I have never built a pc before, and I am wondering what the best $650 pc is.
I am atually kind of looking for the best $850 PC CAD.
Although, after converting it and calculating higher margins in Canada, I assumed that It was equal to $650 USD.
I plan on overclocking cpu and gpu.
This is my current Idea http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/xWVJZL
Does anyone have any ideas or recommendations?
Basicly that setup looks not that bad to me, the only con for you, is that the cpu is not overclockable. or atleast not very far.
Because it has a locked multiplier.
I will look what i can trow together in CAD.
Oh yeah as a side note, if you are going with an haswell i5, overclocking isn´t realy that nessesary by the way.
Because even at stock speeds, they are pretty capable to max out any single gpu on the market today.
You can't overclock the CPU it's not a "K" part. and with a budget build you want to go AMD. Intels nice and all, but you don't want to go there if you are on a budget. if you were to go intel, most of your budget would of gone on the Processor alone. if this is PC build is Gaming Focused the most expensive thing you must invest in is your GPU. Why? cause that's what you are using to game lol.
Here's what i put together.
http://ca.pcpartpicker.com/p/GTmPHx
When building a PC, you want to make sure you don't skimp out two primary components. the motherboard and the PSU (Power Supply Unit) why? you may ask, well your Power-Supply will power your ENTIRE system. if you get a cheap PSU chances are it's not providing good enough power to your system and there's a chance it can catch fire and PROBABLY take something with it. whether your GPU, processor, motherboard whatever. and with the motherboard, you want to make sure motherboard is made with good quality components. and have excellent VRMs to keep your CPU under control.
All the components i put in the build are overclock-able and are excellent components. with the R9-285, you get all the goodies AMD offers with their GPUs. Mantle, True-Audio, Free-Sync and even Direct X12 support which in the future will add extra performance to your games since all the CPU over-head will be held on the GPU.
Also for future reference, You DON'T need a gaming motherboard. i just put that in there cause it's the best motherboard for that platform. and is feature rich.
I personaly dont realy see any point going with the Athlon 760K to be honnest.
That cpu is realy lacking on L3 cache, which definitely will make sense in cpu bound games.
I´n my opinnion "op´s" own build is way better, intel is simply the way to go if you can afford it.
Diffrence in performance between a 280 and 285 isnt realy existend, so for that matter it does not make sense to cheap out on the cpu + mobo for that part.
The i5 will simply perform better in gaming, then anything AMD has to offer right now, and it will give him a way better upgrade path for the future as far as GPU´s goes.
The Athlon paired with a midrange gpu will basicly not perform bad, but in cpu bound games that cpu will still be the limited factor, i realy dont see this issue change with DX12 at all.
Next to that, it will also take a while before we will even see, fully compatible DX12 games for that matter, But offcourse those are slowly starting to show up.
Still this does not change the lack of per core performance and ipc that AMD cpu´s in general have.
They simply dont make sense to me at all atm, unless the budget is realy tight of course.
But since "op" can easaly get away with an i5, i would totaly advice to go with that.
Because if he wants more performance in the futur, he will be totaly ready for that, he just need to buy a better gpu till then.
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Of course the i5 is the better performer. but considering the budget, if the focus is gaming, he shouldn't be investing most of his money for the CPU. the processor is good enough and so is the graphics card. and later down the road he can upgrade to Godaveri, if he wishes. the processors are dirt cheap to upgrade later on. if this were lets say a $1200 CAD build. then that's a whole other discussion, the intel would most definitely be the better choice and it really wouldn't harm the budget. he could of grabbed an R9-290x and it would be great.. but for someone who is new to this, and wants to have something good for now, the build i recommend will be fine. For the future we already know core-performance will not be the end all for gaming anymore. and we've seen how massive the performance increases we get with Mantle as it is.
well, the i5 build he made himself totaly fits his budget.
like i said, there is allmost no diffrence between the tonga 285 gpu and the Tahitie 280 performance wise.
so for that matter, the i5 build would be the better choice imo
Of course this does not mean that your build isnt good, because it looks realy nice.
But i dont think that going with the Athlon over the the i5 for cost savings, will make a whole lot of sense.
I have that exact GPU for 5-6 months, works great for me. If you want more info and oc recommendations for msi afterburner read here:
Also a youtube vid:
That PSU is much lower quality than the xfx unit I had in my build. Just because it is made by corsair doesn't mean it is good. That psu isn't even a rebranded seasonic part like the rest of corsair's psus.
For BF4, the r9 280 will perform better than an r9 285 due to the 280's higher vram amount. an athalon 760k might bottleneck my gpu in some cases
Great, I also watched Jay's video on my gpu, and that is how I chose it over the windforce.
