awesome set up Morphismus im well jell

will e looking at this a few times before i build my own

i doubt highly that it will show anywhere near as good a rating as ur one does on the windows rating thing


i love them cases, the one im looking at is a corsair and on the top it has a fan and also a dock for a hard drive.


5 stars *****

Time for an upgrade imo. Stuff like Watchdogs doesn't run smoothly anymore, and GTA V for PC is coming.



What I'm thinking is

CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K, 4x 4.00GHz, ~€330 - I'm set on this, it's the fastest for that socket, the other i7s are not that much cheaper, so why not go for it?

Graphics: ASUS STRIX-GTX970-DC2OC-4GD5, 4GB GDDR5, ~€350 - I think the GTX970 is the best option right now (at least nVIDIA-wise) if you want performance at a still somewhat reasonable price. What I like about this one that it switches to passive cooling in desktop mode. Anyone knows a better GTX 970 option?



I am also pondering a memory upgrade. I don't need that 32GB I was thinking about when I built this, but defo need 16GB. I'm not sure if I should get something faster for that CPU. Thoughts?

I also want to replace my 32GB swapfile SSD with a like 250-500GB SSD (non-raid) just for the purpose of installing games and other big software. That 250GB main disk space goes quick. Any ideas for that?

You don't need a new CPU, I'd save money there.
Don't go with the GTX 970, memory issues are well known,google it a bit.
I'd either crossfire 2x R9 290X or go with a 980.
Middle-term would be a GTX 780 STRIX 6GB.
As for SSD...850EVO or MX100/200

Naaah dunno, with Watchdogs one of my 4 cores goes always to 100%, and the rest stays below 20% or so. I figure hyperthreadding should really help there.

Yeah I read something that 500MB of that 4GB has lower speed, but how big of a deal is that really? I'm just using an 1080p monitor.

thnx

Hyperthreadding isn't used for gaming yet (afaik,I haven't been involved much in it). The CPU is fine,really. If a core is getting to 100% all the time while using big amounts of RAM, a RAM stick may be faulty,causing too many accesses to memory.If you want to upgrade,sure go for it, but maybe wait a bit longer for the next gen.

Out of principle,I would not go with a GPU that has known issues. Furthermore, those issues may very well arrise with games such as GTA V

I googled a little and I found a site (in German) where they said that Watchdogs is one of those (still few) games where hyperthreadding adds significant performance. Of course I don't want to buy a CPU just to play one particular game, but I guess we might see more of that in the future.

Regarding nextgen CPUs: I don't expect much more from Broadwell over Haswell (except power consumption) since it's the same architecture; and Skylake will be another socket anyway.

I also wanted to install an aftermarket cooler for silence (should have done this from the start tbh.), and while I'm at that, why not installing a new CPU?

Yeah that's a point. As I understand, the slow RAM is only used when you go over the 3.5 GB margin, but how to make sure of that? At least with GTA IV there where neat settings where they showed you in how much RAM-use your settings resulted in; but I think that was the only game I ever saw that.

So am I really getting myself a ~€600 GTX980?

Well,if you want to upgrade the CPU,heck go for it. Get the i7-4790K or so, should be fine. Don't think you really need it, but that's up to you.

Well,unless you plan to change GPU every year, that thing will last you a few years. I still got my GTX 570 going for 4 years now,give or take. Ofc I could use an upgrade,but meh. I played Crysis 3 on it,was pretty happy ^^
A 290X should do the work for 1/2 the price, and you can crossfire it later on I guess. But if you rather go NVIDIA,go GTX 980.

So I ordered an MSI GTX 980 Gaming 4G and a 500GB MX100 - for now...

Any tips for a RAM upgrade? Should I replace my 1600Mhz RAM Kit with a 2400 MHz one? Would it be worth only it if I do the CPU upgrade? What should I look for regarding that CAS/RAS stuff?

Don't bother with upgrading the RAM. Relax,it'll run fine

So the Watchdogs thing still persists, but I'm thinking now about trying to over-clock my i5 before going for a new CPU. I would try this water-cooled, and I hear the Corsair H100i is good. Anyone has experience with that here? Thoughts?

I've been running that for a few months now and my i7 Devils canyon is running very cool OC'ed with no maintenance. The previous gen corsair is in my roommates pc running over two years now with no maintenance as well. The one thing I can mention is I read everything that can go wrong with different cases and mobos ahead of time so I was well prepared for understanding the mount before starting.

