StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Hello everyone
I am currently looking into buying a new PC. Because I don’t know much about hardware I decided to try and get a few opinions from you guys.
I put this system together on the website of a company that is willing to put it together for me:


Components:
Processor:
Intel Core i5-4670K - 3.4 GHz (4 kerner - 4 tråde) - Haswell (unlocked multiplier)
CPU Coolers:
Cooler Master Hyper 412S
Motherboard:
Asus Z87-A (C2) - Haswell
Memory:
Kingston HyperX Beast Dual Channel DDR3-2133 - 16GB (2x8GB)
Graphics Card:
Asus GeForce GTX 760 OC - 2GB GDDR5
Hard drive 1:
Samsung 840 EVO SSD - 500GB
Hard drive 2:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.14 - 1TB
Optical Drive:
Plextor PX-891SA Black
Housing:
Fractal Design Define R4
Power supply:
Corsair CX600 V2 - 80plus Bronze - 600W PSU

Price: 10 603 DKK (1421.20 €/1954 $)



Any compatibility issues?

Is there any part of the system that is overpowered/underpowered compared to the rest?

Is the 2133 MT/s RAM worth it when I’m not going to overclock the system?

Any issues with the power supply?

Should I consider water cooling?

Should I expect any major changes in the market on the next month or so?

Does the price seem excessive?

Any other thoughts?


Part picker site (link in Danish)
(system not stored)


(Note: I translated a few of the terms in the component list from Danish, I may have made a few terminology errors in the translation, if that is the case then please ignore them.)

You are paying a large price premium for stuff you might not need. For example 500gb ssd at this point, I'd not pay that much unless you really wanted the extra space. Dropping down to a 250 or even a 120 should be fine for your OS. Using the external HD for the majority of programs with maybe one or two games you need to be able to load super fast. The majority of your benefit comes just from having the OS on the SSD.

I assume this is a gaming rig. I've always had good luck with ASUS products. If ASUS makes a particular part, I buy it over any other Manufacturer... with a couple exceptions. As stated, the 500GB SSD might be overkill, but it all depends on how much you want sitting on it without bothering to move games around. If you play multiple large games, it could be worth it just to not deal with the hassle of uninstalling or messing with mklink.

16GBs of RAM isn't really a thing for gaming. Maybe if you stream or cobble together your own videos. But RAM prices are pretty cheap again, so it may not be an issue.

The days of overclocking and watercooling being a thing are pretty much over. If you want to do it, do it for the experience, not the minimal performance gain. It was never cost-effective to begin with, nor was it really worth squeezing a few extra Mhz out of an Athlon so you could grab 1-2 more FPS. Your build should pretty much crush any game that's out or will be out in the next few years. The main thing is games are eating up copious amounts of VRAM more than anything and MSAA (or just trying to do 8x AA) will drag your GPU down for no noticeable gain because resolutions are so high these days you can't even notice the "improvement."

You're paying a bit of a premium, but at the least that premium is buying you more than a few years of future-proofing.

Malagar wrote:Any compatibility issues?

Is there any part of the system that is overpowered/underpowered compared to the rest?

You have a fast and large SSD, so you could probably go with a 'green' low-speed hard drive for mass storage.

I personally prefer Samsung's Pro and Intel's higher-end line of SSDs, but they come at an annoyingly high price premium. The Samsung 500GB EVO is pretty good.

Is the 2133 MT/s RAM worth it when I’m not going to overclock the system?

AnandTech has some scaling charts for you

Any issues with the power supply?

Should I consider water cooling?

Should I expect any major changes in the market on the next month or so?

No, no and no.

Mr Bean wrote:You are paying a large price premium for stuff you might not need. For example 500gb ssd at this point, I'd not pay that much unless you really wanted the extra space. Dropping down to a 250 or even a 120 should be fine for your OS. Using the external HD for the majority of programs with maybe one or two games you need to be able to load super fast. The majority of your benefit comes just from having the OS on the SSD.

Application loading on an SSD is also nice, and 120GB is not much space. The EVO 120GB has a relatively constrained lifespan, too, due to its use of TLC flash.

