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Started By
Message
re: Build the Best Gaming PC Your Money Can Buy: A Detailed Guide (Updated Sep 2014)
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:13 am to ILikeLSUToo
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:13 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++++ALERT: You are reading an out-of-date version of the guide and wasting your time.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 Power Supply Unit (PSU)
The power supply unit is that metal box that converts alternating current from your electronic outlet to the direct current needed by your PC.
A standard ATX PSU
It doesn’t make your computer any faster, so all you really need to do is find a cheap one with enough wattage, right?
Nope. Choosing a PSU is much more fun than that. An insufficient PSU can cause stability problems. A bad PSU can kill your components. This part of the process is important, and should be treated as such. Here’s what you need to know.
====///====Trusted PSU Brands====\\\====
Knowing what brands are good and which ones to avoid is the biggest hurdle of this whole process. There are dozens of brands out there, with several tiers of quality within each brand. Sorting through all those brands is laborious, and mostly an exercise in futility since quite a few brands sell power supplies made by the same manufacturer. There’s an incredible disparity in quality between lowest- and highest-end PSUs, so the easiest thing to do is rely on the opinions of experts and enthusiasts with more resources and years of experience devoted to testing PSUs.
Because of the vast amount of PSU brands and models at various price points, brand bias has become a necessary evil. The PC enthusiast community has more or less reached a consensus on the PSU brands that are considered “fully trusted.” The common top names you’ll find are:
> Antec
> Corsair
> Enermax
> PC Power & Cooling
> Seasonic
> Silverstone
> XFX
This doesn’t tell the whole story, however. As I said, some of these brands use different manufacturers depending on the model, so it’s not enough to choose the cheapest of the above brands that meets your needs. To get a clearer view of the models to look for, and which to avoid, refer to this well-researched post that places PSU brands/models into various tiers: PSU Tiered List. The top tier lists include a few brands that I did not put in the list above, simply because they aren’t as common or because it’s a brand with more “bad” models than good ones. The above brands are considered “safe”—and most importantly, none of these brands have PSU models in the lower tier categories.
As you’ll see in the tiered lists, there are other brands that have quite a few good models, but require a little more research to be sure it’s not from a low-quality manufacturer (the tier list is helpful in that regard). These “partially trusted” brands include:
> Cooler Master
> Cougar
> Kingwin
> OCZ
> Rosewill
> Thermaltake
Yes, some people will argue to add companies to this list and remove some, but once you’ve narrowed the list this far, it becomes a pointless war much like AMD vs. NVIDIA. Anyone who has a strong opinion one way or the other is not a reliable source of information.
In the post linked above, the tiers are described as followed:
Ideally, we want a PSU from tier 1 or tier 2 for top-level stability and longevity. Sometimes, that’s not feasible at certain budgets. The good news is, PSUs in tier 2b and tier 3 are still fine units for lower budget systems, or really in any gaming PC that won’t be subjected to extreme overclocks and a plethora of voltage tweaks that require the utmost stability and zero margin for error. You’ll find many of the same brands across Tiers 1–3, which is an important indicator of reliability, even if the power output quality has been scaled back in favor of marketing at different budget levels.
====///====PSU Quality and Manufacturers====\\\====
If you are curious about what makes a PSU “good” or “bad” (and you should be), read this excellent article at tomshardware.com: LINK
The article discusses the differences in designers, manufacturers, and labels. It also gives a run-down of some of the brands to avoid, discusses quality standards in the individual components of a PSU, and shows you how to identify manufacturer information about your PSU. The article also provides a giant list of all the PSU brands and who manufacturers them. It’s interesting that some of the popular brands on the market get their PSUs from several different manufacturers.
That list, as a whole, is not useful unless you happen to be familiar with the quality standards of each and every one of these manufacturers. I sure as hell don’t know who Dongguan Zhangmotou is. But if you look at some of the brands that have notoriety (either as good or bad), you can start to figure out the “who’s who” among a handful of companies. For example, if you looked up the Tier 1 models from the other link, you’d find that about a third of them are made by Seasonic. Many of the brands made the list for the sole reason that they are made by Seasonic, as it’s one of the most reputable manufacturers of PSUs. Other common manufacturers of Tier 1 brands include Enermax and Delta.
++++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 Power Supply Unit (PSU)
The power supply unit is that metal box that converts alternating current from your electronic outlet to the direct current needed by your PC.
A standard ATX PSU
It doesn’t make your computer any faster, so all you really need to do is find a cheap one with enough wattage, right?
Nope. Choosing a PSU is much more fun than that. An insufficient PSU can cause stability problems. A bad PSU can kill your components. This part of the process is important, and should be treated as such. Here’s what you need to know.
