Build Request - First time builder

[Coburn1990]

Hi all,

First off, thanks for taking the time to read my thread. I’ve always played wow on a sub-par machine, and these days via a laptop connected to a coolermaster stand with peripherals.

I thought it’s about time I built myself my own machine. I am a first time builder though so I’m looking for some advice. I’ve done various amounts of research myself however I’m finding it hard to really look at the specs of individual hardware pieces and come up with a solution that’ll fit my needs.

• Budget (In Stirling) – I would like to keep it below £800 and ideally in the £500-£700 range. If I need to spend more then please don’t be afraid to say so, it’ll just mean one or two more pay cheques
• Resolution – 1920 x 1080. I am currently using a ASUS VS248HR and once I have the build settled in, I will likely buy another to use as an extended display.
• Games / Settings Desired – World of Warcraft Legion & Overwatch as high as they’ll go. I can almost categorically say I won’t ever be playing games such as Witcher3, Battlefield etc so I will not need to accommodate for that.
• Any other intensive software or special things you do (Frequent video encoding, 3D modeling, etc) – Possibly some in game capturing with potential rendering. It would be useful to know if there is a considerable upgrade in hardware needed in order to Capture/render in game footage. It’s not something I actively do at the moment but I might like to although if it meant I had to break my budget in order to do so, then I would probably go without.
• Country - UK
• Parts that can be reused – None
• Do you need an OS? – Yes, Win10 Home edition
• Do you need peripherals (e.g. monitor, mouse, keyboard, speakers, etc)? Nope, already have the monitor, mouse, keyboard & headset. I’ll probably grab some speakers eventually but by no means a priority for now.

Thanks in advance!

[Thunderball]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£174.90 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Asus H110M-A Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£59.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory (£67.23 @ Ebuyer)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£78.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£57.54 @ CCL Computers)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB SC GAMING Video Card (£237.99 @ Ebuyer)
Case: Corsair Carbide SPEC-M2 MicroATX Mid Tower Case (£49.99 @ Novatech)
Power Supply: EVGA 600B 600W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (£57.21 @ CCL Computers)
Other: Windows 10 - Kinguin.net (£24.99)
Total: £808.83
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-09-06 13:19 BST+0100

[Coburn1990]

Thanks for the previous response @Thunderball

Do you have any suggestions for a WLAN card?

Thanks

[Deleted]

Its been a long time since your first post and things have changed . You would need a revised build. As for your question, since you are going to use a dedicated graphics card you need to see what display port that has not the motherboard. Next month we get the new Ryzen cpu chips from amd which are very promising and will have similar to intel performance but will be much cheaper. So if not in a hurry i'd wait.

A current gen i5 build that has pretty much everything needed, included the wifi card you want:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-7500 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor (£188.99 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: ASRock B250 Pro4 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£85.37 @ BT Shop)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory (£57.60 @ Kustom PCs)
Storage: Crucial MX300 275GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£84.06 @ Novatech)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£42.95 @ Amazon UK)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB 6GB GT OCV1 Video Card (£209.98 @ Novatech)
Case: Phanteks ECLIPSE P400 ATX Mid Tower Case (£55.56 @ Aria PC)
Power Supply: SeaSonic 520W 80+ Bronze Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£70.80 @ Alza)
Wireless Network Adapter: Gigabyte GC-WB867D-I PCI-Express x1 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi Adapter (£25.98 @ Amazon UK)
Other: win10 - kinguin (£25.00)
Total: £846.29
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-02-16 09:23 GMT+0000

About the ports it will depend what connections the monitors got available compared to the gpu. If you want say more dvi-d ports you will need to get a more expensive gtx1060. An RX480 gpu from amd has in general close performance to gtx1060 and you could save up to 30pounds or so, performance will depend from game to game. But for the games (blizzard) you specifically mentioned a gtx1060 will be better.

Another way to save some money would be to drop the i5 to an i3 or drop the ssd. But honestly if you are going to go for that, or wait more for the extra cost in a build like the above, wait to see what Ryzen brings to the table.

[Coburn1990]

Thanks for taking the time to revise the build @Kostattoo. I thought I was in a position to purchase back in sept but alas car issues and xmas expenditures rolled up.

I'm much more ready to purchase now and I'm quite eager to do so so I will probably opt to not wait for the Ryzen releases.

Also my budget is more comfortable now so the prior requirement for a £800 max build isn't so strict now. I'm happy to spend the money on the i5 and SSD.

Are you able to provide any insight on the decision to half the ram?

Thanks in advance

[Deleted]

Are you able to provide any insight on the decision to half the ram?

