570 replies to this topic

[Sneaky Snake]

I run a business selling gaming computers.

Drop the Z77 mobo and get an H77. Drop the 3570K down to an i5-3450 (Quad 3.1). Use that $50 (that's in canadian/american $$ amounts) you just saved to get a better graphics card. That will give you the best gaming performance for the buck. If your thinking of running caching with that SSD I recommend against that (hence my recommendation of the H77 mobo instead). I ran caching with a 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 in my Z68 setup and it slows down over time. I dedicated SSD boot drive is significantly faster.

Besides, if most of the games your going to be playing are online it makes no difference what your load times are, because your still waiting for the guy with the slowest computer to load.

So in summary:
i5-3450
H77 motherboard from Asus or Gigabyte
Radeon 7870 video card (or you can go with a Nvidia 660, but I like to support radeon).
500 Watt Corsair or Seasonic Power Supply (Please do NOT cheap out on a power supply), stick with one of those two brands.

Other then that just get whatever the best deal is for RAM, HDD, SSD, case, and optical drive

That computer will perform around the same as the newest iMac with 680MX.

[The Liberator]

Sneaky Snake, on 29 October 2012 - 04:16 PM, said:

I run a business selling gaming computers.

Drop the Z77 mobo and get an H77. Drop the 3570K down to an i5-3450 (Quad 3.1). Use that $50 (that's in canadian/american $$ amounts) you just saved to get a better graphics card. That will give you the best gaming performance for the buck. If your thinking of running caching with that SSD I recommend against that (hence my recommendation of the H77 mobo instead). I ran caching with a 60 GB OCZ Agility 3 in my Z68 setup and it slows down over time. I dedicated SSD boot drive is significantly faster.

Besides, if most of the games your going to be playing are online it makes no difference what your load times are, because your still waiting for the guy with the slowest computer to load.

So in summary:
i5-3450
H77 motherboard from Asus or Gigabyte
Radeon 7870 video card (or you can go with a Nvidia 660, but I like to support radeon).
500 Watt Corsair or Seasonic Power Supply (Please do NOT cheap out on a power supply), stick with one of those two brands.

Other then that just get whatever the best deal is for RAM, HDD, SSD, case, and optical drive

That computer will perform around the same as the newest iMac with 680MX.

If I can get a replacement mobo with Thunderbolt, I will happily change to the H77, but if not, I will have to stay. Because even though I will be using a PC, and mainly for gaming, it will also become the main computer for me, and I want to keep my options open; using it for not only gaming.

Edit: Which manufacturer do you think best to go with for the graphics card. I will get the ATI Radeion 5870, I know that now. I just do not know from which company.

Lib.

[Sneaky Snake]

Your getting a 5870? That card is a little old, still very capable by all means, but I'd go with a new one such as a 7870 or something. Pretty much any brand is good. On the Nvidia side EVGA is considered one of the best, on the Radeon side XFX is the best. But Sapphire, Asus, Gigabyte, and Zotac make good cards. I'd stay away from MSI, they had some overvolting problems recently.

Also, are you absolutely sure you want to switch to windows? I asking because I decided that about 2 years ago, and although windows is fine for normal tasks, whenever I wanted to do something more advanced I found myself longing for OS X everytime. I am a power user in OS X, and even though I can overclock very well, build my own computers, have education in both computer science and software engineering, and code in windows every day for school, I absolutely hate it and swipe back to mac from parallels as soon as possible.

Your current mac games well enough, and if you don't like the massive resolution because it's hard to run games at good settings, just get an external 24" 1080p monitor for $150.

The way I view it is that unless your planning on spending A LOT of time gaming, there's no point in fully switching to windows. You will miss OS X, I can guarantee that. Personally I use my computer time as the following:
40% web browsing/music
30% coding for school
20% typing up reports/essays in a word processor
10% gaming

if you actually break it down and determine how much of your time you actually spend gaming while on the computer, I doubt it's a majority percentage. Does it make sense to have a worse experience in every other area of your computer, just to get a better framerate during the 10-30% of the computer time you spend gaming?

[Tetsuya]

While my ratios are very different, i agree with what Snake is saying about fully switching to windows-only.  