====///====Trusted PSU Brands====\\\====
Knowing what brands are good and which ones to avoid is the biggest hurdle of this whole process. There are dozens of brands out there, with several tiers of quality within each brand. Sorting through all those brands is laborious, and mostly an exercise in futility since quite a few brands sell power supplies made by the same manufacturer. There’s an incredible disparity in quality between lowest- and highest-end PSUs, so the easiest thing to do is rely on the opinions of experts and enthusiasts with more resources and years of experience devoted to testing PSUs.
Because of the vast amount of PSU brands and models at various price points, brand bias has become a necessary evil. The PC enthusiast community has more or less reached a consensus on the PSU brands that are considered “fully trusted.” The common top names you’ll find are:
> Antec
> Corsair
> Enermax
> PC Power & Cooling
> Seasonic
> Silverstone
> XFX
This doesn’t tell the whole story, however. As I said, some of these brands use different manufacturers depending on the model, so it’s not enough to choose the cheapest of the above brands that meets your needs. To get a clearer view of the models to look for, and which to avoid, refer to this well-researched post that places PSU brands/models into various tiers: PSU Tiered List. The top tier lists include a few brands that I did not put in the list above, simply because they aren’t as common or because it’s a brand with more “bad” models than good ones. The above brands are considered “safe”—and most importantly, none of these brands have PSU models in the lower tier categories.
As you’ll see in the tiered lists, there are other brands that have quite a few good models, but require a little more research to be sure it’s not from a low-quality manufacturer (the tier list is helpful in that regard). These “partially trusted” brands include:
> Cooler Master
> Cougar
> Kingwin
> OCZ
> Rosewill
> Thermaltake
Yes, some people will argue to add companies to this list and remove some, but once you’ve narrowed the list this far, it becomes a pointless war much like AMD vs. NVIDIA. Anyone who has a strong opinion one way or the other is not a reliable source of information.
In the post linked above, the tiers are described as followed:
quote:
> Tier 1 provides the best quality power, great for overclocking, super high-end systems, and bragging rights. The best of the best. Very good longevity.
> Tier 2 offers very good quality power output, and great reliability. Highly recommended for use in new systems.
> Tier 2b contains units that almost made Tier 2, but may not have quite as good quality output(still very good), or may not last as long. Recommended for systems not expected to run 24/7 for several years.
> Tier 3 power supplies fully meet all ATX requirements for power output quality, but don't have as good of power output quality as above tiers. No reason to replace one if you have one, and they're still good choices for most systems.
> Tier 4 units may have some problems, such as being unable to deliver rated power at higher temperatures, or being slightly out of ATX spec on power output quality. Not recommended to buy except in situations where you will not be stressing it, or expecting it to last for more than a few years. If you have one, you can probably keep using it unless you're experiencing problems.
> Tier 5 power supplies are NOT RECOMMENDED. If you have one, you should strongly consider replacing it ASAP. These can damage your computer, and often cannot put out the power that they're rated for. If a brand name is listed here, then all models from that brand name are considered to be Tier 5, except for those specific models listed above.
Ideally, we want a PSU from tier 1 or tier 2 for top-level stability and longevity. Sometimes, that’s not feasible at certain budgets. The good news is, PSUs in tier 2b and tier 3 are still fine units for lower budget systems, or really in any gaming PC that won’t be subjected to extreme overclocks and a plethora of voltage tweaks that require the utmost stability and zero margin for error. You’ll find many of the same brands across Tiers 1–3, which is an important indicator of reliability, even if the power output quality has been scaled back in favor of marketing at different budget levels.
====///====PSU Quality and Manufacturers====\\\====
If you are curious about what makes a PSU “good” or “bad” (and you should be), read this excellent article at tomshardware.com: LINK
The article discusses the differences in designers, manufacturers, and labels. It also gives a run-down of some of the brands to avoid, discusses quality standards in the individual components of a PSU, and shows you how to identify manufacturer information about your PSU. The article also provides a giant list of all the PSU brands and who manufacturers them. It’s interesting that some of the popular brands on the market get their PSUs from several different manufacturers.
That list, as a whole, is not useful unless you happen to be familiar with the quality standards of each and every one of these manufacturers. I sure as hell don’t know who Dongguan Zhangmotou is. But if you look at some of the brands that have notoriety (either as good or bad), you can start to figure out the “who’s who” among a handful of companies. For example, if you looked up the Tier 1 models from the other link, you’d find that about a third of them are made by Seasonic. Many of the brands made the list for the sole reason that they are made by Seasonic, as it’s one of the most reputable manufacturers of PSUs. Other common manufacturers of Tier 1 brands include Enermax and Delta.
