My new gaming PC

[osh]

Hey all!


It's hell about time I upgraded my PC (I think it's been 5 years or so?). I'll try to keep it brief, but ask anything that could help you understand my goal.


Who am I?

• I'm a software engineer by profession and a gamer by heart (I lack time to play as much as I wish to).

What do I want?

• A gaming PC overall. I want my games and apps to load and work really fast, but the system needs to be stable (no extreme OC).

What do I need?

• speed (CPU, GPU and storage)
• memory (32GB with ability to expand to 64 in a couple of years)
• stability
• compatibility (dual boot to Windows for gaming and Linux for work)

What details are good?

• Some connections in the front/top, e.g. USB 3.1 (or USB-C)
  Apart from the connector type, are USB ports not backward compatible? Why they still do mobos with USB 2?
• 2 way SLI to be available - for the optional future upgrade
  does anyone do any more than 2 nowadays?
• VR
  I don't know what's the expense, so possibly not not, but it would be nice if my system was easy to upgrade with it

What details are not so important?

• noise
  Obviously silent is a bonus, but i don't care much about it, as I make more noise myself)
• design
  I can appreciate crazy LED builds, but I don't think there's a particular need for it - is it expensive at all?)
• form factor
  I always had a fairly big tower PCs and I just like them)

Budget?

• I don't really have one
  Don't want to spend all the money that I save for a house, but £1k? £2k? You convince me to spend more ;]

What I have been looking at?

• Mobo
  Not much clue here - I just know that Socket 1151 with Intel Z170 seems to be a standard now, but 7th generation of Intel CPUs is round the corner. Will it make it obsolete?
• CPU
  Prolly fastest from the 6th gen. What's the difference between 6700 and 6700K?
• GPU
  I guess a single Nvidia 1k series would be just fine. Is there a real benefit to go for 1080 rather than 1050 etc...
• Storage
  From what I read PCIe is much superior that anything else (right now I have an old HDD) I found this and it looks amazing value - great performance and acceptable price:
  scan.co.uk/products/1tb-samsung-sm961-nvme-mlc-v-nand-m2-ssd-pcie-30-x4-80mm-read-3200-mb-sec-write-1800-mb-sec-450k-400
• Monitors
  I'm somewhat confused what's up with all those free-syncs, G-syncs and NSYNCs (joke) I was looking at those high-res curved screens and a pair of those looks really sweet.
• PSU
  Whatever that can make my build stable.
• Case
  Not care much about glass or crazy looks - read the not so important section above
• Anything else?
  Is there something I'm missing?

Thanks for taking your time to read and help me out!
Osh

[Dashers]

Sounds like you want to do it right. Why do you want so much RAM? Virtual machines, databases and other such resource hogs of development tools. Well my friend, I think what you want is a workstation.

Don't pander around with the kids in the Z series motherboards. What you want is a big fat X. Currently that means X99 but the tech is a little bit older being based on Haswell/Broadwell architecture - as you've waited five years, you could probably twiddle your thumbs a little more and go for SkyLake-E in the new year, and boy what a chip that'll be.

Only girls have less than 3647 pins for the CPU. Yes, you read that right, 3647 pins! What they do is beyond me, but it's gotta be good. That's a whopping 1636 more pins than the X99 platform. Heck, the X58 when these things really kicked off only had 1366 pins altogether! That's a lot of pins. Invest big in pins.

Some of the things that those pins give you:
- Real SLI. Want two cards? Fine, shove in two cards running at full x16 link speed, none of this bandwidth sharing stuff. Who shares in today's world? Stop being a communist and gobble that bandwidth up.

- 4, yes FOUR channels of RAM. Dual is so 2000s, Quad-channel memory is what real men use. Ignore the benchmarks that suggest it's not worth it, what do they know? As soon as you start dumping virtual machines on there you're going to want to move serious amounts of data around in a small amount of time.

- A sense of manliness.

- Probably loads of I/O controllers and srubbishrubbishrubbishrubbishy fast USB 3.1 lanes.

You're bang on about NVMe. Don't muck about with throwing old rust around in circles, get some super-lean PCIe attached storage. M.2. gives you an easy way to attach it, but why stop there? With all those PINS you can add in more and more (well, up to 7 and that might start causing problems with needing a graphics card in there somewhere) expansion cards in. I've got an Intel 750 SSD, it's stupid fast handling 2.5GB/s (bytes baby, none of this bit lark) at huge queue depths. That means you can reindex that database, whilst defragging your VM and compiling some dog-awful bit of code you've picked up from somewhere. All with no slow down.

