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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 2:11 am to ILikeLSUToo
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:11 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++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time.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.++++
------------------------
The Motherboard
Sometimes referred to as the mainboard, or “mobo,” the motherboard is the main PCB, allowing all of your components to communicate and even providing power to some of them. Hopefully, you already knew that. The stability of a motherboard can make or break a system because it holds so many crucial components. This fact leads some people to believe they should be spending as much as they can on the motherboard, assuming more money means more stability. This is partially true, but only because expensive motherboards tend to have more features that require extra power. If you aren’t actually using those features, you’ve overpaid for your motherboard.
As you saw in the budget pie chart, only 11–17% of your budget should be allocated to the motherboard in a standard gaming PC. It’s preferable to keep that percentage on the lower side and choose a board with the features that meet your needs. This section will discuss the main features to consider when purchasing a motherboard.
====///====Brand—Does it Matter?====\\\====
Everyone has an opinion. Ford vs. Chevy, Intel vs. AMD, Heinz vs. Hunts, and so on. I’ll admit that I do have a certain level of bias for particular brands, but I recognize that bias as mostly superficial and based on isolated incidents (e.g., one particular brand failed on me twice, so I never bought another one again). I won’t pollute this section with my opinions on brand. The truth is most of these brands get their components from the same manufacturers, and motherboard failures are generally the result of either user error or just bad luck. There’s no point in polling for opinions about reliability because the answers you get will be corrupted by pride of ownership and hearsay.
These are common brands, in alphabetical order:
> ASRock
> ASUS
> Biostar
> ECS
> Foxconn
> Gigabyte
> Intel
> MSI
> ZOTAC
You’ll be equally safe with any of the above brands. You’d be surprised how incestuous the brands really are. For example, Foxconn makes Intel’s motherboards as well as boards and other components for nearly every major electronics brand out there.
When shopping for a motherboard, consider user reviews as you would for any other product, but avoid being influenced by the label. It’s best to make your decision based on reviews of individual motherboard models, not of overall brands. Still, individual reviews can be tainted by brand preference. Take under consideration any specific problems that are cited across multiple reviews. Otherwise, just choose the cheapest board that meets your needs.
====///====What Do You Need from the Motherboard?====\\\====
Motherboards come with a wide array of feature sets. For our purposes, we’ll look at the following features, labeled in the image below:
The motherboard shown above is an ASRock 990FX Extreme3, which uses the latest chipset for AMD’s Socket AM3+ platform.
====Form Factor====
There are four commonly used form factors in mainstream PCs: Extended ATX (EATX), Standard ATX (ATX), Micro-ATX (mATX), and Mini-ITX. The obvious differences are size and number of onboard components.
Side-by-side size comparison of form factors. The ATX form factor motherboard measures 12” x 9.6” (L x W)
I did not include EATX in the above comparison because the sizes can vary. It has an official size standard of 12” x 13” (L x W), but many motherboards that are classified as EATX are only slightly wider than an ATX board. It’s a form factor reserved for the highest-end (and expensive) motherboards with the most features. With any EATX, you’ll need to use a full-tower case or carefully research a mid-tower to accommodate it.
By far the most common setup for any performance PC uses the ATX form factor, as it offers the widest variety of options. The smaller form factors allow you to use cases that are more compact; they are well suited for HTPCs, home servers, and low-profile light productivity PCs.
Yes, you can build a decent gaming PC with mATX and even Mini-ITX motherboards in small cases, but you’ll have to be careful about selecting properly sized parts and cooling solutions. As you become more familiar with part selection and research, you may find the smaller form factor parts can net you a dirt cheap, compact, and “capable” gaming PC, or a high performance gaming powerhouse in a small space for a premium price.
Tom’s Hardware published an article in June 2013 that detailed a $1,300 Mini-ITX build that has less performance than the $1,000 sample build in this guide.: LINK.
Although the guys at Tom’s made several poor choices on components in that particular build, you will still undeniably get more for your money with an ATX build. That’s the setup we’ll stick with for now.
====CPU Socket====
I’m going to assume you know what this is. And obviously, you have to pick the right socket for the CPU you’re buying:
++++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.++++
------------------------
The Motherboard
Sometimes referred to as the mainboard, or “mobo,” the motherboard is the main PCB, allowing all of your components to communicate and even providing power to some of them. Hopefully, you already knew that. The stability of a motherboard can make or break a system because it holds so many crucial components. This fact leads some people to believe they should be spending as much as they can on the motherboard, assuming more money means more stability. This is partially true, but only because expensive motherboards tend to have more features that require extra power. If you aren’t actually using those features, you’ve overpaid for your motherboard.
