Its finally done! Pics and Benchmarks soon to come.

[DrDigitized2]

Hello everyone. I am going to Buy or Build 2 computers for around $1500.00 each. One for me a gamer since birth and one for my wife who's idea of gaming is to play WoW once in a while.

 

She will be using her computer mostly for facebook, research, WoW, Storing Lots and lots of pictures, and the occasional game that I throw on there. She wont need a monitor just yet as she can use my old one.

 

 

Myself on the other hand would like a computer that can play everything that's out today and up to a year from now when I add $500 worth of upgrades into it. Or at least thats my goal.

I have an old case that I should be able to use again unless you guys think its outdated. Its a Thermaltake Tsunami. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811133132

 

I was looking at the new SSD drives and thinking that I should get one of those so that my OS and high end games start up and respond faster but I don't know if its worth the sacrifice that I would be paying that I could use for better parts or a Bigger HDD.

 

Also I wont be getting the Computers until I get my Tax returns in late Jan early Feb. Should I wait until Windows 8 comes out or should I just go ahead and get the computers when I get the money.

 

If I buy a computer I was thinking of going CyberPower. At $1500 would it really benefit me to build a computer?

 

Anyways. Thanks for reading. Please give me your honest opinions. It wont hurt my feelings.

Edited February 23, 2012 by DrDigitized2

[Stonerboy779]

I was looking at the new SSD drives and thinking that I should get one of those so that my OS and high end games start up and respond faster but I don't know if its worth the sacrifice that I would be paying that I could use for better parts or a Bigger HDD.

 

An SSD is definitely a great investment if it is going to be as a boot drive look no lower than 120GB

 

Also I wont be getting the Computers until I get my Tax returns in late Jan early Feb. Should I wait until Windows 8 comes out or should I just go ahead and get the computers when I get the money.

 

Windows 8 is going to be very heavily optimized for touchscreens, tablets and the such and the Metro UI is really . a lot of people off while alpha/beta testing.

Have a look at some vids of it but a lot of people will skip windows 8 as it is a continuation imho of microsofts pattern of good os, bad os, good os, bad os....

 

If I buy a computer I was thinking of going CyberPower. At $1500 would it really benefit me to build a computer?

 

Anyways. Thanks for reading. Please give me your honest opinions. It wont hurt my feelings.

 

Nothing wrong with a cyberpower pc or any other prebuilt although you must remember that you will have a rather poor selection when it comes to hardware. So for greater customization and to absolutely get the max for your budget build yourself.

You could probably get a cyberpower PC for your wife nice and cheap and very easy. Then sort out your own gaming pc with the higher end products.

[DrDigitized2]

Thanks StonerBoy779. I was thinking of cheepining her PC some but at the same time I want her to be happy. Also thanks for pointing out the flaws in Win 08. I would hate to get stuck with the next Vista.

I was leaning towards SSD but just wanted to make sure.

 

Any other Ideas anyone?

[AtaliaA1]

Thanks StonerBoy779. I was thinking of cheepining her PC some but at the same time I want her to be happy. Also thanks for pointing out the flaws in Win 08. I would hate to get stuck with the next Vista.

I was leaning towards SSD but just wanted to make sure.

 

Any other Ideas anyone?

 

 

The Wifes Pc. should be a "Boutique" build, she will get alot more and for less than we can build. $800 for her system from iBuyPower or CyberPC would keep her happy and allow you more for the gaming PC. SSD for sure, no less than 120Gigs

and focus on the video card for sure. nothing lower than the 6950 AMD and all of the Ti Cards 460 and up in the Nvidea offerings are good. That $500 upgrade you mentioned would be good for updating the video card to what ever is the best offering at that time.

 

Your Gaming PC budget allows for another Boutique build. take a look, that budget will get you a heck of a machine and less headaches unless building is just a matter of 'Passion" as it is to most of us.

Edited December 30, 2011 by AtaliaA1

[Stonerboy779]

Just had a look on cyberpower pc and you could put together your wifes build for just under $1000

 

i5 2500k - $210

Cm 212 EVO - $35

gtx 560 - $180

p8z68 - $170

8gb ddr3 1600 - $70

1tb HDD - $100

Win 7 home professional - $100

NZXT tempest 210 Case - $55

600watt PSU - $70

 

just rough prices from the egg put it at ~$990

which is also what cyber power put it at for the selections I made.

