Looking to build a PC

[MOFLSTOMP 899]

I see all of these posts and wonder why nobody thinks to hit up a micro center to build shit. Literally picked out and bought a setup for my friend, and managed to come in over $200 under his budget (was $1500) compared to internet prices because of their combo deals and rebates. 

[Duex 1095]

27 minutes ago, Roflstomp said:

I see all of these posts and wonder why nobody thinks to hit up a micro center to build shit. Literally picked out and bought a setup for my friend, and managed to come in over $200 under his budget (was $1500) compared to internet prices because of their combo deals and rebates. 

 

this is why

[Swed 2651]

3 hours ago, Roflstomp said:

I see all of these posts and wonder why nobody thinks to hit up a micro center to build shit. Literally picked out and bought a setup for my friend, and managed to come in over $200 under his budget (was $1500) compared to internet prices because of their combo deals and rebates. 

IMO Micro Center is only reliable in the sense that I can pick out a processor and have them undercut the online price by about 100-150$

[Koriko 79]

11 hours ago, driz said:

your point was rendered moot like 6 posts ago when i said he could skip the nvme and get an evo 840 which would be in his budget

It would be within budget for one of the builds, but I guess that's why you gave him an option for a more expensive monitor to go over budget if he had the money. Still, the cost of either storage solution should have been included with your totals, as it'd give more insight to how much everything would cost him.

11 hours ago, driz said:

you also appear to think an i5 is a "power combo" when in reality it's a middle of the road affordable cpu that can be had for 200$ with a free 700MHz.

I don't actually think it, though I could definitely see how you could think that I do. I did put on some sort of display of extreme hyperbole and was even a bit pretentious when I called the i5 a "power combo". You're correct in that it wasn't anything to be excited for in terms of parts.

11 hours ago, driz said:

your suggested build doesn't even leverage any benefits of the chipset you selected, presumably because you don't actually understand. why would you ever choose a single stick of ram with a chipset that hugely benefits from 2? if you want 8G, buy 2 4G sticks.

I moved up to the Z170 chipset instead of the H170 chipset because I thought he'd want to leverage SLI in the future. At the very least a 1070 can SLI as opposed to the 1060 in the build you posted. You are right in the fact that the Z170 chipset should have all, or at the very least most, of its advantages over the H170 chipset. Choosing a single stick of 8 GB of DDR4 RAM was also a dumb choice, I'll admit. While he can theoretically expand up to 64 GB of RAM in the future, I highly doubt that he will have a need to, and this very slim possibility isn't enough to justify running a single stick of RAM in single channel mode. A kit consisting of two sticks at 8 GB each is definitely the right way to go in terms of starting out, and 32 GB of RAM isn't a bad limit either. I'm not afraid to admit I'm wrong here.

11 hours ago, driz said:

you clearly state a sata SSD is faster than an HDD and go as far to suggest one.. a sata ssd is ~4x faster than the fastest HDD and an nvme is 4-5x faster than the fastest sata ssd; so the metrics speak for themselves. if it's worth getting a sata ssd, it's worth getting an NVMe. that being said, it's impossible to say what his real-world experience with it will be. in terms of online games, instant map loading is a noticeable effect... but once the game is loaded, you might as well be on an HDD... regardless, an HDD or a SATA ssd will be the bottleneck in the system, an NVMe will not.

1) I don't believe that given the current market prices, "if it's worth getting a sata ssd, it's worth getting an NVMe." holds true. I believe that with this build, futureproofness in terms of graphical performance outweighs futureproofness in terms of storage speed. This is where we get into the realm of opinion as PC builders, and this is what I want to get across: Given our limited budget, do we want better graphical performance or do we want faster loading times?
2) You're correct about everything else.
3) I'd like to add to my argument's weight with that he can purchase an NVMe drive and add it in later with basically no trouble. If he were to get a 1060, he can't utilize it should he swap the card out for a better one, barring any exotic applications/games in the future that will utilize LDA Explicit Mode.

11 hours ago, driz said:

further, you are poor at math, since in only one case were we even close to 300 over

Stating that one of your builds goes $300 over budget, and being correct, doesn't make me bad at math.

11 hours ago, driz said:

and while windows 10 may be the best OS since Windows 95 from Microsoft, referring to it as a "highly optimized OS" is ignorant. it's not optimized in any way, thats why it runs on EVERYTHING. Optimization limits compatibility.

