Building computers

[Camacha]

And don't listen to the guys badmouthing GTX 760. It's a good card for the money. ATI might have more powerful cards for the same amount, but nVidia has much better software support for games. Like, seriously. With ATI cards, you'll have to constantly worry about patches and updates with half of the games. It's a hassle.

Both brands make excellent cards, both brands have had problematic drivers, chips and generations. The GTX 760 is good choice too, but support is not brand bound and it often boils down to the specific game you want to play.

[K^2]

but support is not brand bound and it often boils down to the specific game you want to play.

Sure. But you can also look at the broader picture and see which ones have problems more frequently. nVidia has historically worked closer with the DirectX side of things. They also run PhysX, which a lot of games use. The feature sets are more typically standard. It's all these little things which mean that there is a broader nVidia market, which also means that more QA is done on these cards, more problems are caught early, etc. On average, you'll have fewer problems with nVidia cards.

But yes, they have had problematic generations that should be avoided. Nothing wrong with 760, though.

[Camacha]

Sure. But you can also look at the broader picture and see which ones have problems more frequently. [...]

I can honestly say I have not seen one or the other do better. I have been helping people on a large tech forum for a while now and neither seems to have the upper hand when it comes to stability or reliability. From a personal point of view I have the same experience (I know, N=1), having switched brands pretty much every time I got a new card. Both were generally good, with some specific exceptions on both sides. Admittedly, that is a bit anecdotal.

If you have any numbers quantifying reliability I would be very interested, as I have not been able to come up with any. The best advice I could give is to look at the benchmarks of the games you want to play, look at the prices and make your pick based on those. Standards could indeed be a reason to pick on or the other, but since PhysX is rarely used in games and OpenCL is now supported in suites like Adobe's I feel that distinction is a lot less important than it used to be - and irrelevant to most consumers. If you are into those things cryptomining can be an argument too, although even there the difference is getting ever smaller.

But you are indeed right - nothing wrong with the GTX 760.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Camacha

[Dedjal]

Sorry man, but if your are giving advice you should give good advice and do it in a complete manner. Most of your post is incomplete, harmful or outright wrong. This will break people's hardware.

GHz alone says nothing.

Air cooling is cheaper, often more quiet (no water pump) and a lot less fiddly and error prone. The gains are quite minor. I would not advise people to bother with it, unless you want to go for absolute maximum performance (like overclocking in a competition) or just do it for the fun of it.

Not advisable for two reasons: smaller RAM sticks limit your upgrade path and KSP will be 64-bit very soon. What do yo mean by limited to one brick? It is not as if an application that can only use 3,2 GB of RAM is physically bound to only one stick when it is run on a 64-bit OS, especially not when in dual channel mode.

You should actually be very careful with voltage - it is one of the few things that can seriously shorten your hardware's lifespan, or kill it outright.

RAM cooling is almost never useful. Do not even bother with fancy high profile heatsinks, they only get in the way.

Again, do not mess with voltage if you do not know what you are doing. Also, only increasing the voltage will add zero performance. Increasing voltage is a way of enabling higher overclocks, but on its own it does nothing but heat up your card. A higher clockspeed increases speed and calculative power. When your options run out on the clockspeed front, you might consider changing voltage if you are willing to take the risks and have the knowlegde to limit the dangers.

You are talking about lapping, but you forget to mention the important bit: that the idea is to flatten your IHS as much as possible. Just sanding a CPU will ruin it really quickly.

Liquid cooling is necessary for over-clocking a lot.

And when you have that short of cooling, why not expand it to other components, hmm?

And playing with voltage is a must in over-clocking, otherwise you are not able to get that last drop of power out of it.

But seriously. Are you talking to me or the OP?

'Cause I can't tell.

If you're talking to me, then oki. But I know this. I over-clock stuff. Sure something gets fried and stuff, but that's part of the learning process.

If you are talking to the other fella, rephrase your text, please.

To OP

Do not touch BIOS unless you know what you are doing.

Or unless you really want to find out what changing that value would do...

