Hardware PC Hardware Buyer's Guide Q4 2016

Oh yes, I do!

 

I respectfully disagree. If you want to game at resolutions higher than 1080p, where the GPU becomes a limiting factor, AMD suddenly becomes quite viable.

 

What can you really say about HDD these days "it's slow but big space" You can't really test reliability at this level and everyone has their preferred brand. PR is 1TB SSD instead of 2TB HDD.

You'll regret it. Truly.

 

If I had more money first thing I would have gone for is the SSD. However after that, well the cheaper m/b, case and no after market cpu cooler is £100 at least. Include a bit more careful selection of the other parts and I'd have easily managed to pack in something like an i5-6500 (£80ish more) and a Radeon 470 (£40ish more) for the same money you spent. That gives me a much better system - I'll live with the cheaper case and m/b for that.

 

Can't wait!

 

Nope, it's the same 525GB Crucial, only as M2, at least that's what it says in the pricelist.

No but you can test speed (5400vs7200?) temperature and noise.

While I'm at it, I miss a "maiddle class SSD" tests. All these NVMe test are well and good, but praktikally, the "middle class" goes for bigger "normal" SSD's.
I see a lot of people buy Samsung 850 Evo's and Pro's, but for the price, wouldn't a (bigger) Crucial, or a Sandisk ultra II do? (like you chose here)

 

welcome back buyers guide, literally the reason i subscribed to custom PC from first issue and later bit-tech. as much as i love the format i think all the brackets are too expensive - i agree there is now no way a PC can get close to console performance for the price anymore but i'd like to see the budget at least include options to get it under £500 (from scratch, excluding monitor/mouse/kb). can't argue with your logic on future-proof bits like cases and PSU's though.

good job for the "on the horizon" section, there is always something new but it's very handy to know if it's a refresh or a whole new family of products - lets you make an informed decision wether to buy into an older but reliable family (often with cheap bits on ebay) or wait for a new but untested bit.

what is going on with small form factor though ? loads of sff motherboards that are just as good as their larger brothers for general use, sff PSU's are gradually becoming cheaper and more common but while optical drives are either no longer needed or can be catered for with a slim USB drive most cases have not shrunk - i find it absurd that the PC industry isn't pushing size factors these days even in the face of tiny boxes/sticks/tablets that have removed most average peoples need for a big noisy home PC.

 

Good guide. Like many others, I originally got hooked into Bit-tech via the buyers guide and have since stayed.

On more important matter, might I request a donuts contest instead of cheesecake?

 

OK I appreciate that. A performance, temp + noise test would be useful.

 

Very informative article, but wondering what I should do. Here's my current rig:

Core i7-4770K
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
ASRock Z87 Extreme4
Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB DDR3-1600
Asus GTX 980 Strix 4GB
2x128GB SSD in RAID 0
3TB HD
NZXT H230
Thermaltake TR2 700W ATX Power Supply

Any recommendations on upgrades? The 4770K seems like a good CPU to keep for a while still. Thanks!

 

Glad to see this return

 

Depending on what you do with it, I would say the most beneficial (as in you actually feel a difference) would be, as is most often the case, an update to a 1080 or Titan XP. Also, you could check out whether or not your mainboard supports NVMe drives, but I am absolutely not sure if that's a thing for Z87.

 

I too am very pleased to see the HW Buyer's Guide return, thank you.

However, it was almost immediately rendered irrelevant to me, as the cheapest rig you've specced is £600, which is beyond what I would consider anywhere near 'affordable'. I would prefer it if you worked to price brackets, rather than the names you use. Eg. £400/£600/£800/£1000+.

Plus, it would be good if laptops could get some coverage, but I do appreciate you're then faced with the same pricing category issues. Maybe if you alternated on a quarterly basis - i.e. first quarter = desktop, 2nd quarter = laptop, 3rd quarter = desktop etc...

 

Excellent news seeing this return, and just in time for xmas

 

Personally, I did pretty much the same as the gaming machine, except (perhaps a bit senselessly) splashed out on a 1080 and a full GPU+CPU custom waterloop. Also, 32GB RAM cheesecake.

Plan is to use it to do some heavy CUDA stuff (machine learning things) as well as my normal usage, so extra upgrades make a little bit of sense.

 

I always enjoyed the Buyer's Guides and it's really good to see it back.

I've always liked the idea of adding a "used market parts" build too, based on the best bang-for-buck slightly older tech bought on the used market.

 

(dupe)

 

Interesting article. I'm coming in late, but I've just placed my order on my first build since 2012, and probably my last gaming PC, since I have less inclination to spend as much time on games any more.

Premium Player was useful to me. I went in a rather different direction, though. I think PCs should be neither seen nor heard, so cheaper cases, less blingy motherboards with fewer lighting options are no downside, and cut a few hundred off. Since I almost never upgrade piecewise, headroom on power supply is also unimportant. I'm also going with air cooling, Noctua with a nice big slow fan. And I don't really see the point of the 6850k vs 6800k - there's little OC headroom on the 6850 and 40 PCIe lanes only matters to someone considering SLI, but the box as specced doesn't have SLI. And 16 lanes vs 8 lanes per GPU is really marginal in practice.

Meanwhile, I'm going for a 1TB 960 Evo and no secondary drive, because secondary drives are a faff - always need to plan ahead which app is going to go where, and if you put all your games etc. on the primary drive, you'll run out of space, whereas if you put them on the secondary drive, you're not getting the performance you're paying for. These days, all my bulk storage is on my NAS and replicated in the cloud, my PC today only has 700G or so across two drives. I think a super-fast primary drive, but most importantly big, is the key spending area after GPU. Remove the indecision. Stop compromising on install locations.

I also went with 32G RAM, but that's because I'm a developer and virtual machines munch RAM with abandon.

Of course it's impossible to create a build that caters to everyone, so this isn't really a criticism (I still think the 6850k is the oddest of the PP component choices, also the selected cooler has really bad reviews for leaks), it's a fine place to start from.