Gaming Desktop Build Help Please :D

Edward T

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May 19, 2015
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So yeah this is like my second time asking on online forums just want to confirm everything because I changed a lot.
My build:
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/edwardtyl/saved/Lx2nTW

How I picked stuff:
So basically the i5 I picked because I thought the couple FPS from the 4460 to 4590 for $15 might be worth it. (A note about the CPU: people keep telling me to get the 4460 and 4590 and I can't decide between them because everyone has their own opinion of which one is worth it.. so which one??) The r9 290 I picked... because the r9 290 can run all games above 60 FPS at ultra (which is what I'm aiming for in this build) and the sapphire vapor has the best cooling and FPS overall for the r9 290s. The motherboard I picked because I have really good headphones and I wanted good onboard audio, and I also wanted the features from the Creative Blaster audio suit (scout mode, etc), and this is the cheapest motherboard I could find compatible with my build which has Creative Blaster onboard audio. The case I picked because its only $50 and it has all the fans preinstalled and looks like it has great design inside and out with plenty of space in addition to perfect reviews. The display I picked because its the cheapest good quality IPS screen with HDMI input. Keyboard - cheapest with 'good' key switches. I believe everything else in my build is pretty standard.

Objective:
Tell me if I screwed up somewhere or if I should change something out to improve it or drop the price without sacrificing important features. Honestly I just want to have a decent build that will be durable and powerful for 60 FPS on ultra gaming. However, I don't plan to overclock or upgrade this build in the future or get sound cards or anything (so there is no reason to get ATX over mATX right?). I guess really all that's left (other than you guys giving your opinions) is trying to lower the price.
Thank you in advance!
~Edward

Final note forgot to mention to prevent people talking about this: The CPU MUST have 4 cores minimum because of new games that need quad core (and Battlefield 4 takes advantage from quad core).
 
Solution
Most of the IPS panels made on this rock we call a planet are made by LG and Samsung. And as you would expect, they keep the best panels for themselves, and once they have taken the cream of the crop, they sell the rest to everyone else.

So guess which 2 companies *should* have the best panels out there... LG and Samsung. Not to say the other companies have bad panels, but the best of the best are kept by the manufacturing companies for their own monitors

IPS with sRGB Over 99%... That means every color your eye can perceive is there. Trust me on this, I have an IPS panel in my monitor, and you will absolutely love it.

Now a little bit about reviews. I have learned to take consumer based reviews with this massive grain of salt. And...
-Overall a very good build. Cheers!
-If you won't be getting an SSD I recommend Western Digital Black hard drive which is a performance oriented drive.
-The power supply you chose is the G1 series. The one you want is the G2 which is much better quality, made by Superflower.
 
I really like what you selected there.

But... LOL... I would suggest one change. You have picked a 23.8 inch monitor. Gaming is so much better on a larger screen. I went looking, and found an AOC 27 inch IPS panel monitor that I think you would love, and Newegg has it for $199.99. It might be out there for less, but Newegg is the only place I looked. Here is a link to the monitor at Newegg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824160202&cm_re=27%22_monitor_IPS_1080-_-24-160-202-_-Product

My monitor is an AOC, and while this is the first time I have owned an AOC monitor, I've had this for a year now, and just love it. When I was looking for a bigger monitor for you, I was not looking for a specific brand, but rather a 27 inch, IPS panel monitor that had 5ms or faster response times so you would not see any ghosting on the screen while playing games. AOC was the lowest priced monitor that I found.
 


Thanks for the hard drive tip. Changed!
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/edwardtyl/saved/Lx2nTW

As a reply to the other things:

MarkW I would agree with you but unfortunately that's adding over $70 to my budget which is quite significant. $10-$20 I can go for but I currently have a 13.3" laptop so for me 23.8" will probably be very large relatively and I should be fine. However I do agree with you I would love to have an ultrawide display 😀 but all big screens cost minimum ~$200. I'll consider it though thank you for the input. For now I'll go ahead and change it to an ultrawide IPS from LG which also costs $200 -- link:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824025122&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

Archaic59 what do you mean by super flower PSU? can you give a link to which PSU you recommend? because I thought that a 80+ gold 750W PSU from evga should be good. Please correct me if I'm wrong :)
 


In my other comment I said I added this ultrawide:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824025122&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=

Would this be worse quality than the 27" AOC you linked? Or would it be good/without ghosting/etc?
Thanks!
 
Two things about that monitor you last linked.

First, it is a 2560x1080 monitor. Which means your video card would need to produce more pixels per frame than the 1920x1080 monitors would.

Second, and this might not be a factor, the only connectors are both HDMI. I prefer to use DVI-D or DisplayPort, but in this case HDMI should be fine.
 
Hi Edward. The EVGA G1 series power supply you selected is made by FSP (Fortron) and is decent (average) quality. If this is sufficient for you then that's fine. If you want something better, the EVGA B2 and G2 series are made by Superflower, a European manufacturer you may not have heard of. They make the highest quality power supplies available, with Seasonic as the only true competition in their class.

http://pcpartpicker.com/parts/compare/evga-power-supply-110b20750vr%2Cevga-power-supply-220g20750xr/
 


I don't think the extra pixels should be an issue honestly the r9 290 benchmarks show it still gets above 40 FPS in 2560x1440 which is more than the ultrawide so I can just turn of anti-aliasing and get above 60 FPS.
Why do you prefer DVI-D & DisplayPort over HDMI? Is there a quality difference for 1080p @ 60Hz?

