"Budget" Gaming System vs Flat-Out

[Silibant]

Hey, so I have two potential rigs I'm planning out. They're both for gaming at 1080p and progressively higher resolutions, and they would replace my slightly-above average PC (FX-4150 and GTX 770, 8gb RAM and no SSD).
There's the more practical one: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Tryptophan/saved/37dJ7P

And the more crazy one: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Tryptophan/saved/Vk76Mp

To my understanding, they should be similar in performance and run most games very nicely. However, I want to know if the more expensive CPU would make a tangible difference in real world scenarios and if I'm overspending on parts I don't need to (equal quality, lesser price). I do have a similar thread, so sorry for potential forum-clog, but this is a little different to that in objective, so I feel justified. Thanks for any help.

 

[TechyInAZ]

The hexa core i7 won't give you even 10% extra performance. Unless you play games that support hexa core then it isn't needed.

Plus, even if games you play support 6 cores, a i7 4790K will be more than enough for gaming.

 

[Silibant]

The hexa core i7 won't give you even 10% extra performance. Unless you play games that support hexa core then it isn't needed.

Plus, even if games you play support 6 cores, a i7 4790K will be more than enough for gaming.

Great answer, thanks! I'll definitely save the cash. Now, the real question is, do I even need a 4790 or can I go 4770 (both K, obviously)? I've heard mixed reviews on their comparable performance, but it's tough to find info from a purely gaming perspective.

 

[Anencephalus]

You won't even need an i7-4790k. Grab an i5-5690k, it's one of the best gaming processors.
If all you are looking to do is game, then you don't need the i7. This is a common misconception.

Make sure you have the proper cooling for what you are going to be doing. If you are overclocking I highly recommend liquid cooling.

Other than that everything looks great! Love the 970 SLI I'm a huge fan. Might want to get a 850W PSU.

 

[Silibant]

You won't even need an i7-4790k. Grab an i5-5690k, it's one of the best gaming processors.
If all you are looking to do is game, then you don't need the i7. This is a common misconception.

Make sure you have the proper cooling for what you are going to be doing. If you are overclocking I highly recommend liquid cooling.

Other than that everything looks great! Love the 970 SLI I'm a huge fan. Might want to get a 850W PSU.

Ok, thanks for the advice. I'll take a look at the i5. Would you mind explaining why that's all I need? Also, since you looked at my list, I assume you noticed the NH-D14 and the other PSU; you think they're insufficient? I can understand the PSU because of SLI, but the CPU cooler is said to be great (although I do have a Corsair CLC in my current rig) as well as silent, which is what I really want, hence the Define R4. But if you think I really need liquid, would you say the H100i is good?

 

[Anencephalus]

The new i7 processors, like the i7-4790k, use hyper-threading. I'm not an expert on the subject so I can't explain in detail but it's basically a feature that isn't used much in games.

I would recommend this PSU: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-power-supply-rs850afbag1us

You have a very nice build in mind that has a lot of power. If you know you are going to be overclocking, liquid cooling is almost a must with that build. It's not 100% required, but it will prevent any damage to your hardware and it's much more efficient.

Edit: Sorry forgot to answer your question. Yes the h100i is fine

 

[Silibant]

The new i7 processors, like the i7-4790k, use hyper-threading. I'm not an expert on the subject so I can't explain in detail but it's basically a feature that isn't used much in games.

I would recommend this PSU: http://pcpartpicker.com/part/cooler-master-power-supply-rs850afbag1us

You have a very nice build in mind that has a lot of power. If you know you are going to be overclocking, liquid cooling is almost a must with that build. It's not 100% required, but it will prevent any damage to your hardware and it's much more efficient.

Edit: Sorry forgot to answer your question. Yes the h100i is fine

Thanks for the explanation and PSU/cooler reccomendation. I will definitely switch the PSU and cooler. Now, as to the CPU: I appreciate the information you've already provided very much. However, I have another question- some of these new games have an i7 listed in their Reccomended specs list. Does that mean they just want a quad core, or is it the dawn of hyperthreading in the majority of the market? I don't expect you to magically know, but if you could explain any potential advantage of hyperthreading, that would be nice. Plus, the satisfaction of having an i7 is just amazing.
Edit: that PSU is very expensive. Can I go for a less expensive one? I found the EVGA B2 850W, rated 9 out of 10 by JohnnyGuru. It's about 30 dollars cheaper, if not more, and it's the same wattage. For reference, modular is not necessary, and semi-modular is preferred over modular. Thanks for all the help.
Also, you'll notice I've switched to one 970. EVGA step up is netting me the other GPU for approximately $7.

