re: PC Discussion - Gaming, Performance and Enthusiasts

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Do you think the 780ti is worth the price difference vs. the regular 780?

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35% more for the 780 Ti for 15% performance increase over the 780.

Any reason you ignored our suggestion to get the 290 or 290x, especially if you're on a strict budget?

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fastest/best SSD, RAM (Vengeance, G.Skills, Kingston...?), and air cooling a system (what case might work best for that, good case fans, etc.). Even if I'm going to air cool I want to do everything I can to keep the noise down. Also, is something like the Corsair H100 CPU cooler a self-contained unit and does it require any maintenance?

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If you're shying away from watercooling (understandable if you don't know how to do a basic build yet), do you know what you'd be gaining from the H100? Do you know how to overclock beyond just raising the multiplier (to the extent that you get benefits from water cooling)?

The H100 is self-contained and doesn't require any maintenance besides the occasional compressed air to remove dust. It only cools the CPU. I've always been a proponent of GPU cooling over all else, since they tend to have the noisiest fans and are most likely to throttle during gaming if not adequately cooled (not that air cooling isn't adequate, but water cooling basically takes away the thermal limit completely, and overclocking is limited only by its power.

RAM is RAM. The popular "problem-free" brands are Corsair, Kingston, G.Skill, Mushkin, Crucial, and so on. You won't notice a difference.

Samsung, Crucial, and Kingston make popular/good SSDs.

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My first PSU was a Corsair and my second was a Thermaltake and they both failed. I think Corsair has a pretty good reputation so I may go back to them, but Seasonic is supposed to be pretty good too, right?

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Don't look at brands. Look at manufacturers. Read my guide for details. Otherwise, Seasonic, XFX, and Corsair AX series PSUs are my recommendation for a high-end setup.

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And say I run a GTX 780/780ti and may add another card for SLI in the future, what's a good power range for the PSU to aim for? Could I get by with ~850w or should I try to go for ~1000-1200?

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Watercooling and overclocking/overvolting, I'd say 900-1000w. You could probably get away with a good 850w running stock, but those cards can pull 400w a piece when you start overvolting.

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One more question, with games like Watch Dogs already coming out recommending 6, if not 8gb of RAM, are there any other performance pros to running say 16 or even 32gb of RAM? And is 1600MHz good enough, or should I go for a for something higher? Any benefit to doing so?

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I've been running 16GB for a couple of years now. There's never been any benefit to it in games, but I do a lot more than gaming. Maybe Watch Dogs will be a beginning of more memory intensive games, but I doubt it. These games are still console ports. Still, 16GB wouldn't hurt. 32GB is overkill unless using a ramdisk. 1600MHz is fine.

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Oh, and ILikeLSUToo, how much maintenance is involved in running a water-cooled setup? I have the links and will go over them, just thought I'd ask.

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Every 6-12 months, most custom loop enthusiasts will drain the water and maybe flush the loop before adding new water. Some may replace all the tubing depending on the amount of plasticizer observed during the flush. Others break down their loops completely, disassemble their blocks and clean the insides, flush the radiators, replace tubing and o-rings, etc. etc.

Realistically, I've run a loop continuously for 2 years straight at one point, and it was fine. Ideally, you want to at least drain it after the first 6-9 months after you first run it, just to remove any stray metal particles, plasticizer, etc. since those could damage a pump over time.

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Also, you don't happen to do installs for people do you

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Yes, locally. I won't ship a PC with a custom loop, just because I don't want to deal with the hassle and risk.