I've been looking into getting a PC for a while now and now have a decent amount of spare cash to get one. Everybody tells me I should build my own so I'll give it a shot. A dude from work who does IT stuff helped me find a place which will deliver parts and also helped select what I should order, which is... Intel Core i7 2600k processor CPU cooler: Noctua NH-U12P SE2 Graphics Card: Msi GeForce GTX 580 Twin Frozr Overclocked 1536MB Case: Fractal Design Define r3 Black Corsair HX-650 Power Supply OCZ Vertex 2 3.5" 120 GB SSD Seagate Barricuda 1TB ST31000524AS hard drive Lite-On IHAS124 24X DVDRW OEM ASUS P5P67 LE Motherboard B3 Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws X F3-10666CL7D-8GBXH (2x4GB) DDR3 -all which comes at about $1800 (I've always said I'd spend up to 2 grand but not much more than that). Anyway just wanted to run this by all the computer nerds here for thoughts or maybe improvements before I put an order through. Kthx
a few things. i would rather go for an evga video card, not that MSI has anything wrong but i trust evga more. you might have to get a 'stock' speed one because of the price premium, but overclocking it yourself shouldnt be hard and lets face it, a 580 gtx stock will shit on any game youll play easy. also i would invest in a more powerful PSU, 750+ Watts so you never have to worry. SSD's are awesome, hows the price on the intel ones compared to the OCZ? it's still solid, i'm fucking jealous as hell
I'm pretty dumb when it comes to computer technically, I wouldn't know how to overclock myself, heh. Yeah I think you're right about the PSU, I'll do that. As for the SSD's, you're looking at $360 for the Intel of the same size vs $285 for the OCZ, so unless there's a big gap in quality I'd probably prefer to cut myself an extra $100. The OCZ Vertex 3 has gotten pretty good reviews though: "The OCZ Vertex 3 is by far the fastest SSD we have tested, and trumps its rivals by as much as 50% in real world benchmarks. It may be pricey compared to older rivals, but this is the only SSD to own if you are a PC enthusiast." And that's only a month old or so.
Ended up switching only a few things around and put the order in on Friday, so all the parts should be delivered to my door either tomorrow or the day after. And then the fun begins.
Yeah sorry I didn't get to this sooner when you asked. TBH though if I had suggested anything different you would have just told me why you wanted what you already had on the list and not have changed it anyway, amirite? Looks find though. Depending on what you'll be using it for it may be overkill but who knows.
Ken usually when I actually ask for input it's when I have admittedly little to no clue, as opposed to being told stuff I already know. I know what I want it all for, but I had no idea what's best for me other than the fact I didn't want a mac or a laptop kek - but if it all looks fine to everybody then I have faith I'll do fine. It may be a bit overkill even but I'd like to get some decent mileage out of it rather than have to upgrade in a year or so. The dude from work was saying something about sealant... coolant... yeah I'm hopeless.
Can't think of any kind of sealant that building a PC requires. Coolant... if you do water cooling... but then it's just water, and you're not doing water cooling. You do need thermal paste to put between the processor and the heatsink, but the processor will come with that pre-applied. You can buy better stuff than whats stock but really if you don't know what you're doing it's best to not fool with it. Too little or too much or it not being applied correctly can cause problems. Besides, unless you're going to overclock the CPU the stock paste and heatsink will work just fine. They wouldn't sell you something that was insufficient for the stock speed of the CPU, it's when you start upping voltage and shit that it runs hotter and may need better cooling to make sure you don't fry it. In that regard you could have saved money by not buying that heatsink but it probably looks a lot cooler than the stock one and won't hurt anything. While we're on that subject, if you're putting this together yourself don't be afraid to muscle the heatsink on there a bit when you get to that point. Everything else goes in nice and easy but those heatsinks latch down super duper tight on top of the processor and you'll probably be thinking "damn im about to break this" or "am i putting this on right? it shouldn't be this hard" but it is. Edit: Oh yeah, and when you get to that point, once you've placed the heatsink on top of the processor and are going to latch it, if you move it around a bunch and then pick it up off of there you're supposed to remove all of the paste and apply new stuff. The idea is to get a very thin layer of paste between the heatsink and the cpu with no air bubbles in it. Metal-on-metal is a no-no and air bubbles are a no-no, as either contribute to a cpu that is running too hot. The first thing to do when you get it up and running is install a program to monitor hardware temps and keep an eye on them. Different stuff runs at diff temps and they all have safe ranges to operate in that you want to abide. Everything these days has auto-shutoff if it gets too hot to keep from dying, but it's best to just not let that happen at all. Use the stock paste already on the cpu and don't pick the heatsink up after you've placed it down and you'll be fine.
Ah, that's what he was talking about! He said that one of the things I got comes with some thermal paste and to use that instead of what comes with the processor or something... but said to just watch a vid on youtube to get an idea of the right amount to use. Other than that though I should apparently be okay (but then again he's a big comp nerd). I know the processor itself is unlocked so it's open to it but I don't think I'll really need to (and wouldn't know how even if I wanted to) so yeah, don't think I'll be fiddling with that junk. Thanks for the tips about the paste. Hopefully it won't be too complicated to do but you've given me an idea what to aim for. Do you know any off the top of your head?
CPUID - System & hardware benchmark, monitoring, reporting is what I use. The biggest things are the GPU and CPU. I've never heard of ram or hdd's overheating. You'd have to google it to find out about ssd but I doubt they overheat either. If your GPU is installed correctly and your case has sufficient airflow it won't overheat either. It's probably the heatsink that comes with it's own paste but I'm telling you man you'll be much better off to just use what's already on the processor when you get it. Your call though. I'm using stock paste and heatsink on my processor and it runs cool as can be.
So everything came this afternoon, I was pretty overwhelmed and unsure of where to start first. Everything was packaged together in a giant box the size of Justin Bieber, no joke. Probably about as heavy also. Installing Windows atm on the SSD and everything seems to be working a-OK - things are lighting up like their supposed to, drives are being recognised, all 4 fans are working (not counting the one in the PSU). The casing is really well designed and insulated, everything is pretty quiet at the moment. Intel's own heat sink/fan actually comes with the stock paste already applied on the underbottom of it, so I ended up using having to use the paste that came with the Noctua cooler after all - which mind you is fucking HUGE and looks like a miniature car engine. Luckily you can shift the position of the fans a little since the Rimjaw DDR3's are unnecessarily tall. Next comes driver discs a plenty and hopefully will put the graphics card to test tomorrow.
MAAAAYBE Just a few problems so far. The comp has shut down inexplicably twice, and after reboot wouldn't recognise keyboard or mouse until restarted again. Also froze up once while installing Windows 7 and wouldn't even let me turn it off using the power button. I've been reading that installing Win 7 can be problematic for a few things but I don't think it's the root of all my problems sadly. It has been fully installed at least though. edit: also winduhrs doesn't seem to recognise my 1TB HDD, even though it shows up in the BIOS.
