think this is a good build for making Game play commentary's vids on youtube?

[TGWTHF]

right so i want to start making youtube videos and gaming lets-plays and stuff... so im going to build my own gaming rig... however there are a few things im unsure of so i thought i'd run it by you guys in hopes that you can help me ^^

Case: Zalman Z11 Medium case
Motherboard: (undecided/need one with 2 to 3 PCIE x16 2.0/3.0 ports in either x16 or x8 bandwidth)(also, under £150 would be best))
Power Supply: (also undecided, need one 750 Watts or above and has Crossfire/SLI Support)(under £60 would be best too)
RAM: 16GBs Black Vengeance RAM ((I'm future-proofing, thats why 16GBs))
CPU: Intel I5 2500k ((or should i wait for Ivy Bridge?))
Graphics Cards: two Asus ATI Radeon HD 6850 in Crossfire ((or is there something better that would be cheaper/around the same price?...))
HardDrive: 2TBs


also, the date im going to start buying the things to build it is may 6th so would/might there be any upgrades i can make to it by that time?/after that time?

[TGWTHF]

should I go for the Asus MAXIMUS IV EXTREME Rev.3.0 Intel P67 Express Socket 1155 Motherboard, or the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3P Intel Z68 Socket 1155 Motherboard?

also the power supply, I was thinking either a Powercool one or a dif one, can't figure out its name, think its OCZ technology or somat... i dunno, but i cant decide XD

[mikeo01]

Personally, I would go with the ASUS, good quality VRMs, solid reputation and also the Z68 chipset is basically the P67 but with extra things
Also the feature set with ASUS is good.

That case you've chosen is very nice, more looks than anything It has decent airflow (if you are willing to spend some money on other fans) and looks air tight. Supports you're chosen cards easily, you'll find it'll have a lot of space for future improvements

Your CPU choice is good, you will probably find its more than enough for your needs.

RAM, 16GB is quite a lot, games do not use much RAM, probably 2GB tops. I would say 8GB RAM is enough, unless you are going into serious video editing. I think going for 16GB is a waste.

HDD, that's just personal preference.

Power supply, personally I would suggest Corsair just because of your setup, dual card configuration requires plenty of stable power and Corsair models will do that. The TX/HX. But in terms of OCZ quality it really does vary, I would avoid the StealthXstream. The OCZ ZS is a decent model, but has higher ripple than other high quality PSUs. 750w should be plenty, fortunately the HD 6850s use a lot less power than the 5xxx series.

Right, what monitor are you going to be using and at what resolution? 1x HD 6850 will hold up very good at high resolutions, only consider crossfire if you are going to use a high resolution with a high graphic game at 1080p. Anything under and I would consider a single GPU (but more powerful).

But you may find getting a single HD 7850 will result in less power at the same performance of two HD 6850s. The HD 7850 is around £200, 2x HD 6850 is going to be around £200. Makes more sense to be to get a single HD 7850 for the same price and improve in the future. Crossfire 2x HD 6850 doesn't seem worth the price, heat, performance and power consumption when a single HD 7850 will do the job fine. You could overclock it too. Leaves another PCI-E free for future use if you go with Eyefinity (multiple monitors).

[TGWTHF]

hmm, I also found a different motherboard that would suit me, the ASRock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3, that or the asus? XD, the asrock is cheaper than the asus one.

yea i chose it for its looks and size haha, yeah i was going to buy the maximum sized fans for it haha.

like I said, i chose 16GBs of ram because i'm future proofing it, I'd raher pay 90 for 16 GBs now than about 140 for 16 GBs in future from upgrading from 8GBs lol
keep in mind i'll be livestreaming and recording the gameplay at the same time so..

also the HDD is because its a ton more space for a lot cheaper than a SSD ((SSDs are overpriced if you ask me)) XD

im unsure on powersupply still, but i want a cheap one that w ill be able to accommodate for future upgrades

but from benchmarks that i've seen, the 2 Asus HD 6850s cost less than 1 Asus 7850 and get higher FPS in games than the 7850 too ((keeping in mind i need higher FPS for making videos as recording severely lowers FPS))
I also use 1280x1024 more than high resolutions, and I dont see the point in using more than 1 monitor, not sure what monitors I have, but one is 19 inch widescreen the other is near enough the same size ((half inch smaller on each side)) but its about 2 inches higher than it too, they're both TFT I think ((dont take my word on that one))

I dont ever plan on overclocking anything, I've seen them blow up from failing and i dont want to risk it, that and i dont feel like getting water-cooling because it seems stupid to have water near electrics if you ask me

[mikeo01]

To be honest I would stick with the ASUS. ASRock have got good reviews, but they're more aimed at budget. You'll find the ASUS performs better and will put your mind at rest in terms of quality and solid reputation. ASRock are fairly new, and their reviews are mixed.

