Revised list of parts, first time build

[Torvera]

A while ago i posted a thread with specs for a new computer i wanted to build. I got the advice to wait for sandy bridges, and i heeded that nugget of brilliance. Now i have a new list hoping i could get it reviewed, along with a few questions that i would love to have answered.

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500k
GPU: HIS Radeon HD 6870
RAM: GeIL Value PLUS 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3
MOBO: Intel BOXDH67CL LGA 1155 Intel H67
HDD: Western Digital Caviar Black, 640GB
PSU: Corsair 650tx, 650w
Case: Antec Three Hundred Black Steel
CD/DVD drive: TS-H552 (taken from an older Gateway)

A few questions:
1. Do i need to buy a heatsink? i have heard that this processor stays cool enough on its own.

2. i am still wary about the motherboard. The only things i knew what to look for were brand names and socket.. i really do not want to spend more than $130 on the MOBO, but im open to any suggestions!

3. To assemble this, will i need to buy any additional supplies? I have OS, keyboard, mouse and monitor.. is this all i need to go from scraps to fully functional?

Thanks for taking the time to help me, i appreciate it

[OhpUldum]

Here is a better motherboard Asus P8P67. Price is right within you're budget. Then you also get such nifty things as Crossfire or SLi support, USB 3, and eSata. Also the H67 series of the socket 1155 are turning out to be rubbish for overclocking capabilities, and assuming since you are buying the i5 2500k you will at some point overclock going with a P67 socket 1155 board is the way to go. Also give you the capability to dual video card down the road.

In regards to an aftermarket CPU cooler you only need to buy one should you decide to overclock. Otherwise the stock cooler is fine.

[Torvera]

Oof, forgot to check to make sure it was a P67 board..

With the board you suggested, does it matter that it is a micro-ATX since the case says that it is ATX compatible? in other words, does ATX compatible mean it will work with both micro and regular motherboards?

[nerfbacon]

A Micro ATX Board will work fine in that case.

Also if you have the option to get it buy the Caviar black with model number WD6402AAEX. It is around $5 more for the drive but has more cache and a SATA 6Gb/s interface. In real life experiences you wont see a huge advantage but if you ever wanted to add another drive in a raid array having more cache cant hurt. Just make sure you connect it to the SATA 6Gb/s ports on the board.

[Deleted]

Are you planning on overclocking, if so gratz on picking 2500k best bang for buck processor :-)
If your not, just get a standard 2500.

Also, please make sure you get ASUS parts, asus mobo and graphics card with the software and bios on there is AWESOME, im talking drag 3 bars OC your graphics card to ridiculous, recently built a pc for a friend with a 6850 in and the graphics memory clocked to 5000mhz just by dragging 3 bars......DERP.

btw, could i recommend an asus vento case, same case i put my recent build in and i must say its fantastic and look amazing aswell.
midi tower case, i baught mine from scan(co uk), just quick search on there if you want an image of it.

also, very very nice choice in HDD, caviar blacks are top dog.

On another note please can i reccomend you dont get bog standard 1333mhz ram, please do go upto 1600 and again dependant on how much your dishing out for this try and get some at CL8 or below, CL9 is fine but youll notice a tasty difference with CL8 or 7.

Again, are you going to be overclocking this, if so i would recommend getting a nicey nice heat sink i would recommend zalaman coolers without question also the titan ones are just as good.....if you do overclock this you will enjoy the VERY nice new bios GUI thats on the newer mobo's.

All i can say in summary just make sure you are getting the right stuff for what you want, if your gonna overclock please get asus i beg of you Ive had nothing but very good surprises from them.

****asus fanboy I know, but with good reason****

---------- Post added 2011-01-22 at 10:30 PM ----------

To assemble this, will i need to buy any additional supplies? I have OS, keyboard, mouse and monitor.. is this all i need to go from scraps to fully functional?

Its not needed but if you want the best cooling possible get some thermal grease removal and some arctic silver.

