Final Touches on First Build.....opinions?

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1

I've decided to build a gaming(some video editing) PC because i've had enough of Battlefield 3 on the PS3 and I am starting to favour the advantages of a PC over a console. I did quite a lot of research in the past few weeks to help me decide what parts to get, now I have a list but because of the vast amount of hardware to choose from I could do with some more input so I decided to sign up and ask here. For all the parts I will try to reason why I chose them to backup my decisions, if you have any advice/suggestions please back yourself up with something (I dont want: "use this graphics card because its better.", please tell me why and give me some test results or something, thanks. I am trying to learn as much as possible while I build this PC!)

My list of parts: (for your info everything will be bought in Germany and budget is around 1000€ (1100$) but dont worry to much about this, im flexible)

Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-Z77X-UD3H DFD 

- I chose this board because it supports SLI/crossfire, has lots of USB 3.0 ports, overclocking capabilites and its not crazy expensive. I was looking at AsRock boards but they are apparently less reliable than ASUS, MSI and GIGABYTE.

CPU: i5-3570k

- chose this due to the overclocking capabilities and most reviews praise this processor, dont want the i7-3770k because from what I read gaming wont be affected and only difference is 4 more virtual cores. I don't want an AMD.

CPU Cooler: stock/closed loop liquid cooler/Noctua NH D14 or similar

- this is the first part im very unsure about, I was pretty set to use the Antec KÜHLER H20 920 closed loop liquid cooler but then I had doubts about liquid cooling due to the chances of leaking and frying everything. I didnt really want a high end air cooler due to their size. I will eventually overclock but now I am thinking about using the stock cooler for a while before choosing a better cooler and overclocking. 

 Memory (RAM): Kingston HyperX 1600mhz 4GB x2

- I always think ram is not that important as long as its present, the kingston is one of the cheapest I could find but to be honest I didnt spend much time on this part. 

Graphics Card (GPU): GTX 660 (for now, SLI enventually when BF4 gets released) or maybe GTX 670/GTX680/AMD 7970

- most important part in this PC and the one I am most unsure about! Chose the GTX 660 because it is relatively cheap and can easily play BF3. I also found this http://alienbabeltech.com/main/?p=32679&page=3 where two 660’s in SLI beat a AMD 7970 and GTX 680, this gave me the idea with the 660’s thinking they would be able to play pretty much anything in the near future. For some reason I prefer Nvidia (CUDA does speed up video conversion and AMD doesn’t have this, right?). I get that the 660’s have a slower bus speed than the 670/680/7970, but they still seem to perform well?! Definitely need help here!

Storage: SSD/HDD

- I definitely will be using a SSD at some point so I was thinking about using only an SSD to start off with and buy a HDD when I need the extra storage. I’m not worried about this though.

Case: Antec Three Hundred Two

- chose this case because it has USB 3.0 that plugs directly in to the motherboard, has lots of options for fans for lots of air flow, has easily removable dust filters, looks sleek/simple and should be big enough. I don’t need a fancy case.

Power Supply (PSU): Corsair CX750M

- 750W should be enough power even for SLI (or?), is modular so fewer cables to worry about, 80plus certified.

Optical Drive: the cheapest I find

Operating System: Windows 7 HP 64bit

That’s all folks! Your input will be much appreciated. Oh, and I will be building this in June so if you know of any spectacular hardware that will be released soon let me know XD

 http://de.pcpartpicker.com/p/Onmm <- to make it easier if you want to send me an edited list

2

Everything looks pretty good, but ill start off with some reccommendations 

Cooler: For the price and Air cooler will be better than an AIO, and it will also be cooler than everything except Dual 120mm or 140mm rads, and a few doublt thickness single 120mm rads. id recoommend the Phanteks PH-TC14PE. 

GPU: id try and find a 7870/7870XT, while the GTX 660 is a decent card for the money a 7870 is much fatser than it, will scale better in Crossfre and also Overclock better. It should also be mentioned that Open CL is just as effective for GPU accelerated rendering as CUDA, the Adobe Vide Editors are the only pieces of software i know of so far that only supports CUDA and not both. 

Storage: starting off with an SSD would be nice, but id suggest you get one at least 256Gb in size, they fill up faster than youd expect. 

 

3

looks good dude

things you may want to consider.

im asuming your using your 64 gig ssd as a chaching drive, instead have a look for an msata ssd instead for that, just cause the transfer read/write rates are just as good and you get back a sata port on your motheroard. and yeah your motherboard does have a msata port.

also with your gpu, it really comes down to what software your edditing on. if your using adobe premeire and after effects then nvidia all the way... but if your using vegas then amd cause vegas is opencl driven, other than differen performance in different games at different price points for the good old amd vs nvidia, for gaming both company's offer different feature's for gaming, physx, stereo-scopic 3D, txaa from nvidia and msaa, more user friendly surround gaming, and tressfx from AMD. so it depends what you want in your gaming exeperience.

as for your ram most brand are good so what ever, but if your edditng if you can jump up to 16gig then you will laughing as that what you need at minimum ideally, also cas timming's are important for edditing impaticular and i see you have gone for cas 9 which is good but if you can go to 8 or 7 then even better, faster clocked ram would be nice... but cas is way more important so prioritise that over ram clock speed but 1600mhz is just fine anyways

4

thanks for the suggestions!

Editing wont be a major use for the PC as I will be doing that only now and then and I dont mind if things take 20minutes more or less (good to know AMD has similar things to CUDA)...I might increase the ram at some point though as thanos suggested.

