I'm bumping a 4 months old thread, just to notify those who were interested, that I have finally ordered my new PC that should arrive next week! Money have been tight, but through some slick financial moves (mostly involving living off ramen the past months), I finally had enough cash to order. And as an added bonus, the specs are even better than what I had in mind! Check it out:

Computer I'm Getting Next Week:

• Chassis: Fractal Design Arc Midi Tower
• Power Supply: Corsair TX 650W V2 80+
• SSD: Corsair 120GB SSD - Force 3
• Motherboard: MSI Z77A-G45 Z77
• CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K (6M Cache, up to 3.80 GHz)
• Memory: Corsair 16GB DDR3 (1600MHz)
• Harddrive: Seagate Barracuda Green 2TB - 5900RPM - 64MB
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 2GB GDDR5 (1006Mhz)

Also included is mouse, keyboard, DVD-burner, Windows 7, and all that other boring regular stuff. So what do you guys think?

Feel free to compare it to the specs I planned on getting back in July:

• Chassis: Fractal Design Arc Mini mATX Black
• Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W V2 80+
• SSD: Corsair 120GB SSD - Force 3
• Motherboard: MSI H77 - Socket 1155 - H77 - mATX
• CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K - 3,4Ghz - Ivy Bridge
• Memory: Corsair 16GB DDR3 (1600MHz)
• Harddrive: Seagate Barracuda 1TB - 7200RPM
• Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2GB GDDR5 (965Mhz)

You are buying a K cpu. which means its overclockable, but you are also buying a H77 chipset motherboard, which is more of a low-end deal, if i remember correctly it doesnt actually have any overclocking features, and if it did, the hardware on the board wouldnt be as dimensioned to cope with the increased stress as higher tier motherboards.

it wont hamper your out of the box performance though. ( as long as it has all the expansion slots and connections you are intrested in )

and the un-K version of the cpu isnt that much cheaper. but worth mentioning.

The rest of the build is pretty straight forward, this computer is pretty state of the art, not at all a cheap build.

Also, there are a shittone of "msi H77" boards, you have a better chance of having a person with experience in the product you are buying answering, if you type out the entire model name.

@Devildoll: So you're pretty much saying I should go with this, and/but pretty much only the motherboard is not up to snuff in case I should switch something out? Sorry for sounding like an idiot, but as I said it was a long time since I last did this, hehe.

You could save some $ by going with 8 gigs of ram (16 is overkill).

For MBs I have heard good things about the Asus P8Z77-M Pro which is a micro atx (or its bigger sibling the P8Z77-V Pro)

My only suggestion is to put the correct shipping address, which I can happily help you with via PM. Other than that, it looks good!

Nice and beautiful, good luck mate!

I'd up the PSU wattage to a 750 watt just to be on the safe side. Or if you want to be able to buy another GTX 670 to SLI them later on you could get a 850 watt PSU. But this is all up to you. I'm guessing you're getting that case cause there's a $40 promotion on newegg(linked to it just in case you didn't see it).

I agree with both of the real suggestions above: if you're going to buy an Intel CPU, you have to overclock it to compete with the similarly-priced AMD model. Spend the extra $10 and get an ASUS board; they just work better. The one piece you absolutely don't want to skimp on is the motherboard, and not just because it's the hardest thing to replace down the road.

I'd also suggest you get an aftermarket fan/heatsink. Even a good one won't run you much more than thirty bucks, and they make a world of difference. Just make sure it'll fit in your case: a friend of mine had to dremel a hole in his side-panel to make his fit! Don't worry about your power supply not being able to power the larger fan; I'm running a similar setup with only 500W.

Speaking of power supplies, a modular power supply will really help you cut down on tangled cords all over your case, and they're becoming very popular (i.e. inexpensive) these days. I don't have one, but I wish I did. No real biggie if you don't, though.

And yeah, just get yourself 8 gigs. It's all you need at this point unless you're a big photo/video editor. Get two 4GB sticks (instead of 4x2GB) so that when you actually do need 16, you can just buy a couple more and fill the other two bays instead of throwing out your old RAM.

A last suggestion is to get a full-sized ATX board instead of a micro-ATX. They're easier to work with, especially since you're buying a beastly video card. Better airflow for cooling, too. This one's more personal preference, though.