[Cantii]

IMO you should only use micro ATX boards in an ATX case if you don't care about convenience, since most of the time the video card will heavily overshadow things like SATA ports and the like, but that's up to you. You also might want to consider spending the extra $30 and get the Crosair HX series 650HX, for the sole purpose that it's modular and will save you A LOT of time and headache in cable management.

As far as after-market CPU heatsinks, unless you intend on overclocking, the stock will be fine. I do, however, recommend taking off the existing thermal compound from the stock heatsink and using something else, something like Arctic Cooling MX-2 or OCZ Freeze. Stay away from Arctic Silver, there's a lot of hype behind it and it requires some pretty ridiculous feats to get it to set properly. Arctic Cooling MX series and the OCZ Freeze series severely out-perform Arctic Silver anyway.

Are you planning on overclocking, if so gratz on picking 2500k best bang for buck processor :-)
If your not, just get a standard 2500.

Also, please make sure you get ASUS parts, asus mobo and graphics card with the software and bios on there is AWESOME, im talking drag 3 bars OC your graphics card to ridiculous, recently built a pc for a friend with a 6850 in and the graphics memory clocked to 5000mhz just by dragging 3 bars......DERP.

btw, could i recommend an asus vento case, same case i put my recent build in and i must say its fantastic and look amazing aswell.
midi tower case, i baught mine from scan(co uk), just quick search on there if you want an image of it.

also, very very nice choice in HDD, caviar blacks are top dog.

On another note please can i reccomend you dont get bog standard 1333mhz ram, please do go upto 1600 and again dependant on how much your dishing out for this try and get some at CL8 or below, CL9 is fine but youll notice a tasty difference with CL8 or 7.

Again, are you going to be overclocking this, if so i would recommend getting a nicey nice heat sink i would recommend zalaman coolers without question also the titan ones are just as good.....if you do overclock this you will enjoy the VERY nice new bios GUI thats on the newer mobo's.

All i can say in summary just make sure you are getting the right stuff for what you want, if your gonna overclock please get asus i beg of you Ive had nothing but very good surprises from them.

****asus fanboy I know, but with good reason****

---------- Post added 2011-01-22 at 10:30 PM ----------

To assemble this, will i need to buy any additional supplies? I have OS, keyboard, mouse and monitor.. is this all i need to go from scraps to fully functional?

Its not needed but if you want the best cooling possible get some thermal grease removal and some arctic silver.

Asus is good, but they're not the be-all-end all of PC parts. The HIS HD6870 is a rockin card, so is the XFX HD6870 (I actually recommend the XFX HD6870 over all else just for the double lifetime warranty). There are also far superior cases to the Asus Vento (CM Storm series cases for example, as well as CM HAF series, Antec 902 and 1200 are superior as well, 300 as well). I love Asus myself, their motherboards are some of the best, but there's no special super awesome setup when you go with all one company -- it's not a set bonus.

As far as memory goes, LGA 1155 actually has the sweet spot with 1333 MHz RAM, and you won't notice any difference going from 1333MHz to 1600MHz on an LGA 1155 board. LGA 1156 and 1366, however, have the 1600MHz sweet spot (1366's sweet spot is really anywhere between 1600MHz and 2200MHz due to the enthusiast nature of the platform). GeIL makes good RAM for the price, as does G.Skill, might also want to check them out (aside from Corsair, G.Skill is one of the top selling RAM kits in the U.S., solid product).

Also, when concerning latency, RAM is a tricky. Lower latencies shine at lower clock speeds, and vice versa. That CAS 7 1333MHz DDR3 will perform pretty much the same as that CAS 9 1600MHz DDR3. Now if you're going extreme with CAS 6, then higher latency RAM needs to be ~1866MHz or higher to compensate. However, lower CAS memory is not in the budget, so that's not even moot.

P.S. - Samsung SpinPoint F3s are better than WD CavBlacks, just FYI.

[Deleted]

IMO you should only use micro ATX boards in an ATX case if you don't care about convenience, since most of the time the video card will heavily overshadow things like SATA ports and the like, but that's up to you. You also might want to consider spending the extra $30 and get the Crosair HX series 650HX, for the sole purpose that it's modular and will save you A LOT of time and headache in cable management.