Consider keeping the Mac for Mac stuffs and building the PC just for gaming.  I did that (Mini for day-to-day computing, media, office work, etc, gaming PC for gaming) and got out the door with both for less than 1400 bucks including a new monitor for the Mini.  

Depending on where you live, if there is a retail-Microcenter store in your area, you can probably get a faster i5 (3570K) and keep the Z77 if you want - seems like every two or three weeks they run a weekend in-store deal that gets you 50-100$ off if you buy both an unlocked i3/i5/i7 and any Z77 chipset MoBo.  End of the day, i got my 3570k and Asus Z77 Mobo for 100 bucks off, less than 150$ for both.  

And dont skimp on the video card; almost any modern CPU is more than enough for most games - the video card is almost always the bottleneck in a modern system.  I have a 7850 and im very happy with it, i wouldn't recommend a 7870, as you pay 40+$ (or more) extra for almost no real performance gain over the 7850.  If you're going to go past the 7850, head straight for a 79XX series.  

Right now, as well, the nVidia GTX 660 is a VERY capable card (better than the 7870/midrange radeons by a decent margin at the same price point) with a great price/performance ratio.  And the EVGA cards come packed in with AC3 and Borderlands 2.  

Like snake, though, i prefer AMD/ATI cards.  They use less power, by and large, for similar performance, and have better thermal tolerances.  Ive had three different nVidia chipset cards over the years; all three melted down at some point, within six months to a year at most.  I've never had an ATI card fail on me like that.  It's just a personal preference.

[The Liberator]

Yeah, I meant the 7870.

I am actually starting to not mind 7 that much; I have been booted into 7 for days before. That has however been when I have not needed Mail/Calendar/Contacts at all really. I was also doing this because I thought it would be an easy solution, especially in the end for having Windows on a computer. As time has gone on, I have found more reason to keep both OSes on separate drives. Seeing that it is not possible to have separate drives on the same machine on our iMacs, I think I will be opting for having this gami g machine instead.

Thanks for your help guys, it is much appreciated.

Lib.

[Sneaky Snake]

The Liberator, on 29 October 2012 - 09:28 PM, said:

Yeah, I meant the 7870.

I am actually starting to not mind 7 that much; I have been booted into 7 for days before. That has however been when I have not needed Mail/Calendar/Contacts at all really. I was also doing this because I thought it would be an easy solution, especially in the end for having Windows on a computer. As time has gone on, I have found more reason to keep both OSes on separate drives. Seeing that it is not possible to have separate drives on the same machine on our iMacs, I think I will be opting for having this gami g machine instead.

Thanks for your help guys, it is much appreciated.

Lib.

What I'm trying to say is that getting this gaming machine and using it as your primary makes all the other areas that you use the computer suffer, assuming you consider yourself a power user in mac. Give me OS X, with a multitouch trackpad, and have it running off of an SSD, and I will make that computer dance. Something that I've never been able to come close to on windows. I have years of accumulated knowledge in mac doing shortcuts, weird tweaks, terminal commands etc. All that stuff can be done in windows as well, but it would take me years to relearn all the finer points of the OS like a know with mac.

You can go days, maybe even weeks, without needing OS X, but then something will come up and you'll say (well at least I've said this many times during my dark ages of not having a mac) "FIRETRUCK, I could do this task so much better in OS X."

Now, obviously this is all my opinion, but if your only reason for going to gaming PC route over the iMac is because you want to run games on "Very High" spec instead of "Medium-High" I think you may want to reconsider. Also, consider the amount of time you spend on a computer, if your anything like me, it's a ton, so I think it's very justified spending extra $$ on a computer since so much time is spent on one.

Now back to talking about components. If your going to be playing games at 1080p, then there's no reason to go above a 7870/GTX660, and if you want to save a decent amount of money for almost no performance loss go with the i3-3220 CPU. Don't let the i3 branding scare you away, it's just intel's marketing trying to make you spend more $$ on an i5. the 3220 is a fast dual core, and 90% of games don't use more then 2 cores. In skyrim I saw only a minor frames per second difference between my old i3-2120 setup (sandy bridge 3.3 GHz dual core), and my i5 2500K at 4 GHz.

