Help Grandpa Build An F4 Rig That Will have Tons of Mods

[mwhenry16]

So, I haven't built a rig since before there was "i" anything, let alone i5, i7, etc. I currently have a 2011 27" Imac, because back then it had the highest monitor resolution going. It plays Fallout 4 on low, with a fair amount of mods. It doesn't look pretty (sadly) like it did with Skyrim on Ultra (huge number of mods, lots of textures). I love all in ones because I hate wires, but they are either under-powered, or in the Imac case, overpriced.

 

Time and time again I read on posts "build it yourself", versus say a custom rig (ibuypower, etc). More bang for the buck and so forth. So using the 5k Imac 27" price as a point ($2700) please help an old gamer stay in the game, and get back on the track of upgrading myself, instead of dropping $3000 every 4-5 years.

 

I will only be playing Fallout 4, Skyrim, TES,and all their children, and perhaps an odd shooter here and there, but mostly the aforementioned. However, I will be using tons and tons of mods (fell in love with modding at an advanced age), and would like to dabble in modding also.

 

I simply must have at least a 27" monitor, if not two, or at a minimum 2x24". I don't want to squeeze every half percentage out of the CPU and video, but I certainly don't want to be under-powered and changing either or both when the son of Skyrim comes out, and I may want to dabble in oc'ing ( like I used to, once with a "zzzzzt", smoke and silence). I don't want a barely capable i5, but if there is an i5 thats more than capable, great, If an i7 is needed, fine.

I don't want a wimpy video card, but obviously (maybe it isn't) the $2700 might not support a 2x or 3x 900 something Ti setup either.

 

Case wise, I don't want a shoe-box, nor a cave, I want quiet, quality, and upgradibility. I know nothing about SSD, they didn't have them back when, and I need at least 2TB for storage. I don't care about fancy ( or even not fancy) lights, don't need an optical drive, but would love lots of USB plugs. I'm left handed so mice are always a problem, and because of the Imac, I'm now attuned to a chiclet KB, although it doesn't mean I can't go back.

 

Sorry for the long winded post, but I think I need to be saved from Apple, and I plan on playing until my last day on earth. Thanks in advance (I hope).

[obobski]

I'll try to run through your post with bullet points, hopefully this will help:

 

- Building the machine yourself will likely get you better bang-for-buck if you do it smartly, but that doesn't mean its a magic bullet that will negate upgrades or buying a new machine every 4-5 years. That's just life. If you want top of the line full-max-ultra performance from a gaming PC, expect to be spending a few thousand dollars every few years (if not every year) - again, that's just life. You can build that machine yourself, or your can buy it from Alienware; neither has a magical "future proof" button. In general 4-5 years is a pretty long life for a gaming machine, especially if we're using history as an example.

 

- Fallout 4 is basically going to drive the specification requirements for your new build here, but I'd remind you that driver and game updates will have an impact on performance, and we're nowhere near "the end" of those kinds of updates. Without knowing about what's inside your mac, its hard to say if it may even be reasonable to expect some driver updates there (doesn't the 27" imac have something like a GTX 780 in it?).

 

- Performance cannot be guaranteed with mods. Full stop. It is entirely possible to load enough mods to grind even the most absurd machine to a halt even with a game as old as Morrowind - again, that's life.

 

- The monitor(s) you want are no problem for your budget, and there's tons of options out there. I'd take a look at BenQ, Asus, and ViewSonic, and perhaps consider others as well. When you mention "a 27" monitor" I'm curious though - do you mean 2560x1440, or just a large display? This makes a difference wrt performance requirements of the machine (e.g. if you just want a big display, go get a 40" 1080p HDTV and be done with it).

 

- You can use your Apple peripherals with a Windows machine if you like, or buy a new set of them for the new build. The Magic Trackpad isn't perfectly supported (it does work but it won't work as cleanly as it does in OS X), but the mouse and keyboard work as standard USB devices (just like non-Apple keyboard/mouse work on your Mac).

 

- No problems with getting 2TB or more of storage - if that's a lot of videos and photos and such that you care about, I'd strongly encourage you to consider a good back-up scheme, which your budget entirely supports.

 

- Let's not even try to talk about Elder Scrolls 6 or other unreleased, unannounced, mythical, etc games - there is no future proof, there is no crystal ball, and its impossible to predict or assume what will or won't work in a year, five years, etc. If you're after high end PC gaming, you WILL be upgrading, including entirely new builds, in response to new games - that's just part of it. It can get very expensive.

 

None of this is meant to be doom-and-gloom - just reality.

