Building a new setup

[Legend of the West]

Hey all, my name is Frank and I'm a long time lurker (since before IV was new), first time poster. I've decided to get back into the PC gaming scene recently after a long hiatus with xbox. I plan to build the entire PC from scratch and have come up with (what I think is) the best list of parts for the money. Basically, I chose the best CPU and GPU I could afford, a decent motherboard, and everything else is pretty much the cheapest available while still maintaining quality brands. Anyway, I hope you guys have some insight for me as to how this theoretical system will run, given the parts that I've chosen. There should be no compatability issues, and I don't think I left anything out, but like I said, I've been away from PC performance for a few years.

 

- AMD Phenom II X4-965 3.4GHz quad-core processor (AM3)

- Sapphire AMD Radeon HD6850 w/ 1gb of 256b DDR5 V-RAM (PCI-e)

- Gigabyte GA-990XA-UD3 (AM3, PCI-e @ 16x)(DDR3, 4x240, 32gb max)

- Kingston 8gb (2x4) 1600MHz DualChan DDR3

- WD 1tb 7200rpm SATA III HDD

- Antec Three Hundred ATX Mid Tower case (1x120mm and 1x140mm fans incl. w/ 3x 120mm avail. spots)

- Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus 550Watt (kinda feel like this might be cheaping out a little...nevertheless, 550w, all the connectors I need, good reviews, cheap as hell)

- Samsung 22x DVD/RW optical drive (cheapest possible, will barely be used after Windows install)

- 3x NZXT 120mm case fans

- ASUS wireless network adapter

 

So, as far as I am aware, everything in this list will fit and perform well together. If I have made an error in part selection, or am missing a part that I need to make the rest of it work, PLEASE let me know. I value all input.

 

Thanks,

-Frank

[s1xty7]

Frank, I have a few suggestions for overall PC use/performance which you might enjoy, but they are opinions.

 

First, I'd look at an Intel CPU. Something in the second or third gen core CPUs. They're a bit more expensive but they do great all around. If you shop around you can find decent deals. For instance, if you have a Microcenter near you, they sell the i5-2500K for $150 I believe. Not an Intel fanboy, but the last couple years the performance difference between AMD and Intel has been pretty big.

 

Second, the AMD cards overclock great, but seeing as you are posting this in the GTAIV section, I believe Nvidia has a bit of a performance advantage in IV. Just something to keep in mind. Also, I've had good luck with Newegg open box video cards. If you keep your eyes pealed, you can usually buy some great cards for great prices. I got a brand new 4890 from there for $25 last year and my new 7970 OC edition for $350 a few weeks ago.

 

Third, I'd suggest an SSD for a boot drive. Some of the sales that occur fairly regularly have (all SATA III) 60GB at $50 or less, 120GB SSDs at $80 or less, and 240GB at $150 or less. The difference this makes in general responsiveness of the OS and any installed apps is amazing, at least to me. Just remember, there are some specific settings for SSDs you should perform if you go that route.

 

Whichever way you go, good luck with your build!

[Legend of the West]

Thanks for the input! I am well aware that Intel processors have been leading the pack lately, and would have been my choice provided I was on a looser budget. I chose the X4-965 because it seemed to me to have the power/performance I'm looking for at the very attractive price of 105 shipped. I don't plan to delve into overclocking as of yet, but it's nice to know that I can if necessary to keep it up-to-date and delay expensive upgrades for longer.

 

As far as the Radeon/Nvidia choice, I couldn't find a 1gb DDR5 256 Nvidia-based card for anywhere close to the $148 price of the Radeon. Theoretically, a card with 1gb DDR5 256-bit should have the memory bandwidth equivalent of a 1gb DDR3 128-bit card, no? I'm thinking the Radeon should be more than enough for GTA IV and also somewhat future-proof as the card and mobo are both CFX ready. Also, my mobo choice at $130 seemed far better than a comparably priced Intel mobo in terms of features supported.

 

And that is really a great bit of info regarding NewEgg's open-box products. I never knew they did that! I'll start looking out for those deals though, as that is the only reason I go to Best Buy haha.

