Advice on new rig

[Blue Pulsar]

It's been nearly a decade since I built my computer, though it's had some upgrades. But I did stop upgrading when CoH closed. So I've decided that with all the upcoming projects, I should probably just start fresh. Build a new system. Not looking to buy a prebuilt one... that is, unless I can get one built and ready to go with the specs I need and for a comparative price to building.

Now, I'm not looking to dump tons of cash into a setup. But, then again, I'm not trying to be a cheap ass. I do know that, when I built my last one, on a MB, CPU, Gfx card, RAM, and HD, I spent about $600. It seemed to run two instances of CoH/V with relative ease and with the graphics somewhere above medium. But, times change, technology changes, etc. I'm not sure what I'd need to spend, but I know 1,000 is my absolute max. I think my target is more like the 700-$800 range.

I know how to put all the parts together, and I used to know what to get, but I've been so far out of the loop for so long, I need help. So, now comes to my question, which is more like a lot of questions all rolled up in one. What do I need? Moreso, what SHOULD I get.

And I mean that in every sense possible. What kind of specs for the different aspects of a decent gaming rig. Maybe some specific part recommendations. Combinations that work or don't work. Brands to avoid. Places where I could get deals. Really just looking for as much information as I can get before I go off hap-hazardly buying stuff.

Perhaps someone who has the time could give me a list of specs and parts for a bare-minimum machine, an adequate machine, and a higher quality machine. Something to compare and such.

All-in-all, bare in mind that I'll probably be building this over the next few months, then testing it, adjusting it, tweeking it, getting it running smooth, have a while to settle into it, and have it more than ready in time for the release of some of the projects coming out.

[Tahquitz]

For the quickest advice to get your feet wet, check out Ars Technica.

Ars Technica posts their System Guide yearly, highlighting their picks of two PC builds: the Bargain Box (around $600) and the Performance Box (above $1,000 but not ridiculous... see alienware.com).  Each article discusses the rationale in picking the components, so you can either get them yourself, or challenge it with your own preferences and make a more informed decision.

Their articles were the jumping-off point for the system I built for City of Heroes back in 2012, and it's still running great today.  With minor upgrades over time, this system might last me 7-8 years, more than I possibly could have expected when I first made it.

Otherwise, if you want advice, FatherXMas is an avid system builder if you want to flag him down in Private Messages. 

Tom's Hardware has two great charts: one for CPU hierarchy, and one for Video Cards.  It doesn't make a one-to-one comparison for each CPU or graphics card, but rather it arranges them in classes so you know what model numbers are superior to others at a glance.  These both are immensely helpful when picking through parts.

Also: most components you can get a feel for pricing after paging through a few similar components.  If a component has a really low price and it seems too cheap, you're probably right.  Trust your gut, and beware Amazon and eBay 'deals', especially for the big five parts: CPU, Motherboard, RAM, Hard Drive and Power Supply.  You don't want to go too cheap for any of those.

[Blue Pulsar]

Thanks for the response. Any and all info is welcomed and appreciated.

One thing, though: I looked for the ars guide you mentioned, but the last guide they put out was in 2015. Any other good guides you know of?

Of course personal opinions on parts, etc, would be great too.

[crashpositron]

For reliability, I suggest the ASUS TUF motherboards, like the Z170 and Z270.  I'd go for the fastest i5 I could afford and at least 16GB (memory is fairly cheap right now) .  nVidia GTX 950 for video and at least a 500 watt power supply (I like EVGA, CoolerMaster and Thermaltake, myself) .  Hitachi hard disks are the most reliable and you can get a 2TB for $70 if you shop around. You can get a case for $40-50

[Tahquitz]

ASUS makes great motherboards, but their "everything else"... video cards, AIOs aren't great.  Laptops are 50/50. (Their ROG and GXX lines are good.  Their cut-rate stuff... bleh.) I haven't had problems with Gigabyte motherboards either.  ASRock Motherboards I've always wanted to try, but I've heard horror stories and praise in equal amounts.  Avoid Biostar, ECS, and Jetway.

Power Supplies, Corsair is my favorite brand, hands down.  Not overpriced, good MTBF on even their cheapest ones, and the cables are well wrapped on the non-modular ones where cable management is less of a pain.  EVGA has gotten into the game, haven't tried them yet.  The power supply is one thing you don't want to be cheap or poorly reviewed, so read other reviews on Newegg where necessary.  There are a lot of PSU manufacturers out there.

