The 'Build Me A PC' Thread

[Chimpy]

I believe that Dell has stopped selling the Optiplexes, based on my recent search for a PC to fit my needs which I didn't also have to build.  When it came down to it, I just decided that 16GB RAM and a spindle-drive was good enough and went for the employee discount.

OptiPlex are only sold to business/government/education. They don't put them on the "home" sales site.

[Salamok]

I believe that Dell has stopped selling the Optiplexes, based on my recent search for a PC to fit my needs which I didn't also have to build.  When it came down to it, I just decided that 16GB RAM and a spindle-drive was good enough and went for the employee discount.

Maybe they just don't show up on the "For Home" section, New Haswell model optiplex's hit in the "For Business" section about a month ago.  Prety sure they are not discontinueing that line, instead they just gimped it.

[Hammond]

Dell still sells Optiplex's and you can still customize it although there are not a ton of options. They are incredibly easy to work on with no tools required. For a simple desktop they are pretty nice and inexpensive also relatively small / quiet. We buy the 7010 series for work and the upgrade to the 2.5 inch drive is totally worth it because they ship a adapter which allows you to install a SSD drive down the road (If you want). Oh and you can buy it with windows 7 if you want which is a nice plus :).

[Phildo]

My office is a Dell partner and we often buy Optiplexes for our clients.  I can confirm that you can customize some models, although the website is clunky as hell and sometimes it can be hard to find the option if you don't know exactly where it is.

[Engels]

Small correction: The Optiplex All-In-One is NOT easy to service. It is essentially based on a Mac all in one chasis style, and has dozens of screws. Also, the motherboard is a laptop motherboard and has a very dubious power supply. Source: Me, having to maintain 20 of them.

[Chimpy]

All in ones are terrible to service in general. Just like laptops.

Thus why we buy complete care on laptops. If it ain't a HD or battery replacement, Dell sends a tech.

[Lantyssa]

All-in-Ones are also loud as fuck.  I put in a quote to order a customized Optiplex and my boss at the time put one of those monstrosities on my desk instead.  He thought it was better because it had a higher price tag.

[Yegolev]

It's almost a given that I'm not always great at performing searches on different sites.  Also I dumped most of the brain-info once I decided to go with a HP desktop.  I am pre-de-volunteered to put it on the network, which makes me happy.

I'm in danger of learning the workings of a Dell R720.  Hopefully nothing will come of it.

EDIT: if anyone wants a HP desktop for some reason, I'm getting a noticeable discount; the one I ordered was something like 23%.  Less so on popular devices.

[Chimpy]

R720 is not bad, though it has some quirks.

If you don't need UEFI for some specific reason, I highly highly recommend that you switch it to BIOS boot mode otherwise you can't boot from CD or USB devices easily as it will only boot to I think FAT32 formatted devices in UEFI mode.

Also, the R720 takes a long time to boot because of all the separate firmware initialization steps.

[Yegolev]

That's for the peons to worry about.

[Stormwaltz]

Off the tech question thread: it looks like my motherboard is dead. Newegg lists precisely one model that fits my Intel Core 2 Quad CPU, from a no-name manufacturer. My alternatives are:

Replace the old ASUS P5E Pro.

I'll need to fit in:

4 x Corsair XMS2 2GB DDR2 240-pin
1 x Creative Sound Blaster X-FI Elite Pro PCI
1x HIS Radeon HD6950 2GB GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1
1 x Antec Earthwatts 650W PSU
2x SATA HDs
1x BD-ROM

A possible alternative is updating to a new CPU. More expensive, but a longer-term upgrade. Looking at Intel i7 and discounting Haswell core for their increased power draw and heat:

i7-3770 Ivy Bridge 3.4GHz (3.9GHz Turbo) LGA 1155 77W
ASUS P8Z77-V LK LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard (the cheap option)
ASUS P8Z77-V LGA 1155 Intel Z77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard (the expensive option)

Am I correct to hope that the PCIe 3.0 on the motherboards will fit the PCIe 2.1 Radeon?

[Chimpy]

PCIe is backwards compatible.

Unless you do a ton of 1080p video encoding (or some other extremely processor heavy multi-threaded tasks) save the cash and buy an i5.

Don't get too hung up on ASUS unless you feel you absolutely have to buy them through brand loyalty. You can get good (sometimes better) boards from Gigabyte, MSI, etc. and save a good chunk of dough. I still like Tom's Hardware guides for comparison of the pros and cons of boards in a set price range.

You will need to buy new DDR3 RAM if you buy a whole new setup so take that into consideration.

[Hoax]

Dead  mobo really means new cpu+mobo+ram, everything else you can carry over if you want to.

[Lantyssa]

My last board was a P5E Pro as well.  I loved it, but I had serveral intermittent problems at the end, too.  Probably some of the capacitors going bad because pinning it down had been a royal pain.

[Lantyssa]

The system I got back in October.

The motherboard might be more than you need, but overall its been running like silk.  Very happy with it, and the I5 over the I7 has been fine.  Either is way more processor than my old quad-core.

[satael]

I just ordered a new mobo (and processor etc) to replace my current (which is p5ql pro so almost p5 pro). I also decided to go with sabertooth (just one for a am3+ processor). Unfortunately I got greedy with a new tower which ended up being too exotic and even the importer couldn't say when it would be available so I had to go for a more normal one (phantom 530) and the parts will still come too late for me to enjoy the full ESO headstart (though I'm not really that sad about it)

[Stormwaltz]

Lantyssa, today you are my hero.

