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"I Need a New PC!" 2015 Part 1. Read the OP and RISE ABOVE FORGED PRECISION SCIENCE

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Soo any advice for me?


I'm going to buy 2 980ti's next month but i don't know which to choose between the evga version or the msi gtx twin frozr version


Good thing the latter is not out yet but the former is probably out of stock

And hopefully by august i got all the parts and will build soon and hope someone would help me out here once i put all the parts and help me on what to do next lol (specifically software and which updates to do .. What programs to install, what benchmarks programs to use and antivirus softwares to get and other advice ^_^
 

MoonGred

Member
You need new fans.

Get silent fans and do this:

http://www.corsair.com/en-us/blog/2014/november/dennis_build_log

Put the waterblock as intake in a push pull configuration, a 2nd fan and then get the 2 for the top.

As I said, get silent fans if you are concerned with noise.

I just tried and there no way I can fit a 2nd fan on the top, the tubes of the h80i gt are sleeved and not as flexible.

So at the moment its 2 fans at the front as intake and one in the middle on top as exhaust
 

NeOak

Member
I just tried and there no way I can fit a 2nd fan on the top, the tubes of the h80i gt are sleeved and not as flexible.

So at the moment its 2 fans at the front as intake and one in the middle on top as exhaust
That works too

How about slim fans?
 

MoonGred

Member
That works too

How about slim fans?

It's not the width of the fan, but the actual allowed space up top. It just fits 2 120mm fans but you really have to space them out, at the back I lose about 3cm because of the motherboard powercable and at the from the AIO tubes block the way.
But yea this should work as well, I'll have a look at my temps tomorrow and see if there's some improvement.

The only thing I need to do now is to find a way how to run the AIO tubes, they currently lean on the case window fairly hard
 

-SD-

Banned
Installed Windows 8.1 pretty fast off a USB drive.
We have come quite far from these times:

WideeyedFormalHorsechestnutleafminer.gif
 

RGM79

Member
Ok so I've decided to go with an all new PC, yay! My HDDs seem to be ok, and I assume my two optical ones are good too (dvd and blu-ray). My r9 290 was thankfully not installed when I did the bad thing, so I'm set for a GPU for now too.

As for most other components, it's been 4 - 6 years since I've upgraded them so I'm definitely out of the loop. I guess I'm turning to you guys for help in educating and enlightening me in the following areas.

MOBO

I know next to nothing about motherboards, whatever I need for modern PC parts will be fine.

CPU

My i5 2500k served me well, but it also means I've no clue when it comes the current CPU market. I assume Intel are still the way to go, but as for prices, models and number of cores? No idea. I guess I want something AT LEAST as powerful as an i5 2500k clocked to 4.5ghz, but if a bit more money will get me a lot more performance then so be it.

RAM

Another area I'm unsure of. I hope it's still as cheap as it was in 2011! I had 8gb before, is 16gb the norm now? Can I mix and match with my old gskill 8gb 1600mhz?

CASE

My CM690 is coming up to six years old, and I've really messed it up over that time. Size isn't really a problem, again, whatever is good and relatively cheap these days.

SSD

I've liked the sound of SSDs for a long time now but have always been put off by 1. The small size and 2. the ordeal of transferring everything from to the other, especially my steam files, ugh. I'd like some advice on you guys on both what a good bang for your buck SSD is, but also how best to go about transferring from my old HD to the new SSD.

COOLING

And finally (unless I'm forgetting something) there's the cooling. I have several fans in my old case, two of which would be easy to remove and put in a new one, but I assume it would be better to start from scratch? Water cooling sounds great, but is another scary concept both in terms of money and execution. As for CPU cooling, I'd love some recommendations.

I'm happy with my current speakers, mouse and keyboard. My current monitor isn't ideal, but I'll probably wait and upgrade that a bit further down the line.

Think that's everything, thanks in advance to anyone who helps out, you guys do great work here.

Edit: Ha! Of course of all things to forget...

