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£1300 gaming PC budget, thoughts?



I'd go for a 7970 3gb over a 2gb 680, if you're an Nvidia fanboy then get the 4gb equiv. (Slightly better performance, more VRAM so it's future proof, usually use less power also.).

CPU - don't bother with OEM, for ~£5 more you can get a Retail with an extra 2 years warranty, may not have any issues but for the sake of £5.

In terms of mobo i'd personally go for the Gigabyte Z77 range - I think it's a DS3H or D3H - one of them is highly recommended in that price range - search on OcUk and you'll find it.

Wouldn't bother spending £60 on 1866mhz, get 8gb 1600mhz for £30 / 16gb for £40ish and save some money - you won't see any benefit. (perhaps spend more on the case).

Power supply isn't bad - but I'd go for a Seasonic - the most highly recommended and best components in a PSU - you'll still get a 850W modular for that money.
Seasonic make a lot of XFX/Corsair PSU's, so if you prefer those manufactures then see which ones they produce.

SSD - I'd personally invest a bit more and get a bigger PSU - you'll get pissed off having to manage space on 60gb. (I also would never buy Seagate again, so for me a Western Digital drive would favour - but it's all opinion).
 
  F82 M4
Appreciate you looking at it thanks mate.

Didn't know about OEM vs Retail CPU's. Turns out it's actually the same price anyway so I'll swap that over now. I also recommended to him a 7970 but he's got his heart set on Nvidia, the 4GB 680 however is close to £500 so will have to stick with 2GB. (He's looking to SLi it in the near future as well.) Will take a look at that motherboard cheers, motherboards are definitely my weakest area of knowledge.

The SSD is only for Windows & programs and Intel SSD's are brilliant (they have the lowest failure rates in the industry) and 60GB should be more than sufficient, he'll be using the 1TB HDD for games etc. I have 2 Seagate HDD's and they are absolutely faultless to be honest mate.

Antec PSU's are also brilliant, but if we can save cost in this area we will definitely be looking to.

A close mate of mine recommended the RAM and he's the biggest geek I know :cool: - So you don't think I'll need the quicker RAM?

Cheers mate :)
 
  Bumder With A Buffer
I have the gigabyte ga-z77-d3h. For the money its been spot on so far.

Easy as fcuk to overclock too for a noob like me. 4.5Ghz its ran safely and easily for months now.

Only thing is certain games like Fallout really do not like being played on my machine on that overclock...I have had to switch it back down to standard to play Fallout NV. I couldnt play 10 mins of it without it crashing on 4.5Ghz, backed it down and played for 8 hours solid and not a hitch.

Interestingly only on those games..Skyrim and FarCry3 work fine overclocked/
 
Check benchmarks on the 3570k for different RAM speeds, you'll see 2 fps increase in most games when you get 2400Mhz, so you can guess how little difference there is at 1866Mhz!

The new AMD series massively benefit from RAM speeds, but this series' of Intel do not rely on it so much.

And as above, it's the D3H which is recommended :)
 
  172
The SSD is only for Windows & programs and Intel SSD's are brilliant (they have the lowest failure rates in the industry) and 60GB should be more than sufficient,

Please do not make the mistake of thinking 60GB will be fine if you want to have your most used programs and the odd game (10GB each these days) on the SSD. You do a fresh install, see 45GB free space and think brilliant.

A service pack or two, a year of windows & driver updates, MS office, photoshop & your 3 most used programs and you've suddenly got 10GB left and find yourself having to run cleanup wizards on a monthly basis (which you should be doing anyway of course :p )

It really is worth investing in as big an SSD as you can afford now. Unlike, for example, RAM it's extremely inconvinient to add boot drive storage at a later date.



With regards to hardware (especially GFX cards & CPUs) there's no excuse to speculate when there are so many good quality profesional reviews & benchmarks out there. On a purely financial basis divide price by average FPS on your most played games and that will tell you which is better value out of the 680 (generally faster) and the 79x0 cards (I'd assume it's cheaper). If a few £/FPS here or there doesn't concern you (I don't think it will on a £1300 build) too much then it's definitely worth considering things like reliability, SLI/xFire potential & power consumption.

