Old vs new Best i can afford OLD Computer Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2100 CPU @ 3.10 ghz Ram 8Gb 1333 Mhz Windows 7 Gigabit motherboard 750W PSU 500GB Harddrive Geforce GTX 660 3GB NEW Computer Intel® Core™ i7 Six Core Processor i7-8700 (3.2GHz) 12MB Cache 16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2666MHz (2 x 8GB) Genuine Windows 10 Home 64 Bit - inc. Single Licence Gigabyte Z370P D3: ATX, LG1151, USB 3.1, SATA 6GBs - RGB Ready CORSAIR 450W VS SERIES™ VS-450 POWER SUPPLY MAIN DRIVE 512GB SAMSUNG 970 PRO M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3500MB/R, 2300MB/W) Other Harddrive 2TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 64MB CACHE 6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready! What you think?
Seems like a decent spec, my only thoughts would be regarding the PSU only being 450w and the 1060 being a little weak. While 450w from a decent, branded PSU - as the Corsair unit is - is likely fine, it doesn't give you much wiggle-room in the future. I'd personally go for a 650w PSU as a minimum and have it live an under-stressed life Perhaps I'm being over cautious, but in my experience the PSU is often the longest used item in many of my builds, lasting several complete systems (so, CPU, mobo etc.) but it's nice to not to have to worry if, for example, you got yourself a 2080Ti one day if the price drops...wishful thinking lol. The GTX 1060 is a decent GPU, but stretching to a 1070 would be quite a jump, based on performance reviews I've read. Depends on price point of course. I got my 1070 near launch, before the price boom, but they should be back down to reasonable levels again now - basically, it looks like you can get them for the same price I paid now, rather than the inflated prices we've been seeing for a while. One thing that did surprise me when I was looking up your parts, is the fairly recent THIRTY PERCENT price increase on the 8700 and 8700k. I almost got an 8700k (and rest of the system) a few months ago, and it was priced at £300 here in the UK, checking just now and the same CPU is £440, which is crazy. I know there have been currency fluctuations, but not to that degree! I really thought we'd be seeing 8th Gen CPU's going down in price to clear stock ready for the 9th Gen - perhaps the production capacity issues are worse than thought for 14nm. Scoob.
I'd do whatever it takes (skimp elsewhere) to get a x80 GPU, as the x60's are just a waste of good money that could go towards x80 type cards (nvidia). It is and will be the sole powerhouse that drives all your games. So reducing something else to get the funds, is worth it (excpet in PSU of course... lol, you need a PSU to power it all!).
With the new Nvidia 20- series coming out a lot of the 10- series are going down in price, so if you want to wait a little longer you might be able to get a better card at a lower price.
@Scoob had some excellent points about PSU's - people usually waaaaaaay over-power their computers, but you still want some margin for advancement later. @Frigidman also had an excellent point and I will further it; that I7 you listed is a monster processor and is not at all what you need. Get yourself a nice I5, probably quad and ideally with some over clocking potential if you want to do some tweaking. Frankly 90% of games will not even use it close to its full potential. Once you make the swap, that should EASILY free up the necessary funds to get a better graphics card. I have the 1060 6GB in my MSI Laptop and it is pretty nifty, but with the freed funds you could jump to a 1080, and that is just... wonderful. Be aggressive with graphics cards. Also spring for a sexy cooler - I tried water cooling a few years ago and was underwhelmed. Cooper plating, pipes are cute but materials are more important, and dual fans(I am crazy - I love air movement so my towers usually have 10 - 15 fans in them that possess HUGE through-put. ) Tower shopping is also a joy - gotta have the flow! Some other thoughts; do you really need a 2TB disk drive? I have a secondary disk drive too, but jesus, 2TB is just not needed for the wild majority of users. Even gamers. If it is free or part of a bundle, awesome. If not, drop it down and spend it on something else. Also, motherboards are more important than many realize. Loves me some Asus, and I do not know that Gigabyte. Do not over-spend on them, but do not skimp either.