Jam in whatever graphics card looks a good price when you come to build your Skylake-E platform. Shove it in whatever monster case tickles you - look out for ATX-E motherboard support as workstation boards often spill over the silly confines of user-world ATX restrictions.

You will of course want an Ultra-Wide 21:9 high-resolution monitor with a VA panel to handle all those windows you'll have open. Heck, why not two?

Don't listen to the reasonable, level-headed responses you'll get on this thread. Do it right or go home.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So what games do you want to play and at what resolution??

What software do you intend to be running??

[wazzickle]

The best argument for spending more is that you can.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor (£316.98 @ Novatech)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D14 65.0 CFM CPU Cooler (£57.98 @ Novatech)
Motherboard: Asus SABERTOOTH Z170 MARK 1 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard (£224.99 @ Amazon UK)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200 Memory (£164.19 @ Amazon UK)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 1TB 2.5" Solid State Drive (£281.99 @ Novatech)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 8GB GAMING X 8G Video Card (£649.98 @ Amazon UK)
Case: Fractal Design Define R5 w/Window (Titanium) ATX Mid Tower Case (£109.65 @ BT Shop)
Power Supply: Corsair RM 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply (£116.35 @ Eclipse Computers)
Monitor: Acer Predator XR341CK 34.0" 75Hz Monitor (£841.63 @ Amazon UK)
Total: £2763.74
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-11-09 18:10 GMT+0000

By the looks of things you could shave a couple hundred off that monitor from places like overclockers when it comes back in stock. Might want to spend more on a better cooler, there will be more qualified people who can comment. This seems to fit your needs if you wanted to pull the trigger now, rather than wait for 7th gen intel processors (after christmas I think?) and/or the SSD you linked to which doesn't appear to have been released yet.

Only difference between 6700 and 6700k is the latter is unlocked for overclocking.

USB ports backwards-compatible until you get to USB-C. They still make USB-2 because it's cheaper, but also because a lot of stuff that relies on it (powering phones/speakers, mouse/keyboard etc) don't benefit from higher bandwidth of 3.0 and 3.1.

[EndlessWaves]

Pick the screen first. Decide what size and resolution suit your viewing distance and desk size and how many of them you want. For gaming that's generally 1 or 3, two means center-screen elements like crosshairs end up on the join.

You can't really decide on the graphics card(s) until you've sorted your screen setup and whether you're going for dual GTX 1080s or a single RX 480 will determine how much it's sensible to spend on the rest of the system.

Faster SSDs don't make a great deal of difference to loading times, for example:
http://techreport.com/review/30813/s...ssd-reviewed/5

When it comes to SSDs big and cheap is usually far more effective than small and fast. Once you have any sort of SSD the bottleneck is generally elsewhere.

[osh]

Thank you all for your replies.


@EndlessWaves, your point makes a lot of sense.

To answer it more specifically, I think 2 monitors will be good. I see your point with 1 or 3, but I think I'd play my games on one and the other one would be for messengers and similar (possibly streaming I'm considering). Main game I play right now is (don't laugh) WoW. And I know it's not too demanding game, but there are others that'd I'd love to play with every thing maxed out for the next few years (e.g. new Doom). 2 monitors is more for working, when I don't want to be switching though windows all the time and have everything what I need up and ready.

In terms of the storage... To me it's one of those things that last. Most o my hardware is about 5 years old. My monitor has about 7 years, but 1 of my HDDs more than 10 (250GB) and I still use it for backups ;] I read that flash storage shrinks over time. I read an article that on average it doesn't really matter what storage specifically it is, it fails over time anyway (it was something similar to this one backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q2-2016/ , but about SSD drives in data centers (Google ones?), but I can't find it right now, something relevant is here usenix.org/system/files/conference/fast16/fast16-papers-schroeder.pdf ). Some storage provide spare chips that if one fails, then the other will be used in its place, but I would imagine this applies to enterprise storage, that would also cost more.
I'm going a little too far from the topic now... what I need from my storage is to be fairly reliable (I don't store data which loss would make me lose billions), but it's fast and will last decent time. Seen comparison charts that effective load time of OS or software is very similar, however it's not only that. I'll be running various VMs on my disk and many of them purposefully have hard limits on memory and they may use storage for swap file; some tests are storage IO heavy; changing big repo branches, regenerating hydrators and proxies etc. I understand that this may not be a bottle neck in terms of gaming, but for work, there's a lot of work to be done by storage. I should have said in the title - it's not only gaming machine.