Saying "It's not optimized in any way" is just as ignorant as me calling it a "highly optimized OS". It's at the very least more optimized than Windows 7, given the benchmarks and comparisons that were floating around on launch. You're correct however, that optimization does usually limit compatibility. People pay for Windows either directly or indirectly because it strikes a nice enough balance between the two.

11 hours ago, driz said:

for your last ditch effort to sound educated

Oooh, fun. I love accusations.

11 hours ago, driz said:

i provided speed comparisons and real world numbers and suggested it;

Yes. Yes you did.

11 hours ago, driz said:

i further stated it could be skipped for a brand with a good reputation, good warranty and a length of history to establish quality in manufacturing.

While a brand can help determine the probability of a product being a good product, the individual product in question should be decoupled from the brand when under review and should stand on its own merits as opposed to the brand's pedigree, or lack thereof. A good chef can make a bad pot of stew every once in a while, and a bad chef can make a good pot of stew every once in a while.

 

11 hours ago, driz said:

you strung together a bunch of big words to sound intelligent and failed because you couldn't be bothered to research, read, or comprehend.

I don't think I strung a bunch of big words to sound intelligent. It's how I normally type in these sorts of threads. And since we're on the topic of literacy, a little proofreading and spell/grammar checking goes a long way.

11 hours ago, driz said:

Your points were invalid and would only lead to a post like this, which i intended to avoid by allowing you time to research first.

Not all of my points were invalid. The ones that were were already outlined above. That said, my build could have done a better job at focusing more on short term benefits instead of long run ones.

11 hours ago, driz said:

Our builds were right around the same cost

Sure.

11 hours ago, driz said:

but i provided a better monitor (significantly so), a better cpu, more ram and actual supporting information for components that could be questions.

You did, but at the expense of not adding storage to the total, or even peripherals, which were outlined as requirements. At the very least, you should outline everything except the peripherals and give purchase links PCPP-style. It'd help OP a lot.

11 hours ago, driz said:

the fact that you suggested an A-Data SSD and then claimed it had good reviews (by which quality reviewing group, i might ask)

It has almost 1000 aggregate reviews across PCPP's outlined retail sites, never dipping below 4.5 stars. This is including the negative-slanted review bias most retail sites have. Granted, it's not a "quality reviewing group" like you asked for. Most review groups get engineering or binned samples anyways. I claimed it had good reviews because it had good aggregate reviews.

11 hours ago, driz said:

shows your poor decision making skills in terms of building a PC. I commend you for taking the leap and looking at custom builds, but you should do a lot more research first before suggesting builds to others.

Cool, I got commended by some whiz kid on the internet. It's what I've always wanted for Christmas.

11 hours ago, driz said:

I would love to see your math supporting your input regarding Diminishing Returns

I'm sure you understand Diminishing Returns quite well seeing as you're an enthusiast PC builder. It's the economic (Macro? Micro? Or just plain?) principle that permeates most of decision making, and applies to PC building as well. Storage speed is an area of PC building you can examine the Law of Diminishing Returns on, but the granularity of storage speed makes it difficult to express without charts, and since there's no benchmark suite for loading times of various PC games and aggregate those results across builds, it's hard to construct those graphs in the first place with such little data. Really, the only way to represent Diminishing Returns right now is to divide storage types into "tiers"
Say a game takes 16 seconds to load on your trusty HDD, but you can spend $100 to jump up to a SATA III-based SSD that will cut your loading times by 12 seconds because it's 4x faster at loading games than your HDD. Your games now take only 4 seconds to load, but you can spend an additional $100 to buy a NVMe-based drive so you can shave off 3 seconds at the same 4x improvement, making your games take only 1 second to load. Obviously, these prices, loading times, and multipliers are grossly misrepresented and are not indicative of real-world scenarios, but it'll help OP understand how diminishing returns is represented in the PC building space. At each "step", OP has to consider the cost to jump to the next "step", and if the cost justifies that money being pulled from elsewhere.

11 hours ago, driz said:

I also didnt lowball any numbers, i actually pulled from from my amazon purchase history, newegg, and a couple other stores (i also listed sales that recently ended but will obviously return).. but good research  

They're lowballing current market prices. I redid your build in PCPP just so I can see the price history graphs before I wrote my post. They will return, of course, but it's up to OP how long he's willing to wait to build his PC. IMO, I think we've driven him off a bit, so for that, I'm sorry.

