Hi Guys, Girls.. I am stepping out into the great wide world of pc gaming and building/moding.. I recently posted on here for some help with picking parts for my first build, but since then I have managed to go full out and scrape my budget up from £500-£600 to around £1000-£1100 I should explain a couple of things first the reason I chose the i7 over the i54690k is specifically for the Hyper Threading as i do a lot of messing around with videos, films that kind of thing so it's my understanding of hyper threading that it will cut the time it takes to edit/render a hour long video considerably compared to the i5!?? I will also like to say that I already went and jumped in with the GPU as NovaTech were offering the card with the Backplate, and witcher 3and batmans arkham Knight for free! I've read a lot of not so good things about the 970 but they were all last year or 2012 and also read that the cooling on the EVGA 970 is improved acx 2.0+ over the 2.0.. or something and the drivers have changed as well I think I read somewhere so are these complaints outdated? Here's what I have in mind.. Fractal R5 Asus Z97 AR i7 4790K 16Gbs of 1866mhz Duel Chan, Corsair Dominator Platinum EVGA SSC ACX 2.0+ 970 120GB SSD 1TB HDD EVGA SuperNova 750w G2 (eventually) XSPC Water cooling loop and then OC everything. Also I'd like to thank you in advance as the piece of s''t I'm on now has a habit of not working when I want it and talk talk broadband has a habit of cutting off ( thank god for Word ) so sometimes I can be a bit rushed in my responses and not always remember to add thanks to end before I'm cut off So Thank you in advance to any one willing to help
deathtaker27's right, you'll want a larger SSD. Since you're intending to do video editing, which requires a lot of disc drive thrashing, I'd even install a secondary SSD specifically to do this on (a 'scratch' drive). So, a 250GB SSD for a boot disk, a 120GB scratch drive. You're absolutely right about hyperthreading - it really shines for converting videos. However, the 4790 is a hot running chip, so even though you intend to watercool your PC, I'd pick up a decent cooler anyway - a refurbished H60 AIO or a cheap dual fan air cooler will do. In fact, I'm going to insist you pick up a cooler as I doubt the default cooler will actually be able to handle it even without overclocking - my 4790K is actually running at the lower end of the recommended voltage range and still get crazy hot on an H80i.
Obviously it's choice (& budget & whatnot), but a cheaper alt for video editing is to have a pair of fast HDDs - one for source & the other for destination - & short stroke them so that you've got a small initial partition at the beginning of each dedicated to this. (you can then have a 2nd partition that uses the rest of the space for whatever else you have in mind) Tbh, it depends on what your editing & transcoding & whatnot involves though - as some tasks are going to be CPU (& GPU) limited, whilst others will be drive limited.
Ok so if I go with the 120gb to build the thing, and then add a second '250gb' ssd when finance dictates.. then just swap the os from the 120 to the 250gb once i've bought it.. and then use the 120 as a scrub drive.. what do you think, sound good? I know.. probably not the easiest way to do it i know, but i don't think i can stretch to a 250gb ssd straight of the bat but maybe.. I just want to mention the 16gb of corsairs dominator platinum 1866 c9 ram.. any thoughts on the 16gb vs 8gb (duel channels of course) and 1600 vs 1866mhz?? You know what i think i already knew that but i'd forgoton, I now remember reading that the i5 4690k is fine at stock but only needs an A.M cooler once OC, but the i7 runs hot regardless.. thanks for bringing that up now i know to put the evo 212 back on the list! or i like the look of the Alpenföhn Himalaya 2 CPU Cooler - and i was gonna add a second 140mm fan.. but it's nearly twice the price of the Evo and if I want to go water cooling anyway i should probably save the extra £20 & go with the 212 more decisions.. I get what some people mean when they say they start of a build hyped and pumped up and then by the time they finish they've lost all interest in even looking at another pc for a good wk after, my parts list changed so much in the first couple of weeks i stopped printing it out lol I actually like this idea better if I'm honest.. and budget for the mo is getting tighter I've already nearly doubled my original £600! I like the idea of a 250gb ssd and 2x fast hdd's from my local CEX shop (I can get 1tb Wd HDD's brand new ones.. for £28 each) Can you give me a link or some info about the "short stroking" and how to use 2 partitions ect, I've never even partitioned a hdd! ( By the way which is better for loading your games from.. I'm guessing it's a dumb Q and the A is SSD! So if so would the 250gb be OK for a bootable/gaming drive?? ) To answer you question.. I DL a lot of films which I want to be able to burn off copies for my old girl to watch on her dvd player.. But mainly I need to be able to