That's what I'm doing right now. I might as well just buy new RAM, but I'm trying to be as cheap as possible here!
Well, my point is that you don't want to buy new RAM. 4x1gb is fine, it's not going to make that system run any games better, your bottleneck is that graphics card.
One of these days I'll upgrade the GPU. 4x1 is okay if you have enough slots to take it. This one wouldn't.
With what you've got I'd go with option A or option D. Spending money to quasi-upgrade a system that's still using old-ass tech and IDE drives is a waste of money you could be saving towards something substantially better. I'd do what I could to get it working well enough and start thinking about a new system.
Yeah that $45 spent on replacing the motherboard is just a way to keep the computer going longer. You really don't want to look at upgrading anything on that motherboard, it's a waste of money.
Right. It's a stopgap measure to keep a system that meets my current needs alive. Someday I would love to build or buy a proper gaming PC, but I don't play enough at the moment to justify the expense.
I'm thinking of building a new system. Here's a link to my Amazon shopping list: http://amzn.com/w/3GI30X4WWW714 Anyone see anything obvious I should consider in the range of the components? I'll list em all in text here as well: ASUS SABERTOOTH Z77 LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz 8 MB Cache LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770K Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10) Samsung Electronics Samsung 840 Series Solid State Drive (SSD) 500 sata_6_0_gb 2.5-Inch MZ-7TD500BW Gigabyte AMD Radeon HD 7870 2 GB GDDR5 DVI-I/HDMI/2x Mini-Displayport PCI-Express 3.0 Graphic Card GV-R787OC-2GD Rosewill Gaming ATX Full Tower Computer Case THOR V2 Corsair Enthusiast Series TX 750 Watt ATX/EPS Modular 80 PLUS Bronze (TX750M) Razer DeathStalker Expert Gaming Keyboard (RZ03-00800100-R3U1) Mionix Naos 3200 USB Wired LED-optical 3200 dpi Mouse CM Storm Sirus - Gaming Headset with True 5.1 Surround Sound and Control Module (SGH-6000-KK5R1) I'm in no way married to any of it, and I'm pretty underwhelmed with the overall upgrade from what I have for the price, but it's been four years since I bought a computer.
if you have a Microcenter store near you, that cpu is ~$100 cheaper there (in-store only, limit 1,etc). [clicky link] it's a fair bit of money, but that oughta last a good while.
I wouldn't recommend a 7xxx series card. People have had a lot of issues with them, google '7870 flickering' to see what I mean. I went through two 7850s myself, both of which had the same problem.
My PC is back up and running now! With half the RAM, natch, until I get around to buying some DDR3, but still, it's better than nothing! Had to do a clean install of Windows, but aside from Steam, I didn't have much installed that I'm worried about replacing. Maybe Lightroom...
I'm not a fan of any ATI card. Also, 16gb seems like overkill with so many games utilizing more texture memory without jumping up as severely in system RAM usage. If 16gb isn't a priority, I would use 1x8gb and get the second chip sometime in the future.
Son's hard drive in his laptop asploded (chkdsk failed and bluescreened even in safe mode), but through the miracle of Amazon Prime + saturday delivery, I ordered a new hard drive on Friday night and had it installed by Saturday at lunch time. Reinstallation went without a hitch, and through the awesomeness of Steam and "the cloud" not much was lost. I think we're going to build him a proper desktop for his next birthday, is there a good site for "Recommended builds at various price points"?
[quote="BaconTastesGood, post: 439140, member: 626"I think we're going to build him a proper desktop for his next birthday, is there a good site for "Recommended builds at various price points"?[/quote] Ars Technica's system guide is always a decent starting point. What I recommend, though, is to check the reviews on Newegg for each component and see if there are any repeated issues or problems.
The only problem I have with Ars' guide is that it goes from moderate to WTF without a high-end step between. $1,500 to $14,000? Sheesh. The Tom's Guides are another option: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-computer-how-to-overclock-gaming,3363.html but they are released quarterly.
If you ever needed a reason to hate system building, go ahead and get two ATI cards and run them in Crossfire.
