Hi im planning to build a pc for about 1500 dollar. This will be my first time so i apperciate som tips to my build. Im from Sweden so u cant buy componets from the US. The computer will mostly be used for gaming or watcing movies etc since our school gave us free macbooks :o I want the system to be persistent and have possibilitys to be upgraded in the future :)
I will list both kronor and dollar prices. 1 $ = 7 KR
(KR = Kronor, swedish currency)
All the prices aproximate (im doing the counting between dollar and kronor in the head som i can be wrong)
For a hard drive if you want to have alot of storage I suggest a Western Digital Caviar green 3 TB HDD it only costs $150 USD but the 1 TB black cots $100USD so I would go green. (No pun intended.) Not sure about the monitor. (In the US these are the prices)
avoid OCZ agility. so i've heard. vertex is better. crucial m4 with firmware update even better. (ref: custom pc magazine) UK. But i'd go with what these guys are advising on a HDD.
lol Vortex88 just told me to avoid MSI motherboards xD
Btw should i get this GPU instead of the Msi? EVGA SuperClocked 02G-P4-3662-KR GeForce GTX 660 Ti
Watched review on Newegg and saw that it preformed way better then the MSI card, its also 100$ cheaper. The only downside is that it run a bit hotter but that might be because of the covered case desig.
Or is it mutch worth it to save some more money and buy a gtx 670?
Also, MSI actually makes really awesome graphics cards. If the EVGA is faster it's only because it's overclocked very slightly, and you could do that on your own with the MSI card anyway.
If you're going to save up for a GTX 670, then I would go for a Radeon HD 7970 instead. They're around the same price, and the 7970 will outperform a GTX 680 when overclocked.
In terms of overclocking, MSI's 660 Ti Power Edition cards are awesome right now. Getting close to or matching 670 performance. effectively saving you $100 (700 kronor?) They even beat an overclocked EVGA card.
The 7970 is also a great value right now. I would definitely recommend it.
As for the motherboard. The MSI board you had already picked out was good. Vortex made a good suggestion as well. Gigabyte's line of Z77 boards are very good.
I would never recommend an MSI board. The overclocking settings in their bios are really shitty and some of them don't even work. Not to mention that I had a high end MSI board fail on me.
Well then, i think im going for the MSI gpu then. Any "Great and cheap" displays that u could recommend and also how many watts(?) do i need for my power supply?
i got the msi mpower and i kinda second vortex88 i mean it wont recognise my rams x.m.p and when i oc it it never actualy puts it in to practise when i reboot or just boot in general. and its not my ram had it on an asus board before worked just fine.
that said ocing the cpu is awesome and i prefer it over asus. i love the mobo apart form that one little ram fault.
If the motherboard is more expensive, it probably has to do with what it has built into it, not performance. For example, A motherboard with usb 3.0 and Cross fire ready will be more expensive than a motherboard with usb 2 and not crossfire capable.
there ar zalman 23" monitors out there for about 130, lcd, w/ led backlight. as for pwr supply, get a 750W, it'll give you more headroom if you want to add stuff later on
Also, just to elaborate a little on my MSI woes, I'll explain what happened as much as I can remember. I used to have an MSI Z68A-GD80 (G3) until if failed on me. The first thing about the board I noticed is that the bios would not save my overclocking settings. I figured it was just a bios issue, so I decided I would update the bios and hopefully the problems would be fixed. There were about 5 different ways to update the bios. I tried all of them, and only one of them worked.
After I finally got the bios updated (it took at least 4 hours because of all the glitches I was running into), I started tweaking the overclocking settings. During a couple of long days of overclocking and stability testing, I noticed that the CPU would throttle itself if I took the multiplier above 47. I looked up the issue online and discovered that it was just a fault of the board. Every Z68A-GD80 had this problem. I evenutally got the cpu fairly stable around 4.7Ghz.
After that I really thought my motherboard issues were over, but I was definitely wrong. After a few months, the board stopped recognizing SLI configurations. I thought maybe one of my cards had failed or that I was just having some driver issues. I reinstalled drivers multiple times, and I even used Driver Sweeper to get rid of them and start fresh. No matter how many times I reinstalled drivers, I was still having problems. While this problem was going on, I also noticed that some of the decorative LED lights on the board were flickering when they were supposed to stay solid.
After all of those issues, I decided to get an ASUS board and ditch MSI. I went with the ASUS P8Z77-V Pro, and I haven't had a problem since.
I also have two 3GB MSI GTX 580 Lightning Xtreme's in SLI, and they're amazing. I have them overclocked to 940mhz on the core and 2200mhz on the memory.