@BeyondNight, that cooler looks absolutely massive! The 140mm fans are interesting though as they seem to give pretty good cooling at lower noise levels (http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/Phanteks-PH-TC14PE-CPU-Cooler-Review/1615/6). I will definitely note this one down, thanks.

As for the graphics card though, I am not sure about the 7870. It seems to perform worse, albeit not much, than the 660 in BF3 (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/geforce-gtx-660-geforce-gtx-650-benchmark,3297-7.html) but is more expensive (around 200-230€, 660 is 180€) so I dont see any use in changing to the 7870, as well im not too interested in overclocking the GPU, only when i desperately need the frames per second I might.

I was thinking about a larger SSD (512gb even) but then I just keep thinking about them becoming so much cheaper every year and that as long as the OS and some games fit on it I should be good with a HDD.

@thanos, no I wasnt intending the SSD as a caching drive (speeds up first start of programs, right?) just for the OS to boot faster :D but i might. Can I still put the OS on the SSD that is used for caching? or do I need a seperate one? sorry I know close to nothing about this.

Do different GPU's affect the gaming experience a lot? I wouldnt have thought so. I know physx is for particle affects and aa for less jagged edges but I wouldnt think this changes the gameplay experience much.I have a better feeling towards Nvidia cards for some reason (gut feeling, dunno?!).

For the RAM does the CAS latency doesnt seem to make much differnce when it comes to gamin. I think I will just get the cheapest ones I can find, but I will check that they dont have a crazy CAS latency, thanks for that.

 

I think I may have changed my mind with the graphics card, I would like to go with one relatively powerful card such as a GTX670 and not SLI until games wont run anymore, this way it makes things easier to upgrade in the future. My budget isnt that tight and I will spend the same on the 660's eventually. So what do you guys think about the GTX670 and the AMD 7970? they are both aruond the same price but 670 seems a tad better (http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html).

Again thanks for the input!

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as for your gpu it's up to you, personaly i like using nvidia but thats because of the feature's nvidia cards offer and i play alot of nvidia optimized games, that is personal preference though. once again what edditing software you using? this is a big factor

as for your ssd caching thing, yeah it helps with boottimes, it also acts as virtual memory which is really handy and you can not put the os on the caching ssd, it's not meant to be used like that.  but i would highly reccomend a secound samsung ssd and wacking them in raid o and put your os on that

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^^ there old video benchmarks new amd drivers bosted the 7970s performance by around %15-%20 

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i would go with the Msi Z77 mpower motherboard.

 

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@MisteryAngel. Could you give some reasons why? thanks.

 

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http://goo.gl/DZUA3

http://de.pcpartpicker.com/p/Orje

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cause its an awesome board wenn it comes to oc, in my eyes its one of the best Z77 motherboards to get, those boards come hand tested out of fabrick, msi test those boards  with an i5 3570k oc to 4.5 ghz or so, on full load for 24 hours, so that gives you the guarantee its good.furter it looks awesome.and realy nice fuetured.

http://www.alternate.de/html/product/MSI/Z77_MPOWER,_Mainboard/1024994/?

am Holländische alternate das board ist  billiger, keine anung wieso in Deutschland isser 184,90 und in Holland 169,90..

11

hmmm, the MSI board looks interesting. I like the whole quality thing going on, military grade components and it being tested. i also like the wifi/bluetooth integration (but that could easily be added to the other board for 10€), I dont like that I feel like I will pay for features I dont need/want, such as the OC Genie II. I dont care about looks as the case wont have a window. I'll keep this in mind though. Oh and I can get the board for 170, i checked elsewhere.

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Just an FYI, the Power design on the Gigabyte Board is just as good as the MSI and will be just as durable 

http://www.overclock.net/t/1252290/z77x-ud3h-review-and-oc-testing-circuit-analysis-ln2-runs-efficiency-comparison 

This Board has a VRM design which can be pushed to rediculous levels,also the Ultra Durable features really do work "Military grade" doesent specify the actual capability of the components.

It even beats the Oc potential of a lot of baords with the same CPU 

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/mainboards/display/msi-z77-mpower_8.html#sect0

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Those benchmarks are old, after the 12.11 drivers the AMD cards got a pretty big performance boost, which means the 7870 can now compete with the 660Ti when slightly overclocked. 

which also brings me to the point i have about overclocking, you may think youll never use it/need it, but once you try it and see how easy it is, your probably going to want to get the most performance you can out of your card.

14

Thanks for that info on the motherboard. I think I will stick with the GIGABYTE because it seems to be enough for extreme overclocking, something im not planning on doing, so it will be sufficient for my planned moderate overclock.

15

I researched a little more about the drivers and they really do seem to improve performance by quite a bit! Now I am confident of the performance of both GPU developers, and if the in game FPS differs by only 2-3 I dont really mind, I can always overclock. I think I will buy a card like the GTX670 or AMD 7970 which both cost about the same, at the moment though the 7970 comes with Crysis 3 and Bioshock Infinite :D I will check again when I order the parts whether Nvidia gives bonus content (hopefully BF4!) and I will decide from that.

 

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FYI 7970 outperforms 680gtxhttp://goo.gl/VA5pb  , and if any gpu manufacturer  gives free codes for BF4 it will be AMD, since the BF4 is a officially Gaming evolved game http://youtu.be/2ipzXiWHThY

17

I still prefer the msi, or a asus board above the gigabyte, its a personaly thing, i just had bad experiance with gigabyte boards. and i know im not the only one :) thats why i prefer msi or asus above gigabyte wenn it comes to intel based boards.

 

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I'll let you know how it goes once its up and running! If it doesnt work I'll try the MSI :)

19

Sweet!

680 kicks ass in Battlefield though...