 

So for the lazy approach you should be happy if you did it yourself and build you could likely drop $100 or even a bit more and add an SSD.

 

Edit: you could do two of these builds and then use whatever the default 560 is to go sli in your wifes machine and then go buy yourself two gtx 560 ti's for extra performance and both of you will be maxing games at 1080p res for a long time to come with maybe some sacrifices on aa in a select few games. Alternatively leave the wife with a single 560 which is enough to max WOW atm and then get yourself the second matching 560 from the egg and go sli in only your build.

 

Then buy an SSD or two and decide if you want SRT or Boot drive, provided you want the extra speed.

 

Also atm cyberpower pc is offering a small percentage off discount with purchases over $999.

Edited December 30, 2011 by Stonerboy779

[Tjj226_Angel]

Well I will always say to build a pc if you can. Stoner is right that Cyber power is a good choice, but building one is still usually better.

 

Wifes PC.

 

CPU

 

Motherboard

 

Ram

 

Graphics card

 

SSD

 

Hard driveHard drive. 1 or 2 depending on amount of space needed.[/url]

 

case

 

Power supply

 

And the cheapest DVD or blu ray drive you can find.

 

So a couple of things with your wifes build. It should not exceed 1K no matter what. if you are above 1K you might only be wasting money since it doesn't sound like your wife is a huge computer person. The CPU is a brand new APU from AMD. It has your basic 4 core setup at 3 ghz, but the nice thing is the integrated graphics card. On it's own, the integrated graphics card would probably play World of warcraft (I assume that is what WoW is), but you can install a 6850 and use the integrated and the dedicated GPU in a crossfire configuration. This gives you a TON of awesome gaming performance for not a whole lot of money. It is a perfect solution for your wifes graphical needs. The motherboard is an asus board and it supports crossfire, so you have plenty of upgrade head room on the board, and it can give a nice overclock to your CPU too . Plus it is Asus, and who doesn't love asus? The RAM, is nice, cheap, good quality, and super low volts. Can't possibly ask for more there. The graphics card is the cheapest 6850, without it being from a.......eh less liked company if you know what I mean. However, you might want to test the APU on its own though before you get the graphics card. You might get away with having WoW run just off the integrated graphics witch could save you some $$$$$. The SSD is nice, cheap, fast, 120GB, and made by an amazing company. It is certainly not the best of the best out there, but it sounds like you wife doesn't use enough of the resources on a computer to distinguish the performance difference between this one and one that cost 100 dollars more. For the hard drive, it is a single plater 1TB drive with 64MB of cache. Basically it is currently the cream of the crop for standard hard drives. You can have 1 or more depending on how much space you need. For the case, I would give your wife the Tsunami case. I have the exact same case sitting in my garage right now, and I can tell you for certain, you NEED something with more airflow for your pc. If you decide to get rid of the Tsunami all together, then the case is totally up to you. I simply gave a suggestion that was more geared towards a woman. I would say to get the power supply I have recommended though. It is modular for a clean look and it will give you plenty of power for upgrades. Plus it is 80 plus bronze certified and is made by corsair who are if not the best company to buy a power supply from than one of the best. Optical drive......well go crazy. That is totally up to you, just don't forget to put one in .

 

 

Your Rig.

 

Since your wifes rig shouldn't have exceeded 1K, I shall make your budget 2K to balance out the total 3K budget. I am also designing your PC around overclocking and a black and red theme. The color scheme is up to you and I can help you with that, but you WILL be overclocking so that you can hold out on CPU upgrades until Haswell or Skylake.

 

CPU

 

Motherboard

 

Memory

 

Graphics card will be a soon to be release 7950 for about 400 bucks.

 

SRT SSD

 

Get a second one of the corsair 120 GB SSD for your OS and games.

 

HDD

 

Case

 

Power supply

 

And again, any optical drive that makes you happy.

 

 

Ok explanation time again...............

