New mid range build
February 7th, 2017
Thanks Case
1 x Corsair Graphite Series 230T Midi-Tower Case – NO PSU, Black
2xUSB3.0, 2x120mm Red LED, Angular, Windowed, Steel Aesthetic Pas With High Airflow Plastic Front Fascia, ATX Power Supplier
1 x ThermalTake 850W Toughpower Series – ATX 12V v2.3, EPS 12V, 135mm Fan, Low-Profile Modular Cables, 80 PLUS Gold Certified
9x SATA, 4x PCI-E 6+2-Pin Motherboard
1 x ASUS Z97-PRO(Wi-Fi ac) Motherboard
LGA1150, Z97, 4xDDR3-1600, 2xPCI-Ex16 v3.0/2.0, 1xPCI-Ex16 v2.0, 4xPCI-Ex1, 6xSATA-III, 1xSATA-Express, 1xM.2, RAID, 1xGigLAN, 8Chl-HD, USB3.0, WIFI, Bluetooth, ATX CPUs | Processor
1 x Core i5-4690K Quad Core CPU (3.50GHz, 3.90GHz Turbo, 350MHz-1.20GHz GPU) – LGA1150, 5.0 GT/s DMI, 6MB Cache, 22nm, 88W SSD
Samsung 1000GB 2.5″ Solid State Disk, 3D V-NAND, SATA-III (MZ-7KE1T0BW) 850 Pro Series•Read 550MB/s, Write 520MB/s
Cooling
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer Xtreme Rev.2 CPU Cooler
120mm Fan, 1500rpm, 35.7CFM Memory – RAM
1 x 16GB (2 x 8GB) PC3-12800 1600MHz DDR3 RAM CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Drive
1 x 24x DVD+-RW Dual Layer DVD Burner Video Card
1 x Gigabyte GeForce GTX970 – 4GB GDDR5 – (1178MHz, 7000MHz)
256-bit, 2xDVI, 3xDisplayPort, 1xHDMI, PCI-Ex16 v3.0, Fansink – G1 Gaming Edition Operating System
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 – Professional – 64-Bit
what is the purpose of this build? for doing what !!!
cannot comment on this if i do not know what you are trying to achieve.
what is the purpose of this build? for doing what !!!
cannot comment on this if i do not know what you are trying to achieve.
Predominately gaming but with a bit photoshop editing .
Z97 UD3 BK. Stock cooler or Noctua NH-D12S.
FSP Aurum,
The cheapest GTX 970 you can get, maybe mini pcb ones.
That ‘s definitely a killer pc for gaming man . good to go
Why not go with i5-6600k, a Z170 board and some DDR4 ram? The price is too close to be spending money on parts that are 15-18 months old.
it is actually a very good build. but i can suggest something for decreasing budget for other parts than gpu and so you can go for gtx 980.
1- if wifi is not essential for you , buy a cheaper motherboard from asus without on board wireless. also remember you can use usb sticks for wireless
2- if you dont plan overclocking , buy i5 4690 instead of i5 4690k
3- actually you are going to be robbed with that 1tb samsung 850 ssd , the prices for ssds at that size is way too high. instead i can offer something like that
a- buy 1 samsung 256 gb 850 evo/pro(pro is little better and expensive but you wont see that difference over evo while gaming) + 1 tb wd caviar black/blue (black is best but blue is almost similar in terms of performance and cheaper)
b- if you want to do some of your daily work on ssd but main samsung 256gb one wouldnt have enough space for you , you can go like that. 256gb samsung evo/pro + 256gb OCZ ARC + 500 gb wd caviar black/blue.
c- if you insist on big size samsung 850 , buy 500 gb samsung evo/pro + 500 gb wd black/blue
personally i would go 256gb OCZ ARC + 1 tb wd blue if you want to get best gaming performance with that budget.
