Hi guys
I asked this on another big forum yeterday but got not a single reply though I had hundreds of views. I honestly expected to get a lot of conflicting replies rather than none lol. Anyway apologies if you already read this elsewhere. I will explain what I am trying to do, then waffle a bit about my background seeing as I am new here.
The Project.
I got back into computer gaming last year having not played any games since the late 90s. I've been playing retro gqames, on retro hardware - but now I want to build a rig that can handle recent or current games. And I am trying to do it on the cheap.
What I have so far... and this is where i would like some recommendations
Motherboard
I have an ASUS X99 Deluxe II motherboard - came with a batch of spares/repair motherboards I bought to fix. This cost me £51 and it's working now. I believe this should be able to run games from a couple of years ago very well, yes?
CPU
i7-5820K 3.3GHz CPU which I am hoping to overclock up to around 4.5GHz fingers crossed. Cost me £56 second hand which I thought was OK. Yes i know I can get 40 lane CPUs for this motherboard but I couldn't find one at a good price :-(
RAM
I'm using 2x 4Gb Corsair Vengeance 2400MHz DDR4 to test the motherboard- I bought these in auction last year for £20 the pair. I use these for testing in my workshop so I want to buy some more DDR4 for this motherboard. I was thinking 4x4Gb DDR4 - but what speed should I buy? As I have 4 channel RAM so I have a very high bandwidth, do I need to buy super fast DDR or will the four channels more than make up for that? Also I cant currently see any DDR4 quite as cheap as I got those other two - looking on ebay it seems a set of 4 is gonna cost me around £80, which is OK, but if I can get good DDR4 for less avoiding named brands.....
GPU
I'm currently testing with a GTX 750ti which is the fastest GPU I have, but I need that for one of retro rigs (read my waffle later) so I need another one
Storage
I used a 128Gb Kingston SSD - installed Windows 10 64 bit and all drivers to test the hardware so far.
PSU
I have an OCZ ZX Series 850W modular PSU, it's about 10 years old but it works fine. I also have a Tagan TG700-V25 700W that is waiting for some parts (the 5V Standby section has blown with a few burnt out components but it should be easy to fix, I manged to reverse engineer that part of the circuit from the Switching IC datasheet). I think either of these will suffice for this build
Case
I have a 15 year old cooler master clone case from another old XP rig of mine - it is spacious and has 3 built in temperature probes/meters. Should do the job fine. - cost £0
Cooling
Plenty of 80mm and 120mm fans lying around
So that is what I have now
Cost so far, plus my shopping list :
Case £0
Motherboard £51
CPU £56
PSU £0
SDD 128Gb Kingston - £17.50 - I need to add more storage.... How much more?
4x4Gb DDR4 What speed? what cost?
Cooler suitable for OC 17-5820K - cost? at the moment i have an old cooler just stuck on the CPU with heatsink compound.
And the big Question..... What GPU? What would be a good match for this PC without being overkill and without being under powered for the motherboard/CPU combo. And what can I find at a decent price second hand? My monitor is 24" 1080p so I want to play games at that resolution. That should help me get the best advice.
Over to you.
Waffle
Ok I am new here, so if you want to more what I am interested i and where I am coming from, read on..
You could probably describe me as more interested in computer hardware than in playing games. At best I am a part time gamer. I'm a self employed electronics engineer.
I played computer games from the early days, First on the Spectrum, then C64 and moved onto the Amiga when that first came in the UK. From there I moved to the PC (my first rig was a 486DX50 which I built when games Rebbel Assult and Seventh Guest came out, so that would have been 1993/4 I guess) Back in the day I enjoyed games like Doom, Doom2 and my all time favourites Duke Nulem 3D and Tombradier. But then in the late 90s I lost interest in games altogether.
About a year ago I got interested in emulators to play spectrum and Amiga classics, and then in to retro PC hardware and gaming. Now have several retro rigs that cover a range of games from DOS to Windows XP.
I have a A 486DLC40 DOS machine found in a skip. This is basically a 386DX 40MHza overdrive machine with 487 Maths Co Pro. Needs a better ISA VGA card but it is working.
A Super Socket 7 Gigabyte GA-5AX AMD K6-350 with ISA AWE32, 256Mb PC-133 and a Geforce 2 given to me by a friend who had it sitting in his garage for nigh on 20 years. Looking for an AMD K6-III+ 450 or 550 and a Voodoo 2 or Voodoo 3 to complete this one but it is kinda my pride and joy as it is such a highly sought after machine and i t is working.