MarkW thanks for explaining I ended up changing my PSU to the 100 dollar model since PSU is pretty important.

Thank you!
 

1920x1080 = 2,073,600
2560x1080 = 2,764,800
2560x1440 = 3,686,400

So 2560x1080 is 33% more pixels per frame than standard 1080p. And with an R9 290, yes, you should be able to do that.

I'm just trying to make sure you understand how a simple little change like that might affect you within a game. I'm not saying its a bad thing.


Both DVI and DisplayPort were designed specifically to get the output from your video card to your monitor. HDMI was designed more for taking a movie from a device (like a DVD player) to the TV. All three today can and do work fairly well with computers, but sometimes, I see artifacts and things with an HDMI cable, that when I switch cables to DVI or DP, just are not there. I do not know if it is the TV, the video card, the cables or what exactly is the problem when I see the artifacts. Its rare. But whenever I have a choice, I prefer to use DVI or DP.

And the future belongs to DisplayPort. Its the only protocol out there that can do 4K video at 60Hz today. I think DVI is dead. HDMI can only do 4K at 30Hz. It most likely will be updated, again...


:)
 


Yeah I see the monitor might be a problem... I searched through stuff and apparently color accuracy isn't that great on it either... so I guess no ultrawide for me 🙁.

So is there any monitor with good color accuracy you would recommend?
 
Most of the IPS panels made on this rock we call a planet are made by LG and Samsung. And as you would expect, they keep the best panels for themselves, and once they have taken the cream of the crop, they sell the rest to everyone else.

So guess which 2 companies *should* have the best panels out there... LG and Samsung. Not to say the other companies have bad panels, but the best of the best are kept by the manufacturing companies for their own monitors

IPS with sRGB Over 99%... That means every color your eye can perceive is there. Trust me on this, I have an IPS panel in my monitor, and you will absolutely love it.

Now a little bit about reviews. I have learned to take consumer based reviews with this massive grain of salt. And for a few reasons. First, most people that buy a product never post a review of it. Secondly, a *much* higher percentage of people that buy a product, and then have a problem, even if the problem is due to something they did wrong themselves, will post a negative response. And we know, without any doubt at all, that there are a huge number of people buying computer hardware who have never done this before. So they have expectations which are often unrealistic. And then when those expectations are not met, they decide the hardware is crap, and they post negative reviews.

So over the years, I have come to the following conclusions. Any product that can maintain a 4 star/egg/fuzzy bunny rating, is most likely a good product. Anything less than 4 starts to make me wonder. When the rating is 3.5 or lower, I find a competing product and start checking it out. Now whenever you look at these ratings, you also need to pay attention to how many reviews have been posted. Low numbers of reviews means there is not yet a good rating for that product.

I look at Newegg, which is where you linked this monitor from, and it has a grand total of 1 review. And that was a 4 rating. Then I see that he says that its 4 stars because there is a tiny bit of backlight bleed. Well... ok. That isn't what I would call unusual. Often, lowering the brightness just a little bit will fix that. But he didn't know that, so we see the somewhat negative review.

So I went to Amazon. 6 reviews there. 4 are 5 star, 1 each are 3 star and 4 star. Not a lot of reviews here either, but 6 times the number at Newegg. And overall a good trend on reviews here. So now I am liking this a little bit more. And then I see something at Amazon that I did not see at Newegg. In addition to the 2 HDMI ports, this monitor has a DisplayPort connector. I talked about DisplayPort earlier. In my book, that is a very big plus for you.

So I think this would be a great gaming monitor for you. if you have not already done so, go look up the monitor at Amazon, and scroll down a little bit, and they have all kinds of graphics along with explanations of all of the features this monitor has.
 
Solution
Personally think a 23.8/24 screen is fine.
Id do this with the build though.
That gets you a ssdc& a 1tb drive for less than your original budget.
That antec is a rebadged seasonic & has ample power for your build.
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4590 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($159.99 @ Micro Center)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97MX-Gaming 5 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($106.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Sniper 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Mushkin Chronos 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($52.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($51.49 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon R9 290 4GB Vapor-X Video Card ($301.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: Antec High Current Gamer 620W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Samsung SH-224DB/BEBE DVD/CD Writer ($14.98 @ OutletPC)
Keyboard: Cougar 200K Wired Gaming Keyboard ($28.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Other: DEEPCOOL KENDOMEN Black ATX Mid Tower Computer case Preinstalled 5 Cooling Fans With Side Window Support 240mm Water Cooling Installation at Top ($49.99)
Total: $867.39
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-05-30 12:35 EDT-0400
 


Stellar advice! I'll go with this then:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00V8FAWC2/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1433010145&sr=1-1&pi=AC_SX110_SY165_FMwebp_QL70&keywords=lg+ultrawide#productDescription_secondary_view_pageState_1433010379659

Seems like it's the cheapest one too by far.
Also to the other suggested build:
All you did is select a discounted version of the i5, which I'll make sure to take advantage of. Then you swapped out the psu for a cheaper model, but honestly I'd rather get a 750 W instead of a 600W so that way if I ever wish to add something in the future I have enough wattage.

Thanks for the suggestions guys!
 


LOL yep!
if only one FPS was actually 1 dollar. then 60 FPS would only be 60 dollars instead of a minimum of ~800 dollars 🙁