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Message
re: Build the Best Gaming PC Your Money Can Buy: A Detailed Guide (Updated Sep 2014)
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:08 am to ILikeLSUToo
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:08 am to ILikeLSUToo
------------------------
++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
------------------------
Budget
As part of this guide, we are going to configure gaming PCs at three different budgets: $600, $800, and $1,000. I feel that these budgets best represent the performance range of mainstream custom gaming PCs, with the lower end being an ideal comparison to the next-gen consoles, and the higher end representing a powerful gaming PC with a fair amount of built-in future proofing for the evolution of next-gen games.
====///====Some Notes about the Budgets====\\\====
> The budget includes the PC only[/b] – That includes everything inside the case. Monitors, keyboards, mice, and headphones/speakers vary widely in personal preference and price, so those peripherals are not included.
> The sample build prices will have a deviation of about 10% from their respective budgets – When you save a configuration on PCPartPicker, you can monitor its total price and even see a graph showing its price history. You’ll notice that it changes often—it’s like watching a company’s stock, as I’ve seen hardware prices change multiple times in a 24-hour period. The price changes are the result of constantly cycling promos, rebate offers, basic supply and demand, and new releases. Because it changes so often, any particular set of components I recommend today could shift up or down in price tomorrow, or an hour from now. That’s why this is a guide, and not just a compilation of PCPartPicker builds for you to blindly accept.
> Promos are included – As I said above, one of the reasons PC hardware prices change so rapidly is because of the constant limited-time promos that cycle in and out. The promos can provide considerable savings and are reliable enough that if a promo ends on one part, you’re bound to find a promo on some other component that will offset the difference and not decrease performance.
> These budgets take rebates into account – Yes, I know rebates are annoying. But they are rampant in the PC hardware market. A $10 rebate here and there may seem like more trouble than it’s worth, but they add up to be a fair sum of money that can sometimes equate to getting the performance of a $700 PC for $600. If you follow directions, the companies do reliably make good on their rebate offers, and the whole process shouldn’t take you 30 minutes if you just mail them all at once. The only real drawback is that you have to temporarily tie up more money than your budget allowed (6–8 weeks unless you pay a couple of dollars to each company for rush processing). Regardless, I have decided to include rebates by default and urge you to find the wiggle room to include them yourself.
> The budget does not include an operating system – I wanted to focus on the hardware performance, since the operating system is pretty much a given. Most gamers are still using Windows 7 at this point. How you acquire the software is up to you. Of course, it would be wrong of me to suggest acquiring it illegally, so I won’t. Stealing is wrong, after all. I know it’s tempting to pirate Windows 7 because it’s incredibly easy to use one of many torrent sites to download and crack a fully working copy that even delivers updates—but is it right? Even if you’ve already dropped hundreds of dollars into hardware, and you’d rather just download a torrent of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit because it’s incredible easy, you should consider the money you’re taking from Microsoft by this devious act. Could you really just visit www.kickass.to and do a simple search for a “Windows 7 Loader by Daz,” download it in minutes, and fully activate any copy of Windows 7 without feeling guilty?
So, with your $600, $800, or $1,000 PC, how much money should you allocate to each component? That’s an important question and one that first-time builders often ignore when they allocate too much of their budget to components that should be treated as lower priority. The pie graph below shows a general percentage range you should be aiming for when selecting parts for your budget.
I decided to lump hard drives, optical drives, and solid state drives into the same category, because the percentage will still be the same in lower-budget machines (you simply remove the solid state drive from the equation, because a $600 budget will allow for a $60–$70 hard drive and an optional $15–$20 optical drive).
Some of the percentage ranges are wide by design. They account for variances in budget and premium options. For example, you’d probably spend 12% on the motherboard in a $1000 machine, but likely a few more percent in an $800 build because motherboard prices won’t scale down much in these performance ranges, and neither will memory or cases. Percentages can also vary due to discounts and rebate deals at various times of year (common with power supplies and video cards). Consider the chart as a basic sanity check to ensure you’re not making a common newbie mistake, such as putting too much money into the CPU, motherboard, or memory.
This guide will explain the thought process behind selecting each component. If the chart doesn’t make sense to you now, it should by the time you finish reading.
++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
------------------------
Budget
As part of this guide, we are going to configure gaming PCs at three different budgets: $600, $800, and $1,000. I feel that these budgets best represent the performance range of mainstream custom gaming PCs, with the lower end being an ideal comparison to the next-gen consoles, and the higher end representing a powerful gaming PC with a fair amount of built-in future proofing for the evolution of next-gen games.
====///====Some Notes about the Budgets====\\\====
> The budget includes the PC only[/b] – That includes everything inside the case. Monitors, keyboards, mice, and headphones/speakers vary widely in personal preference and price, so those peripherals are not included.