 

As far as adding an SSD, I did have that in mind while choosing parts, and planned ahead for it, but I have no experience with them, and several questions about them. The case I chose has one 2.5" SSD bay (in addition to the six HDD and three optical drive bays) and the mobo will support one, so I'm ready for it, but in the interest of keeping the overall cost in the $700 ballpark, I didn't add an SSD to the list, but have two in mind:

 

- Crucial 64gb 2.5" SSD, SATA 6Gbps. It's $73 through Amazon Prime and has great ratings

(Average of 4.5/5 stars, and 734/925 of the reviews are 5's). Seems like I can't go wrong

with this one, but at 64gb, this other one caught my eye:

 

- Kingston 120gb 2.5" SATA III 6Gbps SSD. For $2 more than the Crucial drive, I'd get

double the disc space, which is quite preferable. Haven't settled on it though, seeing as

I'm not familiar with Kingston (decided to trust them with the RAM though, $40 for 8gb 1600

D3 and incredible reviews, ..can't go wrong?), and it doesn't have nearly enough online

reviews, positive or otherwise, to convince me to trust it blindly.

 

That being said, I have no personal experience with internal SSD's and would greatly appreciate any insight. If the Kingston 120 can be trusted, It seems like a great choice for me. Recommendations for other brands/drives are welcomed also, however, that 240gb SSD for <$150 that you mentioned sounds perfect for me. Do you recommend a certain brand of SSD as far as reliability? Hard drive reliability is of the utmost importance to me. If I woke up one day to find all my data lost on a bricked drive, I'm sh*tting in the box before I send it back!

 

Lastly, I greatly appreciate all the input, but I'm pretty much dead set on my CPU/GPU (brand at least, open to model suggestions). I've always leaned towards AMD & Radeon over Intel/Nvidia, and I probably always will as long as money is a primary issue. IMHO, AMD's and Radeon's 'performance-to-dollar' ratio, by far, blows away the competitor's products, but we all know that's an endless debate. I'm pretty confident about my parts list, and will probably order it within the next few days, barring the discovery of any compatibility issues. I'm just worried that everything will show up and I'll get halfway through assembly only to realize that X doesn't work with Y, or that I didn't know I needed adapter Q to pair W with Z, or whatever else. I'm just certain that it won't all go right. I'm a mechanic by trade, so the idea of a complete and running computer, with only a 15-piece parts list generates some serious doubts in my mind. I'm used to a simple cylinder head rebuild being a ten hour, 100-part operation. Anyway, I hope it all goes well. Totaling at the attractive price of $689 (FREE shipping included through Amazon Prime), my parts list is only 16 items short. This even includes some things that aren't even necessities; RCA audio wires (for now..), HDMI cables, three fans! Sorry for rambling...it's just so foreign to me. Alright that's it for now, if you read to this point, then you're probably just as bored as I am, sitting here writing on and on...

 

Thanks again,

-Frank

 

 

TL;DR Version!:

- AMD > Intel, IMO

- Radeon > GeForce, IMO

- Don't know too much about purchasing SSD's

- Still not buying the fact that I can build an entire working computer with 10-15 pieces and a screwdriver.

[yoječ]

- I'm 99% sure you don't need that much expensive motherboard. Are you going to have several video cards and are you going to extremely voerclock your CPU? If not, then it's just a waste. Go for something cheaper, like e.g. Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3.

- CM eXtreme Power PSUs are based on a very outdated designs, they didn't receive that good reviews on professional sites (like here - this PSU burned itself when they tried to pull full power from it!) - definitely not a good value.

- If it's supposed to be a gaming rig, I wouldn't get an SSD but get a faster video card instead.

[Legend of the West]

As far as the motherboard goes, I agree that its overkill, and I checked out the board you suggested first, but the difference in price is only $20. I'm not planning on overclocking or running dual GPUs yet, but for an extra $20, i have the option to do so in the future, which I do intend to do, to keep the system reasonably up-to-date for as long as possible. Upgrading to a CFX setup will be very reasonable since I already have a.capable mobo.

 

Thanks for the PSU input though, because thats the one part I'm nervous about cheaping out on. Hopefully it will do its job long enough for me to replace it with a quality unit. It was dirt cheap, so if it gets me by for a few months until a nicer one can be had, I'll be happy. Can anyone recommend a certain brand over others? And why? Also, what wattage should I be looking for with the above setup? Going off what I've read, 500+ should to be adequate.

 

And at 1 gig of 256 D5, this card should perform admirably with everything I'll use it for. Aside from GTA IV, I've never needed to run games on the highest settings to be satisfied, but IV on max, with certain mods looks and plays utterly amazing. If i can run IV and V (with minimal upgrades) then I know I'll be satisfied with this computer for several years.

[yoječ]

500W would be much more than necessary for this rig. It's hard to recommend just a brand since most brands have a crapton of PSUs to choose from, ranging from good to bad (CM is the prime example). As far as cheaper PSUs go, OCZ ZS 550W and XFX Core 550W are pretty solid and futureproof options.