@wazzickle, thank you for putting together a detailed list, but I think it's a little early for that - I'd like to define a bit more precisely what are advantages of one or another piece of hardware (or maybe I'm overthinking this as I personally tend to do?). I may not be that good with hardware as I used to, but I care deeply about my stuff (nerd) and I like to know that's the best for me for the moment (and nearest future).

I actually may wait until xmas or a little longer and go for the 7th generation CPU. I can survive 2 more months or so
The only question here is how the entry level 7th generation CPU will compare to the best ones of 6th generation in terms of price and performance (value over all). Then again if the prices will be too high, the prices of current models will surely go down (with possible xmas sales deals) ;]

USB still is unclear to me - if it is backwards compatible, then why not shove all of them as version 3 and you can still plug USB 1.0 if you got. What different hardware there is that would make it more expensive? What's controlling them?


@CAT-THE-FIFTH, your honor, I'd be playing a few random games, including WoW, Overwatch, Doom, and possibly some other new FPS that I would be able to (definitely not sports games or simulators, including racing games). I also run simulations for WoW (they use more CPU than anything else I do - including compiling).
I need a lot of RAM so I can run the Chrome browser (lol)... for software development, so I can run a VM or two with a lot of memory (that's normally 4-8 GB) while still working comfortably on the system.


@Dashers, what do I do with you, sir? Your post is quite informative and funny at the same time ;] I think it never crossed your mind that I actually may be a girl (yes - there are some coder-gamer girls out there), however I'm still a guy I definitely want to do it right and that's why I'm here.

You need to forgive me as I'm not so fluent with CPU architectures. I'm getting confused what's Broadwell, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Skylake and there's Broadwell and Haswell Extreme (I guess the Skylake-E you talk about is Skylake Extreme) is this the 7th generation I read about? There's also Xeon, but I think I don't do that much stuff to spend so much more to have more cores a little real-world benefit if my case.

I saw those Intel 750 PCIe storage that you have one of, but when I saw the Samsung SM961 NVMe (link I posted before), it seems to be superior in performance (both on paper and in tests) while still being cheaper, so that's an easy choice.

In terms of RAM channels I never knew what difference they make (right now I have 3 channels and only 6GB RAM). I just want to have fast 32GB of RAM to keep up with all of my Chrome tabs open ;] You guys tell me if the number of channels will make actual difference for me or not.


Is there anything else to look for on a motherboard?


Once again, big thanks for taking your time to read and reply,
Osh

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Do you have any inclination for overclocking?? I would probably avoid it for software development as you can never quite test an overclock for stability IMHO OFC.

Beyond that,you have two options:
1.)Core i7 6700 - 4C/8T
2.)Core i7 6800K -6C/12T

The main difference is the number of cores you have. The latter option will be around £200 to £300 more expensive.

So will you have any advantage of having more cores for general multi-tasking??

I assume you have a Core i7 920 - the second CPU is on the platform which is the spiritual successor to yours. If it is indeed socket 1366,you can actually pick up cheap ex-server CPUs with 6 cores as a drop-in upgrade now.

Regarding graphics cards - a GTX1060 6GB would be fine at 1080P for the games you want to play. GTX1070 will no doubt be faster,but again that is another £120 to £150 more.

With SSDs,the major improvement is random access times - I would not bother with PCI-E based ones unless you are doing serious amounts of disk intensive work,like video editing.

[Dashers]

@Dashers, what do I do with you, sir? Your post is quite informative and funny at the same time ;] I think it never crossed your mind that I actually may be a girl (yes - there are some coder-gamer girls out there), however I'm still a guy I definitely want to do it right and that's why I'm here.

You need to forgive me as I'm not so fluent with CPU architectures. I'm getting confused what's Broadwell, Haswell, Ivy Bridge, Skylake and there's Broadwell and Haswell Extreme (I guess the Skylake-E you talk about is Skylake Extreme) is this the 7th generation I read about? There's also Xeon, but I think I don't do that much stuff to spend so much more to have more cores a little real-world benefit if my case.

I saw those Intel 750 PCIe storage that you have one of, but when I saw the Samsung SM961 NVMe (link I posted before), it seems to be superior in performance (both on paper and in tests) while still being cheaper, so that's an easy choice.

In terms of RAM channels I never knew what difference they make (right now I have 3 channels and only 6GB RAM). I just want to have fast 32GB of RAM to keep up with all of my Chrome tabs open ;] You guys tell me if the number of channels will make actual difference for me or not.


Is there anything else to look for on a motherboard?

Your sex is irrelevant. An Extreme! platform makes you a real man, it'll put hair on your chest. Ignore all these other people with their child-like Z platforms. Go nuts, do it properly.