4- that psu you have selected , is not fully modular but semi modular. go for a fully modular one such as corsair rm 750 , rm series are cheapest fully modular series from corsair but it would be sufficent.
now , after saving some budget now i believe you can go to gtx 980 , even gtx 980 ti which is a hell of a gpu. that 1tb ssds causes hell of a price increase . gtx 970 is good but it has 3.5 gb vram barrier which is not problem for now but maybe in the future. gtx 980 is not as efficient as gtx 970 in terms of price performance but no doubt it will endure longer.
actually i got excited and let me do my build for you with a similar budget which only focuses on gaming performance.
Motherboard
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Z97A/
Cpu
http://ark.intel.com/products/80810/Intel-Core-i5-4690-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz
Memory cheapest 2*8=16 gb at 1600 mhz you can find from corsair , gskill or kingston
Ssd
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820228116
Hdd
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236339
Psu http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139055
Gpu
https://www.asus.com/Graphics-Cards/STRIXGTX980TIDC3OC6GD5GAMING/
thats my build with same budget for the best gaming performance. now your mid budget pc can compete with high end pcs in terms of gaming performance. i didnt look the prices but it should be similar with what you did , even maybe cheaper so tell me the cost of your build and my build , we can make some adjustments.
Like says, go for the more modest SSD/HDD combination and have more to spend on the vid card, if you wish
Thanks for the input guys .
The reason I chose the 850 pro SSD is for the 10 year warranty and the reviews on that SDD are amazing but it is expensive but its a lot of super fast storage , I have another machine with 2 250gig OCZ SSDs and they have filled up in no time games are huge these days they are what actually prompted this new build , I have lots of portable usb storage so didnt bother with a second drive in this build as I just use the usb drives .
This build cost me 3000 Australian dollar which would be around 1800 US , that SSD drive alone cost 770 and as pointed to was the reason I dropped back on the Graphics Card , from what I can gather that Gigabyte card is on of the best 970s you can get and it was like 400 cheaper than a 980 and Ti .
Will go over the suggestions and do some more number crunching .
Cheers .
the price problem about ssds with huge size is same for every brand. samsung 850 pro is best and most expensive ssd which makes the situation even worse. you wont feel how powerful samsung is , during your daily usage of while playing games. games can load a few secs earlier and thats all.
games are getting huge so install 2 huge games at a time at most. dont install 10 games at the same time and 250 gb would be enough if your aim is gaming performance and systems durability against time for games. buy the built i did. and keep in mind those memory or ssd drives can be added later whenever you have money but changing gpu is more costly and not easy
gtx 970 is gtx 970 , it has its limitations no matter which brand it is . 980ti is an incredible gpu which can bring 970 to its knees. 980ti is just released 2-3 months ago. i can tell you that the build with gtx 980ti above can give better gaming performance than any single gpu pc that was built before the release of gtx 980 ti , it can be 5000$ or 10000$ pc but yours will still perform better. it would be a grave mistake to spend that much money for ssd and leaving your gpu at gtx 970 for a gaming pc.
Youre an evil man my wife is not happy , I explained to her I really need the SSD drive but said I gotta kick out that card and lower the SSD cost , so I did the smart thing .
I swapped out the GTX 970 for this new GPU and kept the Samsung .
Gigabyte GeForce GTX980Ti – 6GB GDDR5 – (1190MHz, 7010MHz)
•384-bit, 2xDVI, HDMI, 3xDisplayPort, PCI-Ex16 v3.0, Fansink
Well that was a clever bit of number clubbing, I must say
An ssd from 2015 in 10 years it will be as slow as an hdd is today. No reason to buy the pro version just because it has a 10 year warranty. By the time 10 years pass if we are alive we will be using that thing as a coaster.
Just get the samsung evo if it’s cheaper by a significant amount.
An ssd from 2015 in 10 years it will be as slow as an hdd is today. No reason to buy the pro version just because it has a 10 year warranty. By the time 10 years pass if we are alive we will be using that thing as a coaster.
Just get the samsung evo if it's cheaper by a significant amount.
It wasnt really because of the 10 yr warranty more the quality of the drive, my PC wont last that long lol , going by Samsung specs its should outlast the evo in data writes 2 to one , for $140 difference Id rather the pro , and its faster so thats a bonus .
