Project Reality Forums

Hey all,



So I have finally decided to make a computer build. I have saved enough money for around a $1,000 dollar budget. I will be using this computer mainly for gaming such as ArmaII mod and BF2 roject Reality. I also wish to be able to use it to stream free television using Hulu to my 50" flat screen tv which supports 1080p which I currently have my gaming console connected to.

After looking around on the internet for some suggested builds these two sites caught my attention:

Build a Gaming PC for Under $1000 | PCWorld

and

Computer Part Selection

I currently am up in the air on the CPU... as well as everything else. I have looked at the benchmarks for both the Intel Core i7 2600k and the Intel Core i5 2500k. They both seem to fit into my price range however I am unsure if the i7 2600k is worth the extra money. I am currently still looking up parts and comparison shopping but until I get back any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank You!!!

I'm only going to chime in on the processor selection a little bit. One of the largest differences between the i7 and the i5 is the fact that the i7 is a hexa-core (whatever it's called lol) while the i5 is a quad. For this type of budget, unless you plan on doing some serious video and photo editing, you only need the i5.

(I love my 2500k at 4.55GHz )

Answer these questions and people can better help you,

1. Are you a high school or University student with a .edu email address? If so, you might be able to get your OS for $30.
2. Do you have existing parts to reuse?
3. Liquid or air cooling?
4. Do you live near a Micro Center or Fry's?

Check this out:

Wooooops XD

Go down.

Also before I say anymore my whole objective here is to get the best parts for the lowest prices.

Steeps5 wrote:I'm only going to chime in on the processor selection a little bit. One of the largest differences between the i7 and the i5 is the fact that the i7 is a hexa-core (whatever it's called lol) while the i5 is a quad. For this type of budget, unless you plan on doing some serious video and photo editing, you only need the i5.

(I love my 2500k at 4.55GHz )

Well since I don't plan to be editing videos or photos anytime soon I will go with the i5.

Did you overclock it?

Answer these questions and people can better help you,

1. Are you a high school or University student with a .edu email address? If so, you might be able to get your OS for $30.
2. Do you have existing parts to reuse?
3. Liquid or air cooling?
4. Do you live near a Micro Center or Fry's?

1. Neither(I did attend my local 1A public school for a few years however :wink
2. None that I'm aware of. My father built a desktop computer 10+ years ago however all of the parts are outdated so we bought two cheap laptops for internet browsing and minimal gaming.
3. I'm undecided at the moment however I am going to look up the differences between the two and compare and contrast.
4. Micro Center is not in my state and Fry's is about two hours away but I've been to it before.

Nice guide btw

So I've started research on the GPU/Videocard.

Radeon HD 6870 ($160 @newegg)
or
Radeon HD 6950 ($230 @newegg)

About an $70 dollar price difference on newegg.com


Here is a comparison: Radeon HD 6870 vs Radeon HD 6950 ? Performance Comparison Benchmarks @ Hardware Compare

Here is the PassMark for the 6870: PassMark - Radeon HD 6870 - Price performance comparison

And for the 6950: PassMark - Radeon HD 6950 - Price performance comparison


If anyone has suggestions of a better GPU/s for a lower price please comment and share!

Qwertfyu2 wrote: If anyone has suggestions of a better GPU/s for a lower price please comment and share!

6870 is a great card for a great price, though the 560 has better performance for the money. If that is not what you want, take a look at this list for the cards with the best price/performance ratio.

PassMark Videocard Value Chart - Performance / Price of Videocards

Sorry to cause you to wait, I know what its like when you finally decide you want to go forward and build yourself a PC, but the AMD 7000 series is literally round the corner, you can pre-order the 7970's right now. Obviously they're bloody expensive, but they're the top end, I'd wait until you can see the prices of the 7950's or 7870's etc... before completely deciding on the GPU.

Edit: Although looking it up a bit more, looks like 31st jan for the 7950's(as well as a hefty price tag :S), although Nvidia say they will be releasing around that time too... So should be fun price wars hopefully , not that I feel I'm going to upgrade, did so last year, and as much as I want to, don't think its viable xD

But as others hae said the i5 is the way to go if you don't need the extra processing power for encoding or such things, i5 = great for gaming, and spend the savings on a good cooler (Noctua do awesome air cooling, silent and have the performance of the corsair watercooling solutions, which are noisier due to the fans they use...)

