Building a gaming PC

+
I'm not sure if I'm posting in the right thread, but I haven't been able to find the old system requirements thread, so I thought I'd ask for opinions here.
So I've put together a little configuration, and I have a few questions after sharing it.

First off, what is your opinion on this:

- WD BLUE 1 TB HDD
- Intel Core i5 4690
- ASUS B80M-G motherboard
- EVGA GTX 980 superclocked
- Corsair CX 750 750W PSU
- Cooler Master HAF 912 case
- Kingston Hyper X Fury Black 8GB 1866 MHz

I haven't looked for K versions of this CPU, simply because I know I will never do overclocking. This EVGA card I choose over ASUS's STRIX card, because I read EVGA's temperature and noise is a lot better while gaming.
Any modifications you guys could recommend? I'm trying to cut down on the price of anything I can, I was actually thinking about going for maybe a 500GB HDD, because I have an external HDD for stuff that aren't games and such.
My most important question though; wouldn't it be better if I'd stick to an ASUS or EVGA GTX 970? I plan on playing Witcher 3 on Ultra settings, maybe without hairworks, and other games on 1440p.

Any advices would be appreciated.
 
- No need to overclock for gaming these days. Don't waste your time and mess up your cooling / ventilation balance in the case.
Unless you have a Maxwell card. Those cards overclock like crazy without the need to tamper with voltages and you'll get a noticeable boost in games. Also they run very cool so temps should not become a problem.

The benefits of CPU overclocking in games are quite small most of the time though. And modern Intel CPUs already run at high clock speeds out of the box vs the older Nehalem and Sandy bridge CPUs so there isn't usually much point overclocking them anyways. No idea about AMD's models though.
 
Last edited:
A couple things I disagree with. Do buy a laptop, if you like the portability factor. Today's gaming laptops are constantly getting better and giving more value than in the past. The video cards are also approaching the power of the PC video cards, such as Nvidia's laptop gaming GPUs are now said to be close to 75% of the performance of their PC models. The technology just keeps improving and making laptops for gamers a feasible option.

I also disagree that 16 GB ram is required or necessary, most people will do very well with 8 GB for years to come, unless they are doing something specialized like video editing. If you are getting a gaming computer, 8 GB is fine.

Finally, I would pay extra for a high end video card if you are a gamer. The games today seem to be rather video card dependent. And lastly, a recommendation for those looking to buy a new computer. I bought my new computer from Mythlogic computers, an outfit in Michigan. I live on the West coast, but I'm the kind of guy that does a lot of research into computer sellers, and Mythlogic is a top quality company, and one that you can select all your individual components for your new computer. They have great warranties and have an actual physical store where they sell computers. This is important, because they have to live up to higher standards than some internet only computer seller, I don't trust many of those companies. Anyway, drawbacks are they are a little more expensive than some other online stores, but I always say, you get what you pay for, and I couldn't be happier with my new gaming laptop from Mythlogic computers.

I agree with everything here. Truly, 8 GB of memory is sufficient. As it is relatively cheap, however, having the extra 8 means having plenty for a long time to come, and there are many programs that will take advantage of a full 8 GB of free RAM. Note that this will improve stability and load times, somewhat -- not in-game performance. High-end cards on the market now should do well with any i5 or i7 processor. (Sorry, but I've long since fallen out-of-touch with AMD, so I can't recommend anything there.)

And I am wholly in favor of gaming laptops. I have been living in the Middle East for the past 7 years, and I've fallen in love with the ASUS RoG line. I've owned a G51 and two G71 laptops since 2007, and I couldn't have been more impressed with their performance. Their price is right, as well.
 
Regarding noise and power supply, I strongly recommend computer cases with power supply at the bottom, It sucks in air from the outside and blows it outside, and thanks to that power supply is completely independent of temperature inside of the case. Recently I have bought such case and it's much more quiet than my previous one.
 
I know you said you wouldn't overclock but still do get the K version, it barely costs anything more.
Well, for a K model you NEED a Z-97, while for a non-K, you can go with H-97 mobo which is also a cost difference. Though if you're going SLI or plan to in the future then Z97 is the only way
 
Well, for a K model you NEED a Z-97, while for a non-K, you can go with H-97 mobo which is also a cost difference. Though if you're going SLI or plan to in the future then Z97 is the only way

I see. Well in that case, I might just go with the 4690, but get an Asus z97-P, because that way I wouldn't have to worry about doing the right BIOS updates. And I guess if I wanted to upgrade later on it would be better with that motherboard.
 
@SigilFey

"64-bit systems cannot utilize more than 8 GB of memory per program"

Not sure what you were trying to say there but that's not true. Operating systems might assign a maximum stack size per program but that's variable and one single process may take the entire user address space if necessary. That's an important point in high performance computing. I've had students write parallel programs to solve linear systems where a single matrix uses 20 GB of RAM or more.
 
