The 'Build Me A PC' Thread

[Lantyssa]

Nvidia just announced some price drops on their mid-to-low end, might get more bang for your buck when it's relected at newegg.

I'd like to, but my system is dying.  It's rebooted multiple times today just web browsing.

[Hoax]

Just use your dying system's video card in the new system until the price drops and you buy a new card? Assuming you are correct and its the mobo failing that should be no problem.

[MisterNoisy]

Okay, my system has an instability which I think is in the motherboard.  It's old, so time to upgrade.  Anything glaringly wrong with the below?

http://secure.newegg.com/WishList/PublicWishDetail.aspx?WishListNumber=24064046


Intel Core i5-4670 Haswell 3.4GHz LGA 1150 84W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics BX80646I54670
ASUS SABERTOOTH Z87 LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
ASUS GTX650-E-1GD5 GeForce GTX 650 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card
CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMZ16GX3M2A1600C10
Western Digital WD Black WD2002FAEX 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive - OEM
Corsair Neutron Series CSSD-N256GB3-BK 2.5" 256GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)
XIGMATEK Gaia SD1283 120mm Long Life Bearing CPU Cooler LGA1150 Haswell Compatible

I have a new 700W power supply I bought as my first troubleshooting test.  Keeping my DVD drive and case.

Video card aside, I'd go with a 4670K processor if you're going to spend that much on the motherboard.  As for the card, that 650 isn't substantially more powerful than the 560ti you bought from me a while ago, so I'd save up for a 'real' upgrade.

[Hawkbit]

Wife's notebook just died, No o/s found error, HDD is clunking.  It's a four year old system.

Any recommendations on solid sub-$1k notebooks?  For email, web surfing, occasional web games and VPN for work.

Thanks!

I was looking at this Lenovo, thoughts?  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834312438

[Trippy]

Uh yeah that weighs a lot. Does she need to carry this thing around?

[Hawkbit]

Nope.  I'd build her a desktop if we had the space. 

I'm definitely up for other suggestions, too!  That system looked a bit overkill, but I was thinking the kid could play some Steam shared games on it.  Dual cards in SLI, heck we could tinker with Big Screen, too.

[Merusk]

Well now it sounds like you're building for you and not her. 

I won't buy the wife another laptop and she covers most of the scope you just described.  There's a reason the laptop market is in the shitter and that's it in a nutshell.
A windows tablet or MS Surface works just fine and an iPad will do everything but the flash-based web games. 

The only problem would be the VPN requirement and it's always been my opinion that if the office wants you to do that, they need to provide you the machine.  If they don't, well the Surface can do VPN but I haven't tried it out with the demo tablets we got to see how well it works.

All that aside, I'm on a Lenovo i7 ThinkPad here at the office that's been damn reliable and is pretty sturdy. It's traveled well from here to the house and as carry-on and while I've only had it for about 9 months now but I haven't noticed any performance degradation like I've seen on prior laptops I've owned.  It's biggest drawback is that since it's a 17" screen it's pretty heavy and the power supply weighs around 5 1/2# itself.

[Furiously]

Or you could buy an SSD and stick it in the laptop you have now and it would seem a TON faster. (And drain the battery less)

[Salamok]

I am looking to replace my current hard drive (750gb - 6 years old and still running strong), my wishlist is something >2tb, reliable and not a total dog on the speed front (ex: Seagate desktop).  Unfortunately either the majority of reviewers are now a bunch of whiney bastards or the reliability of hard drives in the post flood era still hasn't caught up to preflood standards.  

I seem to be seeing a larger number of 1-2 star experiences (due to DOA and/or failure) than I feel comfortable with and it has me gunshy, here are a few things I am looking at and some of my concerns:

• I could pick up a 2TB WD Black (WD2002FAEX) for $135 off of newegg but 25% of the 450 odd review are 2 stars or less.
• I would go with another Seagate but it seems that barracuda has fallen from a reliable workhorse server oriented model to some crappy desktop oriented drive that is trying to snare people into buying it based on the name, 35% of the 1000 odd reviews on the 3TB Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 are 2 stars or less.
• I have a slight bias towards the whole WD green/red refuse to disclose actual spindle speeds and just call it Intellipower business model as it just smacks to me of lets just crank out a bunch of WD Black drives using cheap manufacturing techniques then bin the crappier products as red and the crappiest products as green.
• I do usually prefer to choose from the more enterprisey end of the pro-sumer market so the more favorably user reviewed 2TB WD SE WD2000F9YZ did appeal to me but it is a bit more and a rated MTBF of 800,000 seems a little low.

TLDR: Any thoughts or suggestions on a large capacity drive that I can reasonably expect 5+ years of trouble free operation out of?

[Chimpy]

Don't buy any hard drive (or computer component for that matter) today with the expectation that it will last 5 years. Even enterprise grade hardware is not built with the expectation of more than 5 years use these days.

[Salamok]

Don't buy any hard drive (or computer component for that matter) today with the expectation that it will last 5 years. Even enterprise grade hardware is not built with the expectation of more than 5 years use these days.