PSU

Whatever's good and cheap-ish, I presume 550w is a bit on the low side these days, so 650w or more I guess?

Do you have a set budget in mind?
 

Tendo

Member
New PSU should be here today but I'm still not sure if it just came faulty or if there was an overage spike that damaged it. Anyone use or have a UPS to recommend? Seems that everyone points to the APC 550 for a standard gaming PC.
 

seb_n

Member
Hi all, just a quick question if I may.
I am currently running a pretty crappy old pc, a q6600 paired with an 9800gt and 4gb ram. To be fait, it copes with all I ask, I pretty much just play eve online and Cs:go and it handles both of these at 1080p reasonably well. I am really not that interested in playing super modern games at ultra settings I have a wii-u for casual type games and have no desire to change my dual 1080p monitor setup. However, I have seen that the 750ti is getting pretty cheap now, the evga one, not the ftw edition is about £100. That's a pretty low entry cost for a gfx card. The question I guess is, is it worth it? I see it is pci-e 3.0, my motherboard is 2.0 but I understand it is backward compatible, is that correct? Is my cpu going to be a huge bottleneck and I wont see any performance gains? I know these are vague questions but any info would be appreciated.
 

jambo

Member
Just want some advice on a possible upgrade.

Currently I have:

Core i7 870
8GB DDR3
2 x GTX 670 2GB in SLI
30" HP @ 2560x1600

I've been having a shit of a time recently with newer games (Witcher 3 with every single setting on low to hit 60fps, GTA V fps between 40-60 on medium/low) and was thinking about an upgrade option.

I've been looking at the 970/980 situation and it looks like there is a similar fps gap to previous gens (5-10fps between the x70 and x90 models) and with the 980ti pushing down prices the 970 is almost in reach.

A 980 would be nice (980ti the dream), but the extra bump in price for another 5-10 fps just doesn't seem worth it, especially when I can fiddle with a few settings to maintain frame rate.

Just wanted an idea of performance gains, especially going from 2GB of VRAM to 4GB. Not many sites have benchmark data for older SLI setups.

Thanks
 

Skel1ingt0n

I can't *believe* these lazy developers keep making file sizes so damn large. Btw, how does technology work?
We have come quite far from these times:

WideeyedFormalHorsechestnutleafminer.gif

I remember the first time my parents got the family a computer that *wasn't* a beige box:

10053.jpg


This thing was such a piece of garbage.

P4
256MB RAM
80GB 5200RPM HDD
IGPU

... for the time, the specs were relatively decent - but holy shit was it just a load of garbage. It overheated. The PSU gave us lots of problems. And bloatware... everywhere bloatware.
 

AndyD

aka andydumi
So I have a bluetooth dongle that works perfectly when plugged into my Gaming PC USB ports. But the range is barely not enough for the controller to reach into the living room where the TV is.

I have 2 six foot USB extension cables, and I cannot get the dongle to work plugged in at the end of a cable, only when directly in the PC. I tried both, together and each alone. My goal is to move the dongle about 5-6 feet closer to the other room, just enough for the range to work fine.

Should I get an active extension cord like this:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B009GUTFX8/?tag=neogaf0e-20

Or just a hub at the end of the current cord? A self powered hub?
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DQ5RYP0/?tag=neogaf0e-20


And as to above, our last beige PC was a horizontal Packard Bell, a Pentium 3! With a floppy drive and all. I remember buying it at Walmart with dad.
 

kennah

Member
Hi all, just a quick question if I may.
I am currently running a pretty crappy old pc, a q6600 paired with an 9800gt and 4gb ram. To be fait, it copes with all I ask, I pretty much just play eve online and Cs:go and it handles both of these at 1080p reasonably well. I am really not that interested in playing super modern games at ultra settings I have a wii-u for casual type games and have no desire to change my dual 1080p monitor setup. However, I have seen that the 750ti is getting pretty cheap now, the evga one, not the ftw edition is about £100. That's a pretty low entry cost for a gfx card. The question I guess is, is it worth it? I see it is pci-e 3.0, my motherboard is 2.0 but I understand it is backward compatible, is that correct? Is my cpu going to be a huge bottleneck and I wont see any performance gains? I know these are vague questions but any info would be appreciated.
PCIe is backwards compatible, 2.0 is fine for the 750 ti. You'd certainly see an improvement with that video card. Keep your eyes open for a 2500k i5 coming up for sale used in your area, it'd be a hell of am improvement on your q6600. Even an i3 3220 would be a good jump.
 