Intel (we'll ignore AMD as that's for wannabes too) are following a "tick-tock" philosophy. They release a CPU architecture, and then shrink the process that makes it, the naming pairs them up fairly clearly. Haswell got shrunk to Broadwell, Skylake got shrunk to Canonlake. The architecture change is arguably where the benefit is - there's no point in getting a Haswell over a Broadwell, but if you're waiting to buy at a good time, snipe in at the launch of a new architecture, it'll last you the longest without becoming out-dated.

Ivy/Sandy Bridge was followed by Has/Broad Well, which is followed by Sky/Canon Lake.

Then there's the extreme editions. They don't waste precious die-space for wimpy and pathetic integrated GPUs suitable only for old-folks-homes. It's all about the POWEH (say it out-loud, and say it deep, like a man). Importantly, for the developer in you, there are some great big bulging caches - fat caches speed up very heavy work loads, e.g. media and hard-core development (running multiple virtual machines and crunching lots of data). They're fat to feed all those extra juicy cores. None of this quad-core business, you're looking at least six cores, you can go for more - if you have the cash to flash. Vroooom.

Now if having an Extreme makes you a man, having a Xeon means you have really big cahoonas too. At the entry level there is one that is for all parts identical to the Extreme i7, just marketed for business and not for enthusiasts. It will cost the same too. But after that they get more specialised and require the use of a workstation chipset (C range), these boast features more suited for big-business such as remote management and what-not. No need to muck about with those and the extra cost. For a home dev/gamer machine, the X chipset reins and nobody is going to be concerned about your cahoona size, just as long as there is plenty of hair on that chest from the X series.

The Intel 750 is very specialised and is essentially a domestic version of an enterprise product. You're indeed correct in thinking the Samsung is a good bet., it's newer to the market and produced in high numbers.

Your RAM, do you have three sticks or three channels? There's a difference. The older extreme platform (starting with Nehalem on X58) was tripple channel. Your average Z-series chipset will have 4 RAM slots, populate two and you're running in dual channel. Populate the other two, and you're still running in dual-channel. Populate just three, and you're likely to be damaging your performance as it'll switch to single-channel and half the available bandwidth* (implementation specific).

Quad-channel systems will have 8 RAM slots. You need to populate a minimum of 4 to get quad-channel performance (x4 the bandwidth of a single stick). Not massive use for checking for when the next Emerdale omnibus is showing, or probably, most gaming, but really useful when powering multiple virtual machines and such. Plus, it's what the cool kids have. Do it to be trendy. People won't want to be your friend if you only use dual-channel.

Motherboards are all much of muchness, especially if you're looking at the Extreme X series chipsets. They're all premium and have variations on a theme. They'll be packed with SATA ports, PCIe slots, and other gumph. Where there's a difference comes in specialising in things, e.g. big overclocking (all will do it, some are just easier), built in wifi, extra LAN cards or dedicated gaming LAN, better onboard sound etc. If you want things to sound good, have a look out for a board sporting a Creative audio chip (you could also just buy a dedicated sound card).

Happy to give any more help to make you proud to be a man (albeit one with svelte inny and outy bits).

[Dashers]

https://www.techpowerup.com/227716/i...sktop-platform

Looks like some news on the next Intel extreme platform, and it'll be SkyLake-X (not -E) and it won't be available until Q3 2017. So if you want an enthusiast platform looks like you're limited to Broadwell-E for the next year. Depends on when you want to upgrade, personally, I'd wait.

Or start doing partial upgrades. You could invest in a 1080 graphics card now and hopefully have recovered a bit financially for Q3. Same goes for SSD storage, whilst you might not have an M.2 slot, you can get PCIe boards cheaply (sometimes bundled) that will allow you to use it straight away (although might not be bootable, but some funky bootloader configuration can work around that). Same for peripheral items such as monitors and cases.

[Andy14]

Not even my thread, but just had to say I'm loving Dashers "manly" replies.! The first one especially gave me a good chuckle.

Personally I see a man who's heading for a system pretty similar to what I will be buying at the start of next year. Z270 based, 7700K CPU and a high-end (1070 / 80 / ti) GPU. All this X99 based macho stuff is great, but you need to have a very serious use to justify it.

[Dashers]

All this X99 based macho stuff is great, but you need to have a very serious use to justify it.

A man doesn't need to justify himself. Worrying about consequences is not manly. Just do it.

Anyway, it's easy to justify X99 if you're a programmer: "I need it for programming stuff". Job done.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

A man doesn't need to justify himself. Worrying about consequences is not manly. Just do it.