Last edited:
@SigilFey

"64-bit systems cannot utilize more than 8 GB of memory per program"

Not sure what you were trying to say there but that's not true. Operating systems might assign a maximum stack size per program but that's variable and one single process may take the entire user address space if necessary. That's an important point in high performance computing. I've had students write parallel programs to solve linear systems where a single matrix uses 20 GB of RAM or more.

Conceded. I'm skipping steps when I speak.

GAMES will not likely be utilizing more than 8 GB of RAM in the foreseeable future, and that is basically down to games being built for 32 bit systems as well as 64. 64 bit processing is capable of using up way more RAM than anyone has on a desktop nowadays (stereotypically speaking: 8-16 GB). 32 bit systems may use only 4 GB of RAM maximum because of 32 bit processing limits within Windows. Linux systems and 64 bit processing systems have already tipped the balance toward more, but developers need to actually be able to write programs that run in real-time with all of the detail possible for capable systems to take advantage of it. That has not happened yet as far as I know.

It won't likely happen much even in the next 5 years or so. When you up the amount of RAM used, the game grows exponentially -- in both detail and calculations-per-second. We'll see it someday, sure! Just not next week.
 
It won't likely happen much even in the next 5 years or so. When you up the amount of RAM used, the game grows exponentially -- in both detail and calculations-per-second. We'll see it someday, sure! Just not next week.

Not really. The only reason 32 bit is still widespread is mostly because of many mobile ARM CPUs which only now are starting to switch to 64 bit arch. That's happening however, so quite soon 32 bit will be practically obsolete.

You can already see new games coming out in 64 bit only. It's easier to develop, and developers don't need to deal with all the mess involved with supporting 32 bit. So it's not just next week - it's already now.
 
Last edited:
Not really. The only reason 32 bit is still widespread is mostly because of many mobile ARM CPUs which only now are starting to switch to 64 bit arch. That's happening however, so quite soon 32 bit will be practically obsolete.

You can already see new games coming out in 64 bit only. It's easier to develop, and developers don't need to deal with all the mess involved with supporting 32 bit. So it's not just next week - it's already now.

Love the avatar -- what does it say?

Back to computers: I'm not saying there are no 64 bit programs. Even the original Crysis was updated to take advantage of 64 bit systems. What I mean is, there have only been a very few games released that require a 64 bit system; there are no 64 bit consoles yet; and no game released so far has made use of the full functionality of 64 bit processing.

I'll use Space Engineers as one of the first games that I imagine might. Once they incorporate the massively multiplayer maps, the sheer amount of real-time deformation of geometry experienced by all players on the server in an infinite, procedural map...that could do it. It's still only one title that may accomplish it though. I think we'll be looking at relatively familiar titles that will manage to stay within a 16 GB RAM limit for the next 5 years at least.
 
Conceded. I'm skipping steps when I speak.

GAMES will not likely be utilizing more than 8 GB of RAM in the foreseeable future, and that is basically down to games being built for 32 bit systems as well as 64. 64 bit processing is capable of using up way more RAM than anyone has on a desktop nowadays (stereotypically speaking: 8-16 GB). 32 bit systems may use only 4 GB of RAM maximum because of 32 bit processing limits within Windows. Linux systems and 64 bit processing systems have already tipped the balance toward more, but developers need to actually be able to write programs that run in real-time with all of the detail possible for capable systems to take advantage of it. That has not happened yet as far as I know.

It won't likely happen much even in the next 5 years or so. When you up the amount of RAM used, the game grows exponentially -- in both detail and calculations-per-second. We'll see it someday, sure! Just not next week.

The common register (or uncommon since IA-64 and X86-64 (both intel and AMD versions of it) support just as many 128bit registers as they do 64bit registers mainly for SIMD operations) size and word size supported by the CPU has nothing to do with the memory address space it supports.
All Pentium IA-32 Intel CPU's have had 36 bit memory address space to support PAE and used 36 bit memory address registers(MAR's).

The funny part is that technically there isn't a 64bit memory address space available on any operating system...
When AMD was working on AMD64 they've settled on a 48bit Virtual Address Space, and a 52bit physical address space (with probably no reasonable justification as to why).

Intel when building EMT64 decided that if AMD is using PAE now too they'll rename their memory management architecture IA-32e which provides either 32bit address space in protected (not to be confused with actual protected vs real mode CPU operations, because terminology...) mode (32bit/mixed mode) or 64bit when running in IA-32e mode (which is was Intel calls a native 64bit mode because again terminology)
Microsoft on the other hand said hmmpf, 32, 36, 48, 64, 80, k we are supporting 44 bit address space and nothing more.
Linux well who knows atm i think 4 supported 38... really depends on which kernel you use currently but again no full 64bit memory address space either.