 

[Anencephalus]

Thanks for the explanation and PSU/cooler reccomendation. I will definitely switch the PSU and cooler. Now, as to the CPU: I appreciate the information you've already provided very much. However, I have another question- some of these new games have an i7 listed in their Reccomended specs list. Does that mean they just want a quad core, or is it the dawn of hyperthreading in the majority of the market? I don't expect you to magically know, but if you could explain any potential advantage of hyperthreading, that would be nice. Plus, the satisfaction of having an i7 is just amazing.

I have also seen some recommended specs like from gamespot that provide those recommendations and they are not always accurate (thought I'm not saying they aren't correct).

From my knowledge, hyper-threading is basically used for multi-tasking in your machine. Hyper-threading organizes and makes multi-tasking much more efficient and faster. It doesn't have any benefits when it comes to gaming and has in some cases actually shown to show a decrease in gaming. Although this is unlikely and only been proven in a few games.

So really if all you're doing is gaming than an i5 is perfect for you.

Edit:
Yes I was only recommending that PSU. All you're really looking for is a good manufacturer and the right specs for your PSU. The specs don't vary drastically in PSUs (usually) so it all comes down to price and trust. If you find a PSU that's $50 cheaper and similar specs but the manufacturer is a bit less-known and may have bad reviews, well that's probably why it's $50 cheaper

 

[nikoli707]

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($208.99 @ NCIX US)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H100i 77.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($79.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD3H-BK ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($99.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Crucial MX100 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($94.97 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($48.49 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770 2GB WINDFORCE Video Card ($249.99 @ Newegg)
Case: Fractal Design Define R4 (Black Pearl) ATX Mid Tower Case ($99.98 @ NCIX US)
Power Supply: XFX XTR 750W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($94.99 @ NCIX US)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM) (64-bit) ($84.15 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $1061.54
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-11-26 00:02 EST-0500

i would run that and sli your 770s. also keep everything else from your old rig. you would be better off just going on ebay and getting a matching 770 for $200 or less. then wait for gm210 to come out and sell the 770s off.

i would jump on that gigabyte z97 black board though if you fully intend on going lga1150... its extremely nice, supports sli, plenty of connections, and since your not running a custom loop with a platinum power supply, you dont need an exotic board for 5.0ghz+.

 

[Silibant]

nikoli707: I want 970's because of the added frame buffer and I'm still on the fence about the i5 (although it seems like a better option). However, most of the parts you've suggested in that build are great alternatives to the ones in my list, so I will be using them instead. Thank you.

Anencephalus: Thanks for the facts. CPU-wise, things are leaning drastically in the favor of the i5, and I'm glad you brought that to my attention. As for the PSU, I did about 2 hours worth of research and math that suggests a 750W quality unit is slightly more than what I'll need, and thus I'm going to go for the XFX unit suggested by nikoli707. It provides good wattage and XFX is a good brand. Thank you for spending time on that though, I very much appreciate it.

Currently, I am attempting to sell my 770 to several people on Reddit who have expressed interest in my card and general rig. This is because, according to EVGA rep #2, I cannot buy an extended warranty to re-claim EVGA StepUp status on my old GPU. I think it might be because they don't want to give me a 970 for only the cost of shipping, but it doesn't matter; I'm not getting a god-tier discount on a 970. Back to the main point, though: I've seen many Redditors sell stuff legitimately, especially on the PCMR sub. However, does anyone think I would be better off selling either the card or the whole machine to a computer illiterate at the full price I paid for it? Advice on sale websites/techniques is greatly appreciated, and once again a big thanks to everyone who has helped me with this build.

 

[Anencephalus]

You could try ebay or craigslist as well. I usually use craigslist. I don't like ebay but I know a lot of people who use it to sell their computer parts just because there are more chances of finding a buyer.

Craigslist is nice because you can find people interested nearby. The process is usually quick and easy.