Edit: oh. Almost forgot. Sanding the cpu is to reach the copper layer, which is a better heat conductor than the paint is.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Dedjal

[Seret]

Javster, if you're happy dropping over £600 on a PC then you should seriously consider an SSD. An old-fashioned spinny drive in a nice modern machine like that is a serious performance bottleneck. They're not that expensive any more. You can keep a magnetic drive on board if you need bulk storage space, but you'll want to put your OS and main apps on an SSD, or use a cache drive that will manage that for you.

[78stonewobble]

I can honestly say I have not seen one or the other do better. I have been helping people on a large tech forum for a while now and neither seems to have the upper hand when it comes to stability or reliability. From a personal point of view I have the same experience (I know, N=1), having switched brands pretty much every time I got a new card. Both were generally good, with some specific exceptions on both sides. Admittedly, that is a bit anecdotal.

If you have any numbers quantifying reliability I would be very interested, as I have not been able to come up with any. The best advice I could give is to look at the benchmarks of the games you want to play, look at the prices and make your pick based on those. Standards could indeed be a reason to pick on or the other, but since PhysX is rarely used in games and OpenCL is now supported in suites like Adobe's I feel that distinction is a lot less important than it used to be - and irrelevant to most consumers. If you are into those things cryptomining can be an argument too, although even there the difference is getting ever smaller.

But you are indeed right - nothing wrong with the GTX 760.

Especially agreeing with that bit about looking at benchmarks for games. They do those for both processors and graphicscards. If you can't find a benchmark for exactly the game you use, it might still be helpfull to look up other games with same or similar engine.

[78stonewobble]

Javster, if you're happy dropping over £600 on a PC then you should seriously consider an SSD. An old-fashioned spinny drive in a nice modern machine like that is a serious performance bottleneck. They're not that expensive any more. You can keep a magnetic drive on board if you need bulk storage space, but you'll want to put your OS and main apps on an SSD, or use a cache drive that will manage that for you.

Principally I agree, but I have a suspicion that games that stream constantly from the harddrive (large open world stuff), will benefit much more than games that load everything every half hour to 45 mins.

Ie. lotro even though it's quite old nowadays can still be quite choppy when moving around due to, I think, slow loading. As opposed to games like tf2 or l4d, where it doesn't matter quite as much whether the map loading screen in the beginning takes 30 or 5 secs.

Atleast imho

[Elthy]

And don't listen to the guys badmouthing GTX 760. It's a good card for the money.

Its not about the GTX 760, its about the 4GB Version. 4GB of VRAM are complete bull on a card with this power. The R9 280 should show he could get more performance for the same money as the 4Gb card. Or he chooses a GTX 760 with 2Gb, which is cheaper but has exactly the same performance as the 4Gb version.

Overclocking with water cooling should start when everything else on a pc is maxed out since its extreme expensive and overvolting is something i wont recommend if you dont know what you do...

[Sky_walker]

Vast majority of games are capped at 4 or less GB of VRAM, so it's not a problem.

[Elthy]

The only game i know that needs more than 2Gb of VRAM @1080p is Titanfall, and that is because they put the whole intro video in the VRAM and keep it there. Perhaps this is allready fixed. And even if there is a game in the future which needs more than 2Gb on maximum settings it doesnt matter since the GTX 760 will be to weak for such extreme settings.

[Seret]

Principally I agree, but I have a suspicion that games that stream constantly from the harddrive (large open world stuff), will benefit much more than games that load everything every half hour to 45 mins.

It's not just about games though. Even if you buy a "gaming" PC chances are you'll spend a fair bit of your time doing general computing tasks. If you had to edit a video, would you do it on your high-spec "gaming" machine, or your tablet?

It just seems odd to go for decent specs across the rest of the spectrum, then massively bottleneck it for I/O.

[magnemoe]

Its not about the GTX 760, its about the 4GB Version. 4GB of VRAM are complete bull on a card with this power. The R9 280 should show he could get more performance for the same money as the 4Gb card. Or he chooses a GTX 760 with 2Gb, which is cheaper but has exactly the same performance as the 4Gb version.

Overclocking with water cooling should start when everything else on a pc is maxed out since its extreme expensive and overvolting is something i wont recommend if you dont know what you do...

Note that vram requirements is likely to raise in the next years as most games will be made for PC, PS4 and One. We have not had much use for huge amount of memory in games earlier as most games is designed to run on 360 and PS3 with 512MB.

