Help Me Build My PC Catch-All

I assume you forgot to add a 1 TB mechanical HD to the list? The 128 GB SSD will leave you with room for about one AAA game after the OS is installed and you've patched it up.

I'll be running at 1600x900.

OK, the 270X should be just fine for that.

And complexmath is right: don't forget the spinning rust hard drive for bulk storage.

If you can swing the extra money, I prefer SSDs in the 240ish gig range: that's genuinely enough space, especially if you delete the hibernation file and put the swap file on a regular drive. With the 160 I had before, drive space was frequently an issue, but with a 240, it really hasn't been. It's surprising what a difference that extra 80 gigs makes. (or extra 120, if you're coming from a smaller drive.)

Malor wrote:

If you can swing the extra money, I prefer SSDs in the 240ish gig range: that's genuinely enough space, especially if you delete the hibernation file and put the swap file on a regular drive.

Speaking of that, when I moved my swap file, I left 1GB on the SSD. I'd read it was good to leave 800MB or so on C for crash dumps, etc. That right?

I like this list much better from the same site:

http://www.hardware-revolution.com/b...

I can't believe for $656 they've fit a 760 into a budget build. It seems a little ridiculous to me but they did it.
For me I like the tier 1 with the fx-6300 and the 7850 2GB. ($110 less) Though I might go with the tier 2 with that OC 7870 for $180 ($80 less). But definitely I'd get 8gb ram.

Also, the ram prices seem extravagant. I've been looking at cheap ram and 8GB is $65 at the lowest. So it seems to me I've seen much better ram for $70-75 and not $87. And it seems hysterically funny the confirmation bias of the reviews for the $87 ram, remarking how well priced it is. Did they even look elsewhere? I mean I followed the link to the ram and on that same page they had recommendations for the same gskill brand but less fancier named and much cheaper.

Speaking of that, when I moved my swap file, I left 1GB on the SSD. I'd read it was good to leave 800MB or so on C for crash dumps, etc. That right?

I don't think it matters where the swap is, I think you can get crash dumps if the swap's on D.

But even then, who cares about crash dumps?

So as Newegg had a sale on this video card, so I snagged it:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...

I cannot WAIT to get it.

I just got a 770 earlier this week. It is great so far!

Congrats, and yay!

Malor wrote:

And complexmath is right: don't forget the spinning rust hard drive for bulk storage.

Yeah I should probably replace my old external bulk drives huh? Do internal drives trump external USB 3.0 for speed?

Noted on the ATX board and case - I have big mitts so I could see some frustration on assembly day.

edit: Yeah I'm tempted to go with the Tier 2 listed on the Budget Builds page on that site, it's head and shoulders over what my current machine is. But on the other hand, being a gamer with a JOB I may just put on my big boy pants and go for the mid level stuff.

Osiran wrote:

Yeah I should probably replace my old external bulk drives huh? Do internal drives trump external USB 3.0 for speed?

Well, I haven't done much experimentation with USB3, only with flash drives, really, but I believe SATA requires quite a bit less CPU to run. You can most likely get pretty close to the full speed of a hard drive on a USB3 connection, but you'll burn a lot of processor power to do it, where SATA has nicely low overhead.

Noted on the ATX board and case - I have big mitts so I could see some frustration on assembly day.

Well, Micro-ATX is really quite small, so you're usually limiting your expansion options when you go that way. You can put a MicroATX motherboard in a fullsize ATX case, but not the reverse, and you need to match the power supply to the case. Unless you know you want an unusually small machine, I'd stick with regular ATX. Bigger cases can be quieter to cool, too, as you can use larger fans, spinning slowly. The smaller a fan is, the faster it has to spin to move the same amount of air, and that's noisy.

fangblackbone wrote:

Also, the ram prices seem extravagant.

I was just reading that this is because of a big fire in a RAM plant not too long ago. RAM has gotten very expensive since.

edit: well, "very expensive" in terms of prices six months ago, but compare it to, say, prices two years ago, and it's still looking pretty good.

I was just reading that this is because of a big fire in a RAM plant not too long ago. RAM has gotten very expensive since.

Apparently also in the mix is the third largest manufacturer is filing for bankruptcy and/or not being bailed out by the Japanese government. But that was seen on the internet so it has gotta be true

My Thermaltake Smart 750W PSU is interesting. The fan doesn't spin until there's a 200 watt load. This is normal right?

Malor wrote:
Speaking of that, when I moved my swap file, I left 1GB on the SSD. I'd read it was good to leave 800MB or so on C for crash dumps, etc. That right?

