Gaming PC & Monitor €900-€1100

bloopbloop

Hey, thanks for helping out in advance, looking to part with some money on a new machine - Think I'm finished with Laptop gaming for now.

Was thinking 900-950 on the machine and around 150-200 on a monitor? But whatever you guys think is best - I'll go with your advice.

1. What is your budget? [€900-1100]

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? [Gaming] Arma 3, Battlefied 4, Dota2, CoH2...any of the latest games really.

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? [No]

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? No

5. Do you need a monitor? [Yes]

5a. If yes, what size do you need. [22']

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? Need Wireless Card/Adapter

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? [Yes/No] In the future yes, but plan to leave as stock until needed.

8. How can you pay? PayPal/Credit Card/Laser

9. When are you purchasing? April 26th

10. If you need help building it, where are you based? Dublin - Will be ok though


Cheers,

BloopBloop

Addled

This is a bit over budget but should get the ball rolling.
Hopefully someone else can help trim it down a little but it's pretty much no compromises:

Item|Price
Intel Core i5-4670K Box, LGA1150
|€194.33
ASUS Z87-K (C2)|€94.89
8GB-Kit Team Group Xtreem Series White, DDR3-2400, CL10|€70.58
MSI R9 290 Gaming 4G, AMD Radeon R9 290, 4GB DDR5|€370.32
FRACTAL DESIGN Define R4 Black Pearl|€82.79
Corsair CX Series Modular CX600M, 600W|€59.89
LG Flatron 22EA53VQ-P|€115.09
TP-LINK TL-WN881ND Netzwerkkarte/-adapter|€10.78
Samsung SSD 840 EVO Basic 250GB SATA 6Gb/s|€115.38
WD Blue 1TB 6Gb's|€46.86
LG DH18NS schwarz bare SATA II|€11.32
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€1196.56

That's using the stock cooler to start with but you can add in a different cooler later on. The ram is pretty fast but has high heatsinks so it might be worth swapping them for lower profile ram or opting for a closed loop liquid cooler when you do decide to start overclocking. I'd also normally have gone for a gigabyte windforce 290 but they're out of stock right now.

estilen

€21,45 over budget, but if you run the parts through geizhals, you should get them cheaper. Also, check out Amazon, really nice prices and free delivery on most of the stuff.

Iiyama ProLite X2380HS-B1 - 149,02 € (monitor)
Intel Core i5-4670K Box, LGA1150 - 204,87 €
8GB-Kit Crucial Ballistix Tactical Series DDR3-1600, CL8 - 71,73 €
Gigabyte G1.Sniper Z87, ATX - 132,92 €
ASUS GTX770 - 285,89 €
Corsair CX Series Modular CX600M, 600W - 65,71 €
Seagate Barracuda 7200 1000GB, SATA 6Gb/s - 50,86 €
FRACTAL DESIGN Define R4 Black Pearl - 88,47 €
TP-LINK TL-WN881ND Netzwerkkarte/-adapter - 11,99 €
Crucial M500 120GB SATA 6GB/s 6,4CM (2,5") 7mm - 59,99 €

All for €1.121,45, prices from hardwareversand as for now. Could do with a cheaper case, I just don't know your preference. Case is a pretty personal choice anyway. Could also pick a cheaper motherboard, but I like the make of the G1.Sniper, it has lots of awesome features and leaves lots of room for upgrade of the system. It also has excellent overclocking abilities, but for that, you'll need a good cooler for your CPU, like Cooler Master 212 EVO or a closed liquid loop, like Corsair H100i or H105.
The monitor is a nice 23" IPS panel, with 5ms response time. If you're not a hardcore/professional gamer, then you'll love it, colours are much more better than with a TN panel.
If you can afford to, jump for a 240GB SSD, 120GB isn't enough... Well, personally I think it's not enough. You can load your games onto it to get better loading times, just remember to leave a bit of free space to keep good speeds.
Apart from that, there isn't much to say. Good and stable overclocking build, with a fancy monitor. Oh, and RAM has lower timings than any other common 1600Mhz memories - 8-8-8-24.

bloopbloop

Hey, Thanks for the two builds. Appreciate it.

I kind of made a mix & match of two - I want this purely for gaming so whichever GPU gets me more punch for my money I'll go with that.

So, a few questions.

GPU - is the r9 290 much better than the GTX 770?

Case - What exactly do the different cases do, like putting the extra money into the one you both linked - is it worth it?


