Ok wow. Thats pretty cool. I had know Idea about that. It does make sense tho. Ill definitely make sure I have one then(and use it for the install).
That site you suggested is the same one Sancus linked so thats cool to have a second person suggest it, and Ill check out the Youtube stuff as well. Thank you Coolaidz PS how come when I quote you it shows a whole other paragraph vs what I see on the boards? odd.
Yeah, lots of pretty good advice here. Don't forget to check newegg.com when you decide to shop for parts. They usually have pretty good deals.
Quick note since ya asked for clarity- SSD is a solid state hard drive. Typical hard drives consist of a spinning disc, which can hold more data but requires more time to read. Solid state hard drives are essentially a large USB storage device that is a solid chunk with no moving parts, allowing for near instant data access. They are more expensive than regular hard drives in a $ to storage ratio. I would recommend getting an SSD for the operating system and any games you really want to be fast, and use a standard hard drive for data storage. I recommend Dell for easy to use PC building (some don't like it, like the Ford vs Chevy type crowds) but I have had good results for pretty good value. I have the know how to build a PC from assorted parts and vendors, but didn't feel like doing the research. If you are somewhat unfamiliar with the specifics involved like bus speeds, compatible parts, RAM types, etc then this might be a good idea since you can simply select compatible parts and not worry too much. I would definitely go for an i7 processor. You want to get the most powerful processor you can for longer lasting use. Upgrading RAM and video cards aren't that hard compared to processors. Also go for an upgraded motherboard so you can rest assured you wont have compatibility issues or upgrade past the motherboard capacity. Unless you are looking for a mega badass computer to impress girls (lol) then keep in mind generally the cost to return ratio gets worse the higher end you get past a certain point. Bottom line: i7 processor, 16-32gb of DDR 5 RAM, SSD as large as you can afford, standard hard drive 2 TB unless you plan to install tons of games or videos/photos (2tb is quite a bit for most applications), and the highest end video card you can afford. It will all be available in handy drop down menus.
Why would you need an i7 for gaming? Is there any trend of the multi-threading being worth it for gaming in the next couple years? I mean I do have an i7, but I consistently hear you are not going to get much better performance (if any) compared to an i5 for almost everything gaming related. I agree with Sancus on that. Urging someone to get an i7 seems silly unless their budget is very large. Also, the motherboard thing is an Intel thing. AMD tends to support is sockets longer, but granted AMD is quite far behind Intel right now when it comes to CPUs. I still fully agree it's ideal to not replace the CPU though. It's probably the easiest part to destroy if you make a mistake due to the delicate pins if putting it together yourself. Personally, I think going over ~$350 tops is like burning your money unless you really want top of the line equipment and don't care that in 2-3 years your $500-$700 monstrosity of a GPU will be matched or beaten by sub $300 cards. Also for some reason there is all kinds of bad advice floating around on the internet about SSDs like disabling the swap file (only mattered for early models) or the completely pointless idea of disabling SuperFetch (RAM is still far faster than a SSD and you lose nothing with SuperFetch on).
The price difference between i5 and i7 isn't very big unless you go with x99. The benefit of going x99 is significantly more PCI-E lanes, allowing the use of toys like SLI+M.2 SSDs at the same time. Most people won't take advantage of that. In any case, i7 vs i5 when talking Z97/Z170 is a simple $100. Personally, I do more with my computer than gaming and can make use of the extra threads. Not to mention that running a whole bunch of everquest clients at once makes good use of extra threads, too (I only run 6, but it helps). The biggest difference you will notice in video games as long as you have a current-generation processor and enough GPU, is loading speed from your storage device. You can speed this up tremendously with a Ramdisk (and all the hassle that goes with it), or by going to faster storage. You could put some Sata SSDs in raid0, but it's still going to be slower than a single M.2 - so I'd recommend a 256 or 512GB 950 Pro and call it a day for fast storage. Grab a 2TB (or 2 in raid 1 for redundancy) Sata drives for your slow storage to hold multimedia and the like. So yeah if I were to build a budget minded but higher end gaming PC for someone right now, I'd do something like this: CPU: i7-4790K Mobo: Use tomshardware to find one that fits your needs and gets good reviews GFX: GTX 1070 or equivalent Storage: 1x Samsung 950 Pro 512MB, 1x 2TB HDD But if I were building a PC for an everquest gamer who wants to run a LOT of EQ clients and doesn't care much about modern games, I'd use the same storage and GFX from above but put it on this: http://www.natex.us/Intel-S2600CP2J-Motherboard-Kit-p/s2600cp-sr0h8-128gb-12800.htm With 16 cores/32 threads, I bet you could get 24 or 30 clients running smoothly.