> The sample build prices will have a deviation of about 10% from their respective budgets – When you save a configuration on PCPartPicker, you can monitor its total price and even see a graph showing its price history. You’ll notice that it changes often—it’s like watching a company’s stock, as I’ve seen hardware prices change multiple times in a 24-hour period. The price changes are the result of constantly cycling promos, rebate offers, basic supply and demand, and new releases. Because it changes so often, any particular set of components I recommend today could shift up or down in price tomorrow, or an hour from now. That’s why this is a guide, and not just a compilation of PCPartPicker builds for you to blindly accept.
> Promos are included – As I said above, one of the reasons PC hardware prices change so rapidly is because of the constant limited-time promos that cycle in and out. The promos can provide considerable savings and are reliable enough that if a promo ends on one part, you’re bound to find a promo on some other component that will offset the difference and not decrease performance.
> These budgets take rebates into account – Yes, I know rebates are annoying. But they are rampant in the PC hardware market. A $10 rebate here and there may seem like more trouble than it’s worth, but they add up to be a fair sum of money that can sometimes equate to getting the performance of a $700 PC for $600. If you follow directions, the companies do reliably make good on their rebate offers, and the whole process shouldn’t take you 30 minutes if you just mail them all at once. The only real drawback is that you have to temporarily tie up more money than your budget allowed (6–8 weeks unless you pay a couple of dollars to each company for rush processing). Regardless, I have decided to include rebates by default and urge you to find the wiggle room to include them yourself.
> The budget does not include an operating system – I wanted to focus on the hardware performance, since the operating system is pretty much a given. Most gamers are still using Windows 7 at this point. How you acquire the software is up to you. Of course, it would be wrong of me to suggest acquiring it illegally, so I won’t. Stealing is wrong, after all. I know it’s tempting to pirate Windows 7 because it’s incredibly easy to use one of many torrent sites to download and crack a fully working copy that even delivers updates—but is it right? Even if you’ve already dropped hundreds of dollars into hardware, and you’d rather just download a torrent of Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit because it’s incredible easy, you should consider the money you’re taking from Microsoft by this devious act. Could you really just visit www.kickass.to and do a simple search for a “Windows 7 Loader by Daz,” download it in minutes, and fully activate any copy of Windows 7 without feeling guilty?
So, with your $600, $800, or $1,000 PC, how much money should you allocate to each component? That’s an important question and one that first-time builders often ignore when they allocate too much of their budget to components that should be treated as lower priority. The pie graph below shows a general percentage range you should be aiming for when selecting parts for your budget.
I decided to lump hard drives, optical drives, and solid state drives into the same category, because the percentage will still be the same in lower-budget machines (you simply remove the solid state drive from the equation, because a $600 budget will allow for a $60–$70 hard drive and an optional $15–$20 optical drive).
Some of the percentage ranges are wide by design. They account for variances in budget and premium options. For example, you’d probably spend 12% on the motherboard in a $1000 machine, but likely a few more percent in an $800 build because motherboard prices won’t scale down much in these performance ranges, and neither will memory or cases. Percentages can also vary due to discounts and rebate deals at various times of year (common with power supplies and video cards). Consider the chart as a basic sanity check to ensure you’re not making a common newbie mistake, such as putting too much money into the CPU, motherboard, or memory.
This guide will explain the thought process behind selecting each component. If the chart doesn’t make sense to you now, it should by the time you finish reading.
This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 3:31 pm
1
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:08 am to ILikeLSUToo
------------------------
++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
------------------------
Monitors and Frames Per Second
Yes, we’re starting with a part that isn’t even included in our budgets. But without this information, we cannot create an informed build. That’s because your monitor’s resolution will dictate your video card needs, and the video card commands a large portion of the budget, as it should.
This section is not about actually selecting a monitor, however. Here, we will focus on only two factors that will directly influence your overall gaming experience: Resolution and Refresh Rate. You probably already know what resolution is, so let’s save resolution options for later and take a moment to discuss refresh rate. In that respect, monitors generally come in two flavors: 60 Hz and 120 Hz. Some people mistakenly view this as a direct indication of frames per second (FPS). While this does have a significant and somewhat absolute correlation with frame rate, it’s important to understand that FPS (number of frames per second being processed) is independent of the monitor refresh rate, which is, you guessed it, the rate at which the monitor’s hardware is refreshing the display. Why does that matter? Answer: Just because you have a 60 Hz monitor doesn’t mean that anything beyond 60 FPS is useless and unnoticeable. You can notice a benefit with a frame rate higher than 60 FPS, even on a 60 Hz monitor.
