Rate my parts before I buy?

delta36

So, decided to upgrade from my laptop to a decent-ish PC with upgradability for the future. I'll be using it mostly for gaming, but I'm on a budget, so don't mind that I won't be able to run things on max/ultra. I'd like to be able to play some games that have launched recently (like BF4, DayZ), primarily though, I just want to play Guild Wars 2 without insane amounts of lag. :P

With the help of a friend far more knowledgeable than me, this is what I've got:

Item|Price
Intel Pentium G3420 Box, LGA1150|€55.88
WD Blue 750GB SATA 6GB/s 9,5mm|€51.00
2 x 2GB Corsair XMS3 PC3-10667U CL9|€45.64
ASRock Z87 Extreme3, Sockel 1150, ATX|€97.64
MSI N660-2GD/OC, GeForce GTX 660, 2048MB DDR5|€149.61
Corsair CX Series Modular CX750M, 750W|€82.46
Thermaltake V3 BlacX Edition HDD Docking Station, ohne Netzteil|€35.39
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€536.61

I want this to be upgradeable in the future, and long term want to be able to upgrade the CPU, which I think is possible given the socket, and also be able to add more RAM/a second GPU to use in SLI down the line.

Any thoughts/comments would be welcome. This is really the max for my budget, as I still need to get a screen (any recommendations for one for about 100 quid max would be appreciated as well). I know some of the items are out of stock, but I'm not planning on ordering till next week sometime, and if they're still not there, I'll go for the nearest alternative/order off scan/pixmania. Final question, would I have to pay any extra VAT on this stuff as it's entering Ireland?

Thanks in advance guys, this is my first self build rig, and looking forward to it!

SterlingArcher

Topsy turvy build. Why in case you sli in the future? One decent card will ultra most games at 1080p.... Sli sure. If you are getting a 4k monitor the price of that whole budget. Never chase the dragon.

Shoud have a 100 euro I3 In there and a decent mobo with a 550w PSU.

Or an AMD fx 6300.

With the 30 euro saved on PSU and all parts ran through discount site, put in a 760. Sorted.

But I'm probably missing something here.quick once over.

yawhat!

I would get one stick of 4GB Ram for now instead of thé 2*2. But games like battlefield 4 are starting to use more than 4 GB

660 isn't a great card and be better off with a 7870. Your motherboard and powersupply are fairly overkill for your budget but do allow an I5 and SLI/crossfire at a later date. When is your friend thinking of updating it is the big question?

If it was me I would just go with a FX6300 and a 760/7870 with 8GB of Ram.

delta36

Ah, noticed a mistake there, meant to say I'd be putting in 2x4GB RAM sticks.

I'd prefer to stick to an intel core, as many of the games I want to play are reporting better performance with intel over amd, and again, in maybe a year or so, I'd like to upgrade the core to an i5 or something.

In terms of the GPU then, my idea behind building for an SLI config (again in a year or two) is that when I find games are coming out that aren't playing fantastically well on my system due to the GPU, I can get another one, relatively cheap, and install that alongside. That's why I'm picking a more expensive motherboard and power unit. Is that a better way of doing it? Or am I better off cutting down on the mobo, and power, and putting that extra bit of money towards an even better card now, that will do me for 3-4 years without needing to be upgraded?

Finally, I was picking Nvidia over AMD due to their SLI seemingly being better than Crossfire, but if I change this rig around so I don't plan to SLI/XFire, I'd be willing to go with an AMD card, especially with Mantle coming out soon. Have they gotten any better at driver updates in recent years? My laptop has a HD5000m series, and I could never once update the drivers through AMD without something bad happening.

Thanks for the replies guys, appreciate it!

SterlingArcher

Cut back on the mobo and power supply forget sli.
Get a decent card. And down the line swap out CPU.

Playing games struggling but in your head saying some day it be good?
You do not want to be gaming **** now on the pretence you will sli in future. Only plan sli if the budget is not an issue.

marco_polo

On one hand I can see what you are trying to do, and for single player gaming you could probably manage away for a year or two.

