Gaming and Dev machine (€~1000)

RedXIV

Hey guys,
I'm finally past the wedding and I'm just getting some last minute bills paid for this month and then I can splurge on my machine.

1. What is your budget? [€1000]

2. What will be the main purpose of the computer? Gaming and Dev work. Gaming should hopefully support VR and dev work should support open source game engines

3. Do you need a copy of Windows? Yep, windows 10 please!

4. Can you use any parts from an old computer? No, last machine was over 10 years old now.

5. Do you need a monitor? Yep, ideally I'd like to support 2. Can buy one later but definitely need one now

5a. If yes, what size do you need. 24' at minimum

5b. If no, what resolution is your current monitor and do you plan to upgrade in the near future? [1920x1080/1440x900/etc.] [N/A]

6. Do you need any of these peripherals? [Keyboard/Mouse/Wireless Card/Card Reader/Speakers/etc.] Pretty much. But I'm ok starting with just a keyboard and mouse for now, I can pick up the bits as I go along.

7. Are you willing to try overclocking? [No]

8. How can you pay? Debit card

9. When are you purchasing? I've a month to play with for a few bits, (under €200) I'll be buying machine proper in a month's time.

10. If you need help building it, where are you based? South Dublin and would definitely appreciate help

RedXIV

So I took a stab at this. Well aware that I went over budget, as well as avoided picking up accessories but I can survive with some older stuff for the moment and splurge over the following months.

I'm no expert so I'm hoping someone in the know can tell me if the below can:

• output to multiple screens
• run VR hardware
• Run most games (I can live without Crysis on Ultra)

Cheers!

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (€235.42 @ Mindfactory)
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M5 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€167.03 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (€85.89 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€92.93 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€97.84 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Hitachi 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€80.59 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€67.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB FTW Gaming ACX 3.0 Video Card (€463.55 @ Mindfactory)
Case: Corsair SPEC-02 ATX Mid Tower Case (€64.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: EVGA 850W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit
Total: €1355.82
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-27 02:11 CEST+0200

Squidgy Black

If you're not looking to overclock then you're wasting money on the processor and motherboard, you can get a non-k series cpu and a H170 board.

You could get the exact same processor and motherboard, just not the overclock versions on mindfactory for 330 as opposed to 400

Serephucus

Some things that jump out:

Unless you need something specific on that MSI board, most Z170 boards are pretty similar, so you can get whatever's cheap. The only thing that really sets them apart are obvious things: Number of PCIE slots, dual LAN, built-in WiFi, better audio, stuff like that. Generally speaking, they're all roughly the same quality.

You have two sets of RAM in there. :P
Speed seems to matter... a little bit, with DDR4, but not massively, so again, just get what's cheap.

Did you want a 1TB drive as well as a 2TB?
I personally like WD's Red drives, as they come with a 3-year warranty, and are supposedly pretty reliable, though any evidence I have of this would be purely anecdotal.

I'd have a look at Palit's 1070. ComputerBase did a great article comparing all the AIB 1080s, and the TL;DR is Palit's GameRock card was the best bang/buck. One of the quietest, and one of the fastest, while being cheaper than the others.

850W for the PSU is maaaassive overkill, even if you're going to add a second GPU down the line. 550W will power two 1070s, a CPU, and leave plenty of room for overclocking.

Pretty good choices otherwise though. Hopefully some of this helps bring you back under budget.

RedXIV

Thanks for the inputs guys

I tried to take everything you said into account, dropped from the k series CPU and got a cheaper H170 board.

Definitely removed the second set of RAM, that was a mistake on my part I left the single 16GB stick rather than the 2x8GB sticks as in my head that should make a tiny difference, feel free to correct me on this if I'm wrong!

Regarding the storage, I've spent most of my life getting used to computers with a single drive so this is the first time I've considered getting additional drives for storing photos etc (seriously, we've thousands of photos). I may revisit that still but from my understanding, the least compatibility issues should arise from this area?

The graphics card has removed all the savings above though I went and found the card from your article and slapped it in the build and I'm now at 1,500 quid

Thanks for taking the time to look, I really appreciate it!

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (€203.79 @ Mindfactory)
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty H170 Performance ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€115.42 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (1 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (€92.93 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€97.84 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Hitachi 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€80.59 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€67.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Palit GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GameRock Premium Video Card (€809.94 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Case: Corsair SPEC-02 ATX Mid Tower Case (€64.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit
Total: €1533.08
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-27 12:04 CEST+0200

Serephucus

I meant you could go with the 1070! They use the same GPU core and cooler, the article was only for reference! Also, I'm 99% sure the GameRock Premium is just the GameRock with slightly higher default clocks, which means next to nothing with GPU Boost 3.0, so you might as well save yourself a bit of money there.
(The 1070 is better bang/buck, by quite a bit, but by all means get the 1080 and game happy.)

