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Building a Desktop

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Carol Haynes:
Do those led fans flicker?
-tomos (March 07, 2013, 06:20 AM)
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If you mean my red LEDs no - they are steady (apart from HD activity LED)

40hz:
If I hadn't just gone through this (and wasn't also a heavy duty gamer), then I'd probably agree with you.  But having done it, I can say that as he already has a pretty good MB and CPU, the biggest bang for his buck is going to be taking that $100 step.
-wraith808 (March 06, 2013, 09:25 PM)
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 ;D Agree. It's always more cost effective to bump your GPU budget from $200 to $350 than it is to buy a $200 card only to scrap it a year later and then drop an additional $350 on the card you wished you originally bought.

So yes...after getting the best CPU you can justify, and after matching it to an appropriate mobo...and after installing 8Gb of RAM...I'd definitely put the money into a better GPU if I were a gamer.

Additional RAM over 8Gb could easily be added later should it ever be needed. (And for normal gaming use, it definitely wouldn't.)
 :)
 

f0dder:
Are you going for 1x8gig stick? I'd personally go for 2x4 instead - cheaper to replace if one goes bust (not to mention if one goes bust, you can run your system at 4gig while you're waiting for a new stick). ((Ok, so I personally went for 4x4, but if the choice was 1x8 or 2x4... :)).

I also wouldn't go for the wireless - but that's mostly because I've never had great success with it, wired plain old works and is cheap, and if the new übercharged wireless matures, it's going to be cheaper then. Often not a very good idea to be a tech first mover.

Dunno about GPU - haven't researched the market for a while, but I've been burned enough by bad AMD/ATi drivers (and noisy fans) that it'd take some convincing. And they still don't support PhysX, do they?

Why are you going for the *K CPU? OK, on the i5 you get HD4000 graphics instead of HD2000 (whereas on i7 you get HD4000 on both), but are you going to utilize that? You miss out on VT-d and trusted execution on the *K model, those might be more interesting in the long run.

As for power, you don't really need all that much. Unfortunately I lost the power readings I did on my current right (Corsair TX550M PSU, ASUS P8Z77-V PRO, i7-3770, 4x4gig Corsair DDR3-1600, Intel 520 SSD, WD 2.5" 300gig 10k-rpm velociraptor, Gigabyte 1gig GTX460), but I think it's somewhere along the lines of 50-70W idle? And I weren't able to push it to 300W even while maxing out both the GPU and the CPU. Go for something with decent cable management, low noise, and stable voltages (Be Quiet! and Corsair has some decent models - but do a lot of studying, stable CPU voltages is going keep your motherboard happy). Oh, and decent PSUs also mean less power drain, under load as well as idle (and the so-called "power-off", which really isn't unless you flip the switch on the PSU or the wall socket).

EDIT: I mostly went with that particular motherboard (over a cheaper micro-atx one) because it has onboard Intel NIC - having had bad experiences with other brands in the past. It also has onboard wifi, which was helpful when assembling the system. Wasn't really necessary, though - the i5 system on my new server has realteak or whatever, and I easily saturate the gigabit connection between them. And micro-atx boards might use a bit less power than full-sized ones? (A bit hard to make direct comparisons because the boards tend to have relatively different feature sets :)).

Carol Haynes:
Dunno about GPU - haven't researched the market for a while, but I've been burned enough by bad AMD/ATi drivers (and noisy fans) that it'd take some convincing. And they still don't support PhysX, do they?
-f0dder (March 07, 2013, 11:46 AM)
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Not had many problems with ATI/AMD drivers (far fewer than I had with nVidia on my last system). There were a few dodgy Catalyst releases early in version 12 but verion 13 seems rock steady to me.

Not really surprising that they don't support PhysX since it belongs to nVidia. Can't say I have found a game that seems to suffer from not having it and strangely I have it installed (seems to be a requirement for some games weven though they don't use it!!!).

f0dder:
There were a few dodgy Catalyst releases early in version 12 but verion 13 seems rock steady to me.-Carol Haynes (March 07, 2013, 12:04 PM)
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I've had really nasty BSODs that resulted in pretty nasty data corruption - granted, that's quiiiite a few years ago, but that kind of thing leaves an impact. It's also not too long ago that you couldn't do system-wide DEP because the AMD/ATi drivers were crap (that'd give you wonderful BSODs too). While the situation might be OK now, it just doesn't give me a lot of confidence in their software engineers.

Can't say I have found a game that seems to suffer from not having it and strangely I have it installed (seems to be a requirement for some games weven though they don't use it!!!).-Carol Haynes (March 07, 2013, 12:04 PM)
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I prefer having it and not using it (goes for CUDA too), compared to not having it and not being able to run something that wants it :-)

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