I go by appearance with cases and chuck in some fans and make sure its air tight it looks like a good case.

And if you want to future proof with 16GB then go for it, if you do stream, record and do a lot of tasks with videos you'll probably benefit from it. But if you plan to do some video editing and recording now and again I would seriously consider whether you need 16GB. Also 16GB are for heavy programs, such as virtual and VMWare so if you don't plan on using it you may find 8GB is actually enough.

And yes I do agree on the HDD, SSD may be amazingly fast, but for a 60GB model you're not going to install much on it and be WOWed in my opinion SSDs may live longer, but as you said the space on the HDD is too great to overlook compared to SSDs. And most users are comfortable with a HDD.

And cheap and PSU are bad in the same sentence the higher components you have, the more you should pay for a PSU. If a PSU goes up or struggles under load you are going to know about it. Take a look at the Corsair TX750W V2, they have solid reviews, one of the best models, and at £83.17 you can't go wrong if that's a bit steep for you then by all means try the OCZ ZS http://www.amazon.co.uk/OCZ-OCZ-ZS75...5467234&sr=8-3. It is bronze 80+, so it'll be decent at providing a stable current for your components. The ZS is a good build, although not as good in quality as other models such as the Antec TruePower or Corsair TX.

And 2x HD6850s may produce better results, but you got to remember 2x HD 6850 is an extra 110W more than a single HD 7850, plus you will have a lot of heat produced. You will need around a 700W PSU for dual configuration using HD 6850, but you could get away using 600W using a single hD 7850. Plus the HD 7850 overclocks well apparently. You use 2 monitors, so I assume you are going to use only 1 monitor for gaming. And if that monitor is 19" or even close, the max resolution I assume is going to be around 1600x1400 or even 1400x900. Take a look right click on desktop > Personalisation > Display and it'll list your resolution.

I use 1x HD 5830 for a 17" monitor with a resolution of 1440x900, which is plenty for even the demanding games (Crysis!). A single HD 7850 will do very well at the resolution 1600x1400 (overkill for this res), and good at 1980x1080.
That extra performance will be gained by an overclock on the HD 7850, plus you'll be without the higher power consumption and heat. And a nice free space on the other PCI-E lane for future use.

And an overclock won't blow your card up unless you do ridiculous overclocking, most cards can overclock on its stock voltage, and as long as you have good cooling most are fine with it. thermal protection will shut down the card before any damage can be done anyway. Overclocking is safe is you budge up the clock by a little bit.

Water-cooling is unnecessary unless you serious overclock. Most moderate overclocking can be done on air (after market cooler). My stock heatsink on my graphics card at the moment holds up fine, and I have bumped it up a lot. The stock keeps the temperature well under dangerous temps. But to be honest even if you are worried about overclocking, a couple of FPS increase by using dual configuration with HD 6850 doesn't sound worth it to me.

If people tell me I am wrong, you can laugh at me

[steelfury]

I would go for SSD + HDD. The 60 GB Samsung 830 has excellent speed for its size.

[TGWTHF]

thats my point, i am kind of on a budget, the cheaper ASRock would allow me to buy a better psu lol, my budget in total is about £800-£900 lol, the cheaper the better XD

art programs are heavy programs rofl, jk XD, but i do need a bit of ram from what i've experienced XD

i wouldn't know how fast an SSD is lol, never used one before in my life XD, and the fact they live longer is crap if you ask me, my dad h as had a PC for 10 years+ now and the harddrive in it is still going strong XD, and i have a real old laptop ((near enough 20 years old)) and its still going strong so :S lol

cheap is everything i do hahaha XD, but i don't know, £83 for a PSU is a bit much if you ask me... i'll go with that OCZ one lol XD, I do understand that you pay for what you get, but from my experience, the cheaper things i've bought out live the more expensive things for some reason... dunno if thats been luck or not but it happens XD lol

yeah i can live with more Watts lol, heat i can live with too, I know i need at least 700 for the dual config, thats why i was looking for a 750W psu lol, and like i said, i don't plan on overclocking XD, and I dont use 2, I have 2, both on seperate PCs, one came with the other pc i had ((the busted one as you probably know)) and this one i bought second hand the other day for £25 XD, which im using on this pc lol, and i dunno, this ones being weird and only displaying 1020x780 as its maximum for some reason ((it has 1440x1020 earlier but suddenly started displaying "NOT SUPPORTED RESOLUTION!!!" even tho it wouldn't let me change it to anything smaller :S so, i had to plug in dif smaller monitor to change it, and then 1020 was maximum size XD))

like i said tho, most of my games are played at 1280x720 resolutions lol, I got used to that resolution because it used to provide optimum performance on my old pc with the stock 9100 geforce, and even better on the GTS 250, but thats dead and i'll probs still use that resolution.