TheFeniX wrote:I assume this is a gaming rig. I've always had good luck with ASUS products. If ASUS makes a particular part, I buy it over any other Manufacturer... with a couple exceptions. As stated, the 500GB SSD might be overkill, but it all depends on how much you want sitting on it without bothering to move games around. If you play multiple large games, it could be worth it just to not deal with the hassle of uninstalling or messing with mklink.

Not having to mess around with what goes where is well worth it.

16GBs of RAM isn't really a thing for gaming. Maybe if you stream or cobble together your own videos. But RAM prices are pretty cheap again, so it may not be an issue.

RAM is so cheap that you might as well go with at least 16GB.

phongn wrote:

Malagar wrote:Any compatibility issues?

Is there any part of the system that is overpowered/underpowered compared to the rest?

You have a fast and large SSD, so you could probably go with a 'green' low-speed hard drive for mass storage.

The reason I went with that HDD is because it is the cheapest one they offer.

I personally prefer Samsung's Pro and Intel's higher-end line of SSDs, but they come at an annoyingly high price premium. The Samsung 500GB EVO is pretty good.

Yes, the price jump for the Pro is just too much for my budget.

Is the 2133 MT/s RAM worth it when I’m not going to overclock the system?

AnandTech has some scaling charts for you

Thank you, with that in mind, and because the price difference is negligible, I will upgrade the RAM to 2400.

Any issues with the power supply?

Should I consider water cooling?

Should I expect any major changes in the market on the next month or so?

No, no and no.

Thank you.

Mr Bean wrote:You are paying a large price premium for stuff you might not need. For example 500gb ssd at this point, I'd not pay that much unless you really wanted the extra space. Dropping down to a 250 or even a 120 should be fine for your OS. Using the external HD for the majority of programs with maybe one or two games you need to be able to load super fast. The majority of your benefit comes just from having the OS on the SSD.

Application loading on an SSD is also nice, and 120GB is not much space. The EVO 120GB has a relatively constrained lifespan, too, due to its use of TLC flash.

TheFeniX wrote:I assume this is a gaming rig. I've always had good luck with ASUS products. If ASUS makes a particular part, I buy it over any other Manufacturer... with a couple exceptions. As stated, the 500GB SSD might be overkill, but it all depends on how much you want sitting on it without bothering to move games around. If you play multiple large games, it could be worth it just to not deal with the hassle of uninstalling or messing with mklink.

Not having to mess around with what goes where is well worth it.

Yes, I would prefer to have all my programs on the SSD, and the 500GB should be more than enough for all of the programs I have, and will acquire over the next few years.
That said though I will consider going with a 250 GB SSD.
Oh and yes this is going to be a gaming rig.

16GBs of RAM isn't really a thing for gaming. Maybe if you stream or cobble together your own videos. But RAM prices are pretty cheap again, so it may not be an issue.

RAM is so cheap that you might as well go with at least 16GB.

The low price and my habit of running a lot of programs at the same time is the reason I went for 16GB.

Thanks for the feedback thus far, I will probably buy the system after Christmas when I have a bit more time and postal services are back to normal.

Having a lot of programs open still won't need 16GBs of RAM. You need to be running crazy shit to get up there, like high resolution image editing and video streaming/rendering. 8GBs is still more than enough to run any game, have voice chat, a browser, and numerous other crap running and likely never get over 60% of it. VRAM seems to be the real bottle-neck these days as any decently optimized game will eat up all it can.

All that said, 16GBs of RAM is under $100USD which is crazy and there's talk that RAM prices are going to get high after some fire at a major production facility (same thing that happened when Taiwan got hit in the early 2000s) so I think it's not a huge deal to pile the stuff on when it's cheap, even if you never utilize it all. If anything, you'd be able to pull bad chips and still keep truckin' in the unlikely event of a stick failure.

Where the hell have you found 16gb of ram for less than $100?

TheFeniX wrote:Having a lot of programs open still won't need 16GBs of RAM. You need to be running crazy shit to get up there, like high resolution image editing and video streaming/rendering. 8GBs is still more than enough to run any game, have voice chat, a browser, and numerous other crap running and likely never get over 60% of it. VRAM seems to be the real bottle-neck these days as any decently optimized game will eat up all it can.

