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Post by Tony on Aug 30, 2014 9:00:40 GMT
It's been about 8-10 years since I last built a PC as I got sick of upgrading every two years or so just to keep the bloody thing running operating systems stably never mind games with having to keep installing different driver versions to get decent performance on an almost per game basis.
I understand that PC tech has pretty much hit a wall now unless you are an uber geek pixel counter so I may dive back in plus I now have a decent spare 32" samsung TV that is going to get relegated to a guest bedroom unless I make use of it soon....
I most likely wont play games on it much if so it will be older stuff anyway so I was thinking an AMD a10 7850k as my laptop with an a8 can happilly chug along at 45fps on BF4 at 900p so the a10 should be fine for the minimal stuff I will do.
However motherboards is something that seems to have changed drastically since the days of Sovtek! The only restriction I have in this area is it needs to be a mini ITX form factor as I want this to be reasonably small and i'll probably bung it in a Cooler Master Elite 130 or something.
Everything else seems pretty similar just faster ram etc.
Just for reference i'm not a big fan of Intel after having 4 Pentium 4s fail on me within a few months. CCL told me it was a faulty batch but fuck Intel as the same also happened to a Core 2 duo that I had with no overclocking going on and stable 35-40c temperatures.
Obviously i'm not going to bother with a seperate GPU and will probably throw 8gb of DDR3 in it as the main purpose of this PC will be recording and watching films. So any recommendations on RAM are welcome but I don't want any of the stuff with massive ugly heatsinks on as it will obviously not fit in a mini ITX build.
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Post by Blankplank on Aug 30, 2014 20:15:17 GMT
I built a mini ITX system recently based around the Intel Broadwell chips. Get the Asus Maximus IV Impact and I think it was the 4690k (3.5GHz job). If you want a full parts rundown I'll dig it all out! Runs a beast.
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Post by Tony on Aug 31, 2014 20:50:16 GMT
I built a mini ITX system recently based around the Intel Broadwell chips. Get the Asus Maximus IV Impact and I think it was the 4690k (3.5GHz job). If you want a full parts rundown I'll dig it all out! Runs a beast. I'll take a look into them. Cheers for the heads up. Why not post up your main rig? |
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Post by Blankplank on Aug 31, 2014 20:56:53 GMT
I will do tomorrow!
It's looking a little dates these days. Built it 3 years ago now.
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Post by MDV on Sept 2, 2014 11:09:50 GMT
My builds will of course be out of date now, but they are:
i7 920, 6Gb of ram, HD7950:
General fuck about and games machine. With modern games I have no problems setting everything to max and diving in. Not failed me yet. Could, by the looks of the requirements for some games coming out soon (tm) do with a bit more ram. Bar the graphics card, its about 5 years old or so now. Does its job very well, largely because of the good graphics card and non-bottlenecking CPU and ram.
i7 4770, 16gb of ram, HD4890:
Audio machine. That graphics card is in there purely because I have it and know its silent when not under load, which it never is in this machine. Big mixes need the CPU and ram that this machine has. For audio processing, its a beast. Were that CPU and ram in the games machine, they would be wasted (and vice versa for the graphics card in the other).
Asus sabertooths (of the appropriate sockets) in both machines, because they are gloriously over-engineered, solid, no bullshit motherboards that are just really, really well designed, and while not quite being all singing all dancing, they have more than enough features that the old one is still fine (it just lacks USB 3 I think), and the new one is about as future proofed as you can reasonably expect.
WD caviar blacks, 2x 1Tb drives in each, because they're fast and pretty well made.
If I could only use one, obviously I'd put the 7950 in the 4770/16gb machine and watch it laugh at everything I threw at it.
Moral of the story - two pretty old computers there, each doing demanding jobs, and doing them very well. Don't agonise over what to get that much, horsepower available in half decent modern PCs exceeds the demands we routinely put them under by quite a way.
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Post by Blankplank on Sept 2, 2014 21:28:19 GMT
My rig;
Intel Core i5 2500k
Asus Maximux IV Gene (mATX)
Corsair Vengeance 1866MHz - 16GB
Asus ATI HD7870
OCZ Vertex 4 SSD - 256GB
Coolermaster Silent Pro Gold 1000w PSU
Coolermaster HAF-X case
Akasa Venom CPU cooler
Joes new build;
Intel Core i5 4670k
Asus Maximus VI Impact (mITX)
Corsair Vengeance 2133MHz - 8GB
Asus nVidia GTX760
Samsung 840 Evo SSD - 250GB
Corsair Builder Series 750w Modular PSU
BetFenix Prodigy Mini-ITX case
Corsair Hydro H100i AIO watercooler
I haven't had extensive use with Joe's machine, but considering my machine smashes out Skyrim on Ultra without batting an eyelid, Joe's should do even better still. It's absolutely tiny too, being mITX. If that motherboard had Thunderbolt on, I'd be going that way for my next build without a shadow of a doubt. None of the Asus RoG boards other than their top-end ATX boards even think about Thunderbolt though (for my interface, Focusrite have confirmed all their interfaces work properly with Thunderbolt>Firewire adapters).
I think Joe's machine came to just under £950.
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Post by Frank on Sept 7, 2014 16:50:36 GMT
I upgraded to an Intel i5 system this year after running an ancient machine for a very long time. Windows 8 is fine once you install Classic Shell and do a registry edit to stop the stupid new way of resizing the program window.
The pain in the arse was moving from a 32 bit OS to a 64 bit one. The old PCI soundcard had to go (no more PCI slots!) and I had to buy new versions of Cubase, Reason and all my VST plugins to run on 64 bit versions plus a Firewire soundcard and Firewire expansion card as there was none on the motherboard.
I can confirm the Focusrite Saffire Pro24 works like a dream on Firewire. Never a single problem with it and it sounds utterly superb.
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Post by Tony on Sept 21, 2014 15:42:53 GMT
I decided to just stick with some familiar stuff especially as I know it will do what I need and it all came in under £360
AsRock FM2A88x-ITX+
AMD A10-7850k
Patriot Viper 3 2133mhz 8gb
Seagate 2tb SSHD
Cooler Master Elite 130 case
Cooler Master Seidon 120v Liquid cooler
Cooler Master b500 PSU (came with the case I'll probably change this later)
It's all running smoothly and super quick.
I can run Battlefield 4 in 1080p with everything set to high at 60fps with the APU temperature never going north of 40c
Not that I like BF4 but it came free with the APU so I figured I had best give it a whirl along with the Mantle API
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Post by Tony on Oct 17, 2014 8:16:42 GMT
Just for reference the cooler master Seidon 120v is awesome for £39.
I was tinkering a bit earlier with the APU clocks and boosted the GPU up to 1200mhz from 720mhz and the cpu up to 4.7ghz from 3.7ghz and ran it through a stress test on sandra and it stayed perfectly stable and the temperatures got to 49c under max load through a 30 min test. The fan only kicked up to 1108 rpm too which was just audible usually it sticks around 800rpm
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