I don't think it matters where the swap is, I think you can get crash dumps if the swap's on D.

But even then, who cares about crash dumps?

I've just acquired an SSD which I'm about to install. I've worked with a few SSDs, mostly in laptops where you don't get a choice where to put things because there's only one drive, but haven't had one in my own gaming PC yet. So...

Wouldn't you want the swap file on the SSD for performance?
Is there a definitive guide on how to manage Steam? It seems to me that anything that runs on startup should run from the SSD but all the game data files would want to be elsewhere?
Any other really important things to do or not do?

Redherring wrote:

Any other really important things to do or not do?

If it's a desktop, you might as well disable hibernate mode. That will free up space on the SSD to the tune of whatever amount of memory your PC has.

Wouldn't you want the swap file on the SSD for performance?

Well, ideally, you should never be hitting the swap file at all. If you're hitting swap, by definition that means you don't have enough RAM. Drive interfaces just aren't very fast, even with an SSD, and swap should be for emergency use only. SSD space is expensive, so why waste it on a huge file that you should never be using? Magnetic drive space is far cheaper.

If you're on a memory-constrained machine where you *need* to hit swap, then putting it on SSD a gigantic performance boost over swapping to a spinning drive. But adding more RAM, and not swapping at all in the first place, is a far better solution, if the machine and OS will take it.

It seems to me that anything that runs on startup should run from the SSD but all the game data files would want to be elsewhere?

Well, I have a 240-gigger, and I just load everything to the SSD. I put my virtual machines on the spinning drive, and bulk storage on the NAS. If you don't think you'll have enough space, Steam will let you configure multiple install directories, and put individual games anywhere you want. Determining which games you want on the SSD is something you have to decide. Some game benefit tremendously; others have heavily packed game files, and end up bottlenecked on CPU. Games of that type may barely load faster from SSD than from a regular drive.

Any other really important things to do or not do?

Never defrag an SSD. The reason you do that with regular drives is to make files into contiguous blocks, so the drive can load them in one quick stream, instead of having to seek all over the disk. Seeking is very slow on mechanical hard drives, so a file in many pieces, scattered all over the drive, can take much longer to load.

But SSDs have seek time of basically zero, so they load a scattered file just as quickly as one that's contiguous. Every write to an SSD puts wear on it, and since defragged files don't load any faster, there's no reason to add to your write count.

If you're on a desktop, don't forget to disable your hibernate file, which by default will be the same size as your RAM. On Windows 7, you do that with this command, typed into a command prompt running with admin privs:

powercfg -H off

I have no idea how to do it on Windows 8, or if it's even relevant anymore with that OS.

I took some advice here and pulled the trigger today. I know what I'll be doing this coming Thursday!

Intel Core i5-4670 3.4-3.8GHz Turbo Quad-Core 84W
Coolermaster Hyper 212 EVO cpu cooler
ASRock Z87 Extreme3 LGA 1150 SATA 6Gb/s CF/SLI USB3.0 ATX
Corsair 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1600MHz CAS 9 1.5v
Asus Radeon R9 270X 2GB OverClocked Dual fan
Samsung 840 EVO 2.5″ 120GB SATA III SSD
LG SATA 24X DVD Burner
Corsair CX 500W psu
Corsair Carbide 400R atx case

Regarding swap, I think Malor is right that Windows doesn't swap unless it needs to, but some OSes, like Linux, swap aggressively by default. So simply hitting swap doesn't necessarily mean that you're low on physical memory. It's more a matter of what the OS optimizes for. I've always felt that it was a good idea to have my cache on the SSD but I've never bothered testing whether it actually gets used on my home setup.

Malor wrote:
Wouldn't you want the swap file on the SSD for performance?

Well, ideally, you should never be hitting the swap file at all. If you're hitting swap, by definition that means you don't have enough RAM. Drive interfaces just aren't very fast, even with an SSD, and swap should be for emergency use only. SSD space is expensive, so why waste it on a huge file that you should never be using? Magnetic drive space is far cheaper.

If you're on a memory-constrained machine where you *need* to hit swap, then putting it on SSD a gigantic performance boost over swapping to a spinning drive. But adding more RAM, and not swapping at all in the first place, is a far better solution, if the machine and OS will take it.

It seems to me that anything that runs on startup should run from the SSD but all the game data files would want to be elsewhere?