You're actually better off with the 2x8GB sticks. This lets you run in dual channel mode which doubles your memory bandwidth. Usually gets you a small performance bump.

Yeah, storage is fine. I hope you have that stuff backed up though. If not, I'd drop to a 1070, and use the cash for a 4TB drive that you could back the other three up to.

RedXIV

Ohhhhhhhhh! That makes way more sense now that you said it! While it'd be nice to get top of the range cards, I was already pushing my luck to get it up to 1300 before any accessories So I'm going to take your suggestion and drop to the 1070 instead. The 4TB drive idea is very good though as I do want to make sure I've a back up. Switched the RAM again also, thanks for the tip on that!

So that leaves us with:


PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (€203.79 @ Mindfactory)
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: ASRock Fatal1ty H170 Performance ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€115.42 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (€85.89 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€97.84 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Hitachi 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€80.59 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€67.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Western Digital Red Pro 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€270.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Palit GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GameRock Premium Video Card
Case: Corsair SPEC-02 ATX Mid Tower Case (€64.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
Optical Drive: Asus BW-12B1ST/BLK/G/AS Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Pro OEM 64-bit
Total: €986.77
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-27 12:32 CEST+0200

Which is presumably not the full price as there is nothing there for the video card or cooler in terms of price?

Serephucus

Looks good! I see you went for the Red Pro. 5-year warranty on those vs. 3. Nice.

Did you mean to add the blu-ray drive?

The only other thing is the CPU/motherboard combo. You've picked a very high-end H170 board, and for the price, you'd probably be better served with a lower-end Z170 board, get the overclockable CPU, and have the option down the line. Unless there's some other reason you picked the Fatality that I'm missing.

RedXIV

Serephucus wrote: »

Looks good! I see you went for the Red Pro. 5-year warranty on those vs. 3. Nice.

Did you mean to add the blu-ray drive?

The only other thing is the CPU/motherboard combo. You've picked a very high-end H170 board, and for the price, you'd probably be better served with a lower-end Z170 board, get the overclockable CPU, and have the option down the line. Unless there's some other reason you picked the Fatality that I'm missing.

Honestly had no idea with the warrenty, I saw "Red" and went for it

The blu-ray drive was added in hindsight to watch blu-rays on the TV (I've a steam link ordered and thought it made sense). I wouldn't be burning Blu-rays, just DVDs, and that's usually for just photos or burning software. So if there is a better option, I'm all ears?

The CPU and Motherboard is an area that I know I'm pretty ignorant on. I know at a basic level the CPU number of Hz is "bigger is better" and the motherboard needs to have all the ports I need for the build but I don't know much beyond that. Hence me coming here

Serephucus

RE Blu-ray: Not sure. Maybe look for a blu-ray reader (vs. a blu-ray writer, which is what I think that one is), maybe that's cheaper.

Right, CPUs and the like.

This article compares the different chipsets that support the current generation of CPUs. Basically, the only real difference between Z170 and H170 is overclocking. You have a couple more PCIE lanes, which might be useful if you were running two GPUs and something else - sound card, etc. - but outside of that it shouldn't really matter.

Overclocking then, lets you run the CPU faster than it ships out of the box. So instead of having a 3.5GHz quad core, you might have a 4.0GHz chip, or 4.2 or whatever. The long and short of it is you could get... probably about a 15% performance bump fairly easily. If this sounds worth the extra cost to you for the stuff you'll be doing with it, then go for it, if not, stick with H170.

As for the motherboard: I really like Newegg for browsing stuff like this. They don't ship here, but they're fantastic for searching for stuff. Go to the motherboard section, select H170 boards, and tick off any of the things you want on it, then arrange by price, and pick the first one that looks nice. That's generally the cheapest way to get everything you want from one. This link should show you all ATX form factor H170 motherboards, so you can just tick things off you want from there. Maybe a HDMI port, for example? Or, I dunno, built in cheese grater.

RedXIV

Thanks a million for that!

The only reason I haven't said I'd look at overclocking is the last time I even googled it, it seemed to be a 1 in 4 chance you'd destroy your machine when trying to do it and as i'm not an expert I thought I'd be in that category

I've been waiting for my new machine before I jump back into proper game dev again and to be honest, the extra bump would be useful but I'd be nervous I'd fry something.

