Hey everyone!
I'm planning on building a pretty high end ($3-4K AUD give or take) and I was pretty dead set on parts until a few days ago where I was told that my choice of GPU was "Overkill" and when I said I wanted to just destroy everything on ultra and make my PC as future proof as possibile I was told I'm doing it wrong and that I should do something else. It's going to be my first PC build and I'm fairly new to PC gaming. I'm origionally an XBOX 360 gamer but the whole reason I'm moving to PC is because I'm a graphics whore lmao. Here were my specs:
Intel Core i7 3770K
ASRock Extreme9 Z77 Motherboard
3x GTX 680's with custom waterblocks
Corsair Vengeance-8GB (or Might get 16GB) Dual Channel DDR3 (or something like that will probably decide on what looks best if I see kits in a shop or something)
Corsair Force Series 3 90GB
Western Digital Caviar Black 1.0 TB
PSU: I'll probably get a nice Corsair one like their new 1200i or a nice Seasonic one
Silverstone TJ11
CPU and GPU's will be watercooled (Haven't decided on what kits and rather)
Anyway so that is what my ststem was going to be but this guy reckons that 3 GTX 680's is overkill for a single monitor and if you really wanted to future proof you either get something like a single 660ti-680 and then sell it when the next gen card comes out and get one of those if you really want to future proof. But even single high end cards have trouble running some games fully maxed out. Well not super bad. But average FPS's at around 45 and min's being 30 and I know that's playable but I want it to be the smoothest gaming experience possible without having to upgrade like every year.
So now I have no idea what I need to do now and I know I'm blabbing on like an idiot non stop and I'm wasting too much of your time with this huge arse post but if you could help me out that'd be much appreciated! Thankyou! :)
oh yah i would probly agree that the 3 680s r overkill i would go with 2, it really depends on your monitor situation if u r running one 1080p monitor u probly could get away with just one 680 at most i would use 2 for a single monitor for future proofing and if u do cut out one of the 680s i would send the extra money towards a bigger ssd maybe a 512 gig
Yeah that seems good! So you're saying keep two and that should all be fine? How many years future proofing can I get out of that? I'm not too fussed on price cuts if I want I could save up for another month on top to get a 512 gig ssd but If that's what you think then thanks for you advice :)
single/dualGPUS will get 60+FPS if your monitor doesn't go higher than 1080P
But will it be future proof for games maxed out settings for 3 years?
if you go withthe 680 you should be good for a few yeasr as far as fps goes if your only playing at 1080. Heck i am using a 5750 and getting 40 and up in sc2 on ultra wt the moment with a phenom 2 940 be. the bigest ihing i would look at is if your are wanting to go with 2 680 just get a 690, ot uses less power produces less heat and takes up less room in the case which should help with air flow. If it was ne and i know i mite have a different opinion on theis than others but go ahead and do the 2 x 8Gb dimms of memory now and when you get ectra get 2 more of the same and creata ram disk with the extra 24 that windows and the game wont use. of someone knows more about the ramdisk that would be great.
Okay that's reassuring! But I thought a 690 was more like two 670's in terms of performance? Well at least it was more like that with the 590 being more like two 570's. I heard a fair bit about ramdisk! But I know in term of synthetics and in bandwidth tests it makes ssd's look like a joke lmao but in real world tests such as loading games does it really make a difference? Also what are you trying to say in terms of what should I put on my ramdisk? And how big should I make the partition if I get 32GB worth?
as far as the size of the ram disk it all depends im still learning bout it all myself im gonn set mine up in the spring when i get school money back sigh unemployed lol. check out anandtech.com they do awsome comparison charts on your main components. and hears the chart for the 690 vs 2 680s in sli the 690 is like s lil less in some tests but in most they are within the margin of error,
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/585?vs=586
with the ramdisk i would either go with a 16-24 partition i think and leace at least the other eight as system. im hoping someone else gets on hear that know more about ramdisk than i do lol
ohh almost forgot that the march issue of maximumpc.com had an article about how to set ram disk up
haha aw I just got a job lmao so I'm gonna try and work hard and save up! Maybe I might just get the 690 but in some cases the 680's pull away a bit more than the 690 but we'll see. I might get the version that has more than 2 gigs of vram per GPU though.
haha sounds good! How big is windows 7 itself? Imagine using ramdisk for boot that'd be nutters if it could take full advantage of the bandwidth!
you can't install windows on ramdisk, once ram looses power it looses the data on it, also ramdisk is a program within windows, windows 7 takes about 8-18GB
I heard with ramdisk or something else that makes partitions with your ram you can make a permant partition, the only downside being that shutdown times are a bit slower. How come the variable of windows 7's size is so large?
permanent as in it recreates it every boot so by the time you get into windows its already made
8 is like absolute minimum install, 18 is with your basic programs, also windows likes to create a 8GB pagefile without telling you
you could make a pagefile I believe on the ramdisk, but I think there is a program that already does that forgot what it's called
Ahh, I see.
Do you think it'd help in game loading times for example? I've seen comparision videos of a 7200rpm HDD vs a SSD and if the loading time was usually 15 sec's or longer the SSD was always only like 4 seconds faster. Do you think It'd be the same with an only minor improvement compared to how well SSD's perform in other tasks such as windows boot?
well my friend ztrain saw his friend with 64GB of ram did something with ramdisk and skyrim loads were like 8 miliseconds
Holy shit that's fucking nutters lmfao deffs getting 32 gigs of ram now! ;D
try to get low latency high freqeuncy ram if you can 2133 with 9-9-9 would be great for it
I heard ram speeds above 1600mhz and lower than average latencys don't really make a difference but I guess it would with a ram disk? Could you kindly give me a link to ram with those specs if you don't mind? :)
Pick your poison
1866
2133
2400
smaller 2x4GB and 4x4GB varients have a bit lower latencies but you wanted 32GB, unless you wanted to go socket 2011 and have 8 ram slots
Latency's seem pretty good to me!
Besides making a ramdisk what's the benefits of higher feq ram? The Dominator GT's and that AVEXIR ram modules look sick imo!
But yes not willing to move to 2011 because this build's costing me a shit ton as it is haha.
latecy is like how fast the data can go back and forth between the CPU, freq. is how much shit it can do in between that time
I imagine ram disk eats up bandwidth, since its being splite between the game, ramdisk for the game, and windows and various programs high freq. is also good for video editting while low latency is good for games