Building A PC Rig, need help please. (First Time Builder.)

[mark5916]

mark5916; Will that setup be able to run fairly high graphics on Skyrim or Fallout 4 for example with no lag? I want to set that as my benchmark and have it last me a while.

 

Also can anyone tell me a really good place to order parts from? Amazon looks good, Im trying to get lowest prices possible.

 

Amazon would be the most appropriate place to start.

 

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If you go with that RIG or similar you will be able to play Fallout at 1080p (ultra)

 

However keep i mind Fallout 4 suffers form many bugs, glitches, save crashes, and sometimes the game doesn't even start.

 

I advise you to seach that forum for any workarounds and possible fix. Also as many people we must wait for a patch from the devs.

 

The RIG would be faster if the prices on Australia wasn't so expensive. !!!

 

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Do not hesitate to ask for any questions and workarounds for your PC build.

Edited November 17, 2015 by mark5916

[obobski]

Thanks for the reply obobski, I didn't know why my laptop broke down until you mentioned cheetah blood does that, I was sure that couldn't be the reason but hey, the more you know. Like I stated I am new to building my own PC Rig, so I thought people would be able to tell me of their own personal preferences and what they have used themselves in the past, then I could look it all up and compare them all one piece at a time to see what would be the best bet, I am sorry that I asked such an intensive question, it was never my intention to make people think that they had to work excessivly hard to answer my queries.

 

Skyrim is a most definite on my new Rig, however I also, at some point, wish to see about getting the new Fallout game, Fallout 4, onto it as well, and I was wondering if the price range you suggested, $1300 would be good enough of a budget to run it on fairly high specs and garner no lag?

 

As to RAM, thank you again for telling me about it, I was unaware that 32GB of RAM was overkill, my assumption was that the more RAM you had the faster your PC went, not to cheetah blood speeds, but just a little bit faster with each GB. Ill be investing in only 16GB of RAM thanks to your helpful suggestion and information.

 

As to the Intel CPU, I looked it up and do you suggest that the higher the 'i', as in i3, i7, etc, would make for a better CPU? Or does it not matter over all?

 

As to nVidia and AMD, I'm pretty sure I'll be heading the nVidia route, I've heard that Steam now runs better with nVidia, as do a lot of games, though thats just from forums I have visited for information, I may be mistaken. Thank you for the recommendation towards AMD though. The GeForce 960 looks good, though would you recommend anything a bit better, I have always had the most trouble with the graphics, sound and motherboard parts of the Rig as I am not well versed in them all, and there are so many to choose from.

 

Finally, Windows 8 would be my pick as the OS as Windows 10 has been getting a lot of negative press everywhere I look, perhaps in the future when the reviews pick up I may look into upgrading.

 

mark5916: Thank you for the help, I await your response eagerly, however thanks to obobski's reply I now know that I am asking too much of you. If you could provide a list of parts that fit well with say, $1500, then I would be more than happy, thank you so much for your time.

 

Didn't see your reply until now (I admittedly don't check Nexus consistently every day), here's my reply:

 

- It's not so much "excessively hard" as it is "excessively tedious" - a completely open-ended build question has a legitimately unlimited number of possibilities. As far as brands I've used and liked, however:

 

For motherboards: Asus, ASRock, Intel (they make their own motherboards), Biostar, and Gigabyte from time to time. I avoid MSI (awful customer service and reliability IME), and no-name/new-to-market brands (nothing comes to mind off-hand but basically I don't like being the guinea pig)

For graphics cards, nVidia: EVGA and PNY

For graphics cards, AMD: Sapphire, XFX, and PowerColor

For sound cards: Creative (historically Razer and M-Audio were good, but neither still makes sound cards that I'm aware of - lots of stuff on ebay though (you can probably still find Razer AC-1 cards for cheap on ebay, and as long as they have the breakout HD-DAI cable, they're a steal - assuming you get a motherboard with a PCI slot))

For PSUs (and I can't stress enough how important a quality PSU is): PC Power & Cooling (today they're "FirePower Technology" but they'll always be PC Power & Cooling imo), Antec, and Enermax; there are other good suggestions here and in general I'd say read jonnyguru and pick something that measured/tested well

For cases: Silverstone, Lian-Li, Antec, and believe it or not, Rosewill

For RAM: G.Skill, Kingston, Corsair, and Crucial

 

That should get you started in the right direction at least - ofc there are many other manufacturers that may (or do) make great products; I haven't tried every single product or every single brand under the sun, and admittedly I have a preference to find a brand that makes quality stuff at reasonable prices and stick with them, vs experimenting with every build.