My suggestion is based upon finding the best prices, not on specific hardware...

start checking online deals websites daily:
my personal preferred bargain hunting websites:
slickdeals.net
fatwallet.com
bensbargains.net
dell.com outlet deals in conjunction with coupons I find on the web.
amazon.com Gold box deals
email subscription to newegg.com for their daily deals
email subscription to us.ncix.com for their weekly deals

others I check from time to time:
techbargains.com
subscribe to tigerdirect.com email daily deals.
subscribe to buy.com email daily deals.

Sign up for accounts on slickdeals.net and fatwallet.com
You can create keyword searches that are instantly emailed to your email address you sign up with,
set up email deals alerts for "Radeon" "gtx" "psu" "i5-2500k" "ssd"
set up a filter in your email to put all those alert emails to a single folder.
you'll get some desktops and notebooks mixed in the emails, but it's a pretty good otherwise.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Piecemealing the system together by buying online retailers' loss leaders one at a time can save you upwards of 15% on the system as a whole. It takes some time and time is money, so it's up to you.

This week us.ncix.com has good deals on i5-2500k+mobo combo deals.

Check out the Dell outlet for gaming systems, if you hit it just right you can get a scratch and dent system for less than the cost of parts, and the system comes with WIn7Pro x64 which will cost you at a minimum $50 to buy. Finding those dell outlet coupons is tricky though.

As for waiting to buy the your GPU until the new ATI HD 7XXX and Nvidia cards come out, I agree with Pedz, those middle range ATI 78XX cards look like the way to go.

Pedz wrote:Sorry to cause you to wait, I know what its like when you finally decide you want to go forward and build yourself a PC, but the AMD 7000 series is literally round the corner, you can pre-order the 7970's right now. Obviously they're bloody expensive, but they're the top end, I'd wait until you can see the prices of the 7950's or 7870's etc... before completely deciding on the GPU.

Edit: Although looking it up a bit more, looks like 31st jan for the 7950's(as well as a hefty price tag :S), although Nvidia say they will be releasing around that time too... So should be fun price wars hopefully , not that I feel I'm going to upgrade, did so last year, and as much as I want to, don't think its viable xD

But as others hae said the i5 is the way to go if you don't need the extra processing power for encoding or such things, i5 = great for gaming, and spend the savings on a good cooler (Noctua do awesome air cooling, silent and have the performance of the corsair watercooling solutions, which are noisier due to the fans they use...)

Before I begin I want to thank everyone for the feedback .

Ok... where to begin.

AMD 7000 series looks top notch in performance but I don't plan on shelling out $500 dollars for a gpu just yet . Yes I also agree that there should be a gruesome price war between AMD and Nividia so the cost should go down but it probably won't hit that $200 dollar mark anytime soon(IMHumbleO). However I could be horribly wrong and I might be able to get the AMD 7000 series for $100 bucks

Also I really don't plan on doing any encoding anytime soon so I think I'll stick with the i5.

I almost forgot about the Noctua fan you recommended.

Looks great for the price and also the reviews!!!

Also,

@[R-COM]LITOralis.nMd

I'm looking into the sites you have posted and I hope to get the bests prices soon.

and

@Q2M100

Thank you very much for pointing that one out!

After doing some comparison shopping I think the 560 is better for the price. I have also been eyeballing the 560 Ti which is only $10 more at Newegg.(Which btw I'm usuing as a base price not that I can't find better deals on other websites as LITOralis mentioned.)



Ok now that I'm done with the feedback time to ask more questions!!!


So I'm using these as potential canidates for my GPU and I am going to look around for better prices but for now we'll use Newegg.

Newegg.com - EVGA SuperClocked 01G-P3-1461-KR GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

vs.

Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GV-N560UD-1G GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

My main concern is if I will really notice a difference in the FPS or texture detail between the 560 vs 560Ti while playing games like the Project Reality series(or maybe even BF3 ).