As you saw in the budget pie chart, only 11–17% of your budget should be allocated to the motherboard in a standard gaming PC. It’s preferable to keep that percentage on the lower side and choose a board with the features that meet your needs. This section will discuss the main features to consider when purchasing a motherboard.
====///====Brand—Does it Matter?====\\\====
Everyone has an opinion. Ford vs. Chevy, Intel vs. AMD, Heinz vs. Hunts, and so on. I’ll admit that I do have a certain level of bias for particular brands, but I recognize that bias as mostly superficial and based on isolated incidents (e.g., one particular brand failed on me twice, so I never bought another one again). I won’t pollute this section with my opinions on brand. The truth is most of these brands get their components from the same manufacturers, and motherboard failures are generally the result of either user error or just bad luck. There’s no point in polling for opinions about reliability because the answers you get will be corrupted by pride of ownership and hearsay.
These are common brands, in alphabetical order:
> ASRock
> ASUS
> Biostar
> ECS
> Foxconn
> Gigabyte
> Intel
> MSI
> ZOTAC
You’ll be equally safe with any of the above brands. You’d be surprised how incestuous the brands really are. For example, Foxconn makes Intel’s motherboards as well as boards and other components for nearly every major electronics brand out there.
When shopping for a motherboard, consider user reviews as you would for any other product, but avoid being influenced by the label. It’s best to make your decision based on reviews of individual motherboard models, not of overall brands. Still, individual reviews can be tainted by brand preference. Take under consideration any specific problems that are cited across multiple reviews. Otherwise, just choose the cheapest board that meets your needs.
====///====What Do You Need from the Motherboard?====\\\====
Motherboards come with a wide array of feature sets. For our purposes, we’ll look at the following features, labeled in the image below:
The motherboard shown above is an ASRock 990FX Extreme3, which uses the latest chipset for AMD’s Socket AM3+ platform.
====Form Factor====
There are four commonly used form factors in mainstream PCs: Extended ATX (EATX), Standard ATX (ATX), Micro-ATX (mATX), and Mini-ITX. The obvious differences are size and number of onboard components.
Side-by-side size comparison of form factors. The ATX form factor motherboard measures 12” x 9.6” (L x W)
I did not include EATX in the above comparison because the sizes can vary. It has an official size standard of 12” x 13” (L x W), but many motherboards that are classified as EATX are only slightly wider than an ATX board. It’s a form factor reserved for the highest-end (and expensive) motherboards with the most features. With any EATX, you’ll need to use a full-tower case or carefully research a mid-tower to accommodate it.
By far the most common setup for any performance PC uses the ATX form factor, as it offers the widest variety of options. The smaller form factors allow you to use cases that are more compact; they are well suited for HTPCs, home servers, and low-profile light productivity PCs.
Yes, you can build a decent gaming PC with mATX and even Mini-ITX motherboards in small cases, but you’ll have to be careful about selecting properly sized parts and cooling solutions. As you become more familiar with part selection and research, you may find the smaller form factor parts can net you a dirt cheap, compact, and “capable” gaming PC, or a high performance gaming powerhouse in a small space for a premium price.
Tom’s Hardware published an article in June 2013 that detailed a $1,300 Mini-ITX build that has less performance than the $1,000 sample build in this guide.: LINK.
Although the guys at Tom’s made several poor choices on components in that particular build, you will still undeniably get more for your money with an ATX build. That’s the setup we’ll stick with for now.
====CPU Socket====
I’m going to assume you know what this is. And obviously, you have to pick the right socket for the CPU you’re buying:
This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 3:35 pm
1
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:12 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.++++
------------------------
====Northbridge and Southbridge (Chipset)====
The Northbridge is the chip that generally regulated crucial functions/components such as the CPU, memory, PCIe, and front-side bus (the pathway that connects the CPU to your other components). The Southbridge is a slower chip that interfaces with the Northbridge and handles basic input/output functions such as USB, audio, regular PCI bus, Ethernet, and others. Nowadays, many of the Northbridge controls have migrated to the CPU, and Southbridge chips have been removed, integrated, or renamed/reconfigured. For example, Intel CPUs now have an integrated memory controller and PCIe controller that comprise an integrated Northbridge chip. AMD CPUs also have integrated memory controllers, but still rely on a Northbridge for PCIe functions.
The functions traditionally provided by the Northbridge and Southbridge chips are now more commonly referred to as the chipset. Given the role that the chipset plays in regulating your hardware, it’s important to make the right choice (if the CPU is the brain of your PC, the chipset is the spine). There are multiple chipsets available for each socket, but the choice is easy for a gaming PC, as I’ll explain below.