EDIT: Out of curiosity, did you use the SSD for OS install? If so, how's performance? I was given am old-ish 256GB SSD when I thought my HD was failing, but I wasn't sure it would fit Win7.

[Lantyssa]

Yes, the SSD is for OS and programs.  All my Steam games are on the other disk.  Boots fast and otherwise it's smooth as silk.  I'm glad I went with it.

Purchased around the same time was an NAS with 12 TB of disk (well, 6 TB since I made it RAID 10) for backup and storage of anything I'm not immediately using.  It doubles as my media server.

[Chimpy]

Win7 will fit easily inside any drive 40GB or larger. Put all of your stuff like music, pictures, and video as well as programs where load times are not an issue on a larger spinny drive.

[Abagadro]

Question for the cognoscenti:

I have a 3(4?) year old system and am debating whether to get a new one or just upgrade the graphics card. Don't know enough about this stuff to know if an upgrade would be pointless as there would be some other bottleneck that means it wouldn't mean much.  So here are the specs, let me know if throwing in a 660 or something similar (or heck even a 760 if I can find it at the right price) would be worthwhile or a waste of money.

Asus P7H55
2.8 GHz i5 760
4x2GB RAM

[Trippy]

What resolution is your monitor?

[Hoax]

My immediate thought is that a GPU upgrade should be enough to get you by surely. Will you get the absolute most out of the card? No but it should still improve a lot of things, run a lot colder with its fan on a much lower setting etc.

But I also would ignore anything I say in favor of anything Trippy says.

[Abagadro]

I rarely run anything at 1920 x 1080. So mostly 1600 x 900 or 1280 x 720.

[Trippy]

Okay, what GPU do you have now?

[Lantyssa]

Do you have any trouble running the games and apps you like to use?

[Abagadro]

I have a Gtx 560 Ti.

I've had to turn down my world of tanks settings to keep my FPS from dropping too low as the graphics have been improved.

[01101010]

I just swapped out my 460 GTX which was holding up fairly well but wasn't quite cutting it for the newer stuff. I grabbed a PNY 760GTX off newegg for $235 on some special. That goes along with my i5 2500k clocked @ 3.7gHz and 2x4g RAM. Running @ 1680 x 1050. Can't say I am unhappy at all.

[Trippy]

I have a Gtx 560 Ti.

I've had to turn down my world of tanks settings to keep my FPS from dropping too low as the graphics have been improved.

Okay I found some benchmarks for a couple of versions of WoT so you can guesstimate your performance increase from them.

First, your GTX 560 Ti roughly equivalent to the GTX 750 Ti based on the last graph on this page:

http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-750-ti/performance

There's a more detailed comparison of specs here:

http://www.game-debate.com/gpu/index.php?gid=883&gid2=704&compare=geforce-gtx-750-ti-vs-geforce-gtx-560-ti-amp


You can check out some benchmarks comparing the GTX 760 to the GTX 660 Ti here:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7103/nvidia-geforce-gtx-760-review/11


Here are some benchmarks for WoT 8.11 that include the GTX 750 Ti and GTX 760:

http://www.techspot.com/review/785-free-to-play-games-benchmarks/page2.html

You can compare the cards and how resolution affects the performance. The CPU they are testing with is the Core i7-4770K which is faster than yours (base clock is 3.5 GHz).

More comprehensive benchmarks for an older version of WoT 8.5 are here:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18508204

If you scroll down to the bottom there's a graph that compares a bunch of different CPUs and you can see the affect upgrading the CPU may have on your performance as a percentage or ratio. Note that they are testing with CPU performance with a GTX Titan to limit the GPU bottleneck. I.e. you won't the same absolute increase in FPS (even ignoring that it's an older version of WoT) cause the GPU is different than what you will be getting.

[Lantyssa]

I have a Gtx 560 Ti.

You can always upgrade your card, and if it doesn't perform well enough, buy the rest of the system.

[Abagadro]

Thanks for the input. Very helpful.

[Trippy]

Amazon.com's daily deal today is PC components.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/goldbox/ref=cs_top_nav_gb27

The Intel I5-4670K is a good price at ~$40 off it's normal price.

[Stormwaltz]

The Intel I5-4670K is a good price at ~$40 off it's normal price.

What's the K indicate? It seems otherwise identical to the one I have my eye on at Newegg (though Newegg's normal price is $220, not $260).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819116898

[Trippy]

Unlocked meaning it's super easy to over clock.

[Stormwaltz]

Fucking sold, then. Thanks for pointing that out. :)

[Salamok]

Unlocked meaning it's super easy to over clock.

I deeply regret purchasing the K series for my CPU:

intel-outs-quad-core-haswell-cpus

Worst of all the K-Series parts are utterly crippled. Yes Intel gifted us with unlocked parts for about 10% more, or should we say that they didn’t remove the overclocking features for a steep price. Unfortunately what they removed is much more than clock locks and definitely more useful to the buyer. If you read the chart, vPro, TXT, VTd, and SIPP are removed, as is transactional memory but they don’t tell you that. If you get a K-Series device you can’t use virtualization, none of the management features are there, and neither is the hardware security that they said you absolutely needed last generation. This generation you don’t seem to need it any more though but you are definitely better off without Intel “security” features. Removing transactional memory, TXT, and VTd are just dumb, plus the K-Series SKUs are so crippled you should avoid them abusive price premium or no.

He is overstating the virtualization slightly, you can still run a VM it just runs in a gimped software emulation mode (no hardware acceleration).