In this setting you have to work hard to manage to use 2GB vram.

[Sky_walker]

It's not just about games though. Even if you buy a "gaming" PC chances are you'll spend a fair bit of your time doing general computing tasks. If you had to edit a video, would you do it on your high-spec "gaming" machine, or your tablet?

I do video editing on dedicated computer, not a "gaming machine".

Anyway - editing video on regular gaming PC is bottlenecked by hard drives and CPU+GPU processing power, not VRAM.

[Elthy]

Note that vram requirements is likely to raise in the next years as most games will be made for PC, PS4 and One. We have not had much use for huge amount of memory in games earlier as most games is designed to run on 360 and PS3 with 512MB.

Yeah, but you will only need that much VRAM when you turn the settings so high that the GTX 760 will be out of processing power...

[Nuke]

I do like mini-box towers, but they have some restrictions. They are great for generic mid-high ranges. Especially if you want to have something you can bring to LAN parties. But if you plan to run a RAID5 or a SLI, there is no substitute for full ATX. Good air circulation in large tower helps too.

those are things i feel have no place in a desktop machine. maybe in a professional workstation or server perhaps. but most of what im gonna be doing on it is playing games, making graphics, programming, and circuit design. none of that requires any fancy hardware. sli costs more than its worth, and i back files up to an external drive, so i dont need raid. i also prefer not to overclock outside of spec (aside from factory overclocked ram and features like turbo boost).

i also find that air circulation is better in a small case, as opposed to a sparsely populated large case. all im putting in there is the mobo/cpu/ram, a modest video card, and an ssd. i have an old cube case build and it has the best airflow of any of my rigs, and only uses one large quiet case fan. so i am comfortable with the tight assembly. one thing when building something like this is that you have to be really careful with part selection, just to make sure everything fits.

ive always been somewhat disapointed with the trend of ever increasing case sizes while at the same time diminishing part count and dimensions. i have cases that are just a big empty box with very little hardware, and fans cooling empty space. you get a big, loud, impractical build. im trying to avoid that if at all possible.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Nuke

[Seret]

Anyway - editing video on regular gaming PC is bottlenecked by hard drives and CPU+GPU processing power, not VRAM.

Indeed, I was talking about storage. Just seems odd to me to stick a nasty 7200rpm magnetic hard drive into a £600 PC.

i also find that air circulation is better in a small case

I agree. Until the RPi came along my HTPC was a mini-ITX. The cases are so small that distances are short and fans can exhaust straight out the vents (which make a higher proportion of the case). As long as you're not wedging more than you should into the case airflow is almost a non-issue.

[Javster]

I'm a bit lost... Which parts in this build are good and should not be changed?

I've changed it so I have both an SSD and a HDD, because I want fast read/write speeds but I also want a lot of storage. Is that a bit extravagant or unreasonable? (It's increased the price a bit too...)

Also, maybe I should get rid of the optical drive, I've never had to use it on my current computer. Is it more useful when you set up a new computer?

I'm not planning to overclock this at all.

Could the CPU cooler be changed? What about the CPU itself? is there a cheaper version with almost the same specs?

Edited July 8, 2014 by Javster

[Guest]

Watch "Carey Holzman" on youtube, probably the most experienced person on youtube. He's built 25k computers.

[Seret]

I've changed it so I have both an SSD and a HDD, because I want fast read/write speeds but I also want a lot of storage. Is that a bit extravagant or unreasonable? (It's increased the price a bit too...)

No, that's perfectly reasonable. A lot of people have their machines set up that way. You pay extra, but you're paying for increased performance, the same as putting extra money into any other component.

Also, maybe I should get rid of the optical drive, I've never had to use it on my current computer.

That's your answer then. As long as you've got access to one somewhere you should be ok. You'll need it when you install the OS unless you're installing an OS that can go on a USB stick, but if you haven't got any apps that need it you'll probably never use it again. Having said that they're pretty cheap, so if you don't need that bay for anything else it wouldn't kill you to have one.

[Camacha]

But seriously. Are you talking to me or the OP?

'Cause I can't tell.