I went a bit over budget but got some quality components in a pretty fast build that should last a few years before I need to update it, my other machine which is an older similar build , it has a GTX780 and still plays any game thats out there at the moment real good, so this one should last 5 yrs at least .
my PC wont last that long lol Yeah kind of like me, my upgrade schedule is every six months, although I go to the computer shop once a week.
Just completed a Strix 970 SLI config today, let the benchmarking start.
Youre an evil man my wife is not happy , I explained to her I really need the SSD drive but said I gotta kick out that card and lower the SSD cost , so I did the smart thing .
I swapped out the GTX 970 for this new GPU and kept the Samsung .
Gigabyte GeForce GTX980Ti - 6GB GDDR5 - (1190MHz, 7010MHz)
•384-bit, 2xDVI, HDMI, 3xDisplayPort, PCI-Ex16 v3.0, Fansink
ahahha , i m not evil. your unstoppable desire to get that samsung ssd is evil aside from joke , if you are going to have troubles cuz of higher budget , just buy ocz arc 240 and buy samsung ssd later. i dont know what your are planning to do except gaming but i have both first and last generation of ocz vector ssd on 2 different pcs. until now i didnt see a single difference while navigating through windows and gaming. even installation times are same.
if your external drives you mentioned above are usb 3.0 , you can even install games on it which has average 100mb/sec of speed. it would be more than enough. i dont know you but i personally prefer a game loads in 5 secs instead of 4 but gives 100 fps instead of 50 with my more powerful gpu i suggest asus strix version of gtx 980ti , it may have lesser factory overclock but it is really silent and cool.
we need to review a few things.
1- i5 4690 and i5 4690k are identical cpus if you are not going to overclock. if you are going to overclock buy 4690k.
2- 980ti is pretty large gpu , asus strix’s dimensions
12 ” x 6 ” x 1.57 ” Inch
30.5 x 15.22 x3.98 Centimeter
so you need to make sure you case’s gpu length capacity is enough , most mid towers can not handle more than 30 cm.
3- have you changed your psu with the one i told or any fully modular one ? using a semi modular psu on this case would be also waste
Swapped the PSU for the RM Corsair it was the same price , my first choice for the GPU was the Asus Strix but there is non available for 3 wks so I went with the Gigabyte Gaming version 980ti it will fit in the case no problems .
Will eventually over clock the cpu thats what I went with 4690k .
From a review on the case .
The Corsair 230T offers support for up to seven expansion slots, which fits all standard ATX motherboards nicely. The system supports a GPU up to 430mm long in the top slots and 340mm long at the bottom. Here’s what that means, practically—every GPU on the market today will fit into this case, including behemoths like the R9 290X, the Nvidia GeForce GTX 780 Ti, and the AMD Radeon HD 7990.
Im “trying” lol…. to put together a case which mirrors your earlier post, minus the ssd for 1700$ compared to your 3000$ where are you buying your parts??
Your more recent post is more expensive, but given your previous one was like mine but double the price….
Im "trying" lol.... to put together a case which mirrors your earlier post, minus the ssd for 1700$ compared to your 3000$ where are you buying your parts??
Your more recent post is more expensive, but given your previous one was like mine but double the price....
1700 bloody hell did you use a balaclava and shotgun lol thats just the Graphics card and SSD in this build , whats the best price you can find on those in Aus .
Well here is an update on building this rig .
I have a Dell 30inch Ultrasharp monitor its a beautiful big display at 2560 x 1600 , it only has one DVI dual link connection so I thought no problems I,ll just get a KVM switch , then I find out dual link KVM cost a bundle, so then I think ok I will get some dual link hdmi adapters so I can have the new machine and my old machine using the same monitor by just pulling out and plugging in a hdmi cable for whatever machine I wanted to use .
First issue my old machine will not go pc-adapter-hdmi-adapter-monitor , the screen is all scan lines and unusable .
Then I try the new machine and go PC-hdmi-adapter-monitor and it worked but with a maximum resolution of 1280 x 800 , then I try the new machine with straight dual link cable no adapters , it would show the boot screen then the Starting Windows animation and then blackscreen and nothing, about now Im thinking wtf is going on here, so I boot into software mode with the dual link on the new machine and it loads windows and again the only res supported is 1280 x 800 .
