Trying to build a Computer

[MorbidFly]

I’ve decided that after 3 years it may be time to get myself a new computer. I really want to build it on my own but have never done anything like it before. It’s going to be mostly a gaming PC but I also want to be able to run things like Photoshop and other memory intensive programs.
A couple questions I have are:
1. Can I even build a computer that will do what I want on the budget I have? ($1500 max)
2. Should I get an SSD for at least my OS?
3. Should I get two graphics cards or will one be enough?
4. How much ram should I get?
Here is a list of parts I was planning on getting, does this look like it’ll do what I want it to or am I way off?

DVD Drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106289

PSU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817194086

MOBO:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131730

CPU:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115070

RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231315

Graphics Card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121432

Here are a couple cases I’m considering. I like the Thermaltake but am I really going to need that kind of expandability? I mean, 10 5.25” bays seem a bit like overkill right?
http://www.xoxide.com/thermaltake-armor-case-250mm-black.html
http://www.xoxide.com/coolermaster-haf932case.html

I hope I’m not completely off on these parts or forgetting something, any and all advice is both welcome and appreciated as I am fairly new to computers.

P.S. As a completely unrelated side question, is a degree in Computer Science and Information Systems with an emphasis in CCNA & Security a good choice in regards to future employment opportunities? Or are there better out there?

[PhoenixEnigma]

$1500 is far more than enough for your goals - you can likely build a very solid system for $1000 that will do everything you want.

A couple observations:

You have no hard drive. You will probably want one of those. Given the recent price spike, it might not be worth getting a huge one, and a slow drive + SSD might look more attractive. In fact, given your budget, there's no reason not to have an SSD - they are entirely worth it as far as percieved speed for your dollar.

The rest of the system is, if anything, overkill. 16GB of RAM is insane, really - 8GB is lots for all but rather specialized tasks, although it is fairly cheap. The 2600k is likewise overkill, and offers nothing on the 2500k for gaming (most games don't see any gain from that 4th thread, let alone 5th-8th). Even that is probably overkill (and there's no reason to buy the "k" version unless you pick up an aftermarket heatsink with an eye to overclocking). Likewise, the GTX570 is a hell of a video card - unless you're going to be gaming in 3D and/or at 2560x1440+, it's plenty. You don't want two video cards if you can help it - one powerful card is almost always better than two lesser cards.

You also don't list an operating system. Remember to budget for that if you need to.

I don't see any mention of peripherals - mouse, keyboard, screen, etc. As those are the bits you actually interact with, if you don't have quality ones already, it might be nice to pick some up.

[MorbidFly]

Forgot to list a hard drive, I'm thinking of just recycling the one in my old pc, at least until the prices come back down, then I might drop in a 1 or 2 TB from Seagate.

As far as the RAM goes, I was told that 16GB was a minimum for running photoshop and more would be even better. That’s the only reason I went for that much. And since RAM is cheap I didn’t think much of it.

The 2500 is the i5 core, correct? I only went with i7 because I don’t want to have to upgrade again in a year, I thought I could just spend a little extra now and be set for a while.

The video card was just a guilty splurge, I want to run all my games at the highest quality without any lag at all.

I’ll be running Win7 for my OS and as far as peripherals go, right now I’m using LG wireless mouse and keyboard but as soon as I can I’m going to upgrade to some RAZER equipment. I’m also using a pretty nice LG TV as my screen. I've also got a Labtec sound system and a Sound Blaster Tactic 3D alpha headset.

One other question I did want to ask is if I do get a SSD what should I put on it? I know I’d put my OS on it, but what else? Would I see faster load times on my games if I put them on there?

[EvanED]

I like the Thermaltake but am I really going to need that kind of expandability? I mean, 10 5.25” bays seem a bit like overkill right?

Slightly more than going small game hunting with tactical nukes.

I mean, from your list, what is gonna go in it? The DVD drive. You will use 1, at least for now. (Maybe you'll add a BluRay drive or something in the future.) You should also be sure you realize that case is huge.