I am talking to you. Your advice is incomplete at best and plain wrong at worst. With the information you supplied you can be sure someone with little experience will damage his hardware without knowing why.

Liquid cooling is necessary for over-clocking a lot.

And when you have that short of cooling, why not expand it to other components, hmm?

And playing with voltage is a must in over-clocking, otherwise you are not able to get that last drop of power out of it.

Liquid cooling is not necessary for overclocking. It will get you a little bit further, but the gains do not warrant the trouble, dangers and cost for most people. Jus

Playing with voltage is also not strictly necessary for overclocking. I would advise anyone to start out with the clockspeeds. When you get a feel for what you are doing and run out of options with clockspeed alone, you might consider fiddling

with voltages. Be careful though, as voltage will kill hardware easily when not used wisely and will increase wear in most cases.

If you're talking to me, then oki. But I know this. I over-clock stuff. Sure something gets fried and stuff, but that's part of the learning process.

I can only go on what you say here and I feel the information is far from complete. The fact that you seem to fry gear on a regular basis does not instill confidence.

Edit: oh. Almost forgot. Sanding the cpu is to reach the copper layer, which is a better heat conductor than the paint is.

There is no paint on a CPU. Copper is indeed a better conductor, but you are still forgetting the important part of lapping: to reduce the roughness of the IHS. With a properly lapped processor you would not need TIM at all. Yet all this is advanced material and not something you should push onto a novice that does not understand what is going on.

Just sanding a CPU will ruin it, you will need to make sure it is as flat as it can be. That can only be done with a lot of patience and knowledge of proper sanding techniques.

[Camacha]

I'm a bit lost... Which parts in this build are good and should not be changed?

It all looks fairly balanced. Are you sure you do not want to overclock? Because there is very little room to do that with this setup. That also means that your CPU cooler is primarily there to reduce noise. If you are simply interesting in keeping the temperatures down, a stock cooler is adequate when not overclocking.

I would advise against any Sandforce SSD, as there has been a lot of trouble with those. The Crucial MX100 or Samsung EVO are both excellent choices when it comes to performance, reliability and economics. I would suggest to take the MX100, as it has added protection against power failures.

Its not about the GTX 760, its about the 4GB Version. 4GB of VRAM are complete bull on a card with this power.

The reaons those cards exist is SLI/CrossFire. Since video memory cannot be selectively filled - which means two cards with both 2 GB still equals 2 GB of total video memory - these cards have doubled up on VRAM so that the calculative power of both cards can be fully utilized.

i also find that air circulation is better in a small case, as opposed to a sparsely populated large case.

Actually, a larger volume of air aids cooling - it simply takes longer to heat it up. Of course you need ways of pumping it outside of your case, but the wriggling room is smaller in a small case than in a large case. Of course, there are other factors that come into play, like the room you have for your components. It is nice to have some space to work with if the outer dimensions of the case do not bother you. Especially with the next generation of PCI-E SSD's coming up some extra PCI-E slots will not hurt in the long run.

However, when push comes to shove it is primarily a matter of personal preference.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Camacha

[Javster]

I don't have any network adapters in the build. I need them if I want to use the internet, right? Can anyone recommend some decent ones?

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/X6QVmG

EDIT: just realised I have 2 SSDs and no HDD... http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/hspbTW is the corrected version.

Edited July 8, 2014 by Javster

[magnemoe]

Yeah, but you will only need that much VRAM when you turn the settings so high that the GTX 760 will be out of processing power...

Games with lots of large textures will also benefit of lots of vram if i'm not mistaken.

I play elder scroll online with a 1GB vram card and see that the card has to get textures, very visible on armor in cities where it loads low texture and then update to high after a second or two.

And you will only run into this game in large open games who is not for PS3 and 360.

[magnemoe]

I don't have any network adapters in the build. I need them if I want to use the internet, right? Can anyone recommend some decent ones?

http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/X6QVmG

EDIT: just realised I have 2 SSDs and no HDD... http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/hspbTW is the corrected version.

Any motherboard has an build in network adapter. Few has build in WiFi. If you use WiFi it might be better with an pci-e card than a usb card because of latency, anybody know if this is still true?

[Javster]

Can someone explain what the specs of the wireless adapter mean?