I then built a Core 2 Quad which is my main retro gaming PC, it has 2x SSD and 2Gb RAM and it's on one of the few motherboards that supported Core 2 Quad/Extreme and still had AGP, so it is fully compatible with DirectX 8.1 and 9.0. I have a Geforce 4ti 4200 and a Radeon HD 3450 which I use on that machine depending on what I want to play, for example I am now playing Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness using the HD 3450, but older games like House of the Dead 2 crash on that card so i have to fit the Geforce 4ti. This PC has 2x SDD, one has XP and the other Windows 98SE so I can boot to either and it cost me about £100 to build, the HD3450AGP I found at the flea market/car boot sale for almost nothing. The Geforce 4ti works great for Windows 98 games!
The fastest PC I currently have is this one which is my general work horse.
ASUS Motherboard P8Z68-V
Intel i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz
16Gb RAM DDR3 1600MHz
Radeon HD 6800
60Gb SSD
2x 2TB HDD
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
I recently watched a youtube video on PhilsComputerLab, 'Building a fast windows XP gaming PC', where Phil built a retro gaming PC of very similar spec to my i7-2600K. Following Phil's recommendation I decided to do the same so I bought the second hand GTX 750ti I mentioned earlier to fit that machine and intend to use it as a 'killer' XP retro gaming as I seem to find a lot of games from that era at the local flea market.
So I am pretty well covered for retro gaming. Now I want to build a fast PC that can play recent games. On the cheap!
Last question - I know this is gonna be very subjective.....
I haven't played games since the late 90s until I started again last year with retro gaming. To date I played and completed all the Tomb Raider from the original to Last revelation and I'm currently playing and enjoying Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness This would be my favourite series of games so far.
I played around with Crysis Warhead a bit and find it a bit tough at times though enjoyable, also Prince of Persia Sands of Time but I find that really hard to control the character for some reason. I also played another old game called Bloodlines Masquerade though only part of the first level - but I quite enjoyed that. Basically there is an entire back catalog of 20 years of games I never saw and could play.
So the question is... is an oldie like me going to enjoy recent games? And what recent/current games would be similar to the ones I played and enjoyed?
And what's with all these multiplayer games? They seem to have their own vocabulary/language of slang which don't mean much of anything to me but I get the gist and as I don't know anyone else even vaguely interested in PC games and I tend to play maybe hour a day is this just something I should avoid?
Now let's see how much it is going to cost to complete that PC I want to build
And Hmmmm how do I upload pics from my PC to this thread?
I asked this on another big forum yeterday but got not a single reply though I had hundreds of views. I honestly expected to get a lot of conflicting replies rather than none lol. Anyway apologies if you already read this elsewhere. I will explain what I am trying to do, then waffle a bit about my background seeing as I am new here.
The Project.
I got back into computer gaming last year having not played any games since the late 90s. I've been playing retro gqames, on retro hardware - but now I want to build a rig that can handle recent or current games. And I am trying to do it on the cheap.
What I have so far... and this is where i would like some recommendations
Motherboard
I have an ASUS X99 Deluxe II motherboard - came with a batch of spares/repair motherboards I bought to fix. This cost me £51 and it's working now. I believe this should be able to run games from a couple of years ago very well, yes?
CPU
i7-5820K 3.3GHz CPU which I am hoping to overclock up to around 4.5GHz fingers crossed. Cost me £56 second hand which I thought was OK. Yes i know I can get 40 lane CPUs for this motherboard but I couldn't find one at a good price :-(
RAM
I'm using 2x 4Gb Corsair Vengeance 2400MHz DDR4 to test the motherboard- I bought these in auction last year for £20 the pair. I use these for testing in my workshop so I want to buy some more DDR4 for this motherboard. I was thinking 4x4Gb DDR4 - but what speed should I buy? As I have 4 channel RAM so I have a very high bandwidth, do I need to buy super fast DDR or will the four channels more than make up for that? Also I cant currently see any DDR4 quite as cheap as I got those other two - looking on ebay it seems a set of 4 is gonna cost me around £80, which is OK, but if I can get good DDR4 for less avoiding named brands.....
GPU
I'm currently testing with a GTX 750ti which is the fastest GPU I have, but I need that for one of retro rigs (read my waffle later) so I need another one
Storage
I used a 128Gb Kingston SSD - installed Windows 10 64 bit and all drivers to test the hardware so far.
PSU
I have an OCZ ZX Series 850W modular PSU, it's about 10 years old but it works fine. I also have a Tagan TG700-V25 700W that is waiting for some parts (the 5V Standby section has blown with a few burnt out components but it should be easy to fix, I manged to reverse engineer that part of the circuit from the Switching IC datasheet). I think either of these will suffice for this build
Case
I have a 15 year old cooler master clone case from another old XP rig of mine - it is spacious and has 3 built in temperature probes/meters. Should do the job fine. - cost £0
Cooling
Plenty of 80mm and 120mm fans lying around
So that is what I have now
Cost so far, plus my shopping list :
Case £0
Motherboard £51
CPU £56
PSU £0
SDD 128Gb Kingston - £17.50 - I need to add more storage.... How much more?
