New Build - Parts Acquisition

[wesimmo]

Morning All,

Ok so after I got into a little bit of overclocking this year and then the release of Football Manager 2013 / Borderlands 2 and now Far Cry 3 i'm looking to build myself a new PC.

I currently run a E6580 Dual Core (clocked to 3.6) and a 5850 gpu and 4gb of ram.

Thats supported by 2 x SSDs and 1 HDD.

I intend to get rid of my old PC as a working unit if i can, to do so i'll replace the 5850 with the orginal GPU, take out the SSDs and replace the Corsair PSU i have upgraded with the one it came with (5850 required more power).

That leaves me with the PSU and SSDs as the basis of my build.

I'm not going to go with the latest iteration of anything, while i want to do this build, i have got to be careful with money so thought that getting components that aren't quite the latest of the latest makes the most economic sense.

Therefore i have just ordered

MSI HD 7850 Twin Frozr III OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Cards w/ FARCRY3 & Sleeping Dogs PC Games - I wanted FC3 anyway so that makes the card fairly reasonable given the daily deal @ £125 + VAT, though i have read MSI do have some issues occasionally.

Toshiba (7K1000.D) 1TB SATA 6GB/s 32MB Cache - OEM (DT01ACA100) - Again on the daily deal @ £38 + VAT it seems just what i need for media storage. The SSDs run Windows + main programs.

I will hopefully get some Corsair Vengeance Low Profile 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit off the secret santa too.

I intend to get the i5 3750k and overclock that.

The motherboard is something i'm still looking into, balancing the features vs price, i'm hoping to spend £100-150, is that going to provide me with a nice balanced system?

Case is still undecided, then once i have decided on that and see what cooling comes with it, various fans and a CPU heatsink at least will be specced up.

Any hints or tips from people who have a similar system?

I'm going to do some googling, but again if people have direct experience, what's the best way to take the SSDs across onto a new build and retain windows etc?

Thanks.

 

[wesimmo]

Thanks for the replies.

re Hard Drives, yeah i have an external drive for music too, and i will add a NAS of some sort in the future (i have got one somewhere but it's been lost in the 4 house moves i've made in the last 2 years), we have my work PC and laptop, my personal PC and laptop, my girlfriends PC and our daughters tablet all on the network so shared storage makes sense.

That ASUS board looks pretty good, and fits under £150.

I'll move onto the case now i know the board that's going in.

Hopefully soon be some photos of the parts ready to be constructed, though probably not until the new year, i think the girlfriend is trying to dig for info on 3D monitors as a potential present so i may put actually buying more things on hold until after Xmas and see what might turn up in my stocking as well as the RAM.

 

[wesimmo]

Yeah i had wondered about the size of the board, but given i'll not be cramming 2 GFX cards and all sorts in there i thought it'd be ok.

The fan control is a bonus, it'll normally only get under any load on the one or 2 nights a week i get to play games (due to 2 year old daughter) and when i do i use headphones so a bit more fan noise when its working hard is no bother, i currently use SpeedFan for that.

 

[wesimmo]

I've got the Gigabyte ud5H + i5 3570k on the way, should be here tomorrow.

The board i picked up for a smidge under £150 so i went for that over the Asus, plus although aesthetics are very much secondary to me, the board is blue which goes with the lights on my PSU, though that may be changed at some point as it's not modular so it's messy in my current build.

When the new parts arrive i'll get some photos of my current build and the parts and then progress reports as i strip the current case back and start rebuilding.

Assuming i have to wait for some RAM from Santa, i don't know whether to run my current sticks until then or get another 8gb anyway and then run 16gb, but i'm not sure i'll need that much.

 

[wesimmo]

All the parts are now here for the initial build, except one.

I cocked up and ordered the RAM to my parents house so had to grab a cheap 2gb stick this morning from PC World just to get things fired up.

So from this mess...

And with these....

Into this.....

I hope to have a working PC soon.

I'm sure being my first build i'll have forgotten things i might need, and it will be awful looking when i get it working, but i want to get it fired up and prove it all works, then i'll begin on the tidying up,

 

[wesimmo]

First post from new PC.

Runs ok even with 2gb of ram on Win 7 64, fired up first time, just need to sort the cabling out now i know it works.

Also need a female to male converter as the top fan won't plug into the PSU yet, but i'm still on stock anyway so shouldn't be a worry.

I'll need a heatsink for the CPU too, but that can wait, i'll be happy with the increase in performance from an old dual core anyway for a while.

 

[wesimmo]

It's now got 8gb of Corsair Vengeance low profile, with another 8gb to come for Xmas, i ordered the RAM to my parents address by accident so stuck the 2gb in to fire it up, my sister came to visit and bought the RAM from my parents yesterday.

The case is a new case! The problem is more the PSU and the amount of cables that i don't use and the fact i just chucked it together to make sure it worked and haven't done anything with it since.

That aside, despite the top exhaust fan not being powered yet, i've got it clocked to 4.2 on stock heatsink, literally just come off a 4 hour Borderlands 2 session with temps not getting above high 40s, though my office is currently 18 degrees.

The GPU is at 1050/5400 using GPU Tweak and running fine, but i need to fiddle to get any more than 1050 as it's the max GPU Tweak will let me do.

Tidying up is next on the list, i just don't get the time.

 

[wesimmo]

So it's been running well, the CPU is up to 4.4 on stock cooling and remains stable during all normal use, max i've seen is 60 degrees, a true bench mark test will probably get some interesting temperatures though...

I think the 16gb of ram in there is probably overkill for what i use it for, but hey it was cheap.

The 6850 is the weak point at the moment, i've not done much on the overclocking front to it yet, i'm still locked to 1050mhz though i understand i can unlock it somehow.

Otherwise i'm happy with the performance, or was until i got a bonus £120 as a result of a train being delayed so i got a full refund....

Xfire?

 

[wesimmo]

My office is very cold, 15 degrees some days, the free thermometer we got through the door from the council warns i'm at risk from illness it's so cold....so like i say the temps under normal use are fine at the moment, i'll be dialling it back before i did any real testing under load for long periods. For gaming though it is fine at the moment.

I've ordered another 7850 as i managed to get both cards for about £140 each.

When that is in and working ok i'll be getting a modular PSU to improve the cabling, then some cooling for the CPU, depending on how the case tidying goes i might consider some watercooling, damn addictive this PC building lark....

 

[wesimmo]

So that's where i am so far, next on the list is some cooling for the CPU and some more tidying up of cabling.

Would it be worth turning all the hard drives round so the cables plug in towards the front of the case, that'd probably hide a lot of the cabling thats currently a birds nest to the right of the MOBO, otherwise i don't know how to hide them any more, there's no room behind the MOBO for much at all.

With regard to the CPU cooler, there's a 120mm fan to the left of the CPU and a 200mm fan overhead, any recommendations as to which heatsink would work well with that layout?

I'm guessing i wouldn't need a Push/Pull set up as the rear exhaust fan would effectively be the pull?

This is how the set up is performing at the moment, the 2 x 6850s are both at 1050 and 1450 as per the max overclock Afterburner will let me do "out the box" and the CPU is at 4mhz using the Easy Tune preconfigured settings.

I have the PSU pulling air away from the GFX cards and a 120mm fan on the side of the case blowing directly onto them.

CPU max temps on Far Cry 3 are low 60s, the top GFX card peaks at 68.