All that said, 16GBs of RAM is under $100USD which is crazy and there's talk that RAM prices are going to get high after some fire at a major production facility (same thing that happened when Taiwan got hit in the early 2000s) so I think it's not a huge deal to pile the stuff on when it's cheap, even if you never utilize it all. If anything, you'd be able to pull bad chips and still keep truckin' in the unlikely event of a stick failure.

Looking a bit more at things I can see that if I went with just 8GB RAM I would be able to replace the current SSD with the Pro.
Would you say it was worth it to do that?

Cheaping out on SSDs is a bad idea, I think. You don't want it crapping out on you early and there's not gonna be a difference in performance between 8 gig and 16 gig of memory.

Don't cheap out on SSD. Get a nice solid reliable one
Also 16 gigs I think is a minimum for Gaming PC not because you need 16 gigs but because console ports are shit and eat memory like no ones business. I have 32 gigs myself because I got a deal at the time but I'd be fine with just 16 gigs.

Standard usage 8 is amazingly good, 16 is perfect for gaming PC because as I said, dev's are lazy and memory leaks are one of the most common game bugs out there. BF4 for example has several notorious memory leak errors that cause a crash after a single round for those with only 4 gigs of memory. Those with eight can make it two rounds and change. Those with sixteen normally get a different crash before the memory leak gets them.

It's not ideal and it should not be a reason to buy a ton of memory. Sixteen is good, in two years the market will look very different on DDR4 and a good time to snag another 16 gigs in two years.

JLTucker wrote:Where the hell have you found 16gb of ram for less than $100?

I slipped up, I meant 8GBs of RAM, to get him up to 16.

Malagar wrote:Looking a bit more at things I can see that if I went with just 8GB RAM I would be able to replace the current SSD with the Pro.
Would you say it was worth it to do that?

I would take a higher quality SSD over an extra 8gigs of RAM, because you can always add in more RAM, but an underperforming drive is dead weight, or relegated to a secondary.

Mr Bean wrote:Also 16 gigs I think is a minimum for Gaming PC not because you need 16 gigs but because console ports are shit and eat memory like no ones business. I have 32 gigs myself because I got a deal at the time but I'd be fine with just 16 gigs.

Even the bloated PC devourer of SWTOR wouldn't get above 3.5 gigs of usage. And to be honest, that was the most horribly optimized piece of shit I've ever installed. Most games won't break 2GBs and neither did SWTOR because they would just run two instances of the game, with the 2GB limit set or something to that effect. I doubt even Crysis 3 full-blown would require a system with more than 8GBs of RAM. You may not be able to run much else, but I've read even it only caps out at around 6GBs (including the OS).

I have 9GBs in this PC and the only thing I don't max out is MSAA or AA in general. My bottle-neck has only ever been my VC and that was VRAM.

Bf4 after a hour and a half play session had pushed my memory usage to 14 gigs. Skyrim with lots of mods installed regularly tops 7 gigsbused

How many mods do you have for Skyrim?! I've got something like 70 and it never even hits 2 gig for Skyrim itself.

Mr Bean wrote:Bf4 after a hour and a half play session had pushed my memory usage to 14 gigs. Skyrim with lots of mods installed regularly tops 7 gigsbused

DICE has always been good (even back to BF1942) about taking as much RAM as possibly to cut down on load times. When I was running BF2 with 512, it would eat up almost all of it and still run great. When I upgraded to 1GB, it would eat up all of it and run even... greater...?

I have like 150 mods for Skyrim, high-res texture packs and quite a few high-poly model replacers. Skyrim never really gets above a gig or 2, however I had to upgrade to a 3GB Video Card or Riften because a slide show. I don't know what you could be running to eat up 7GBs unless you have one hell of a memory leak. However, I also don't mess with ENBs and I've heard some of them are RAM hogs.

It's easy enough to add RAM if you need it. Unless you're getting a significant two-for-one discount, I'd say start with 8GB and see how you get on.