you wanted to be able to play Bluray since you had it in your last thread. Hope you're dropping a few thousand on a monitor too or Bluray vs. DVD isn't going to make any difference on your PC. =\

Cooler Master Stacker 830 - Huge case because huge system. Good airflow/etc., not much to explain here other than it's efficient for your system. Make sure not to be rough with the mobo tray, the only real complaint this case gets is mobo grounding problems, and these occur due to a bent mobo tray. Make sure it's not bent on arrival either.

Multi-Fan Power Port - You're going to have a shitton of fans in this case unless you go the water cooling route (and since you're a novice comp builder and water cooling is a huge hassle anyways, you shouldn't and I'm not going to go into wc systems), so this is a power splitter specifically for fans, so that you don't have to buy a crapton of molex splitters.

Acrtic Silver 5 Thermal Compound - Arctic silver, nuff said. Use rubbing alcohol and a q-tip to remove the paste from your CPU cooler if it has any on it when it arrives. Then apply Arctic silver to the CPU carefully and according to the directions on the Arctic Silver site. It's very simple really.

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 - It's compareable to Zaleman's, no reason to go up 20$ for one. (Not that it matters in your case)

ASUS Striker II Extreme 790i Ultra - Used in most professional overclocking/SLI setups. While it did have some problems, most everything (BIOS/drivers/etc.) has been fixed at this point, the varied ratings are a result of that, pay them no heed. As long as you know what you're doing or get help from someone who does, you're fine. Dual Gigabit LAN, SLI setup, etc. Lots of room for expansion and overclocking, which you damn sure better be doing down the road if you're dropping this much on a system.

Intel Q9650 - The performance increase for a QX9650 is not worth 500$, no matter what your budget. There is almost NO DIFFERENCE. If you INSIST on buying retarded parts, then get a QX9770, but you will see no performance jump until maybe 6 years down the road when they're all outdated by everything out on the market then anyways.

Seagate 7200.11 500GB - Anyone about to suggest Raptors, shut up now. Unless you like your HDDs dying way too early and losing all your data constantly. Also, pick up however many of these you want, or up it to 1TB/etc. Just make sure you throw your boot on a seperate partition than your other media, best way to set up a computer in case there are complications in the future and formatting would cause you to lose ALL your data with one big partition as opposed to a seperate boot partition.

Mushkin DDR3 1600 2x2GB sticks - Great RAM, mushkin is a less heard of pro for what they do. Great timings, and excellent out of the box performance. You may need to tweak your voltage/timings a bit, but that is to be expected from ANY RAM that is this high performance, and better it be with Mushkin that can generally be used out of the box rather than OCZ where you'll more than likely end up RMAing parts 2 or 3 times before finding out it's some incredibly stupid problem that is common of people building with their RAM. Because srsly, OCZ has way too many issues that you have to spend too long figuring out. =\

EVGA GeForce GTX280 1GB (x2) - Hot. Also, SLI them babies. Their performance is supposedly worse in some games with an SLI, but that doesn't really matter since "worse" refers to 150fps vs. 200fps. It's not humanly possible to see a difference, so you know. The reason you'll get the SLI is for the sake of longevity. Also, the SLI performing worse in some situations is due to drivers, not the hardware, so as soon as nVidia gets their ass on fixing it, performance will be higher across the board. Again, stressing the fact that the performance drop will not matter and will be fixed eventually, long before the performance of SLI'd GTX280s matters.

ENERMAX Galaxy 1000W - I am NOT going to spend time going over power supplies and what you want to look into for them. Long story short, YES, it's worth that much if you're intent on putting money into a system. If you do more than glance over and pick a big number for wattages, there are almost as many factors into what makes a good power supply as to what makes a good computer. The number of 12v rails, for instance, is a big thing that many people do not know about. Wiki/google will teach you about power supplies if you're interested in learning. If not, this is a pro power supply and will be fine for this system and any possible upgrades, including triple SLI/etc.

LG 6x Blu-ray Drive - Blu-ray player/DVD/CD burner. I think it might also burn Blu-ray, not really sure, I didn't bother to read, I just picked what I could find that would read Blu-ray as well as burn DVDs/DL DVDs. There are very few out now that do all of it apparently.