Yeah. While on the one hand I appreciate them not getting too fine grained, I think the $800/$1500/$14K is a little silly, since the latter is more geek aspiration than actual buying guide. I think it's way more sensible do even $750/1000/1500/3000 or something like that. The $800 system they have seems a little underpowered and the $1500 has stuff I don't care about. I'm aiming for a bit under $1000, which I think can I get with an i5, magnetic drive, GTX 660Ti, 8GB, or thereabouts.
I'm doing something a little different, for a writing project. I'm building a "Steambox for real gamers." It's a mini-ITX Z77 board, Coolermaster mini-ITX Elite 120 case, Seasonic 520W fanless 80-plus platinum PSU, GTX 680. It's slightly larger than those old Shuttle boxes, but with better PSU and airflow, while still being pretty quiet. I *think* it even has room for one of those Intel sealed liquid coolers.
I guess this is the place where system build questions go. I'm basically building a machine for my kids, with the potential to turn it into a budget-level gaming PC if I decide to do so later. Would I be doing anything horribly wrong if I went with this build? MSI Z77A-G45 i3 3225 OCZ SSD Thermaltake 430W Power supply 8GB Corsair RAM Thinking about making a Micro Center run tomorrow to get all the pieces, since they have a sale on for the mobo/CPU combo.
Unless you're in a hurry it's usually cheaper to buy on-line to avoid sales tax -- it's a 6-9% discount right there if you get free shipping. Also, depending on the age of your kids, an i3 might be underpowered. I went through this with my kids where I'd buy something 'good enough' and six months later they wanted to play games that couldn't run on their computer anymore. The first computer I got my daughter was strictly for playing old fashioned CD-ROM games and online Flash games, but it didn't take long before she wanted to play Minecraft. And the older kids started on Minecraft and then wanted to play Skyrim. SSDs are still problematic for a lot of people, I'd opt for the size of a mechanical drive at the same price. 60GB just isn't that much these days. That said, if your plan was to essentially toss out that system when your kids start playing 'real' games, then it looks fine (assuming the integrated graphics work for whatever you're planning).
I guess if I'm dropping the SSD (I have some regular drives that will work for it), I can move up to the i5 3570K. Might be a little more future proof. Not sure if that's worth the price increase, though. This is for a 3 and 5 year old who will likely play any kind of graphically-intensive 3D stuff on a console, so the increased processing power would be for video encoding and maybe serving as an HTPC. I doubt I'd need to upgrade for at least 5 years or so, and I'm guessing dropping a nice video card in there would give me the power I needed if I wanted to turn it into a gaming PC (feel free to correct me on that if I'm wrong, been a while since I built one of these things).
I really don't think that's the case - if he's going to run on integrated graphics, the extra cores* of the i5 won't make a lick of difference for gaming... hell, I'm running a measly Celeron G550, and even if that had the HD4000 IGP, I still wouldn't be CPU-bottlenecked in most games. Video encoding is an entirely different kettle of fish, though. There it would make sense to go for as much CPU grunt as you possibly can - not if you have to drop the SSD to make that happen, though. *BTW, what's the score on HT efficiency in real world usage these days? I'm kinda out of the loop on that one - I know it was pretty poor on Prescott, dunno how things are on Ivy Bridge though.
Also, I'll be building a killer gaming rig based on the Bitfenix Prodigy mini-ITX case for tested.com. We're even doing a video of the build. Wish me luck!
So after much soul searching and frenzied addition/removal of items to a virtual shopping card, I've made my decision. Dropped the SSD and switched to a proper power supply for potential future added graphics card. MSI Z77A-G45 i5 3570K CX500M Power Supply 8GB Corsair RAM I'm selling off the remnants of a couple of ancient machines and a busted time capsule to bring some extra funds to the party. If that goes well, maybe the SSD goes back in there. Picking it up tomorrow. Preparing to bleed.