Just to comment further regarding CPU choice... A couple of years ago, and before, I'd have confidently recommended an i5 over an i7 for purely gaming workloads. It was sound advice then and remains a solid choice now. However, having run a similarly spec'd i5 and i7 system of the same generation, I've been noticing a marked performance uplift from the i7 in the titles I play. So, HT, at least on a quad-core, seems to make a difference. I'm not talking a staggering huge peak FPS for anything, but certainly a smoother experience in general with less dips. I also see Core and Thread utilisation being pretty even, it's very rare that I see there being one overloaded thread. A few years back Hyper Threading could sometime cause issues as the Windows scheduler failed to distinguish between real and virtual cores. As a result, rather than spreading something over two physical cores it'd be loaded on to a single Core but over two threads. I recall discovering this ages ago, when one time I'd launch a CPU-intensive title and performance would be great, the next time it'd be a stuttery mess. Investigation highlighted the aforementioned issue, with Core affinity being the "fix" when Windows got it wrong. Back in the early days of multi-Core - I had an AMD Athlon 4200x2 - Windows XP totally SUCKED at Core loading, regularly causing worse performance on a multi-core CPU...until you understood what was going on. XP's Scheduler - the thing that decides what goes where thread-wise, just wasn't set up to handle this. Vista (shudder) was marginally better, which was about the only reason I switched to it...briefly. Windows 7 was pretty good, but far from perfect. 8.1 nailed it - 8.0 was a buggy mess - and W10 does a damn fine job. If we assume a loose budget from your selected parts, I'd be inclined to do the following: Save some money with a decent i5 vs. the i7 - perhaps a k model for some OC fun. Motherboard is fine, but double check its OC potential if going for a k model CPU. Ram is fine, though personally I'd look at 3000mhz ram as, when I was looking last, it was the sweet spot for price / performance. Spend some money on that PSU, nothing crazy, a branded 650w would be great for a single, high-end, GPU setup and an overclocked CPU. Spend some money on that GPU. The 1060, while fine, is a bit weak in my view, a 1070 would be much better and perhaps a 1080 if you can find a bargain. I'm actually considering a 1080Ti if prices continue to drop, as it's quite a jump from my 1070, though the 1070 has been a very solid performer since I got it. I undetstand the desire to build something right away, but if it takes an extra month of saving to go from a 1060 to a 1070 then it's worth it. I've always left quite a long time between my builds, as such I can usually budget for very high-end parts - I'm not talking HEDT here, just your regular high-end i7's - which then last really really well. Certainly the core Motherboard, CPU and RAM can last exceptionally well if you go high-end. Throw in a few GPU and perhaps Drive upgrades during that time and you're getting great value. Of course your use case if specific to you, so perhaps you have a greater need of certain parts being stronger while skimping on others, that's cool. One of my builds matches an overclocked i5 with just a 750Ti, but that build isn't for gaming, though it'd make a good one if I popped a 1070 in there for example. Btw: I know you've spec'd out an Intel based system, a great choice for gaming. However, don't disregard AMD due to their slightly lower IPC and clock speeds, they're offering a lot for your money currently. I guess my main advice is take your time, get it right, then buy with confidence and get value for your hard-earned money. Scoob.
I'd be inclined to drop the NVMe drive in favor of a standard sata3 SSD and use the $100 that you'd save to turn the 1060 into a 1070; I think it's unlikely that you'll notice the difference in most situations, and it's an easy enough upgrade to do in the future if you ever find that the SSD is the system's bottleneck. Given the apparent very small difference between the 8700 and the 8700k, it doesn't seem like it's worth the upgrade if you don't plan to overclock. @Scoob is correct that you could also save some by going with an i5-8600k instead (same number of cores, which didn't used to be the case for i5's, and only slighly lower single-threaded performance). Oddly, at least according to Passmark, the i5-8600k has substantially worse overall performance than the i7-8700 despite having very similar single-threaded performance. Depending on if you need your old system fully functional or not, you could always reuse its PSU and Windows license (not sure if it's possible anymore to induce Microsoft to upgrade windows 7 licenses to windows 10, but might be worth a try); that would free up another $150 which you could dump right into the graphics card and have yourself a shiny 1080 (assuming you go with the standard SSD and a 1070). EDIT: You could also reuse the old system's 500GB hard drive if it's still in good condition. And potentially sell off the gtx 660 if you don't need it for anything (a cursory scan of ebay suggests you might be able to get $50 for it). I've managed to accumulate ~500GB of game files, with only a small portion of my library installed; given that many new games are averaging 50GB, bulk disk space goes faster than you might think. In light of that, my suggestion to reuse the old 500GB might not be that great, or at least, an upgrade would be warranted for it soon.