edit, render, convert documentaries to small sizes for uploading or quicker streaming.. convert 720 hd vid's to 360, or vice versa.. that sort of thing. Add my sites logo to an hour, 2 hour long video (which I've never bothered doing before because of the ridiculous amount of time it took the first time i tried it on my cr.p dell piece of recycling waiting to happen.. ) Or what ever else I may need to do on 'handbrake' for the documentaries I upload to my WWII YouTube Channel and Fb Page.. plus other things i may wish to get back in to in the futer like building another website, which i enjoyed doing years ago.. so nothing on a professional level but just enough things to keep an amateur enthusiast happy! Any thought s on the Fractal R5.. Black vs white vs titanium??? I'm not sure between the black or titanium but I'm leaning more towards the Titanium to match the chrome dominator ram and silver/black MoBo with eventual transparent blue water cooling (with black anti kink rings on clear tubing) to match the blue l.e.d's in the xspc cpu block, & ram, and blue l.e.d power button on the case Thanks for all the great advice guys....
Almost the only thing that higher speed ram can be really useful for consumers is for video rendering/transcoding... ...however, it is all about what your specific needs are - so if things aren't time critical (ie you're not desperate to be using the machine for something else that's major at the same time or can do the rendering & whatnot when you're out or asleep or whatever) then save your money unless you can find a deal. Short stroking is literally just making a smaller initial partition on a HDD & using that for things that are speed critical - & you do it in Control Panel -> Admin Tools --> Computer Management ---> Disk Management. Basically, the outer cylinders spin faster than the inner ones & so the r/w speeds are much better... ...whilst by hiving off space from 2 drives so that they're *only* used for the source & destination of the thing that you're actually working on then, this effectively removes any slow down d.t. fragmentation. Naturally SSDs don't have this limitation, but it's about bang for the buck when the budget's limited. Obviously, the faster the drives (up to a point - until something else becomes the bottleneck) the better - so it'd be worth looking at the HDTune b/ms for a few drives, concentrating on the first 100-200GB (depending on the size of projects you're working on) to make sure you're getting the best bang for the buck. 'An' idea though would be to look for a cheap (2nd hand) 6Gb/s SAS controller on eBay & a pair of (2nd hand) small(ish) high speed SAS drives... Well, whilst i have loads of SSD space, i still predominantly use 300GB Seagate 15K7 drives for video editing as they're pretty nippy. (if you're looking, make sure they're SAS not fibre channel) That said, it's all choice & budget - though i imagine you could get the drives for ~£40 each & a controller that'd be more than good enough for no more than about £60-70... ...indeed almost certainly less for the controller, but i don't have time to check all the options atm so just had a look at the pricing for a couple of lsi ones that i know are reasonable (ie not top end). As to SSDs & games then it's primarily about initial & level load times - so if you're not bothered by that atm then it's not the most critical thing for your usage... ...but naturally that's all down to perspective & budget - as i personally use them for all of the odd games i play as i've got bunches of SSD space... ...& lots of other people (who are heavier gamers than i am) really notice the difference in many titles.
Sorry, i was dead tired when i wrote the last post & needed a siesta. Anyway, assuming that the SAS idea is going to be cost prohibitive, my recollection is that that fastest reasonably priced drives for what you're looking at are the 1TB Seagate 7200.14 (aka ST1000DM003) - which, new, should be no more than £40-41 delivered each... (something like the 1TB WD Velociraptor's a bit faster but also several times the price) ...& i believe you'd be looking at short stroking them to about 200GB before the curve starts noticeably declining; though it's all about limiting it to what you need. Yeah, they should be noticeably faster than the WDs you're considering (though slower than the 15K7 ones) - & for an extra ~£12 a throw it'd certainly be worth paying the extra imho. [NB Admittedly i don't trust Seagate consumer drives hugely - though that was d.t. the 7200.11 drives which i bought several a few of, & they all started failing within warranty... ...& then the refurb replacements from Seagate semi-instantly failed... But, having kept a weather eye on stuff, that appears to have been just a shonky drive & the subsequent ones seem to have been far more reliable.] & obviously, the remaining space, after the initial partition on each, can be used for storing stuff - but ideally you don't want to be reading or writing to that whilst you're actually doing any encoding/transcoding as it'll slow things down.