 

To the specific task at hand:

 

- A higher-spec Core i5 (e.g. 4670/4690) is basically as good as you're gonna get, CPU performance wise, for gaming, today. If you feel the need to spend more money, the i7 brothers (4770/4790) will accomplish that, get you nothing better for gaming performance, but will be cheaper than Broadwell/Skylake (which also offer nothing better for gaming performance). Sources:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation/16

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9320/intel-broadwell-review-i7-5775c-i5-5675c/9

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7963/the-intel-haswell-refresh-review-core-i7-4790-i5-4690-and-i3-4360-tested/9

 

So why go for any of the more expensive CPUs? The i7s make sense if you have something that can derive some benefit from Hyperthreading (video encoding is an example), Broadwell makes sense if you need the IGP (but for the price delta, you can get Haswell and a nice graphics card that will do better than the IGP anyways), and Skylake if you just want to have the newest thing for the sake of having the newest thing. Personally I'd say save your money, get a high-spec i5 (e.g. 4670/4690), and a Z97x motherboard, and be done with it.

 

- On the graphics card, I've recently been suggesting Maxwell (nvidia) or GCN (AMD) parts, but after doing further reading on the DX12 scandal for Maxwell, I'm just going to suggest GCN (especially since you care about forwards compatibility, where DX12 support may matter (and the fact is, Maxwell doesn't support all of DX12 in hardware - nvidia lied and paid off/pressured benchmark makers to cover it up at launch, but its coming out now (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_900_series#Limited_DirectX_12_support)). The R9 290/390 (they're basically the same thing, but 390s are more likely to have 8GB of RAM (nothing needs it but price no difference, I'd go for it) - get whatever is cheaper (and that may mean you get 8GB of RAM)). Fury is more powerful, and since you have a big budget you might consider that too. Multi-card is largely more headache than its worth IME, and never worth the price - you could spend $1000+ on a pair of 290s or Furys today, or buy a single card for $300-500 and then in a year or two buy another single card for $300-500 as an upgrade, and probably have better performance in the future, and not have spent all the money at once (if that makes sense).

 

- So now we're basically talking a high-spec i5, or one of the Haswell i7s if you need HT (e.g. you do a lot of video encoding (e.g. you make "lets plays")), a higher-end AMD card (if you must go nVidia for some reason, the GTX 980 isn't a bad performer - I'd pass on the 970 due to the memory bugs, and the 960 because it probably won't live up to your performance goals)), and a Z97 or Z97x motherboard, along with your hard-drive setup to get you to 2TB or greater (you can do all of that on a single disk if you want, or you can do multiple disks that will add up to it - really its whatever you like; I'll make a separate item point for storage too). I'd say 16GB of RAM is a good place to be - nothing (at least gaming-wise) will need more than that, and you could upgrade in the future (and memory just gets cheaper per capacity as time goes on, and 16GB is currently the sweet spot, price wise).

 

- What about storage? A lot of people like SSDs, the reason being they offer higher throughput than some other storage systems, and it lets disk-related tasks complete fast. The most oft-cited is "Windows starts up so fast!" - personally I don't (and never have, and never will) get the appeal of that as a marketing item, but to some people its important. The biggest (only?) improvement for gaming is level loads tend to be faster when run from faster storage, but it will do nothing for computationally-bound tasks (e.g. it won't help frame-rate, it won't let you run more mods, it won't let you run ENB, etc). You have a big budget and could easily have an SSD or two in this machine, but what you need to keep in mind is they only benefit data stored on them - so if you buy a small one and throw Windows on it, and then get a big 2TB hard drive and install all your games there, it will do nothing at all for your games because they're coming off that big 2TB hard drive. My advice? If this is something you care about, and since you have a big budget, you could get a moderately large SSD to throw Windows and your games on, and a big 2TB hard drive for all of your movies/music/photos/etc ("bulk data storage") assuming thats what your storage needs look like. It'd improve load times for your games, but save you money for storing "bulk" stuff. That said, if your 2TB of storage need is for all applications (I can't imagine what could use that, but who knows), unless you feel like spending more I'd probably just go with a 2TB hard-drive and be done with it. To put this into some perspective for you, a 1TB SSD is like $300-400, while a 1TB mechanical hard drive ("conventional hard drive") is like $50. Given your budget you could go all SSD, but you'd probably end up spending nearly a thousand dollars to do it (if you wanted multiple TB of SSD storage), and if most of that storage capacity is needed for storing photos, music, etc it simply is not worth it (because even older mechanical hard-drives are more than fast enough to keep up with the requirements of multimedia usage).

 

- On the case, I'd look at Lian-Li. The PC-7 is my recent favorite, and they tend to go on sale quite frequently. They have tons of other cases though, so I'd give a look around their website and see if something else strikes you. Some of their larger cases can get very expensive ($400-500), but overall the pricing isn't too bad ($100-150 is pretty reasonable for a quality case). You might also consider Silverstone, Antec, and Cooler Master if you want to see some other options.

