Man, the new 950 is tempting. It's definitely the right price, but I'm bummed there's no 4GB option. I'd pay an extra couple bucks for 4GB, but then, I guess that defeats the purpose of the card.
Yeah, I'd figure that in more intensive games, you'd have to turn down settings to keep up a good framerate and doing that would lower VRAM usage anyway. There is the
R7 370 graphics card that does come in 4GB variants and fits your price range, but it's
roughly 20% slower than the GTX 950 at 1080p gaming.
It's a BitFenix Neos ATX Tower and the CPU cooler is a Corsair Hydro H80i, for the record:
Motherboard - MSI Z97 GAMING 9 AC
Graphics - Gigabyte GTX970 Windforce
Memory - 16GB Crucial Ballistix Tactical
CPU - i5-4690K
Is it generally recommended that I use the fans attached to the watercooler to blow air out? I thought it was best to have it as an intake
It's fine to use the H80i as air exhaust for your case. While it does mean your CPU will be cooled with the warmer air from inside your case instead of the cooler air from outside, it doesn't mean your CPU will overheat. And you're probably not doing some extremely intensive overclocking that requires that your CPU get the coolest air possible, right?
Now, the thing about airflow in cases is that you want warm air to escape. Warm air rises. Unfortunately, the Bitfenix Neos is somewhat limited when it comes to cooling. It's just those three fan mounts, and it has no vents at the top that would help with letting warm air rise out of the case.
The Neos has two fans located in the front, but they are mounted low. The only other fan mount
is mounted high. See the issue? The air inside the case is getting warm because the warm air rises to the top of the case. The fans that you have set up to remove air are drawing from the lower half of the case, though.
This is your current setup. The arrows indicate airflow, blue for cool air and red for warm air. The boxes are for showing the general temperature of the air inside your case. Cool air is drawn into your case via the H80i, and it is warmed up a bit by the CPU. The warm air stays in the upper region of your case, while the cooler air inside your case is around the bottom of your case. The front two fans are drawing more cooler air out of your case than warm air. Sure, some warm air escapes a bit from the top of the two frontal fans, but not a lot.
This is a better setup for your airflow. The two front fans should be air intakes. As the cool air enters your case, it'll pass by the graphics card, helping cool it down. As the air heats up from the graphics card, it'll rise to the top of the case, and be exhausted out of the case by the H80i CPU cooler.
I'm hoping I can get some help on here. I bought a new PC when Battlefield 3 came out so it's time for an upgrade. The only redeeming quality of my current build is my i5 2500K processor that i've never bothered to overclock, etc. I have not kept up much at all with hardware advancements and updates.
I don't want to put it together myself unless I can save a substantial amount over getting it from ibuypower, etc. Previously when I bought from ibuypower I priced out the parts individually and I would have saved a whopping 28 dollars building it myself, something i'm not super familiar with doing.
SO, I want to get a pre-built PC, Windows 10, and my budget is 1000-1200 USD. It will be mostly used for high end gaming and non-3D graphic design work. Things I DO NOT want are SLI setups and I don't care about spending the extra money on resolutions beyond 1080p unless it fits in the budget. I'm hoping with the holidays their are some great deals out there but again, I have not been keeping up with PC hardware like Skylake, etc. or even graphics cards much.
Any suggestions? Should I put together a build without a processor and put my 2500k in there?
Sure thing:
PROCESSOR: Intel® Core i5-2500K Processor (4x 3.30GHz/6MB L3 Cache)
RAM: 8 GB [2 GB X4] DDR3-1600 Memory Module - Kingston HyperX
VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti - 1GB - EVGA Superclocked - Core: 900MHz - SLI Mode (Dual Cards)
MOTHERBOARD: Gigabyte GA-Z68AP-D3
POWER SUPPLY: 850 Watt -- XFX Core Edition PRO
1 TB HARD DRIVE
Unfortunately, we tend to recommend custom PCs whenever possible in this thread. That doesn't mean we won't help you and answer your questions, though. You may have been approaching it from the wrong direction. If you choose the same parts as the iBuyPower's prebuilt PC, of course you'll come to a similar price conclusion. But if you were to consider looking for different parts with the same budget, then it might be a better deal.
Your 2500K uses an older motherboard chipset and socket that has been discontinued, so unless you also reuse your motherboard, you can't just put your i5 2500K in a new PC. While it still is quite a good processor that
when overclocked is a decent match for recent processors, current generation motherboards don't work with the 2500K.
Have you been looking at any prebuilt PCs from iBuyPower recently? If you can link to one that you're interested in, I don't mind doing a parts cost/performance analysis. And as Kennah says, you could do just fine with a graphics card upgrade, the rest of your PC is still very good for the next few years. If you want, you could add another 8GB of RAM for 16GB total, and that 850 watt power supply is a high quality model that is more than capable of powering any upgrades you might do.
