Thinking about a new PCFollow

I put together a rig for just under $1,000 (http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/saved/1G0LXB). Let me know your thoughts.

A few things to note:

• I don't have a solid state HD on there. Unsure how much this improves performance, if it's worth the extra money.
• The rig comes with liquid cooling and a build-in fan, but I'm unsure if I need more cooling than that.
• Unsure if I need to upgrade the internal network card from the on-board to an Intel LAN 10/100/1000 card. Thoughts?
• This doesn't include the OS or any software.

Thanks in advance for the tips!

I went with: http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/saved/1G0MDU

Lowered the CPU from an i7 to an i5 with the potential to overclock. Could even take the slightly cheaper non-K version if you'll never overclock it.
Went from 16GB RAM to 8GB; RAM is a cheap upgrade later on if you should ever need it and you don't need 16GB right now
Used the savings to get an a 64GB SSD for a boot drive and a copy of Win7 Home Premium, also slightly upgraded the HD to a Western digital Black Caviar.

Left the water cooler just in case you ever decide to try overclocking it. Plus it only saved $30 to drop it to stock fan. With the free upgrade on the GPU, I think that's a good choice.

I think a nicely assembled system with good cable management and a nice case can look pretty slick. All personal opinion though, just like some people like the look of car engines or other machines. And it's easy to have a system that looks crappy with bad lighting, cables all over, etc. Or just a butt-ugly case.

Plus, a system with stuff as basic as an aftermarket cooler, heat sink fins on the memory or a temp display on the case easily impresses the plebs who think computers are made out of techno-magic

A SSD speeds up boot times, and zone loading / software loads immensly. We're talking going from 45 second boot times to under 10 seconds from power button press, and a similar speed increase for program loads. Plus, a solid state drive has no moving parts in it. They still wear out over time, but much less risk of a catestrophic bearing failure.
The liquid cooling option will make the entire machine quieter. I personally would pick that Corsair Hydro 140mm unit since your case has a mount for it. Better airflow, and better components than that aztek (sp?) one. Either is going to be more than adequate though.
The internal network card is going to be fine. it's a direct bus port into the motherboard chipset, so probably slightly faster than an add in card. You only really need an add in card if you are planning on doing something out of the ordinary like bonding multiple ports, or dual network homes.

As far as your overall build, I like it except for the video card. The 750 GTX is a low end card, and it only has half the memory pipes (think bandwidth) of the higher end cards, so it's pretty crippled compared to the higher end ones. Enough that it may be noticable. You could drop the processor a bit and up the video card and get better overall performance for what my understanding of how you use computers is. If you are doing a bunch of rendering or video / music editing, you want the additional cores and hyperthreading.

Since they offier it, I would also encourage you to leave the first 1TB drive in, and add a second one in a raid 1 array. In that configuration, you can lose one entire data drive and still have all your data intact. For $70, it's pretty cheap insurance. A SSD by itself isn't going to be big enough for most people. This is about the minimum I would reccommend if you can swing it. http://www.cyberpowerpc.com/saved/1G0MQK You could always go with the lower end video card and upgrade later, but then you are spending more in the long run. Same with the ram. The SSD is worth it, but with OS and program installs you need at least the 250GB to not be constantly running out of space. The Samsung drives are generally a bit faster than the ones they had at the 240GB mark. I'm running a samsung 256GB pro series in the main computer here. The secondary actually has an older Crucial M4 SSD in it as it's primary. The media PC downstairs has another Samsung 120gb in it as its primary drive, Very few programs on it so it doesn't need as much, but even then it runs closer to the edge than I like




Part of it is the Sci Fi aspect, Part of it is to show off the technical ability. I've put lights in some of mine because I wanted to play with the technology. For a long time that was also the only way to get into a really good quality case (Thermaltake back in the day, etc.) Plus they kind of work like a night light.

Besides, who wouldn't want to show off their motherboard setup?

More cases should go with the sleek and minimal futuristic look, PC's are already crippled in the looks department because of the many different parts so they'll never get the looks of an iMac but there are so few good options at all there must be a niche for one of the manufacturers to design something that doesn't look like a 14 year old dreamt it up.

Anyway, I think games are largely unaffected by SSD's? I know D3 did the whole preloading thing but that got so much hate because it caused catastrophic fps drop for a few seconds whenever you used an ability the first time unless you had it installed on an ssd or flash drive.

And if you don't install games on it, 120GB should be plenty. 64gb probably works as well though you'll feel restricted by it sooner or later.

If you don't care much for startup time and you mainly game an SSD isn't really needed anyway so you could cut it out entirely. I'd certainly pick a better graphics card over an SSD.

How does one overclock a CPU anyhow?

TECHNO-MAGIC!

I doubt I'll ever decide to do that, so I'm dropping the liquid cooling system.

Edit: Nevermind, that Tom's Hardware link had the answer I was looking for.

Edited, Apr 13th 2014 11:29am by Demea

The case is actually a better case. As for the HD, I would go with a good brand like WD, Seagate, Samsung, etc.

You can drop the K version of the processor then as well. The only difference between an i5-4670K and an i5-4670 is that the K version is unlocked for overclocking. That and twenty bucks.

As a counterpoint to Kao's warning, I have used that exact power supply for a couple years now, trouble free.

For the same cost, I'd take the R9 270 over the GTX 750 Ti but that's just me. See also performance charts here.

Edited, Apr 13th 2014 12:45pm by Jophiel

It will work.

Another potential upgrade would be to go back to liquid cooling ($20) for quieter operation. That puts you right at $1,001

Awesome. Forged against the unyielding anvil of internet forum nerd crowdsourcing, it shall be a thing of beauty, no doubt.

You did go Fairy engraving, I hope.