PocketDemon knows his stuff about storage, so I'd definitely take his advice! In my experience, video converting doesn't require much RAM, so 8GB will be fine (for gaming as well). Down the line you can simply plug in more anyway. I would also agree with PocketDemon in that you're not going to notice the difference between 1600 and 1866 unless you have your machine working 24/7 on chewing video stuff. As you think, games load quickly from an SSD!
Thanks for the compliment Pete. Tbh, it's about trying to come up with options for the OP within a couple of budget ranges - & whilst either using fast SAS drives or a SSD for video encoding would be better, at least going for a pair of the fastest sequential r/w mainstream (ie cheap-ish) drives & short stroking would be a major bonus... & as & when there's more cash then other options can be looked at; whilst having 2TB of space for storage always comes in handy for backing things up to & whatnot so it's not as though the drives would be wasted into the future. (okay, for me then even if i were given 2x1TB drives for free then they'd actually be a damn nuisance as they'd be far too small for storage for me, but then i'm an out & out datawhore) As to memory speed, i don't exactly agree with the 24/7 comment - not that it's necessarily untrue; in the sense that it'd be *a* reason, but it's not what i'd focus upon. instead, it's about how quickly you ideally need something to be finished &/or how long you're prepared to wait before doing something else that's going to tax the machine... So whilst an extra few minutes is meaningless if it's going to complete whilst you're asleep or at work or whatever either which way, it's a damn nuisance if you're counting down the minutes waiting for the damn thing to finish so that you can upload it before going to bed or for playing some high end game or some such. & only the OP knows if their time is critical enough to them to pay the extra. As to memory capacity, whilst you're 100% correct that using something like Handbrake for transcoding doesn't need stupid amounts of memory, as the OP's also talking about video editing then certainly things like any recent(ish) version of Premiere can utilise whatever you can throw at it... (it's not clear what the OP's using for editing so it's just about covering it) ...so i would highly recommend going with 16GB *if* the OP's using s/w that actively supports it & it's affordable within the budget - though personally i prefer 32GB (& use 2400MHz CL10 stuff - simply as that was the fastest 32GB kit i could find in 2012, & had the money) with Adobe s/w.
I would get a smaller, cheaper but still high quality gold PSU in the 450-550w range, cut the ram back to 8GB as it will be quite enough to start with, and use that savings towards either a bigger SSD or pair of 120-128GB instead. I have that evga GPU, and it's quite good. I have had no issues with it at all. I still think all that fuss was way overblown. I also do quite a bit of work with video files, and with use of nvenc software that allows to do partial offload via cuda I can burn through a full length movie file in minutes. With the way that works, it uses more vram than ram, and use about 35-50% cpu instead of full loading it. It won't give quite as good quality as some other encoding solutions, but it's just fine for making lower quality smaller sized files for web, mobile, etc type stuff. As for cooling... as a long time former watercooling guy I would just recommend not even going there. Invest in good low noise air cooling instead and save yourself a huge amount of money and grief. Most of current intel and nvidia stuff runs so much cooler, in many cases active air cooling is barely needed, let alone water. It's just a huge waste of money, time and effort to do a custom water loop these days. When I built my current rig, I considered bringing over my loop to my new build, but met some resistance being able to adapt my cpu block to the 2011 socket. So I just said to hell with it. I've got my 60w 6C/12T CPU, and just using a Zalman CNPS9900 which is a pretty nice cooler. With software fan control I have it set to spin all the way off when it's under 40c which is much of the time. The evga acx2.0+ does basically the same thing... so unless I am doing something that needs prolonged load to heat things up it's totally silent, and even when the fans do come on it's still very quiet. Quieter than my old water pump by a good margin actually.
That SSD is going to fill up FAST!! i bought a 256Gb SSD and it keeps filling up i ONLY store software on that drive, no/minimal files. i would personally recommend a 256 as an absolute minimum.