11 hours ago, driz said:

side note @OP if you only wanna play shit like rust, csgo, css, dota2, gmod (shit we have here) just run linux, it'll be much faster and a fuck ton more "optimized" than any windows version. obviously you need to verify all the games you wanna play will work, but i've yet to see a game i couldn't play in linux (and i've been a *nix user/gamer since 94). also, there's the whole free vs ~100$ thing to consider free+more fps vs 100$+less fps easy choice IMO. and if anyone tells you linux is hard to use, they've probably never used it before. if you can run windows or macOSx, you can run linux.

Agreed. If you can teach him how to use a good distro, he could spend that extra $100 towards an NVMe drive or better peripherals. At the very least, everybody should give Linux a shot at least a couple of times in their life. Speaking of which, which distro do you recommend? (I was rather fond of Hannah Montana Linux. It was awful in pretty much every way, but at the same time it was worth the effort put into it. As for the distros I tried, I used Ubuntu for a year, and Debian for two before deciding it wasn't for me.)

11 hours ago, driz said:

i was not savage, it was a logical reply that identified shortcomings in reply and illogical writing techniques commonly used to "confuse" the uneducated (like most US teachers!)

Cool.
I'll head to bed with this build proposal. It has design principles from my build and driz's build. It can be purchased today ~$23 under budget.
 

Quote

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor  ($219.99 @ Newegg) 
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler  ($24.99 @ Newegg) 
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z170-HD3 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard  ($82.87 @ OutletPC) 
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory  ($60.99 @ Newegg) 
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5" Solid State Drive  ($157.89 @ OutletPC) 
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive  ($47.49 @ OutletPC) 
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card  ($408.99 @ SuperBiiz) 
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro ATX Full Tower Case  ($74.99 @ Newegg) 
Power Supply: Corsair RMx 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply  ($79.99 @ Newegg) 
Monitor: Acer GN246HL 24.0" 144Hz Monitor  ($199.00 @ B&H) 
Keyboard: Cooler Master CM Storm Devastator Gaming Bundle Wired Gaming Keyboard w/Optical Mouse  ($19.99 @ Newegg) 
Total: $1377.18
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-08-20 05:56 EDT-0400

CPU: It was dumb of me to not leverage all of Z170's potential. 6600K it is.
CPU Cooler: I'll stand by this cooler. It's the best bang for your buck air cooler and has thousands of positive reviews as well as being a well-regarded air cooler in the PC building space.
Motherboard: Yeah, I know this is a weak part of the build suggestion. This motherboard appears to have two PCIe x16 slots, but the second one is an electrical 4x slot. Unless the spec has changed in recent years, SLI requires at least a PCIe 8x slot per card, and I wouldn't doubt if the spec did change to accommodate a 4x slot given the new high-bandwidth bridges NVidia introduced. Either way, I don't know why you would want to run a video card at 4x, especially if you're dropping money on a 1070. You could probably hold off on the motherboard if you wanted to buy one to support SLI. A relatively cheap board like this will impact your ability to overclock to the absolute top, but IMO spending $100 less on a motherboard for a better video card and sacrificing a couple of hundred of MHz is worth the tradeoff. Driz might have different opinions on this specific tradeoff though.
Memory: Yeah, it was beyond dumb of me to utilize only a single channel originally. 16 GB should last you a while. There's two more slots on the motherboard if for whatever reason you feel the need to double up later. These sticks can be swapped out with leftover money if you want a different brand/look.
SSD: It's not NVMe, but it's a Samsung SSD. While I still stand by my ADATA SSD, there's money to spare, so why not get something a bit nicer? It's 500 GB, which should have you manage storage space a lot less than say a 250GB SSD.
HDD: 1 TB to hide your non-porn. Maybe you can swap both of these storage devices out for a NVMe drive if driz can lead you to a slick deal on one that doesn't impact the rest of the build.
Video Card: I still stand by the idea that a $1400 PC should not be rocking a 1060. This one will basically shred any 1080p game, and most 1440p games for the foreseeable future.
Case: Generic case selection. It can be swapped out for a case that matches more of what you like. It's cheap enough to not impact the build much, and doesn't bring up any compatibility flags in PCPP.
Power Supply: Driz and Swed were onto something with the RM line. 750W is a little bit overkill, but it rocks the top of the efficiency curve in Corsair's spec sheet, which will help save power.
OS: It's missing! That saved us money for other parts of the build.
Monitor: It's 144Hz. With a 1070 commanding it, there's no reason any game should have this monitor below 144 FPS at max settings.
Keyboard & Mouse: It's a generic bundle. At this price point, these peripherals are basically throwaways once you decide to move up to better gaming peripherals.

