Building a pc for the first time!

Serywil · Jul 3, 2016

Okay guys a little background. I use to play pc games on a old vaio when CoD1 came out, and css was popular. About the time cod4 came out and my computer wouldn't play it, I bought a 360, we'll I hate consoles. Controllers just don't work for me. So eventually I stopped gaming completely. Well recently I got back into the gaming scene one xbox and still can't stand it. So I'm going back to my roots, pc. I am going to build my own. I'm a mechanic, building a pc can't be as hard as rebuilding a motor, right? WRONG. I don't know anything about what I need. So I'm coming here for hopefully some help. I filled out this template yall had posted, hopefully it will help.

Approximate Purchase Date: plan on buying parts a few at a time over the next few months.

Budget Range: like 500 to 700 over a period of time, possibly more if I can slip it by the wife. Lol

System Usage from Most to Least Important: gaming, music and movie streaming.

Are you buying a monitor: yes if my extra 40 inch TV won't work.

Parts to Upgrade: starting from scratch

Do you need to buy OS: Yes and I only have experience with xp Vista and 7

Preferred Website(s) for parts: Newegg or amazon?

Location: Branson, MO USA

Parts Preferences: any that I won't be replacing in a month.

Overclocking: I have no idea what this is

SLI or Crossfire: umm. Again I don't understand what this is.

Your Monitor Resolution: idk yet. This is bad I know!

Additional Comments: the games I plan on playing are bf4, bf1 and csgo, and the older call of dutys. Like black ops 2 and back.

Thanks for the help in advance! If it helps I think I picked a graphics card already in my budget. It's a "MSI GAMING GTX 960 4GB OC Twin Frozr-V HDCP Ready SLI Support" of this is bad let me know, lol

nwolf1010 · Jul 6, 2016

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/x4P2RG
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/x4P2RG/by_merchant/

CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz 6-Core Processor ($98.95 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Asus M5A99FX PRO R2.0 ATX AM3+ Motherboard ($117.88 @ OutletPC)
Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury Black 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($34.49 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($66.89 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 960 4GB Video Card ($215.00 @ B&H)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($49.99 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: Corsair CXM 650W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($49.99 @ Micro Center)
Total: $633.19
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-07-06 11:12 EDT-0400

first of all, WELCOME BACK TO PC GAMING, this should be a great PC for the price, this should allow you to play all the games you are looking to play, i used to have a very similar system myself and it worked great. second of all as it seems to me you are new to this i will explain some of the things you mentioned you did not know about:

overclocking:
this is when you boost the clock speed (basically how fast a pc component runs) to get better performance, some graphics cards come already overclocked so you dont have to do it yourself, you can also overclock a cpu but you will also need to buy another cooler because the one it comes with is not good enough to manage the heat when you overclock. you have to be careful though, you can ruin your components by clocking them to high and causing them to overheat, because of this i would not recommend this for a fist time builder like yourself.

SLI/Crossfire:
This is when you run two graphics cards of the same type together for extra performance, if this is done with nvidia brand graphics cards this is called SLI you also new something called a SLI bridge witch is like a cable that runs from one graphics card to the next. if it is done with AMD graphics cards it is called crossfire, with crossfire you do not need a bridge like you do with SLI.

Hope this helps, if you have any more questions fell free to ask.

Serywil · Jul 6, 2016

I was told by a friend to not run amd. It was his opinion but I wanted to get yours. And you think this build will handle bf1? That and csgo are definitely going to be the most played. And I already have a 500gb hdd from an old pc. I was thinking of using that money on a ssd for speed and using my 500gb for storage. Opinions? And is that amd pcu comparable to the i3 or i5?

nwolf1010 · Jul 6, 2016

Serywil :

some people seem to love inlet and have something against AMD or vise versa, im not sure why but i can assure you they bolth make good cpus, the main diffence and the easiest way to explain it is that AMD offers more, but slightly less powerful cores for less money, AMD cpus also tend to do better when overclocked. intel has less core but the ones that they do have are more powerful. they also tend to be more expensive. i would say this CPU is most comparable to a i3 in price and performance, all though the cheapest decent i3 you would be able to get would be about $130 and would not be able to preform as well in most cases. a couple of years ago i would have recommended a intel CPU but now more and more games are being created to better utilize multi-core processors, so because the AMD CPU i suggested has 6 cores it is the better choice. and yes this pc should be able to run bf1 just fine, the only thing i would suggest is that if you can get the extra money i would go for a 970 instead of the 960, or ideally if you are able to find one of the new AMD RX 480's at a good price (they are supposed to cost $200 but right now you can only find them for about $280) i would go with that, it has great performance.

next the storage, if you wanted you could diffidently get a ssd instead of the hard drive i put in the build, just know a good 250 GB ssd will be a little less than double the price of the 2 TB hard drive i put in your build. also keep in mind that games are getting bigger and bigger as time goes on and i can almost guarantee that you will be wanting more that a 500 GB hard drive within a year or two. hell i just got my current pc a year ago with 1 TB of storage and i have already upgraded to 2 TB and im running low on storage again! but as long as your sure that you are not going to need more than your 500 GB hard drive then a ssd will for sure make load times a whole lot faster.

hope this was helpful, just like before fell free to ask anymore questions you might have.

Serywil · Jul 6, 2016

So pretty much the only gain a ssd brings is loading speed and boot times? To me it isn't worth the loss of storage, or the price. This may be another dumb question but could I run two hdd like you can with a hdd and ssd? Like could I buy a 1tb for my games and use my 500gb for my OS and music? And will any case work with that build or does it need to be a mid tower or whatever? And last annoying question, I was referred to the 750ti superclocked card instead of the 960 for budget and was told it would do fine, but I'm thinking of going bigger like you suggested to the 970/480. What's your thoughts on the 770? I've never bought a gpu or any pc parts other than keyboards and mice before so it's all kinda new to me.

Serywil · Jul 6, 2016

I meant what's your thoughts on the 750ti I apologize.

nwolf1010 · Jul 6, 2016

Serywil :

ok, to start off you can run as many hard drives/SSD's as you want, so long as the motherboard you have has enough sata ports (the ports you plug hard drives into) so in short, yeah you could use the 500 GB for os and music and a 1 TB for games.and it would work just fine. next the 750ti, it was and still is a great budget card but it is starting to get too outdated, it is just not as powerful as it used to be not to mention the low amount of vram, the same thing goes for the 770 you are going to want at least 4 GB of VRAM, especially for bf1, the 700 series graphics cards are just not going to cut it. if you want to go for a sub 200 dollar graphics card go for the 950.

if i were you i would wait to buy the graphics card last, especially scenes you said you are going to be buying them over several months ans when the time comes to buy it i would first look to see if you could find a RX 480 at a decent price and if not go with the 960/970.

Serywil · Jul 6, 2016

Sweet thanks for your help.

nwolf1010 · Jul 6, 2016

Serywil :

no problem

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