Hey everyone,
Sorry if this has been covered a lot already in this thread, but I wasn't sure how to search for it. I'm looking to build a low-mid range Skylake machine once the supply is back up, and I was wondering if there was a consensus about which Z170 board in the $130USD or less range is the best bang for the buck? I won't be doing any aggressive overclocking, so I'm just looking for something on the cheaper end to get me started.
Also, what should I be looking for in terms of DDR4 speeds? 2666 seems like the best value, but is there any significant benefit to buying 3000/3200 or higher? I'll likely be getting 16GB (2x8GB for dual channel) unless there's a reason not to.
Thanks in advance!
Does it specifically have to be under $130 USD? I like the
Gigabyte Z170XP-SLI for the feature set but it's $140. For cheaper motherboards, there's the
MSI Z170A PC MATE which features USB 3.1 and the
Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3P which has USB 3.1 and USB type C.
DDR4 speeds aren't shown to have much of a difference in most games due to the fact that not a lot of games are bottlenecked by RAM in the first place. In certain situations higher speed DDR4 can be a benefit, just not a very large one. Still, I don't think that means you should opt for the lowest end 2133/2400MHz RAM. Yes, I think 2666MHz is a safe bet. Sometimes even 2800MHz can be found at a low price. As long as it's not unreasonably more expensive, I think higher speed RAM is OK to buy.
What will you be using the PC for? It wouldn't hurt to have 16GB of RAM,
but the majority of users will get by fine on 8GB according to this Techspot article.
so for a good enough gaming PC you need $500 right ? but a great gaming pc is around $800 ?
Depends. What do you want to do on the PC? What games do you want to play? What settings do you want to play at?
Have any of you ever had a problem with a Norton Antivirus quick scan causing your PC to BSOD?
I built a new PC less than a week ago, and everything was going well I thought.....until I installed Norton and ran a quick scan. The blue screen says something about an uncorrectable hardware error and then reboots. I can trigger the BSOD by using a Norton quick scan almost every time. For some reason, it *very* rarely goes through and works, but it's BSOD'd the last 5 times I tried. However, using a Malwarebytes quick scan or a Windows Security Essentials quick scan *never* causes any issue.
I checked the device manager to make sure all my drivers were updated, and they were. Then, I ran Prime95 overnight to stress the machine, but it came back with 0 warnings and 0 errors, a 100% success. Then I ran Memtest for a few passes to further test the memory, and it also had 0 errors, so I'm beginning to wonder about the hardware error part and thinking it might somehow all be tied to Norton, which is bizarre to me since I've had Norton for 10 years on multiple machines and have never had a problem. I installed BlueScreenView and looked at the 16 BSODs, and every one of them have the cause listed as "caused by driver: hal.dll" & "caused by address: hal.dll+12a3b". All of the crash addresses are listed as ntoskrnl.exe+735c0.
The machine seems to work alright as long as Norton is turned off, but that's only been for 1-2 days since it's a new PC. I'd like to just not worry about it since it seems like the solution is to not use Norton, but I hate not knowing the cause of a problem that might rear its head in the future. Does anyone have any ideas?
Edit: I just ran the Norton Removal and Reinstallation tool, and after reinstalling, the moment the Norton window said, "Communicating with server," the screen went blue. I'm really baffled by all this.
Seems like quite a few people have had the same issue with Norton. Some say it's the RAM, others say driver issues. Personally I'd just use something other than Norton, it might just be buggy that way for certain specific hardware configurations.
I'm awful at working out bottlenecks but trying to work out a plan for my next build and what needs to be swapped. Since Pascal isn't here yet I guess we can't really have any idea just how it will perform so lets pretend I'm buying a 6gb 980 instead. I'm running an i7 2600k and only 8gb of 1866mhz ram through and old asus P8P67 (pro I think).
Now I'm pretty certain that ram is going to be a limitation fairly soon if it isn't already holding me back, but would my processor or maybe even mobo (I suck with how mobos actually work) perhaps be a limiting factor with a 980? If they aren't is there much headroom left?
I REALLY don't trust myself to overclock so my processors are always running stock and I'd rather just upgrade than risk frying my CPU.
Your RAM's not a limitation in any way. No game currently requires more than 8GB and very few games are limited by RAM speed.
Your processor is still alright, but if you are unwilling to overclock, then you could consider a new CPU and motherboard. The motherboard won't really factor into CPU performance unless you're overclocking.
There isn't so much "how much headroom remains", it's more about what you use your PC for and what programs you're running. Some games don't require a strong CPU, while others can stress the hell out of it. For example, the
Witcher 3 will run just fine on even mid-range processors from 4~5 years ago according to Techspot, and
according to Eurogamer even the Pentium G3258 can maintain over 60FPS. On the other hand a game like GTAV will strain the CPU more and lower end processors can struggle in certain areas of the game according to
Eurogamer and
Techspot again.
That's not to say you don't get more of a benefit out of higher end processors. Stronger processors can keep the bottom line higher - fewer and smaller framerate drops when the action gets intense.
In any case, your 2600K is still decent and should still be able to hit 60FPS for a few years from now, but if you're not willing to overclock then it'll feel less capable sooner.