RAM, I tend to use G.Skill and PNY.  Crash is right, RAM prices are falling as manufacturing processes are changing, so the market wants to push out their stocks (not just RAM, but flash, SSDs and other memory products.)  It's a buyer's market right now.  Other good ones include Mushkin, Kingston, and HyperX.  For RAM, avoid any Value or Budget product lines.  RAM isn't just about capacity, but also speed.  Look at the CAS Timings (TLDR: CAS Timings are expressed as a series of four numbers, the first two numbers you want as low as possible) to see where the faster RAM is.  (CAS Timings will be where 'value' RAM is apparent: lower timings will be in the more expensive ones, higher timings and slower performance will be in the cheapest RAM.)  Usually, they'll mention it right in the product name if it's Value or Budget.

Hard disks, for SSDs I use SanDisk.  Very affordable, and all the punch and speed of SSD.  Other good SSD manufacturers include Toshiba/OCZ, PNY, and Kingston.  Samsung is positioning themselves as the supreme choice for SSDs, but you'll pay for that superiority.  For platter-based drives I use Western Digital.  They recently absorbed HGST, so their portfolio is broadened quite a bit.  I avoid Seagate drives, their quality in the last 6 years have led to my workplace carrying out boxes full of blown Seagate HDDs straight to e-Waste...  I used to like them in the past, hell, my first PC had a Seagate 20MB hard disk on my XT 8088 PC Clone.  But times have changed.  Seagate does have very good Server Hard Drives, but their desktop offerings really are unreliable.  (Even had Barracuda drives fail in batches, their flagship model.)

CPU is really a simple choice.  If all you care about is top of the line, Intel is king of the mountain.  But you're going to pay out the nose for the fastest stuff.  AMD's better for budget-conscious builds, and their Ryzen chips are catching up to the Core i7 behemoth.  Realistically, designs between Core i3, i5 and i7 as far as WHAT they are have stayed the same: Core i3 is the dual core model, i5 the quad core model, and i7 the quad-to-six core model.  (WATCH the processor numbers!  They do sell i5s that are dual core, and i7s that are quad core!)  The major difference between Nehalem (2008) and Kaby Lake (Today) is two things: smaller manufacturing processes, which allow more transistors per mm, and less power draw (Nehalem TDP was as high as 130 Watts.  Kaby Lake's lowest TDP is 35 Watts.)  This is where the performance differences are realized.

The wrench in Intel's works are the laws of physics: silicone only has so far that it can be 'miniaturized' before quantum tunneling occurs (TLDR: errors), so they're at 10nm right now.  7nm is as low as it goes.  Once they hit 7nm, they need to find a new element or alloy, or processors will start getting physically larger again to accommodate more transistors (larger = more electricity, more cooling needed.)  This could be AMD's moment to turn their fortunes around if they can figure it out before Intel does, but based on their past history... *shrugs*

(This post is FULL of opinion, none of this except the last bit on CPUs are FACT.  Feel free to rebut or correct!)

[Tahquitz]

Video Cards: here's a general guide on picking these up --

'Family' is the year the card was produced, 'Product line' is their relative performance compared to other cards in the same family.

NVidia:
Current family: GTX 1000 series.
Prior families: GTX 900/800 series.

Product lines: look at the ten's digit.  10-30 is their 'budget/business' line (GT 930 and GT 820 all examples of these), 40-60 their 'enthusiast line' (GTX 1060, GTX 950 and GTX 840 being examples of these), and 70-90 their 'performance line' (the GTX 1080 Ti being NVidia's flagship... at $700).

Budget cards are useful to add extra monitors to a system, but are bare-bones gaming capable.  Enthusiast cards deliver better gaming frame rates, and Performance cards are the best, but cost the most to have.  Performance cards are also lately the only cards that support multi-card linking (SLI for Nvidia, Crossfire for AMD) for combined performance gains.

Notable NVidia cards: the GTX 1050 is a sweetheart.  Price is around $140, good performance, and these require no additional power leads from your Power Supply.  They work off of PCI-Express slot power alone, so no Power Supply shopping is necessary.  (Certain 'performance line' cards require Power Supplies with a specific number of amps on the +12V rail.  If yours can't supply it, then you'd need to replace the PSU as well.)  What's weird: past families of the same number are more expensive.  I can't really advise going for the GTX 950 or 850, as their prices are higher with the same performance.

