Critique my potential new computer

[Deleted]

Hey guys, im looking for a new PC and ive been trying to put something together from my budget of around £700. With a lot of advice from Chauds monthly set up im looking at this:


Case
COOLERMASTER CM STORM ENFORCER

Processor (CPU)
AMD FX-6350 Six Core CPU (4.2/3.9GHZ - 8MB CACHE/AM3+)

Motherboard
ASUS® M5A99X EVO R2.0 (DDR3, USB3.0, 6Gb/s,CrossFireX/SLI, Windows 8)

Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2 x 4GB KIT)

Graphics Card
2GB AMD RADEON™ HD7870 - DVI,HDMI,2 mDP - DX® 11, Eyefinity 4 Capable

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
120GB KINGSTON V300 SSD, SATA 6 Gb (450MB/R, 450MB/W)

2nd Hard Disk
500GB WD CAVIAR BLACK WD5003AZEX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE (7200rpm)

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT

Power Supply
CORSAIR 550W VS SERIES™ VS-550 POWER SUPPLY

Processor Cooling
Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe AMD CPU Cooler (£19)

Fan Controller
NZXT Sentry 2 Fan Controller with upto 5 Fitted Case Fans

Any changes you would make? Mainly to get it any cheaper but i dont want to skimp either. Still not sure if ill build it myself or get it pre assembled. People always say cheaper to build yourself but the price i was quoted for the above set up was pretty good and im still trying to see if i could get it cheaper by buying all the parts individually.

Thanks

[Zeddicious]

for the price, that machine will do you well.

only maybe spend a little bit more for
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...FYwWMgodayAAvg

[Fluorescent0]

Rather not get any of the parts you listed on the pricerange you're looking at. You can get something much better building it yourself. I suggest you to fill the sticky in the computer build/upgrade help forum and follow the suggestions you're going to get instead.

[potis]

Failed because lack of sleep, check below! 2 posts ;D

[Fascinate]

If you plan on playing MMO's people will suggest you go with intel CPU (which requires a different motherboard as well). i5 may be out of your price range but an i3 is perfectly fine for most current games. That corsair power supply i have never heard of, i looked on newegg and there is no VS series from them. Fan controllers are kinda things of the past really, most motherboards have multiple pins on them so you can control them with software or even settings in the bios. You could always negate the SSD and put that into other parts of your budget, i would go for an i5 personally and drop the SSD. 7870 is a fine card but sometimes you can find a 7950 for just a little bit more money (and its quite a bit faster).

- - - Updated - - -

BTW people shouldnt really be suggesting the amd 200 series cards atm, 7950 for under 200 bucks is the card to be suggesting.

[potis]

1) Low AMD CPU plus AMD is bad for WoW = Bad choice, and i mean low because you either put 8350 or 8320, the 6 cores are not worth the price considering an i3 pretty much outperforms them easily.

2)7870 is already considered an old card, get a 270X thats coming out next week or two for the same money or so and it is stronger.

3)Fan controller is a waste of money unless it comes with the case.

4)If you need the memory card, sure? :S

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-4570 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor (£145.72 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: MSI H87-G43 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£73.83 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£57.98 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£72.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£61.86 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: HIS Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card (£190.79 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Case: Cooler Master Storm Enforcer ATX Mid Tower Case (£74.87 @ Scan.co.uk)
Power Supply: EVGA 500W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply (£41.00 @ Ebuyer)
Optical Drive: Lite-On iHAS124-04 DVD/CD Writer (£13.15 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £732.19
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-10-08 17:36 BST+0100)

You can do much better as shown above, replace that 7950 for a 270X and its the same thing.

[Fluorescent0]

There's no real point in going for an i5 instead of an i3 if the main goal is gaming. An i3 will actually perform better purely due to the higher clock speed while saving money. That PSU is also HEC OEM, stay clear of it.

[Deleted]

Thanks guys. I was led to believe AMD CPU would be better value, obviously not. Looks like I will be building myself then. I'll go for an i3 or i5 CPU. Any specific kind of motherboard I should look for? I knew the 7870 was old but again was told it was good value for money. Won't be getting this for another month so I'll look into the 7950 and 270x

[Lemmiwink]

an i3-4340 should do the job just fine. It's not better for gaming as someone above claims as it is not able to overclock and it only has half the L3 cache. Also, it utilize HT making each logical core roughly 96% effective versus the i5 which is a true 4 core CPU. It will however be more than enough for gaming, if that is your primary use.

The 270X, 280X etc. are rebranded GPU's. They perform identical to the older versions. If you can get your hand on a heavily discounted 7970, that would be the best choice per now tbh.

[Fascinate]

7950 is the card you want, 7970 is not 100 dollars better than a 7950 : )

[Deleted]

I'd suggest this build:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i3-4340 3.6GHz Dual-Core Processor (£117.76 @ Scan.co.uk)
CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 45.0 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler (£18.91 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: MSI B85-G41 PC Mate ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£62.22 @ Scan.co.uk)
Memory: Avexir Core Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£53.90 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Storage: Samsung 840 EVO 120GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (£72.99 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£61.86 @ Aria PC)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£46.55 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: XFX 550W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply (£49.24 @ CCL Computers)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-222AB DVD/CD Writer (£13.44 @ Amazon UK)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8 (OEM) (64-bit) (£69.00 @ Aria PC)
Total: £565.87
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-10-08 19:58 BST+0100)

With this GPU Gigabyte WF3 Radeon R9-270.

