Gaming Rig Theorycrafting

[Chuchurocket]

Well folks, with an actual job lined up i can finally put into action Operation Gaming PC to replace the slightly sad remnants of my laptop (Shes seen better days)

The two options i have are Build or Buy, I'm slightly hesitant over building due to my lack of knowledge on the components part and if it goes wrong im up poop creek with only my hands to steer Whereas buying a premade one is guaranteed to work and some safety net but comes at a price. So suggestions on both would be great

Budget: 600-700 (Base Unit only) i can stretch further if its something special.

Requirements: Gaming, video editing (not a massive priority)

With regards to AMD/Intel and ATI/nVidia, im open to both as my knowledge of their stuff is pretty piss poor


Any help would be majorly appreciated and rewarded with a batch of my homemade virtual home baked cookies!

Inital rigs recommended by bloke are this and this

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

Nvidia has a better graphics control panel than ATI, imo. Had i known before i purchased the cheaper equivalent card, i certainly would not have done. Additionally, i am unable to upgarde my gfx driver, and i am not alone.

 

[Chuchurocket]

Yeah i have an ATI on my laptop that has been quite a bit of trouble in the past but i would have though their pc ones would fare a bit better. Looks like nvidia might be a preferable choice.

 

[Wol]

How many monitors are you planning on buying / do you have?

My own personal preference so far is nVidia for graphics, but I've heard good things about ATIs support for 3 monitors in one.

I'd heartily recommend building your own though. My completely non geeky female friend built her own PC with no problems, so it proves its not too hard. Theres enough people on here who can recommend spec stuff, then you buy it, it turns up in boxes, and you pretty much just have to plug stuff in where it fits or read the manual!

If you just buy a premade one, you'll never learn ;-) So you may as well learn at some point!

 

[waterproofbob]

Although the control panel provided by nvidia is slightly more user friendly I'm still loving what ATI is offering at the moment. It's not quite at the point as it was a year ago when I'd have said defo go ATI but I'm still preferring the ATI cards.

I've had both over the years and had issues with both so that is me being as unbiased as I can be. I guarantee you take any one product and search for issues and you will find some. Remember people very rarely go on to support forums to let everyone know their stuff is all working fine as that is just spiteful .

Also killer what card do you have? My feeling on graphics drivers is I tend not to update them unless I hit an issue with a game or something suggests I do. Early releases of drivers often break things so if it works leave it alone. I learnt that the hard way with both my 7900GTX and the 3870X2.

If you are in the slightest bit worried about building it yourself unless you are brave and don't mind having to fix stuff down the road I would say don't. Get a pre-built unit, I love putting stuff together however even I these days am considering pre-built just so I have a warranty and someone I can go cap in hand to when it doesn't work .

 

[Chuchurocket]

I suppose now is as good as time to learn as any Eyefinity would be nice but i doubt ill be multi-monitoring in the near future. Though a lot of the cards ive seen have 2 DVI ports and a mini-HDMI port, but i guess that doesnt mean itll support 3.

If i get up shit-creek i suppose i could design a webcam helmet and livestream my futile attempts at building it

 

[Kasatka]

I personally prefer the AMD/nVidia combination myself. Hex core CPU and a mid range GPU has seen me through fine, but i love my 16gb of RAM most.

 

[Chuchurocket]

One thing i forgot to mention is it needs to have a wireless internet card. Or even an external device that could do that

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

ati 5850 i think, tbh i dont remember, i have had no other problems with it, and at the time the equal offer nvidia card was 60% more

 

[Ronin Storm]

Also weighing in on the "not ATI" camp. I have no issues with nVidia cards in terms of drivers and game compatibility but the one ATI card I ever had (I forget the model) had all sorts of issues.

I'll second Wol's suggestion to build it yourself. It's much more like dealing with expensive lego, thesedays; that is to say, hard to get wrong. Especially if you choose a no nonsense motherboard (Asus is often a good choice).

We can all advise on construction and parts. Just post your thoughts here and we'll all be chiming in.

 

[waterproofbob]

Yes it is big adult lego, it is also expensive lego. There are things you can break in the putting together of said lego.

I'll have a look at some builds for you tomorrow so you can compare them with premade systems and make your decision from there. Unless you are saving big money on DIY then it makes much more sense to get a premade system.

You can make your own mind up on that one though

 

[Chuchurocket]

My Shot at it:

Case - Coolermaster, Antec or Xigmatech]
Motherboard - Asus Bit of random guess tbh
CPU - AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
CPU Cooler - Coolermaster Hyper 212
Memory - Kingston
GFX Card - ATI 6850 i may be wrong but is the motherboard specific for ATI?
HDD - western Digital Caviar Green
Optical Drive - Some Sony One
PSU - OCZ Fata1ity leet speak...it must be good


Know next to nothing about the parts so i used the Top Trumps method of picking them Any thoughts?