A word on video cards: the numbers you don't understand (pipelines, bit, whatever) are more important than you think. If the one you're buying is $30 cheaper than the competition with similar first-glance numbers (clock speed, RAM), check those other numbers to make sure they're comparable to the more expensive competition so you don't end up with some arcane bottlenecking issue.

Great idea buying yourself a giant drive and a modest SSD; that will really help you out. Happy building!

@Jazzycola said:

I'd up the PSU wattage to a 750 watt just to be on the safe side. Or if you want to be able to buy another GTX 670 to SLI them later on you could get a 850 watt PSU. But this is all up to you. I'm guessing you're getting that case cause there's a $40 promotion on newegg(linked to it just in case you didn't see it).

these computers the more and more power efficient all the time.

with the 600 series, nvidia made a serious leap in power efficiency. this computer will top out at about 300 watts, so for single card use, there is no need to bulk up the psu.

with two 670's in this setup, you are going to be talking about around 500 watts. and since the cx600v2 only pones up 480 watts on the 12 volt rail, we're going to get in trouble.

@BitterAlmond said:

I agree with both of the real suggestions above: if you're going to buy an Intel CPU, you have to overclock it to compete with the similarly-priced AMD model. Spend the extra $10 and get an ASUS board; they just work better. The one piece you absolutely don't want to skimp on is the motherboard, and not just because it's the hardest thing to replace down the road.

I'd also suggest you get an aftermarket fan/heatsink. Even a good one won't run you much more than thirty bucks, and they make a world of difference. Just make sure it'll fit in your case: a friend of mine had to dremel a hole in his side-panel to make his fit! Don't worry about your power supply not being able to power the larger fan; I'm running a similar setup with only 500W.

Speaking of power supplies, a modular power supply will really help you cut down on tangled cords all over your case, and they're becoming very popular (i.e. inexpensive) these days. I don't have one, but I wish I did. No real biggie if you don't, though.

And yeah, just get yourself 8 gigs. It's all you need at this point unless you're a big photo/video editor. Get two 4GB sticks (instead of 4x2GB) so that when you actually do need 16, you can just buy a couple more and fill the other two bays instead of throwing out your old RAM.

A last suggestion is to get a full-sized ATX board instead of a micro-ATX. They're easier to work with, especially since you're buying a beastly video card. Better airflow for cooling, too. This one's more personal preference, though.

A word on video cards: the numbers you don't understand (pipelines, bit, whatever) are more important than you think. If the one you're buying is $30 cheaper than the competition with similar first-glance numbers (clock speed, RAM), check those other numbers to make sure they're comparable to the more expensive competition so you don't end up with some arcane bottlenecking issue.

Great idea buying yourself a giant drive and a modest SSD; that will really help you out. Happy building!

what? overclock an intel cpu to get even with amd?

back in the days of pentium 4 and athlon perhaps. right now intel has undisputed performance advantages. there are very few "every day" cases where a modern amd cpu actually beats an intel.

an aftermarket heatsink is nice, but if this guy hasnt built computers in a while id suggest keeping it simple at first, then later on, if he feels the need, he can throw down some cash on a noctua or similar.

i agree with your suggestion about getting a full atx motherboard. if your chassi is big enough to house it, dont waste that space.

its extremely complex to compare graphics cards of different architecture to each other.

the best thing to do is to look at what actually matters, game performance, find a review that has all the cards you are interested in, and look at the graphs.

an example is the 7970 vs 680.

seen like this, the 680 looks like crap. its got over half a billion transistors less than the 7970, way fewer shaders, tad higher fequency's but in turn way lower amounts of ram, as well as a significantly narrower memory pipe. the reason you cant just look at the numbers is because they dont show the whole picture. there is no universal "shader" they all use. the 7970's might be individually less capable than the 680's etc etc.

the real life situation is that the 680 is the better card, something you probably wouldn't have figured out just going by the specs.

the only time you can safely compare two cards, is if they are both the same card, and one of em has a factory overclock. cause then you know for sure, that that is the only difference, and since the factory oc card has the bigger number ( somewhere ) its going to be better, although a sane person would just overclock his card himself and save a couple of bucks.

