Need advice on a new gaming build

Viper_Freak1 · Aug 3, 2016

Hey guys, just looking for some advice on a new gaming build I'd like to do within a month or so. Here is what I'm thinking about building.

CPU: Intel Core i7 5820K 6-core
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 1080 EK X (build in water-cooling block)
Motherboard: MSI X99A SLI Plus
Memory: G.Skill RipJaw V Series 16GB (4x4GB)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 500GB SSD, 2X Seagate Barracuda 3TB 7200RPM HDD
PSU: Corsair RMx 850W Fully modular ATX
Case: Fractal Design Define S w/ window (ATX Mid tower)

I plan on water-cooling with a single loop using PETG with 2x360 rads (one in the front and one on top). I've never water cooled before, but I've watched tons of videos on it and feel like I have a good enough grasp to get the hard tubing to work for me. It doesn't seem that cosmic at least. And yes, I do care about the looks of the system, which is why I'm going with hard tubing and a side window on the case.

Now for the questions, and bear in mind, I haven't build a PC in about 8 years, so I've had to do a lot of reading to catch up.

1. Should I go with the 5820K for the CPU? I know games right now are optimized best for 4 cores. However, I think in the future, more games might be using more cores as more cores become the norm. I would hate to get a 4 core processor only to have to upgrade it within a year or two.

2. I keep hearing that Z170 is a solid gaming platform right now, but again I was thinking about going X99 for future upgradability, even if it means spending just a little bit more money. Is this a good idea? I'd like this gaming rig to last a few years at least.

3. Should I get the GTX 1080 or the GTX 1070? This is a gaming rig so I understand that most of the money should be put in the graphics card. That being said, I'd like to keep the cost down as much as possible, but I do make enough money to be able to afford whatever is best. I've always been all about getting the best bang for my buck in the past because I think it's kind of unnecessary to go overboard. I'm looking forward to playing Star Citizen when it comes out, even if that doesn't happen for a couple years. But in the meantime, I'd like to play the current games on the market very well. When Star Citizen comes out I can always upgrade my graphics card down the road to play that game on max settings. Also, right now I'm looking at getting a monitor that is 1440p and 144hz. I've read that its the sweet spot for gaming. The current hardware isn't up to snuff for 4K quite yet. Thoughts on this? Should I save money and go with the 1070 and upgrade a few years from now to top of the line. Or, bite the bullet and spend a lot of money on a 1080 in the hopes that it will last a little bit longer than a 1070 before upgrading?

4. Thoughts on SLI? I've read that its best to spend as much as you can on a single GPU and go the SLI route later if its a cheap and easy upgrade to graphics performance, but don't get it right off the bat. Also, some games don't even support SLI.

5. 16GB of memory should be enough for high end gaming for the near future, and I can always just slap another 16GB in for cheap down the road if I need more. Correct though process on this?

6. Is this a good storage setup for lightning fast boot times and load times in games as long as I put games on the SSD? Do I need a bigger SSD to hold all my games and go with less on the HDD? Or should I bite the money bullet again and get an M.2 SSD? I've heard that M.2 SSDs in SATA 3.0 aren't fast enough over standard SSDs to warrant the extra money.

I know this is a ton of stuff. Thanks in advance to anyone that provides some advice. Just wanted to do a dummy check before I pull the trigger and spend a lot of money!

lejacob · Aug 3, 2016

First of all, It's always a really good trait to think ahead about components like you've been doing, so props to you! Most people just think, "hmm this build runs current games @ ~60fps, I'll take it!

When I built my computer I made sure to think ahead and "future proof" the rig, and I'm really glad you're doing the same.

1. The i7-5820k is an excellent choice of CPU.

2. I'm not sure how much exactly you're thinking of spending on the moBo but the Asus X99-A II ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard is a really great moBo. If you give me a budget on how much you're willing to spend on a MoBo I'd be able to be a tad bit more helpful on that matter.

3. If I were in your shoes i'd go with the 1070 (preferably the Asus GeForce GTX 1070 8GB Video Card due to the fact that it's one of the less expensive 1070 cards but it is core clocked at 1.61ghz (most are 1.5) and it has the standard issue 1070 card 8GB vRam. 1440p @ 144hz will be perfect for gaming, and I'd just stick with the 1070, maybe in 2-4 years it may start slowing down a bit, but by then the technology will advance and you'll be able to get a much better card. For now and the next few years, i'd recommend sticking with the 1070.

4. I never go the SLi route, I always invest in a single, more powerful card. In a couple years you may have to upgrade the card, because if you use spend all your money on two less powerful gpu's they will need a replacement much sooner than a brand new 1070.

5. 16GB of memory will be perfectly fine for at least 2-3 more years. But ram is inexpensive and easy to replace so don't bother buying more than 16gb until games start to require additional memory.

6. If you have 6tb HDD and a 500gb SSD you will have amazing boot up and load times don't worry about that. Also, what I do is I install the majority of my games on my HDD, but if I'm going to play a game like Skyrim where I have 100's of Mods loaded and a lot of additional content it takes longer to start up and load so I installed it on my SSD.

