@ldhudsonjr said:
Thanks, you guys are awesome!
Let's start with a budget of $1,100 not including a monitor (i'll probably just buy the cheapest monitor I can to start out with and move up from there, rig is the important part for now.) Games I'm planning to play right out of the gate would be League of Legends, SWTOR, Starcraft 2, Minecraft, DayZ etc..and would want to max them if possible. I'd like to build a system powerful enough to keep up with whatever is coming out for a bit. Really want to get around 8 months to a year out of it before having to upgrade the GPU or anything if possible. Once again, thanks a lot for your help guys.
Well, how likely you are to max those games will be dependent on your resolution; it's a hell of a lot easier to do that at 720p vs 1080p, and easier to do it at 1080p than at 1920x1200 or larger. Still, here's what I quickly came up with in your budget. So, let's go piece by piece:
The CPU is the best of the Ivy Bridge i5 line; with the ability to overclock to crazy numbers, if you ever feel like your CPU is holding you back, you can just crank it up. The motherboard is standard fare, able to handle any modern GPU but without a bunch of frills that just serve to drive the price up. 16GB of RAM is where you want to be right about now; you can get away with 8 but it's so cheap there's no reason not to just toss in the extra. The power supply is a modular unit from Corsair that's rated 80 PLUS Gold; it should run quietly and efficiently. Plus, you only need to install whatever cabling you require, which keeps the clutter down. The hard drive is a 1TB unit from WD (the black line, not the green line; I'll get into that more later) which will handle everything more or less perfectly.
Now, the GPU. I've got you with a boosted 7950 from AMD; it'll beat up the 660 Ti from nVidia more often than not. You've got some options, however. You can step up to a 670 for about $40 or so more, and you can also go up to a 7970 for a bit extra, although you'll have to do the research and find out if the extra few frames are worth the cost for what you play at whatever your target resolution is.
So, that's about $974. We still don't have a case, but that's so personal preference based (in terms of looks) that I leave it out for you to decide. Anything that can fit an ATX motherboard in either mid-or full tower size will do just fine, so you can allocate the remainder to that.
Now, upgrades. You can go for a SSD, either in place of a HDD or in addition to. If you are going as an addition, revert the HDD to a green line model (which are slower to respond and perform vs the blacks, but if it isn't your primary storage device then you don't really need to worry about the difference) and pick a SSD around 128GB. You'll need to rotate games in and out a bit, but you can store whatever isn't load time dependent (movies, music, etc) on the bulk drive and keep whatever can take advantage of the speed on the SSD. If you are going to replace the HDD, don't go any smaller than 256GB on it. I would also suggest an aftermarket cooler for your CPU if you feel comfortable replacing the stock one; it'll run cooler and quieter along with aiding any future overclocking. I also didn't add a CD/DVD drive in there, but they are cheap enough that you can just spring for one if you so require it.
Downgrades that you could make to save cash involve cutting the GPU to a 660 TI or 78xx series, which will hurt your FPS but not drastically, especially at lower resolutions. You could probably gain $100 out of that. You can back off the PSU to a non-modular 80 PLUS Bronze unit, but no less than that; bad PSUs are system killers and I'd rather you throw the extra into here vs anywhere else in the build. You could also cut the CPU back but you lose any overclocking potential if you get away from the unlocked "k" series units, so keep that in mind. Everywhere else will save you so little money that it isn't really worth doing.
So, let's look at it vs the most expensive pre-built system you have there. You lose the SDD and a TB of hard drive space, but you're getting a WAY better GPU while the rest of the features more or less pair across the board (the 3770k would be completely wasted on a gaming rig, the 3570k is more than enough) for $300 less. Not bad, eh?
If you do feel like upgrading from what I have feel free to toss any ideas you may have or questions about my recommendations my way.
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