I jump on line and find out that its to do with the Dell scaling and the Dual link and how it talks to the graphics card , was on it most of the night and its driving me nuts because the old machine with a GTX550 ti works beautiful on this monitor giving full res of 2560 x 1600 and the same dual link cable connect to the new machines GTX980 ti only gives 1280 x 800 so after trying many adapters and cables Dell driver updates etc etc I gave up and have resigned to having my old machine on the Dell and I was forced to buy another monitor for the new build .
Ended up pulling the trigger on a Asus Rog Swift, I love technology but it can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, and costly ! Cheers
if you make 1 more update to this rig , you are probably gonna get divorced rog swift is the best gaming monitor available for now if other IPS pa ones are still not released and as far as i know they didnt , so it is a very good choice but costly as you said. remember to buy hdmi 2.0 cable if you are going to use hdmi otherwise you wont be able to use monitor at 144hz, on the other hand all display port and dual link dvi would be enough for 144hz. if you are planning to use monitor also as speaker , hdmi 2.0 or any display port is your only option since dual link dvi can not carry audio.
install crysis 3 and set everything to max when you built your system then play it and tell us the results
Haha you might be right buddy the wife is visiting mum and wont be back for 5 days no more updating after this monitor or I will be gone lol , Ive a got a racing 3 monitor rig as well as these 2, at the moment my computer room is looking like the stock exchange lol I played Crysis 3 on that Dell 30 inch and its a beautiful game got to be one of the best looking games made .
Haha you might be right buddy the wife is visiting mum and wont be back for 5 days no more updating after this monitor or I will be gone lol , Ive a got a racing 3 monitor rig as well as these 2, at the moment my computer room is looking like the stock exchange lol I played Crysis 3 on that Dell 30 inch and its a beautiful game got to be one of the best looking games made .
for me it has the best video game engine this may seen as subjective. but one thing is certain , it is the most demanding one. thats why i told you to try it for some kind of gaming benchmark to test your pc. so you actually built the case and tried it ? are you happy with the performance of your build , did it meet your expectations ?
if everything is ok , i have a few more things to say for enhancing your gaming experience.
Haha you might be right buddy the wife is visiting mum and wont be back for 5 days no more updating after this monitor or I will be gone lol , Ive a got a racing 3 monitor rig as well as these 2, at the moment my computer room is looking like the stock exchange lol I played Crysis 3 on that Dell 30 inch and its a beautiful game got to be one of the best looking games made .
for me it has the best video game engine this may seen as subjective. but one thing is certain , it is the most demanding one. thats why i told you to try it for some kind of gaming benchmark to test your pc. so you actually built the case and tried it ? are you happy with the performance of your build , did it meet your expectations ?
if everything is ok , i have a few more things to say for enhancing your gaming experience.
Yep got the box yesterday and the monitor arrived today , set up steam and got all the games running , havent really spent a lot of time but it handles everything easy on very high settings , and that Asus Rog monitor is a gem with great color for a TN pa and Gsync is butter smooth .
1 more happy customer then we sometimes make builds here and feedback stops after the build has been completed so we cant know if there is a problem with any specific hardware part for future recommendations. i guess , people are immediately starting non-stop gaming.
a few tips for you
i also have little brother of rog swift , vg248qe. those gaming monitors have higher PPI(pixel per inch) density compared to its counter parts. That PPI somehow compensate color quality and accuracy on TN pas which are far behind of IPS. ofc it is still not as good as IPS but beyond expectations. since you are aware of g-sync , you must disable v-sync in games to make it in full control. also since it is relatively new and related to drivers at some point , g-sync may cause problems on some games so you disable g-sync and enable v-sync through nvidia control pa.
if you are playing old games , for example a game from 10-15 years ago , again g-sync may cause problems. you probably wont need this info for 3 years more cuz of your strong gpu but g-sync kicks in after 30fps. actually i was looking for someone with actual experience with g-sync since i m also thinking about buying it. i just know the technical details , dont have any experience.