Used to be you could count on enterprise grade for 5 years which means it usually lasted longer than that, hence my current 6 year old drive that I am replacing due to age (performance wise it is still fine).

[MisterNoisy]

I am looking to replace my current hard drive (750gb - 6 years old and still running strong), my wishlist is something >2tb, reliable and not a total dog on the speed front (ex: Seagate desktop).  Unfortunately either the majority of reviewers are now a bunch of whiney bastards or the reliability of hard drives in the post flood era still hasn't caught up to preflood standards.  

I seem to be seeing a larger number of 1-2 star experiences (due to DOA and/or failure) than I feel comfortable with and it has me gunshy, here are a few things I am looking at and some of my concerns:

• I could pick up a 2TB WD Black (WD2002FAEX) for $135 off of newegg but 25% of the 450 odd review are 2 stars or less.
• I would go with another Seagate but it seems that barracuda has fallen from a reliable workhorse server oriented model to some crappy desktop oriented drive that is trying to snare people into buying it based on the name, 35% of the 1000 odd reviews on the 3TB Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 are 2 stars or less.
• I have a slight bias towards the whole WD green/red refuse to disclose actual spindle speeds and just call it Intellipower business model as it just smacks to me of lets just crank out a bunch of WD Black drives using cheap manufacturing techniques then bin the crappier products as red and the crappiest products as green.
• I do usually prefer to choose from the more enterprisey end of the pro-sumer market so the more favorably user reviewed 2TB WD SE WD2000F9YZ did appeal to me but it is a bit more and a rated MTBF of 800,000 seems a little low.

TLDR: Any thoughts or suggestions on a large capacity drive that I can reasonably expect 5+ years of trouble free operation out of?

The only mechanical HDDs I'd consider now that Seagate has bought Samsung's HDD unit (the old Spinpoint F3 was amazing) are WD Blacks - I've had nothing but good experiences with their 1 and 2 TB units.

[Trippy]

I am looking to replace my current hard drive (750gb - 6 years old and still running strong), my wishlist is something >2tb, reliable and not a total dog on the speed front (ex: Seagate desktop).  Unfortunately either the majority of reviewers are now a bunch of whiney bastards or the reliability of hard drives in the post flood era still hasn't caught up to preflood standards.  

I seem to be seeing a larger number of 1-2 star experiences (due to DOA and/or failure) than I feel comfortable with and it has me gunshy, here are a few things I am looking at and some of my concerns:

• I could pick up a 2TB WD Black (WD2002FAEX) for $135 off of newegg but 25% of the 450 odd review are 2 stars or less.
• I would go with another Seagate but it seems that barracuda has fallen from a reliable workhorse server oriented model to some crappy desktop oriented drive that is trying to snare people into buying it based on the name, 35% of the 1000 odd reviews on the 3TB Barracuda 7200.14 ST3000DM001 are 2 stars or less.
• I have a slight bias towards the whole WD green/red refuse to disclose actual spindle speeds and just call it Intellipower business model as it just smacks to me of lets just crank out a bunch of WD Black drives using cheap manufacturing techniques then bin the crappier products as red and the crappiest products as green.
• I do usually prefer to choose from the more enterprisey end of the pro-sumer market so the more favorably user reviewed 2TB WD SE WD2000F9YZ did appeal to me but it is a bit more and a rated MTBF of 800,000 seems a little low.

TLDR: Any thoughts or suggestions on a large capacity drive that I can reasonably expect 5+ years of trouble free operation out of?

Hard drives fail. And are DOA at times. It's like death and taxes. The highest MTBF 7200 RPM hard drive with a 5 year warranty would be an HGST (Hitachi, now owned by WD) Ultrastar. I have a bunch of Ultrastars in my unRAID NAS and they've been fine but I don't write to them much (other than the parity drive they are basically write once, read many). I did burn them in for a week before setting up the array, though, to minimize the chances they would start having write errors right off the bat.

I like the Caviar Blacks but haven't bought one in over a year now and the Newegg reviews do look worrying. These days I use SSDs if I need speed and use the cheapy WD Greens for bulk storage. However if I needed a 7200 RPM 2 TB hard drive right now I'd probably roll the dice on an Ultrastar 7K3000.

[Shannow]

Not sure if quite right thread but,..

Gaming laptops under 1000 us?  Any worth it? Or am I just kidding myself?

[Trippy]

It's possible if you find one on sale like this MSI one from Newegg which is out of stock. There's also this weird one from Lenovo which has dual 750Ms.

For myself I wouldn't get anything less powerful than a 660M class GPU (the 755M is roughly comparable to the 660M in the 7 series). My current ASUS gaming laptop has a 560M which has fewer cores than the 660M (192 vs 384) and it definitely has issues playing some games like FF XIV Reborn at 1080p but is usually tolerable with settings turned down.