@Devildoll: Everything else I agree with wholeheartedly but there is no benefit to a full sized motherboard for a games machine these days. There are mATX boards which can do CrossFire and 3 Way SLI and a smaller board means better airflow.

@SeriouslyNow: well, if everything is more tightly packed issues might occur on that front.

i just prefer bigger boards cause you got space to fiddle, but if you aren't going to open up your case all the time and tinker, that might not be so important.

I agree with the maybe more power supply comments, never hurts to have extra does hurt to have *just enough*. Also again you might want to up the quality of the mobo a bit, up to you. Otherwise it is fine. I also prefer building in really large high quality cases (makes them reusable, easier to build in, do maintenance on) but again up to you.

@Karkarov: a 600 watter isn't "just enough" for a build that will only reach about 300 watt's under heavy load though.

I'd say swap out that mobo for a Z77 board, which isn't too much more, just so you have overclocking capabilities down the road if you so happen to want that eventually. mATX is perfectly fine for that build (and saves some space). And as mosdl said, 8GB of memory is fine and saves you a little cash, not that that really matters too much, though, when we're talking about a, what, $1300ish (?) rig and $40 more in memory. Edit: just realized you're from Sweden and prices for that stuff there can be a bit different from the US, regardless of the exchange rate, so please disregard my price estimates. And after reading the other guys' posts, you may indeed want to go with ATX for the reasons stated above. Up to you, won't make a huge difference.

@Jazzycola said:

I'd up the PSU wattage to a 750 watt just to be on the safe side.

Was about to suggest the same thing. The rest looks pretty solid.

The only thing I'd echo is that 16gb is overkill for ram - 8 is plenty (unless you are editing multiple videos at once).

And I'm personally not a huge fan of MSI boards, but to each their own.

too much Ram. Large Caches of RAM run slower. you should put less.

@Devildoll said:

@Karkarov: a 600 watter isn't "just enough" for a build that will only reach about 300 watt's under heavy load though.

Fair enough. I wasn't even really saying he had "just enough" at 600 watt though, more I was just making the point that sometimes bigger is better. Especially when it comes to a PSU. Considering I also saw a newegg deal last week for a 1k watt corsair gold+ fully modular PSU for only 150 it seems like maybe the prices are at a good spot these days too. So why cheap out, go bigger for maybe 50 more and know you are in good shape even if you expand later.

You should get a Z77 motherboard, and if you need extra money to do so you can chop 8 gigs off that ram because no game is going to take advantage of that.

The PSU is fine, Corsair pack serious power over their 12v rails usually. Only go for more if you think dual GPUs is in your future.

and cut that ram down to 8, even 8 isn't required for gaming right now but you should definitely get that amount for new builds.

@Karkarov: yeah thats true, a good powersupply is like a good case, you can keep it forever.

its definitely a good idea to invest in a gold or platinum psu with modular setup if you plan on staying on pc for a while.

@Devildoll said:

what? overclock an intel cpu to get even with amd?

back in the days of pentium 4 and athlon perhaps. right now intel has undisputed performance advantages. there are very few "every day" cases where a modern amd cpu actually beats an intel.

That's not what I said at all. I said overclock to get the same performance for the same money. I recently bought an FX CPU that ran at 4.2GHz, right out of the box. My mobo's auto-overclock feature set it to 4.5 by default, and if I feel like pushing it I can get close to 5.0 comfortably. It cost me less than $200. For the same money, I could barely afford a 3GHz Intel chip. However, because of how they're built, I'd bet that the Intel chip costing the same would perform about the same as my AMD if it was overclocked. Otherwise, forget it.

tl;dr: I'm not suggesting that a 4.0GHz AMD will outperform a 4.0GHz Intel. The opposite is true. However, AMD will give you a higher-clock chip for less money, and in order to get maximum bang-for-your-buck, overclocking Intel chips is essential. Especially since they're rated to withstand temperatures much higher than AMD's chips.

@Devildoll said:

its extremely complex to compare graphics cards of different architecture to each other.

the best thing to do is to look at what actually matters, game performance, find a review that has all the cards you are interested in, and look at the graphs.

an example is the 7970 vs 680.

