All right. I'm finally converting to PC from Xbox 360. My problem is, I'm not exactly sure where to start. I want to be able to play most games at max, and get at least 30-40 frames min. Thing is I really want to record game-play/ commentate. I've been looking at the Avermedia Graphics card that is featured in Ocelot so my gaming experience won't be hindered. I will probably play in 1080p, but I want to upgrade to 1440p. Rendering would be a big thing(not nearly as much as gaming), as I want to make videos. I already have a good mouse, Keyboard, and monitor, so don't factor that into the price. I want to be able to play games without ever having to worry about anything, other than anti-aliasing. Graphics memory would be important; I want to be able to mod games like FNV or Skyrim with mods like NMC's texture pack, or other resource hungry mods. Please help me out. If anything is unreasonable for how much I want to spend, please tell me, and please recomend the best build I could make for this ammount.
If possible, give some options. Many thanks for making this transition easier. OH! And yes, I want to build it.
That's what I would build for what you're doing... there's not even really much overkill if you want to play at 1440p in the future, movie edit, etc... could cheap out on the cpu cooler, I guess, since the Xeon isn't overclockable, but you've got $100 to play with...
This is what i came up with http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3nw4Q This build is IMO the best, if you want to overclock, or add a second GPU in the future. I picked the parts with the future in mind, but i can't just say to you that this will last for like 5 years, because i can't tell the future, but for today, this rig will max out any game in 1080p and in 1440p you can play with high settings with very playable FPS.
There are a lot of things where you could save money in this build tho. For excample, if you are not into OC, you could go with the Xeon E3-1230 V3 for excample and with stock, or something like a coolermaster Hyper 212 evo cooler, and a less expencive mobo. That would save almost 100-150$. Also, if you don't edit that much, you could go with a 8 gb set of ram, lower the SSD to a 120 GB one etc...
But why i picked these parts is that i wanted to give you an excample of a great build, that is somewhat "futureproof" and OC ready, if you want to do it. There is spare room in the PSU for another R9 290 GPU, and lots of fast storage with the 250 GB SSD and the 2 TB SSHD.
Hoocee12's build id good and he brings up good points.. I'm sorry DrunkenPanda, but the build is a bit off for a gaming rig.. The editing part is more for editing gaming stuff.. not really professional.
There is what I came up with for $1820
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3nzOM
This has some better items that use current pricing value, like the Antec P280 case is a an awesome case and is at a great price right now. The powersupply here is also lower price and enough to easily run this rig.
I also changed up the Storage options. I have a smaller SSD for windows and primary programs, and one SSD that can be used for gaming/editing. The HDD is really for long term storage and backup. So with you finish a video project, you back it up there, then clear the space on the SSD. Having multiple drives like this increases performance and life span. Each SSD is being used for different tasks so they are being used a LOT less.
... why's my Xeon build a "bit off for gaming"? Do you need to overclock a hyperthreaded CPU to have a gaming build? Cause games don't, and can't, use hyperthreading... so technically if this was a gaming build, anything over an i5 is superfluous on socket 1150...
Same quality coolers, same basic mobo features, minus overclocking and a few bells and whistles he won't use, ram clocking at 1600-1866 is unnoticeable, ESPECIALLY in gaming...we both have 780 ti in the build... and if any man(or woman) argues against a Fractal Design Define R4, rest assured he/she has never owned one...
I actually suggested the better PSU, contrary to price and efficiency ratings, as the RM series is built for silent fan output and can fail rigor testing (though they may have fixed it by now, the article I read was from November http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/11/13/corsair_rm750_750w_power_supply_review/1#.U0NDAfldV8E). The TX line is solid...
I would find it hard to believe he's running more than 120GB worth of windows and programs... and I don't believe in paying to store games on a SSD... waste of money for minimal gain...
So... your build can overclock and has better storage... and that's worth $320? I doubt he'd notice the difference between the two builds... both are ridiculously nice gaming builds that can multitask and video edit with ease...
Anyways....
I'd build hoocee's build, but with a Xeon E3 / H87 chipset / cheaper cooler and take my girlfriend out with the $200+ saved to shut her up about buying a $1500 PC to ignore her with... I just threw mine together in a few spare seconds at work... didn't notice the reference design 780ti...
Corsair Vengence is overpriced, The RM series is cheap chinese shit, and the 4770K is totally unnecessary. For gaming grab a 4670K instead and use the money on a larger SSD and better case fans. Grab an Enermax, Seasonic, Fractal, Be Quiet, or PC Power and Cooling power supply. Get some ram that isn't egregiously overpriced for what it is (Some ADATA XPG, or some Kingston). Otherwise this build is the best so far.
