Desktop Computers

So, put something together quickly and I havent built a pc in forever....4 yearsish (graphics card is a gtx 275...ugh). Thoughts? Shooting for less than 1500, no idea if I can get something much better for the price though. This comes out to $1350 with tax and shipping. Already have monitor, mouse, kb etc

COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN3-GP Black Steel Plastic and Mesh Bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case with USB 3.0 and Black Interior - Newegg.com

MSI GeForce GTX 970 GTX 970 GAMING 4G 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support G-SYNC Support Video Card - Newegg.com

EVGA 220-G2-0750-XR 80 PLUS GOLD 750 W 10 yr Warranty ECO Mode Fully Modular NVIDIA SLI Ready and Crossfire Support - Newegg.com

SAMSUNG 850 EVO MZ-75E500B - Newegg.com

ASUS Model BC-12B1STAS Black Blu-ray Drive - Newegg.com

These below 3 are in a combo for 537$

ASUS Z97-As USB 3.1 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com

Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell Refresh Quad-Core 4.0GHz LGA 1150 Desktop Processor BX80646I74790K - Newegg.com - Newegg.com

HyperX Savage 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 8 - Newegg.com(x2)

Just some basic questions for you.

Do you need the Hyperthreading? Otherwise get a i5 variant. And Skylake is out so get a 6600K or 6700K (if this is even available yet, might need to wait on the i7).

Do you need a full size ATX board and tower? Could look at mATX stuff if you want a smaller system but it's all preference.

Do you need a disc reader at all? Pretty optional these days.

That combo isn't saving you much money. And as stated above, the 4790K is now last generation. Look at Skylake 6600 and 6700 for the same price as the previous gen.

Also, get an aftermarket cooler. The Cooler Master Hyper 212 evo is a solid recommendation. And if you decide to get Skylake, the retail packaging for the Ks doesn't even come with a cpu cooler anymore.

Hey guys, I currently use a Gigabyte G1 GTX 980 and looking to buy a second card to run in SLI. Can I use other brands with the same clock speed and ram for SLI?

My understanding is that the base/factory clock speeds are irrelevant, so long as the actual GPU and RAM amount is the same. You'll just have to clock down to the lowest common denominator.

Genjiro_sl said:

So, put something together quickly and I havent built a pc in forever....4 yearsish (graphics card is a gtx 275...ugh). Thoughts? Shooting for less than 1500, no idea if I can get something much better for the price though. This comes out to $1350 with tax and shipping. Already have monitor, mouse, kb etc

COOLER MASTER HAF 922 RC-922M-KKN3-GP Black Steel Plastic and Mesh Bezel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case with USB 3.0 and Black Interior - Newegg.com

MSI GeForce GTX 970 GTX 970 GAMING 4G 4GB 256-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support G-SYNC Support Video Card - Newegg.com

EVGA 220-G2-0750-XR 80 PLUS GOLD 750 W 10 yr Warranty ECO Mode Fully Modular NVIDIA SLI Ready and Crossfire Support - Newegg.com

SAMSUNG 850 EVO MZ-75E500B - Newegg.com

ASUS Model BC-12B1STAS Black Blu-ray Drive - Newegg.com

These below 3 are in a combo for 537$

ASUS Z97-As USB 3.1 ATX Intel Motherboard - Newegg.com

Intel Core i7-4790K Haswell Refresh Quad-Core 4.0GHz LGA 1150 Desktop Processor BX80646I74790K - Newegg.com - Newegg.com

HyperX Savage 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 8 - Newegg.com(x2)

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In addition to what others have said (get the Skylake 6600k/DDR4 RAM), your PSU is overkill for what you're running. A single 970 GTX only requires a 500watt PSU. You can go up to 550/600 if you want to give yourself some overhead.

What's the working limit on memory? Building a new machine for work related stuff. One customer keeps sending us multi gigabyte drawings with 100's of layers and I have to strip out what I need. It's incredibly slow and painful to mess with.

I'm going to build a new computer since basically I'm dicking with a pretty low end machine at work. What's the normal soft limit of adding memory? Any use past 16gb or even to go beyond 32gb? Money isn't the real issue here, just trying to make it easier to work with. I'm the only person in the company to dick with this stuff. Then I turn off all their layers of shit I don't need. I save out what I need and wind up with a file smaller than 1mb. But the 4gb files to sort thru to get them sucks. Takes a couple of minutes to redraw after turning off a few layers.

AutoCAD? Photoshop? Illustrator?... I've hit memory issues on my work machine that has 16 GB in it but that is when I have 5-6 big CAD files open and a few in PS/Illustrator with my normal Chrome/Pidgin/etc running all at once. Most of the time CAD crashes and then goes wonky on me until I restart.