Could you tell me what overclock you got, and what you think is realistic for me to get. I have no experiance overclocking.
You can choose whatever PSU you want.
The parts i put in the build are a recommendation. it's your money and you can do whatever you please.
I've personally have had excellent experience with Corsair PSUs in fact i'm using one now.. i can't speak for anyone else. And as a reminder for future reference, more VRAM does not make a card better. there are 4GB models of the R9-270x cards that don't help performance at all. similarly with the GTX 770 4GB models and 4GB GTX 960 cards, They didn't realistically do anything to help the card perform better at higher resolutions.
that doesn't mean overall it doesn't help other cards. the reason i chose an R9-285 is strictly for the overall performance and feature set. it supports DirectX 12, Free-Sync and True-Audio. the R9-280 does not.
My choice in the AMD chip was strictly because it's an excellent CPU for the money. and this is a mid-range card. it's not going to bottleneck it. if it were maybe a R9-290x. that's a whole other discussion. BUT the reason the AMD CPU's are over-looked is strictly due to the core-performance. which in the future with DirectX 12, Mantle, and Vulkan API's we've seen core performance is not going to matter anymore. in fact you can see it for yourself it you play a Mantle based game.
And the R9-285 DOES beat a R9-280. depending on the game. it's by a few frames OR it's by 10%.
I know that more vram doesn't make anything faster, but 2gb is considered a slight bottleneck in bf4, which is a game I most hope to get into. The recommended specs include 3gb of vram, and there isn't enough of a speed difference elsewhere to justify the cost and lower bf4 performance.
2GB is not considered a slight bottleneck in BF4. in fact it's not a bottleneck at all. and you can see it clearly if you watch those videos. the only time more VRAM makes sense is if you are playing heavily graphic intensive games or if you are playing at high resolutions. For example heavily modded Skyrim uses more than 3GB of VRAM at 1440p. Shadow of Mordor annhilates your VRAM at 1440p. for 1080p gaming 2GBs is perfectly fine even 3GB is more than enough.
The way a game is rendered is by the CPU and GPU. some games like a fast CPU and some don't. Future Games are starting to get more and more GPU bound as apposed to CPU bound. Mantle, DirectX 12 and Vulkan have these "down to the metal" features, where games will take all the overhead on the processor and put it towards the graphics card. core-performance won't matter anymore. what will matter is extra processor cores. which right now, for this moment speaking, a 6-core doesn't make sense for gaming.
because it doesn't utilize all 6 cores. with DirectX 12 you could have a 6 core 8 core processor and your game will use ALL 6 or 8 cores. that is going to happen in a year or so when Direct X12 games start coming through the pipe-line.
I would like to reiterate myself. it's your money and it's just my recommendation. the R9-285 BEATS the R9-280 in 2 out of 3 tests. the reason i chose it is strictly cause it out-performs the R9-280 slightly and it has all of AMD's new features. despite the R9-285 having 2GB of VRAM. and basically the point i'm trying to make is, in about a year or so, my current i5 4670k is not going to show any more benefit in my games then an AMD CPU in about a year or so.
what's going to determine gaming performance is how many cores you and how fast is your graphics card. which AMD is king in this regard. they are very generous with their FX chips by providing you with many cores as apposed to Intel where you have to pay the premium.
Ok thank You
280X on the same price point as the GTX960, is a way better choice.
280X is an old tahiti card, but its still way better then a GTX960.
About cpu´s, like i said above an haswell i5 is way better then anything aMD has to offer for gaming, and i have no where seen proof that DX12 is going to change that.
The cores of the haswell cpu´s are way faster then AMD cores, and that still matters.
i realy dont see any vallid reason, why you should botter with an old AMD platform atm for gaming, it simply does not make any sense to me.
I have a FX8350 for allmost 3 years, and i definitely know its pro´s and con´s. The performance per core is totaly rubbish compaired to intel haswell cpu´s.
The FX8350 is even slower then a core 2 Duo, wenn it comes to per core performance.
I dont see any DX version, is going to fix this problem lol.
AMD simply needs to get their lazy asses to work, and release a proper line of new cpu´s.
I got the same OC as in this recomendation: http://www.hardocp.com/image.html?image=MTQxMzE1ODMzMmlwUnZhOHdMOFRfM180X2wuanBn.
Although some games my card got a slight coil wire while playing with it OC. It was in fist full of frags, think it might have something to do with it pumping out extreme fps during less demanding games. After investigation with fraps. Sorry it took so long for me to reply.
Thank You.