New computer

[Peotr]

Back in Orofino *again*, but this time we brought my dad home. Thanksgiving is next week, which means nothing will be normal, but at least I'm not trapped in a motel room.

And it's time.

It's really time.

For reelz, itz time.

It's time to BUILD A FUCKING COMPUTER, OOOOH YEAH, BITCHES! I have been looking forward to this for over a year! FUCK YEAH! Good timing, too, since the steelhead are almost finished for the year and my brother wants to steal his computer back. =|

I want to be ready for SWToR. I was invited to the beta also, but it's hard to participate on a 1.8Ghz P4 laptop with 512mb of RAM, 200MB of free hard disk space and non-DirectX video card (and also no internet connection). But now we're gonna build a new machine, and I'm posting my plan here for your review. If you've read my previous posts you know dat budget it be tight, but I think this will work.


FIRST, A FEW THOUGHTS:

1. Some guilt will go into the creation of this computer. I was working on my aunt's computer (my aunt in The Dalles, which I think I posted about earlier) and we had to go to Staples to get new ink for their printer, and while we were at Staples the shopping bug came over my aunt. They decided to buy a new camera, and they bought a new external drive because I want them to back up their data, and they bought a copy of Norton AV, and then they bought a lamp, they bought some stickers, a plastic cargo box and a gallon container of pretzels, etc., etc. I should mention here that my aunt, although not super wealthy, is pretty well off, she gets about five grand a month from three different retirement funds. She's a Home Shopping Network junkie.

The upshot was that they spent about $500.00 in Staples just trying to buy printer ink, and somehow in that frenzy of purchasing I wound up with 8GB of Kingston DDR3-1600 memory.

I admit I am a bad nephew. The memory was only $50.00 (bad justification). And I'm the one who gave them their computer (another bad justification). And even though it's Kingston it was still the cheapest, 'cause it doesn't have heat sinks (third bad justification). But I am still a bad nephew.

I never ONCE said that it was for their computer, NOT ONCE (terrible justification). And my aunt told me several times to buy something for myself, although my mom vetoed that idea (fifth bad justification).

I admit my guilt, I admit that when I fall from the slippery sidewalk of life I will surely wind up in the gutter of hell, but I DID NOT LIE, I just said, "Here's the ink, the external drive, and the RAM," and I dropped all three into the basket.

So hidden in my book bag are two mint sticks of Kingston RAM. =| I even kept the receipt.

To be honest I don't feel bad at all. I spent almost an entire day cleaning their refrigerator (sixth bad justification), and my aunt originally wanted to buy me a $600.00 iPad, which I didn't want (seventh bad justification). I feel worse about putting their cat in a Macy's shopping bag and hooking it to the ceiling, and I don't feel bad about that, either.

And it is well known that seven bad justifications are roughly equal to one normal justification, so I am morally in the clear.


2. I didn't build a computer earlier because I wanted to see Bulldozer's benchmarks and prices. When the Bulldozer NDA was lifted I spent the morning reading the nerdosphere, and I came away feeling blah. You could say I felt a little depressed. Because of my funds I had accepted the idea that going AMD for this build might give me the most bang-for-buck (I even toyed with the idea of going with one of their Llano processors) but my heart hardened after reading the reviews of their latest and newest. I like AMD, but I'm a Windows gamer, a realist, and I'm poor, it seems best to float down the river of popular wisdom.

Also, I have $180.00 credit at a friend's computer store. He's retail, and his prices for video cards are way too high, but his prices for motherboards are reasonable. But they only sell Intel motherboards. Not Intel chipsets - they only sell Intel branded motherboards.


So here's my workup.

PARTS I AM SALVAGING:

Antec Nine Hundred case (w/ all Scythe fans, old but good)
Antec 550w TruePower (a little small, but with up-to-date connectors, and I'm not running SLI anyway)
2x SATA3 DVD burners (Asus and LiteOn)
500GB Western Digital 7200RPM drive (it'll do, and I have oodles of 160GB drives if I want to try RAID or a seperate virtual memory drive, etc.)
Xigmatek (Dark Knight?) CPU cooler (it'll do, and I can't overclock, and I scavenged the 1155 brackets from my friend)
Samsung 21.5" monitor (I will never buy Hanns*G again)
Windows Vista 64 Enterprise (it sucks, but it's legal)


PARTS WHICH I STOLE WHICH WILL SURELY CONDEMN ME TO HELL:

8GB Kingston DDR3-1600


PARTS I AM BUYING FROM MY FRIEND'S STORE:

Intel LGA 1155 Z68 Motherboard (BOXDZ68BC, the link is to NewEgg)


This leaves me with about $380.00 of my own money for processor and video card. And I think I've decided to do this:

Radeon HD 6950 (Gigabyte GV-R695OC) ~$250.00
Intel i3-2120 (dual core, 3.3Ghz) ~$130.00


I'm going as big as possible on the video card, and as near as I can tell this is it. I was considering trying to pair a GTX 570 with a socket 1155 Pentium G840, but it's a little outside of my budget and I don't think it will give me better framerates.

And I think that covers it. If I had to I was willing to go all the way down to a socket 775, but I don't think I'll have to. My brother is buying me SWToR, so thats good.

All comments are welcome. Since I can't throw away money on the latest hardware I'm not really up-to-date on the latest hardware shiznit, but I think this is as good as I can get for the money that I have.

-- Peotr

P.S. Forget it, Lons, I'm not buying a GTX 560 Ti.

[Lonskils]

If you have to purchase something online, purchase from newegg on black Friday at least. Also buy.com has 1000's of refurbs with monitors et al for under 200.

I wasn't gonna tell you to buy a GTX 560 Ti!!!