Helznicht

Member
Any suggestions for a $500 PC that will perform noticeably better than PS4? My son has a friend who wants to get a gaming PC and thats his budget.If not he will likely go console. He will need an OS unfortunately too, so $420 budget?
 

daxy

Member
Building a PC, completely new to this so I've been trying to figure this out on my own, but I've run into a wall. Here below I've got what I'd like to get so far, but I don't know what to do with the cooling, power supply and housing.

Videocard: Nvidia GTX 980 (ASUS Matrix Platinum 4GB, PCI-Express 3.0 x16, 1241 MHz)
Processor: i5 4690K (3.5 GHz, 4 cores, 22 nm, 84 W)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97E-ITX/ac (Mini ITX, Socket 1150, DDR3, Intel Z97)
RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (16GB DDR3-1600 CL9 kit, 16 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, DIMM, 2 x, CL9, 1.5 V, XMP support)
HDD: 2TB Seagate Barracuda (7200 rpm, Serial ATA 600, 3.5 inch)
SSD: 250GB Crucial BX100 (Serial ATA 600, Silicon Motion SM2246EN, 535 MB/s, 370 MB/s, 2.5 inch)
Cooling: ???
PSU: ???
Housing: ???

Budget: up to about 1400 EUR, preferably. The components listed above are about 1250 EUR together, based on the shops I checked.
Country: Netherlands
Monitor: 1920 x 1080
Main use: games, writing lots of papers
Overclocking: not at this point in time

The build is still open for changes as I haven't bought anything yet and I'd of course like to get good performance as cheaply as possible, so if something I chose is a minimal upgrade over something I could get equivalent performance for, I'd be up for considering the cheaper option. I'll be building this over the course of this summer. I'd like to be done by mid July, if possible.

With the 980 Ti out now, I was thinking of getting that naturally, but here (Netherlands) it's like 200 euros more expensive than the 980 and I'm not sure if that justifies the performance boost. My main concern is that it supports DX12 as that seems to be offering a lot in terms of performance. I've also been considering the 970, and I really like its pricing (350 EUR).

Any advice is appreciated! I've no idea what I'm doing :U
 

Engell

Member
Building a PC, completely new to this so I've been trying to figure this out on my own, but I've run into a wall. Here below I've got what I'd like to get so far, but I don't know what to do with the cooling, power supply and housing.

Videocard: Nvidia GTX 980 (ASUS Matrix Platinum 4GB, PCI-Express 3.0 x16, 1241 MHz)
Processor: i5 4690K (3.5 GHz, 4 cores, 22 nm, 84 W)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97E-ITX/ac (Mini ITX, Socket 1150, DDR3, Intel Z97)
RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (16GB DDR3-1600 CL9 kit, 16 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, DIMM, 2 x, CL9, 1.5 V, XMP support)
HDD: 2TB Seagate Barracuda (7200 rpm, Serial ATA 600, 3.5 inch)
SSD: 250GB Crucial BX100 (Serial ATA 600, Silicon Motion SM2246EN, 535 MB/s, 370 MB/s, 2.5 inch)
Cooling: ???
PSU: ???
Housing: ???

Budget: up to about 1400 EUR, preferably.
Country: Netherlands
Monitor: 1920 x 1080
Main use: games, writing lots of papers
Overclocking: not at this point in time

The build is still open for changes and I'd of course like to get good performance as cheaply as possible, so if something I chose is a minimal upgrade over something I could get equivalent performance for, I'd be up for considering the cheaper option. I'll be building this over the course of this summer. I'd like to be done by mid July, if possible.

