Does this build need adjustment?

[Sinafey]

Hey so I'm being extremely picky about the computer I finally buy. I was trying to lower the price on this computer as much as I could but I'm not sure if I can without lowering performance or upgradability. Heres what I have for my gaming PC build:

Gigabyte Intel Z77 LGA 1155 Dual UEFI BIOS ATX Motherboard GA-Z77-DS3H

Corsair Builder Series CX V2 500-Watt 80 Plus Certified Power Supply Compatible with Intel and AMD Platforms - CMPSU-500CXV2

Crucial 128 GB m4 2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SATA 6Gb/s CT128M4SSD2

Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler (RR-212E-20PK-R2)

Intel Core i5-2500K Processor

ASUS HD7850-DC2-2GD5 Radeon 2GB DDR5 VGA/DVI/HDMI/DisplayPort GPU Tweak Utilities PCI-Express 3.0 Graphics Card HD7850-DC2-2GD5

Seagate Barracuda 7200 500 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s 16 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Bare Drive ST500DM002

Asus 24xDVD-RW Serial ATA Internal OEM Drive DRW-24B1ST

The total is $1000.00

 

[Rockdpm]

Yea that will be a good build. I5 and 7000 series with a good quality SSD. good build

 

[kulladoctor]

Suggestions to reduce price:

Start with the Stock cooler on the 2500k. You can always upgrade to a better cooler if your OC is being Temp constrained.


Drop the SSD. You can always upgrade to one later, or get a 64 GB SSD.

Your system is not upgradable to SLI anyways, because of your power supply. So you can get a $60 p67 board, or a $80 micro-atx z68. This is not much savings, but the upgrade from z68 to z77 is not very significant performance wise, especially since you are getting a SB CPU.

I dont see RAM in your build. Not that you can save much on it, but RAM speeds dont affect SB performance much, and if can pick up a cheap 1600MHZ set of 8 gigs instead of higher speed ram.

 

[Sinafey]

What exactly is SLI? If I need a better power supply I'd rather do that. I want to be able to easily upgrade. I have ram I just didn't put it in

 

[kulladoctor]

SLI is sticking 2 identical Nvidia graphics cards into your computer so that they run together. Ususally two cheaper cards linked together would give you slightly better performance per dollar than a more expensive card, but you have to deal with increased power needs, larger power supply requirements, more heat and a bit of image quality loss due to flickering shadows etc.


Your power supply is fine, but its 500 W, so you wont be able to do SLI or Crossfire(same as SLI but for AMD cards).

So if you dont know what SLI is, I suggest you stick to a single card config. This being the case, you dont need the extra pciE slot on your motherboard, and can get a micro-ATX board with fewer pciE slots for slightly cheaper ($20-30)

 

[Sinafey]

Best answer selected by sinafey.