Interestingly enough,neither do Moose,but usually with disastrous results.

[Andy14]

Anyway, it's easy to justify X99 if you're a programmer: "I need it for programming stuff". Job done.

It's that kind of logic that makes otherwise perfectly sensible people buy a MacBook Pro

[Dashers]

It's that kind of logic that makes otherwise perfectly sensible people buy a MacBook Pro

Honestly, I'm done with Apple buyers. If that's what tickles them and that's what they can afford, then that's what they should buy. They won't be happy otherwise.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Honestly, I'm done with Apple buyers. If that's what tickles them and that's what they can afford, then that's what they should buy. They won't be happy otherwise.

Bloody Pear eater!! Shakes fist!!

[osh]

Hey all,

It's been a while since I last posted. I really need to put myself together and put a product list together, so I can finally buy it. I delayed it way too long. I think I will need to define a couple of bits, before I make decision though. I re-read what I have posted originally and the goal remains the same, but the budget will most-likely be higher and I will explain in a moment why.


I'm seriously considering 4K gaming. I want to have ultra graphics, but on a single monitor.
I pretty much need 2 monitors for working, but I don't think I need both of them UHD. Right now, I have an old Samsung SyncMaster 226BW (with a not too common 1680x1050 resolution), but it's just fine for work. I wonder if it's viable to get a 4K monitor for gaming and use it together with my old one as an off-screen (i.e. use it for work or communication channels or streaming, etc...). It surely won't look too well on my desk, but I guess it's acceptable. I want really nice pictures, so I read that ISP is the best here when it comes to quality and viewing angle; ~5ms response time is a bit slower than TN, but it's just fine. Most likely I will want to have G-sync/freesync (correct me if I'm wrong).

Next thing is to power this ultra gaming - GPU.
I heard that even Nvidia 1080 GPUs are not too strong with such a massive demand as playing 4K on ultra graphics settings and as far as I know (please correct me!) my only viable options are Nvidia Titan X or AMD Pro Duo. I was told that even a couple of 1080s is not as good as the old Titan X - fact or myth? (obviously we're talking about 4K gaming here, not overall). Titan X is quite old now and doesn't even support DX12. I want my games to look awesome and be smooth (60 Hz is the minimum, ideally double that! How much will it cost me to do so?)

From another angle - CPU.
I understand that for gaming it's that that important and even my current Intel i7 920 (@CAT-THE-FIFTH How did you know? Or have I posted this somewhere? Massive credits for you!) is not too bad when it comes to processing power. I do want to upgrade it though, but this is for work. I need some decent help with this - more cores would do great and I even consider going Xeon, but the problem with this is that I don't want to spend too much on CPU (probably no more than three or four hundreds) but then I get only few more cores and and bigger cache, but slower clocks. I don't want my games to suffer because of this (will they?). What about AMD? Anything worth considering? And one more question - what do I really get out of those £300 that I would spend compared to what I currently have? Maybe I should just stick to it?

Storage.
This is much easier now. https://www.scan.co.uk/products/512g...ps-400tbw-reta seems like the one for me. I think if I were to record my gaming to upload it, a separate cheaper and bigger SSD would be better. I do consider going for the 1TB version to get 450k IOPS.

Keyboard.
I really need a new one. I was considering a mechanical one for quite some time now and I did some research, but it seems it really is a personal preference. Myself I want it to be quiet and I think low profile (half height) is the most comfy for me. I can spend even a hundred if it's worth. The only dilemma I have is - should I go for for an extended one. As I code a lot, I use various methods to be as performant as I can. This includes (sometimes weird) combinations of keyboard and mouse - I can sometimes click a button and sometimes use a shortcut depending on what will be faster at a moment. This obviously involves using quite a bit of numeric pad (if I gonna input more than 3 different digits in a short period of time - 99% chance I will use the pad), but at the same time they got in the way a number of times (pun not intended). I think a short one will just do and if I feel like I need the numeric pad, I guess I'll but it separately.
Wired vs wireless. I think it doesn't really matter that much. The benefit of wire to have a shorter response time is I think negligible nowadays. The benefit of of not having a wire and making keyboard more portable and have a "cleaner desk" is equally unimportant, so in the end it doesn't really matter.
I want some back-light or colour key marks (LED customizable) cause I never had and I think they are cool

Mouse.
I have R.A.T. 7 Contagion and I don't really plan on changing it.

Mobo, PSU, cooling, case.
This will come later once I nail the main components, I will just need support whatever I may need (or not and reuse what I already have).

I guess that's it.
I really want to have this purchase going, cause I delayed it more than I should have.


Thanks,
Osh