I'm currently running pair of traditional SATA SSD's in RAID0. They're not M.2 fast, but still crazy fast. I've not checked the M.2 vs. SATA SSD price difference per capacity, but if it's substantial, then @geostar1024 is right regarding putting the saved money to another component. Note: when comparing a HT vs. non-HT CPU many Benchmarks do make the difference appear quite pronounced. Generally in gaming though, while you can (and I do) notice a difference in many titles that multi-thread well, it's not quite so extreme. There are many good options for a decent gaming PC build available today, it's not a clear cut "buy this". The thing to remember is what your goals are for this build and, perhaps, what your longer-term plans are. I.e. spend a little more on a higher-end CPU now, a little less on the GPU, planning to upgrade when funds permit. I've never actually done a CPU upgrade in one of my own main builds, having bought the best CPU for that socket I can afford, as well as a high-end motherboard. So, for me, getting the CPU and motherboard right at the start is important I also generally get faster ram, but maybe not quite as much initially ( went from 8, to 16, then 32gb in my current build - yep, I used that 32gb to it's fullest...I need 64 now really (really!) but my slots are all full lol) Drives are easy to change and upgrade, as are GPU's. PSU's are a little more involved, so that's another part I'll over-spec if anything. My current Corsair 750w PSU has been in several builds. My Corsair 860i - currently residing in my water-cooled PC - is all set to go into my new build (along with the external loop) when I finally go for it. I guess what I'm saying is, certainly for me, getting the base build right from the start means future upgrades are largely just plug and play. I hope we're not providing too much information! I do tend to ramble on when it comes to PC builds, I've done so many both for myself and others over the years... I sorta like it. Wonder if I could actually get paid for this stuff? lol Scoob.
Yeah, I remember the days of needing 100's of GB's of space but gaming has really changed over the last 5... 10? Years? Download speeds are so fast that even slower connections can download games conveniently and the various services make it easier than ever before to add and remove games - and that is saying something because using the control panel on older windows systems and then a good defrag every once in a while was not especially difficult. The cloud services save various settings or they are stored on your computer. I think there has been an inertia/lag for the community to realize this because of the fear of so many things - will this hard drive be enough? Will this processor be fast enough? GPU/GRAM enough? The industry then acts like a fireplace billow and people lose focus. I do not mean to enter into any kind of political discussion nor do I want to act like billows myself and stir controversy, it's just a bizarre confluence of events. I was talking to Kieve about this recently - it was right after the announcement that there will be a new Elder Scrolls. I have played the absolute **** out of Skyrim and Morrowind but I forced myself to hold up and say, "Is this really something to be excited about?" I bring this up not to tangent, but more to illustrate the overall cultural challenge. On a more positive note, it is easier than ever before to custom build PC's. Hooray!
And often cheaper than buying a pre-made system. IMHO, don't go with less than 16GB RAM. 8GB is entry-level, and if you do any serious games, you'll be using close to 12GB on a regular basis. Plan for the future.