 

- You should put a quality PSU into this as well; I'd take the lazy route and just pop over to jonnyguru and read a few reviews for PSUs in the capacity range you'll need (use this calculator: http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator) and pick something that reviewed very well. Usually that will mean Corsair, Antec, PC Power & Cooling, Silverstone, Enermax, etc.

 

- You'll probably want an optical drive for compatibility's sake, and they're super-duper cheap anyways (like $10-20) for a DVD+/-RW.

 

All of the above will probably run around $1500 for the tower, and then throw the monitors and other stuff on top, and you should come in under budget. I'd advise you to at least take a look at Apple's current offerings and see if they have anything that can touch your price-point. Just a quick look and you could get, for your ~$3000 budget, the top of the line 5K 27" iMac with Core i5 (I'm guessing its a 4690 but they don't), Radeon M390, and a 2TB Fusion drive (its a hybrid SSD + mechanical drive; they never really took off for PCs, but Apple embraced them a few years ago, the new Xbox One Elite uses such a drive too). That won't be as fast as the machine proposed above (its no slouch though), but if you want the all-in-one thing and want to keep OS X and such, its at least worth considering. Just food for thought more than anything else - iMac is a nice machine, but so would be something like what I proposed above.

 

Some other stuff to consider:

 

- Which version of Windows are you getting? Windows 10 has a number of "gotchas" associated with it, like the undocumented snooping, forced updates, removed DVD playback support (Win8 has this too), and tie-ins to your Microsoft account (may or may not be a help or a hindrance depending on what you do); Windows 8 has the Metro UI that people seem to hate or love, the lack of DVD playback, and (like Win10 and anything else later than 8) gimped DDI8/DirectDraw (and lower) support (what does this mean? more performance/compatibility issues with old games); Windows 7 uses a much more familiar UI (Win10 is largely similar too), includes the DVD codec packages (you may be wondering: does this mean 8/10 can never play DVDs? no. it just means you have to buy third-party software to enable it, while 7 just supports it out of the box (like OS X)), has better DDI8 (and lower) support, but lifecycle support ends sooner (2020 for 7, 2023 for 8, and iirc 2025 for 10), and there's no DX12 (which currently nothing uses, but you're worried about future-compatibility). My point is none of them are perfect - personally I'd probably vote for 7 or 8 depending on how you feel about legacy support, Metro, etc and let Microsoft work out whatever they're going to do with 10 on their own (my biggest complaints being the random snooping and, more immediately, forced driver updates that can bring the system down).

 

- Do you want a stand-alone soundcard? It really isn't required these days, since modern games do all their audio in software, but it can still be a nice extra, especially if you're looking for features like headphone amplification, more inputs, post-processing effects, etc. Asus and Creative are the most popular choices.

 

- Some sort of back-up device - an external hard-drive is the easiest solution, just copy your files/data onto it and then stick it in a closet or something, and remember to periodically refresh it as needed. That way its largely "free" of any problems with the computer (e.g. you get a virus, you break something, etc) and your data is kept in another location, it also can make it easy if you get a new computer to transfer stuff over because you already have it good to go on an external hard-drive.

 

- Given your budget, you *could* go a bit wilder and step up to something like the X99 platform (LGA 2011-3). This wouldn't make a lot of sense for pure gaming, but if you're doing a lot of modeling, video encoding, rendering, etc the extra CPU cores will likely be useful. This would cost more, so that's worth considering too. I'd probably consider the 4770/4790 as a good intermediate step here, especially if you're just doing that stuff as a hobbyist (so "speed" is really just about personal usability, not "I need this done to make a deadline to get paid").

 

- Given your budget, you could consider multi-monitor gaming via Eyefinity (nVidia has a competing solution that they've renamed a few times, I think its called GeForce Surround currently, and there's also always the Matrox TripleHead) - it's a neat novelty if you can get over the divided display, and have space on your desk for 3+ monitors. Given how cheap monitors can be had today, it'd at least be worth taking ten minutes and looking at imho. I don't know about Fallout 4, but I know Skyrim, FO3/NV, and Oblivion are decently enough supported (and moddable) for multi-monitor, and many shooters support it as well. You may also consider, even if you don't go this route for gaming, a mutli-monitor mount or something similar that would let you have the iMac and the Windows PC side-by-side for "multiboxing" (e.g. you could be playing Skyrim on the new Windows PC, and browse the web or watch a movie on the Mac at the same time). This is mostly just coming up with a potential use for the iMac than anything else, since its probably still a very competent machine, gaming aside.

[mwhenry16]

Thank. I hoped you would be one to answer. I had my fingers crossed.

