Need Some Advice (Warning: it's a long post)

KrazedGuy

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Jan 20, 2016
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I’m a new builder with a boat load of questions so any advice you guys can give me on this I’d definitely appreciate. I’m trying to build a nice gaming pc, I’m off to college next year and while I still have my job and am in High School I want to build something to take with me.

Motherboard – I was looking for a nice motherboard, with built in Wi-Fi, at least 4 PCIE slots. (For Skylake) So I was looking at Gigabyte G1, MSI M9, or Asus Rog Something (but they have so many models I don’t know where to begin). Thoughts on those or any better suggestions?

Memory – I was torn between the different types of storage, I wanted something fast but not too expensive. That being said should I go m.2 or Sata lll and get a bunch of gig. Or should I get a PCIE storage card from intel (if that sounds dumb I’m sorry I might not understand the differences).

DRAM – Definitely going DDR4 but should I go 16 or 32gig and what’s the best company to get them from, I was looking at corsairs Dominator series. (I do a little bit of video editing although to my knowledge probably not enough to warrant 32 gigs but if it will help with gaming then I might invest).

Graphics Card – I’m pretty solid on getting the GTX 980 Ti but I was more curious what model to get, and from whom, EVGA or MSI or Gigabyte.

CPU - Core i7 6700k

To water cool or not to? – I’m petrified of a coolant leak to say the least, I can barely afford this rig, I definitely could not afford to replace it. Should I go with a lot of fans and a big case for some big heat sinks or risk it all? Not opposed to hybrid all in one pumps but I hear so many horror stories of leaks.
Case – I want something pretty big to expand on and I would like it to be black (My theme is going to be red and black or the closest I can get). I would also like a big viewing window and dust filters on all areas of intake. I was thinking the Obsidian 900D but I saw a good bit of reviews knocking down the quality of the case. Plus, its expensive as hell.

Monitors – Pretty much my only question is should I get a large curved monitor or do three 1080p IPS monitors (cheap ones) in NVIDA surround.

If you read all the way through this thank you very much I’m pretty lost. Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Solution
Are you dead set on Skylake? The X99 platform is pretty good too, and offers a ton of options for most high end builds. If you are set on Skylake there's honestly not point in dumping that much into the motherboard though. A lot of what you're paying for is name rather than needed features, as well as a particular look. Realistically you could spend less on a motherboard and look at some other options for the system instead.

Realistically you won't need more than 8GB of ram, 16 if you are doing a small amounts of video editing, though I'm a huge fan of having a board seem full of RAM. Totally up to you though

With regards to the GPU it's honestly a tossup. If you're just trying to get a good one there really isn't a particular brand I...
All i can say because my understanding in some of these things are not good, but I know this:

1. Graphics card: Good choice, should work pretty well for games, but you could consider buying 960. Its a lot less expensive and 980 doesn't outperform it by much

2. Ram: The boost from 16 to 32 gb is so small you probably won't notice. And its not needed unless you will develop games, then you need as much as you can get.

3. CPU: Nothing to say there, really good CPU.

4. I suggest not to watercool, but use the good old method. Lots of fans will do the job.

Other things i don't really understand, sorry 😛
 


Thanks for the feedback man!
 
Are you dead set on Skylake? The X99 platform is pretty good too, and offers a ton of options for most high end builds. If you are set on Skylake there's honestly not point in dumping that much into the motherboard though. A lot of what you're paying for is name rather than needed features, as well as a particular look. Realistically you could spend less on a motherboard and look at some other options for the system instead.

Realistically you won't need more than 8GB of ram, 16 if you are doing a small amounts of video editing, though I'm a huge fan of having a board seem full of RAM. Totally up to you though

With regards to the GPU it's honestly a tossup. If you're just trying to get a good one there really isn't a particular brand I could recommend, though I'd have ASUS in that list over Gigabyte.

A full liquid cooling loop honestly isn't needed here. Unless you're planning a huge overclock on everything you can get away with just the CPU cooler, and that's totally up in the air. If you're paranoid of leaks there's tons of really good air coolers on the market, though they can obscure the motherboard a considerable amount. AIO coolers on the other hand perform well, and have a much smaller heatsink, but technically they could leak. I haven't had any issues with the 4 I've used over 5 years though so I honestly wouldn't worry about it too much.

I'll throw a parts list together for you and just let me know where it sits as far as you budget goes and I can help tweak things from there

Parts List

I think this checks off most of what you were looking for in a system minus the triple monitor setup. Has the 980TI, and while the motherboard only has 3 PCI-E slots, you'll still be able to SLI two cards in the future (was also the reason I put in a 1000W PSU. I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. An 850W would work fine as well) Has a boot SATA3 SSD and then a 2TB storage drive. For the increase in speed I just can't justify spending 300+ on a hard drive, even with how good this computer will be. Price to performance just isn't there in my mind. I threw in an AIO cooler as well, not so much because it's better at cooling, but it definitely seemed like you wanted to show off the hardware, and like I said before an Air Cooler can take up a huge amount of space.
 
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