EDIT: Looking at the one i made against the iConquer one from novatech doesnt seem to be much difference :/

 

[Chuchurocket]

Yeah bob you do make a good point, if theres not a big enough gap between a pre-built and home build id probably go with the pre-built and then upgrade parts in it from time to time so i can eventually build one from scratch. Would be fun to build my own but knowing me ill probably do something stupid like have the motherboard directly touching the case

 

[Traxata]

Yeah bob you do make a good point, if theres not a big enough gap between a pre-built and home build id probably go with the pre-built and then upgrade parts in it from time to time so i can eventually build one from scratch. Would be fun to build my own but knowing me ill probably do something stupid like have the motherboard directly touching the case

Meh, they kind of do that already, as you have the screw them onto some chassis directly

Your problems are when you short out your motherboard and out comes the magic smoke...

 

[Chuchurocket]

I do love the smell of electrical smoke

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

Some component companies which prebuild, devide up the charge very clearly into items and labour. The labour normally includes OS installation.

 

[Haven]

Motherboard > Graphics > CPU > Hard Drives > Memory > PSU

Obviousy a gross simplification but a generic guide in order of priority as to component importance. The odd one for most folks is choosing a good motherboard - it dictates how well everythign else will play together so is top of the pile. Assuming you don't get an ultra budget CPU graphics would be the next in line.

Re Branding:
Intel vs AMD - comes down primarily to cost (AMD cheapaer than Intel) but also pure single core speed (Intel) vs multi-threading performance (AMD). Generally AMD make great server chips and Intel make great gaming chips as games are mostly limited by single thread performance. But if money is on your mind you get more bang per buck from AMD. AMD are waiting on their next product revision to hit in a couple of months time so Intel 2500/2600 products currently have a lead for gamers.

NVIDIA vs AMD - Too complicated to call unfortunately too many variances between different products to have an overrall opinion. Consider Driver support (NVIDIA tends to have better) vs Color processing and number of heads (ATI/AMD win this one) vs memory for texture processing and GPU units (depends entirely on the product). You get a lot more bang for your buck by buying a second gen product rather than the latest and greatest - I'd advise you to get the best thing available 6-12 months ago

Hope that helps - choose a really good motherboard - the rest can be easily replaced/upgrade/added to at some later date.

Be prepared for surprises on the costs of good cases, heatsinks and cabling if you build your own - quality does not come cheap and CPU coolers easily hit £60 on their own (10% of your budget).

The disadvantage to building your own is you'll end up spending 25-50% more for a rig than buying a pre-built. The advantage is that you'll end up with the best components and reliability. Pre-built tend to focus on a couple of key areas and the rest is done on a budged i.e. scrimping on quality (particularly the motherboard/drive controlers/case). Personally I'd always build my own for the satisfaction of knowing its as good as it can be. But its sometimes nice to have someone else already have done all the hard work for you so we won't judge you too much if you don't

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500-600 budget:

CPU: i5-2500 (sandy bridge) only purchase motherboards released after 1st March as there was an issue with an earlier revision and SSD controllers.

Motherboard - SATA3, USB3 and a well known brand i.e. MSI/Gigabyte/Asus/AsRock and bear in mind the sandy bridge SATA issue so get a newly released board/revision.

RAM - get quality over quantity as you can always get more later. 2GB minimum DIMM's i.e. 2 x 2GB. Go for Crucial/Corsair/Kingston sticks - don't get no-brand or budget RAM! Go for tight memory timings over higher frequency unless you plan on overclocking your system.

Graphics: Make sure it has 1GB of RAM minimum and get the best you can afford.

Its easy to spend 150 on a case, 50 on a heatsink, 25 on cables and 100 on a PSU (325) so budget carefully on what you actually need. BUT - if you buy quality now then you'll have quality to re-use in your future systems!

 

[Wol]

Meh, they kind of do that already, as you have the screw them onto some chassis directly

Actually that was the only mistake my friend made when putting her system together. Although it should say in the motherboard manual that you needed to put the mounting posts into the case first.

@Haven: Re: the point you made about single core/ multithreading performance. How many games these days use multicore processing? I know theres flags in the source engine now which is "enable multicore rendering" but have no idea how much of it ends up in multiple cores that way. Anyone know anything more on that sort of side of things?

 

[thatbloke]

most modern games are now making use of multiple (read: 2) cores (though some use more). In fact the requirements for many newer games now state that a dual core processor is a minimum requirement.

I know many of the games I play (RIFT, BC2, Civ V) all use whatever they can get at

 

[Ki!ler-Mk1]

I bought an i7 when the tech was new (1 month), but i wouldnt mind having an i5 now, if they had been avaliable when i made that decision.