###Intel Socket 1150 and Socket 1155 Chipsets###
The desirable chipsets for Socket 1150 and 1155 are Z87 and Z77 respectively. Here’s why:
> Full overclocking support for unlocked CPUs – you’re going to want this when you decide to learn about overclocking.
> Support for SLI/Crossfire – later down the road as games evolve and become more demanding, adding a second graphics card is an easy, cost-effective performance boost. You’ll need a chipset that supports it.
> More SATA 6 GB/s ports and USB 3.0 ports – not quite as important, but nice to have the extra ports for possible expansion later on.
> 2 DIMMs per memory channel – most, but not all, of the chipsets support this, but it’s handy to be able to run up to four sticks of RAM in dual channel, so you can later add more RAM by simply adding two more sticks of what you already have, rather than having to replace them.
There are several more things unique to the Z-series chipsets, but the above features are the ones you’re most likely to care about. The other available chipsets (H87/H77, B85/B75, and more) lack one or more of the above features and are generally more suitable for HTPCs and budget home/office systems.
And if you’re wondering, the main difference between Z77 and the Z87 is that Z87 supports more native SATA 6GB/s ports (more on that later) and more USB 3.0 ports. This shouldn’t influence your decision, because the two chipsets support entirely different CPUs. If you want an i5-3570K, you’ll be using a Z77 socket 1155 motherboard, and 4670K CPUs will use a Z87 socket 1150 board.
###Intel Socket 2011 Chipset###
Intel’s enthusiast/extreme platform currently uses the X79 chipset, which has similar features to Z77—the key differences being PCIe lanes and quad-channel memory (more on those later).
###AMD Socket AM3+ Chipsets###
One great thing about AMD is backwards compatibility. They stick with the same socket for a long time, and bios updates allow today’s AMD CPUs to work with chipsets that were released years ago. In fact, Some of the older AM3 (non-AM3+) chips are able to run on AM2+ motherboards with a proper bios update, and likewise for AM3+ chips and AM3 boards, provided the boards can handle the current. With careful attention to detail, AMD makes it possible to build a competent gaming PC at very low budgets. But for an inexperienced builder, it could be more headache than it’s worth, and you run the risk of selecting a motherboard that’s “mechanically” compatible but cripples the performance of your CPU. We’ll keep it simple and somewhat painless by narrowing the choices to two chipsets:
990FX and 970
The 990FX is AMD’s “top” chipset. It has the highest level of support for SLI/Crossfire (PCIe 2.0 x16/x16) and overclocking. The 970, on the other hand, is a slightly more budget-oriented chipset. Most of them don’t support crossfire/SLI, but there are a few that support a PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 configuration, which would give slightly reduced performance over x16/x16 but still viable. Overclocking performance on the 970 chipset, as far as I’ve read, is not as good as a 990FX, likely due to the quality of the voltage regulator circuit design and other components being scaled down to cut costs. In fact, there are a few 970 boards that only support 95W TDP CPUs (i.e., FX-6300, 4300, 6100, and 4100). The differences in these two chipsets aren’t too big, but it’s generally a good idea to pair a 125W TDP CPU (the 8350 or 8320) with the higher-end chipset, especially if overclocking and/or planning to SLI/Crossfire in the future.
====SATA Ports====
Serial Advance Technology Attachment (SATA) is the modern interface used to connect your internal drives (hard drives, solid state drives, and optical drives). There are several types (revisions) of SATA ports, the main difference being transfer speed. Today’s motherboards include a mixture of SATA 3Gbps and SATA 6Gbps ports, explained below:
====SATA 3Gbps (SATA Revision 2.0)====
This SATA revision has an advertised max throughput of 3.0 gigabits per second (Gbps). Note, this is a bit, not a byte—similar to the way your Internet download speed is advertised. There are 8 bits in a byte, so an Internet download speed of 12Mbps has a max download rate of 1.5 megabytes per second (MB/s). But to further complicate things, serial protocols like SATA use a type of wire encoding called 10b8b that essentially means only 80% of the bitrate is devoted to actual data throughput—in other words, the actual max throughput of SATA 3Gbps is 300 MB/s. If you want to read the geeky details about this, have at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding
++++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.++++
------------------------
====Northbridge and Southbridge (Chipset)====
The Northbridge is the chip that generally regulated crucial functions/components such as the CPU, memory, PCIe, and front-side bus (the pathway that connects the CPU to your other components). The Southbridge is a slower chip that interfaces with the Northbridge and handles basic input/output functions such as USB, audio, regular PCI bus, Ethernet, and others. Nowadays, many of the Northbridge controls have migrated to the CPU, and Southbridge chips have been removed, integrated, or renamed/reconfigured. For example, Intel CPUs now have an integrated memory controller and PCIe controller that comprise an integrated Northbridge chip. AMD CPUs also have integrated memory controllers, but still rely on a Northbridge for PCIe functions.