This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 3:37 pm
2
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:14 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.++++
------------------------
====///====Choosing the Proper PSU for Your PC====\\\====
Now that you have an idea of what brands/manufacturers to consider, the selection process is much easier. There are just a few specs and design options to consider, starting with wattage.
====Required Wattage====
We need to know how many watts your PC will draw when every component is hard at work. This will ensure more than enough power is available to your system in the most extreme situations. Nothing less than that is acceptable.
To find this out, I recommend using a popular free PSU calculator tool from outervision.com: PSU Calculator
Simply select the components you’ve chosen for your build, and click “calculate” to see a minimum and recommended PSU wattage. For example, here’s how we’d calculate the wattage for our sample $1,000 build:
We can see that the minimum wattage for this setup is 362 watts. A safe round-up would be 400W. However, this is not even close to what I’d recommend for a gaming PC. While you’d scrape by with a good 400w PSU for a while, it leaves absolutely no room for graphics card upgrades or much overclocking, nor does it take into account capacitor aging, where the PSU will lose some of its wattage capacity over time or heavy use. I usually account for a 30% capacity reduction to safely cover the most extreme use. Thus, it’s a wise decision to calculate wattage with the future in mind. For this system, we should account for the following:
> An extra graphics card that might be added later
> A rough estimate for a small CPU overclock (e.g., a 15% speed increase and a 5% voltage increase)
> 30% capacitor aging
> Two more sticks of RAM
> An extra hard drive
Taking all of the above into account, the power requirements quickly jump to roughly 700. Always erring on the side of caution with PSU wattage, a 750w PSU should be the starting point for this build. The power requirements won’t change much in the lower tiered builds, maybe 50–100W less.
If you don’t think you’ll upgrade or ever run more than one graphics card and your budget is constrained, another decent rule of thumb is to take the baseline PSU requirement for your system (400W in the case of the $1,000 PC), and add at least 50% more wattage, giving us a 600-650W PSU. This will ensure that the PSU is never over-stressed and hot. It will make the fan in your PSU run more quietly as well and ensure that your PSU is running efficiently (we’ll discuss that shortly).
Now you know the wattage. A common newbie mistake would be to stop at this point and go hunting for the cheapest 750W PSU money can buy. There’s a little more to it than that.
====Rails and Amperage====
Quite often, the entire concept of PSU rails is overlooked by newbies, and it’s actually more important than calculating wattage. Every PSU has multiple rails, each rated for a certain voltage that never changes. The rails that are relevant today include:
> +3.3v—Provides power to chipsets, other various low-power onboard chips, and expansion cards.
> +5v—Mostly provides power to USB ports and the devices connected to them
> +12v—The most important rail, which provides power to the rest of your system, including the CPU, graphics cards, hard drives, optical drives, case fans, and so on.
Those rails produce their respective voltages at specific amperages. Multiplying this amperage by the rail’s voltage will give you the total wattage provided by that rail. Knowing the amperage per rail of a PSU is vital. Without this information, advertised wattage means nothing, as many companies like to exaggerate the wattage advertised on their PSUs. The main reason it’s so important is because the +12v rail alone powers up to 90% of a gaming system, which means 90% of your wattage will need to be provided by that rail. For example, in our $1,000 sample build, we determined that a good quality 750W PSU would be more than enough to prepare for upgrades and a long lifespan. Taking 90% of that wattage (675W) and dividing it by 12 will give us a safe number to look for in terms of amperage. 675W/12v = 56.25A.
Since we already know who the good brands are, it will be incredibly easy to find a PSU with more than enough +12v rail amperage—and once you’ve found it, there’s no need to worry about the +3.3v and +5v rails. Accordingly, they’ll have plenty enough amperage. To show how easy it is, let’s look at a few 750W PSUs that carry a label from our short list of fully trusted brands. I did a quick search on PCPartPicker and chose the cheapest 750W PSUs (at the time of this writing) from Tiers 1, 2/2b, and 3.
First up is the PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III 750W PSU, a Tier 1 model with a price tag, as of this writing, of $109.99 after promos and rebates. Take note of the information in the red box. Our amperage requirement is more than covered with 62 amps on the +12v rail. The price, however, puts it out of spec for our sample budgets.
Next, we have a Seasonic SS-750AM 750W PSU, a Tier 2 model that provides the same comfortable amperage. It often has promos and rebates that put the price around $60–$75. These deals are quite common among PSUs in Tier 2 and Tier 3, and it’s a wise use of your money to take advantage of those deals in lieu of premium priced Tier 1 models.
Finally, there’s the Corsair CX750M 750W PSU, a Tier 3 model—again, 62 amps. At the time of this writing, however, it’s a few dollars more than the Seasonic.
++++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.++++
------------------------
====///====Choosing the Proper PSU for Your PC====\\\====
Now that you have an idea of what brands/manufacturers to consider, the selection process is much easier. There are just a few specs and design options to consider, starting with wattage.