 

For the CPU, the i5 2500K is perfect. It can overclock really well, and it is a true bang for the buck chip. I don't think you will need the i7 since it did not sound like you were going to do a ton of video editing and such. The motherboard I chose has two purposes. 1 it looks nice and 2: it is a real over clocking monster. The RAM is great for overclocking your CPU and the RAM itself can overclock pretty well too . The graphics card will be released out on the market soon, but apparently it is supposed to beat out the GTX 570. I don't know much more than that and that it will probably cost 400 USD, but we can work the card out a little later when you get your tax return. As for your SSDs, I have a 60GB one for SRT technology which basically makes your 1tb storage drive go fast, and a 120gb SSD for a boot drive and some games. Trust me, you will crave more SSD power, so you want to cram as much of it in your build as you can. Hdd....again it is a wonderful drive, and you should probably purchase it whether your like my build advice or not. The case is there because it is an AWESOME case. Your Tsunami case just won't cut it for cooling your CPU. This case is sexy and will cool everything just fine, however, I would not buy it until I could find it for 150 or less. Again though, it is your choice as long as it isn;t the tsunami case. The PSU is an awesome little power house and since it is fully modular, it will keep your build nice and tidy.

 

Lastly, I want to recommend the cooler. GO WITH WATER COOLING!!!!!!!!!!!! We can help you decide on how to set you up with a custom loop, but you need to give us the go ahead so we can start tweaking your build to fit your budget. I think water cooling is a must so that you can get a super high overclock and keep your CPU cool. However, I won't even go down the road of recommending particular items until you tell us that you think you would be comfortable with water cooling. So let us know what you think you would want to do.

 

Other than that Welcome to OCC !!!!!!!!

[DrDigitized2]

Wow, Thanks for all the help. I am really looking forward to this. This isn't my first build. This will be my second and third build. For this build I am leaning towards Tjj226_Angel's build.

 

My first build was in the Tsunami Case. I had chose it for 2 reasons. One it looked cool for the time and 2 it had tons of awards. My Mobo was an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe I chose it because I thought it would be great for gaming. My PSU was a simple 450W that came with the Case. I had 2 gigs of Ram which at the time was quite a bit. My CPU was AMD 4800+. My GPU was MSI N-videa 7900 GTX. Always planed on adding more but by time I was planing on adding it the technollgy had changed so much that I might as well just replace it. And then my computer died. It lasted me 5 years. As far as liquid cooled went I felt that I did not need it. And it was my first build so I was kinda nevis as I was spending about $2500 trying to build it.

 

 

Now I am a bit concerned going into the build because I have never OC or Liquid cooled anything. I did use the software that came with my Mobo and my GPU to overclock but thats as far as it went. I would like to learn how to OC and I have tried to understand it as best I can but I am going to need a step by step tutorial. I am sure I can find one on this site as per its name and any recommendations that you have will help. The Liquid cooling doesn't look that hard, at least not 6 years ago it didn't. lol Do you still need those big radiators to cool the liquid?

 

One question I had was. How does the SSD drive help speed up the HDD?

 

Red and black sound awesome as the color theme. My last theme was Blue and black so I think I need a bit of a change. The case is a really nice choice as well. What it lacks in . appeal it more then makes up for it in ingenuity. The Mobo looks awesome.

 

Thanks for your time. I know it takes time to come up with all these parts. My wife and I thank you and look forward to more input for you guys.

[Tjj226_Angel]

Wow, Thanks for all the help. I am really looking forward to this. This isn't my first build. This will be my second and third build. For this build I am leaning towards Tjj226_Angel's build.

 

My first build was in the Tsunami Case. I had chose it for 2 reasons. One it looked cool for the time and 2 it had tons of awards. My Mobo was an ASUS A8N32-SLI Deluxe I chose it because I thought it would be great for gaming. My PSU was a simple 450W that came with the Case. I had 2 gigs of Ram which at the time was quite a bit. My CPU was AMD 4800+. My GPU was MSI N-videa 7900 GTX. Always planed on adding more but by time I was planing on adding it the technollgy had changed so much that I might as well just replace it. And then my computer died. It lasted me 5 years. As far as liquid cooled went I felt that I did not need it. And it was my first build so I was kinda nevis as I was spending about $2500 trying to build it.

 

 

Now I am a bit concerned going into the build because I have never OC or Liquid cooled anything. I did use the software that came with my Mobo and my GPU to overclock but thats as far as it went. I would like to learn how to OC and I have tried to understand it as best I can but I am going to need a step by step tutorial. I am sure I can find one on this site as per its name and any recommendations that you have will help. The Liquid cooling doesn't look that hard, at least not 6 years ago it didn't. lol Do you still need those big radiators to cool the liquid?