The functions traditionally provided by the Northbridge and Southbridge chips are now more commonly referred to as the chipset. Given the role that the chipset plays in regulating your hardware, it’s important to make the right choice (if the CPU is the brain of your PC, the chipset is the spine). There are multiple chipsets available for each socket, but the choice is easy for a gaming PC, as I’ll explain below.
###Intel Socket 1150 and Socket 1155 Chipsets###
The desirable chipsets for Socket 1150 and 1155 are Z87 and Z77 respectively. Here’s why:
> Full overclocking support for unlocked CPUs – you’re going to want this when you decide to learn about overclocking.
> Support for SLI/Crossfire – later down the road as games evolve and become more demanding, adding a second graphics card is an easy, cost-effective performance boost. You’ll need a chipset that supports it.
> More SATA 6 GB/s ports and USB 3.0 ports – not quite as important, but nice to have the extra ports for possible expansion later on.
> 2 DIMMs per memory channel – most, but not all, of the chipsets support this, but it’s handy to be able to run up to four sticks of RAM in dual channel, so you can later add more RAM by simply adding two more sticks of what you already have, rather than having to replace them.
There are several more things unique to the Z-series chipsets, but the above features are the ones you’re most likely to care about. The other available chipsets (H87/H77, B85/B75, and more) lack one or more of the above features and are generally more suitable for HTPCs and budget home/office systems.
And if you’re wondering, the main difference between Z77 and the Z87 is that Z87 supports more native SATA 6GB/s ports (more on that later) and more USB 3.0 ports. This shouldn’t influence your decision, because the two chipsets support entirely different CPUs. If you want an i5-3570K, you’ll be using a Z77 socket 1155 motherboard, and 4670K CPUs will use a Z87 socket 1150 board.
###Intel Socket 2011 Chipset###
Intel’s enthusiast/extreme platform currently uses the X79 chipset, which has similar features to Z77—the key differences being PCIe lanes and quad-channel memory (more on those later).
###AMD Socket AM3+ Chipsets###
One great thing about AMD is backwards compatibility. They stick with the same socket for a long time, and bios updates allow today’s AMD CPUs to work with chipsets that were released years ago. In fact, Some of the older AM3 (non-AM3+) chips are able to run on AM2+ motherboards with a proper bios update, and likewise for AM3+ chips and AM3 boards, provided the boards can handle the current. With careful attention to detail, AMD makes it possible to build a competent gaming PC at very low budgets. But for an inexperienced builder, it could be more headache than it’s worth, and you run the risk of selecting a motherboard that’s “mechanically” compatible but cripples the performance of your CPU. We’ll keep it simple and somewhat painless by narrowing the choices to two chipsets:
990FX and 970
The 990FX is AMD’s “top” chipset. It has the highest level of support for SLI/Crossfire (PCIe 2.0 x16/x16) and overclocking. The 970, on the other hand, is a slightly more budget-oriented chipset. Most of them don’t support crossfire/SLI, but there are a few that support a PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 configuration, which would give slightly reduced performance over x16/x16 but still viable. Overclocking performance on the 970 chipset, as far as I’ve read, is not as good as a 990FX, likely due to the quality of the voltage regulator circuit design and other components being scaled down to cut costs. In fact, there are a few 970 boards that only support 95W TDP CPUs (i.e., FX-6300, 4300, 6100, and 4100). The differences in these two chipsets aren’t too big, but it’s generally a good idea to pair a 125W TDP CPU (the 8350 or 8320) with the higher-end chipset, especially if overclocking and/or planning to SLI/Crossfire in the future.
====SATA Ports====
Serial Advance Technology Attachment (SATA) is the modern interface used to connect your internal drives (hard drives, solid state drives, and optical drives). There are several types (revisions) of SATA ports, the main difference being transfer speed. Today’s motherboards include a mixture of SATA 3Gbps and SATA 6Gbps ports, explained below:
====SATA 3Gbps (SATA Revision 2.0)====
This SATA revision has an advertised max throughput of 3.0 gigabits per second (Gbps). Note, this is a bit, not a byte—similar to the way your Internet download speed is advertised. There are 8 bits in a byte, so an Internet download speed of 12Mbps has a max download rate of 1.5 megabytes per second (MB/s). But to further complicate things, serial protocols like SATA use a type of wire encoding called 10b8b that essentially means only 80% of the bitrate is devoted to actual data throughput—in other words, the actual max throughput of SATA 3Gbps is 300 MB/s. If you want to read the geeky details about this, have at it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8b/10b_encoding
This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 3:35 pm
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