Hey man, I didn't mean to say your build is bad, but I am willing to bet that he will be wanting premium parts and speed in the budget. The SSD for games and editing really helps load times write speeds, which are important for recording gameplay. Faster loading means less to edit out of his videos and faster writes means less hang ups and jitters during recording.
I think your build is great for someone only looking to play games at high framerates, but he is looking to record and display it on probably youtube or twitch. The windows SSD is for windows, all your office and editing software, and what ever else you want to put on it. I have an 80gb ssd as my windows drive and it gets full if I dont keep it maintained. I have a 256gb ssd for just games and it really helps with load times. The drive is mostly full with all the games I play. Load-as-you-go games like skyrim can get jitters on a HDD with all the mods and etc. Then I have 2 HDD's, 1 for media like movies and music, and another for backup. Seperating the tasks keeps the data more secure, faster, more reliable, and keeps the drives running longer.
Anyway, there are some good reasons for the storage, I didn't mean to say your build is bad, because its not, but if you wanted budget, an i5 overclocked would probably do better than the XEON, or an AMD 8350 overclocked. But if you got the budget, then why not. Not everyone would needs to save the extra money for other things.
The ram was actually the cheapest ram for the specs. The power supply is fine and doesn't have reliability problems. The 4770k is a great processor for his recording/editing needs. Especially if he has multithreaded applications for video conversion and editing.
Make a build on PC partpicker thats better and in budget and let the OP decide.
The Xeon 1230v3 is literally an i7 4770 without the iGPU and a slightly lower clock speed. You're paying an extra ~$100 to be able to overclock.
I do think the i7 4770k is worth it if you have the budget, but in most scenarios the Xeon will be better, especially since CPUs are not the bottleneck in most games.
Well that's a pretty steep price point to start with. Considering it's your first build, I recommend going for something a tad bit less, but with the possibility to upgrade and overclock. Although PC Gaming is great, it may not be for everyone. There is a slight chance you might not like it. Also, for what you are doing, you can save yourself some money because in PC's there is a point of diminishing return where the price per performance just goes down. For example: Here is my skyrim mod list:
And here is an album of some of my screenshots. : https://imgur.com/a/gijk5
I can also play Battlefield 4 on High, Assassin's creed 4 on almost ultra, Crysis 3 on high all on really good frames. What am I running this all on? Well I'm glad you asked! Look at my profile and my specs are there! And I would consider what I have low-mid end.
Although it's your money you can spend it how you want, if you want to go all out, more power to you! I would like to do that myself! But if you want to get a better bang for the buck, here is what I would build:
AMD FX 8350 8 core CPU
Asus Sabertooth 990fx
8Gb of ram
R9 290 or GTX 780 if going 1440p, if your staying at 1080p for like another 2years or so, R9 280x, or GTX 770
Solid CPU Cooler: Xigmatek Dark Night, Noctua Nh D14, Phanteks 140mm dual tower cooler etc..
Sub $100 ATX case, the reason why I go ATX is because it's more expandable, you are not stuck with cramming alot of stuff in a mini or micro case.
Solid 80+ bronze or better power supply from a high end brand such as corsair, XFX, Seasonic, etc,
1 TB Drive
SSD for boot
PC Partpicker: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/fatninjamke/saved/4a1i
Eh-oh. Although the build you recommended is pretty solid, I am kinda a "Full Power Forward" kinda guy. I literally try to push my "measly" laptop to the max on how far it can go with mods. Also, I do love Pc gaming, I have played PC as a secondary to console gaming for a long time. It's just I never appreciated the gaming quality and experience on Pc. Well, now I'm dedicated, and I really want a Pc that will be up-gradable, yet more than powerful enough to record, game/edit. Btw, I am going to buy a Avermedia Live Gamer HD. Don't let this sway the build any, because I want a machine that can handle stress. Finally, Im kinda locked in at wanting 16gb of Ram for the sheer fact of editing massive projects(not just gaming related, but school animation related) Even I think 1,850 is kinda pushin it, but I feel as if anything under 1,600 isn't going to give me the kick I want. If you could come up with a build based off that really vague description I'd appreciate it.
This is a Sample build I came up with
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3oEdn
I'm going to scavenge a optical drive off one of my old desktops and I believe I have a copy of windows 7 somewhere, but if I dont than I will get windows 8.1 pro
Again, I have no clue what I'm doing picking those parts, except some research I have conducted. I know the motherboard is kinda outrageous for the build, and if you could modify this build to be like 1,800, I would be 100% thankful.
