Opinions on new gaming build

fireman166

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Dec 5, 2011
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Hello everyone!

I'm new to the site but picking up lots of great info. I'm building a new gaming rig and wanted to get your opinions.

Here's the important bits:

Asus P8Z68-V Pro/Gen 3
i5-2500k
16gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 RAM (will be upgrading this at some point in near future)
Thermaltake Chaser MK-I Chassis
Crucial M4 128gb(x2) Raid0 - 256gb total
1.5tb drive being repurposed from my current Dell XPS
Corsair H60 Liquid CPU Cooler
900W Apevia Warlock Power Supply
Sapphire Radeon 6950 Dirt 3 Edition (will be adding a 2nd at some point)

Anything I'm overlooking or should change? I'm relatively new to this but looking forward to building for the first time!

Thanks everyone.
 

jacknhut

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Sep 26, 2010
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I would change the PSU to either Seasonic X 850W or Corsair AX 850W or OCZ ZX 850W.
 

danraies

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Aug 5, 2011
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What you have is pretty good, but I have some suggestions about how to get more gaming performance out of your dollar.

I agree with jacknhut that you should change power supplies. Brand name makes a difference in that category.

First, you will not need 16GB of RAM for anything right now, much less an upgrade from that. I recommend starting with 8GB of RAM and upgrading only if you find yourself running out. Some people (like myself) have very specific applications that use a whole lot of RAM, but for almost everything (including games) 8GB is fine.

Also, hard drive speed should not really be a high priority in a gaming machine. An SSD is nice, but the functional difference between a single M4 and a RAID0 will be slight if any. It's not uncommon to put two SSD's in RAID0, but I think the money may be better spent elsewhere.

For gaming you might want to check out the ASRock Extreme3 or ASRock Extreme4 motherboards. They're similar boards but the Extreme4 has a little more bells and whistles. If you don't need a big port cluster or a usb 3.0 header then the Extreme3 will save you some money and perform at least as well as the P8Z68-V PRO.

For the value, you don't get any increased performance out of the H60. Air cooling works just about as well but costs half as much.

If you make the above changes it'll save you $250-$300. You should use that money to upgrade your video card. A gtx580 would be about $500 or so and that would be my recommendation. You could also add a second 6950 with that extra $250 and it would outperform the 580 but wouldn't leave you room to upgrade. Anyway the point is that in a gaming machine you should sink as much as you can into your graphics.
 

fireman166

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Dec 5, 2011
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Thanks for the input! I'm changing to the OCZ-ZX850W Power Supply and going with a single Crucial m4 256GB SSD. I'm going to stick with the RAM, Asus Motherboard, and the H60 since I already ordered them. All were black friday deals and I got pretty good deals on them so I'm ok with it. The Sapphire 6950 will do for now as it's free. I'm getting it from a friend who just upgraded.

I appreciate all the help.
 

Petrofsky

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If you have the money, there's nothing wrong with two SSDs, but if I was going to RAID them, I would run them RAID 1 for fault tolerance. A single SSD is plenty fast already without RAID 0.

The self-contained water jobs are inferior to similarly priced air coolers, and are a lot worse than top-drawer airies. Water is for clockheads and other extreme modder hobbyists and for people like me who think it looks really cutting-edge to have all the fluorescent tubing and dilithium reservoirs and all (not that I've got any). Water should be done properly by hand, full-blown, not bought in a rinky-dink make-pretend module.

Get more graphics card right now, and you will be happier right now.
 

danraies

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Yeah, there's nothing wrong with an SSD raid, but even if you have the money - in a gaming build on a fixed budget it makes more sense to leave out one of the SSD's and put that money toward more graphics.

In terms of air-cooling vs. self-contained liquid cooling, I used to agree with Petrofsky, but a recent Tom's article suggests that the self-contained liquid coolers cool slightly better than air-coolers but the air-coolers are better relative to their price.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/h2o-h80-h100-benchmark-overclocking,3084.html
Either way, I'm never going to buy a self-contained liquid cooler and it would take a pretty heavy overclock to get to a level where a $25 Hyper 212 couldn't handle the heat.