Which comes to £726 with everything a Base unit needs. Future upgrades include obtaining an unlocked Intel CPU and a Z87 motherboard, unless you forgo the SSD, in which case the cost goes up to around £741 including said GPU:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-4670K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor (£167.99 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev.2 45.0 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler (£18.91 @ Amazon UK)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87-D3HP ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (£99.40 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: Avexir Core Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (£53.90 @ Overclockers.co.uk)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£61.86 @ Aria PC)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case (£46.55 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: XFX 550W 80 PLUS Bronze Certified ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply (£49.24 @ CCL Computers)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-222AB DVD/CD Writer (£13.44 @ Amazon UK)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8 (OEM) (64-bit) (£69.00 @ Aria PC)
Total: £580.29
(Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available.)
(Generated by PCPartPicker 2013-10-08 20:01 BST+0100)

[Fluorescent0]

an i3-4340 should do the job just fine. It's not better for gaming as someone above claims as it is not able to overclock and it only has half the L3 cache. Also, it utilize HT making each logical core roughly 96% effective versus the i5 which is a true 4 core CPU. It will however be more than enough for gaming, if that is your primary use.

The 270X, 280X etc. are rebranded GPU's. They perform identical to the older versions. If you can get your hand on a heavily discounted 7970, that would be the best choice per now tbh.

So much misinformation in this post. An i5-4570 can't overclock either, L3 cache for gaming has little to no impact and HT is actually making each logical core a 20% improvement over the other core (as in if 4 cores is 400% performance, 2+2 is ~240% when utilising to full extent de to physical resource sharing), but simply games that effectively use more than two cores can be counted on your fingers anyways.

[Fascinate]

Forgetting one important thing, future proofing. Who knows, gaming studios may start making games that utilize more than 2 cores. If he is gonna keep his pc for more than 3 years its highly suggested to get an i5.....just in case. This is already happening in some games, like bf3 for example (prob bf4 as well):

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-b...nce/page7.html

The dual cores in their tests were maxing out cpu usage.

Better safe than sorry imo, go with the i5.

[Fluorescent0]

Forgetting one important thing, future proofing. Who knows, gaming studios may start making games that utilize more than 2 cores. If he is gonna keep his pc for more than 3 years its highly suggested to get an i5.....just in case. This is already happening in some games, like bf3 for example (prob bf4 as well):

http://www.techspot.com/review/458-b...nce/page7.html

The dual cores in their tests were maxing out cpu usage.

Better safe than sorry imo, go with the i5.

That's all we got in eight years of multithreaded CPUs being available. A couple games and hopes. There's only too much that can be done on parallel and even then synchronizing threads and making sure they always are is an absolute headache.

[Fascinate]

But wouldnt you agree if he had the choice of an ssd+i3 or a 4670k to go with the i5 and no ssd? Thats what i suggested earlier in the thread.

[Tehterokkar]

But wouldnt you agree if he had the choice of an ssd+i3 or a 4670k to go with the i5 and no ssd? Thats what i suggested earlier in the thread.

i5 >>> i3+SSD also in my opinion. Also you can later on add the SSD, they are much easier to install(plug in Power+SATA cable and done) than a CPU, not to mention weird incompatibilities that might happen for some weird reason.

Pretty much all properly ported Triple AAA titles do utilize more than 2 cores and also, since XBone and PS4 are just around the corner, and they have 8-core CPUs, we will for 100% sure start seeing ports being able to utilize up to 8 cores.

[Lemmiwink]

So much misinformation in this post. An i5-4570 can't overclock either, L3 cache for gaming has little to no impact and HT is actually making each logical core a 20% improvement over the other core (as in if 4 cores is 400% performance, 2+2 is ~240% when utilising to full extent de to physical resource sharing), but simply games that effectively use more than two cores can be counted on your fingers anyways.

Wasn't talking about the 4570, there is basically one CPU people talk about when they talk about overclocking, the 4670k. But if you really need it specified, I was comparing it to the 4670K as someone was saying an i5 would be worse for gaming due to lower clock frequencies.

When I was talking about the 96%, it is the measurable performance in syntethic tests/benchmarks I was talking about. To keep it simple. It's kind of the reason a 4670K can compete with a 4770K despite the 4770K having a higher clock frequency. I agree, I might have formulated it a bit "general" but that is to not overcomplicate and give a real life comparison instead of a technical comparison, which 99/1000 people is not gonna understand nor care about anyway.

L3 cache is actually more important than you think, not specifically for gaming but for alot of other tasks which you will use if you do have a computer. Not gonna write anything about it as it's really irrelevant for this discussion. My point was: an i3 will do the job just fine, but the i5 (4670k) is not only more powerfull out of the box, but it's potential power due to overclocking far surpasses the i3.

- - - Updated - - -

i5 >>> i3+SSD also in my opinion. Also you can later on add the SSD, they are much easier to install(plug in Power+SATA cable and done) than a CPU, not to mention weird incompatibilities that might happen for some weird reason.

Pretty much all properly ported Triple AAA titles do utilize more than 2 cores and also, since XBone and PS4 are just around the corner, and they have 8-core CPUs, we will for 100% sure start seeing ports being able to utilize up to 8 cores.

We will see game utilize more than 2 cores, but what purpose will the extra cores utilized serve? I don't think they are that far in programming within the next few years that they can actually utilize more than 2 cores. Will it be more of an extras gimmick like physics etc.? But yes, I agree, buy the best CPU you can afford and make sure your GPU is the most expensive single component.

[Deleted]

I'm gonna go for ah i5 even if I have to drop the SSD. This computer will have to last a good few years so want to future proof it. I'm thinking 7950 for GPU. How do you know what kind of motherboard to get to support everything?

[Fascinate]

Good call man. If your going i5 go all the way and get a 4670k and z87 chipset motherboard. This allows for overclocking, and even if you dont want to OC now you have the option years down the road.

[Deleted]

Also how important is a CPU cooler?