With the 980 Ti out now, I was thinking of getting that naturally, but here (Netherlands) it's like 200 euros more expensive than the 980 and I'm not sure if that justifies the performance boost. My main concern is that it supports DX12 as that seems to be offering a lot in terms of performance.

Any advice is appreciated! I've no idea what I'm doing :U

Yeah many vendors are keeping the price high on the 980ti to get the 980s that they payed full price for out of stock, after that you should see a price drop.. give it a month or two if you can(also what ever AMD has to show, could have an effect on this, but the rumors are not to promising)

Are you set on ITX? this can complicate things a bit, many itx cases don't have space for a full length graphics card.
 

AndyD

aka andydumi
Any suggestions for a $500 PC that will perform noticeably better than PS4? My son has a friend who wants to get a gaming PC and thats his budget.If not he will likely go console. He will need an OS unfortunately too, so $420 budget?

Take a look in the OP at the guides. The question is whether he has anything already? Monitor, mouse, keyboard, case, game controller... Those things can be reused but they will eat into a small budget enormously to the point that a PS4 is a better deal.
 

Crisium

Member
Building a PC, completely new to this so I've been trying to figure this out on my own, but I've run into a wall. Here below I've got what I'd like to get so far, but I don't know what to do with the cooling, power supply and housing.

Videocard: Nvidia GTX 980 (ASUS Matrix Platinum 4GB, PCI-Express 3.0 x16, 1241 MHz)
Processor: i5 4690K (3.5 GHz, 4 cores, 22 nm, 84 W)
Motherboard: ASRock Z97E-ITX/ac (Mini ITX, Socket 1150, DDR3, Intel Z97)
RAM: 16GB Crucial Ballistix Sport (16GB DDR3-1600 CL9 kit, 16 GB, DDR3, 1600 MHz, DIMM, 2 x, CL9, 1.5 V, XMP support)
HDD: 2TB Seagate Barracuda (7200 rpm, Serial ATA 600, 3.5 inch)
SSD: 250GB Crucial BX100 (Serial ATA 600, Silicon Motion SM2246EN, 535 MB/s, 370 MB/s, 2.5 inch)
Cooling: ???
PSU: ???
Housing: ???

Budget: up to about 1400 EUR, preferably. The components listed above are about 1250 EUR together, based on the shops I checked.
Country: Netherlands
Monitor: 1920 x 1080
Main use: games, writing lots of papers
Overclocking: not at this point in time

The build is still open for changes as I haven't bought anything yet and I'd of course like to get good performance as cheaply as possible, so if something I chose is a minimal upgrade over something I could get equivalent performance for, I'd be up for considering the cheaper option. I'll be building this over the course of this summer. I'd like to be done by mid July, if possible.

With the 980 Ti out now, I was thinking of getting that naturally, but here (Netherlands) it's like 200 euros more expensive than the 980 and I'm not sure if that justifies the performance boost. My main concern is that it supports DX12 as that seems to be offering a lot in terms of performance. I've also been considering the 970, and I really like its pricing (350 EUR).

Any advice is appreciated! I've no idea what I'm doing :U

How much are the 970 and 980 in Netherlands?

Sometimes I feel like such a jerk when I bluntly say it, but it's true at least for the US. The 980 is a nonviable card since the 980Ti launched, utterly and completely. Usually, price-to-performance ratio gets worse as you step up. But 970->980 is more money than 980->980Ti. And it's also less performance increase. You should either stretch your wallet for a 980Ti (or see what new AMD card hits in 2 weeks), or have some sense and get the cheaper 970 (or 290).

In US prices, going from 970 to 980 is around 50% more cost for only 11% performance gain at 1080. If it's anywhere close to that for you forget it and stick with the 970 or a 290.
 

Dries

Member
Guys, I'm using a custom .icc profile with my monitor. I'd also like to use the .icc profile in games. But, so it seems, some games ignore .icc profiles and revert to defaults once run.