Over the years, people have parroted some variation of the phrase: “The human eye can only perceive 30 frames per second.”—or 40 or 60 or 15 or 100. There are too many variations in the way digital media is presented to make such a blanket statement. To learn more, read this article: LINK
Forget anything you’ve heard about how many frames per second the human eye can see. We aren’t watching a movie. We’re playing a game that requires your physical interaction as well as dynamic input from other hardware (i.e., mouse and keyboard). It’s a different experience, and here’s why.
When you play a game, you have the option to enable or disable vertical sync (VSync). When you enable it, your video card’s goal will be to keep the frame rate of the rendering engine (the game) equal to your monitor’s refresh rate. In this case, 60. Assuming you have a video card powerful enough to achieve this, VSync turns your monitor into the frame rate bottleneck. This isn’t a bad thing, visually. 60 full frames per second is the maximum your 60 Hz monitor is capable of allowing your eyes to see. It’s the frame rate you want to achieve, minimum, in most cases.
When you disable VSync, your video card will work independently to output the highest frame rate it’s capable of producing under that game engine at the graphics settings you’ve chosen. So, without VSync, you might run a FPS monitoring program and see that you’re getting 90 FPS on your 60 Hz monitor. What you’re actually seeing is the FPS that the GPU can produce before it reaches your monitor. The monitor is processing all of those frames, but it is not displaying every whole frame. But this surplus of frames, so to speak, lends itself to another absolute necessity in fast-reflex games such as First-Person Shooters, especially online: low-latency mouse response. Mouse lag.
In the simplest of terms, when in VSync mode, your video card waits for the monitor's next refresh operation before rendering the next frame. In such a case, when you move your mouse, it must wait for the game engine to respond, which is waiting for the video card, which is waiting for the monitor to refresh, and then you see your cursor/crosshairs move. Because the video card is depending on the monitor, it has to wait for the next refresh cycle before rendering the next frame. If the frame rate is even lower than the refresh rate, the monitor is now performing more refresh cycles before the next frame is rendered, causing an even longer waiting time for the mouse to respond.
The latency between the video card and the monitor is the largest, which is why watching a cut-scene at 24–30 FPS doesn't look bad to your eyes, but trying to manipulate your character in real-time at that frame rate can feel loose, slow, and unresponsive. Ideally, you want to be able to render more than 60 FPS consistently, without VSync, so that your video card is always ready for your monitor to show a frame before the next refresh cycle.
Here’s a visual example, involving two theoretical players with the same hardware and precisely the same skill level:
The above chart only depicts a stop/aim/shoot scenario, which doesn’t even take into account the lateral movement of the players or even the crippled accuracy that results from Player B’s lower frame rate, but as you can see, the additional time spent waiting for frames and refresh cycles nearly doubles the total latency between the player’s mouse movements and the action on the screen. If you pit these two players against each other, you’d certainly want to be Player A. You would see your own movements before Player B does. You’d even see your opponent’s movements before he does because the game engine’s response is not dependent on the monitor (therefore the enemy is in the player’s virtual line of sight at the same point in time in both scenarios).
I added human reaction time to the graph to show that the input-to-display time all occurs in a fraction of the time it would take even a skilled player to react and compensate. This lag between your mouse and the monitor's display of your movements is only a matter of milliseconds, but it is noticeable when you have to make frequent, split-second movement decisions in a game.
Test your own reaction time at humanbenchmark.com
But like most benefits, there’s a cost. With extra frames comes the potential for screen tearing, which is when the screen appears torn between multiple frames. Some people hate it, and some people don’t notice it. Here’s an extreme example of screen tearing:
Image borrowed from tweakguides.com
Notice the different horizontal sections of the screen that are out of vertical alignment. As I said, this is an extreme example to show its effects clearly. Tearing most commonly occurs at frame rates higher than your monitor’s refresh rate because the monitor is trying to display more frames per refresh cycle. This will cause the monitor to display the next frame before it's finished displaying the previous frame. It’s more noticeable in some games, and completely unnoticeable in others.
++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time. Read the PDF for the most accurate up-to-date info.It's best to download the PDF and use a proper PDF reader. Google's formatting of PDFs breaks all of the links. Link to directly download the PDF. I have stopped updating the text in the thread because the forum's limited code makes it far too time-consuming to change images and add text.++++
------------------------
Monitors and Frames Per Second
Yes, we’re starting with a part that isn’t even included in our budgets. But without this information, we cannot create an informed build. That’s because your monitor’s resolution will dictate your video card needs, and the video card commands a large portion of the budget, as it should.