Item|Price
Intel Core i5-4670K Tray,3,4 GHZ, 6MB Cache, LGA 1150, VGA|€190.32
Corsair CX Series Modular CX600M, 600W|€65.71
TP-LINK TL-WN881ND Netzwerkkarte/-adapter|€11.99
Samsung SSD 840 EVO Basic 250GB SATA 6Gb/s|€114.99
WD Blue 1TB 6Gb's|€49.80
LG DH18NS schwarz bare SATA II|€12.28
8GB-Kit Team Group Xtreem Series White, DDR3-2400, CL10|€70.58
ASUS Z87-K (C2)|€99.90
Iiyama ProLite X2380HS-B1|€149.02
ASUS GTX770-DC2OC-2GD5 DirectCU II OC, GeForce GTX 770, 2GB GDDR5|€285.89
Shipping|€18.99
Total|€1069.47

estilen

@bloopbloop
With cases, it's all about airflow, cable management and overall aesthetics. I actually didn't notice the case he suggested, haha, however the R4 is a great case. If you can spend a few more quid on it, I'd suggest something like Corsair Vengeance C70, but... It's a personal choice anyway, so have a look yourself. Don't forget to pick a case, you don't have one in the list you posted. :P
I don't think it's worth getting 2400Mhz memory, I was actually wrong about the memory scaling with gaming. 1600 is more than enough for gaming and any other purposes, I'd personally stick with that Crucial memory, its low timings might actually benefit you more than 2400Mhz memory.
R9 290 is surely faster than GTX 770, but how much faster? tomshardware.com wrote a nice review on the 290, as you can see, the difference isn't dramatic. Games like BF4 were optimised for AMD, that's why there's quite a bit of a gap in frames, but you're still well able to play on ultra on 1080p resolution. And also note that nVidia recently released new drivers that bring out more performance out of their cards. I don't think it's worth it to spend nearly a hundred quid for a few more frames, I'd stick with 770.
As for the motherboard, Asus Z87-K is a bit of an entry board for K series processors, it doesn't support SLI and on the G1.Sniper board (I think, don't quote me on that :P) you'd get a more stable overclock. And SLI would be a better solution for more graphical performance in the future.

Addled

estilen wrote: »

@bloopbloop
With cases, it's all about airflow, cable management and overall aesthetics. I actually didn't notice the case he suggested, haha, however the R4 is a great case. If you can spend a few more quid on it, I'd suggest something like Corsair Vengeance C70, but... It's a personal choice anyway, so have a look yourself. Don't forget to pick a case, you don't have one in the list you posted. :P
I don't think it's worth getting 2400Mhz memory, I was actually wrong about the memory scaling with gaming. 1600 is more than enough for gaming and any other purposes, I'd personally stick with that Crucial memory, its low timings might actually benefit you more than 2400Mhz memory.
R9 290 is surely faster than GTX 770, but how much faster? tomshardware.com wrote a nice review on the 290, as you can see, the difference isn't dramatic. Games like BF4 were optimised for AMD, that's why there's quite a bit of a gap in frames, but you're still well able to play on ultra on 1080p resolution. And also note that nVidia recently released new drivers that bring out more performance out of their cards. I don't think it's worth it to spend nearly a hundred quid for a few more frames, I'd stick with 770.
As for the motherboard, Asus Z87-K is a bit of an entry board for K series processors, it doesn't support SLI and on the G1.Sniper board (I think, don't quote me on that :P) you'd get a more stable overclock. And SLI would be a better solution for more graphical performance in the future.

The 770 probably a better fit for this build plus you get shadowplay into the mix as well.

I'd still opt for faster than 1600mhz ram just because the price difference is practically gone. Here's another couple of compromises between latency, clock speed and price:

8GB CL9 1866Mhz kit for €62.82 with geizhals:

http://www.hardwareversand.de/1866+Low+Voltage/50800/8GB-Kit+G.Skill+Sniper+PC3-14900U+CL9-10-9-28.article

8GB CL9 2133Mhz kit for €68,79 after geizhals
http://www.hardwareversand.de/articledetail.jsp?aid=56809&agid=1913&pvid=4ncb9kspr_htzpls00&ref=13

In all probability there will be almost no appreciable difference between any of the kits except for a few cpu intensive apps but for the same price or less may as well get the higher clocked ram.

Corsair have an article (almost certainly biased but still indicative) on performance gains with faster ram here
http://www.corsair.com/en/blog/2014/march/haswellrealworld

The sniper is definitely better than the z87-k for the better onboard audio and it would probably net you a slightly better overclock though the z87-k should have no problem getting to 4.2-4.3Ghz.

The overclock you get will be strongly influenced by the individual processor most 4670ks can hit 4.2 Ghz easily, a smaller number can manage 4.4 and a very select few can manage 4.6. I had a maximus VI gene myself and couldn't keep mine stable at 4.4 no matter what I tried. Also if you think you might want to add a second 770 then the sniper if definitely the way to go.

Pages

Perfect was just looking for a PC/monitor for around €1100 myself.