For ram I always go with gskill sniper series, I do notice a quality difference and I don't believe it's much more expensive than counterparts.

One thing I forgot about is I replaced the stock fans with quality noctua fans for silence and performance. Depending on your case you can do push/pull or just pull or just push.

Thanks for the feedback. I would do the setup like in your picture; I actually think you might have the same case.

Regarding the RAM I don't plan an update for now. From what I read/watched about overclocking I understood that the RAM frequency is actually going down ( ), which I don't get. So I have to educate myself more on that obv.

So I just ordered that H100i - let's see how this works out...

Update: The H100i actually didn't fit in my case. So I returned that and got myself that Intel liquid cooler, where radiator and fan basically replace the case fan.



That cooler is solid, super silent, looks nice (lol LED), and is easy to install; yet I didn't get the results from overclocking I was hoping for. I got to 4Ghz, but the Watchdog issues still persist. Meanwhile GTA V got out, and while that ran better, all cores where maxed to 100% almost all the time and for it to run smooth enough, I had to reduce some settings.

I had to reduce some settings!

So I finally got me that i7-4790K! It was a bit painful to install as it didn't boot at first; turned out the BIOS update wasn't complete (ME update was missing, whatever that is). At the end I got it running, messed up my main drive in the process and had to re-install Windows, which was not a big problem as I have most of my stuff on the other drives.

So I just ran GTAV and it's a bigger difference than I anticipated. I can max everything out, especially visibility range, and it runs waaay smoother. Also all 8 (4 + 4 virtual) cores are used equally at 50-70%, so hyperthreadding is definititely used. Downloading Watchdogs right now (that one was on the main drive), but pretty sure I'm golden there as well.

So that basically concludes this build; that rig should serve me well for the next ~2years. The next stop on my personal technology roadmap: Skylake.

Confirmed golden with Watchdogs.

btw in idle my system is more silent than an external drive I have on my desk. I switched it off accidentally a couple of times already when I thought I would switch it on.

Good build, I have almost the same components (older i5).
I would not do any caching/swapping/virtual machines on the SSD.
I run Samsung 850s for my OS and games the rest goes on 1TB HDDs, no RAID currently as my UPS is down.

Drop your swap file size - https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2860880
Your cable management could use work, it's impeding air flow in the cabinet.

^ that looks really neat! Next time I will set up the drives better such that I can access them all via the backplate side. Anyway, with the CPU basically cooled directly from the outside now I should be fine, especially as I added another fan at the front.

I have the Swapfile on auto now, since I got rid of my "swap-drive". Why no VM and swapping on the SSD?

Wait, what? Your CPU cooler pulls air from the top of the case into the case?

Thx for the updates btw, keep 'em coming.

Thanks, that's not my rig, but it's close.
HDDs to avoid wear on the SSD for tasks that don't need the disk i/o.
There is little to be gained by running VMs on SSD unless it's your daily driver OS or has databases on it. Keep the grinding to the HDDs.

I run poker clients + PT4 + PgSQL off the SSD too, prioritize what you want/need on it.
Samsung Magician has presets for performance/reliability and more.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9158/n...ter-this-month
http://techreport.com/review/27909/t...heyre-all-dead

You're right, for some reason I thought it would go in. That would heat up the case bad obv. I guess you could even do it with 1-2 fans at the top sucking it out directly.

Little update: After years of paranoia, resulting in me putting $$ into RAID arrays, it finally paid off! One of the 2 data discs in my RAID1 array died today. I saved the most crucial data to an external drive, got me another 1TB disc, swapped it with the goner, and the RAID1 array was restored after like 2,5 hours. Great stuff imo!

Nice, I have raid 1 on a zfs nas and it's definitely peace of mind. Also upgraded main rig to skylake i7 with asus z170 16gb ddr4 512gb Samsung nvme and Evga gtx 980 ti classified. Sold all my old components making the upgrades marginal in cost.

Soon plans are to get the kaby lake which fits lga 1151 (don't need to swap motherboard), Evga gtx 1080 ti classified which will go nicely with my 55" 4K Sony tv (120hz native) that I got for $700 off on cyber Monday.

Should add that after cleaning my radiator the last time I realized that pull is the better config so you don't get the layer of dust between the fan and radiator. Temps still perfect after