Turned out great! I'm looking at a project where I build a cheaper PC for the kids, but also want to keep it compact and not too noisy. Your article is a great base - ill use a lot of the suggestions and just knock the CPU and graphics card down a notch or two. (And lose the SSD)
I just built another system using a Bitfenix Prodigy. That's just meant to be a killer gaming rig, not a Steam Box, but it turned out well. We videotaped the build from start to finish for Tested.com, and that video will go live next week, around midweek.
So everything came together with no bleeding at all. Regretting having just recently sold a few SATA drives because I could have used them here, but such is life. Wound up having to use a notebook-sized drive for the Win 7 install, then dropped a 500GB in there and set it up to dual boot for OSX Lion. It currently beats the shit out of my now 5-year-old Macbook (not to mention the old PC it's replacing), and I'm strongly considering moving all my libraries (photos, video) onto a portable drive so I can do any of that work on the new machine instead of the laptop. If screen sharing weren't so laggy, I'd probably just use the Macbook as a glorified terminal for the better machine. One thing I'd forgotten about is that I don't have any SATA CD/DVD drives, so I couldn't install my copy of iLife '11. Then I realized that I had an IDE DVD-ROM drive in the old machine...but the enclosure I had was for 3.5" drives...so... Removing the drive from the case would have involved screws and finding a way to keep it level, so I just left it in there. On the right is the 3.5" enclosure, with the IDE and power cables snaked into the case and connected to the DVD-ROM drive. There's a USB cable that runs from the enclosure to the new machine. Too bad I didn't use any duct tape. That would have really tied it all together nicely.
Does anybody have any need for dual 512mb 8800GT cards? They still run fine, SLI works flawlessly, and I'll sell them for cheap. I figured I would ask here before putting them on eBay: http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2720#ov I also have a laptop CPU, an Intel i7 720QM which came out of a performance laptop that burned out its power supply input (common problem on that model Asus). These are actually not that cheap but again I figured I would ask before putting it on eBay. It's definitely a workhorse CPU for that socket and easily replaces i3 and i5 models (PGA988 socket, or Socket G1).
I'm thinking of throwing another hard drive into my machine (that isn't acting up anymore). I'm thinking of picking up this Seagate 2TB drive for $100 (it's got a code until 3/11). I've currently got a 1TB drive with a little less than 400GB left free on it. Would I be better off buying the same drive again and doing some RAID array thing on it? I've heard that the larger hard drives are still flaky. And really, I could delete some games and free up some space on my current HD. I've been doing some video stuff, and that's what the new drive would mostly be for.
Yeah, every time I tried RAID on my home PC it ended badly. I don't think there is any point for a home PC anymore - just get an SSD if you want speed.
Yep. Only use RAID spanning if you don't mind losing everything on both drives when the wind blows the wrong way in the afternoon. You're doubling your potential failure rate, and that's not factoring in any weird stuff that might happen with the controller. Also, if a single hard drive crashes you might have a chance in hell of recovery. RAID array? Good luck. I know this from bad, bad past experience. Also, please tell me you're backing up. Please tell me everyone in this thread is backing up. It's important, damnit!
Yes, I'm backing up. I use Carbonite. And I have everything from before June on the old HD, and everything that's currently being worked on is on Dropbox as well as the HD and Carbonite. So $100 for a 2TB drive then? Justify my purchase so I can feel good about myself.
As much as I hate to be this guy... You're only using 60% of your current capacity. Is there something you need that extra space for right now? If not, you might be better off waiting a little bit. I managed to snag a 3TB for $100 during an Amazon sale at the end of last year. Odds are you'll be able to find something similar if you're willing to wait it out a little.
Y'know, you're right. Mostly I just wanted to buy something, and then be able to brag that I have 3 TB of storage! I was just fiddling with external drives and thinking, "Why am I fiddling with external drives? I should just put a gigantic amount of storage on my PC?" If I just uninstall some games that I'm done playing I will have fucktons of storage again.
Don't be that guy. The one who brags about how much storage space his computer has as though it was actually a thing worth even noting. I mean, unless it's 3TB of SSD storage. I would tip my hat to you if you had that.