At the risk of continuing a tangent, I disagree that local storage isn't as important now as it used to be. Internet connection speeds have not kept pace with the growth in game sizes, and, at least in the US, it may simply be impossible to obtain broadband speeds (25+ Mbps) in certain parts of the country (50 GB at 25 Mbps takes ~4.5 hours to download). Local storage, on the other hand, has gotten substantially cheaper with time. I much prefer to download something once (and move it about locally if absolutely necessary) than to be continually swapping out what games I have installed. Then again, my views on this may be more extreme than most, so perhaps I'm in the minority and most people wouldn't be bothered by this nowadays.
I used to run a mix of SSD's and spinners in my gaming build. However, as I have several computers as well as laptops, I've set up a server of sorts using an older PC. Up until last year, this was a Q6600 with an SSD system drive, a 500gb "misc." drive and a pair of 1.5tb drives mirrored for important stuff. This build is now a backup box - still running great - and I have a newer Ivy Bridge machine as my "work horse" PC. It has a RAID0 SSD array (two drives) a third data SSD (downloads) and a mirrored 1.5tb spinner array for data. My Gamer on the other had just has a RAID0 SSD Array plus a single SSD. I backup Steam game images to the array on the other PC so I can reinstall them quickly without going through a load download process. My internet here - out in the sticks - is just 20 mbps down with 1 mbps up, so quite poor compared to many. Basically, I'm saying that for my Gamer local storage isn't an issue as I have ample elsewhere. Your old rig would make for an excellent server / storage / work horse type machine, if you have the space. Personally, I like having a nice, clean, SSD-only Gamer build. Scoob.
Tell me about it the only internet available at my house is 1.5mbs (150kbs real download speed) ATT DSL. Ive even inquired about paying for ATT and Charter to run lines to my house and they will not even talk to me? Luckily Ive got a little system going where im using a dedicated Verizon phone running it to my computer VIA usb then running an Ethernet cable to a wireless router has been working great for over a year now, I get anywhere from 5-10mbs downloads. Which for me is like going from Dial up to DSL. So at the moment i can complain. Related to the build here at the chance of causing a up rising why go with Intel? At the moment AMD is the path to take if you want to upgrade in the future they are going to support the AM4 socket until 2020 and when the 7nm stuff comes up im pretty sure the its going to be great. No fanboy here I go with what is the best bang for my buck at the time. Yea Intel might beat my 2700x by 10% in games but ive got 4 more threads. The Core wars have started the more cores the better, and I see 8 threaded games in the near future as the norm so the consoles can keep up. I say pop a AMD 2600x in it grab a great Mobo and sit back and wait until the 7nm stuff hits this will net you a $100 savings. And upgrade that 1060 to a 1070 or a 1080. I can tell you that even at 1080P that many games use 100% of my GTX 1080 though im trying to push FPS as high as possible im running a 144hz monitor. Also I see the VR ready! Trust me on this Ive got a HTC vive and that is the reason i upgraded to the GTX 1080. VR eats GPUS for breakfast and screams for more power. By the way MSI still puts out Windows 7 drivers for their new motherboards my ryzen build is running Windows 7 Pro and MSI put out USB 3.1 driver for it. I hate windows 10 its worse than VISTA! Also that power supply is not gonna cut it ive had good luck out of Rosewell stuff for a budget build as long as you read the reviews. Ive been running a 750w for over a year in another build and I've had no problems at all and running a heavy overclock on it super stable voltages! Here is a decent 850w one alot better that the one you got there at $10 more https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182342 Also if you dont mind used Gpus you can pick up a used GTX 1070 off ebay for around $220 right now due to all the miners dumping them. Overall thats a great build, but to each their own, Intel is still king of the hill when it comes to IPC and clocks, but when it comes to upgrades I feel like AMD is your best bet. And saving money and buying a GTX 1070 is going to net you a good 40% gain performance! Dont waste money on the GTX 1060. Again not a AMD fan boy if Intel would have had a 8core 16thread Cpu out that had the same performance per dollar or very close to it i would have built another Intel machine in a heart beat. I just didnt see the 8700k as a big enough upgrade to my 4770k 4 more threads for $1k build not worth it for me.