Thanks for the info and the tip on newegg! I'll go and play with that now for a bit!

K.O.Kiki

I fixed up your prices for you OP

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (€203.79 @ Mindfactory)
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler (€40.00)
Motherboard: ASRock Z170 Pro4S ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (€108.58 @ Mindfactory)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3000 Memory (€79.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€97.84 @ Mindfactory)
Storage: Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€67.90 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Video Card: Palit GeForce GTX 1070 8GB GameRock Video Card (€464.04)
Case: Corsair SPEC-02 ATX Mid Tower Case (€64.67 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA G2 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (€83.28)
Optical Drive: LG BH16NS55.AUAR10B Blu-Ray/DVD/CD Writer (€68.14 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit (€101.53 @ Mindfactory)
Total: €1378.77
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-27 15:31 CEST+0200

• DDR4 will only run at 2133MHz on H170 motherboards; only Z170 can run at higher speeds.
• Removed the extra 1Tb and overpriced WD Red drives
• Changed Win10 Pro to Win10 Home
• Filled missing prices using Geizhals

RedXIV

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

I fixed up your prices for you OP

• DDR4 will only run at 2133MHz on H170 motherboards; only Z170 can run at higher speeds.
• Removed the extra 1Tb and overpriced WD Red drives
• Changed Win10 Pro to Win10 Home
• Filled missing prices using Geizhals

Thanks a million!!!

I'm glad I'm having people review, I'd never have copped the DDR4 speed thing

I presume with the build I have, it's going to be quite easy to add more drives in the future anyway so I'm flexible with that to start.

Good catch on Win10 also

I think I'm getting there!

Serephucus

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

I fixed up your prices for you OP

• DDR4 will only run at 2133MHz on H170 motherboards; only Z170 can run at higher speeds.
• Removed the extra 1Tb and overpriced WD Red drives
• Changed Win10 Pro to Win10 Home
• Filled missing prices using Geizhals

1 - Wasn't aware of this, nice. It's worth noting, Red, that the RAM you specced will work fine, it'll just clock itself to 2133MHz when you boot. If you can find a cheaper 2133MHz set though go for it.

2 - That "overpriced" drive was in there for backup purposes. As someone who's gone through a lot of hard drives, I'm not even going to debate this. A backup of some sort is a requirement as far as I'm concerned.

3 - Probably a good idea. The only real things Pro gets you over Home are Hyper-V (for virtual machines, though you can use any software you like - it doesn't have to be Hyper-V), and proper remote desktop support (You can't have someone remote into your machine, but you can remote out to someone else's.

RedXIV

hmmmmmmm I didn't realise win 10 home would remove Hyper-V, I use VirtualBox a lot, i may need to up the ante and just pop for win10 pro.

K.O.Kiki

Serephucus wrote: »

2 - That "overpriced" drive was in there for backup purposes. As someone who's gone through a lot of hard drives, I'm not even going to debate this. A backup of some sort is a requirement as far as I'm concerned.

For backups, it's better to have 1-2 backups which are not inside the PC; e.g. an external drive + a cloud-storage backup.

Serephucus

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

For backups, it's better to have 1-2 backups which are not inside the PC; e.g. an external drive + a cloud-storage backup.

It depends what you're protecting against. An external drive is better if someone kicks over the machine or if that room catches fire (assuming the ex. drive is stored somewhere else, which in most cases it isn't), but the added step of needing to physically connect the drive means it'll get backed up much less often.

Cloud services are fine, but I prefer local storage myself. To each their own.

RedXIV wrote: »

hmmmmmmm I didn't realise win 10 home would remove Hyper-V, I use VirtualBox a lot, i may need to up the ante and just pop for win10 pro.

You can absolutely use VirtualBox with Win10 Home. Hyper-V is just MS's included virtualisation software. Apologies, should have made that clearer.

RedXIV

Serephucus wrote: »

You can absolutely use VirtualBox with Win10 Home. Hyper-V is just MS's included virtualisation software. Apologies, should have made that clearer.

Ah! Ok, thanks for clearing that up!

tadcan

Valid Windows 10 can also be bought on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoftsoftwareswap/ for less.

K.O.Kiki

tadcan wrote: »

Valid Windows 10 can also be bought on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoftsoftwareswap/ for less.

None of those are valid actually.

Serephucus

Yeah I've had hit-and-miss experiences with those. As PITA as it is, you're probably best shelling out for a regular copy. The MSDN ones tend to get deactivated after a few months.