if you go to nvidia control pa then 3d settings and then individual program settings(not general one). you will see list of every software that uses gpu on your system including browsers. so pick one of the games and enable both MFAA and FXAA as anti aliasing methods. if they are not supported , they would be grayed out so dont worry about it. i also didnt know multiple AA techniques can be used at the same time to get better quality since each of them have different kind of method to reduce the alias. i always thought it would compatibility issues but thanks to my dear friend simulac on here , i learned they all be combined together.
in addition the AA options through nvidia control pa , you can enable AA in game options which is either SSAA or MSAA to have 3 AA combined. actually dont enable if it is SSAA , i have a similar pc with yours and the game i tested first was metro 2033 redux. it has SSAA option when i set it at 4X on 1080p , i got the warning of my pc is slow and maybe need of a new hardware it is hell of a disappointment to face just after you build your system and testing first game SSAA is rare and very demanding method so you wont see it much. generally MSAA is used for games now. i suggest you to do custom install of nvidia drivers and remove everything except drivers itself which is greyed out. it installs too many useless things such as geforce experience , 3d vision , audio drivers etc.. i assume you wont use your monitor’s speakers otherwise you need audio drivers from nvidia.
thats all for now i guess, i write more if something comes to my mind.
Thanks will have a play with stuff tonight , just briefly with the high res and refresh rate of this monitor Ive found in demanding games like Wither 3 if I turn off all AA I cant even notice it on screen its still beautiful and I cant notice any jaggies at all and I dont have the overhead of AA , what Ive noticed with Gsync is how smooth it is all the time it has a fluid feel to it , the oldest game I have is Unreal Tournament and its so smooth same with Counterstrike just so smooth , this monitor is fantastic for FPS and has the thinest bezels about 6ml would be awesome in a triple setup . The box already had Nvidia drivers installed and as you say it has all the BS Nvidia packed with it but its running great so I wont change that until I do another driver update , one thing I noticed in the Nvidia control pa every guide Ive seen about gsync it says in the 3d setting to disable Vsync and select the Gsync option and they show a drop down that gives 3 options on off Gsync , well I dont have the Gsync option under Vsync only on off , anyway I selected off and enabled Gsync in the other setting actually it was on by default , the red light for Gsync comes on when gaming fullscreen and I can definitely feel it in game so all is good .
Another thing this mobo has Realtek Crystal Sound 2 on the board and its great , I have a ASUS Xonar Essence STX soundcard on another machine and this Crystal Sound is just about as good and very hard to pick the difference through the same head phones and speakers , very happy with the stock onboard audio .
i assume you play on 2560*1440 which is max resolution of rog swift. it is normal AA loses its efficiency as the resolution increases. i told those additional things cuz when you buy something and when you especially pay too much for it , you would like to get most out of it
those FXAA and MFAA are really lightweight AA , i have gtx 980 and metro last light redux on 1080p with everything set to max , with no AA also Vsync enabled causes %50 load on gpu. when i enable fxaa and mfaa at the same time load increases to at most %60 and dwells between %50 and %60 generally. so keep it also in mind.
those extra things has no bad effect in terms of performance but they are also useless and uses connection also collecting your hardware data , geforce experience especially does that. i didnt tell disable vsync in control pa but in game menu , some games may have it enabled by default which can cause problem with gsync. on control pa when you enable gsync , vsync should be disabled automatically. those games you mentioned are very popular and still widespread games which still get patches , so i dont think it will have problems but if you play a game for example fallout 1-2 or arcanum from 15 years ago and not widespread , you may or may not have problems. i send you a pm after 1-2 months to learn about your experience with gsync.
btw which motherboard did you buy? asus Z97A or your first choice asus Z97-PRO ?
I cant tell the difference with no AA at 2560 x 1440 it looks glorious .
Got the Z97-Pro mb .
Yeah I dont play any of the older games I think after a while the graphics just kills them for you after you play a fair bit of the modern stuff .
So far Gysnc is the bees knees it so dam smooth all the time on very high res , I thought my previous rig was very smooth as it was but this is different its hard to explain until you actually feel it yourself , its kinda organic , I feel its the best in your face performance upgrade Ive done since my first SSD .