£1200 gaming/general/x264 encoding PC

[mroz]

Revised: Okay, how about



The PSU might be overkill, but the machine could end up with two gfx cards in future. Also lower loads for now mean extra quiet, I hope. Oh, I have a 4TB WD Green I'll add in. Any comments? Cheers all.

Was:

I fancied an overclocked 4790K but didn't want to overclock it myself, so am thinking of a Scan bundle. I'd welcome opinions on

[Pob255]

Umm not sure why you've got an nvidia shield in there . . .

It's all rather overkill IMO, overclocking is fairly easy these days (if it's even needed) asus has a hardware/software system, TurboV Processing Unit (TPU)
Once you've got windows, drivers and such installed, open up the tup software activate the auto oc mode and give it a bit of time (10-20min), it auto tunes and run simple stress tests, reboting a couple of times and hey presto, you're overclocking and it does a reasonable job
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum...review-15.html

it may be worth looking at an M2 SSD instead of a sata one

Personally I'm not a fan of a full atx cube case such as the 540, mATX cube is ok such as the 240 or the Aerocool Dead Silence

[mroz]

Thanks for the feedback Pob. The Shield is in there as I want one to stream games to from this PC. I've not had the opportunity to try that before as the old PC has a GTX 460 in it & my laptop of the last four years, a 485M (which is virtually unusable due to overheating even under medium load).

Overkill? Do you mean you think I could make significant savings for a small drop in performance? What would you change & what to?

Overclocking. Hmm, ok, thanks. Maybe I will just do it myself. Ta for the link. [Edit after reading:] That does sound seductively simple

I've only overclocked one machine before. Got a nice Q6600, G0 stepping, upto 3.4 stable on air. I ran it like that for about a year iirc. However 'stable' is a relative term in this context. It blue screened about three times in that year. I couldn't find the cause & as testing involved tweaking one setting & waiting an average of four months to see if that helped eliminate/reduce the problem I ended up just going back to stock settings. I guess I could have tolerated the infrequent crashes but I wasn't happy about it, especially as I'd used Intel's matrix raid in the build & discovered that is/was easily upset by bluescreens. After the first one, one of my drives simply ceased to be recognised as part of an array. I managed to recover all the data in the end. The filing system seemed fine, it was just the meta data that had been corrupted.

M2: do any of the current drives exploit the extra bandwidth? What I've read in the last month or so seemed to suggest there was little to gain atm.

May I ask why you don't like the cube? Purely personal or are there any build, airflow or other issues? I know case choice is personal, but I'm interested in suggestions, with functionality being of prime importance. I was disappointed with my last antec case. The quality wasn't exactly fantastic & I managed to break one of the front usb ports within a week, so it's not as though I trust my own judgement

While I'm here, how about OS? Would you still stick with 7 or go with 8.1 that MS are currently pushing? I was planning on Windows 7 Home 64 bit, as it's not likely to ever have more than 16GiB in it (at least not while it has Windows on it; maybe after that, if it ends up as a FreeNAS box).

[Edit:] I've updated my basket to buy the components separately. Saves about £40 & I can claim on that Intel cpu/mobo cashback offer, about £50 I think.

Anyone reading this?