Sorry if some of the stuff doesn't make sense it took me a while to write this so my thoughts & ideas may be mixed up a bit. I hope this helps you!! If it did feel free to select this as the solution or upvote it

Zerk2012 · Aug 3, 2016

1. Get the i7 6700K processor it's faster than the 5820K at the same clock speed and overclocks a bit better. Their no such thing as future proofing it's a myth. What you buy today can be replaced with better stuff next year
2. Z170 board to go with the processor their no reason to spend over 170 bucks on one.
3. Get the GTX 1080 for a 2K monitor with 144 refresh rate you will be glad you did in a couple years. 1440p (2K) is the current best resolution. A GTX 980ti it's about on par with the GTX 1070 BF4, 1440p Ultra settings FPS is in the 80's nothing near your 144 refresh rate. SLI is more of a crutch not a good solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jLaV4-JrG4
5. 16GB of memory for gaming will last you the life of the PC games have just now started breaking the 8GB area and 8GB will still work for any current game. (2X8gb set for a Z170 board)
6. M.2 SSD for a gaming PC is a complete waste you get no performance increase that you would ever notice even if it was a PCI-E X4 slot one. If your doing a ton of file transfers or using one as a scratch drive then it would be nice other than that you would get about a whooping 0.5 second boot time reduction. The SB 3TB drives are not the best for reliability and you will need nothing near 6TB of storage. I would get a 250GB SSD for the operating system and programs, a 500gb SSD for your main games and a 1TB WD Black or Blue drive for storage and lesser played games.
7. Good PSU choice!!!!!!!!!!!

lejacob · Aug 3, 2016

Zerk2012 :

1. Get the i7 6700K processor it's faster than the 5820K at the same clock speed and overclocks a bit better. Their no such thing as future proofing it's a myth. What you buy today can be replaced with better stuff next year
2. Z170 board to go with the processor their no reason to spend over 170 bucks on one.
3. Get the GTX 1080 for a 2K monitor with 144 refresh rate you will be glad you did in a couple years. 1440p (2K) is the current best resolution. A GTX 980ti it's about on par with the GTX 1070 BF4, 1440p Ultra settings FPS is in the 80's nothing near your 144 refresh rate. SLI is more of a crutch not a good solution.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jLaV4-JrG4
5. 16GB of memory for gaming will last you the life of the PC games have just now started breaking the 8GB area and 8GB will still work for any current game. (2X8gb set for a Z170 board)
6. M.2 SSD for a gaming PC is a complete waste you get no performance increase that you would ever notice even if it was a PCI-E X4 slot one. If your doing a ton of file transfers or using one as a scratch drive then it would be nice other than that you would get about a whooping 0.5 second boot time reduction. The SB 3TB drives are not the best for reliability and you will need nothing near 6TB of storage. I would get a 250GB SSD for the operating system and programs, a 500gb SSD for your main games and a 1TB WD Black or Blue drive for storage and lesser played games.
7. Good PSU choice!!!!!!!!!!!

Care to give a little insight on how future proofing is a myth? Yes technology advances, but you can have a build from 2013 that runs games from this year perfectly fine.

Zerk2012 · Aug 3, 2016

Look into your crystal ball and tell me what games will need 2 years from now. You can to a small point but not very much in general if you buy a CPU you can overclock then you have future proofed to a point because you can increase the performance by overclocking. Same thing with the GPU you can buy overkill from what you need but would the added expense really be justified when you consider 2 years from now you could spend less money for a video card that has a lot better performance?(selling the card you have would help against the cost of the new card) Take my card a GTX 980 bought it for 439 bucks (409 after rebate) a very good deal when I got it but now for the same price I can buy a GTX 1070 with much better performance less than a year later.
Take your CPU when released the 4460 was a good processor but when time moves on and it no longer gives the performance you need then spending a extra 40/50 bucks on the 46XX K processor would of saved you money in the long run instead of buying all new stuff you could of overclocked the processor getting the desired performance and getting a extra couple years out of your build.

Viper_Freak1 · Aug 4, 2016

lejacob :

Thanks for all the input! I'm looking at spending less than $250 on the motherboard. I've done a little more research and it looks like MSI, Asus, and Gigabyte would be suitable for this build. I've had great experience with Asus 8 years ago when I was building PCs, but it seems like MSI and Gigabyte have really stepped up their game. Again, the sole purpose of this build will be for gaming, and it seems like Gigabyte has a lot of perks for gamers, but I'm not sure. Care to expand on this a bit?

Also, I was thinking about putting the 2x3TB HDDs in RAID 1 configuration for the backup in case one fails. But, I'm not really sure about this either because I've never really had a hard drive just fail on me except for one time where it happened in a crappy laptop that was issued to me for work purposes. But if it's a possibility, then maybe spending an extra $80 for a cheap insurance policy is worth it? Although I never really thought about the "250GB SSD for OS and programs, and 500GB SSD for games" idea so I might have to price that out and give it some more thought.

With further research, it seems as though more games are starting to support multiple cores and more threads. I think I'm going to suck it up and spend a little bit more to go with the X99 platform. If I'm not mistaken, it looks like DirectX 12 will try to support more cores. Either way, I'm seeing several people get some great over clocks with the 5820K. Hopefully a custom water cooling setup like I'm planning with help with this tremendously.

I've decided I'm going to stay away from SLI and M.2 unless someone can give me a compelling reason not to.

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Need advice on a new gaming build

Viper_Freak1

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lejacob

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Zerk2012

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lejacob

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Zerk2012

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Viper_Freak1

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