[Legend of the West]

Thanks for the input! I checked them both out, and both seem like far better choices than the cooler master. At $65, the XFX is only $15 more than the CM, so I'll be going with that. Much appreciated!

[s1xty7]

Some quick current possible options for you. OCZ Agility 3 240GB SSD, $129 after MIR. Some people have issues with the sandforce based SSDs, but I have been running the 120GB version of this for about a year with nothing but great performance. As for the security of data, I keep all the files I MUST have on a RAID 1 of two traditional hard drives. You should also make backups of important documents and services offered by companies like Google can make smaller amounts of cloud based storage available for free. I keep things like my resume there so that I always have it available.

 

If, as has been suggested, you decide on more video card for the buck, here is the link to Newegg.com's open box newer video cards (hint: I use key word "GDDR5" to weed out the older cards): Newegg Open Box Video Cards. For instance, there is a PowerColor 7850 or a Gigabyte 560Ti for approximately $200 right now. Don't know that you could max GTAIV or V, but they should run pretty decent.

 

Good luck again!

[mkey82]

If at all possible, I would personally avoid using sandforce SSDs.

[yoječ]

Yeah, especially seeing the latest TweakTwon article on how TRIM doesn't work on SF-2281 based SSDs with new firmware.

[luceberg]

Just to say that the Antec 300 case is dated compared to more recently designed cases. I have the Coolermaster Haf 912+, which is very good, apart from some minor dislikes, such as red led lights on the front.

[Legend of the West]

Thanks again everyone. That open box new egg deal is excellent info and I'll definitely be watching it. It seems I'm not ready yet for an SSD, I have never heard of sandforce, so I guess I have some reading to do. I definitely want one as soon as money allows, and will look into the one s1xty7 is using with good results. Lastly, I'm sure the Antec 300 is old news seeing as its one of the cheapest around but it has more features than I need right now and was a nice budget choice so I'll stick with it. Great input though, thanks all.

[GTALegacy]

This isn't directly related to your build, but once you get everything put together and GTA IV installed...

 

DO NOT PATCH GTA IV TO THE LATEST PATCH (1.0.7).

 

Patch it to 1.0.4 if you can?

 

(If you buy the Steam version and download it, you have no choice but to use the 1.0.7 version, but there are many tutorials on the net that show you how to downgrade)

 

The reason you want 1.0.4 and not the latest patch is because it gives better performance all around, but better performance for AMD/ATI cards in particular.

 

Another reason is most of the graphic mods (ENB; IncEnhancer, etc.) you might want to play around with are also written for 1.0.4. as well. This also includes a lot of the car packs and other mods out there for the game, too.

 

If you want to play MP, you can have two installs; Just copy your 1.0.7 installation and then downgrade it for SP.

 

The only drawback to using patch 1.0.4 is you must have R* Games Social Club installed (to launch the game), but it is worth the increased in-game performance, IMO.

 

Best of luck on your new build!

[Legend of the West]

Thanks for that last reply, you answered several questions that I was going to ask after the computer is all together and running. I do have quite a few questions considering mods since the last game I played with mods on pc was operation flashpoint, and it was much less involved. This forum has been very helpful so far so I'll be back with more questions when the computer is done. Parts should arrive tomorrow so we'll see how it goes. Thanks again

[GTALegacy]

One last thing you are going to want to use regardless of the version of the game you install:

 

SMAA Injector

 

This is a small mod that injects Subpixel Morphological Antialiasing into GTA IV, and other games that natively do not have AA like "Unreal Tournament III", etc.

 

The download consists of four small files that you simply drop into your main GTA IV directory.

 

I recommend editing the "injector.ini" and chaanging SMAA_PRESET_HIGH to SMAA_PRESET_ULTRA. This will give you nice AA at high resolutions with very little performance hit vs. FXAA.

 

[Legend of the West]

So all my parts arrived yesterday and I would've bet the house that there was something small I had overlooked and would have to run downtown to Staples (god help me) for, but everything went just peachy. I took my sweet ass time and had the thing turned on and installing Windows 4 1/2 hours after opening the boxes. With Windows installed, and all the drivers installed, the first thing I did was run WEI and was very pleased by the results: 7.4 7.5 7.7 7.7, and the HDD ruins it with a 5.9. This was with only the included drivers on cd, and my 1600 RAM running at 1333. After work today I'll be going through the arduous process of getting all the most recent drivers downloaded/installed (btw, is there a program that checks and sources drivers? Cuz 1 by 1 really sucks..) and changing ram freq to 800 and seeing of my WEI improves at all.