My case has four 5 1/4" bays, and one of them hasn't ever been punched out, a second is holding a disconnected DVD drive, and a third is holding the front panel for an unused Audigy sound card. (The last is holding the operating DVD drive.)

Even that cooler master is huge overkill. It does look nice though. (You might consider this. It looks similar but is a bit smaller (I think this is good) and rather less expensive.)

The rest of the system is, if anything, overkill. 16GB of RAM is insane, really - 8GB is lots for all but rather specialized tasks, although it is fairly cheap. The 2600k is likewise overkill, and offers nothing on the 2500k for gaming (most games don't see any gain from that 4th thread, let alone 5th-8th). Even that is probably overkill (and there's no reason to buy the "k" version unless you pick up an aftermarket heatsink with an eye to overclocking). Likewise, the GTX570 is a hell of a video card - unless you're going to be gaming in 3D and/or at 2560x1440+, it's plenty. You don't want two video cards if you can help it - one powerful card is almost always better than two lesser cards.

Your mobo also seems expensive to me, though I don't know the field at the moment, and the Z68 does have some neat stuff like SSD caching. I'm gonna guess your PSU is overkill too and you could get away with a couple hundred less watts, but I don't know how much power your GPU will take.

I don't see any mention of peripherals - mouse, keyboard, screen, etc. As those are the bits you actually interact with, if you don't have quality ones already, it might be nice to pick some up.

I've suggested this in other similar threads. It amazes me how many people spend $1500 on a gaming box then go out and buy a $15 keyboard.

If you like it, that's fine... but stuff like your keyboard and mouse are basically the one part of the computer that you actually use, and they deserve careful consideration and testing of alternatives probably more than any other component.

One other question I did want to ask is if I do get a SSD what should I put on it? I know I’d put my OS on it, but what else? Would I see faster load times on my games if I put them on there?

And there is the crux of actually using an SSD, at least IMO.

What you use it for depends on how big it is. You will see faster load times, but you won't be able to get more than a couple recent AAA games on your SSD at once unless you buy a really big one. Depending on what you're doing with Photoshop, you might see more benefit putting your pictures on it. I dunno. Figuring out how to manage this and the cost of one large enough that I feel I wouldn't have to micromanage a lot is basically why I haven't gotten an SSD.

The other thing to point out is that your motherboard's chipset has an SSD caching feature. Anandtech took a look at that a bit ago (I'm too lazy to find the link), and the conclusion was that unless your working set was large enough to blow through the cache, it got a lot but not all of the benefit of putting everything on an SSD.

If I had your budget I'd probably cut back on a couple of the items we suggested, and pick up maybe a 120 GB SSD. Newegg has a lot listed, most in the range $165-$210, which... is actually almost tempting. (Not sure of the quality of them. I get the sense that SSDs are highly-sensitive to quality.) Use 60 GB for the cache and 60 GB for the OS and documents and such.

Edit:

As far as the RAM goes, I was told that 16GB was a minimum for running photoshop and more would be even better. That’s the only reason I went for that much. And since RAM is cheap I didn’t think much of it.

I'm not a Photoshop person, but I do use Lightroom. However, if I was pushing it, I could only get it to use a bit over a gigabyte of RAM. (It very briefly took the top spot in memory use, over Firefox, at about 1.2 GB.) I agree that 16 GB might be overkill -- I would guess that the only time PS would come close to hitting that is if you are editing lots and lots of very large images at the same time. (For comparison, I was flipping through several ~3500x5200 pixel images in rapid succession to get the memory use up during my experiment. After viewing 3 or 4 it seemed to stabilize anyway, so you'd need to have things open simultaneously.)

However, I actually agree with you to some extent. In some sense, as excessive as 16 GB probably is, it's also surprisingly cheap. And it definitely should make your computer at least a tiny bit faster; even if no program uses it explicitly, it'll at least increase the size of the OS's buffer cache.

The biggest argument against getting 16 instead of 8 GB in my mind is to make 16 GB affordable, you're getting 4x4GB. If you want to upgrade later (keeping in mind that 16 GB will almost certainly last you a rather long time), you'll have to dump half of that.