Well, I have a 240-gigger, and I just load everything to the SSD. I put my virtual machines on the spinning drive, and bulk storage on the NAS. If you don't think you'll have enough space, Steam will let you configure multiple install directories, and put individual games anywhere you want. Determining which games you want on the SSD is something you have to decide. Some game benefit tremendously; others have heavily packed game files, and end up bottlenecked on CPU. Games of that type may barely load faster from SSD than from a regular drive.

Any other really important things to do or not do?

Never defrag an SSD. The reason you do that with regular drives is to make files into contiguous blocks, so the drive can load them in one quick stream, instead of having to seek all over the disk. Seeking is very slow on mechanical hard drives, so a file in many pieces, scattered all over the drive, can take much longer to load.

But SSDs have seek time of basically zero, so they load a scattered file just as quickly as one that's contiguous. Every write to an SSD puts wear on it, and since defragged files don't load any faster, there's no reason to add to your write count.

If you're on a desktop, don't forget to disable your hibernate file, which by default will be the same size as your RAM. On Windows 7, you do that with this command, typed into a command prompt running with admin privs:

powercfg -H off

I have no idea how to do it on Windows 8, or if it's even relevant anymore with that OS.

I can't figure out how to do that multi quoting thing so I'm just going to put everything down here...

1) That makes sense, when I think about it I haven't really paid any attention to swap files on my PC recently, I'll just move it to the second disk.

2) I've got 256GB to play with, not really anything important to put there other than the OS and startup files, and things like Office. I see the library folders in Steam, I wonder what will happen if I install Steam to the SSD then "select" the existing steamapps folder on the HDD? I think I'll back that up first.

3) I believe Windows 7 and 8 are smart enough to disable defrag on an SSD, or can you still run it manually? Either way, I won't miss it, I almost never defrag anything. Hibernation file is a good one, will remember that.

Thanks for the Advice Malor (and Tuffalobuffalo), I'm looking forward to this. Now I just need to remember to bring the thing home from work tomorrow, unlike today

Redherring wrote:

2) I've got 256GB to play with, not really anything important to put there other than the OS and startup files, and things like Office. I see the library folders in Steam, I wonder what will happen if I install Steam to the SSD then "select" the existing steamapps folder on the HDD? I think I'll back that up first.

You can move things if you put Symbolic links to where the main Steam is. You can manually do that via command line, or you get get programs like Game Save Manager or Steam Mover.

Gah, wrong thread, sorry.

So going forward, is every new gpu going to require a 500w psu and 30a on the +12v? Or are we going to see some reprieve where some of the new cards coming out will have a 15-20% reduction in performance but drastically lower power appetite?

Or again are we going to be stuck where, in order to have reasonable power consumption, the gpus with half as potent?

At what point do people stop caring about higher poly counts in games because the configuration hassles, costs of ownership, and strict requirements out weigh the price, and slightly less jaggies?

I don't think PSU requirements are going up right now. As the processes shrink things down, you're getting more and more performance out of the same price and power budget cards. I've gone from an 8800GTX to a 260 to a 6950, and they've all been right in that 450-500 watt recommendation range. But even with that, I think the true power usage (idle, etc) is trending down, and the noise of the cards due to the cooling requirements are definitely much lower.

If you go really high end with dual cards, yeah. But in the mainstream enthusiast middle ground, I think we're actually doing OK.

Yeah I'm pretty sure average power usage in GPU's has dropped overall through the last couple years especially.

Thin_J wrote:

Yeah I'm pretty sure average power usage in GPU's has dropped overall through the last couple years especially.

If anything prior generations top end cards (the most power hungry) eventually become mid-range current gen cards will less power reqs.

Aren't those new AMD cards pulling a fair bit more juice? I thought someone said that the 290X was pulling about 300 watts?

Heh, and I thought I was doing well at 32 gigs.

Malor wrote:

Aren't those new AMD cards pulling a fair bit more juice? I thought someone said that the 290X was pulling about 300 watts?

Top end card, though. The "average" mid range enthusiast cards have staid fairly constant.

MannishBoy wrote:
Malor wrote:

Aren't those new AMD cards pulling a fair bit more juice? I thought someone said that the 290X was pulling about 300 watts?

Top end card, though. The "average" mid range enthusiast cards have staid fairly constant.

Yeah... that's the two very top end cards. As you're well aware the highest of high end hardware has very little to do with the vast majority of the market. There's a lot of videocards out there

Malor wrote:

Aren't those new AMD cards pulling a fair bit more juice? I thought someone said that the 290X was pulling about 300 watts?

Titan pulls 387 at load... 290X 440