I am torn between the 8gb vs 16gb and 1866 vs 1600 especially as the dominator platinum ram is actually not that cheap anyway.. (aesthetics are a factor in the build, as I'm going with the fractal r5 w/window) but I think overall for the gaming side, and as Batman Arkham Knights Recommended specs for the RAM is actually 8GB (there min is 6gb) so how long's it going to be before the Min system Ram for the new games is going to be 8Gb!! And then I'll either have to go with 16gb total over a 2x duel channel config or sell the two 4gb sticks and buy the the 16Gb duel channel set anyway! but then it will save me money now! and if 16Gb of ram is not going to be fully utilised at the moment anyway then.. as pocketdemon said so correctly it's about balancing the op (me ) needs with budget.. not the easiest task! Nail.. Hit.. on the head... OK rendering/editing or to be honest anything being done on my pc after 10-11pm at the MO is a NO.. Unfortunately! So I guess the difference between waiting those extra X..minutes for it to finish or being able to get the vid uploaded quicker so i can get on with the next one or get back to my gaming.. is worth the extra £££.. to a degree! there's still a point ( I have to keep reminding my self) were budget out weighs need! Personally I think, no I know I've done extremely well raising/saving £1000 in only 4-5 weeks while having no job and only the state benefit to live on.. luckily for me i have no real expenditure at the moment and I had a large collection of valuable Warhammer miniatures I'd collected for years that I was able to turn in to cash,, and basically I've spent the last 6 weeks staying in and not spending a penny on anything except the absolute necessitates! and once I reached the original target of 600 i decide to up it and improve on my choices like the i7 4790k over the i5 4690k.. and a kick ass gpu which arrived today (although with the wrong backplate.. for the shorter evga 970's ) I really don't want to cut back on this build it's going to be my first ever build & I've put a lot of heart and sole in to it already and i haven't even started it yet.. honestly when i first got the idea of building my own gaming pc/workhorse pc it started as a simple idea of a gpu to play IL2 Sturmoviks Battle of Stalingrad.. and at that point i had no idea about specs or different motherboards, now I've spent a good 100+ hours reading reviews, comments visiting forums watching youtube video's and I've learnt a lot.. and I've also developed a new passion for it.. and now I've got this picture in my mind of how i want my first ever build to be.. I've also read that the psu is the one thing you don't want to scrimp on.. I was going to go with either the Superflower Leadex Gold 620w or the SuperNova 750w G2 as they don't do a smaller g2.. but as they're both pretty much the same price i might as well go fort he greater w for futer proofing.. plus it has a huge 10year warranty.. but i am definitely interested in seeing some alternatives if you think i can get gold standard just as good for less.. I agree with you here whole heartedly but the only reason for the watercooling loop is becasue of the asthetics.. which is why it's coming later when i have the £ to waste.. I am defiantly aware that there's loads of Air Cooling options for a huge saving ove r WC but non that look as sexxy as a well constructed WC Loop in a windowed case with the right subtle LED Lighting config.. and I'm not talking about a loud gamers rig ( not that there's anything wrong with those) with tones of flashing leads or glowing red case.. i have a vision of subtle blue and whit leds in discreet places lighting the right parts of the build to give it a minimalist sexxy look.. in my mind anyway yeah that's another great thing about the gpu i chose is the quite running and the fans not kicking in until 60c just a shem they sent me the wrong bloody backplate i was well miffed when i tried to put it on lol i was thinking whys all the vid's I've watched show it going on no probs.. and the in the pic on the instructions it shows it going the full length of the card.. then it dawned on me that the ssc 970 is a newer offering and about an inch longer Yeah I'm going with a 256Gb (i wish i could afford a high gb one but i can't realistically) the Corsair M550.. it has good reviews and even still out performs there newer offering the corsair mx200 250Gb SSd.. all though it has a £95 price tag on Amazon Is that good or not for a 256Gb SSD??? OK Guys It's getting late and I've been trying to reply to all your great suggestions and replies for a couple of hours believe it or not.. so I hope i didn't miss anyone and again I'm hugely grateful for all you kind help guys.. I look forward to reading your next comments.. As it stands I think I'm still heading for the 16Gb of RAM but I may go 1600, instead of 1866.. (as it can be oc anyway) or not.. Thanks again Guys.. Night
