Computer built... Now what?

[arkeifrex]

Hey,

There seem to be tons of 'build your own PC guides' out there but they all seem to stop what you get your PC together. I not stuck as such but just not 100% sure of the best way to proceeded forward from here.

I just finished building my new computer I ended going with a

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 4gb version, ( Was going to get a r9 280x but my local pc store had a 15% sale of a gigabyte products so I picked this up)
MSI Z78-GD65 mobo
i5 4670k cpu
8gb corsair vengeance
corsair h100i cooler
Samsung 250gb EVO ssd
1tb WD caviar black HD
xfx 850w gold standard psu
corsair obsidian 750d case
Windows 8 OS
3 after market fans, custom leds and external optic drive

So I just finished putting this together it works I've run windows updates and downloaded the latest gpu driver software. Now what? What else should I be downloading? What programs do I need to get? Are there test I should be running? How can I check my new PC's performance level? MSI mobo uses a control centre to make over clocking easier but I cannot find where to download it anyone know where I can get it from? Can anyone recommend a good overclocking guide that includes an explanation of what over clocking does and how to do it safely?

[Belize]

Games?

Ummm... STEAM!

[SoulForge]

Whatever you want to do.

[Fascinate]

I dont know if this is the same on windows 8 but, on 7 you go to device manager (right click my computer>properties>device manager) and look to see all of your drivers are installed. Again not sure if its like this on 8 but on 7 there are yellow exclamation points next to devices that are not installed properly. Its best to go to MSI's website to get these drivers.

Got an antivirus? Ive used basically all the free ones over the past 10 years and i like avast the best.

As for monitoring programs i use CPU-Z and HWmonitor. You can see real time clock speeds in cpu-z and HWmonitor shows everything else like temps of your cpu/gpu as well as voltages for pretty much anything on your PC.

If you are going to overclock obviously read a guide first but AIDA64 is now the recommended program for testing overclock stability. This program has a CPU-Z built into it, so no need to download it seperately.

As for general benchmarks, 3dmark11 is free and still widely used to compare your system against others. My favorite is catzilla by allbenchmark, really cool little benchmark with nice audio as well.

Last one would be to get malwarebytes, this is seperate from an antivirus and scans for keyloggers and stuff like that.

[Fpsdoug]

I dont know if this is the same on windows 8 but, on 7 you go to device manager (right click my computer>properties>device manager) and look to see all of your drivers are installed. Again not sure if its like this on 8 but on 7 there are yellow exclamation points next to devices that are not installed properly. Its best to go to MSI's website to get these drivers.

Got an antivirus? Ive used basically all the free ones over the past 10 years and i like avast the best.

As for monitoring programs i use CPU-Z and HWmonitor. You can see real time clock speeds in cpu-z and HWmonitor shows everything else like temps of your cpu/gpu as well as voltages for pretty much anything on your PC.

If you are going to overclock obviously read a guide first but AIDA64 is now the recommended program for testing overclock stability. This program has a CPU-Z built into it, so no need to download it seperately.

As for general benchmarks, 3dmark11 is free and still widely used to compare your system against others. My favorite is catzilla by allbenchmark, really cool little benchmark with nice audio as well.

Last one would be to get malwarebytes, this is seperate from an antivirus and scans for keyloggers and stuff like that.

Agree on most everything but prime blend will find memory instability (and usually cpu problems as well) faster then anything if he wants to tweak it. Prime blend is fine with an H100i. On a cheapo cooler? Prime = BAD.

The small TFT in prime should be outlawed on haswell.

With the H100i? I would set voltage at 1.25 override (no adaptive additive crap) and cpu ratio to 46. Don't boot? 4.5. Continue down till you get boot. This will give you a general idea of what kind of chip you got. 4.4 ok, 4.6? Rockin. 4.3 or lower? Curse the silicon lottery god's.

If you want to go past 1.25 volts? Prime can get dangerous with heat depending on cooling. This is why most people are suggesting aida now.

Cache should be no higher then 3900 when dialing in ur max clock. Many people go 3500 for higher clocks as it means more then cache. You might also have to increase some other voltages depending if you got a "dog" chip or not.