As a side note, TIL that changing pages on the forums while writing a reply causes you to lose everything in your reply box. It took way longer to reply than it should have, especially after finishing up my shift.

[driz 2626]

9 hours ago, Roflstomp said:

I see all of these posts and wonder why nobody thinks to hit up a micro center to build shit. Literally picked out and bought a setup for my friend, and managed to come in over $200 under his budget (was $1500) compared to internet prices because of their combo deals and rebates. 

Micro center is where I got my board and CPU , some huge rebate for buying both together and the CPU was crazy cheap

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

5 hours ago, Swed said:

IMO Micro Center is only reliable in the sense that I can pick out a processor and have them undercut the online price by about 100-150$

My son had best buy price match microcenter without issue, even though the sale was in store only

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

[Swed 2651]

Get a copy of windows for 20$ from r/softwareswap. Never actually pay for oem installs.

 

EDIT: Looks like it got taken down. Finding a legit copy of windows for cheap isn't hard. Or, you can go the way of @driz and run Linux for free. How that works for gaming, I'll leave it up to him to go into the particulars.

[Sieghart 9]

2 hours ago, Swed said:

Get a copy of windows for 20$ from r/softwareswap. Never actually pay for oem installs.

 

EDIT: Looks like it got taken down. Finding a legit copy of windows for cheap isn't hard. Or, you can go the way of @driz and run Linux for free. How that works for gaming, I'll leave it up to him to go into the particulars.

I mean it doesn't.

I run Linux at work and home and even with all of the love it's gotten lately from Steam, it's nowhere near enough to make it worthy of any consideration for gaming or for everyday tasks. The drivers are often worse or buggy and games may not even get around to patching issues that affect <1% of their marketshare anyway. You don't get access to programs like MS Office, which is a far superior tool than libreoffice has ever been (yes, I use both, I'm not talking out of my ass). You can't get photoshop or anything similar, while some more recent changes to gimp have been promising, not enough to compete on any level for me (but I'm glad it's coming along).
 

Recommending it for gaming is a mistake and anyone who uses it regularly should know this. But if you really want a free OS then maybe shoot for Ubuntu. You can watch videos, surf the internet, and do general computer things just fine on it, but it's not going to serve anyone well for gaming or office work. You may find some of your favorite utilities aren't available or a pain to get to work.

But I definitely await the day when I can run all Linux all the time.

[driz 2626]

I have been a gamer on Linux since 96 with equal or higher fps in Linux than windows. (Except in wow, well to clarify, i get fine fps in wow, but the opengl in wow is subpar)

Sent from my Nexus 5X using Tapatalk

 

of course, i would also never run ubuntu.. but to each his own

 

i started on slackware in the mid-late 90s, moved to rolling my own custom built linux per machine in the 2000s and then moved to a solid mix of debian for gaming/perf/work and centos for servers.

 

i've literally never run into a game i couldn't play or a work application i couldn't use. that being said, i do tend to use native linux applications for most of my work. I also use office 365 without problems although i have never had an issue with openoffice, in any way at all.  You can get photoshop although i prefer gimp. 

 

clearly your opinion on linux gaming is skewed by your inability to play games effectively, this is a pebkac issue, not a linux issue. does it require a little more work than windows? yep, you get what you put in.

 

in the end, it's a choice, windows is one of those choices but making an overarching, incorrect statement about the OS is just silly.

[Koriko 79]

5 hours ago, Swed said:

Get a copy of windows for 20$ from r/softwareswap. Never actually pay for oem installs.

 

EDIT: Looks like it got taken down. Finding a legit copy of windows for cheap isn't hard. Or, you can go the way of @driz and run Linux for free. How that works for gaming, I'll leave it up to him to go into the particulars.

As I remember it a merchant or two became moderators and allowed bots to give their shops upvotes and rep, while silencing the people they scammed. I have a friend that this happened to. G2A's an option, as you can buy one of those protection things for like a dollar in the event you get scammed.