Building a gaming PC

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Unless I'll encounter a game that won't work well with my GTX 680, I'll probably skip Polaris 10 cards and will wait for Vega 10.

7nm Vega 20 looks like really good power wise, but it's still far away:

TDP:

Polaris 10 - 150W
Vega 10 - 225W
Vega 20 - 150W
 
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This is the setup i want to buy:

Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 1080 X3
Intel Core i7-6700K, 4x 4.00GHz, tray
ASUS Z170-A
Noctua NH-D15
Seasonic G-Series G-550 550W ATX 2.3
Samsung SSD 850 Evo 500GB
Seagate Desktop SSHD 1TB
LG Electronics GH24NSD1 schwarz
Sharkoon BW9000-W

Do the parts fit together? Should I change something? And can you recommend RAM (2x 8GB ~ 80€) I don't know how much MHz I need.
 
This is the setup i want to buy:

Inno3D iChill GeForce GTX 1080 X3
Intel Core i7-6700K, 4x 4.00GHz, tray
ASUS Z170-A
Noctua NH-D15
Seasonic G-Series G-550 550W ATX 2.3
Samsung SSD 850 Evo 500GB
Seagate Desktop SSHD 1TB
LG Electronics GH24NSD1 schwarz
Sharkoon BW9000-W

Do the parts fit together? Should I change something? And can you recommend RAM (2x 8GB ~ 80€) I don't know how much MHz I need.

It looks like a normal gaming PC so just go ahead. Will you assemble it yourself? If you buy some parts at your local PC shop (instead of online) you might get them to do some really neat, clean cable management plus the benefit of having local warranty.

You didn't specify what monitor you will be using however, so just keep it in mind as part of your budget. And in case a 1070 might be plenty for your needs.

The CPU is fine, that's what I currently have. The motherboard is also fine. For a little more you could consider the Z170 Pro Gaming with somewhat better integrated audio. Seasonic is a great PSU brand. I currently have the G650 and I am quite happy. RAM wise, some gamers tend to go for really fast RAM but it doesn't make much of a difference in practice. Just get a couple of sticks from a decent brand, DDR4 for your setup. 2400 MHz is probably plenty.
 
Mesa reached OpenGL 4.5 support for radeonsi at last: https://mesamatrix.net

Which means by the time Vega will come out, it will probably already catch up in distros. Now only radv (open AMD Vulkan implementation) should catch up, plus of course optimizing and adding missing extra extensions needed for AZDO. Anyway, Vega already looks really promising for Linux users.
 
Got the Acer Predator X34A today. Decided to gamble and order one after I found out about the awful contrast ratios in the 1900R LG curved panels (which the upcoming X34P is going to use) and I'm happy I did. Very minor light bleed and no dead pixels. And G-sync is awesome! Don't have much experience in high refresh rate gaming since my GTX 1070 can barely run new games @ 60fps at this resolution. Going to download some older games to see if the difference between 60hz and 100hz is as massive as people say. :)

EDIT: Tried HL2: Ep 1 @ 100fps. Holy crap it's smooth!
 
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I have a non-gaming PC question. I want to get a decent and reasonably priced laptop for work and recording music. This means decently fast CPU, OK RAM, OK hard drive. No TW3 will ever be played in that computer.

I am looking at an Asus 15.6", i5 7200U, 8 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD, 802.11ac. It's about 570 € and it comes without operating system. It will run Linux. Can I do better than that, either similar specs for cheaper or better performance at the same price?

Thanks.
 
Good demo of running TW2 on Linux using AMD RX 480 with open drivers (Mesa-git 13.1, amdgpu+radeonsi):


Unfortunately the author left ubersampling on on ultra (it's off on high there), so in the first part, FPS isn't as high as it could be shown. And there is some glitch with black textures appearing periodically (or may be it's an issue with recording software?). But overall performance looks very good, and with Vega should be probably even better.

--- Updated 08-11-16, 01:10 ---

volsung : Ergonomically, Lenovo laptops are one of the best, and they run Linux well usually (Linux is good for working with music). But they tend to be on the high end pricing wise.
 
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Bought a used X-Rite Colormunki Display color calibrator from ebay and made an ICC profile for my display:



Wasn't really expecting a dramatic difference but it actually did bring quite a change. Richer, warmer colors with better contrast. I'm pretty satisfied with the results. :)
 
volsung;n3198492 said:
It looks like a normal gaming PC so just go ahead. Will you assemble it yourself? If you buy some parts at your local PC shop (instead of online) you might get them to do some really neat, clean cable management plus the benefit of having local warranty.

You didn't specify what monitor you will be using however, so just keep it in mind as part of your budget. And in case a 1070 might be plenty for your needs.

The CPU is fine, that's what I currently have. The motherboard is also fine. For a little more you could consider the Z170 Pro Gaming with somewhat better integrated audio. Seasonic is a great PSU brand. I currently have the G650 and I am quite happy. RAM wise, some gamers tend to go for really fast RAM but it doesn't make much of a difference in practice. Just get a couple of sticks from a decent brand, DDR4 for your setup. 2400 MHz is probably plenty.


Yeah I assembled it myself. First I thought of let it assemble because the last time I assembled PC's was 12 years ago. But I did some upgrades on my old PC so I tried it. I don't really have a shop in town and the shops in the city are quite expensive. It works well now although I had some problems. My old case was quite big and the 1080 and the Noctua are quite big. The case was big enough although it was very very close. The Noctua made it hard to plug in the fan cables because they were beneath it. Also the 1080 could only be mounted on the top slot which was very close to the Noctua and the 2nd fan is very close to the RAM. It took some time but in the end everything fits. Most of the cables I could mount on the backside. Just the case fan cables were to short. One of the cables goes over the 1080 because the pin locations are bad and the cable to short.

About the monitor, I currently stick with my old one. I want to upgrade but I'm not sure. The 21:9 monitors look nice but they are very expensive. Some of the 4Ks have a nice price but have mixed recommendations and also only 50fps would be possible, so I'm not sure how long this will last. I don't want to have a nice gaming PC but then have to play future games on medium settings.
 
Since Vega is not going to be out soon, and there was a good sale, I ended up ordering Sapphire AMD RX 480 (4GB VRAM). I'll post the experience here when it will arrive.
 
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Gilrond-i-Virdan;n7135220 said:
Since Vega is not going to be out soon, and there was a good sale, I ended up ordering Sapphire AMD RX 480 (4GB VRAM). I'll post the experience here when it will arrive.


Definitely would have gone with more vram. Probably would have gone with Nvdia at this point as well. Their driver/update support so far has been really good.
 
Garrison72;n7135480 said:
Definitely would have gone with more vram. Probably would have gone with Nvdia at this point as well. Their driver/update support so far has been really good.

I could, but RX 480 with 8GB VRAM was more expensive. And since I'll potentially buy Vega later too, I don't want to spend too much now on the intermediate card. It's already twice as much VRAM as my GTX 680 has, and I simply got tired of Nvidia blob, and want to start using open Mesa driver.

Mesa is way better integrated with Linux than Nvidia closed blob. And not just in the form of better desktop experience (no tearing, proper tty support and etc.). It also has very neat built-in performance tools, which give you a handy HUD (see an example I already posted above). That HUD is a Mesa/Gallium3D feature. See about GALLIUM_HUD in http://www.mesa3d.org/envvars.html

Nvidia blob doesn't have anything like that.
 
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Since my HD 7950 died last week, I'm back with my now near 6 years old HD 6970 ;D
Good thing I only play Tyranny atm.
 
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