Just grabbed the first review google came across from a decent website: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_gtx_680_lightning_review,21.html 680 seems a fair bit faster in EA/crytek engined games.
 
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  Bumder With A Buffer
I bought a 128 GB SSD and have put windows, fallout new Vegas and skyrim and farcry 3 and am down to around 58gb free.
 
Just grabbed the first review google came across from a decent website: http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/msi_geforce_gtx_680_lightning_review,21.html 680 seems a fair bit faster in EA/crytek engined games.

That's out of date, the AMD latest drivers saw boosts of up to 25% (average around 15% increase iirc), and the 7970 is actually quicker in pretty much everything now :)


There's literally no reason to go Nvidia at the moment, unless you want to special an absurd amount because you think Physx is really that worth it!
 
  172
That's out of date, the AMD latest drivers saw boosts of up to 25% (average around 15% increase iirc), and the 7970 is actually quicker in pretty much everything now :)

Fair enough on the latest-drivers front - I'll hold my hands up for that one.

Historically though it's difficult to argue that nVidia haven't had generally more stable drivers than AMD/ATI over the past few years.



On that note I'm out because this thread is just going to bring out the inner keyboard warrior :p A 4.5GHz OC, with no mentioned stress testing, that crashes in 10 minutes during several different games is described as "safe?" Some of this thread would make computing forums explode!
 
  09Accord 2.4 3.0i Z4
Just to put my input in, 60gb is fine for just O/S and normal programs, such as in my case, my intel 60gb has the O/S, Office 2010, Sony Vegas, and other bits and bobs, and still have over 20GB left.

Don't put games on an SSD, they hardly make that much of a difference, install games on that 1TB and it'll run quick, Since moving the O/S on my SSD and relieving the stress off my 500gb Sata II, i've seen much better load times on it from the likes of BF3 and Skyrim.


Also I'd recommend looking at the 7950/70 cards, but look at Gigabyte cards, for somereason cards from Asus and MSI have increased to around the £500 mark, guess due to low supply.

OR

You could hold out and see what Nvidia bring to the table with the Titan 680 card they're suppose to be bringing out at the end of the month. That's what i'm doing before I decided what to get rid of my 6850 for.
 
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Cookie

ClioSport Club Member
Half the point of the SSD is running games from it. It makes a MASSIVE difference to load times, and anything that involves fetching data from the disk.
 
  09Accord 2.4 3.0i Z4
From my experience, they do not make that much of a difference for game load times, I am running an i7 3770k @4.40Ghz though.

More than half the point of the SSD is to see your boot times decrease to only 5 seconds, I still can't stop myself from hitting the restart button and watch my pc restart in 10 seconds, makes me smile everytime.

But saying that, I am planning on getting a 512gb SSD for my games xD

Also with that budget, albeit add another hundred quid you could quite potentially build an x79 Intel six core machine, but that's just me, others would think it be massively overkill....but think of the power of an intel six core clocked at 4+Ghz.
 
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Silent_Scone

ClioSport Club Member
  Evo 5 RS
Running apps / games off a mechanical drive in a decent system is a bit backwards, go for a 256gb. Only things I'd personally change is the Seagate drive as I don't trust them at all, and go for the Asus equivalent MB. I know Addicted recommended Gigabyte but I personally don't trust motherboard manufacturers who put substandard transistors on to cut costs. Even if they do work most of the time.


I have the gigabyte ga-z77-d3h. For the money its been spot on so far.

Easy as fcuk to overclock too for a noob like me. 4.5Ghz its ran safely and easily for months now.

Only thing is certain games like Fallout really do not like being played on my machine on that overclock...I have had to switch it back down to standard to play Fallout NV. I couldnt play 10 mins of it without it crashing on 4.5Ghz, backed it down and played for 8 hours solid and not a hitch.