Operating systems even 32bit ones may use much more than 4GB of ram with any processor which supports virtual memory addressing and has a dedicated MMU to provide address translations, not going to waste about 5 pages explaining this but please read about segmentation, memory allocation, virtual memory addressing and just in general about how memory is being handled on operating systems and hardware since about 1982(80286!!!)...

If that's too much at least just get an understanding of the difference between the physical address space, virtual address space, window size and image size and then google how Address Windowing Extensions work.

The physical limit of memory in NT based Windows operating system is for the most part license based, a 32bit Windows 2003 Server (Enterprise and above) will support 64GB how? because with 36 bit MAR's you got 68719476736 bytes of address space available which is 64 gigbytes, on Windows 2003 Datacentre edition with more than 1 physical CPU the limit can be even higher.

On the other hand a 64bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium (which is the most common SKU of the currently most common Windows OS distribution) only supports 16GB of physical memory, why? because if you can afford or need more than 16GB of RAM you can afford to pay for the pro version.


Not really. The only reason 32 bit is still widespread is mostly because of many mobile ARM CPUs which only now are starting to switch to 64 bit arch. That's happening however, so quite soon 32 bit will be practically obsolete.

You can already see new games coming out in 64 bit only. It's easier to develop, and developers don't need to deal with all the mess involved with supporting 32 bit. So it's not just next week - it's already now.

Nothing to do with ARM or mobile, ARM's 64bit implementation is also nothing like the x86-64 implementation (it will have something of linear length of 64bits some where but that's where the commonality ends), not to mention that your compiler handles target translation and optimization any how , if you'll use anything say from the Intel standard library or STL which is platform specific like in example TBB your code is incompatible no matter if the target CPU is "bit compatible" or not and no compiler will save you.

And as far as memory limit goes then ARM V8 and it's future offspring use 32bit (LPAE limit) virtual memory addressing and 40bit physical memory address.
Which means that even with 64bit ARM CPU's you won't be able to allocate more than 4GB of memory for each application as the max window size is limited by the 32bit address space.

The amount of actual available memory is going to be even lower depending on the operating system the default settings for Windows is that either the 2 or 3 lower GB (depending if 4GT is on or off) of every virtual address space are available for each user space process with the upper 2 or 1GB being mapped to the kernel.

Android memory management is completely fubar atm and is really dependent on if you are using dalvik, ART or are building your apps through the NDK.

And I'm not even going to bother guessing what the hell Apple is doing with IOS these days...
 
Last edited:
@zorba1138,

Some of what you discussed is a bit beyond my level. I find the AMD stuff interesting, though. My guess is that it was done because there was still a lot of 32bit software out there, and they could keep costs down by making a sort of "hybrid" CPU architecture capable of taking advantage of more advanced processing without needing to actually develop the physical silicon until true 64bit processing kicked in. Maybe. I don't know.

As for Apple: They're planning to do away with RAM completely by directly uploading Steve Job's mind into all devices. This will be manifested in future versions of Siri that all children will begin to associate with "mom". Feeding and bathing routines will then be handled via in-app purchases made through implants in the children's cerebral cortex (administered shortly after birth during iVaccinations). Parents will then have more free time to surf Safari for virtual tours (that can be downloaded for mere cents), completely alleviating the need for actual vacationing and freeing up resources to buy more advanced versions of Apple-exclusive 3D printing technology.
 
Nothing to do with ARM or mobile, ARM's 64bit implementation is also nothing like the x86-64 implementation (it will have something of linear length of 64bits some where but that's where the commonality ends), not to mention that your compiler handles target translation and optimization any how , if you'll use anything say from the Intel standard library or STL which is platform specific like in example TBB your code is incompatible no matter if the target CPU is "bit compatible" or not and no compiler will save you.

It has everything to do with it. Supporting 32 bit builds adds complexity, regardless of the architecture. It's simply a mess. If you target 64 bit only from the start, it simplifies development.

And as far as memory limit goes then ARM V8 and it's future offspring use 32bit (LPAE limit) virtual memory addressing and 40bit physical memory address.
Which means that even with 64bit ARM CPU's you won't be able to allocate more than 4GB of memory for each application as the max window size is limited by the 32bit address space.

Where did you get that from? It should use 48 bit, see note 2 here: http://infocenter.arm.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.arm.doc.faqs/ka16339.html

Personally I don't really care about what iOS or Android are really doing. I'm interested in proper Linux like Sailfish.

Love the avatar -- what does it say?