One more edit:
I think you should at least consider 8 GB now and, if it's not enough, you can always upgrade later. For instance, this seems to be the 2x4GB version of your RAM choice, and it's $45. So even if you ordered a second batch immediately, it'd cost you all of $5 + s&h vs the 4x4GB price. And if you're happy with the initial 8, you'd save 40 bucks.

[MorbidFly]

Sounds like a SSD will be going onto my to-buy list.

As far as RAM goes then, if I go with 8GB instead of the 16GB should I get 4x2GB or 2x4GB or does it matter?

[PhoenixEnigma]

Forgot to list a hard drive, I'm thinking of just recycling the one in my old pc, at least until the prices come back down, then I might drop in a 1 or 2 TB from Seagate.

Makes sense

As far as the RAM goes, I was told that 16GB was a minimum for running photoshop and more would be even better. That’s the only reason I went for that much. And since RAM is cheap I didn’t think much of it.

Doesn't make sense. I just fired up Photoshop CS5, loaded 8 photos from my DSLR, and ran a 22 step action on each one. Photoshop didn't quite manage to hit 4GB - and even with all the other crap I have open (including a good GB of RAM gone to the browser), I'm only at ~6GB used. That's a fairly steep workload for anything less than professional use, really. Having Photoshop's swap file on a SSD* is likely to do you more good than going from 8GB to 16GB - grab 2x4GB, call it a day, and upgrade if you really find you need it. 16GB as a minimum is, frankly, bullshit.

The 2500 is the i5 core, correct? I only went with i7 because I don’t want to have to upgrade again in a year, I thought I could just spend a little extra now and be set for a while.

Correct. The only difference, though, is hyperthreading on the i7. Unless you regularly use things that take advantage of >4 threads, there's no advantage to be had. Spend half the difference on a solid aftermarket heatsink, overclock the CPU (the 2500k is a hell of an overclocker), the other half on beer, and you'll probably come out ahead, particularly in games. The i7 price just shows the lack of competition on the high end at the moment :/

Also, LGA1155 is a bad choice if you want futureproof. Not that I expect any of Intel's sockets to be good for that, but at that price point, waiting for the i7-3820 might make sense. LGA 2011 might have at least a little more life.

<tangent>In the vast majority of cases, upgrading for games is probably going to be a non-issue until the next generation of consoles, anyways, thanks to cross platform development. Fastish C2D and C2Qs are still solid performers for that reason, and it doesn't look set to change any time soon. Just more money to spend on GPUs to make them shinier. </tangent>

The video card was just a guilty splurge, I want to run all my games at the highest quality without any lag at all.

I’ll be running Win7 for my OS and as far as peripherals go, right now I’m using LG wireless mouse and keyboard but as soon as I can I’m going to upgrade to some RAZER equipment. I’m also using a pretty nice LG TV as my screen. I've also got a Labtec sound system and a Sound Blaster Tactic 3D alpha headset.

One other question I did want to ask is if I do get a SSD what should I put on it? I know I’d put my OS on it, but what else? Would I see faster load times on my games if I put them on there?

You'll see faster load times from games, yes, but they're probably not the best use. If you get a Z68 board, just stick the OS on a partition, use Smart Response on another, and let that handle it. It's suppose to defer sequential reads/writes to the backing disk and only cache smaller files, which is nice. If you're not using that, going for things you launch a lot, and things that need to read/write a ton of small files, are the best bet. Games aren't, quite as much, because they tend to involve a lot of sequential reads, where SSDs have a smaller (but still real) advantage over spinning platters.

One other thing that I notice you seem to be overlooking is acoustics. It might not be a concern for you, and that's fine, but having a howling beast of PC can have its drawbacks, so that might be a concern with regards to case/PSU/GPU/CPU heatsink.

*Photoshop also uses the scratch drives regardless of the amount of RAM available, or did the last time I tested that. I don't know why.

[MorbidFly]

It's sounding more and more like tech friend isn't really that good at tech stuff, I think I'll stick with 8GB of RAM for now and upgrade if I need to later.