Interestingly only on those games..Skyrim and FarCry3 work fine overclocked/

Fallout is quite CPU intensive, if you're having problems with your overclock when running it then your OC can't be all that stable
 
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  Bumder With A Buffer
Fallout is quite CPU intensive, if you're having problems with your overclock when running it then your OC can't be all that stable


I prime 95'd the overclock for 19 hours with zero issues. Likewise with Intel Burn Test.

Skyrim and FarCry3 were fine, just Fallout3 and New Vegas.

Is there something else I should be using to prove the OC??
 
  Yaris Hybrid
From my experience, they do not make that much of a difference for game load times, I am running an i7 3770k @4.40Ghz though.

That has been my experience too.

I had some games on my SSD but I have moved them onto the HDD now. I haven't really noticed much difference. My PC is very beefy anyway so there is nothing else slowing it down and load times are unnoticeable.

Boot up times are nice but once booted up I am not seeing any noticeable difference.

I'd still go for 128 though for piece of mind. Oh and I had an SSD failure so I now keep more stuff like personal documents on my mechanical drive. More reliable.
 
  Blobeye WRX STi W/T
Do some research on the Gigabyte d3h freezing.. (overclockers currently stock the v1.0 which has the problem, not sure if v1.1 fixed it)

loads of problems! I'm currently trying to sort it out and it's been almost 2 weeks of tinkering with no success!!
 

Cookie

ClioSport Club Member
Do some research on the Gigabyte d3h freezing.. (overclockers currently stock the v1.0 which has the problem, not sure if v1.1 fixed it)

loads of problems! I'm currently trying to sort it out and it's been almost 2 weeks of tinkering with no success!!

My D3H causes me no end of problems. My Gigabyte GTX670 is currently back for RMA because it's either fucked or one of a growing number that doesn't seem to be compatible with the Z77 chipset :/
 
  F82 M4
Right, we will keep playing around with the final details and then I'll report back for everyone's thoughts. We will turn this into a build thread. :cool:
 
  172
This is becoming two threads in one but people are forgetting the practical difference between SSDs and mechanical disc drives. It's all about whether seek time is a significant % of total read time. Yes, of course an SSD is faster loading a few big files (e.g. a level in a game) but it's comparatively much faster when it's loading lots of little files because it saves upto 20 - 30 milliseconds (typical seek time + spin time) on every file it loads. Ask it to load an OS (probably thousands of small files) and those milliseconds add up.

On the capacity front I'll just put it another way. Moving programs across drives or messing around with imaging drives and bootconfig issues in 18 months (despite having 20 GB free when you installed everything) is a pain.
 
  265
That's out of date, the AMD latest drivers saw boosts of up to 25% (average around 15% increase iirc), and the 7970 is actually quicker in pretty much everything now :)


There's literally no reason to go Nvidia at the moment, unless you want to special an absurd amount because you think Physx is really that worth it!


7970 is pretty much the top card at the moment and would save the OPs friend a bit of money. Dont get the cheapest noisey/hot reference cooler though unless you get a nice air cooled case.

Having said that though i had 2 of them in crossfire for a few weeks and they did my nut in. Drivers are complete bollox. Would never touch crossfire again.
SLI works so much better for me with everything i use my pc for and with that in mind id get a GTX 670 if i was buying a GPU now.
 
  Blobeye WRX STi W/T
I was also crossfire and went back to single (7970's), and I agree SLi is better, but if you're sticking single card and want good VFM then a 7970/7950 is the way to go! :)
I have the 7950
this one

i can't fault it at all!!
would highly recommend it to anyone
 
  F82 M4
Not much to be honest, unless you buy 2nd hand (there will be loads of available 600 series second hand when the 700 series come out). Brand new the 500 series are still very expensive.
 
  09Accord 2.4 3.0i Z4
How much will the price of the gtx 600 series be effected when nvidia release the 700 series in March.

Its been rumoured that 700 won't be coming out till the end of the year, probably due to Nvidia releasing the Titan GTX680 at the end of this month.

Also another board you can consider is the MSI MPower Big Bang Z77 excellent board, I've got one and love it.
 


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