Advive on Upgrading a desktop

Umbran · Oct 7, 2014

trappedslider said:
I was using my own life experience as one view point, sorry for going "hey this is how i feel about it and here's why" and by the way you seem very set against someone building their own pc unless they are a professional.

I don't think he's "very set against it". I think he's trying to save someone from going down a road that he thinks is unlikely to give him good results, and is perhaps being a tad strident.

There were times a decade and more ago where this was a good strategy (or at least a functional one - I did it when I was dirt poor, and had access to really cheap parts), but I'm not sure it is really the best way to go these days. Putting together a computer can be done, but if you don't know what you're doing, it isn't cheap, it isn't quick, and there's likely to be some hair-pulling and cursing as he works through drivers and OS installs and all that, and you probably won't get better performance than just buying a stock model from one of the major producers.

Janx · Oct 7, 2014

Umbran said:
I don't think he's "very set against it". I think he's trying to save someone from going down a road that he thinks is unlikely to give him good results, and is perhaps being a tad strident.

There were times a decade and more ago where this was a good strategy (or at least a functional one - I did it when I was dirt poor, and had access to really cheap parts), but I'm not sure it is really the best way to go these days. Putting together a computer can be done, but if you don't know what you're doing, it isn't cheap, it isn't quick, and there's likely to be some hair-pulling and cursing as he works through drivers and OS installs and all that, and you probably won't get better performance than just buying a stock model from one of the major producers.

That's pretty much on the mark. When people go down the trail of "want to make a gaming machine" and then preface it with "don't have much to spend", they've pretty much shot the project in the foot if they're really going to make a serious gaming machine. Anything less is "I just want to buy the parts and assemble my own computer"

Techno's posted his budget of $1000.

He can get a nice computer new for that much. That'd be a good baseline to compare hardware to for a Build vs. Buy comparison.

Parts list for a gaming machine would likely be:
power supply
case
motherboard
2-4 CPU with 2+ cores each
16GB Ram or better
128GB SSD drive for C: (where the OS goes for faster booting)
1TB SATA drive for D: (where the installed apps go) preferably 10K or faster
Windows OS
100M/bit NIC (don't bother with GigE, your ISP isn't even 100Mbit).
Video Card
Sound Card
DVD Rom drive
USB mouse/keyboard
Monitor

Janx · Oct 8, 2014

another thing to add to the list:
cooling fans. The case may ship with something, but your main problem with white box is that airflow isn't designed with advance knowledge of what and where the CPU and video card is (heat sources).

blackbox PCs are designed with airflow in mind. baffles and fans are designed and situated to optimize getting heat out of the box.

trappedslider · Oct 8, 2014

Well as you can tell I've hang around the gaming pc community too long then lol, I still think you can do it a little at time. for example from Newegg has a number of deals and even combos that are decent. And like i said up thread, if your looking at a particular game that you wanna run go to that game's forum join and post asking about specs and your budget. They are more than happy to pull together a list of parts and prices. Then there's a number of how tos out there on the net that will help you pull it together if you can't find someone in person to do it.

Deset Gled · Oct 8, 2014

Janx said:
Parts list for a gaming machine would likely be:
power supply
case
motherboard
2-4 CPU with 2+ cores each
16GB Ram or better
128GB SSD drive for C: (where the OS goes for faster booting)
1TB SATA drive for D: (where the installed apps go) preferably 10K or faster
Windows OS
100M/bit NIC (don't bother with GigE, your ISP isn't even 100Mbit).
Video Card
Sound Card
DVD Rom drive
USB mouse/keyboard
Monitor

I have to disagree with a number of details of your build here.

First, multiple CPU mobos are uncommon outside of server-grade machines. And that's for a good reason: 4, 6, and 8 core processors are easily available at prices cheaper than getting multiple 2 or 4 core processors (once the cost of the more expensive mobo is factored in).

Second, there's no reason to get a 10k RPM hard drive on a $1k gaming rig. All programs should go on the SSD, the HDD should be for data storage only. And for the price (and heat) of a 128GB SDD w/ 10k RPM HDD you could easily afford a 256 GB SSD w/ 4GB 7200 HDD.

Third, unless theatre quality sound is important, there's no need for a separate sound card. Onboard is fine.

Janx said:
If you are building a top end gaming machine from scratch, 2 years from now, exactly what part do you think you are going to upgrade that is going to make the machine better than it is now?

Most people won't want to bother with the hassle, but it's trivial to come up with legitimate reasons for upgrading a system in two years:

RAM. If you have 4 slots available on the mobo, you can spend a little more to get two big sticks now (instead of four smaller sticks), and fill the other two slots when you have more budget.

HDDs. If you put more of your budget into a better SDD for the OS and apps now, you'll get better performance. Get a cheap HDD for other storage now, and add in more storage as needed.

Optical drives. You only need a cheap DVD ROM drive to start playing games. You can easily upgrade to a Blu-ray burner later.

RAID. Add a hardware RAID in with a PCIe slot and external enclosure if you are serious about adding in lots of storage.

Multimedia add ons. Add a video capture card and/or high end audio card to turn your computer into an HTPC.

Second ethernet port. If you have gaming issues because of network performance, it can be helped with a redundant internet connection.

was · Oct 8, 2014

Looking at the monitors, I'd suggest a widescreen. I work off a 22" widescreen but the width does make it seem bigger. That way you might get by with a smaller monitor.

Hand of Evil · Oct 8, 2014

My feeling these days, buy the most you can for the money AND a good backup system.

Alan Shutko · Oct 8, 2014

One comment: I say gigE, because some cable providers will already burst over 100Mbps, and if you want to share files between computers, gigE is a lot faster. But if your ISP isn't there and you aren't running a lot on your local network, don't worry about it.

Janx · Oct 8, 2014

it's good to get some actual technical discussion going, thanks to [MENTION=7808]Deset Gled[/MENTION]

I would disagree with part of his SSD strategy. SSD drives are indeed faster, but they have limited Writes to them, and like RAM, price to volume ratio is pretty expensive.

To put into perspective, my wife had nearly 1TB of games installed on her previous laptop before it was stolen. It doesn't go onto the SSD or you'll fill it by your third game install.

You might get your current game installed on an SSD, but as a general rule, you don't put anything but the OS on the SSD. Though it'll kill your OS upgrade path, you also move your profile and Temp directory off of there as well.

a faster secondary drive solves the rest of the problem at a cheaper rate (128GB SSD is cheaper now, and 1TB or so SATA is dirt cheap).

My wife's new AlienWare has a hybrid SATA/SSD drive, but that's a little funky. Even I'm not sure where the dividing line is for what content goes where (it's something AlienWare configured and its not a separate partition).

given that I worked 13 years in servers and storage, I got no clue what you mean by "mobo" as its not a term we used in describing sockets on motherboard, CPUs and # of cores in each CPU in the engineering community.

I do know that getting to 8 cores on the PC will be pretty nice. 4 is OK. That's usually 1 or 2 CPUs with 2 or 4 cores each.

Alan Shutko · Oct 8, 2014

I haven't found games to use that many threads. My quad-core hyper threaded i7 hasn't been fully utilized in the games I have played, but ymmv depending on the games you play.

For $1k you will certainly not get a large enough ssd to put much on. But if you can get a big ssd, it is awesome to run games on. Load times vanish.

When Skyrim was released, it only used up to 4GB of RAM so I loaded the entire game into a RAM disk. That was awesome, so fast between locations.