As far as after-market CPU heatsinks, unless you intend on overclocking, the stock will be fine. I do, however, recommend taking off the existing thermal compound from the stock heatsink and using something else, something like Arctic Cooling MX-2 or OCZ Freeze. Stay away from Arctic Silver, there's a lot of hype behind it and it requires some pretty ridiculous feats to get it to set properly. Arctic Cooling MX series and the OCZ Freeze series severely out-perform Arctic Silver anyway.



Asus is good, but they're not the be-all-end all of PC parts. The HIS HD6870 is a rockin card, so is the XFX HD6870 (I actually recommend the XFX HD6870 over all else just for the double lifetime warranty). There are also far superior cases to the Asus Vento (CM Storm series cases for example, as well as CM HAF series, Antec 902 and 1200 are superior as well, 300 as well). I love Asus myself, their motherboards are some of the best, but there's no special super awesome setup when you go with all one company -- it's not a set bonus.

As far as memory goes, LGA 1155 actually has the sweet spot with 1333 MHz RAM, and you won't notice any difference going from 1333MHz to 1600MHz on an LGA 1155 board. LGA 1156 and 1366, however, have the 1600MHz sweet spot (1366's sweet spot is really anywhere between 1600MHz and 2200MHz due to the enthusiast nature of the platform). GeIL makes good RAM for the price, as does G.Skill, might also want to check them out (aside from Corsair, G.Skill is one of the top selling RAM kits in the U.S., solid product).

Also, when concerning latency, RAM is a tricky. Lower latencies shine at lower clock speeds, and vice versa. That CAS 7 1333MHz DDR3 will perform pretty much the same as that CAS 9 1600MHz DDR3. Now if you're going extreme with CAS 6, then higher latency RAM needs to be ~1866MHz or higher to compensate. However, lower CAS memory is not in the budget, so that's not even moot.

P.S. - Samsung SpinPoint F3s are better than WD CavBlacks, just FYI.

All points very valid agreed, though I personally much prefer WD to samsung, performance wise the spinpoint f3's are better yet but I have had issued with reliability on samsung products before and refuse to recommend or use them again, personal grudge i know but meh.

only 1 point I do massively dissagree with you on is "it's not a set bonus", I call bull**** on that as i said the software what you recieve from asus works dramatically better when using both asus mobo and gfx. Super serial face, asus oc'd my gtx 295 just with the asus smart doctor and shot to rank 300 on sisoft sandra, the tools are definitely worth getting the 'set bonus'.

Agreed the case isnt the best I know but it is a very nice budget case with a quality look and feel, also its nice to build in due to expansion bay positioning makes very nice for cable management and thus airflow. Me personally I run with an antec DF85 which last time i checked was 3rd best cooling case from stock. That saying I do believe a fully kitted out NZXT phantom would outperform any case at cooling its only due to them selling it stock with less fans than it can hold that it isnt top.....this is just a theory though and im yet to buy 1 to benchmark.

Deffinatly agree that G.skill ram is fantastic absolutely fantastic.

[Cantii]

All points very valid agreed, though I personally much prefer WD to samsung, performance wise the spinpoint f3's are better yet but I have had issued with reliability on samsung products before and refuse to recommend or use them again, personal grudge i know but meh.

only 1 point I do massively dissagree with you on is "it's not a set bonus", I call bull**** on that as i said the software what you recieve from asus works dramatically better when using both asus mobo and gfx. Super serial face, asus oc'd my gtx 295 just with the asus smart doctor and shot to rank 300 on sisoft sandra, the tools are definitely worth getting the 'set bonus'.

I've had no problems with WD or Samsungs, ever. Seagates on the other hand...

You can do the same overclocking and get the same results with the bundled software with the video card (or get the latest from the site). I've used Asus video cards before, especially Asus AMD cards, and quite frankly I can't see a performance difference when using Asus' software or the Catalyst Overdrive. Even nVIDIA's overclocking software suite is on par. Asus has good software, the best of any motherboard manufacturer, but it doesn't magically make an Asus video card any better by using exclusive third-party software to do the same thing first-party software does just as well, if it did then anybody who knew anything about video cards and overclocking would exclusively buy Asus over any other manufacturer. But they don't.