This section is not about actually selecting a monitor, however. Here, we will focus on only two factors that will directly influence your overall gaming experience: Resolution and Refresh Rate. You probably already know what resolution is, so let’s save resolution options for later and take a moment to discuss refresh rate. In that respect, monitors generally come in two flavors: 60 Hz and 120 Hz. Some people mistakenly view this as a direct indication of frames per second (FPS). While this does have a significant and somewhat absolute correlation with frame rate, it’s important to understand that FPS (number of frames per second being processed) is independent of the monitor refresh rate, which is, you guessed it, the rate at which the monitor’s hardware is refreshing the display. Why does that matter? Answer: Just because you have a 60 Hz monitor doesn’t mean that anything beyond 60 FPS is useless and unnoticeable. You can notice a benefit with a frame rate higher than 60 FPS, even on a 60 Hz monitor.
Over the years, people have parroted some variation of the phrase: “The human eye can only perceive 30 frames per second.”—or 40 or 60 or 15 or 100. There are too many variations in the way digital media is presented to make such a blanket statement. To learn more, read this article: LINK
Forget anything you’ve heard about how many frames per second the human eye can see. We aren’t watching a movie. We’re playing a game that requires your physical interaction as well as dynamic input from other hardware (i.e., mouse and keyboard). It’s a different experience, and here’s why.
When you play a game, you have the option to enable or disable vertical sync (VSync). When you enable it, your video card’s goal will be to keep the frame rate of the rendering engine (the game) equal to your monitor’s refresh rate. In this case, 60. Assuming you have a video card powerful enough to achieve this, VSync turns your monitor into the frame rate bottleneck. This isn’t a bad thing, visually. 60 full frames per second is the maximum your 60 Hz monitor is capable of allowing your eyes to see. It’s the frame rate you want to achieve, minimum, in most cases.
When you disable VSync, your video card will work independently to output the highest frame rate it’s capable of producing under that game engine at the graphics settings you’ve chosen. So, without VSync, you might run a FPS monitoring program and see that you’re getting 90 FPS on your 60 Hz monitor. What you’re actually seeing is the FPS that the GPU can produce before it reaches your monitor. The monitor is processing all of those frames, but it is not displaying every whole frame. But this surplus of frames, so to speak, lends itself to another absolute necessity in fast-reflex games such as First-Person Shooters, especially online: low-latency mouse response. Mouse lag.
In the simplest of terms, when in VSync mode, your video card waits for the monitor's next refresh operation before rendering the next frame. In such a case, when you move your mouse, it must wait for the game engine to respond, which is waiting for the video card, which is waiting for the monitor to refresh, and then you see your cursor/crosshairs move. Because the video card is depending on the monitor, it has to wait for the next refresh cycle before rendering the next frame. If the frame rate is even lower than the refresh rate, the monitor is now performing more refresh cycles before the next frame is rendered, causing an even longer waiting time for the mouse to respond.
The latency between the video card and the monitor is the largest, which is why watching a cut-scene at 24–30 FPS doesn't look bad to your eyes, but trying to manipulate your character in real-time at that frame rate can feel loose, slow, and unresponsive. Ideally, you want to be able to render more than 60 FPS consistently, without VSync, so that your video card is always ready for your monitor to show a frame before the next refresh cycle.
Here’s a visual example, involving two theoretical players with the same hardware and precisely the same skill level:
The above chart only depicts a stop/aim/shoot scenario, which doesn’t even take into account the lateral movement of the players or even the crippled accuracy that results from Player B’s lower frame rate, but as you can see, the additional time spent waiting for frames and refresh cycles nearly doubles the total latency between the player’s mouse movements and the action on the screen. If you pit these two players against each other, you’d certainly want to be Player A. You would see your own movements before Player B does. You’d even see your opponent’s movements before he does because the game engine’s response is not dependent on the monitor (therefore the enemy is in the player’s virtual line of sight at the same point in time in both scenarios).
I added human reaction time to the graph to show that the input-to-display time all occurs in a fraction of the time it would take even a skilled player to react and compensate. This lag between your mouse and the monitor's display of your movements is only a matter of milliseconds, but it is noticeable when you have to make frequent, split-second movement decisions in a game.
Test your own reaction time at humanbenchmark.com
But like most benefits, there’s a cost. With extra frames comes the potential for screen tearing, which is when the screen appears torn between multiple frames. Some people hate it, and some people don’t notice it. Here’s an extreme example of screen tearing:
Image borrowed from tweakguides.com
Notice the different horizontal sections of the screen that are out of vertical alignment. As I said, this is an extreme example to show its effects clearly. Tearing most commonly occurs at frame rates higher than your monitor’s refresh rate because the monitor is trying to display more frames per refresh cycle. This will cause the monitor to display the next frame before it's finished displaying the previous frame. It’s more noticeable in some games, and completely unnoticeable in others.
This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 3:32 pm
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