 

One question I had was. How does the SSD drive help speed up the HDD?

 

Red and black sound awesome as the color theme. My last theme was Blue and black so I think I need a bit of a change. The case is a really nice choice as well. What it lacks in . appeal it more then makes up for it in ingenuity. The Mobo looks awesome.

 

Thanks for your time. I know it takes time to come up with all these parts. My wife and I thank you and look forward to more input for you guys.

 

As for the liquid cooling, if you think you would want to do it, we can help you out. You have come to a really good website for overclocking (no kidding right?) and water cooling. I will attach a video below to show you how easy it can be as long as you take your time.

 

Yes you still need the bid radiator, but that is why I suggested the case I did. It has a lot of room for that sort of stuff.

 

Now if you really want to make it super simple on yourself, here is a great kit you can buy.

 

XSPC watercooling kit.

 

It comes with everything you need except the coolant. But we will get to that a little later.

 

Overclocking is so easy. You will cry when you learn how simple and safe it is these days. I know I cried seeing how easy the 1155 socket overclocking is compared to the 1366 overclocking.

 

As for the case, believe me, it is better than it looks. It has a really nice clean look to it, and it makes a really clean and sharp looking build. There are always little mods you can do to the case to make it look better. However, the case is totally up to you. Just tell me what you think you would like and I will point you in the right direction.

 

How does the 60 gb SSD make the HDD go faster? That has been an increasingly hard concept to explain. It is either a concept you automatically get or it will take you a month before you understand, but here goes my best shot at explaining it. The SRT technology with the Z68 chipset allows you to take a 60GB SSD and use it to "cache" files. What does caching mean? Well it takes the files you use a lot that are on your slow hard drive and stores them on your fast SSD. So if for some reason you have a word or a power point document that you work on a lot, the SRT technology will see that you are using it as a frequent file and store it to the SSD. That means that the next time you pull up that document it will load from the SSD giving you SSD speeds rather than having your mechanical hard drive slow you down. Obviously this works for applications and pretty much and software related file on your PC. If you didn't get that I will have a video below for you to watch.

 

You don't need to thank me at least for the time. Stoner might want his fair share of compliments though (just kidding). But hey, don't just sit on this. Be active. I came up with a build that would please me, not you. You should really think about what you want to see in these builds. Maybe you want more SSD space and a lower end graphics card, maybe you want fancy cable sleeving and lights? You have to come back and critique what we have recommended so that you can get the best build possible. Otherwise you will end up like me on my first build.

 

P.S. Tip from my first build: NEVER EVER EVER FORGET THE OPTICAL DISK DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

Edit: I forgot the videos hahahahahahaha.

 

Ignore the fact that this guy is annoying as crap. He is really knowledgeable on this sort of stuff and he can teach you a lot.......if you can tolerate him

 

This is for water cooling.

 

 

 

 

 

here is a video for overclocking the i5.

 

 

 

really is that easy.

 

and lastly a video for SRT technology.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHk4t4008KQ

Edited December 30, 2011 by Tjj226_Angel

[DrDigitized2]

As for the liquid cooling, if you think you would want to do it, we can help you out. You have come to a really good website for overclocking (no kidding right?) and water cooling. I will attach a video below to show you how easy it can be as long as you take your time.

 

Yes you still need the bid radiator, but that is why I suggested the case I did. It has a lot of room for that sort of stuff.

 

Now if you really want to make it super simple on yourself, here is a great kit you can buy.

 

XSPC watercooling kit.

 

It comes with everything you need except the coolant. But we will get to that a little later.

 

Overclocking is so easy. You will cry when you learn how simple and safe it is these days. I know I cried seeing how easy the 1155 socket overclocking is compared to the 1366 overclocking.

 

As for the case, believe me, it is better than it looks. It has a really nice clean look to it, and it makes a really clean and sharp looking build. There are always little mods you can do to the case to make it look better. However, the case is totally up to you. Just tell me what you think you would like and I will point you in the right direction.

