My new machine

@=XDC= wild egg tamer wrote:

lovely set up, what did that set you back?

Just over £2k. Got some accessories, like a nice force feedback steering wheel to play racing games with and ended up with some spare HDMI leads etc. I’m please with the end results, it’s a machine I’ve wanted to build for a few years but not been in a position to.

@=XDC= wild egg tamer wrote:

That is an awesome set up, would love something similar but can’t stretch that far funds wise.

Been looking at these guys site today, seem to have reasonable prices but i’m so out of touch with all matters PC, i have no idea what is a good or bad gfx card; CPU etc!

Is it worth going for an i7 cpu or would an i5 suffice? I’ve been told the i7’s are only good for multithreading tasks such as video editing etc and have no influence on gaming quality. Is that right?

I may as well hold out for BF4, i was hoping it would be WW2 but it seems they’ve gone for modern yet again and i’m now missing gaming to the point i may as well give in and get back into it. Hopefully i will be able to get a rig that plays BF4 and possibly Arma3 at high or ultra res and will last me some time.

Generally speaking, for a specific gaming build around 1/3rd of your budget should be on the graphics card to optimize your performance. With graphics cards, you get what you pay for, but always check sites like tomshardware.co.uk for the benchmarks and see where you want to be for your money as the more money you spend give your reduced returns on performance.

Processor wise, you are totally right. An i5 is just as good as an i7 for games right now. I chose an i7 just for the video encoding. There is however a possibility in the future that games developers will pull their fingers out and start coding games to take advantage of hyperthreading etc.

I was going to wait for next gen cpu and gpu. Intels haswell processors are coming out next month but only show a 10% performance increase over ivybridge for what will likely be an inflated price so no point waiting there. Both Nvidia and ATI have pushed their next gen graphics launches back to 2014 so now is as good a time as any to buy.

To play the games you mention at ultra settings on a single screen of 24″ or below, will take no more than a single overclocked 670 GTX or 7970. Both retail for around £300. Then just pick up an overclocked i5 bundle for £400 a small SSD and some bits and bobs such as case and decent PSU and you will have a great PC.

The cost for me came getting 3 monitors and the hardware required to run it. If I was running a single monitor, I would have saved £300 on the 2nd GPU and £260 on a couple of monitors and that would have reduced the budget a decent bit.

If you’re looking for specific advice on components, feel free to PM me and I’ll sort you out.

The cooler is fine. To be homest, i was lazy this time. Lat time i had water cooling, i bought a £300 custom loop and manually overclocked the cpu and gpu. This time, i bought a pre overclocked bundle from scan that guarantee a stable 4.5 ghz overclock. It seems quiet but i keep the case fans on high and they are definitely louder.

The H70 looks cool though 🙂