AMD:
Current Family: R9 series.
Prior Families: R7 and R5 series.

Product line: The same rule as NVidia applies here concerning their performance lines-- look at the tens digit.   10-30 is their 'budget/business' line (R9 230, R8 220), 40-60 their 'enthusiast line' (RX 460), and 70-90 their 'performance line' (Radeon RX 480 being the current flagship of AMD).

Naming across families is less consistent with AMD, so you have to pay attention: RX, Fury and R9 graphics cards are in the same family essentially.  R8 and R7 cards are in the R7 family, etc.

Notable AMD cards: The RX 480 is supposed to be the competitor to the NVidia GTX 1070/1080 at $200, although in practice, I have yet to find any RX 480 card below $200 from any manufacturer.  For the same price point as the GTX 1050, XFX makes a Radeon RX 460 for $140 that not only doesn't require a PCI-Ex power lead from your power supply, but is also fanless.

A Note on Monitors: Current video cards are dropping all support for VGA (either as a dedicated port, or through a DVI splitter, touting DVI-D only if they even offer a DVI port at all).  If you've had your monitor around since City of Heroes shut down and you like it, understand that newer cards will either require you to down-convert the signal to keep using it through the use of an adapter (good luck with that), or it's time to consider a new display as well that uses either DisplayPort or HDMI connection.

What is interesting: a Variable Refresh Rate is possible enhancing visuals more than frames per second normally would.  NVidia calls it G-Sync, AMD calls theirs FreeSync.  Both are the same thing, and both have the same requirement: you need a monitor that is compatible with the technology... and they're not cheap.  And I have yet to find a monitor that is both G-SYNC and FreeSync compatible.  (Share if you do find one!)

----------
(But Tahquitz, what about the Titan X, or the Radeon Duo Pro?  These are past the mainstream market, priced over $1K.  As a general rule, if your video card outprices the rest of the system's components, there's something wrong with buying one of these unless you're a professional gamer.  Especially if the performance gain from one of these is maybe 20% better than the highest mainstream card available.)

[Blue Pulsar]

This is exactly what I needed. Thank you Crash and Tahq. You've given me a tonne of great information. Especially the breakdown of what the numbers in NVidea cards mean, Tahq.

(This post is FULL of opinion, none of this except the last bit on CPUs are FACT.  Feel free to rebut or correct!)

Hey, when dealing with a near infinite number of possibilities when building a machine, opinion from a person who knows what their talking about is sometimes better than just pure and simple fact.

[Tahquitz]

I remember how heated the Hardware threads got on the Official City of Heroes forums in the past, just wanted to CMA a little.

[Blue Pulsar]

Okay, systematically, I think it's obvious that, when building a 'puter a piece at a time, one should start with a case, then a power supply, then MB, then processor, etc., etc. A case isn't hard to figure out, and power supplies haven't changed enough in the past few years that I think I can figure out that fairly easy (especially with what you've said.) You gave solid advice on a chipset, but I may still need to pick your brain on that later. For now, I'm going to try to shop around for the first three, but I am a little lost on mother boards.

My last one was an ASUS, and I do like the brand. But, as I've said before, I'm out of the loop. I guess I need to know what specs to look for, what a gaming rigs need, etc. The motherboard is something that is not easily upgraded later, unlike Gfx cards, sound cards (are those even used anymore?), RAM, HDs, and even CPUs. So, I think it obvious that finding something with "elbow room" for possible future upgrades would be a good idea.

So, specs and/or product examples would be great. I did like your split of budget/business - enthusiast - performance with the Vid cards. Perhaps you could do the same for me with an MB?

I apologize if I'm asking a lot. But I trust the CoX community, and I love well organized information. So, I'd much rather come here and get specific advice than googling "gaming motherboard."

WARNING: I'll likely be picking your brain for a while on this. So if you want to end this now, I'll understand. 

[Kelltick]

I'll throw my $0.02 in here, although I must preface it by saying I've been out of the PC hardware loop for a bit, haven't been staying on top of the "latest and greatest".

For MoBo's, to me the 2 most important factors I look at are a) am I going to be overclocking anything on my rig, or running everything at stock, and b) brand name/track history of said brand names.