I'll probably take the 16 GB I have in my home computer and double up the work computer to 32 GB when I get my Skylake build up.

Yeah I'm not worried about the cost. Just wondering if windows or my program would effectively use it if I added more memory. Some of these drawing files are 4-5gb and loading and sorting thru all the layers and turning them off is really dragging the system down. As mentioned when I pull out what I need I wind up with a drawing off a couple of MB at most. Some I get a block that is 250kb.

No we all use windows 7 pro for a variety of reasons. I just didn't know at what point did adding more memory not really help.

Doing a new system build for a friend within the next couple of weeks. I know this was talked about a few pages back, but I can't find it, what brands of PSU's and RAM are generally considered the most reliable? I have to consult him but the idea is to do a mATX build with a relatively small (but not tiny) case. Unfortuntely the only mATX cases I've found in the ~25 liter range are ugly as hell, the nicer mATX cases are more like 40 liters... which sort of defeats the purpose of an mATX build... no?

Where the fuck are these 6700k chips!?? I have the new build bug.

Mist_sl said:

Wait for Skylake-E.

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First off, Skylake-E isn't due until a year from now. I am not waiting that long.

Secondly, the premium for the E versions are nowhere worth the money and are outdated tech by release.

Intel used to release their EE (extreme edition) processors first in the lineup. They capitalized on early adopters and put their best chips out first. I have no idea why they release E version processors so much later than their mainstream versions these days. It's like now.. who the hell would want to buy Broadwell-E at the Q1 2016 release on the outdated 9 series chipset (X99) when you have Skylake / 100 series chipset (Z170) that is full of newer features?

Simply makes no sense whatsoever.

Super pleased with the new system I built (Desktop Computers - Page 273). It absolutely screams. I can play GTA V with pretty much every option maxed at a very consistent 50-60 FPS. The monitor is pretty goddamn awesome as well. Building the system and getting Win10 installed also went extremely smoothly, even with the 750 SSD. It did go wonky one time when I tried to boot up from a cold start. It didn't seem to be detecting the SSD and was trying to boot from DVD or USB. I messed around with the boot priority settings, that didn't seem to fix it, so I changed it back, and then it booted fine. Weird.

Impressive how good power management has gotten. At idle with the GPU powered down (screen off entirely), it's only pulling about 40 watts. At the desktop it's pulling about 60 watts with the GPU powered up a tiny bit. Even at full load gaming, it's only pulling about 300 watts, significantly less than the old system (GTX 680, 4670 CPU).

Only thing I'm a bit disappointed in is the H110i GTX cooler. It's performance is pretty incredible, don't get me wrong. Even at full load, with the pump on high (can't hear it anyway) and the fans on as low as they go, the CPU is barely breaking 40C (ambient is around 20C right now, my place is cold in the fall/winter). At idle the CPU is basically at ambient. The thing I'm disappointed in is that the fans on the radiator are not as quiet as I would have hoped. I was trying to build a silent or near silent computer. The case fans that came with the Corsair 330R case can barely be heard even if they're at full blast. However the fans that game with the H110i even at low speed using Corsair Link are quite audible. And Corsair link wasn't controlling them well. It's kind of a buggy piece of software. The first time I gamed on the thing it automatically spooled the fans up to max, which was ridiculously loud, even though I had it on a "quiet" setting. Tried fucking around with it and they continued to run at high speed. Eventually I just set them to run at a fixed speed, and the lowest for that is 40%. Which like I said is definitely audible, but not loud by any means. Might just need to do more screwing around, or find better software to control the fan speed.

It also did not mount particularly well in the 330R case. There's a removable panel on top of the case with acoustic matting that now no longer sits flush, because a couple tabs in it line up with where the screws for the radiator mount go. I also had to turn the radiator 180 degrees as the coolant lines were bumping in to the case fan. And last, the instructions said that the best installation was to set the fans up so they pulled through the radiator in to the case. Wish I hadn't done that, as the CPU heat is being pulled in to the case, instead of pushed out, which will make everything else run hotter. Might fix that at some point.

Haven't bothered OCing anything. Seems pointless. I was testing with GTA V, but I finished that over the summer. Right now I'm working through Far Cry 2, Rise of Nations, and FF7. A wee bit of overkill!

There any new options on the horizon for 1440p 144hz/gsync? That Asus ROG thing with gsync looks mighty fancy, but it's a TN panel which I'd really rather get away from, but I'm not really seeing any options for an IPS/1440p/144hz monitor?