4x4Gb DDR4 What speed? what cost?
Cooler suitable for OC 17-5820K - cost? at the moment i have an old cooler just stuck on the CPU with heatsink compound.
And the big Question..... What GPU? What would be a good match for this PC without being overkill and without being under powered for the motherboard/CPU combo. And what can I find at a decent price second hand? My monitor is 24" 1080p so I want to play games at that resolution. That should help me get the best advice.
Over to you.
Waffle
Ok I am new here, so if you want to more what I am interested i and where I am coming from, read on..
You could probably describe me as more interested in computer hardware than in playing games. At best I am a part time gamer. I'm a self employed electronics engineer.
I played computer games from the early days, First on the Spectrum, then C64 and moved onto the Amiga when that first came in the UK. From there I moved to the PC (my first rig was a 486DX50 which I built when games Rebbel Assult and Seventh Guest came out, so that would have been 1993/4 I guess) Back in the day I enjoyed games like Doom, Doom2 and my all time favourites Duke Nulem 3D and Tombradier. But then in the late 90s I lost interest in games altogether.
About a year ago I got interested in emulators to play spectrum and Amiga classics, and then in to retro PC hardware and gaming. Now have several retro rigs that cover a range of games from DOS to Windows XP.
I have a A 486DLC40 DOS machine found in a skip. This is basically a 386DX 40MHza overdrive machine with 487 Maths Co Pro. Needs a better ISA VGA card but it is working.
A Super Socket 7 Gigabyte GA-5AX AMD K6-350 with ISA AWE32, 256Mb PC-133 and a Geforce 2 given to me by a friend who had it sitting in his garage for nigh on 20 years. Looking for an AMD K6-III+ 450 or 550 and a Voodoo 2 or Voodoo 3 to complete this one but it is kinda my pride and joy as it is such a highly sought after machine and i t is working.
I then built a Core 2 Quad which is my main retro gaming PC, it has 2x SSD and 2Gb RAM and it's on one of the few motherboards that supported Core 2 Quad/Extreme and still had AGP, so it is fully compatible with DirectX 8.1 and 9.0. I have a Geforce 4ti 4200 and a Radeon HD 3450 which I use on that machine depending on what I want to play, for example I am now playing Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness using the HD 3450, but older games like House of the Dead 2 crash on that card so i have to fit the Geforce 4ti. This PC has 2x SDD, one has XP and the other Windows 98SE so I can boot to either and it cost me about £100 to build, the HD3450AGP I found at the flea market/car boot sale for almost nothing. The Geforce 4ti works great for Windows 98 games!
The fastest PC I currently have is this one which is my general work horse.
ASUS Motherboard P8Z68-V
Intel i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz
16Gb RAM DDR3 1600MHz
Radeon HD 6800
60Gb SSD
2x 2TB HDD
Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit
I recently watched a youtube video on PhilsComputerLab, 'Building a fast windows XP gaming PC', where Phil built a retro gaming PC of very similar spec to my i7-2600K. Following Phil's recommendation I decided to do the same so I bought the second hand GTX 750ti I mentioned earlier to fit that machine and intend to use it as a 'killer' XP retro gaming as I seem to find a lot of games from that era at the local flea market.
So I am pretty well covered for retro gaming. Now I want to build a fast PC that can play recent games. On the cheap!
Last question - I know this is gonna be very subjective.....
I haven't played games since the late 90s until I started again last year with retro gaming. To date I played and completed all the Tomb Raider from the original to Last revelation and I'm currently playing and enjoying Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness This would be my favourite series of games so far.
I played around with Crysis Warhead a bit and find it a bit tough at times though enjoyable, also Prince of Persia Sands of Time but I find that really hard to control the character for some reason. I also played another old game called Bloodlines Masquerade though only part of the first level - but I quite enjoyed that. Basically there is an entire back catalog of 20 years of games I never saw and could play.
So the question is... is an oldie like me going to enjoy recent games? And what recent/current games would be similar to the ones I played and enjoyed?
And what's with all these multiplayer games? They seem to have their own vocabulary/language of slang which don't mean much of anything to me but I get the gist and as I don't know anyone else even vaguely interested in PC games and I tend to play maybe hour a day is this just something I should avoid?
Now let's see how much it is going to cost to complete that PC I want to build
And Hmmmm how do I upload pics from my PC to this thread?
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