 

- On Skyrim, yes $1300 should be more than good enough. To give you some perspective, my old rig (used it up until last December) had a Core 2 Quad Q9550, 8GB of DDR3-1333, and a GeForce GTX 660 (which replaced a Radeon HD 4890 after its cooler died), could run Skyrim on Ultra with FXAA quite nicely (the 4890 could almost do this too) - that's mostly 2008 hardware. Skyrim is not really that demanding of a game - it's not "lightweight" (e.g. it isn't WoW or CS that will run on positively anything), but you don't need a modern $10,000+ machine with Titan X SLI and 512GB of RAM and 96 CPUs and so forth to get good frame-rates. You can totally mess with the performance by adding mods (especially if you get into texture/mesh mods and other graphics "enhancements"), and I'd say that really just has to come down to a judgment call on your part. IMHO I'm fine accepting more or less vanilla graphics and/or accepting turning down some settings to get better performance vs throwing a mountain of money at it.

 

- On the RAM, the "more RAM = faster PC" is a myth that's older than time itself. I still remember when CompUSA would try to sell people that line directly. It's just not true. Applications basically don't care how much RAM your machine has, as long as it has enough - anything extra is just wasted surplus capacity. Skyrim itself can never use more than 2-4GB of RAM, and that's true of many other games too (conventional Win32 limits are 2GB; with LAA flags they can use 3GB on x86 and 4GB on x64 - that's "up to" btw, not "will always require"). I'm sure if you asked people, plenty of them were playing it back in 2011 on machines with 2-4GB of RAM, not 32-64, but memory gets progressively cheaper (per capacity) as time goes on. There's no downside to 32GB of RAM aside from cost - if your goal is gaming, 16GB is a good choice imho because its around the sweet spot for pricing right now (and to do 32GB you're doing 4 DIMMs, so you could always add another 16GB in the future), and will give you more than enough memory for contemporary 64-bit games too (I'm assuming you're going with a 64-bit version of Windows), which generally request/specify 6-8GB of system memory on their boxes.

 

- On the Intel CPU, yes and no. Intel has tried to simplify their marketing and branding in recent years by doing the "i" thing but ultimately I think it just ends up being confusing in new ways. Technically speaking the "i7" series is top of the line, but for gaming performance there's no point - top-tier i5s will be just as good (we're talking <5% differences in benchmarks, usually fractions of an FPS or less), and in many cases top-tier i3s can be perfectly suitable as well. Generally, today, i3 means dual-core, i5 means quad-core, and i7 means quad-core with HyperThreading - a lot of games still favor single-threaded performance (and this is why AMD falls so far behind; CMT favors high multi-threaded performance), so there's plenty of cases (e.g. Skyrim) where a fast dual-core can be perfectly competent. i5 is a good place to be, price-wise, and unless you're doing something that can actually drive some benefit from HyperThreading (e.g. Handbrake encodes) I'd just save the $100+ on the i7. Ditto for Broadwell/Skylake - they're showing basically el zilcho in performance increases for gaming, but you'll spend more to get that; why not save the money?

 