In Sindarin it reads: "Drego morn!", which means "Flee darkness!".


Back to computers: I'm not saying there are no 64 bit programs. Even the original Crysis was updated to take advantage of 64 bit systems. What I mean is, there have only been a very few games released that require a 64 bit system; there are no 64 bit consoles yet; and no game released so far has made use of the full functionality of 64 bit processing.

Witcher 3 is 64 bit only as far as I know. And I'm not sure what you meant about consoles. Aren't current consoles like PS4 and Xbox One already using 64 bit CPU (i.e. AMD Jaguar)? And more 64 bit consoles are coming out. I.e. like this one: http://www.alienware.com/Landings/steammachine/

While 32 bit games will be developed still, more and more will come out as 64 bit only going forward. Even major Linux distros already contemplate dropping 32 bit releases: http://linux.softpedia.com/blog/Pro...port-for-Fedora-23-Is-Being-Made-470904.shtml
 
Last edited:
"Using 64bit" and "taking full advantage of 64bit" is the disparity I'm referring to. 64bit processing is...pretty wild. Basically, it allows a larger, continuous pipeline of data to stream through processors. Right now, games like TW3 use it to generate much larger open worlds and keep track of more variables (like the physical location of hundreds of NPCs) in real-time. But it's still not everything that 64bit is capable of. Trouble is, no one has written a game that complex yet. That's still the realm of scientists and researchers. It will be a while before we see some real amazing things because we're talking about programs that are becoming exponentially larger.

I thought of another great example of where 64bit games are going -- Elite: Danegrous. Real-time, massively multiplayer, open-world, persistent online universe. The galaxy is 400 billion stars in 100 billion systems on a 1:1 scale. Literally. When you look at the star field in Elite Dangerous, that's not a skybox. Those are actual stars you can travel to. And even when it's loaded with hundreds of players, it doesn't even come close to testing the limits of 64bit processing.
 
Processing complexity is usually tied to parallelism, not so much to bitness of the application. Sure, you can map more memory with longer address, but massive amount of objects usually requires more parallelism to handle it. I.e. the more cores / CPUs you have, the more options it gives. That's not used to the maximum potential of the current hardware in games indeed, but it's a different issue than 32 to 64 bits switch.
 
Hey all, if I were to buy a new monitor and I'm quite confused with the choices out there, do you have any advice? I'm planning to buy a 24" monitor around $150 to $200 max, and the choices I have this far are :

- BenQ GL2460HM
- LG 24MP77HM-P

Are there any significant difference between IPS and TN panel? I've googled a bit and still couldn't make any decision. The LG 24MP77HM-P (IPS) price is about $40 higher than the BenQ GL2460HM (TN). Which one do you think is better especially when it comes to playing TW3? And as a side note, I also do graphic designs, which people are saying IPS panels are better for that case. Or do you have any other suggestions? Thank you very much in advance for your help :)
 
Hey all, if I were to buy a new monitor and I'm quite confused with the choices out there, do you have any advice? I'm planning to buy a 24" monitor around $150 to $200 max, and the choices I have this far are :

- BenQ GL2460HM
- LG 24MP77HM-P

Are there any significant difference between IPS and TN panel? I've googled a bit and still couldn't make any decision. The LG 24MP77HM-P (IPS) price is about $40 higher than the BenQ GL2460HM (TN). Which one do you think is better especially when it comes to playing TW3? And as a side note, I also do graphic designs, which people are saying IPS panels are better for that case. Or do you have any other suggestions? Thank you very much in advance for your help :)

If you do graphics design, IPS is the way to go, because of its better color reproduction. That advantage will also serve you well in gaming as long as you're not super sensitive to refresh rates and/or play fast games on a competitive level. In general I'd say IPS are fast enough by now to serve as a gaming display for all but the most refresh rate focused gamers, and are thus the better choice if you can afford it. If you want to play with 120 Hz or even 144 Hz or 3d Vision or the like, you're mostly stuck with TN.
 
If you do graphics design, IPS is the way to go, because of its better color reproduction. That advantage will also serve you well in gaming as long as you're not super sensitive to refresh rates and/or play fast games on a competitive level. In general I'd say IPS are fast enough by now to serve as a gaming display for all but the most refresh rate focused gamers, and are thus the better choice if you can afford it. If you want to play with 120 Hz or even 144 Hz or 3d Vision or the like, you're mostly stuck with TN.

Thank you very much for your insight :). The BenQ GL2460HM max refresh rate is 60hz, if I'm not wrong, and it fits my budget well, while for the LG I have to strain a bit, but I can compensate if it's worth the $40 difference. So I don't think that buying a TN with higher refresh rate is an option, as far as my options goes..
 
Top Bottom