Reply to: Help the noob PC question

[Halo Jones]

Out of curiosity, what MB have you got? Usually Gigabyte ones have onboard overclocking features via their BIOS. very nifty

Edit--

That's one hell of PSU I like!

BGG got one of the gigabyte ones but I preferred the look of the Asus sabertooth : linky, which also has both novice & advanced OC settings in bios

[tranceporter]

Pretty much what I thought so I got one of these Corsair 1200i, I could not get the link thing to work but that did not bother me as any overclocking I do will be minimal & overtly safe

Out of curiosity, what MB have you got? Usually Gigabyte ones have onboard overclocking features via their BIOS. very nifty

Edit--

That's one hell of PSU I like!

[Halo Jones]

I trust very few PSU companies. Seasonic being one of them. Usually buy the gold standard version PSU's which has have 80% ish efficiency. Don't trust the cheap ones which say 88% efficiency etc. Load of tosh. A good PSU with 700W and 80% efficiency will last longer than a tulipty PSU with 1000W and tulip efficiency. And a get a modular PSU if you can. Less tangle of wires.

Pretty much what I thought so I got one of these Corsair 1200i, I could not get the link thing to work but that did not bother me as any overclocking I do will be minimal & overtly safe

[tranceporter]

Well, the new rig is all built & shiney, minor hiccup when the power supply fried the new CD & one of the SSD’s – I had no idea that you had to get a Haswell compliant power supply..

& last night I ordered 2 x 3GB EVGA GTX 780 Classified graphics cards should get them sometime next week.

And that should do me for a few years.

I trust very few PSU companies. Seasonic being one of them. Usually buy the gold standard version PSU's which has have 80% ish efficiency. Don't trust the cheap ones which say 88% efficiency etc. Load of tosh. A good PSU with 700W and 80% efficiency will last longer than a tulipty PSU with 1000W and tulip efficiency. And get a modular PSU if you can. Less tangle of wires.

[Ticktock]

Well, the new rig is all built & shiney, minor hiccup when the power supply fried the new CD & one of the SSD’s – I had no idea that you had to get a Haswell compliant power supply..

My understanding is that you only need a new PSU if you want to use the new low power states. For my PC, it's either on and I'm using it, or it's off, so I have no need of this. Using an older PSU shouldn't be frying your components, unless there's a fault somewhere.

[Halo Jones]

Well, the new rig is all built & shiney, minor hiccup when the power supply fried the new CD & one of the SSD’s – I had no idea that you had to get a Haswell compliant power supply..

& last night I ordered 2 x 3GB EVGA GTX 780 Classified graphics cards should get them sometime next week.

And that should do me for a few years.

[Halo Jones]

OK well I have decided to go with on-board sound, & ordered an extra 4GB of RAM, I had to order a new optical drive as it seems they went & changed the connection fitting anyhow.

I think in a few months I will go for a single GPU & most likely the Asus Titan

Case has been stripped & dusted, mobo, chip, 4 fans & kraken installed.

Tonight is chores night, so tomorrow I will strip the HD carry cages to replace the noisy fans with nice quiet Noctua ones (why do they have to be beige?)

Doing social stuff Saturday so hopefully finish off on Sunday

The only irksome thing so far is that my case has 3 x USB3 ports on the front, with the internal cables having a double & single (20pin?) plug on them, but the mobo only has 1 USB3 plug (which the double will go into) so I have 1 port that I can’t connect

Thanks to those with sensible comments

[doodab]

I actually make do with Intel on board graphics these days. Civ 5 runs fine. Haven't tried fsx but I have a card somewhere I can use if need be.

[tranceporter]

Just checked on HotUkDeals. 2GB Sapphire HD 7850 OC edition with Bioshock, Tomb Raider and farcry: blood dragon for £139. not a bad deal. The graphics card looks alright though

[tranceporter]

Isn't a more modern one a better bet? GTX 760 or something?

I still have a superclocked Gigabyte GTX 470, and rocking it. Last game i played was Starcraft 2: Heart of the Swarm, and the card just took it fine. The only games probably taxing it would be Crysis 3 etc. I have played Diablo 2 in MMO mode, and the car doesn't even flinch. ON the CPU side, I have a 4 year old Intel C2D 8600 overclocked to 3+ Ghz. 4GB DDR2 Corsair Extreme RAM. Normal 640GB WD Sata HDD. Coolmaster CM 690 Nvidia case with 5 fans to cool the machine. And it still rocks. Maybe in a year or so, I might overhaul the complete thing with a quad core i7, a decent mobo, and another Nvidia GTX 670 or the likes. I just wait for prices to drop.

[amcdonald]

It depends a lot on the game. A game with a lot of simulation, especially physical modeling, will use CPU/RAM much more than a first-person-shooter. I would imagine the new SimCity game requires a hefty amount of CPU and RAM.

Battlefield and Arma are CPU intensive, it depends on the FPS shooter and how much data the game needs to process

Whereas something like Crysis just eats GPUs till they're sobbing in the corner

[d000hg]

Honestly, if all you do is gaming, the only thing that matters is the graphics card. When you are playing the games, the graphics card huffs and puffs while the CPU just sits twiddling it's thumbs up its a$$.

It depends a lot on the game. A game with a lot of simulation, especially physical modeling, will use CPU/RAM much more than a first-person-shooter. I would imagine the new SimCity game requires a hefty amount of CPU and RAM.

[doodab]

I would go for an overclocked GTX 570/580, since I believe that Nvidia has better drivers than ATI/AMD

Isn't a more modern one a better bet? GTX 760 or something?

[tranceporter]

Ok noob questions for you, I am currently upgrading my PC, which is predominantly used for gaming, mostly MMORPG’s & I want a good frame rate.

I have just got an ASUS Sabertooth Z87 MoBo, Intel i7 3.5LGA 1150 chip, 4MB of DDR3 ram, & SSD hard drives.

As the only sounds I listen to via the PC is game noise & the odd YouTube video, do I need to bother with a sound card or will on board sound do me?

Graphics card: is it better to have 2 mediocre cards run in crossfire or 1 stonking good one?

Thank you for any helpful comments.

Honestly, if all you do is gaming, the only thing that matters is the graphics card. When you are playing the games, the graphics card huffs and puffs while the CPU just sits twiddling it's thumbs up its a$$. Since you already have a powerful mobo and CPU + decent amount of RAM, just go for a single strong GPU. No point in having dual graphics card because the performance does not double. You would probably get 35% more performance as compared to having a single card. I would go for an overclocked GTX 570/580, since I believe that Nvidia has better drivers than ATI/AMD

[Pondlife]