Final verdict:
Bad SSD

Literally Watt.

The 290x draws about 300W max under full load.

After five years, my current PC is now at the point where it's not hitting minimum specs for the occasional new release. Thinking about putting together a new one, but I haven't really been paying much attention to hardware news.

Does now seem like an alright time to build something, or are there some big tech leaps just around the corner?

How does the following build look?

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($209.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-UD5H ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance Pro 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($144.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Crucial MX100 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($109.97 @ SuperBiiz)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($79.98 @ NCIX US)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 Video Card ($349.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Antec P280 ATX Mid Tower Case ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair CX 600W 80+ Bronze Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply ($34.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Asus DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS DVD/CD Writer ($16.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $1146.88
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-11-20 13:45 EST-0500

what's your price range?

I'm more concerned about getting the most value out of a build that will ideally last me the same ~5 year time block as my current box. For reference, current box cost about $1300 to build in December '09.

Haven't looked much at hardware recently but your build is pretty close to mine from two years ago except the much better GPU (I have a 680 GTX). In 3 years you can probably slap a new GPU in that thing and be good to go for another 3 years. DDR5 might be good enough to warrant an upgrade in 3 years, but CPU gains have mostly been on the power efficiency side in the last 3-4 years and things look to continue that way. These processors are already overkill for gaming and rarely close to a bottleneck, even the big popular engines are fairly terrible at making use of all the cores.

I might upgrade the PSU to a gold certification, but I've never gone wrong with Corsair. Once you've lost a system to a bad PSU you tend to never scrimp on this area again, but there's a lot of marketing BS tied to these things so read some reviews.

this is a great point...dont go cheap on mobo or psu

Thanks for the psu suggestions. The 80 plus certs are just for energy efficiency, though. There's not anything similar for reliability, afaik.

If anyone bought an nvidia card recently (900 series or 780ti) you can get a free game from the pick your path bundle (assassin's creed unity, far cry 4, the crew)

I bought mine in early october and newegg honored it with no hassles (Seems most retailers are).

Oh? Where do you claim?
Or where is the advert I mean

http://www.geforce.com/pick-your-path-game-bundle

newegg's live chat

Got mine from frys

my gfx card came with an insert for a free copy of crysis

but I didn't realize it until after it'd expired




Poppa,

the gtx 9xx is the new tech that just came out, so you're pretty much covered

(z97 chipset is pretty new-ish as well iirc)

If you really shop around you can probably do that build for ~$900-$950 or maybe even a little less.

There are coupons for newegg and tigerdirect all the time. Microcenter has CPU/motherboard combos(if one is near you). Tigerdirect also has 10% BOA cashback($20 max).

I did a build a little over a month ago with a 4590,r9 270, 8gb ram, 256gb mx100, and 1TB hdd that was $600+ windows license. All good parts too(Z97 gigabyte board, fractal R4 case).

Prices have come down a bit since too. I paid the $110 for the mx100. Now I'm seeing those(or similar on sale consistently). I definitely wouldn't pay retail for an SSD right now. You will probably be able to get an intel or crucial 240/256 for ~$80.

Final build ended up looking like this:

PCPartPicker part list

Pretty much identical to the build I listed before, but with a Seasonic 550w 80+ gold certified modular PSU. Everything except for the GPU arrived on Tuesday, so I went ahead and started to assemble it. A couple hours later, I'm loading windows onto my first ever SSD. Awesome!

As I'm installing some drivers from the mobo-included disk, I realize the case (Antec P280) fans aren't turning. That makes sense, as I didn't actually see the power adapter nestled way back in the top-rear of the case. So after finishing up the drivers and rebooting once, I power down and plug in the single 4pin molex that drives the three case fans. Power back up, the CPU and case fans spin for about 0.25 seconds, and then everything cuts out completely. So I disconnect the case fans and boot up just to make sure that's actually the problem, and sure enough I'm looking at the desktop 10 seconds later.

I perform some more tests to try to isolate the problem:

- Run a modular cable from my current rig's PSU to the new case fans and boot the current rig. Current rig boots fine, new case fans all start spinning. Success.
- Use the same modular cable from last test to connect new PSU to new case fans. Failure.
- Use new PSU's modular cable to attach new PSU to three of the fans in my current rig's case (which combined *should* draw more power than the new case). Success.
- Try attaching the modular cable to a few different slots on the new PSU while connected to new case fans. Failure.
- With case fans not plugged in, insert new GPU (gtx970) and boot up. Success.
- With case fans not plugged in, run new GPU through a couple different benchmarking apps to attempt to draw max power. Success.


What am I missing here?

Weird design having 4 case fans connected through a single molex. No idea what the power draw is, but maybe they're spinning up to max on boot and some bios limiter is shutting the system down. Might muck around in the bios and see if there are any case fan settings and turn their rpm down.

EDIT: although come to think of it, these aren't PWM fans so there isn't a way to control their RPM is there?

Only 3 fans on the case. There's a switch control (low/high) on the rear of the case, they're all set to low.

Does connecting the fans to your other PSU bypass the new case's rpm control? If so, there might be a short somewhere. Otherwise your test cases seem pretty thorough and it's an odd situation.

At some point last night, I got into the power hub for the case fans and unplugged them all, but left the molex plugged in. Failure.

Go to bed figuring there's got to be a short or some other electrical phenomena that I don't understand, and resolve to just unhook and unscrew everything and just start over. Wake up this morning, try to boot up just for kicks. Success. Uh.. maybe I pulled the molex out and I forgot. Nope, it's still plugged in. Power down, reattach the case fans to the power hub and power up. Success, case fans spinning away.

There's not enough eyeroll emoticons to properly express my feelings towards this kind of voodoo ****. I appreciate the effort anyway, weevil.

Bump for master

You RMA that power supply yet?

Debating on getting 120+hz monitor. Tough decision

What is the cost difference like between 60 hz & 120 hz monitors?

About sixty hertz

Is hz another name for money? I don't get the joke.

I think 24" LED 60hz is about $150, and cheap 144hz are around $250. Haven't done a ton of research