- On the GPU. nVidia is *extremely* popular on many forums (like to the point of having a borderline Apple-esque following). This doesn't mean nVidia is "good" or "bad." "Steam runs better with nVidia" sounds like such an Apple-esque statement: Steam isn't a game, Steam isn't even a 3D application - it's just a digital content delivery service. It will run fine on all manner of hardware, be it a top of the line nVidia/AMD graphics card, the rinky-dink Intel IGP in an Ultrabook, or even my cannot-game-to-save-its-life 3DLabs proline card. As far as games being better/worse with nVidia - I'd say its a mixed bag. nVidia has "held games hostage" with things like Gameworks and PhysX (these are SDKs that nVidia owns and pushes on developers, and often these games run worse or without some features on non-nVidia hardware; I'm trying to say this in the least conspiracy-theorist-sounding manner I can), and if you're after games that rely heavily on nVidia IP then you're going to be forced into their ecosystem (see where the Apple comment is starting to make sense?). Skyrim is not one of those games, however; it has run great for me on multiple cards from nVidia and AMD. As far as what I'd suggest, I like bang-for-buck - the GTX 960 is not a bad example there (just like the 760 and 660 before it), but moving up in price I'd probably switch to AMD with the R9 290/390 series (its the same GPU - just go with whatever is cheapest) since they'll generally keep pace with the higher-tier nVidia cards and tend to cost $100+ less (and lets not even get started on Titan). For Skyrim, I'd feel generally confident saying: "none of this matters" - Skyrim will run (more or less) maxed out on high-end cards from 2008, and will (no joke) run on cards even older than that (Ultra on a 7900GTX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXTrK_GtG60 - before "man its so laggy!" - this card came out in 2005*, and the game is on maximum settings; if you dropped things down it'd become much more playable, and consider that even midling cards today are orders of magnitude faster than 7900GTX). However if we're going to talk newer games, like Fallout 4 or whatever else, you will need to give graphics more thought - I still think the 960 is a good starting place, and then decide if you want to go cheaper (and probably somewhat slower) or more expensive (and somewhat faster). Depending on what kind of monitor you're hooking up to, the 960 may even be overkill (e.g. if your monitor is <1080p that's a very different story than if your monitor is 2560x1440). I will add that both manufacturers can, and have, made excellent products (and I own and use examples of both), but I wouldn't want to chain myself one way or another, because neither of them makes a consistently better (or worse) product. Currently (and for the last few years) they've been pretty well tied, ignoring nVidia's (arguably) anti-competitive tactics, and I'd just go for bang-for-buck at this point.

 

- I haven't tried Win10, but I have no complaints about Win8.1 when I've played around with it. My main gaming PC still uses Windows 7 mostly because I don't like constant upgrades; I still have some secondary machines running Vista without complaint as well. I've read about Win10's mandatory updates, and this is where I'd be somewhat leery of going Win10 + nVidia, as nVidia has kind of a nasty history of breaking game support with successive driver updates (back to "its a mixed bag") - sure it may improve performance in some new game, or some game that current reviewers are fixated on for benchmarking, but it may break playability, features, performance, etc in some old game. Example: the Gameready driver updates that improved Watch_dogs performance (which was used in a lot of reviews to benchmark) broke shadows in The Sims 2. Other example: the driver family that introduced and improved SLI performance broke most Lithtech-based games. If you don't generally worry about games more than a year or two old (excepting iconic titles (e.g. Skyrim, WarCraft III, StarCraft, etc stuff that will often be specifically singled out for support)) this probably wouldn't be an issue, but if you're looking at a wide and diverse range of games, being forced into nVidia driver updates is unappealing imho. This isn't to say AMD drivers are flawless, but IME the general trend over the last 16 years has been one of improvement, while nVidia is one of periodization. So if I were being forced into mandatory driver updates, I'd probably rather go with AMD. Or just go with Windows 7/8 and completely circumvent the problem - by 2017/2020/2023 (when Vista/7/8 go EOL, respectively) I'm hopeful that Microsoft will have rethought/improved mandatory update model, that driver-providers will have further improved their game, or that a third-party platform (e.g. OS X) will be able to really counter for Windows for gaming. I'm not anti-update, just anti-avoidable-system-breaking-stuff.

 

* EDIT for nitpicking: 7900GTX itself came out in early 2006, but its a refresh of the G70 (GeForce 7800) which was released in early 2005, and is directly based upon NV40 (GeForce 6800) released in early 2004 (they are quite similar, internally). The GeForce 6's primary competitor, the Radeon X (for the 6800, this would be the X800 and X850), is incompatible with Skyrim (it doesn't support SM3.0), but the GeForce 7's primary competitor, the Radeon X1000 (X1800, 1900, and 1950), would work with Skyrim (it does support SM3.0, and there are boards with 512MB) - I couldn't find a video example though.

Edited November 20, 2015 by obobski