The main problem is that you have listed two multiplayer games that will likely perform very poorly on a dual core pentium. AM3+ or a non SLI ready build are the way go go here IMO.

http://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/arma-3-pc-performance-analysis/

As we can see from the CPU graph, ArmA 3 scales well on quad-cores. Still, we did not witness any performance hit when we disabled one of our CPU cores – in order to simulate a tri-core system. This means that ArmA 3 did not take advantage of our additional CPU core, something that is really ironic considering this is a PC exclusive title that relies heavily on the CPU. When we disabled two of our CPU cores, we witnessed a 10-18fps hit. ArmA 3 is clearly not suited for dual-core owners so we strongly suggest avoiding it, unless of course you enjoy gaming at sub-30fps with awful graphics. Yes, graphics are not everything but ArmA 3 looks bad (and when we say bad, we mean really bad) on low settings.

http://www.dsogaming.com/pc-performance-analyses/battlefield-4-pc-performance-analysis/

As always, we used an overclocked Q9650 (4.2Ghz) with 4GB of RAM, an Nvidia GTX690, the latest version of the GeForce ForceWare drivers and Windows 7 64-Bit. According to its official specs, Battlefield 4 requires at least a dual-core CPU. Now we have to be honest here; those with weaker dual-core CPUs will encounter A LOT of stuttering issues with BF4. While simulating a dual-core CPU, we found BF4 unplayable due to the constant stuttering and the really low framerate (even on low details). DICE suggests an Intel i5 as a minimum requirement, so that CPU may fare better than an older dual-core CPU.

Also that is a laptop drive selected, the 1TB desktop version is the same price

delta36

Thanks again for the responses guys, you're making good points. So if I cut back on the mobo and power supply (looking at other stuff on the site, I could prob half the cost of both of them), would I better off sticking with the 660 (which doesn't seem too bad according to reviews), and using the extra money to upgrade my CPU instead? Because that does seem to be the weakest link. And again, I know I have budget limits, so I don't really mind not having graphics on max if I can get a improved CPU that will improve performance instead.

Edit: Haha, wow thanks marco for the HD! Here's me thinking I'm competent enough with computers to build my own, my face would have been red!

delta36

So how about something like this instead? Downgraded mobo, power, used the difference to get an i5 instead.

Item|Price
MSI N660-2GD/OC, GeForce GTX 660, 2048MB DDR5|€149.61
Thermaltake V3 BlacX Edition HDD Docking Station, ohne Netzteil|€35.39
2 x 4GB G.Skill PC3-12800U CL11-11-11-28|€64.44
WD Blue 1TB 6Gb's|€51.27
ASRock B85 Pro4, Sockel 1150, ATX|€62.61
Thermaltake Smart SE 530W / Modular|€49.90
Intel Core i5-4430 Box, LGA1150|€159.38
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€591.59

marco_polo

delta36 wrote: »

Thanks again for the responses guys, you're making good points. So if I cut back on the mobo and power supply (looking at other stuff on the site, I could prob half the cost of both of them), would I better off sticking with the 660 (which doesn't seem too bad according to reviews), and using the extra money to upgrade my CPU instead? Because that does seem to be the weakest link. And again, I know I have budget limits, so I don't really mind not having graphics on max if I can get a improved CPU that will improve performance instead.

Edit: Haha, wow thanks marco for the HD! Here's me thinking I'm competent enough with computers to build my own, my face would have been red!

Your current budget is actually slap bang in optimum FX-6300 territory :P, even if you shave €80 off the MB/CPU you still only have cash to upgrade one part and that will get you an non-overclockable i5 with the GTX 660.

On the other hand an FX 6300 can be overclocked fairly close to that level, and still allow you to squeeze in a better GPU.

delta36

marco_polo wrote: »

Your current budget is actually slap bang in optimum FX-6300 territory :P, even if you shave €80 off the MB/CPU you still only have cash to upgrade one part and that will get you an non-overclockable i5 with the GTX 660.

On the other hand an FX 6300 can be overclocked fairly close to that level, and still allow you to squeeze in a better GPU.

I see what you're saying, but the 2nd build I posted there is within my budget, and from what I've read, intel is typically better than AMD processors, and from reading some posts on the Guild Wars 2 site, people are saying that i5 performance is a good amount better than AMD FX-6300. Or do I just have a biased opinion towards Intel?:P

marco_polo

delta36 wrote: »

I see what you're saying, but the 2nd build I posted there is within my budget, and from what I've read, intel is typically better than AMD processors, and from reading some posts on the Guild Wars 2 site, people are saying that i5 performance is a good amount better than AMD FX-6300. Or do I just have a biased opinion towards Intel?:P

Guild war 2 runs much better on Intel, what you have is fine but for the most part it is more than fit for purpose as a gaming CPU and is €60 less than the i5 which could be spend upgrading the GTX 660 to something like a GTX 760. It would certainly be fine for ARMA3/BF4.

