PC Modernization - Need opinions

[Jakub Santorek]

Hello everyone!
I am currently upgrading my good old PC for gaming purposes. Last time (about 2 years ago) I bought stronger GPU (gigabyte nvidia geforce gtx 560) and 650W Power supply, now it is time for Motherboard and CPU (and new RAM to go ith it as I still have DDR2).
I found out that Intel i5 4460 hits the sweet spot for me when it comes to performance to price ratio, and when it comes to RAM I just searched for the cheapest possible 8GB ticking on 1600Hz (which would be: Kingston HyperX DDR3 2X 4GB 1600MHz XMP CL9 Genesis)

Now here is the problem: Actually I am not certain when it comes to motherboard. I need standard ATX (as I am not planning on getting new case) and I found out that there are two GiGabyte motherboards in my upper price range (I would prefer GiGabyte mobo): GA-Z97X-UD3H and GA-Z97X-SLI. Which of those would be better and why?
How about cooler? Is it an necessity? I should state that I might upgrade my GPU in a year or two, with my HDD and SSD.

 

[13thmonkey]

you could go matx, if you are not overclocking a cooler will make it quieter, and minimise the likelihood of throttling, for the cost of a hyper 212 I would just get one. If you are not getting a k series processor then you have no need of a Z97 board, are you ever going to go SLI? Most boards are functionally similar tbh apart from extra features, which you may not need.

 

[Jakub Santorek]

Thank you for quick reponse 13thmonkey!
I do not believe I will ever need SLI, I can imagine using maximum 2 GPU's at once. If I am not thinking about overclocking will GA-H97-HD3 be enough? And about cooler: shouldn't there be one provided by CPU manufacturer?

 

[13thmonkey]

There will be one provided by the manufacturer, but from a usage point of view the sound of the fan spinning madly every now and then is really annoying, and for a small amount of money it'll be a lot quieter, and a lot nicer to live with, and a lot easier to deal with at the start than in 6 months time.
With no OC all mobo's are essentially equal, ensure a decent number of USB3 and SATA III ports, but that's it, unless you want wifi or something.

 

[13thmonkey]

if you can imagine using 2 GPUs at once then consider an SLI board, but a more powerful GPU is probably better to be honest unless 1 card can never cope.

 

[Jakub Santorek]

So to sum up what you have said: at point where I check if slot and chipset fit my CPU, I can pick any motherboard, only paying attention to amount of SATA3 and USB3 ports (USB for mouse, keyboard, and so on, SATA3 to connect Hard Drives I believe?), because as I am not planning to use more than one graphics card and won't overclock in foreseeable future, there is not much difference between motherboards I choose (except for size - to fit my case) right?
You higly reccomended getting cooler (CoolerMaster Hyper 212 EVO) as it is cheap way to reduce noises and ensure stable CPU performance.
What about my choice of CPU? As I said, pc will be mostly used for gaming, thus I believe 4 cores 3,2GHz should be suficient enough for 4-5 upcoming years.
Is getting small SSD worth the money? I was thinking about getting 120GB and using it only for OS and most played games.

 

[13thmonkey]

From a 'pleasure of using it' point of SSD's are now worth it in my opinion, much nicer with a fast booting machine.

You'll not get a lot of additional 'experience' out of a CPU until you hit the K's and then only because you can OC and hit 4.3 relatively easily, for which you need a Z board (or some H's from some manufacturers if you are lucky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1150). so to get the next lump of performance requires about another $100 for the better CPU and GPU.

A nice big cheap air cooler will make the experience better, I recently built a mini itx box on an i3 with the stock cooler, very noisy when it gets hot, and you want it as cool as possible so that it turbos for as long as possible, 212 is one of the best air coolers out there, you don't need the best, but it's also quite cheap so why not go for that, it can be reused down the line if needed.

Looking at the article above get one of the second gen haswell boards to go with a haswell refresh cpu, else it will not work out of the box. H97 not H87, I built on a £35 h97 mini itx mobo and there is nothing wrong with it (other than just two memory slots). Remember an ATX case can (usually) take any of the sizes below it and matx can often be cheaper than atx. I like Asus for a few nice features to help the build.

4+ht might be more prevalent in 3-4 years time, but no-one really knows.