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New comp for my 14 year old son


peshewah

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   My son wants a new computer for Christmas. He is using a i5 2500. I don't recall the graphics card. He and buddys  do a lot of game development.  He is a gamer. He plays Battlefield Hardline, Watch Dog, Rust, Space Engineer and more. Resolutions is 1080 and runs max setting when possible. He is smart kid and I don't want to limit him to what he can learn due to a not so great computer. So here I go.

  CPU: i7 5820 or 4790 or ?   I was thinking the 6 core would help him with game development but would it slow him down playing games?

 GPU: 970 maybe unless someone has a better idea.

   Ram: I would like 32gb if I could.  

  Mobo: I have no idea. He doesn't overclock that I know of but I would like for him to be able to  if he wants to. In other words I would like for the option to be there just in case.

   Please give me some input Thanks for your time.

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The 5820 is on sale now and would make an absolutely killer rig I have seen the chip as low as $319. You could pair it with an ASUS X99A and 32GB of 2666Mhz memory to go with the GTX 970. There is nothing he couldn't do with that rig.

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If he is going to be gaming on a surround setup you may have to look at a better card to get decent frame rates without dropping visual quality. That or running a pair of cards. 

 

 

I run a 4960X on an X79 board with 32GB of 2133Mhz memory along with  a pair of GTX Titans and can say that there is not much I cannot do. 

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A 2500 is still a pretty stout chip. Why not upgrade it by overclocking and adding a few new parts?

 

More RAM, a new GPU, and an SSD would make it feel new (game development doesn't really require a top-end CPU).

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Waco, your right. I'm wanting to build a new rig anyway. I am still having trouble trying to choose a mobo. I'm not really digging the 8 dimm slots. It looks to me that a lot of people are having trouble with X99 boards.

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A 2500 is still a pretty stout chip. Why not upgrade it by overclocking and adding a few new parts?

 

More RAM, a new GPU, and an SSD would make it feel new (game development doesn't really require a top-end CPU).

+1, I'm of course biased also owning a legendary SandyBridge processor too but I really see no issue but potentially graphics card for your son (not knowing what he has). 1080P isn't a hard resolution to satisfy, if I can satisfy 2560x1600 with a 970 and 2600K, he could definitely do so with a 970 and a i5 2500. BTW contrary to my sig, my CPU has been set to stock clocks for a while now and I haven't any issues running anything. If he intends to game on 2-3 monitors than he may need more than one 970, whether it be another thrown in in maybe a 980 or 980Ti

Edited by IVIYTH0S

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Well hell. You guys about have me talked into keeping what he has and upgrading it. I think there was an issue with his mobo were it wouldn't let me install 4 sticks of ram. I think its a MSI. I will find out for sure and report back. Right now I am helping my wife dig out the Christmas tree crap

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Well, it all depends on how much you want to splurge for your son's upgrade, and the amount of impact it will actually have.

 

For gaming, 95% of games will utilize all the work on the graphics card, so pick something good for that. If he's staying at 1080P, then a GTX 780 3GB or GTX 970 4G is as high as you need to go. For the 5% of games that also utilize the CPU for physics or what not, then 6 slower cores is still better than 4 faster cores, depending on how the code is optimized for multithreading. Some games it might be the opposite, where 4 faster cores will be better than 6 slower cores. At any rate, a good CPU cooler and a simple 4.4GHz overclock on either solves that problem.

 

For CPU overclocking, you need the K-series to really overclock, and an overclocking motherboard. Once you pick a CPU, we can help with the motherboard options. However, the K-series CPU's do not support vPro and Trusted Execution Technology. This doesn't mean a whole lot unless security is a big issue (and for his uses, it won't be). The only Intel CPU K-series chip that has ever allowed vPro and Trusted Execution Technology is the Ivy Bridge 3770K (but it didn't allow VT-d). At any rate, I would ignore all this mumbo jumbo, I'm just providing extra information you don't have to look up.

 

For coding/development, having a lot of memory is very useful. I typically need at least 12GB of memory available when I'm working on something. Sometimes I'm hitting 24GB if I'm also working heavily on Oracle database stuff, but I don't think your son will be at that level for a while now.

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