also something has also confused me a lot about the newer ATI HD cards, why do the 7xxx series have less cores than the 6xxx series?, doesn't more cores mean better performance?...., the 7850 has 1024, and the 6850 is half the price and has 960, so two together is 1920, near the same as the 7970, and more than the 7950, yet half the price of them too... it doesn't really make sense to me unless they are starting to go like nVIDIA and are able to have less cores with more performance?... ((the GTX 580 has like 500-and-something cores and is a little weaker than 2 6850s which are 1920))..... it confuses me thats for sure...

uhm... it might have also been because it was an old PC, but i still dont feel safe doing it haha, the max i'd overclock would be 1hz, which is nothing rofl xD, but seriously, on air how much would be a safe overclock on the 7850?...
and the couple of fps difference can make the difference between lagging like hell in a video and smooth gameplay XD.

I wont laugh at you, i'm not cruel haha XD

[TGWTHF]

I would go for SSD + HDD. The 60 GB Samsung 830 has excellent speed for its size.

I'm sorry but i don't think SSD's are worth the money they are selling for when i can get 1 hard drive with 15 times the space for cheaper, or 30 times the space for just other £10 more...
thank you for recommending though, I would get one if they were more reasonably priced for their data size.

[mikeo01]

Yes but in turn a lower end motherboard may not last out long. ASRock are not that bad manufacturer, I would definitely read the reviews first on it. Or go for a lower end ASUS or Gigabyte model. It looks decent but it isn't going to produce as good results as the ASUS or Gigabyte in terms of performance and quality.

To be honest 8GB RAM should be plenty, so I do not know what programs you were using to full up that much. You have to remember DDR3 RAM is much faster than DDR2.

SSDs are fast, they're chips, they use PRAM (Phase memory) correct me if I am wrong or are going to use Phase-change memory. Either way they are faster and live longer. But to be honest I agree with you, I don't think getting an SSD will be worth it, Yes hard drives do have more problems and decrease in performance over the years, but its cheaper to buy a new HDD than a SSD. I would get an SSD when they drop in price by a lot.

And OCZ are good power supplies (I don't know about the other models but the ZS is decent). And cheaper in PSUs is not the same case. Cheap power supplies are cheap because they cut corners with voltage regulators, heatsinks and quality components and capacitors. That's why you can usually judge a PSUs quality by its weight (not in all cases though). OCZ would be fine, but in the long run you may find a Corsair would be still running strong and stable compared to the OCZ.

And you currently have 2x HD 6850s? Well in that case if they are both in good working order you have no reason to not use them. I thought you were going to buy 2, in that case yes it'll be cheaper getting a decent power supply Make sure they are in good working order, because you mentioned a display not being supported. Sounds like driver issues in any case. Mind, running at 1280x720 is very low, so you will find a single HD 6850 will do it fine. You only really need 2x HD 6850s if you are planning 1600x1200 and higher with full AA. HD 6850 could max out anything on your current resolution.

And its the way the architecture is, more throughput, using a 28nm design. But remember using crossfire doesn't mean 100% more performance, because it has to pass over the information using the crossfire bridge. Also in crossfire your cards bandwidth will be half, running at x8 rather than at x16, so processing is going to be slower. You may only get another 50% performance due to this.

And on air to be honest most branded cards such as XFX, ASUS and Sapphire come with pretty decent heatsinks to allow for overclocking. The HD 7850 can be overclocked around 200mhz on air. My HD 5830 has been overclocked 200mhz on air and is nice and cool. Voltage increase is usually the way to heat up a card

And a couple of fps making it lag or smooth would mean you have a card on the edge at 30 fps. Over that and everything is pretty smooth. But to be honest if you are going to run at 1400x900 a single HD 6850 will max out anything

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

What budget do you have in total??

[steelfury]

Don’t forget that hard drives are a big bottleneck in performance. CPUs, memory and Video cards have made rapid improvements in performance; hard drives have mainly increased in size with some speed improvements due to aural density. You will notice a big difference in perceived general performance by using a SSD.

Reliability is too soon to call; SSDs have not been around long enough.

[Terbinator]

You're going to want fast sotrage AFAIK if you're after recording video - something like a VelociRaptor or cheapo SSD for dumping .RAW FRAPs videos to.

[TGWTHF]

Yes but in turn a lower end motherboard may not last out long. ASRock are not that bad manufacturer, I would definitely read the reviews first on it. Or go for a lower end ASUS or Gigabyte model. It looks decent but it isn't going to produce as good results as the ASUS or Gigabyte in terms of performance and quality.

To be honest 8GB RAM should be plenty, so I do not know what programs you were using to full up that much. You have to remember DDR3 RAM is much faster than DDR2.