====Required Wattage====
We need to know how many watts your PC will draw when every component is hard at work. This will ensure more than enough power is available to your system in the most extreme situations. Nothing less than that is acceptable.
To find this out, I recommend using a popular free PSU calculator tool from outervision.com: PSU Calculator
Simply select the components you’ve chosen for your build, and click “calculate” to see a minimum and recommended PSU wattage. For example, here’s how we’d calculate the wattage for our sample $1,000 build:
We can see that the minimum wattage for this setup is 362 watts. A safe round-up would be 400W. However, this is not even close to what I’d recommend for a gaming PC. While you’d scrape by with a good 400w PSU for a while, it leaves absolutely no room for graphics card upgrades or much overclocking, nor does it take into account capacitor aging, where the PSU will lose some of its wattage capacity over time or heavy use. I usually account for a 30% capacity reduction to safely cover the most extreme use. Thus, it’s a wise decision to calculate wattage with the future in mind. For this system, we should account for the following:
> An extra graphics card that might be added later
> A rough estimate for a small CPU overclock (e.g., a 15% speed increase and a 5% voltage increase)
> 30% capacitor aging
> Two more sticks of RAM
> An extra hard drive
Taking all of the above into account, the power requirements quickly jump to roughly 700. Always erring on the side of caution with PSU wattage, a 750w PSU should be the starting point for this build. The power requirements won’t change much in the lower tiered builds, maybe 50–100W less.
If you don’t think you’ll upgrade or ever run more than one graphics card and your budget is constrained, another decent rule of thumb is to take the baseline PSU requirement for your system (400W in the case of the $1,000 PC), and add at least 50% more wattage, giving us a 600-650W PSU. This will ensure that the PSU is never over-stressed and hot. It will make the fan in your PSU run more quietly as well and ensure that your PSU is running efficiently (we’ll discuss that shortly).
Now you know the wattage. A common newbie mistake would be to stop at this point and go hunting for the cheapest 750W PSU money can buy. There’s a little more to it than that.
====Rails and Amperage====
Quite often, the entire concept of PSU rails is overlooked by newbies, and it’s actually more important than calculating wattage. Every PSU has multiple rails, each rated for a certain voltage that never changes. The rails that are relevant today include:
> +3.3v—Provides power to chipsets, other various low-power onboard chips, and expansion cards.
> +5v—Mostly provides power to USB ports and the devices connected to them
> +12v—The most important rail, which provides power to the rest of your system, including the CPU, graphics cards, hard drives, optical drives, case fans, and so on.
Those rails produce their respective voltages at specific amperages. Multiplying this amperage by the rail’s voltage will give you the total wattage provided by that rail. Knowing the amperage per rail of a PSU is vital. Without this information, advertised wattage means nothing, as many companies like to exaggerate the wattage advertised on their PSUs. The main reason it’s so important is because the +12v rail alone powers up to 90% of a gaming system, which means 90% of your wattage will need to be provided by that rail. For example, in our $1,000 sample build, we determined that a good quality 750W PSU would be more than enough to prepare for upgrades and a long lifespan. Taking 90% of that wattage (675W) and dividing it by 12 will give us a safe number to look for in terms of amperage. 675W/12v = 56.25A.
Since we already know who the good brands are, it will be incredibly easy to find a PSU with more than enough +12v rail amperage—and once you’ve found it, there’s no need to worry about the +3.3v and +5v rails. Accordingly, they’ll have plenty enough amperage. To show how easy it is, let’s look at a few 750W PSUs that carry a label from our short list of fully trusted brands. I did a quick search on PCPartPicker and chose the cheapest 750W PSUs (at the time of this writing) from Tiers 1, 2/2b, and 3.
First up is the PC Power & Cooling Silencer Mk III 750W PSU, a Tier 1 model with a price tag, as of this writing, of $109.99 after promos and rebates. Take note of the information in the red box. Our amperage requirement is more than covered with 62 amps on the +12v rail. The price, however, puts it out of spec for our sample budgets.
Next, we have a Seasonic SS-750AM 750W PSU, a Tier 2 model that provides the same comfortable amperage. It often has promos and rebates that put the price around $60–$75. These deals are quite common among PSUs in Tier 2 and Tier 3, and it’s a wise use of your money to take advantage of those deals in lieu of premium priced Tier 1 models.
Finally, there’s the Corsair CX750M 750W PSU, a Tier 3 model—again, 62 amps. At the time of this writing, however, it’s a few dollars more than the Seasonic.
This post was edited on 3/20/14 at 3:39 pm
Posted on 9/29/13 at 2:46 am to ILikeLSUToo
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