New build!

Ammeg · 2 Dec 2012 at 19:03

So, it's been way too long with my current build, i've got some spare cash lying around.

Build will be for gaming/browsing/medium photoshop usage. Now i've got an idea on what i'd like, but a few questions:

3570 vs 3570K - i will not be doing any overclocking (ok, so the prices are identical atm, so the k is a no-brainer, but they may be different by the time i come to purchase) is the 'K' worth the extra cash on a no-clocking basis?

Windows: 8 vs 7, HP vs Pro, oem vs Retail (i re-format every few months as a practice)

Motherboards: MSI Z77A-G43 - this should be more than sufficient right?

CPU Cooler - absolutely no idea - don't want to use the stock one as it's noisy, don't want to spend a fortune as i'm not clocking, freezer 7 a good choice?

HDD's: ssd for os/photoshop, 1tb for everything else (not too fussed about games being on the ssd) - is the ssd really worth the extra cash just for a bit of extra ps speed?

GFX: 660 vs 660ti vs 670 - i'm NOT going ati, i've been green for far too long, and everytime the price tempts me to go red, i end up regretting my decision because i hate the drivers >.<

Memory: 8gb vs 16gb, will i really need the extra 8gb for photoshop - i'm a relatively casual user

PSU: I've a HX520w, this'll be fine for the above right?

cd drive: np here, don't need bluray ability, so going to be cheap.

Case: already decided i want the BitFenix Shinobi, not everyone's cup of tea, but kind of fell in love with it 1st time i saw it.

£800 is about as much as i want to spend - tower only + windows, might be able to push a bit more, but please, save me money where you can (without selecting a 'red' graphics card...)

Thankies!

G

Ooh, quick edit: i'd like the build to be pretty quiet. Using water at the moment, but none of my blocks would fit the new components, and i find the noise of the pump to be too noisy for my liking. I've got LOADS of sharkoon Silent eagle 120 lying around, so can easily use those for the case/cpu if necessary, but thinking i may replace the stock cooler for the graphics card if that's viable.

triggerthat · 2 Dec 2012 at 19:40

Something like this?

I'd still recommend going for the K series and do a mild overclock (it's free performance!).

YOUR BASKET
1 x Asus GeForce GTX 660 DirectCU II OC 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with FREE Assassin's Creed III PC Game £185.99
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - OEM £161.99
1 x Samsung 128GB SSD 830 Desktop Series SATA 6Gb/s KIT with Norton Ghost - (MZ-7PC128D/EU) £89.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £89.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-02050) £79.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) £74.99
1 x BitFenix Shinobi USB3.0 Gaming Case - OcUK Edition £49.99
1 x GeIL Black Dragon 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (GD38GB1600C11DC) £23.99
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939/AM2/AM3/775/1155/1156/1366) £15.98
Total : £784.90 (includes shipping : £10.00).

Ammeg · 2 Dec 2012 at 22:15

As always trigger, cheers for the time and effort in posting with pretty pics too

(Don;t let my post count/new user account fool you, been browsing these forums for years ^_^)

I can save on the postage, and i can bump that 660 to a TI for just over budget (gaming is the main use really)

Not confident in clocking, although always willing to learn, plus, could always get my fella to do it for me, i assume the freezer 7 is sufficient for a minor bump?

Would be tempted to do away with the ssd for now, as that's the least 'needed' part (imo, but then again, my experience of ssd's is pretty poor, only one's i've used are 3 years old when they were fairly new tech, speeds seem increadibly fast compared to what they were a few years back)

I didn't really look into motherboards for their OC potential, but seeing as your are a log term user of these forums, i'm assuming you'd have already taken that into account ^_^

With my re-formatting habits, is the OEM windows going to cause me many issues?

And lastly: in photoshop terms only: 8gb ram + SSD or 16gb ram and no SSD, which would yeild the biggest performance boost (i know the SSD would help load times in windows/games too, but i'm not too fussed about that... yet

)

Thankies again!

triggerthat · 3 Dec 2012 at 13:01

If I think who I think this is, then OMG Hello!

Bear in mind that the weekly deals occur on a Wednesday so definitely check them out if you want to save a few pennies.

Definitely overclock the 3570K - it’s extremely easy and a lot of people here will be happy to walk you through it. It’s literally a case of changing 1 or 2 values in the BIOS.

Going for 16GB of RAM is only £25 more so might be worth getting that. The SSD will give significant performance gains (faster when compared to the 16GB of RAM). SSDs have come a long way and I think you’ll be shocked on the performance.

As for Windows, with OEM it is tied to the motherboard so I believe you can reformat as many times as you wish. If you do change your motherboard (for whatever reason, e.g. faulty) then calling Microsoft to request another key is easy.

As for the graphics card, because of your budget you can get away with spending up to £230. People here have mentioned that the 660 TI doesn’t offer much of a bang for buck, especially when compared to the 7950. ATI have released new drivers making them a worthwhile consideration.