I'll admit, I did overlook acoustics quite a bit. Any recommendations as to how I can improve said acoustics? Can't get any level of immersion with a screaming computer.

[EvanED]

Sounds like a SSD will be going onto my to-buy list.

As far as RAM goes then, if I go with 8GB instead of the 16GB should I get 4x2GB or 2x4GB or does it matter?

4x2GB has the same problem I mentioned before: if you later decide to upgrade, you have to dump 4 GB. I'd recommend 2x4GB unless the price difference is a lot. (Doubt it.)

[GeorgeH]

Also, LGA1155 is a bad choice if you want futureproof. Not that I expect any of Intel's sockets to be good for that, but at that price point, waiting for the i7-3820 might make sense. LGA 2011 might have at least a little more life.

LGA-1155 and 2011 will both work with Ivy Bridge but not with Haswell, meaning they'll both die around the same time. The advantages of X79 are 8-core CPUs, 8 RAM slots, and more PCIe lanes. With current and near-future software and LGA-2011 pricing, though, it's a complete waste of money unless the PC is part of a business that can use the extras.

OP: WRT i5 vs i7, please don't fall for the marketing BS - they're just stickers Intel slaps on CPUs to make people think that one is significantly better than the other. If the 2500K is worth ~$200, the 2600K might be worth ~$220. Most of the time the 2600 will only be marginally faster (and that margin only gets smaller as you start to overclock), it definitely won't be any more future proof, and in some games is actually marginally slower than a 2500K because hyperthreading isn't always a good thing.

[PhoenixEnigma]

Also, LGA1155 is a bad choice if you want futureproof. Not that I expect any of Intel's sockets to be good for that, but at that price point, waiting for the i7-3820 might make sense. LGA 2011 might have at least a little more life.

LGA-1155 and 2011 will both work with Ivy Bridge but not with Haswell, meaning they'll both die around the same time. The advantages of X79 are 8-core CPUs, 8 RAM slots, and more PCIe lanes. With current and near-future software and LGA-2011 pricing, though, it's a complete waste of money unless the PC is part of a business that can use the extras.

Well, so they will. Apparently I've become too used to Intel changing sockets as often as socks.

I'm holding out hope for the 3820, though - the higher end i7's on 1366 were likewise overpriced, but a good followup to the 920/930 could be interesting (if the price is not astronomical).

[GeorgeH]

I'm with you there. I might end up building myself a new box around a 3820, but I'm definitely waiting to see what overclocking will be like and if Intel will be releasing a "real" (as with P67->Z68) X79 chipset.

[PhoenixEnigma]

It's sounding more and more like tech friend isn't really that good at tech stuff, I think I'll stick with 8GB of RAM for now and upgrade if I need to later.

As this was never really addressed, a few points:

• Some cases have better acoustic properties than others. More fans tend to be louder, smaller fans tend to be louder, and top fans and uncovered fan mounts tend to increase perceived noise. Some cases also have dampening material on the inside. User reviews are a good way to get a handle on how loud a case is.
• Replacing the stock CPU heatsink can reduce noise a lot. I'm not sure how Intel's current coolers sound, but AMDs tend to be louder and whinier than I'd like. A good tower cooler with a 120mm fan will probably be cooler, and give you more overclocking headroom besides
• Having your commonly used applications and data on a SSD can help, so that hard drives can spin down. The only hard drives I've found to be objectionably loud are the Samsung Spinpoint F3/F4, which are otherwise good drives.
• Some video card heatsinks are louder than others. In general, large case-exhausting fans are quieter than blower fans, although in poorly ventilated cases the inverse can be true.
• Higher efficiency PSUs will generate less heat to dissipate, and some (typically higher end) PSUs will use larger, quieter fans, often spinning them slower under load and, in some cases, stopping them entirely if temperatures permit.
• Consider replacing (some or all) the fans that come with your case with quieter alternatives, if they're particularly loud. I've been impressed with Scythe Slipstream fans for my quiet needs, but there are other options as well.

You don't really need to look at all of these things for a reasonably quiet system, but they're good places to shave off a bit of noise, and good to keep in mind if you want to avoid a system that sounds like a windstorm.