This is what I would build for $1800 then. It has massive overclocking potential from the Sabertooth motherboard and AIO watercooler. Killer graphics potential from that R9 290x. Fractal design case and Corsair Rm PSU make it dead silent. SSD for fast boot times. 16GB of high quality RAM for even the toughest of projects.
Regarding your previously linked build. A 4820k would be useless because it performs similarly to the 4770k. And because it's LGA 2011, your stuck with buying an expensive motherboard. I high end Z87 motherboard costs the same as a low end 2011 board and I doubt that you would be using any of the LGA 2011 board features.
Offcourse option 2 will be the best, in terms of gaming performance. Option 1 and 3 are abit equaly. But, its a bit depending which software you are using for editing, i also made an option 4 for the editing part, if your software utilize open cl.
Which ever is the best choice of those 4 is depending on your editing software. option 1 and 3 are cheaper. and probably better bang for buck. But if you just want the best performance then option 2 or 4 depending on the editing software.
Good luck choosing ☺
Grtz Angel
edit: if you don´t care about overclocking, you could also cheap out on the cpu and mobo, grabbing a H87 board with a Intel Xeon E3-1230V3.
In fact, the logical thread processing from an i7 can actually SLOW DOWN gaming FPS... from that point, the i7 generally outperforms about a half a frame per second from being better ASIC quality... since i5's are, a lot of the time, i7's that failed hyper threading tests...
i7's certainly have their niche in multi-threaded programs, video processing, virtualization, and pretty much every other CPU intensive task that can utilize hyper threading...
Basically, hyperthreading in CPU intensive tasks, such as video processing, fully optimize the processor to handle more throughput by scheduling tasks to run while it's waiting on other tasks to finish if the processor isn't at full load... with gaming, it's using serial processing and doesn't have any room to optimize the task... therefore, an i5 isn't any more of a bottleneck than an i7, despite the i7 performing MUCH better at other tasks... this is why, if you're using a rig specifically just for gaming, it's the biggest waste of money you can do in a rig to upgrade your processor to an i7...
anyways, since the OP is video editing and doing 3D animation... an i7 is optimal for his needs... but games don't use hyperthreading... it actually doesn't even make sense for them to... the reason Intel performs better in gaming CPU benchmarks is largely due to the single core performance, which in some games specifically that are badly coded for multithreading, like ARMA, etc, an i3 (using only two cores, since the hyperthreading is irrelevant) can VASTLY outperform an 8350 in FPS output...
I meant logical core... typo... here is why you are incorrect about simultaneous threads having no priority over one another...
"In a core with HT, the registers are all duplicated. This means that one core will have 2 sets of registers and this is what the operating will see as a “logical core” since the sum of the registers represents the processor’s state. We’ll call these sets A and B. Even though it appears as two cores, they will still be sharing the same cache, branch predictor, front-end, and most importantly, execution unit. Because they still share so many resources, only one thread will technically execute at once. The advantage of adding the HT logic is that if a thread is executing and stalls for any reason, the other thread can be switched in very fast while the cause of the stall in the first thread is addressed. To better illustrate how this works, consider the following:
-Set A is considered the current state of the processor -Thread A starts executing -Thread A needs a value from memory that isn’t in the cache -Memory access is very time consuming in CPU terms, so thread A is considered stalled -Instead of wasting cycles waiting for the memory operation to complete, set B is considered the current state -Thread B is now executing until it stalls or until thread A can execute again (memory operation finishes)
This process basically just continues on constantly. Now, there should be an obvious question: What can cause a thread to stall? There’s a few things, the simplest one to understand is a cache miss. This is when the thread goes to access a value that isn’t currently in the cache or any of the registers. A branch misprediction can also occur when the branch predictor prefetches the wrong instructions into the cache.
There is another time HyperThreading kicks in, and that is if one thread is using Floating-Point resources while the 2nd is only using Integer resources. HT will allow them both to execute simultaneously while they don't conflict."
In essence, the core has so many shared resources, it can only execute 1 task at a time... but what makes it faster is thread stalling and memory latency gets counterbalanced by completing other tasks in the mean time... it optimizes the core to appear to run faster, by keeping the CPU from being lazy and allows multiple processes to queue at the same time...
unless your game has background applications (such as streaming) that queue separate threads outside of the game's sequential stream, no... it doesn't make any sense for it to run faster with hyper-threading... which is why, in real-life benchmarks, an i7 performs negligibly faster than an i5...it can actually slow down the gaming sequential stream through branch mispredictions and cache misses...
but I don't know what I'm talking about, obviously... and am apparently, full of shit...