There isn't really much about it. You don't need 16gb for gaming, you will find yourself most of the times in the 4-6gb area depending on the game and what else you got running at the same time. Usually nowdays on new "gaming" builds ppl go for 16gb so they don't have to worry about it. At the same time was trying to keep the cost down as close to £800 as possible and you can always add another 8gb stick (same) in the future if you need it. Basically comes down to budget and what you can fit on it against any sacrificies that have to be done. Ie getting 16gb of ram can go over of what you can afford and you would have to cut down the ssd or something else.

Also about the win10 for cheap from kinguin i would advise to pay an extra quid or so for buyers protection. So if something goes bad and say key is already used and whatnot you can get a refund or new one. Kinguin is basically the middle man on this afaik, not the one really selling the keys.

[Coburn1990]

Thanks for clarifying

I've gone ahead today and ordered this build with the small adjustment of a slightly larger HDD, I'm looking forward to building it!

I intend to use the video in the sitckied thread as guidance during the build, is this video still relevant? If not is there anything you can recommend?

Thanks

[Lathais]

Thanks for taking the time to revise the build @Kostattoo. I thought I was in a position to purchase back in sept but alas car issues and xmas expenditures rolled up.

I'm much more ready to purchase now and I'm quite eager to do so so I will probably opt to not wait for the Ryzen releases.

Also my budget is more comfortable now so the prior requirement for a £800 max build isn't so strict now. I'm happy to spend the money on the i5 and SSD.

Are you able to provide any insight on the decision to half the ram?

Thanks in advance

Here's some further clarification on the RAM:
http://www.techspot.com/article/1043...ram/page3.html

As you can see, there is little to no difference even between 4gb and 8GB of RAM when it comes to gaming performance, and that's with 65 Chrome tabs open. There are alot of people around here and out there that will tell you 16GB is becoming mandatory, the facts to support that claim simply do not exist though. Facts say that 4GB is still enough really. No reason to get just 4GB though, as you're only talking $10-20 more to get 8GB. 16GB is pretty much double the cost of 8GB though. Doesn't make much sense to spend double for no gain.

[Coburn1990]

Just thought I'd update this thread to let those who helped (And those looking for help) know that the build was a success!

It took me roughly 6 hours to build (Including de-assembling and re-assembling it all after no power the first time I hit the power button, turns out I had the power buttons on the wrong pins on the mobo...)

For anyone wondering whether they should go for their own build I can only recommend you take the plunge and do it! it was very rewarding and I am wholly satisfied with the results

[Deleted]

Just thought I'd update this thread to let those who helped (And those looking for help) know that the build was a success!

It took me roughly 6 hours to build (Including de-assembling and re-assembling it all after no power the first time I hit the power button, turns out I had the power buttons on the wrong pins on the mobo...)

For anyone wondering whether they should go for their own build I can only recommend you take the plunge and do it! it was very rewarding and I am wholly satisfied with the results

Hey there! I am looking at building basically the exact same PC/specs...

Can you give me any insight into how it performs at all?

Thanks!

[Coburn1990]

Hey there! I am looking at building basically the exact same PC/specs...

Can you give me any insight into how it performs at all?

Thanks!

From what I've gathered so far,

Overwatch looks wonderful, couldn't ask for more.

Wow is running at max settings (Bar view distance which is at 8 instead of 10). Depending on where you are, FPS is anywhere from 30 (out door content, lots of textures/view distance) up to 90 (class order hall, arena, not much going on).

I am able to record in game footage (Using shadow play) and stream 720 @ 30 fps (Using OBS) with no issues. I ran in to issues when trying to stream 1080 @ 30 with the CPU maxing out but that was to be expected, my spec didn't account for HD streaming so I'm ok with 720 streaming.

Typically with all that running I run with about 1gb of RAM to spare, so as advised 8gb of ram is enough.

Any more questions let me know!

[Deleted]

Cool! Thanks for the heads up. Really excited to get mine built and get back into WoW.

[Deleted]

Typically with all that running I run with about 1gb of RAM to spare, so as advised 8gb of ram is enough.

I am glad to see things worked out well for you. Don't forget, as i had mentioned, you can just another stick of same ram down the road. About wow settings if you turn shadows a little down from max it will help you a lot and you won't really notice a difference visually. Another thing, if your monitor runs @ 60Mhz, there is no reason to have wow fps uncapped. Cap it to 60fps and will make the rig run quieter when it doesn't have to avoiding the big up and down spikes.

[Coburn1990]

I am glad to see things worked out well for you. Don't forget, as i had mentioned, you can just another stick of same ram down the road. About wow settings if you turn shadows a little down from max it will help you a lot and you won't really notice a difference visually. Another thing, if your monitor runs @ 60Mhz, there is no reason to have wow fps uncapped. Cap it to 60fps and will make the rig run quieter when it doesn't have to avoiding the big up and down spikes.

Thanks for the tip!