Need Advice Quiet Gaming PC $1200

[Gamefan71]

Hi, I have a Dell XPS720 that's beyond it's warranty & keeps having memory issues. I'm going to try & salvage what parts I can, and build a new machine. I think the GPU, optical drives & HD are all I can reuse, the rest seems propriatary (and mobo/memory are suspect problems anyway).

APPROXIMATE PURCHASE DATE: ASAP, this week hopefully

BUDGET RANGE: $1,200 or less

SYSTEM USAGE FROM MOST TO LEAST IMPORTANT: Gaming (WoW, FPS like Crysis, Strategy)

PARTS NOT REQUIRED: keyboard, mouse, monitor (have 24" Dell), speakers, OS (have Win 7 Ult), GPU (have EVGA 285 FTW), optical drives (have DVD+-RW), HD (have 300gb sata)

PREFERRED WEBSITE(S) FOR PARTS: newegg.com

COUNTRY OF ORIGIN: USA

PARTS PREFERENCES: no preference

OVERCLOCKING: Maybe

SLI OR CROSSFIRE: Maybe, but one 285 is enough for now

MONITOR RESOLUTION: 1920x1200

ADDITIONAL COMMENTS: Quieter is better, but I'm not sure how hard installing water cooling would be, not comfortable with that. I've not built a PC before.

 

[jsrudd]

If you only care about gaming go with a socket 1156 and you will be able to come in far below your budget. The only downside is that the PCI-e will run at either 16x if only using one GPU or 8x/8x if using to. Socket 1136 can run at 16x/16x but is overall more expensive.

 

[omfgnoogies]

Im going to reccomend a few parts based on personal experience

Noctua UH-12 .... Its dead silent. Keeps me under 45 @ load and under 30 @ idle on stock settings. From what i understand those are pretty good temps
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835608014

Haf 922 case... massive airflow, easy install, its ugly as sin, good cable management, SUPER QUIET FANS even at max settings.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119197

Samsung f3 hard drives.. one of these two depending on your desire for storage capacity
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&DEPA=0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=samsung+f3&x=0&y=0

Intel i7 920 nehalem
http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0302727&utm_source=mcol&utm_medium=leader_bnr&utm_campaign=hmpg_intel_i7920

asus p6t lga 1366 mother board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131359

corsair 750tx psu - i dont have this particular PSU i have the modular version, but this one has been around for quite some time and comes very highly reccomended
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227365

The next parts i dont own personally, but come reccomended on this site by people fairly often

OCZ gold low voltage ram, 6gigs
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227365




So with the current setup, you are running about 730$ with the smaller samsung drive -40 dollars of MIR brings you to 690$ and you have a kickass machine. This leaves you with alot of budget room for some extra games or whatever you want. your 285 is pretty beastly already, but you could upgrade to a 5870 and get some faster ram and still be under budget. You can also stick with your 285 right now which is way more than capable and use the extra cash to upgrade to the nextgen nividia cards when they drop. If you want a PSU that is modular (can take plugs out for cable management) then i reccomend this one
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139010 which i own and love right now. Im pretty sure im not missing anything but i am super hungover right now. Let me know if this works for you, and if not we can do some tweaking.

 

[Gamefan71]

Thanks for the advice & links. That looks like a great setup. Would I need to order anything else? tools, compound, etc?

That case is ugly! but wow a lot of huge fans everywhere.

 

[Gamefan71]

I noticed the processor linked to http://www.microcenter.com & it was an in store only ad. Then I noticed they have a location about 90 minutes away from me.

 

[omfgnoogies]

Yea that case is holyfuck ugly but it really works and its really quiet. I dont think there is anything comparable at this price range.

the heatsink should come with thermal compound NT-H1 which to my surprise is super highly regarded. I actually bought AS5 thermal paste but the noctua is supposedly better according to this review http://www.overclockersclub.com/reviews/noctua_nt_h1/6.htm

 

[omfgnoogies]

if i wasnt worried about breaking a pin i would put the noctua in

 

[omfgnoogies]

ohh yea, if you order the noctua uh12 let me know and ill send you pics of how to put the fans on. it took me like a half hour to figure out then i was like... "omg thats so smart i can take them off easy"

 

[Gamefan71]

I was reading the Micro Center site, buying everything from them wouldn't be much more than from New Egg & they'll actually put it together for you. Plus I could drive there tomorrow.

 

[Gamefan71]

I'm just worried I'd break something.

 

[omfgnoogies]

i was worried about breaking mine too, so i can understand that. But should you ever want to swap something out, are you gonna drive an hour and a half to do that?
Id recommend having a friend over who knows what hes doing and going from there

 

[Gamefan71]

I went with your recommendations & put the computer together today.

I ended up getting a couple of things slightly different:
Asus P6T deluxe v2 mobo
HAF 932 case
The modular PSU version

I did a fresh install of Windows 7.

The Asus driver DVD didn't work for Win7, so I went to their support page & downloaded the audio driver. I can't get the onboard audio working at all.

 

[Gamefan71]

Weird, after that last reboot sound is working!

 

[Gamefan71]

At idle, the fans seem a little bit more noisy than my old Dell system, but I haven't tried it at load yet. The Dell system got pretty noisy at load.

 

[omfgnoogies]

the noctua? did you put the rubber strips on? cause i cannot hear mine at all

 

[omfgnoogies]

hit me up on aim, well see if we cant solve this
steezydoesit

 

[Gamefan71]

The noise is the case fans, they're quiet, but still audible.

BUT now I'm having memory errors.

I get crashes in games/applications saying they failed to read something in memory.

BSODs with memory errors as the reason.

Windows Memory Diagnostic Tool shows hardware problems & memory errors.

 

[omfgnoogies]

maybe you got a bad mobo or bad ram? that seems to happen occasionally with all the brands. Could also be a bad memory stick. Im not sure how to test that other than pulling one stick out at a time and seeing if you get errors. If there are no errors with the ram, its prolly the mobo.... Good luck though, that is a little bit out of my league. Maybe make a new post in one of hte problem solving forums