Any thoughts or suggestions please comment and share!!!

EDIT: Any suggestions on a Motherboard???

Do NOT buy this board:
Motherboard $122
ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3
Newegg.com - ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

ASRock has serious QC problems with this board for last month, the mobo you'd receive from NewEgg would probably be part of this defective batch.

Th3Exiled wrote:CPU

How were there ~7 posts and not a single person picked up on this error? The I7 2600 is not a hexacore CPU, it is a quad core as is the I5 2500. There is no such thing as a hexacore CPU based on sockets H1 and H2 (LGA 1156 and 1155). Intel's only 6 core processors are based on socket B, also known as LGA 1366 which was intel's last enthusiast level CPU platform which was just superseded by socket R, known as LGA 2011 and the only other current CPU platform offered by intel that has a hexacore CPU out for it.

Hmm sorry about that then. I was always under the impression that the 2600k had six cores to it.

Also, I've learned to not cheap out on motherboards. Seeing as the board connects the entire rest of the computer. Spending $160+ is the ideal amount for quality in my opinion. The board I have now is the ASUS P8Z68-V, and I gotta say, had this computer for 5-6 months now. Not a single problem from the board. It takes anything. Even have it running two graphics cards, four HDDs in RAID, a cache SSD on top of that, and an optical drive. Zero problems hardware wise.

I'd like to thank everyone for the feedback .

So I'm going with this set up. Please tell me if the parts are not compatible xD.

Also if you have any suggestions for better parts that are cheaper but same quality or only a little bit more expensive and even better quality please share them!

Case: I'm up in the air on this one at the moment. I guess I better get all the parts and make sure they're compatible and then get a case that will fit all the parts.

CPU: Intel 2500k: I do plan on possibly overclocking at some point down the road so I suppose it's worth spending the extra $20 dollars for the unlocked version.

Newegg.com - Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 3000 BX80623I52500K

GPU: I'm not going to wait for the AMD 7000 series because I'd rather wait for others to figure out what's wrong with them and then let the prices drop.

I've made three choices.

1) Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GV-R695OC-1GD Radeon HD 6950 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

or

2) Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GV-N560UD-1G GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

or

3) Newegg.com - EVGA SuperClocked 01G-P3-1461-KR GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

The 560Ti looks pretty dang good to me. A little bit more perfomance than the superclocked 560 yet cheaper and almost as good in performance as the 6950.

GPU Cooling Fan:

I'm leaning towards the Noctua. Unless there is a good reason why I should get the Thermaltake(or maybe a different cooling fan) I'll stick with the Noctua.

1) Newegg.com - Thermaltake Frio Overclocking-Ready Intel Core i7 (six-core ready) & i5 Compatible Five 8mm Heatpipes Dual 120mm Fans Intel & AMD Universal CPU Cooler CLP0564
or

2) Newegg.com - Noctua NF-P12-1300 120mm CPU Cooler and Case Fan

Hard Drive:

Take a look and tell me what you think.

1) Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Motherboard:

Any other suggestions?

1) Newegg.com - ASUS P8Z68-V LX LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

PSU:

1) Newegg.com - CORSAIR Professional Series HX650 (CMPSU-650HX) 650W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

or

2) Newegg.com - CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply

Again, any suggestions?

Ram:

Plenty O' Ram but I'm always up for suggestions.

1) Newegg.com - CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B


SSD: Newegg.com - SAMSUNG 830 Series MZ-7PC064D/AM 2.5" 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) Desktop Upgrade Kit



Also, should I get a CPU cooling fan as well?

Thanks for all the help! ^-^

Case: Corsair 650D - Newegg.com - Corsair Obsidian Series 650D (CC650DW-1) Black Steel structure with black brushed aluminum faceplate ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

CPU: good choice man,will serve you well.

GPU: 560 is cutted edition of 560 Ti and Ti version will serve you in long run longer - Newegg.com - MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Or if you insist then MSI have best cooling option right now - Newegg.com - MSI N560GTX Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX 560 (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

I think you mean CPU not GPU cooler.
Yeah Noctua is the best, silent and cool. If you want to do OC then you need aftermarket cooler.

