Critique my Haswell-E build

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1

Hello everyone.

I am in the middle of choosing parts for my computer. Even though I built a PC in the past because I moved a few times I left that system behind. That means I am building a system fully from scratch including peripherals and display. I already acquired good headphones, and mouse and expecting keyboard as a gift, but didn't choose it yet (Razer Blackwidow Chroma Maybe?).

This is the build I have in mind:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-5820K 3.3GHz 6-Core Processor (£274.74 @ Aria PC)
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock 3 113.8 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler (£49.98 @ Aria PC)
Motherboard: Asus X99-A/USB 3.1 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard (£201.65 @ Dabs)
Memory: *Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory (£107.99 @ Aria PC)
Storage: Western Digital BLACK SERIES 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (£58.74 @ Aria PC)
Video Card: Zotac GeForce GTX 980 Ti 6GB AMP! Extreme Video Card (£602.78 @ Ebuyer)
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case (£71.95 @ Amazon UK)
Power Supply: Corsair 850W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£134.99 @ Ebuyer)
Case Fan: Fractal Design GP14-WT 68.4 CFM 140mm Fan (£9.80 @ CCL Computers)
Monitor: AOC G2460PG 144Hz 24.0" Monitor (£296.99 @ Aria PC)
Total: £1809.61
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-07-08 16:31 BST+0100
To give you a little bit of a background about how this is build will be used:
I am planning to use this system for all my work and entertainment needs.

I am a software developer so will be using this machine for whatever software projects I come up with which would usually involve running visual studio and SQL server. I am also notorious with my internet browser habits, I'll have at least 20 tabs open after 5 minutes of browsing. Plus skype, torrent and other programs, so I have no trouble hitting 8 GB of RAM just by doing that. That's why 16 GB.

I might do some video capturing/editing but not sure how I often I will do that yet.
I am also planning on gaming with this system and even though I will have one display initially I am planning to buy additional two afterwards for some surround gaming in simulator games like StarCitizen and newest Need For Speed. I am not shy on dialing down some settings to get high frame rate so I am not to worried about not be able to run any games in the near future, and I can always fall back to single display with high AA settings if required. Plus G-Sync should help a lot with any frame rate dis anyway.

I am also planning to hook this PC to 4K TV, that is in the same room but mainly will be used watch movies and TV Shows (maybe some playing some RPGs like Witcher 3 if I feel like it). I wonder how crazy it would be to hook one 1080p display and 4K TV, and how much crazier to do
this with triple monitors and 4K. I am OK with disabling additional displays in software, but can I leave cables. But would like to know if I can operate 3 displays or at least one while someone else is watching movie in 4K on TV.

So I as I just mentioned eventually I am planning to buy two additional 1080p displays and run them from the same 980 Ti video card, or maybe buy second one for SLI if required. I am concerned about 28 PCI lanes on the CPU of my choice, will these be enough though.

With this setup I am also not sure about SSD for my OS. I could go M.2 instead of SATA. From what I read M.2 uses 4 lanes though. Not sure if this would give me any tangible benefits.

I assume even with SLI setup PCI slots would look like x16/x8/x4 which should provide enough bandwidth. From what I know SATA express would use PCI Express lanes, but the WD drive I chose uses SATA 3.0 which does not require any PCI Express lanes.

As you probably guessed I am planning to torture this system quite heavily, so I will be overclocking CPU to at least 4.0 GHz, but it's quite cool at my place I might push it to 4.4 for stable operation. GPU will be overclocked if stock performance will be not as satisfactory before I consider investing in SLI.

Having all of the above in consideration I still would expect the system to be quite especially while watching TV or browsing Web. I do understand that this system will be audible when playing games but I am not as worried about that as I am planning to use headphones.

I am planning to add additional fan in the front to create positive pressure in the case. I don't want water cool my CPU even with AIO cooler, as I feel it's more risky and a bit noisier. AIO solutions have 3 sources of sound (and points of failure) as opposed to one.

As for Operating system, I didn't factor it in the cost, because I get it for free with MSDN's Developer license.

So... am I heading in the right direction? How realistic my expectation about what this system could achieve?
Any changes, suggestion, critique will be appreciated. My budget initially was about 1500 pounds for a system without one display and, but I guess I can push it up to 2000 pounds for everything (PC+Display).

2

I say go for it. Since you have an M.2, I would go for the M.2 SSD, and if it isn't fast enough or something (I'm still confused by the whole thing, so I can't give full advice), just grab another SSD and use the M.2 for cache or something to record to.

I highly doubt the rig won't do hat you want it to do. The only thing I might add is more RAM, if you can get higher capacity sticks, get them. It can't hurt, and with that many cores + hyperthreading, you could realistically be doing a very intensive task on 6 of the logical processors, and the rest of them on gaming (totally not what I do on my FX-8320, tehe).

3

1080p TN panel, 980ti is a bit overkill for it.
And you're more likely to get a dud graphics card than a AIO anyways, just thought I'd pitch that in.
As far as the other stuff goes its nice, 5820k and 16 gigs 4 channel is the sweet spot for X99.
Might not matter but I'd pitch in a bit more on the motherboard.

4

Nice build.

Personally I may disagree with @thelonewanderer about the overkill of 980ti.. just because in all the benchmarks i've seen, hitting 144fps isn't that common. Also you could downsample from 4k to 1080p, like logan suggests.. apparently looks better than 1080p with filters on.

I built a similar rig to you about 6-8 weeks ago, about to add the graphics card now...

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/HpKd23

I got the m.2 and have no regrets... Samsung SM951 256GB M.2-2280

Instead of getting 550 read and write from a sata ssd, this gets 2200 read and 1200 write on average.. makes a noticeable difference. Whether you need it or not is another matter.

5

build looks great to me.
The 980Ti is definitely the card i would pickup with a budget like that.

6

Yes. I was thinking about down sampling before I get two additional displays. Still not sure how this card would handle triple 1080p monitors with a 4K TV at the same time. Not gaming obviously but watching a movie while browsing web or doing some light coding in parallel.

On and maybe any suggestions for mechanical keyboard?

7

Having that many pixels while not gaming would be a breeze for that card. Basically any decent gpu should be able to playback video while doing other things on the other screens without a problem. You are good to go.

1 Like
8

This is great to hear! Can't wait to actually start acquiring parts for this build. Some people suggested a beefier PSU, about 1000W (Like Seasonic Platinum-1000). I was wondering would it run more or less efficient than 750W/850W PSU while I'll have one GPU? Or having a PSU closer to your estimated wattage is better? I did hear that 80 PLUS rating is rated under 50% load but didn't do any research yet to confirm this.