If you can sell the machine for the full price I would do that and then use that money towards your build. Although if you're current machine is not worth what you paid for then don't rip someone off. If you bought all your parts new then they automatically decrease in price just because you used them no matter how long. Depending on how long you've had the parts and how outdated they are that will decrease the price as well.

So if you're not going to use anything in your current rig, you mine as well sell it and use the extra money. You could also keep some of the parts for troubleshooting purposes if you don't really need the extra money.

 

[Silibant]

You could try ebay or craigslist as well. I usually use craigslist. I don't like ebay but I know a lot of people who use it to sell their computer parts just because there are more chances of finding a buyer.

Craigslist is nice because you can find people interested nearby. The process is usually quick and easy.

If you can sell the machine for the full price I would do that and then use that money towards your build. Although if you're current machine is not worth what you paid for then don't rip someone off. If you bought all your parts new then they automatically decrease in price just because you used them no matter how long. Depending on how long you've had the parts and how outdated they are that will decrease the price as well.

So if you're not going to use anything in your current rig, you mine as well sell it and use the extra money. You could also keep some of the parts for troubleshooting purposes if you don't really need the extra money.

Thanks for the advice. I've been warned about Craigslist, but I assume if I use a public, well-lit space as my meeting ground and bring friends, it should be fine. Also, I paid technically less than what it's worth via selling old parts, christmas cash, etc. PCPartPicker has it at $815 after discounts and rebates, a price I'm pretty satisfied with, considering it's prebuilt, pre cable-managed, and that price includes rebates and discounts like I said.

 

[Anencephalus]

How you sell it is your business.

Craigslist isn't that bad as long as you have common sense. If someone asks you to bring a suitcase full of money to a dark alley then hopefully you know what to answer (or not answer) with. I sometimes take a friend but if you go to a public place you should be fine. I sold my last computer at a Starbucks. I called and asked the manager if he cared and they said it was fine. Apparently they have people bringing in dekstops to work all the time.

If you do sell your machine you 're going to have to have power so you can allow the other person to inspect the machine. Unless they don't want to...but then that's just an example for you of how stupid people can be.

Good luck!

 

[Silibant]

Hey: what do we think of getting one 970 now and SLI'ing later? If I'm going to go single-card, is the 980 (and subsequent SLI) worth it when the cost is spread out a lot? Basically:
a)Save up longer and get 2 970's (probably best option)
b)Cheap out and get one 970 + the PSU for two so I can upgrade later
c)Kind of cheap out and get one 980 + the PSU for two so I can upgrade later

 

[nikoli707]

Hey: what do we think of getting one 970 now and SLI'ing later? If I'm going to go single-card, is the 980 (and subsequent SLI) worth it when the cost is spread out a lot? Basically:
a)Save up longer and get 2 970's (probably best option)
b)Cheap out and get one 970 + the PSU for two so I can upgrade later
c)Kind of cheap out and get one 980 + the PSU for two so I can upgrade later

d)get one 970 now, then when gm210 comes out, buy a single gtx1000/ti and sell the 970

 

[Anencephalus]

Get the 970 now and SLI it later. The SLId cards will be much more powerful then just one 980. Plus the 970 is already one of the top cards so you won't need to upgrade until much later.

 

[Silibant]

nikoli: top kek, I've waited enough. when do you think they'll release that, though?
Anencephalus: thanks for the info. I'm gonna reach for SLI 970's and if I fall a little short I'll just go for one and do like you said

 

[Anencephalus]

Glad to have helped. Good luck!

 

[mdocod]

A Haswell core has a very wide instruction engine with many execution ports (8). When a single thread is running on a core, the scheduler is rarely able to keep all of those execution ports busy. The bottleneck lands on the front end of the core (fetch/decode/scheduling). Hyperthreading more or less doubles up the "front end" of the CPU core, Allowing multiple threads to have instructions scheduled on the available execution resources simultaneously. In doing so, would-be idle cycles on execution ports are saturated, resulting in higher combined execution throughput per core, up to ~20-30% or more depending on the workload. When software is carefully optimized with scheduling optimizations for hyperthreading, it's possible for performance to scale even more than this, especially when a workload can make use of both integer and floating point operations simultaneously (many of these operations are separated on different "ports," so mixing FPU and ALU work within the same core offers the greatest opportunity for performance scaling).