 

How does the 60 gb SSD make the HDD go faster? That has been an increasingly hard concept to explain. It is either a concept you automatically get or it will take you a month before you understand, but here goes my best shot at explaining it. The SRT technology with the Z68 chipset allows you to take a 60GB SSD and use it to "cache" files. What does caching mean? Well it takes the files you use a lot that are on your slow hard drive and stores them on your fast SSD. So if for some reason you have a word or a power point document that you work on a lot, the SRT technology will see that you are using it as a frequent file and store it to the SSD. That means that the next time you pull up that document it will load from the SSD giving you SSD speeds rather than having your mechanical hard drive slow you down. Obviously this works for applications and pretty much and software related file on your PC. If you didn't get that I will have a video below for you to watch.

 

You don't need to thank me at least for the time. Stoner might want his fair share of compliments though (just kidding). But hey, don't just sit on this. Be active. I came up with a build that would please me, not you. You should really think about what you want to see in these builds. Maybe you want more SSD space and a lower end graphics card, maybe you want fancy cable sleeving and lights? You have to come back and critique what we have recommended so that you can get the best build possible. Otherwise you will end up like me on my first build.

 

P.S. Tip from my first build: NEVER EVER EVER FORGET THE OPTICAL DISK DRIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

 

 

When I said thank you it was to all who helped lol. How did you forget the optical drive? ROTFL. I did get what you meant when you explained the SSD and HDD. Now do you have to do anything special to make them work like that? I will be looking and probably changing the parts as I try to understand them better. But you all have given me a great base line.

 

PS. When you don't know what your doing its best to ask or hand it over to someone who knows what there doing. My first build was great except that I did not know what the mounting screws where for and screwed the mobo directly into the case. As you can imagine it did not work. Luckly it would automatically turn off before it damaged itself. So I took it over to a computer shop that showed me what I did wrong and ran test to make sure I did not completely screw it up for very little money.

[El_Capitan]

You could get two very good gaming computers for $1500, let alone for $3000!

[Tjj226_Angel]

When I said thank you it was to all who helped lol. How did you forget the optical drive? ROTFL. I did get what you meant when you explained the SSD and HDD. Now do you have to do anything special to make them work like that? I will be looking and probably changing the parts as I try to understand them better. But you all have given me a great base line.

 

PS. When you don't know what your doing its best to ask or hand it over to someone who knows what there doing. My first build was great except that I did not know what the mounting screws where for and screwed the mobo directly into the case. As you can imagine it did not work. Luckly it would automatically turn off before it damaged itself. So I took it over to a computer shop that showed me what I did wrong and ran test to make sure I did not completely screw it up for very little money.

 

I forgot about it because I was gawking at my processor I went from using the family computer which was using a anthlon 1 core POS cpu running at 900Mhz and 1gb of DDR ram with dial up internet and a super old IDE drive. Basically, the only difference between that PC and something you would find in a beige case is that the case was the tsunami dream. I went from that the an i7 950 and DSL internet with a sata 2 hard drive and 12GB of ram. I was so busy jumping up and down out of shear excitement that I forgot about the disk drive. I ended up rushing to best buy to pay 40 bucks for a dvd rewritable drive when they were 20 bucks on newegg.

 

You can't really blame me though. I have not even played a single game on it at ALL. I literally built a system 100 times over what I needed it for simply because I freaking hated our main computer. I think if you were in the same position I was, you too would have forgotten the disk drive.

 

I didn't mess up anything more than that. The only problem I had was I knew that I was going to have to run windows XP 32 bit for a while I tried to instal Ubuntu 64 bit, and Ubuntu did not recognize my hard drive at all. Every trick and clever approach did nothing. So I just had to wait for windows 7 to come up with a student discount. Of course that was before I knew about torrenting

 

P.S. I edited my second post with those videos.

[DrDigitized2]

there's a few questions I had. Why do you guys only recommend 8 gigs instead of 16. Is it the cost difference or do you just not need that much right now? The Mobo that Tjj226_Angel Recommends (I like it as well) only has 4 slots. So wouldn't be a waist to use up the space with 2x4gig. Then I could only max out my ram at 24gigs instead of the 32 the board can handle. Also, when choosing memory do these numbers really matter that much? 2133(OC) / 1866(OC) / 1600 / 1333 / 1066? The cost difference is huge.

 

The SSD and the HDD, Do you have to do anything special to make them work together with the SSD being the cache? Or does it already do it on its own. Also does that take away from you storing software on the SSD? Hope that was easy enough to understand.