But do check out the Dell refurb store as well!

You need a bigger PS that that.

[Andaas]

You are fine on the PSU; I ran the numbers through the Thermaltake PSU calculator and it recommends 358W. So anything 450+ should be more than enough.

Can I *please* give you $80.00 so you can bump your CPU up to an I5? You're really going to start running into hardware walls fast with a dual core today (at least in my opinion). Even WoW which has very little multi-core optimization runs insanely better on a quad core vs. dual core.

P.S. The PSU calculator only jumps from 358W to 381W with the upgrade to the I5.

[Allara]

I'd be concerned about that PSU handling a 6950 as well. Otherwise it sounds great across the board to me. I use that same case!

[Andaas]

Maybe I'm wrong, but the PSU calc seems to say otherwise - http://www.thermaltake.outervision.com/index.jsp

[Elkwood]

Becareful with the z68 chip set boards. They had some issues early on.

Long as u don't stick to much stuff in your ps should be ok. I normally unload on the ps myself and if i was building the system for me i have a 750 watt.

Since your on a budget and what not i just keep what u got.

ALso that seems expensive for a plain jane reference board. U could always check out the asrock and other company offerings

Best of luck !!

[Zeyla]

I would suggest going with a quad-core processor as well. If you could swing it this would be a good combo:

Intel Core i5-2300 Sandy Bridge 2.8GHz j- $180
XFX HD-695X-ZNFC Radeon HD 6950 1GB - $240

Would put you at ~$420 total (just a bit over your budget)

Another option would be to go with the i5 Processor above and instead get this video card:

XFX HD-687A-ZHFC Radeon HD 6870 1GB - $170

That would put you under your budget even, which would allow for a faster i5 processor if you wanted.

For reference - I am running a core i7 processor with an AMD Radeon HD 6850 card and I have no frame-rate issues with the SWToR beta. The only times where I get a little lag is with heavily player populated issues, and that is more an issue with the hard drive than the GPU (this was always a common issue for me in WoW also). I think an i5 would run it just fine as well (honestly, like most games, it really hits the GPU much harder than the CPU) Once you get to a certain point with the CPU it really doesn't do much for games.

I'm partial to XFX cards because I have had to return a couple and they have been easy to work with. I burned up a couple cards because of trying to use a sub-par power supply on my son's computer! That being said, I have the same Antec power supply that you do and it has been rock solid for me.

Hope that helps.

Z

[Allara]

I'm not sure if the quad core part really matters to be honest. What does matter is the architecture. Rennys had a point in another thread about how Sandy Bridge pushes out more work per clock cycle, so it might make up the 500 Mhz difference between Zeyla's recommendation and yours. My view of it is, with such a small budget, go for clock cycles (or work per cycle) over cores. I highly doubt you'd notice the difference between dual and quad, but the newer processes/architectures might be more of an improvement.

A $220 MB is WAY out of line for your budget, but I'm assuming you're getting a hell of a deal from your friend's store?

Regarding power, always overspec. The 6950 requires a 500W power supply according to ATI, and you should ALWAYS overspec by 25-100%. I've seen recommendations of 750W. Anyways, I think the 550W is probably fine, but the 381W quote from that power calculator seems far too low for reality.

[Rennys]

Yeah, but you're looking at $50 bucks for a 2 core bump AND the Intel Turbo Boost feature. Probably worth it in terms of longevity. With the computing world's movement towards multi-core platforms, I expect SOMEONE to finally figure out how to compile software for multi-cores without requiring developers to manually thread their code themselves.

From all reports, aside from a couple niggling differences in security details, i3 vs. i5 is:

i5 = 4 cores, Turbo Boost
i3 = 2 cores, Hyperthreading

I think reports are that i5 is generally the better buy since it performs better in most, if not all, situations compared to the i3.

Heh, computers used to be a lot easier to figure out which part to buy when you could just say "Intel - check... MHz speed - check... Latest GeForce with highest card number - check"


P.S.
Hyperthreading - Makes each core act like 2 virtual cores
Turbo Boost - Allows the CPU to boost speed past specifications based on demands (basically, overclocking built in)

[Allara]

Did they really remove hyperthreading in i5?

[Rennys]

Yep.

[boopie]

I'm done with the Antec 900 cases. They have the most horrible drive bay setup ever.

[boopie]

Also...

NVIDIA > ATI > Tebow

[Loniel Bonewalker]

Also...

NVIDIA > ATI > Tebow

Sure if for some reason you do not have a choice. For instance I would use whatever I can get. However ATI all the way.

[Lonskils]

I made the mistake a few years ago with going with recommended power supply. I think you may remember all my disconnects in TBC. Anytime I was in a big graphics area and movement... I nailed it down to the power supply. Since then I've added anywhere from 200 to 250 W on builds over the recommend and have never had another issue. It's a simple thing. The cost isn't that much more and it gives you options when upgrading later and never having to say you're sorry!

[Andaas]

Yeah.. I'm not saying to "minimize" on the PSU, just that his 550W was well over the "required" amount needed and should be fine.

Just there's no need to go crazy with a 1000W or 1250W PSU for most single-GPU setups. 600-750W is plenty for even the top-end single-GPU setups.

[Syana]

sigh.. my computer just blew up and i think it's time I need to spend some money on computer parts again. unfortunately, I'm afraid to spend money on computer stuff because I still have so much to spend on the house. (already spent 2000+ yesterday) =\

[Lonskils]

Good month to buy parts tho. Especially the day after Thanksgiving.

[Aindayen]

Are you building a home or redoing one Syana?

I thought Peotr was going to get us an email address so we can donate to the get him a better PC fund...

[Syana]

Just furnishing.