Checkout the graphics card section to see peoples thoughts:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18463448&highlight=660

Here’s a spec with the TI and 16GB of RAM:

YOUR BASKET
1 x ASUS GeForce GTX 660TI Direct CU II 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with FREE Borderlands 2 & Assassin's Creed III PC Games £227.99
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - OEM £161.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £89.99
1 x Samsung 128GB SSD 830 Desktop Series SATA 6Gb/s KIT with Norton Ghost - (MZ-7PC128D/EU) £89.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-02050) £79.99
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) £74.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED316GM1600HC11DC01) £55.99
1 x BitFenix Shinobi USB3.0 Gaming Case - OcUK Edition £49.99
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939/AM2/AM3/775/1155/1156/1366) £15.98
Total : £858.90 (includes shipping : £10.00).

dunn2010 · 3 Dec 2012 at 15:01

theres no optical drive on either of those builds so you will need to add an extra £15 for that

still great builds by trigger.

also the 7950 is the better choice , however on 1 monitor at 1920 * 1080 there isnt much difference between the 660ti and 7950 imo. myself and afriend of mine ran some heaven benchmarks on each of our cards me having the evga (non superclocked) gfx card and him having the HIS ICEQ 7950. my TI came out on top by 4 fps with everything maxed out.

so if your playing on 1 monitor @ 1920 by 1080 the difference between the cards will come down to how the individual games themselves use the cards.

Also i have the shinobi case, the core windowed version is more expensive but comes with a windowed side and tooless locking system for hdd's etc. worth thinking about. but the core case comes with no fans so youd have to purchase a couple fans for case also.

and looking at triggers build, if you drop ssd you could upgrade mboard to z77x-d3h which would allow sli/xfire if this is something that would tickle your fancy in future? (if your going to id defiantly recomend 7950 over ti, 2 7950's are amazing in xfire!)

Not having a go at triggers build btw just throwing some options out there. also taking ssd off and upgrading mboard would put you more inline with your 800 quid budget

Like so

only 1tb hdd but optical drive is on there

YOUR BASKET
1 x ASUS GeForce GTX 660TI Direct CU II 2048MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with FREE Borderlands 2 & Assassin's Creed III PC Games £227.99
1 x Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W) - OEM £161.99
1 x Gigabyte Z77X-D3H Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £112.99
1 x Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit - OEM (GFC-02050) £79.99
1 x Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache WD10EZEX - OEM ** Single Platter ** £58.99
1 x TeamGroup Elite 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C11 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (TED316GM1600HC11DC01) £55.99
1 x BitFenix Shinobi "Core" USB3.0 Gaming Windowed Case - Black £54.98
1 x Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 CPU Cooler (Socket 939/AM2/AM3/775/1155/1156/1366) £15.98
1 x OcUK 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £13.99
2 x BitFenix Spectre LED BLUE 120mm Fan £6.49 (£12.98)
Total : £809.99 (includes shipping : £11.75).

Idleman · 3 Dec 2012 at 15:13

Hellos Ammeg and welcome to the forum.

Have you any other components apart from Psu, that you can reuse?

Ammeg · 3 Dec 2012 at 19:04

Thanks for the replies guys!

Not going for the windowd shinobi, will eventually make my own window, and not too fussed with the tooless install stuff, i tend to find you get a little more vibration noise, may even bungee the hard drive.

I apreciate the 7950 is the better bang for buck, but i've been stung too many times to be tempted

Don't need fans, got a whole bunch of sharkoon SE 120's lying around, infact, i had to check where they were, and for some reason i have 12 of them :eek:

As for other spare parts: The psu is the only thing i could re-use really, current build is:

e7200
Asus P5E-VM hdmi
4gb kingston ddr2
8800gts 512
Corsair HX-520w
500gb hdd (sammy F1 i think)
and i do have an optical drive, but that'll be relegated to another machine, although, there's no rush to do that - same with the HDD
27" BenQ monitor

All watercooled in a lian li v350 <3

I've actually played about with clocking this thing today with some help, so will probably go for the 'K' chip regardless now, obviously the way the cpu's work is slightly different these days, but from what i've read, i more than likely won't even need to touch the voltages for a minor boost.

Oh, got some scythe fan controllers here too, so i could pretty much attach everything to that, minus the gfx card fan - which i'm assuming will be the noisyest part to this build.

Thanks again people, really appreciate the help!

G

Quick edit regarding the sli/xfire: been a long time since i used sli, and it was still in it's infancy. I'm still a lot more tempted to use one beastly graphics card over 2, and would rather not pay the extra just for the capability of something i might use. But i'm not too fussed with everything running on absolute max settings. At the moment i mostly play wow (yeah yeah, i know) and rts games, but i have been going through a few decent FPS/RPG single players, and i'm noticing a little bit of a struggle with Bioshock 1/2, The witcher, and The Witcher 2 is terrible, the lag is so bad it feels like i've got input lag from my mouse.

Double edit: Speaking of mice: I may want to add mouse/keyboard into the equation, i will ofc adjust the budget for those, i have tiiiiny hands, and i LOVE my diamondback, although, it's old, and the mousewheel no longer scrolls and the coating is coming off and the glide pads are almost gone. Anything out now that's similar? Keyboard? well, no idea, just needs to feel right, and my usual way of finding such things is to go out and actualy feel them.

PPS: i'm obsessed with the colour green, and would love to dump ~300 on one of the top end gigabytes, but for the sake of a colour? pfft, not going to happen.