Is Borderless Windowed Mode the only solution?
 

daxy

Member
Yeah many vendors are keeping the price high on the 980ti to get the 980s that they payed full price for out of stock, after that you should see a price drop.. give it a month or two if you can(also what ever AMD has to show, could have an effect on this, but the rumors are not to promising)

Are you set on ITX? this can complicate things a bit, many itx cases don't have space for a full length graphics card.

Not set on ITX at all, I was just going by what I read in a review and its price in relation to other motherboard. New to this thing, and only now realized it's a smaller than usual board. I've no clue what kind of motherboard I'll need apart from that it should have 1150 socket for the 4690K.

How much are the 970 and 980 in Netherlands?

Sometimes I feel like such a jerk when I bluntly say it, but it's true at least for the US. The 980 is a nonviable card since the 980Ti launched, utterly and completely. Usually, price-to-performance ratio gets worse as you step up. But 970->980 is more money than 980->980Ti. And it's also less performance increase. You should either stretch your wallet for a 980Ti (or see what new AMD card hits in 2 weeks), or have some sense and get the cheaper 970 (or 290).

In US prices, going from 970 to 980 is around 50% more cost for only 11% performance gain at 1080. If it's anywhere close to that for you forget it and stick with the 970 or a 290.

A 970 can be found for about 350-400 euros and a 980 is between 500-600 euros, so it's the same price ratio here. The cheapest 980 Ti is 750.

A 970 sounds much more appealing now, so I'm not sure. As Engell suggested, I could hold off on building this for a while until the Ti drops in price here. Would that be worth it if it's like 650 euros? Would be great to get this done asap to be honest, because once uni starts again in September I won't have time for games :(

If I'd go for a 970, 16GB ram seems like overkill, right?
 

Pjsprojects

Member
Bit of help needed please ;-(

Today my 290x turned up so I set about upgrading from my old Nvidea card. Simple enough thing to do but even after uninstalling both the Nvidea and Intel vga drivers I can't get the AMD drivers to install.
I have tried both the latest beta drivers and the ones that came on the disk. Catalyst just says it has installed with errors, when I view the errors it shows as display driver failed.

Going in the manual way with device manager gives me the error below. Anyone know whats not right? Running Windows 10 tech preview.

ibziJ5hkKMuuQS.PNG
 
I'm looking for a relatively cheap (interim) graphics card for my computer - I have a GTS 250 1GB in there atm. Can anyone rec any good ones for £50~ish? A few years old and or used is fine.

Edit: settled on a 750 Ti 2GB. :)
 
Hello folks.

My gaming rig is out of date. But I won't be able to build top of the line rig until next year. Trying to save up ~ 1200€


Anyway, I can put some cash to at least change my GPU in the mean time.

CPU : i7 2600k
MoBo : Asus P8P67


Now, can a GTX 970 be compatible with my mb?
 
Hello folks.

My gaming rig is out of date. But I won't be able to build top of the line rig until next year. Trying to save up ~ 1200€


Anyway, I can put some cash to at least change my GPU in the mean time.

CPU : i7 2600k
MoBo : Asus P8P67


Now, can a GTX 970 be compatible with my mb?
Yep on the GPU. And your CPU is actually still quite fast. Just overclock it to 4Ghz+ and you're set.
 
If my PSU can run my GTS 250 which, according to the GeForce site, requires a Minimum System Power Requirement of 450 W, can my PSU instead power the GTX 750 Ti which has a 300 W Minimum System Power Requirement?

Is that how that works? I'm such a noob.
 

DPB

Member
If my PSU can run my GTS 250 which, according to the GeForce site, requires a Minimum System Power Requirement of 450 W, can my PSU instead power the GTX 750 Ti which has a 300 W Minimum System Power Requirement?

Is that how that works? I'm such a noob.