I've a question though , I notice on all these building gaming PCs threads that 99% of people go for a i5 instead of i7. Now from playing a game like Rome 2 TW I notice the better the processor power the better the game runs , but also from a future proofing this computer point of view would it not be worth it to spend the extra money to upgrade ?

estilen

@Addled
What cooling did you use with your i5/what voltage did you set for 4.4?

Not sure about the RAM, I just read an article on AnandTech about memory scaling on Haswel... It seems like clocked memory basically doesn't do anything in gaming, there's little or no difference between different frequencies. Idk, I'd probably stick with that CL9/2133Mhz kit, it seems ample.
I'd say the Corsair article is at least a little biased but on the other side they're just promoting their Dominators. :P



@Pages
Just wrote a quick rant in a post below, including a link and poof, the mod has to accept the post, ugh.

estilen

@Pages
The only difference between i5 and i7 is HyperThreading. Both have 4 cores, but i5 has 4 threads, i7 has 8 threads. There's basically no difference in gaming, you could gain like 2-3 frames. Unless you're big into editing/rendering etc, there's no point getting an i7. I'd rather spend more money on the rest of the build like a bigger SSD or a better graphics card. Funny thing is, that i5, even in core/thread hungry applications still performs really well. Not worth it for a few minutes less worth of rendering. And as I mentioned, there's no difference in gaming.

Quick example
http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html

Addled

estilen wrote: »

@Addled
What cooling did you use with your i5/what voltage did you set for 4.4?

Not sure about the RAM, I just read an article on AnandTech about memory scaling on Haswel... It seems like clocked memory basically doesn't do anything in gaming, there's little or no difference between different frequencies. Idk, I'd probably stick with that CL9/2133Mhz kit, it seems ample.
I'd say the Corsair article is at least a little biased but on the other side they're just promoting their Dominators. :P

I don't remember the exact voltage but I think I was pushing the 1.25 range before I went back to 4.2Ghz with a Phanteks ph-tc14pe. I've dropped back down to stock for now though because it's still more than enough for everything I throw at it. Really I only needed the overclock for Planetside 2 pre optimization , post optimization it runs really nicely :cool:.

I think Corsair are definitely pumping their Dominators there but the extra mhz might help out slightly when zipping/unzipping massive files or that sort of thing but yeah 2133Mhz is probably as high as it's worth going.

estilen

Oh god, you didn't get lucky in the Haswell silicone lottery. :x My friend got 4.4Ghz with just 1.22v, I really hope next-gen cpu's will be more oc-friendly.

@Pages
Might be a while before my post is accepted, basically there's no point getting an i7 for gaming. Even i5 does better than great in multi-threaded applications. Better to spend the money on improving the build.

Pages

estilen wrote: »

@Pages
Might be a while before my post is accepted, basically there's no point getting an i7 for gaming. Even i5 does better than great in multi-threaded applications. Better to spend the money on improving the build.

Thanks for the reply !

Pages

Ok went with the original build you posted estillen ,

Just added a bigger SSD. Ended up buying it through Amazon since that german site requires bank transfers ( I'd say i spent about 100 euro more but couldn't be arsed with the stress )

Right now all that's left is for me to wait for it to be delivered and then the fun of assembling it

Addled

estilen wrote: »

Oh god, you didn't get lucky in the Haswell silicone lottery. :x My friend got 4.4Ghz with just 1.22v, I really hope next-gen cpu's will be more oc-friendly.

@Pages
Might be a while before my post is accepted, basically there's no point getting an i7 for gaming. Even i5 does better than great in multi-threaded applications. Better to spend the money on improving the build.

Yeah it was pretty bad luck to be honest, I've since returned both the CPU and Motherboard for other problems so I may actually be able to overclock a little further now that I have a different set.

estilen

@Pages
If you want to build the whole lot yourself, you might want to invest in thermal compound for the cpu. Intel stock coolers have it pre-applied but it's pretty poor quality. Arctic Cooling MX-4 is a really good paste + it would be useful if you decide to overclock and get an aftermarket cooler.

I actually do all my computer parts shopping on Amazon, lol. Route cables nicely and post a picture once it's finished. :P

@Addled
What motherboard do you have now?

Addled

estilen wrote: »

@Pages
If you want to build the whole lot yourself, you might want to invest in thermal compound for the cpu. Intel stock coolers have it pre-applied but it's pretty poor quality. Arctic Cooling MX-4 is a really good paste + it would be useful if you decide to overclock and get an aftermarket cooler.

I actually do all my computer parts shopping on Amazon, lol. Route cables nicely and post a picture once it's finished. :P

@Addled
What motherboard do you have now?

It's a gigabyte z87x-UD4h, maybe not quite the same calibre as the ROG but at least it's full size ATX, I mainly got it for a free coolermaster seidon which I'm using at the minute, I might go back to the phanteks for the performance but it's much more unwieldy.