[DarkBlade6]

You are buying a Core i5 2500 <K> Which has been made for Overclocker ! But you are buying a H67 Motherboard, which totally DISABLE overclock feature. So you should probably just change your a motherboard for a MSI P67A-C43, its a very cheap motherboard (120$ish or less) because it has only one 16x PCIE slot , so unless you want plan to buy another 6870, having two 16x PCIE slot is totally useless. By the way i dont suggest you to buy a H67 motherboard , its only good if you plan to just use Internet/Word/Excel, because this kind of mobo uses the integrated GPU of the CPU (yea Intel and AMD now integrate <Crappy> GPU in their CPU). I also suggest you to buy a Corsair RAM kit (2x2GB 1600mhz CL8 or 9)

[nerfbacon]

By the way i dont suggest you to buy a H67 motherboard , its only good if you plan to just use Internet/Word/Excel, because this kind of mobo uses the integrated GPU of the CPU (yea Intel and AMD now integrate <Crappy> GPU in their CPU)

Every Sandy Bridge i5 has the built in graphics. The H series motherboards simply add the outputs that would allow you to use them. Adding a second graphics card to the board will use the second graphics card not the internal to the CPU card. From testing at work the onboard graphics of an i3 or i5 does have the capabilities to run wow just not at anywhere near an enthusiast level...that being said I couldnt handle actually raiding with those build in graphics.

Quick chart of Sandy Bridge i5 features - intel.com/products/processor/corei5/index.htm

[DarkBlade6]

I was just saying that i dont think he want to use the onboard graphic, so totally no need to buy an H67 mobo (he want to buy an 6870 By the way). Hes also buying a K serie , So he probably want to OC his CPU, which is impossible on a H67 mobo. And the P67 dont use the onboard graphic BTW.

Next time,read the whole fucking post before posting crap.

[nerfbacon]

I was just saying that i dont think he want to use the onboard graphic, so totally no need to buy an H67 mobo (he want to buy an 6870 By the way). Hes also buying a K serie , So he probably want to OC his CPU, which is impossible on a H67 mobo. And the P67 dont use the onboard graphic BTW.

Next time,read the whole fucking post before posting crap.

Im sorry if i offended you, i was merely pointing out that because he was already adding a discrete graphics card the discrete graphics card would be the one doing the work, not the onboard graphics.

BUT if you want to get technical he has never expressed an interest in overclocking his CPU at any point in this thread. Others have expressed an interest for him because he picked out the K series processor. He did not pick out an aftermarket heatsink that would allow him to truly overclock the processor and he didnt really go overboard on a PSU which is one of the most integral parts of overclocking success. If he has no interest in overclocking then an H67 chipset motherboard is generally a cheaper option and he had already expressed a desire to keep the motherboard below $130 leading me to believe that he did have a budget and wanted to watch the price...but maybe im reading way more into his posts than needed.

[kidsafe]

Don't need a 650W PSU for this build. You could probably get away with a 430W unit, but I think the sweetspot in terms of price now is in the 500W range.

Seasonic S12II 520W - An exceedingly good unit in the 500W range.
Antec EA-500D - Might be a little noisier at full load, but one of the best deals currently in the 500W range.

As far as thermal compounds go...I like Arctic Cooling MX-2 as well. Do not get MX-3...it's harder to apply and more finicky. MX-4 is okay, but not appreciably better than MX-2. My favorite thermal compound by far is IC Diamond because of its viscosity and amazing thermal conductivity. Arctic Silver 5 is a fine standby...it's still pretty much as good as the newer thermal compounds.

There's no reason to skimp with 1333MHz DDR3 memory. 1600MHz 2x2GB kits are now only a couple dollars more. Don't worry so much about the timings (CAS latency) and just get a kit that is advertised at 1.5V. Don't buy a kit that specifies 1.65V.