| rmarier83 said: I would also go for Nvidia for the Video card especially at the moment where the AMD cards are having a bitcoin bubble over-inflating the price on their cards. |
That's mostly a US-only issue, Australia the prices aren't inflated, in-fact at one point the 290X were 50% cheaper than the USA.
starcraft said:
Thank you, I imagine that would be something like Getprice! Do I not need thinks like heat-absorbing adhesive and things, or will it come with the components? |
Use Staticice.
http://www.staticice.com.au/
My suggestion however is that, despite how attractive MSY's prices are, avoid them like the plague, I swear their "Support staff" is run by babboons, they're on the best of days incompetent when it comes to warranty's and support.
PC Case Gear are highly regarded with Australian PC gamers, they have great warranty and customer service, however their 2% card charge can bite, I stick with them as I am impatient, also a bonus how most of my orders arrive within 2 days, despite me living half-way across the continent.
AusPCMarket are another quality store, no hidden charges either, everything includes freight, card charges etc'. - Can get EXTREMELY pricey when building an entire PC, but can be fantastic value for a once-off part.
They have in the past also had new GPU's available for sale before official launches. ;)
http://i.imgur.com/dCWtXZV.png
You could lower the price by reducing the Powersupply to a Corsair GS-600 or CX-600 which would shave $50 off the price, but I personally wouldn't, the HX series comes with a 7+ year warranty and as someone who has had a Corsair HX 650w and a HX 850 and 950 V1, they punch well above their weight, would handle dual Radeon 270X's and a Core i5 with ease.
You do sacrifice some things to reach this price point however, like Overclocking on the CPU, 4 sticks of Ram and Dual-GPU's.
You could switch to an AMD FX 8320+Socket AM3 Motherboard to keep within the price constraints and gain all those extras, but you loose out on CPU performance with additional power consumption.
| tripenfall said: Go big on RAM |
Don't.
The great thing about the PC is that once you use all your Ram, information is then swapped to the Hard Drive/SSD.
Over the last few years I have jumped from 4Gb to 8gb, 16gb, 32gb and now have 64gb.
Not once has memory capacity ever been a limiting factor strictly for gaming. (Exception would be the move from 4gb to 8gb.)
The only time I would recommend going for 16Gb is if it's a build you intend to keep for half a decade or more as DDR3 is only going to become more expensive as production shifts over to DDR4, but the flip-side is, you should find abundant amounts of DDR3 second hand in places like Ebay.
| BenVTrigger said: A few quick recommendations 1. Get an Intel CPU, don't go AMD if you can help it. 2. If your overclocking get an H80i or H100i 3. For RAM get no less than 8 GB, I personally recommend either Corsair Vengance or Crucial Ballistix Elite 4. Get no less than 700w on your power supply IMO if you can afford it even if your current build won't use that much. Its always nice to have extra if you upgrade to stronger cards in the future. |
PSU can be a little ambigious.
I would choose a Corsair HX/AX 650w PSU over a 1200W Shaw PSU.
Quality is more important than sheer wattage as the Shaw would likely spark and catch fire before even exceeding real-world 500w whilst the Corsair could hit 700w.
starcraft said:
Honestly open to suggestions. Intel seems to be the way to go. How difficult is overclocking? Might be a bit beyond a first time builder? |
Regardless of how difficult it is to overclock, having the option should be included on the checklist, what you might not be comfortable doing/not knowing today may well be an option in years time.
Plenty of gamers that I personally know have stuck with Core 2 Quad processors because, even though they might be 6-7 years old... They are more than adequate of running any game you throw at them once you overclock them, prolonging the gaming systems life.
| enrageorange said: RAM frequency is just the number next to the RAM. So if you get 1600 RAM you would want to get a motherboard that is compatible with 1600 or higher RAM to take advantage of the extra speed. Personally I would only get motherboards with 4 RAM slots so you have room to upgrade in the future. |
It's not "just a number" it's the frequency that the ram operates at it's part of what determines the bandwidth.
At this present time however, DDR3 1600mhz is indeed the sweet spot, for a short time 1866mhz Ram was the sweet spot untill prices inflated.
Taking advantage of the extra speed isnt difficult either, most new motherboards support DDR3 speeds in excess of 2133mhz and if they don't, it's nothing overclocking can't fix.
| rmarier83 said: Do you want to get a SSD (Solid State Drive), or a 7200RPM for the Boot Drive? Solid State Drives are much faster at reading data than mechanical hard drives are, but are more expensive per GB. Most people including myself usually have a small SSD drive as the boot drive (this is the drive your O.S. is on) and another hard drive for extra data storage. Lastly, adding the cost for Windows 7 or 8, usually adds another ~$100 to the cost of a PC, is that also a cost in your build? |
There is a 3rd and 4th option.
A Hybrid drive like the Seagate Momentus.
Or an SSD cache drive like the Sandisk Readycache.
--::{PC Gaming Master Race}::--