If a = yes/maybe, then I yield to others who have stayed on top of the hardware game, as the variances in what to get/what to avoid are far greater than if a = no. If a does = no, then b is of greater importance, imo. As stated earlier upthread, the brand names listed are solid. I'd start looking there. I personally have had nothing but smooth sailing with both Gigabyte and ASRock mobo's - but those both come with disclaimers. First, I overclock. I'm comfortable doing it, I generally know what I'm doing, and haven't had any issues doing so. Gigabyte has not let me down in that regard. As for ASRock, I've only owned 1 of their mobo's, and that was when I was strapped for cash and needed to bridge the gap between some other hardware and ASRock was the only manufacturer that made what I needed at that time. That said, it was a solid mobo and I had no issues with it (and even that rig I OC'd).

If you do/are interested in OC'ing, a thing to note for Intel CPU's - anything with a 'k' at the end of the model number is OC'able, anything w/o is not. Keep that in mind. I, personally, for Intel would stick with an i5 variant, as the bang-for-buck level meets what I usually look for in building a new rig. The improvements in performance for an i7 vs. a comparable i5 just isn't there for me, but again - that's me, others may disagree/be more up on the latest and greatest. And, as stated, I OC, so I can squeeze more out of a cheaper, older CPU than someone who doesn't OC.

RAM, I've always been a fan of Corsair, but even though RAM is cheap anymore, I do tend to spend the extra $$ and get Corsair's performance/gaming models. It tends to offer more flexibility for running weird clock/bus speeds when OC'ing than cheaper RAM affords. I can't speak to any other brands, unfortunately. I like what I like, and buy that brand. No issues ever with Corsair.

Vid cards, I'm kind of in the same boat as I am with RAM. I stick to nVidia. I have owned ATi cards in the past, and they've been solid, but overall I've had a better experience with nVidia than I have ATi. That, admittedly, is where my current knowledge is at it's least, but if I were building a new rig today, I'd look nVidia 1st, given its' track record as a whole, and with me personally. (I also, usually but not always, OC my vid card, so that may play into it a bit too.)

As has been stated, DO NOT cheap out on the PSU. Quickest way to blow up a rig is to have a sketchy PSU. That being said, do some research on what power needs you'll have with whatever rig you decide on. Easiest way to waste money on a new rig is getting a PSU that is too beefy for what you need. But again, do not underestimate the importance of a good, solid, quality PSU. That can not be stressed enough.

And lastly, and perhaps surprisingly, if you've never had one before, upgrading to an SSD from an old-fashioned platter HD is like fully upgrading a CoH toon from DO's to SO's. Best way I can put it. It makes that much of a noticeable difference. Everything installed on that drive just *pops*.

[Tahquitz]

And lastly, and perhaps surprisingly, if you've never had one before, upgrading to an SSD from an old-fashioned platter HD is like fully upgrading a CoH toon from DO's to SO's. Best way I can put it. It makes that much of a noticeable difference. Everything installed on that drive just *pops*.

QFT.  That's the major improvement in PCs in the last 6 or so years.  If you can afford it, get an SSD.  If you can't, get a smaller SSD that can hold Windows with some space left over (100-120GB works, 60 as a minimum if you are very meticulous on keeping installs and browser caches in check), and consider adding on storage later. It's really that much of a night and day difference in load times.

[AmberOfDzu]

I like these kinds of threads. I'm not a computer builder, but it really helps me get an idea of where a good price point is, how much of a premium any given off-the-shelf system's going to carry, and what I ought to plan for the long term.

As it is, I'm about 4 & 1/2 years into my current computer, and would be looking for a new one later this year, so good timing, too.

[crashpositron]

The reason I highly recommended the Hitachi hard disks (the mechanical drives, not the Hitachi SSD):
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

[Blue Pulsar]

So, I browsed around on eBay and Newegg, found a case I liked, read some reviews, watched some unboxing vids, found a good price, and ordered it. Then I settled on a Corsair TX750 power supply.

Now I'm eyeballing an ASUS ROG Maximus VIII Extreme motherboard. It seems to be a good unit, but I'd like to know what you guys think. Also, the one I'm looking at is about $225 because it's manufacturer refurbished. I know with a lot of stuff, when the manufacturer rebuilds something, it's basically new. However, I don't know how that works with high-end electronic components.

Needing some feedback, guys.

[crashpositron]

Just purchased some new ASUS motherboards from NewEgg for $150 - the TUF Z270 Mark II and the Z270 Plus.  Both are very nice and the TUF comes with some very comforting protection devices, including (first time I've seen this) a hardened Ethernet port.  I can recommend either of these for less than the refurb.