Omega Striker 7.1 Sound Card - As per most hyped things, the X-Fi are not as good as they're made out to be. Granted, they're great, and most other cards, including this one, perform about the same. However, the X-Fi cards are notorious for having a bloatware feeling to their drivers/etc., and the Omegas fix that. Also, this card is like 10-30$ cheaper than the X-Fi cards.

Grand Total: $3,242.05 shipped

That is the best system I could build without just getting stupid. Anything more than this and your system is going to perform almost exactly the same and you're just throwing money away, literally. If you'd like a cheaper build, let me know and I'll put something together. Any questions feel free to ask.

[mavrick_nav]

can i just say. wait for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_i7

go for the sli gtx280. but get a cheap ass cpu and mobo and futureproof ram and psu and everything else. my one regreat with my system still is the cpu, and knowing indepth about what is coming up from intel, no fsb is the big thing. and the lolz inducing hyperthreading.

[Bokrug]

A friend of mine who's a systems builder said he would assist in putting the pc together, so I am now considering installing a water cooling system. Any suggestions as to specific systems? Also, I have been a bit apprehensive about water cooling in the past, how reliable are these things in regards to preventing leakage?

[Blues]

There's no reason for watercooling. It is an annoying process, you have to drain it if you want to move it and not risk leaking/damage, and it's just not really necessary to cool the components past what they'll be sitting at normally, especially being C2Q. Watercooling is for system overclockers, and you're not one, so don't bother. Also, I realize I forgot to give you the link to the good slayer 120mms to stock your case with, I'll grab it some time tomorrow.

can i just say. wait for the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core_i7

go for the sli gtx280. but get a cheap ass cpu and mobo and futureproof ram and psu and everything else. my one regreat with my system still is the cpu, and knowing indepth about what is coming up from intel, no fsb is the big thing. and the lolz inducing hyperthreading.

Yeah I had heard about these, but haven't been keeping up. I just built him a comp he can buy right now and be done with, but waiting for the i7s is a reasonable idea.

[Geoff]

Come on guys. 

Go to shop apple and get highest end system there, everyone knows they make computers best.

1 gig of ram at 600 dollars is a steal.

[Dave]

Come on guys. 

Go to shop apple and get highest end system there, everyone knows they make computers best.

who the fuck plays computer games anymore anyways?.

[copulatingduck]

Come on guys. 

Go to shop apple and get highest end system there, everyone knows they make computers best.

1 gig of ram at 600 dollars is a steal.

8)

[Geoff]

No really guys apple is #1

I hear if you buy from them they give you bags as a complimentary bonus, which like their products, can be easily upgraded and last for years to come.

The bag alone must be at least worth $55.

[Spore]

"Imagination meets its match.
Graphic card
Feast your eyes.

All-new high-performance graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA make Mac Pro graphics technology even more cutting edge. The standard graphics card — an ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory, PCI Express 2.0, and two dual-link DVI ports — provides great performance for typical creative applications. And you get dual 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display support out of the box.

For motion graphics, 3D modeling, rendering, or animation, you’ll need the greater graphics horsepower offered by the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3 memory and latest-generation NVIDIA GPU technology. "

THIS IS THE CUTTING EDGE STUFF HERE! I'll be able to run all my favorite Mac games like Bejeweled and Diner Dash like never before with an 8800GT for a mere 300 dollars. I'm spoiled by you, Apple.

[Versus]

wtf, I just got my 9700 PRO for $400 from them. >

[mavrick_nav]

i'm a PC and i like to build my computers.
i'm a MAC and i like to have no rights attaining to the hardware or software inside my computer.

think about this. i know i know, Microsoft dosent build computers, but apple has the OS and the hardware and the BIOS locked down to an extent. microsoft dosent do any of this. who's the monopoly now.

[Spore]

i'm a PC and i like to build my computers.
i'm a MAC and i like to have no rights attaining to the hardware or software inside my computer.

think about this. i know i know, Microsoft dosent build computers, but apple has the OS and the hardware and the BIOS locked down to an extent. microsoft dosent do any of this. who's the monopoly now.

Don't you badmouth Apple! Steve jobs are make the best computer evar and the extra $1000 dollars in hardware and lack of any customization is totally justified because it has OSX in it and OSX is way better than the 100 percent still broken Vista O:<


:3

[Blues]

Jesus I can't believe I did all that work to suggest a PC when he could have just GOTTEN A MAC.

And just think, no lockups or viruses EVER!


WHO PUT THAT THERE?