$100 is not just something I would use with the word "just." If you're very well off with money sure. SLI also seems to be more trouble than it's worth, but again if you have the money to spare nothing's stopping you. Just don't be annoyed if games don't work properly with that niche setup at launch, since they do not sometimes.
When you're talking about $600 for CPU+Mobo, +/- $100 is not overwhelming. Especially when you might be a multitasker or someone who uses CPU intensive software for music/video encoding or editing. There's also the fact that newer games are making more and more use of multithreading. Most games that have launched in the last 2 years will utilize 4 threads, so you could still see a benefit to those games if you bind your non-game stuff to threads that the game isn't using (assuming i7 with 8 threads). Destiny is an example of a game that will use more than 4 threads: I run SLI in cycles to extend the usefulness of my video cards. I started off with a 8800GT, then SLI'd a second one when it got too slow... eventually upgraded to a GTX 480, SLI'd a second one when it got too slow. When that setup finally got too annoying for me (holy crap the heat of 2 gtx 480s), I went to a single 980 Ti. It may be another year or 2 yet before I scoop up a second 980 Ti. In all the time I've been running SLI, the only incompatibility issue I've ever run into is a couple of games that just don't make good use of the second GPU, but still run fine, and it's been YEARS since that happened. Any recent game will work fine with SLI. So yeah, to summarize I think your ideas were formed years ago and are growing old.
Like I said, I do have an i7 it's just the first thing I'd drop if budget were the issue. Interesting on the SLI, are most of the issues nitpicky like the micro-stutter I see people obsess over?
Yeah the rare case of stutter or screen tear is something that I'm apparently not astute enough to notice, or I just haven't played games that actually have issues with SLI.
Why an i7-4790k? I love mine, but it's two generations old at this point. Don't really see any reason not to go with the 6700k. An i7-6700k is around $330 and a solid Z170 motherboard is around $150, so it's not a $600 combo. You're looking at around $380 vs $480, which is definitely a factor in budget minded builds. In those builds, you can usually improve your gaming experience more by putting that $100 somewhere else (usually into your graphics card). If you're doing music/video encoding it's really a different scenario than a purely gaming-minded PC, and thus far I haven't seen any indication that the OP is using this PC for that. I would agree that adding a second card down the road is often a good way to extend the life of your PC, but your experience with SLI really depends on the games you play. A lot of newer games support SLI, but there certainly are newer ones that do not (Doom comes to mind). It's also quite common that games don't work with SLI initially, but support gets added later on. Then scaling differs from game to game; some scale extremely well whereas others that technically support SLI get quite low gains from it. I don't mean to trash on SLI because it works well to keep your PC viable, but I don't think it's quite as issue free as you portray it, especially with how dependent it is on the particular games that you play.
SLI isn't super important for older games like EQ, and the main issue you ever run into with it is simply whether or not a particular game supports it. I wouldn't say anything like, "Oh, you should always get dual GPUs" or anything. The choice to go SLI or not depends on your gaming needs, budget, and what cards are available at the time. As I mentioned earlier, I run 2 GTX 260s. This was a budget decision. A single 260 was a touch on the pricey side when the machine was built, but it was a good card. I only upgraded to a second one some time later. If I had a bigger budget, I'd probably just go with a single powerful card (GTX 1070 / 1080), but it might be possible to get an SLI set of weaker cards for cheaper. It's all about trade-offs. The cheaper SLI setup may be a little stronger right now, but the single powerful card has the possibility of being SLI of that card later on, which would be cheaper to upgrade than a new card in a couple years. The trade-off there is that it will likely be weaker than the new cards at that time (say 2200 series, if/when they exist). I hope that makes some sense. I would definitely not describe them as "more trouble than their worth," but I would say that you should be aware of what you need out of your rig and what you get from SLI if that's the route you wanted to go.