Hyper-threading works just fine in gaming workloads. If you would like to see a demonstration of this, look at any compute bound gaming benchmark comparing the Pentium and i3. You'll see that the Pentium has to be overclocked to ~4.5ghz to match the i3 at ~3.5ghz in games that scale into 4 threads well. The primary difference between the G3258 and the i3-4150 for these purposes is hyper-threading. (there are some other differences in features but they do not impact these workloads).

ANY workload that bottlenecks on the front-end of the CPU core, and can scale into more threads, can appreciate performance scaling from hyper-threading.

With existing games, the conditions required to appreciate performance scaling from hyper-threading occur quite often on a dual core. Once we move up to the quad core, the frequency with which we achieve both of the conditions required to appreciate performance scaling from hyper-threading drops to nearly nil. It's not that hyper-threading doesn't work for these workloads, it's that the i5 has an availability of execution resources that is already so high without hyperthreading, that there is no opportunity to scale up performance any further with hyperthreading given the way the workload presents in existing games.

When the budget is a concern, the i5 offers the best value, as in most cases it offers 90% or more of the performance of the i7 in games. On the other hand, if the budget is lax enough for the i7, I'd advise going for it. For builds that won't be overclocked and will use a dGPU, the E3-1231V3 is priced in-between the i5 and i7, and offers the same compute performance as an i7-4770.

 

[Silibant]

the E3-1231V3 is priced in-between the i5 and i7, and offers the same compute performance as an i7-4770.

Thanks for the recommendation! Since it's non-OC, could I go with a cheaper cooler like the 212 EVO to balance the price?

 

[mdocod]

The E3-1231V3 can run fine on the Intel boxed cooler if you want. Generally the only reason to "upgrade" this is to cut down on noise under a load. An Arctic i11, Zalman CNPS5X, CM TX3, or SilverStone AR02 are all nice options for stock clocked 1150 socket chips. The 212 EVO is actually a bit overkill, though would be perfectly fine.

 

[Silibant]

The E3-1231V3 can run fine on the Intel boxed cooler if you want. Generally the only reason to "upgrade" this is to cut down on noise under a load.

Great! Thanks for the info. Like you said, I want less noise from the cooler. Got any cheap silent air units?

 

[mdocod]

Almost any heatpipe cooler with a low RPM PWM fan can be made to run nearly silent by setting the fan controller to quiet mode, which will hold the RPMs down, allowing the temp differential to grow larger before cranking up the fans. On a stock clocked chip, the core temp is never going to reach the threshold where an increase in cooling demand is required in quiet mode.

 

[Silibant]

Good explanation, I needed that. I looked at some benchmarks, that Xeon is closely comparable to an i7 in gaming performance. Why do people say they're not good for gaming? Is it the inability to OC?

 

[mdocod]

Lots of people advise locked i5's for gaming rigs. Most people don't OC anyway, so there's nothing wrong with not being able to OC in terms of gaming performance.

I think the unfortunate reality is that people let their intuition guide them on the subject of computers, and then share what they have "made up" on the internet. Xeons are marketed to enterprise/professional markets, and are typically associated with server workloads. When someone lets their intuition take that a step further, they arrive at a an assumption about performance that isn't true.

The E3 V3 Xeon series, comes off the same assembly line as the consumer Haswell CORE series. They are the same silicon with the same cores. There are some minor differences in which features of that silicon have been enabled or disabled (for example, ECC memory support), but otherwise, there is no significant difference. The research and design that goes into CPU architecture is so enormous, that it simply does not make sense to actually design separate architectures for separate markets. Haswell is the best arch they have now and can be found in everything from a celeron to an 18 core E5 V3 Xeon.

Gaming performance scales better with per core performance than equal increases in intercore parallelism. Perhaps the reason Xeon's are considered poor gaming CPUs, is that people associate the Xeon name with chips like the E5-2608L v3, which have very low clock speeds, and would not make particularly good gaming CPUs. Xeons comes in all sorts of flavors, just like the CORE series. Some have more cores, some have more clock speed. The enterprise/workstation/server environment has a variety of performance needs as well.