Many good advice's already! I would have ditched the second SSD for another 500 GB M.2 (or the first with 1TB). Rather get an external drive for backup and rarely used (old) stuff. Can often "build" a fast one by getting a cheap cabinet and put in a SSD (2.5''). 650-750 W power supply. Several cores in CPU have no point unless a game/application are coded to utilize it. But if to run several applications and maybe several monitors, then 6 and more might be better than a quad with higher Hz. Also a newer generation have advantages that not always are easily understood if not very technical. But depends on main board and RAM and so on. Also GPU depends on current and future use and plans (and wallet). Like type of monitors and resolutions. Maybe later put in a second card for SLI, or replace it. Watercooled CPU heatsink integrated system also recommended, often quieter and better (in several ways) than an ordinary cooling. Possible to get cheap Genuine W10pro licence (self DL install files to USB Flash), but might need to spend 30 minutes with MS support to activate it, I got one for 30$, but Home version is probably good enough if part of a deal. I like small cabinets, because the less air to transport through the system, the cooler you can have it or less fans. The air ought to flow in one direction. Not too long to Black Friday, maybe can get good deals then too.
That may not necessarily be true. Up to the heak-sink-to-air thermal transfer rate, more airflow is what keeps things cooler. It may be easier to make a smaller case have fewer paths for air to travel through, leading to a more efficient cycling of the cooling air, but a larger case with properly directed airflow will outperform it and be able to use larger and slower fans (and be quieter as a result). Also not necessarily true depending on how large the heatsink is for the water cooler. The (giant) Noctua aircoolers outperform many water coolers and have similar noise levels. Basically, get the biggest, slowest fans that fit the case/CPU and provide enough airflow.
Larger cabinets and/or several in and out directions and fan angles may have a higher chance to create turbulence, so hot and cold air circulate and mix inside. So can become more challenging getting that properly directed airflow. Because there are often many things creating heat inside a cabinet of a computer, along with interruption of the airflow. If also placed in a warm room then can be even more important to find something properly, small or big. Right, are good air coolers, but often they are big (and heavy), compared to water cooled. Can create even more challenges directing airflow. Rack servers (1-4 U) are often constructed as a tube. Also giving the same effect as wind outside when cold, giving a small portion of additional coldness. Why I try find small cabinets that have good options to control the flow, maybe even close openings. Maybe try go for mATX (or smaller), often have enough slots and abilities. In my profile here is listing of my latest gaming computer, built this Spring. Maybe I try add some pics tomorrow. Many years ago I once even took 2 small desktop cabinets (ATX) that got modified and bundled together, creating a tubed flow and separated some components. Also put in some "walls" to direct airflow. No water cooling. Difficult to say if the work were worth it though, then.
@StyxAnnihilator, fair enough, though the larger rack-mount servers tend to have extremely loud fans (which makes sense given that they tend to be in the 3000+ RPM territory). Obviously there's always tradeoffs to be made in terms of airflow, turbulence, noise, and cooling system power consumption. Personally, I tend to optimize most for noise, as my systems live in the same room as me (studio apartment). For extreme silent cooling, there's always the option of sealing the case (put platter HDDs outside the case, though) and filling it with mineral oil .
Yeah, many options. Mine is pretty quiet. Think I continue avoiding stuff like https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/aquarium-computer-case/
I do like a quiet PC. My last build had an external water cooling loop using a 1080 rad with 4x180mm low-rpm fans on it. During stress testing of CPU or GPU's (two of them) it remained near silent. My laptop at idle is noisier than this PC was at full chat. I was quite chuffed with that. My current system has an ancient AIO in it - an original Antec Kuhler 620 -which is surprisingly quiet. My GPU is a Palit Gamerock GTX 1070 - and that thing is near silent despite being air-cooled. Really impressed by that GPU. The GPU being so quiet is what made me not transfer my full loop over, though I will for my next build no doubt. Oh, it was quite an eerie experience initially gaming on my water-cooled build...I mean, no fan noise what so ever. So used to that background fa hum lol. Scoob.