The alternative would be something like the following:

Item|Price
Cooler Master Force 500 Midi-Tower - schwarz, ohne
Corsair Builder Serie CX500 V3 Non-Modular 80+ Bronze, 500 Watt|€52.09
ASRock 970 Pro3 R2.0, AM3+, ATX|€58.55
AMD FX-6300 Prozessor, Boxed, Sockel AM3+|€98.40
2 x 4GB G.Skill PC3-12800U CL11-11-11-28|€64.44
WD Blue 1TB 6Gb's|€51.27
Inno3D GeForce GTX 760 OC, 2GB DDR5|€222.45
Netzteil|€36.15
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€602.34

delta36

Hey, thanks for the responses guys, and especially to marco for putting together another rig, think I'll stick to Intel, again for the GW2 playability (I'm a sucker for them, I know ) I've tweaked my build a little bit again, as 600 was straining me a bit too much, but think I've got something pretty good now, and am fine with not being able to play with graphics set to ultra/max.
Much appreciate all of yer help!

delta36

Welp, went and pulled the trigger there and ordered, tweaked the build I had above as some things were out of stock, and I still needed to get other peripherals like a wifi card, speakers, keyboard, screen etc so the cost was getting a bit much. Got it down to 650 in total excluding keyboard, which I'll have to buy from elsewhere, so pleased enough with that, thanks again for everyone's help!

Now if I could figure out how to pay them through Paypal I'd be happy...

yawhat!

delta36 wrote: »

Welp, went and pulled the trigger there and ordered, tweaked the build I had above as some things were out of stock, and I still needed to get other peripherals like a wifi card, speakers, keyboard, screen etc so the cost was getting a bit much. Got it down to 650 in total excluding keyboard, which I'll have to buy from elsewhere, so pleased enough with that, thanks again for everyone's help!

Now if I could figure out how to pay them through Paypal I'd be happy...

What graphics card you getting? I'd do a bank transfer to be honest to avoid the 3% charge.

delta36

yawhat! wrote: »

What graphics card you getting? I'd do a bank transfer to be honest to avoid the 3% charge.

It may come to that, it's just that they can take a few days to go through. That and I'm probably going to have to ask nicely for 10 minutes in BoI before they'll let me do it, they seem not to like anything that isn't digital these days. Edit: Checking online, I think it has to be over 3000 before they'll let me transfer! Which is bs to be honest. Can I walk into a bank I'm not a member of with cash and do a transfer I wonder?

I ended up going for a 650 Ti, this one to be exact. I know it's not the greatest one, but I don't mind too much about playing games on Ultra or High, I'm much happier going with a better processor, the i5, instead, considering I want to be able to play multiplayer at a decent rate.

yawhat!

delta36 wrote: »

It may come to that, it's just that they can take a few days to go through. That and I'm probably going to have to ask nicely for 10 minutes in BoI before they'll let me do it, they seem not to like anything that isn't digital these days. Edit: Checking online, I think it has to be over 3000 before they'll let me transfer! Which is bs to be honest. Can I walk into a bank I'm not a member of with cash and do a transfer I wonder?

I ended up going for a 650 Ti, this one to be exact. I know it's not the greatest one, but I don't mind too much about playing games on Ultra or High, I'm much happier going with a better processor, the i5, instead, considering I want to be able to play multiplayer at a decent rate.

Do you have online banking? I transfer money to hardwareversand from there and doesn't have to be any minimun value.

delta36

yawhat! wrote: »

Do you have online banking? I transfer money to hardwareversand from there and doesn't have to be any minimun value.

Darn, I don't actually. I only have banking 365, BoI's over the phone banking. And with that, to transfer money, I have to register the account I want to transfer the money into, then wait for them to post me out a pin before the transfer can take place.

yawhat!

delta36 wrote: »

Darn, I don't actually. I only have banking 365, BoI's over the phone banking. And with that, to transfer money, I have to register the account I want to transfer the money into, then wait for them to post me out a pin before the transfer can take place.

No its all done by mobile now, as soon as you set them up you get the pin sent to your phone instead of through post.

delta36

yawhat! wrote: »

No its all done by mobile now, as soon as you set them up you get the pin sent to your phone instead of through post.

Oh, awesome. I'll call 365 in the morning when I have the time to do that so, thanks!

For a parts website that apparently does a lot of traffic, it's strange that bank transfer is their accepted way of taking money.

delta36

So, Bank of Ireland won't transfer money for less than three thousand, and I'm still waiting on my Online Banking pin to come through.
What's slightly more worrying is that I sent these guys an email on Sunday last asking about paypal, got an automated response back, and haven't heard anything since. It's kinda making me wary of going through with the purchase, I don't want to be waiting weeks for my items to come to me.