Hard Drive: Well, its hard to say. I prefer Wester Digital and Caviar Black series. Reliable and fast. Just check reviews of people who got them.

Mobo: good choice, stick with it

PSU: Grab that one with 650W. It fairly good and if you will not do any SLi or Crossfire than it will be good to go. + its modular and it is important. Less hassle with cable and case will look very tidy.

RAM: good choice, stick with it

SSD: Better go with Intel, Corsair or Patriot options

Personally I am in love with my HDD.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822152185

But WOW I had no idea the price was raised by $100 because of the flooding in (can't remember the country). I was buying these drives at $50 each a while ago! The Spinpoint F3s are actually one of the fastest 7200 RPM drives out there. Just look for online reviews about them.

And this is the exact board I was talking about:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131792

The LX version you found has less features, but I'm not really sure what they are.


Edit: Also! Check out this cooler: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6835103065

You can't argue with 2,500 user reviews landing it at 5 stars!

Thanks for the info guys.

So now that I have some new parts to compare to here is what I have come up with.

Case: Looks good and so do the reviews.

Newegg.com - Corsair Obsidian Series 650D (CC650DW-1) Black Steel structure with black brushed aluminum faceplate ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

CPU: Same. Intel 2500k.

GPU: Newegg.com - MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

or

Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GV-R695OC-1GD Radeon HD 6950 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

Ok so I have a few questions on these two GPUs.

First off should I go ahead and buy the Radeon 6950 since it's only $10 dollars more?

Two more things:

Under the details list, on the Radeon 6950 the stream processors are at 1408. Is this better than the 560 Ti which has 384 Processor Cores?

Lastly:

Under the Memory section in the details look at the Effective Memory Clock. On the Radeon 5960 it is 1250 Mhz and on the 560 Ti it is 4200Mhz. That's a big difference. Does this make the 560 Ti better or is it better to have the stream processors on the 6950?

Here is the 6950: Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GV-R695OC-1GD Radeon HD 6950 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card

and the 560 Ti: Newegg.com - MSI N560GTX-TI Twin Frozr II/OC GeForce GTX 560 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

HDD: I decided on the Seagate because it was the fastest and had the most storage space for a good price.

Newegg.com - Seagate Barracuda ST31000524AS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Mother Board: I notice that the Gen-3 has a few more features on it such as more USB ports and etc. Any suggestions on which would be better?

The Gen-3: Newegg.com - ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

and

Newegg.com - ASUS P8Z68-V LX LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

PSU: I personally think I would go with the Corsair Enthusiast Series because it is cheaper and offers 750W instead of 600W in the Corsair Professional Series. Unless the Enthusiest Series has something horribly wrong with it(which on the reviews it looks pretty good) I'll stick with it.

Enthusiast Series: Newegg.com - CORSAIR Enthusiast Series TX750 V2 750W ATX12V v2.31/ EPS12V v2.92 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC High Performance Power Supply

and the Professional Series: Newegg.com - CORSAIR Professional Series HX650 (CMPSU-650HX) 650W ATX12V v2.2 / EPS12V 2.91 SLI Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

Ram: The same as before.

SSD: After looking at multiple Intels this one seemed to be what I wanted for a reasonable price.

Newegg.com - Intel 320 Series SSDSA2CW080G3K5 2.5" 80GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Thank you guys so much for all your help! I couldn't have gotten this far without you!!!

Edit: Cooling fan: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103065

or

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835106150&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-CPU%20Cooling-_-Thermaltake-_-35106150&AID=10440897&PID=4222941&SID=

First thing, the Noctua cooling fan, you listed, is just a fan... You might want to look at their actual coolers (with heatsinks etc..), having just a fan will not help .

Second, you cannot directly compare the cores/memory between AMD and NVidia chips. They work in completely different ways. Hence why there is such a difference in the amount of cores and memory speeds/ width. They are completely different architectures. The best thing (only thing really) to go by, is game benchmarks or similar things to the work you will be doing (so CAD benchmarks if you're doing CAD, but gaming benchmarks seem good for your use ).