So I just finished the biggest parts of my finals. Only a few minor exams in about a month, so I'm basically done. In October I will have to attend military service for the better part of a year and thought: After the finals, and during a time where I have to do menial services for 40h a week I really owe building myself a nice rig.
My budget is about 1100 Euros, 1200 are possible but really sort of hurt. In addition I plan on buying a 1440p monitor from Korea, like the Shimian or the X-Star, so the rig should be able to drive that resolution (in modern games life Thief, and later on Watchdogs/The Witcher 3)
http://de.pcpartpicker.com/p/3DNq4
This is what I cam up with and I wanted to hear some opinions. If you have suggestions on what to change, just use the german pc-partpicker site. Everything will be in English but the prices will be in Euros and all the things available for me.
If some of you have a 1440p monitor, which is surely the case, I'd love to know if 1080p upscaled really looks that bad and if you guys would prefer high settings without many filters in 1440 to maxed out on everything in 1080p.
Thanks in advance, Jacob
TL;DR: can i haz 1440p ~60fps? http://de.pcpartpicker.com/p/3DNq4
I would skip the H110 and go with like a hyper 212 evo and get the R9 290. Would get better performance in gaming for similar price and the even more GDDR5 compared to the r9 280x.
I thought about switching the GTX 770 against a R9 280X, not only because of the VRAM, but also because I could at any given time buy another AMD card, that doesn't even have to be the same one, and let them run in crossfire. With this the VRAM problem would be sort of fixed.
Skipping the watercooling is not really an option for me since I sort of need to overclock to make up for the lack of hyperthreading. Sometimes I do have to emulate machines on my PC and compiling the games I'm writing is a pain in the ass otherwise. Another reason why I will not be skipping the watercooler is that I have a friend working at Noctua in Vienna who said he could pick me up some product samples^^
The 290 is not really an option in my opinion since it costs 150€ more than a 280x, but that increase in price is not worth the few more fps. In this case I would just wait until the first month of military service (gotta love my f'in country) and use the slave like pay to get a second 280x or something. 290: 400€; 2x 280X: 500€.
Also helps with my planned triple monitor setup^^
Any thoughts on 8350 vs 4670k? Maybe Mantle could make up for the lack of gaming performance + I'll have better performance for my productivity stuff then. Also streaming would be easier, which atm I don't do but who knows :)
If you want to game on triple 1440p panels, a dual 280x configuration will struggle. Dual R9 290s would be much more suitable. Personally, I would ditch the CPU heatsink, because that can be included at a later time. If you insist on having 60FPS at 1440p, you really need to consider the faster GPU.
Mantle can be utilised on any CPU, with the inclusion of an AMD card. But the 8350 is quite versatile.
nah I'm talking one 1440p and 2 1080p. only for productivity though. gaming will only happen on the 1440p screen. I have 2 1080p screens now thats why.
So this is the final build I will go with: http://de.pcpartpicker.com/user/Jaxo10/saved/4CQK
I decided to go with the AMD card so I can add another one for Crossfire easily, and in contrary to Nvidia its also possible to add a stronger card for SLI (like a 290X) should the performance be needed. Also 2 280Xs outperform a 780ti by a bit, although being around 100€ cheaper. Thats also why I chose the higher wattage PSU, so that in the case I'll add another card I don't need to upgrade it.
Crossfire is also the reason why I chose the Watercooler over an Aircooler: The radiator will be much farther away from the graphics cards, giving them more of the cool air drawn in from the front of the case. All fans in the case will be Noctua NF-A14s since I have two lying around and someone working at Noctua will be getting me some product samples. For those wondering why theres no Windows included: I have a license left, so no need to buy one. I think its pretty much the best you can get in this price range, apart from personal preferences like Intel-AMD or Nvidia-AMD. Hope this can help out someone planning a build with a similar budget.
I dont know about availabilty of hdds and ssd drives, but i think i would choose a wd black at 7200 or even a blue. Maybe a larger ssd considering what you want to do with it. Noctua does make pretty good aircoolers. H110 is good but maybe not that good.
Unless I'm much mistaken, crossfiring two different AMD cards will only result in the performance of two of the weaker ones crossfired. Might be wrong though.