[Venkman]

Seeing some relatively good deals on Amazon today for Video cards. I've been mulling an upgrade to various components in the Spring. Most of my PC components are 2 1/2 years old now. Question is, what's worth upgrading in the current configuration versus just buiilding something new and relegating this to second PC status:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83 GHz/12M Cache/1333 MHz FSB)
Motherboard:  Asus P5N-T Deluxe, 780i 3-way SLI (Socket 775)
Graphics: nVidia GTX 260 1gb RAM
Memory: 4x Corsair 2mb RAM chips (8gb)

The deal that sparked this post was the PNY nVidia GTX650 for $129. Would the above config benefit from such an upgrade? Or am I bottlenecked somewhere else?

[Trippy]

The 260 is actually more powerful than the 650.

[Venkman]

Cool ok thanks. I'll keep digging.

[Ironwood]

It's almost Christmas.  Time for a new Mobo and Chip.

What does one do these days Trippy, oh wise one ?

[Trippy]

"Enthusiast" config is still either i5-3570K Ivy Bridge + Z77 chipset or i5-4570K Haswell + Z87 chipset. If you need Hyper-threading for some reason you'll want the i7-3770K or i7-4770K.

[Strazos]

So I'm back in the US and (mostly due to poor BF4 performance) I think it's time to start looking at a new rig.

Before I even start digging into specific loadouts, does anyone have any experiencing with having mWave or NCIX do the build and burn-in for them? If the prices are fairly comparable + a builder's fee, I would be inclined to save myself the hassle and risk of screwing something up and just pay a bit more for them to do it for me.

[Salamok]

"Enthusiast" config is still either i5-3570K Ivy Bridge + Z77 chipset or i5-4570K Haswell + Z87 chipset. If you need Hyper-threading for some reason you'll want the i7-3770K or i7-4770K.

I just accidentally bought a 4770k, I thought I was getting a 4770.  If you don't overclock or you regularly use VM's I strongly recommend NOT getting the K version of an Intel chip.

edit - anandtech forum post on the subject

[schild]

Was gonna buy a new gaming PC for the first time in 7 years and uhhh

these cost too much

[Venkman]

So I did some digging on vidcards again. My current config:

Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83 GHz/12M Cache/1333 MHz FSB)
Motherboard:  Asus P5N-T Deluxe, 780i 3-way SLI (Socket 775)
Graphics: nVidia GTX 260 1gb RAM
Memory: 4x Corsair 2mb RAM chips (8gb)
Display: 1920x1080
Budget: Not infinite, would like to keep it under $300 tho.

I'm thinking a GTX 760, maybe this MSI one? I was looking at one of those models with three fans, but I've only got a mid-size tower so I don't think it'd fit. Plus I've got I-think good enough airflow to keep ahead of it.

The GTX 760 seems like a good upgrade, but would I be paying a premium for something I won't get full benefit from because something else is too old?

Paying almost-console for just a video card may seem silly. But only to console gamers. I am not one

[Trippy]

Yes that would be a good upgrade.

[Miasma]

Two games with it can't hurt either.

[JRave]

Double check your PSU to make sure it can handle that card.  The card you linked requires one 8pin and one 6pin PCIE power connectors.  If you look around you might be able to find one that only requires 2 6pins.

[Venkman]

Thanks for confirming folks. I now kinda wish I didn't buy AC4 a week ago 

Double check your PSU to make sure it can handle that card.  The card you linked requires one 8pin and one 6pin PCIE power connectors.  If you look around you might be able to find one that only requires 2 6pins.

Great point, I'll check that.

[Venkman]

Yes that would be a good upgrade.

Mother of pearl, you weren't kiddin'. It arrived today. Easy to hook up. Looks like schild got the same model (though I think his manufacturer was different?). In any case, all maxed-out AC IV looks fucking awesome, and I thought that game already looked rad. Going to need to update GW2.

Click for larger.

[Kail]

So, my laptop just died today, I think... As far as I can tell (and I'm no expert) the CPU just died, so I'm probably fucked, and I need a replacement quick.  And I don't have much income and I just spent most of what I had on Christmas.  Anyone have any suggestions for what to grab with like $150-$200 or so, or am I out of luck?  Most of the actual desktops I'm seeing are like $500.  Is it a good idea for someone who's not super knowledgeable about hardware to grab a barebones PC, I've heard that they don't always work?

[Chimpy]

If you are wanting to do more than just the things that a Chromebook will let you do (Surf web, google apps, be webconnected all the time) you are looking at $500-700 for a computer. You can get Chromebooks for like $250 and the people I know who have them like them a lot.

[Soln]

Intel's new mini pc the NUC looks awesome.  I may get 2.  One as a basic single desktop and the other as a Linux server.  Kicks the Mac mini in cost for less than $500.

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/01/intels-mini-pc-gets-less-mini-but-will-hold-more-storage/

[MisterNoisy]

Interesting study of HDD failure rates by an online backup provider, including statistics on a per-manufacturer/model basis.

[HaemishM]

Holy shit, those Seagate failure rates are massive compared to WD and Hitachi. 

[Chimpy]

The fact that their WD drives were all mainly purchased pre-flood but they purchased Seagates before, during and after the floods means that some of the comparisons can be taken with at least some helping of salt. QC at both Seagate and WD went to shit when they were concerned about getting production volume back up to pre-flood levels to meet demand.

They are also using consumer grade drives under enterprise conditions.