 

Haven't installed GTA IV yet, so far I've just been blowing my mind with this thing; watching HD videos on a 37" tv and flying through Google earth smooth as glass with all 3D objects and textures on. Highest GPU load so far was a mere 40% and it never got hotter than 60C. I love it! Can't wait to see what GTA IV looks like with a few mods! The parts selection and building was such a rewarding process that I almost hope I won't be able to run IV to my satisfaction so that I can plan my next upgrade! Another 8gb RAM and an HD6870 in crossfire maybe?

 

Anyway thanks again for all the support, it was very much appreciated, and if anyone can point me in the direction of any guides or recommended mods, it'd be a big help. Seems like the internet is chock full of mods, but descriptions, recommendations, and general guides or introductions are apparently burried a little deeper. Understood that this isn't the right forum section, just asking as a footnote to my progress report.

 

Thanks again, all.

[yoječ]

Crossfiring cards with different chips isn't that good idea, because in most cases HD6850 will end up slowing the HD6870 down. Not to mention that HD7850 received huge price cuts and as of now it can be even cheaper than HD6870, while performing a tad better than HD6950. Anyway - youd be better off seling HD6850 and getting a single, powerful card. Especially seeing that not all games like Crossfire/SLI - GTA4 can be the prime example.

[GTALegacy]

Yoyo2 gives sound advice

 

Legend...

 

I assume that you have most likely played through GTA IV, on the console, correct?

 

If so, I am still going to recommend doing another play through on the PC just to work out the in-game settings to your liking. Once you have it setup the way you like then you can start to add mods like ENB, and whatnot. I use a wired USB Xbox 360 controller since that is what this game was built around and it makes driving around much easier than using digital buttons.

 

Be warned, however, the last mission (whomever you choose to take down) is bugged and can only be played if the FPS is set to 30. This is due to the RAGE Engine being optimized for HDTV (30FPS) and if you try and play it with 60FPS it's impossible to complete the Quick Time sequence where Niko climbs into the helicopter because the response time is double how many FPS you are running. Thus, if you are playing at 60FPS you have to be able to tap buttons at a rate of 120FPS! This is the only game stopping bug -- and you can get around it by setting your FPS to 30 using a Command.txt entry -- R* never fixed and people still to this day come to forums like this b1tching about it (and rightfully so).

 

As far as mods go...

 

I would start with IceNhancer 2.1 (latest) and see if you like some of the changes that can be done with the overall lighting and color palette of the game.

 

Everybody swears by it, but I do not like the overly saturated graphics this (and many other ENB) mods give. Some of them make the game look even more cartoony than it already does. I like the original drab and gritty look R* had in mind when they designed the game originally. But again, see for yourself as you might love the change in scenery.

 

What I have been doing recently is trying to find a mod that replaces all of the default cars with their real life counter-parts (better models and real names).

 

There aren't very many mods like this, ironically because of the sheer amount of vehicles in GTA IV (170 including TBOGT and LATD) and because there sometimes aren't any quality models to replace them. There is also the issue if you add more cars to the game it will spawn an unusual amount of Taxis on the roads due to a coding bug R* never fixed (there are workarounds on the net).

 

The last thing you might look into are some really cool realism mods that make the game play more realistic in a lot of respects.

 

Some of them include things like...

 

-Realistic weapon damage and magazine capacity

-Real bank account accessible via the ATMs found in the game

-Niko carries a bag at all times that he stores his wepaons in (no more magic pockets)

-First person mod that allows players to play the game from the first person perspective

-Vehicle mods that require gas and that require routine maintenance of your vehicle breaks down

 

Edited September 20, 2012 by GTALegacy

[Legend of the West]

You're saying a good single card performs better than two mediocre ones, so for example, 2x HD7850 Crossfire < 1 HD7970? (3gb D5 384bit, WOW!). Is this only the case for GTA/certain games or is it generally true across the board?

 

I don't know anything about crossfire other than what it is, so thanks for the info. I like the specs for the HD7850, looks a lot like my HD6850 but with double vram, will definitely keep that in mind for when the 6850 gets in over its head.

[yoječ]

Yeah, most of the time it's better to have one HD7970 than two HD7850.. Aside from Crossfire/SLi not working very well with some games, you also have to take into account microstutter (which makes the game less fluent than it should be) and scaling (2x HD7850 doesn't mean 2x rise in performance).