Card	Transistors	Core frequency	Shaders	Texture units	ROPs	Memory Speed	Memory Amount	memory bus width
7970	4.31 Billion	925 MHz	2048	128	32	5,5 GHz	3 GB	384 bit
680	3.54 Billion	1006 MHz	1536	128	32	6 GHz	2 GB	256 bit

seen like this, the 680 looks like crap. its got over half a billion transistors less than the 7970, way fewer shaders, tad higher fequency's but in turn way lower amounts of ram, as well as a significantly narrower memory pipe. the reason you cant just look at the numbers is because they dont show the whole picture. there is no universal "shader" they all use. the 7970's might be individually less capable than the 680's etc etc.

the real life situation is that the 680 is the better card, something you probably wouldn't have figured out just going by the specs.

the only time you can safely compare two cards, is if they are both the same card, and one of em has a factory overclock. cause then you know for sure, that that is the only difference, and since the factory oc card has the bigger number ( somewhere ) its going to be better, although a sane person would just overclock his card himself and save a couple of bucks.

That's also not what I meant. I was talking about the "same" card (architecture, name, etc.) made by different manufacturers, or possibly different "editions" of the same card by the same manufacturer. Two GTX 680s are not necessarily even. Obviously you can't compare architectures just by number of transistors. My old Radeon HD 3850 only runs 300MHz slower than my new GTX 550 Ti, but it has about a third the framerate on most games. I'm telling him to compare between EVGA, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, and all those other companies making the same card.

BitterAlmond:That's not what I said at all. I said overclock to get the same performance for the same money.

@BitterAlmond said:

I agree with both of the real suggestions above: if you're going to buy an Intel CPU, you have to overclock it to compete with the similarly-priced AMD model.

well ok, i was thinking from Op's prespective , there is pretty much nothing on amd's side that can best the 3570 he had in mind.

additionally, there are only 2 - 4 current intel cpu's that allow overclocking, none of em have to be overclocked to compete with any of amd's current cpu's,

BitterAlmond: That's also not what I meant. I was talking about the "same" card (architecture, name, etc.) made by different manufacturers, or possibly different "editions" of the same card by the same manufacturer. Two GTX 680s are not necessarily even. Obviously you can't compare architectures just by number of transistors. My old Radeon HD 3850 only runs 300MHz slower than my new GTX 550 Ti, but it has about a third the framerate on most games. I'm telling him to compare between EVGA, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, and all those other companies making the same card.

@BitterAlmond said:

A word on video cards: the numbers you don't understand (pipelines, bit, whatever) are more important than you think. If the one you're buying is $30 cheaper than the competition with similar first-glance numbers (clock speed, RAM), check those other numbers to make sure they're comparable to the more expensive competition so you don't end up with some arcane bottlenecking issue.

it really doesn't look like you are talking about different subvendor versions of the same card here.

the only thing that differs between subvendors is the sticker on the cooler.

if they have an overclocked edition they bump up the core frequency by 12 MHz. ( and if you are clever, you save a couple of bucks by not buying that one and do the overclocking yourself. )

they are never ( okay never say never ) EXTREMELY rarely going to differ busswidth or piplines. and you are not going to avoid a bottleneck by picking another brand of the model.

Edit :

i just dont reccomend novice people looking at specs, i'll just confuse em.

as i stated earlier, its better if they just look up performance tests of the cards they are interested in and see how they actually perform, instead of looking at numbers and trying to guess which one is better.

@Devildoll said:

BitterAlmond: That's also not what I meant. I was talking about the "same" card (architecture, name, etc.) made by different manufacturers, or possibly different "editions" of the same card by the same manufacturer. Two GTX 680s are not necessarily even. Obviously you can't compare architectures just by number of transistors. My old Radeon HD 3850 only runs 300MHz slower than my new GTX 550 Ti, but it has about a third the framerate on most games. I'm telling him to compare between EVGA, ZOTAC, GIGABYTE, and all those other companies making the same card.

@BitterAlmond said:

A word on video cards: the numbers you don't understand (pipelines, bit, whatever) are more important than you think. If the one you're buying is $30 cheaper than the competition with similar first-glance numbers (clock speed, RAM), check those other numbers to make sure they're comparable to the more expensive competition so you don't end up with some arcane bottlenecking issue.

it really doesn't look like you are talking about different subvendor versions of the same card here.

the only thing that differs between subvendors is the sticker on the cooler.

if they have an overclocked edition they bump up the core frequency by 12 MHz. ( and if you are clever, you save a couple of bucks by not buying that one and do the overclocking yourself. )

they are never ( okay never say never ) EXTREMELY rarely going to differ busswidth or piplines. and you are not going to avoid a bottleneck by picking another brand of the model.