[Frost]

If you're on a budget and want to save a little cash on the drive but still have it be snappy in the OS and for loading, you're basically the exact customer WD is after with the Velociraptor drives. You might give them a look. The current ones run cooler than 7200 rpm drives and they're highly reliable. Most of all, while they're more expensive than 7200 rpm drives, they hit a really nice price/speed/capacity sweet spot where they blow 7200 rpm drives out of the water for performance, but still have significantly better cost per gigabyte than an SSD in that what will get you 256GB with an SSD will get you 1TB with a Raptor drive. Only drawback is the read heads can be a bit loud when they're grabbing a bunch of data really fast, if that sort of thing bothers you.

From my own experience, while SSDs will beat Raptors 10 times out of 10 on benchmarks, as far as how doing normal tasks in the OS, startup, and say loading a map in a game feels, I can definitely tell the difference between a 7200 rpm drive and a 10K drive as easily as the difference between a 5400 rpm drive and 7200 rpm. That said, the difference in feel between SSDs and the Raptors is extremely miniscule unless you're moving or reading a very large file. If you're not doing something that plays very well to the strengths of SSDs, the price/performance ratio a Raptor brings might be something you want to look at.

[bobbob]

Frost, on 29 October 2012 - 11:57 PM, said:

they're highly reliable

Are they? The older ones seem to be the pits. Plus, they're still high latency for seeking (even if the rotations are a little faster), so an SSD would have the edge for speed, and a regular drive would be much cheaper for more storage, leaving the raptor both expensive and middling in size. I got a 512 GB M4 for only a little bit more than a Raptor, or I could have gotten a bunch of 2TB drives and done a RAID and gotten both size and speed without spending even that much.

[Frost]

bobbob, on 30 October 2012 - 12:18 AM, said:

Are they? The older ones seem to be the pits. Plus, they're still high latency for seeking (even if the rotations are a little faster), so an SSD would have the edge for speed, and a regular drive would be much cheaper for more storage, leaving the raptor both expensive and middling in size. I got a 512 GB M4 for only a little bit more than a Raptor, or I could have gotten a bunch of 2TB drives and done a RAID and gotten both size and speed without spending even that much.

Well, it has a higher MTBF than a Crucial m4 and WD's Velociraptor warranty is two years longer than Crucial's m4 warranty. Not to say the m4 is bad or anything, it's my current favorite for high performance SSD.

And if you consider a 512GB $400 drive to be only a little bit more than a 500GB $170 drive or 1TB $250 drive, then you're probably not the intended market and should definitely go with SSD. I don't think that's Liberator's situation though, hence my bringing up the option.

Don't think anybody's going to argue a HDD's latency vs. an SSD. But HDD vs. HDD, ~6ms is a lot faster than ~15+, and for a specific use computer, sometimes one fast, big drive can be preferable to a tiny, ultra-fast drive plus a slow very big drive.

[bobbob]

Frost, on 30 October 2012 - 01:11 AM, said:

And if you consider a 512GB $400 drive to be only a little bit more than a 500GB $170 drive or 1TB $250 drive

Newegg.ca lists the 1TB as $330, and the smaller/older ones are definitely STFA. Warranty/MTBF or no they do have a bad reputation. The Seagate Momentus XT, or whatever it's called now, would be a much better option because it has the SSD cache. Or, Intel SRT if you're willing to set that up and not touch it lest it breaks.

[Sneaky Snake]

bobbob, on 30 October 2012 - 02:15 PM, said:

Newegg.ca lists the 1TB as $330, and the smaller/older ones are definitely STFA. Warranty/MTBF or no they do have a bad reputation. The Seagate Momentus XT, or whatever it's called now, would be a much better option because it has the SSD cache. Or, Intel SRT if you're willing to set that up and not touch it lest it breaks.

Stay away from Intel SRT. I tried it for a few months and it slows down significantly over time. That was with a 60 GB cache. Z68 mobo with a sata 6GB/s Agility 3

Best performing option in my mind is a 60 GB boot drive that you put your files, OS, and smaller apps on (iTunes, Chrome, etc.), then have a several TB drive with all your games, movies, and large apps. I had that setup and it felt significantly faster then the previous SRT setup that I was running with the same hardware.

The main speed gains of an SSD are appreciated in OS tasks such as booting up your computer, opening apps, transferring small files etc. Not in loading the level of a video game. Any decent 7200rpm should load a game at very acceptable speeds - especially when it's not bogged down with having to deal with all the OS stuff.