Yes, it should be fine.
 

mkenyon

Banned
If my PSU can run my GTS 250 which, according to the GeForce site, requires a Minimum System Power Requirement of 450 W, can my PSU instead power the GTX 750 Ti which has a 300 W Minimum System Power Requirement?

Is that how that works? I'm such a noob.
What PSU do you have? Any cance you could take a picture of it?

But yes, the 750 Ti almost certainly will work fine with it. The thing sips power.
 

Pjsprojects

Member
Bit of help needed please ;-(

Today my 290x turned up so I set about upgrading from my old Nvidea card. Simple enough thing to do but even after uninstalling both the Nvidea and Intel vga drivers I can't get the AMD drivers to install.
I have tried both the latest beta drivers and the ones that came on the disk. Catalyst just says it has installed with errors, when I view the errors it shows as display driver failed.

Going in the manual way with device manager gives me the error below. Anyone know whats not right? Running Windows 10 tech preview.

ibziJ5hkKMuuQS.PNG

Just to add I can't get any R9 driver to work. Just tried an Asus one but the same error still shows up.
 

ACE 1991

Member
So the nubs on wired 360 controller have rubbed off and the start and select button are stick as fuck... Probably time to retire this thing. I much like the look and feel of the xbox one controller. If I get the standard one do I still need batteries? I understand that the PC driver currently only supports the thing via micro usb.
 

NeOak

Member
It's not the width of the fan, but the actual allowed space up top. It just fits 2 120mm fans but you really have to space them out, at the back I lose about 3cm because of the motherboard powercable and at the from the AIO tubes block the way.
But yea this should work as well, I'll have a look at my temps tomorrow and see if there's some improvement.

The only thing I need to do now is to find a way how to run the AIO tubes, they currently lean on the case window fairly hard

I didn't mean the width, but the height

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B002CYPWTG/?tag=neogaf0e-20

 
So guys if i'm going to build a new PC,since new CPU and GPU architecture are just around the corner i'll need to change my motherboard in order to upgrade?
 

NeOak

Member
So guys if i'm going to build a new PC,since new CPU and GPU architecture are just around the corner i'll need to change my motherboard in order to upgrade?

Depends on what you have. You might not even need to change the CPU.

But if you want Skylake, yes, you need a new motherboard since it is a new socket.
 

knitoe

Member
Just to add I can't get any R9 driver to work. Just tried an Asus one but the same error still shows up.

Try uninstalling old drivers using this program.
http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html

So guys if i'm going to build a new PC,since new CPU and GPU architecture are just around the corner i'll need to change my motherboard in order to upgrade?
Yes. New Intel CPU chipset usually requires new MB.
 

NeOak

Member
Those have abysmal static pressure. In order to get through a radiator, they would have to be spinning as speeds that would nullify the point of having a radiator.

That would be for where he can't fit a regular fan. He already has 3.

For the radiators they are no-no indeed
 
What PSU do you have? Any cance you could take a picture of it?

But yes, the 750 Ti almost certainly will work fine with it. The thing sips power.
Okay, it is a Huntkey V Power lw-6550 sg. It has an output of 550W. It has a terrible review from Hardware Secrets but I've been using it with 0 issues since 2009. (I built this PC when I was a lot younger and out in the Philippines so I didn't know that much about stuff)

Obviously it'll be the next thing I replace, but for now, should it be fine?

Edit: I think my PSU is buzzing since installing the new card.
 

TUSR

Banned
Pretty quick, about a week on the cheapest option. Arrived by ups But know that they act as a front end for multiple retailers. Shipping speed will vary by what is ordered.

Totally, thanks for the help.




I got everything ordered, should be able to put it together next week when the SSD arrives.

Wanted to thank everyone who helped me, especially RGM79 and Haz. The detail you guys give is beyond anything I would have expected.

Do we post pictures when we complete out builds, is that a thing here?
 
Yikes, after swappign out my GTS 250 for a GTX 750 Ti my power supply was buzzing like crazy so I've shut it down and ordered this.

Scary stuff, I hope I haven't damaged anything in the computer.
 
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