 

If 4-5 years is a long window for rebuilding, that's how it is. At this point I'd rather shell out $600 or whatever now and then rather than $3000 all at once.

Based on your assessment and my thoughts, looks like i5, since I'm not after latests and greatest, just better and forward.

This Mac has a Radeon HD 6970M, 1GB.

By monitor I mean I don't want to go below the resolution this Mac is capable of, 2560x1440, regardless of F4. Big isn't the issue, besides eyesight.

Does't sound like I need an SSD. A few seconds of Windows loading doesn't factor at all. Storage is just some size, backup, and partitioning.

Windows i'm running now is 8.0. I had not thought much about the differences.

I like the AIO, but it's a difficult trade between all at once upgrades , wires, and the flexibility of a piece at a time.

Sound? everything seems pretty good nowadays. Even the Imac has great sound. Never considered needing anything other than out of the box/on board.

Right now I have two 500 GB had drives for backup.

 

Thanks for the answer, I have more to consider. Happy Thanksgiving. Go Panthers!

[obobski]

If you do "progressive updates" on the machine you may be able to spread that "$3000 every few years" out more often, for example if you swap the graphics card a year or two down the line, and the motherboard/CPU after that, and so forth versus buying a whole new AIO every few years. But either way it will end up being expensive. If that's a real problem, fiscally, you might consider an Xbox One or PlayStation 4 instead (I have no experience with PS4, but I'm quite happy with the XB1) - no need for upgrades or what-have-you as time goes on, but they do come with their own pros/cons versus a gaming PC.

 

On the Mac - I didn't know they had "older" cards like that; I thought all of the 27" models were newer. I can see how the 6970M would be a problem with some newer games.

 

Understood on the resolution - still not a problem for your budget. You could get a 4K monitor (go take a look at Dell Ultrasharps as an example) - you'll probably want to set games at a lower resolution for that kind of monitor (4K is very demanding), but if you need the high resolution for non-gaming work it'd be useful.

 

WRT Windows: Windows 8.0 is no longer supported, so if you're going with Win8 you should strongly consider the update to 8.1 to keep it supported.

[mwhenry16]

Yes, the "progressive",psychologically anyway, seems less painful than the "Honey, I'm going to plop $3k on a new Mac this weekend". And I like the upgrade path that allows a piece at a time, especially since the path seems much shorter now than even several years ago.

 

About the I macs, that's the drawback that has me wanting to change. The GPU on the newer models (whenever one buys them) are good, but not great, so they fade, so to speak, faster. The best GPU on a new mac is the R9 395X.

 

I spent a lot of yesterday crunching what you gave me earlier and thanks. Here is what I've come up with so far:

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/H2jnxr

 

I went kind of minimalist, not because of price but because:

1). I may tweak some, but I'm not going to squeeze every last .01% performance out of every part,

2). I'm not into lighting, 2-3 GPU's,

3). I probably don't need it (as in a $150 board VS a $90, I can barely tell the difference, so I probably don't need it, for example),

4). I don't need the best and latest, just pretty good and up-gradable.

 

Funny you should mention the PS4. I actually have the choice of an Xbox or PS4. Free. I was leaning towards the X because it gets mod support first, and that will be an interesting area. But that is in addition to a new rig.

 

While boning up on putting this thing together, some of my few remaining questions are about cooling and fans. Do I need to add fans to that case, or go the water cooled top mount radiator route?

 

TY

[obobski]

Looks very good - I'd double-check that 650W is an appropriate PSU size for that system (it will work, but what I mean is, generally speaking the "best case" for a PSU is to be loaded around 40-60% of its maximum output, instead of 100% load, wrt efficiency and heat - 650W is probably close, if not bang-on, for that but I haven't run the #s to e certain), also do note you've got TWO hard-drives selected, and I don't see a mouse.

 

I don't see any reason to buy a pre-pack water cooler - the performance is often no better than quality air cooling, and in general I'm not a fan of water cooling due to the added complexity and potentials for problems (e.g. leaks). The 4690 is also not a CPU that requires liquid cooling to work (like the dual-core G5 or the FX-9590) - the sink you picked should do very well.

 

As far as the case cooling, what does the case include with it? Also I'll throw in that I'm not a fan of that style of case - the front fans will be nearly worthless (they blow into an almost solid "wall" if you look at the pictures), Ditto for having a bottom-mounted PSU with a bottom-mounted fan of its own trying to pull air thru the bottom panel. Intel didn't make a mistake when they proposed ATX, and I see no good reason to challenge that; it isn't "trendy" but it works very well.

 

Finally, you've selected a 4K monitor - running many games at native resolution will be a struggle even with the Fury, and the pixel pitch will be very fine/small even compared to your iMac.