SSDs are fast, they're chips, they use PRAM (Phase memory) correct me if I am wrong or are going to use Phase-change memory. Either way they are faster and live longer. But to be honest I agree with you, I don't think getting an SSD will be worth it, Yes hard drives do have more problems and decrease in performance over the years, but its cheaper to buy a new HDD than a SSD. I would get an SSD when they drop in price by a lot.

And OCZ are good power supplies (I don't know about the other models but the ZS is decent). And cheaper in PSUs is not the same case. Cheap power supplies are cheap because they cut corners with voltage regulators, heatsinks and quality components and capacitors. That's why you can usually judge a PSUs quality by its weight (not in all cases though). OCZ would be fine, but in the long run you may find a Corsair would be still running strong and stable compared to the OCZ.

And you currently have 2x HD 6850s? Well in that case if they are both in good working order you have no reason to not use them. I thought you were going to buy 2, in that case yes it'll be cheaper getting a decent power supply Make sure they are in good working order, because you mentioned a display not being supported. Sounds like driver issues in any case. Mind, running at 1280x720 is very low, so you will find a single HD 6850 will do it fine. You only really need 2x HD 6850s if you are planning 1600x1200 and higher with full AA. HD 6850 could max out anything on your current resolution.

And its the way the architecture is, more throughput, using a 28nm design. But remember using crossfire doesn't mean 100% more performance, because it has to pass over the information using the crossfire bridge. Also in crossfire your cards bandwidth will be half, running at x8 rather than at x16, so processing is going to be slower. You may only get another 50% performance due to this.

And on air to be honest most branded cards such as XFX, ASUS and Sapphire come with pretty decent heatsinks to allow for overclocking. The HD 7850 can be overclocked around 200mhz on air. My HD 5830 has been overclocked 200mhz on air and is nice and cool. Voltage increase is usually the way to heat up a card

And a couple of fps making it lag or smooth would mean you have a card on the edge at 30 fps. Over that and everything is pretty smooth. But to be honest if you are going to run at 1400x900 a single HD 6850 will max out anything

True I guess... I might go for a lower Asus one lol, no point in getting the maximus iv extreme, it has 4 pcie slots XD

yeah 8GBs should be plenty, but like i said, i'll future proof and go with 16 GBs, it'll be cheaper in the long run, and i'll be on the safe side of things if i decide to do something demanding XD

yeah I know how SSDs work, I just don't like them, and i highly doubt its speed is so much faster than a HDD to justify its prices lol

hmm ok i'll take your word on that, if my pc gets fried, its on your head haha jk x3

lol I notice we dont understand each other on certain parts, or at least, you me, I don't have the 6850s, I'm looking at getting them, I have done so much research into graphics cards over this past month that its ridiculous XD, but yeah, i think it is a driver issue with this monitor, or the fact that its using a Radeon 9200 graphics card ((IKR.. this whole pc only cost £60 so im not groaning XD)) and my other monitor runs at 1440x1020, would a 6850 be good on that, or should i get a 7850 to be on the safer side (because its newer)

yeah i know it doesn't, not unless you have a motherboard that will run dual x16 ((there are some i've seen them, they are just real expensive)) lol, still its more performance than just 1 at x16 because just because its x16 compatible doesn't mean it uses all 16 connections, or so i've been told lol

I think i'll stick with Asus, as they are a brand I know more than any other, have heard about more than the others, and have heard a lot of good reviews about haha XD

yeah i know people recomend 30-40FPS beyond that you wont notice a difference, however recording with fraps or bandicam cuts the FPS near enough in half, so i'd have to have at least 80 FPS as standard to record with decent FPS lol

[TGWTHF]

What budget do you have in total??

about £700-£900 ((£900 is pushing it and i'd have to wait a bit longer to get lol))

[TGWTHF]

Don’t forget that hard drives are a big bottleneck in performance. CPUs, memory and Video cards have made rapid improvements in performance; hard drives have mainly increased in size with some speed improvements due to aural density. You will notice a big difference in perceived general performance by using a SSD.

Reliability is too soon to call; SSDs have not been around long enough.

I don't think i'd notice much of a difference between a HDD and something i've never had ((nor intend on owning unless their prices become more reasonable for their size, like £100 for 1 TB))

[TGWTHF]

You're going to want fast sotrage AFAIK if you're after recording video - something like a VelociRaptor or cheapo SSD for dumping .RAW FRAPs videos to.

lol I know but i used to record with fraps normally on a HDD and it wasn't slow, the file sizes were a huge problem for my 285GB hard drive tho as it would fill up in a few minutes, so i switched to Bandicam, saves files a million times smaller than fraps does ((not quite a million, but at least 30 times smaller))
FRAPS: 3.2GBs every 4-5 minutes
Bandicam 100-200MBs every 4-5 minutes