Edit :

i just dont reccomend novice people looking at specs, i'll just confuse em.

as i stated earlier, its better if they just look up performance tests of the cards they are interested in and see how they actually perform, instead of looking at numbers and trying to guess which one is better.

Yeah, sorry about that one. I agree it wasn't clear, and that's why I said "meant" instead of "said" there. My bad.

And I'm just warning the guy because I have seen it happen. He doesn't actually have to know what the numbers mean (I certainly couldn't tell you what a pipeline actually is or does), just that if the cheaper card's numbers are considerably lower than all of the other cards, it may end up with some funky stuff going on. Check generally, and do some reading if you want to.

I'd disagree with you about the performance between Intel and AMD, but that's because I'm an AMD boy (and I can tell you're more of an Intel fan yourself). Although a 3.0GHz Intel will outperform a 3.5GHz AMD, there is a point where AMD's raw power will overtake the Intel chips. That's why I recommend overclocking: you get the efficiency and the power.

Thank you all for your awesome feedback, I'm slowly making progress over here. Right now I've passed on the information to my PC-building buddy and see what he makes of it, since he'll do the bulk of the work for me (choose cheapest and most reliable retailers, building it, etc). If I come up with more questions I'll be sure to ask you.

Overall it seems the majority of you think it's a good setup, though most also seem to think that the motherboard could be better. I agree that 16G of ram is probably a bit overkill. Some also suggested that more watt was needed. As I said, I passed on all this feedback to my buddy, so now I'll wait for his reply! :)

@BitterAlmond: i personally have only had two main cpu's, both have been intel.

the first one, cause it was my first build ever, and i was at the time ( 2002-2003) unaware that the athlons were better ( pentium 4 )

the second one, cause i was in the market for a killer rig and the i7 920 fit the bill.

I cant say if i am biased or not, i would obviously be tainted enough to think otherwise. but during that time before intel had the conroe's i did put together a fair number of amd builds.

@Cincaid: be sure to stick around for the actual assembly, you might enjoy it!

and when you and your pal makes the final decision on the parts, it would be cool if you posted the list here.

That ssd, is it using a Sandforce controller? I would recommend any SSD that isn't Sandforce, they seem to have a high failure rate.

Bump, as I finally ordered my PC! What do you guys think?

@Cincaid: A few comments:

The SSD you chose is going to be outclassed in practically every category by the new Samsung 840 Pros coming out next week, for about the same price. This isn't an "OH GOD THE SKY IS FALLING" kind of situation, as the extra performance may not be all that noticeable, but the alternative would be better.

I have an intense distaste for "green" drives. They're slow to respond, often times have "intelligent" head parking which just leads to an increase in wear, and aren't all that much cheaper than their 7200RPM bretheran. Still, I assume it's just going to be a bulk media storage drive and you aren't going to do much I/O on it, so it shouldn't be that bad. Something to note for the future though: you should probably avoid green drives unless you have some real restrictive noise/power concerns.

Love the case choice; I got a Node 304 which I'm using for a build (I've posted the initial log in this forum), and it's a treat to use. Fractal is a great company.

I would have liked to see you go with a PSU that was at least 80 PLUS Bronze as you are going to be working it pretty hard, but there's nothing wrong with the brand (I use a AX850 in my Crossfire Rig).

The combo of RAM, CPU, and GPU should allow you to play games at or near their maximum quality setting for a good amount of time, and I think you'll be very happy with it overall. Could you post what monitor you have? I'm curious as to what you are entrusting to display all that GPU muscle.

@Mirado: Thanks for the reply! The package have been ordered, so there's little room for change right now. But I'll certainly keep your tips in mind for future upgrading and stuff.

My current monitor is a BenQ G2222HDL, which was mostly bought because the girlfriend hated my old, fat monitor. Here are two reviews of it (12) if you want more info. And frankly, I don't have that much experience of monitors to know if this is a piece of shit or not. :P