black friday has me tempted to build a new pc. my 24 month old i5-4460, amd r9 270 combo just isnt enough.

I too am considering it.

Sales have been good so far. Still watching for 8x2gb ram deal and sdd/hdd deals.
I3 6100 $72
Evga 450w $16.98
Asus h110M-e/m.2 $37
Deepcool mid Atx case with 2 blue led fans $37
EVGA GTX 1060 SC 3gb $160

$340ish (after two $20 Mail in rebates) + est 160ish for 16gb ram and a sdd + hdd. Done pretty well so far I think

Went ahead and upgraded. Picked up the following:

Intel Core i7-6700K SkyLake 4.0GHz LGA 1151 Boxed Processor
MSI Z170A GAMING M5 LGA 1151 ATX Intel Motherboard
Crucial 32GB 16GB x 2 DDR4-2400 PC4-19200 Desktop Memory Kit

Bought this all in-store at Microcenter. Paid around $620 total. I came from a 5-6 year old Sandy Bridge with a motherboard that was beginning to flake out. Planning on upgrading my video card from my current R9 290 once I get a new monitor.

I'm hoping 144 hz, ultrawide, 1440p monitors start hitting the market soon.

I've run WoW, Hearthstone, and Bluestacks all at the same time and even then my 6700K doesn't go over about 50% load. I have it overclocked to 4.4 GHz.

Finished it off with a 240gb 850evo for 62.99 and 16gb 2666mhz kingston fury Hyper-x ram for 64.99.

Have an older 750gb 7200rpm hdd laying around so I'll use that to get extra space. Feel like I did pretty well. Should last him a few years before needing any upgrades

On the topic of SSDs, crucial has a half terabyte drive for a hundo

http://deals.kinja.com/heres-another...eal-1789425047

Some where lucky enough to grab the 750gb version of this Friday night for 99.99 from newegg

r9 290x just died.

bother with gigabytes RMA process or just buy a gtx 1060? shipping costs aren't covered, and this thing weighs a ton and has to go across the country. also just read a ton of ****ty reviews online about how it takes months and the thing comes back still broke half the time.

If it's a good card then it's worth bothering with the process. If it takes longer than you want it to, you can always buy a new one at that point.

My typical approach would be buy new card. RMA old card and sell it when you get it back.

Amen!

yea that's the thing, the upgrade to a 1060 seems kinda marginal. Don't usually like to spend more than the $2~$300 range because new generation gpus come out so often anyways.

makes sense, guess ill try this out. even tho odds are once i have the new card i'm just way too lazy to ever sell this one.

Something started smelling lightly of smoke near my pc. Figured it's either the power outlet/socket or the battery backup I use. Not sure what to do now.

Everything is off and unplugged for the time being.

Probably dust. Open it up and clean out all the weedsmoke homey.

Looking to buy a gaming PC for my son but don't know anything. Was offered this:

PC Specs Include,
Intel i5 4690k And Stock CPU Fan
Msi B85-G43 Gaming Motherboard
EVGA GTX 960 Super Super Over Clocked Graphics Card
8GB DDR3 Memory
1TB Of Hard Drive Space
EVGA 850 Semi Modular Platinum Power Supply
3x Interior Fans
MID ATX Corsair Gaming Case
Hard Drive Does Include Installed Windows 10 As Well As All The Microsoft Programmes.

Can you advise as to how good/bad this set up is?

Very solid rig, but it has two moderate flaws and one minor flaw:

1. The 960 is a capable GPU that would run most games well at medium/high settings, but is a generation old. This most recent generation of GPUs are not only better in the usual incremental advancements, but the price to performance ratio is also larger than I've ever seen it.

No question your GPU should be either a Geforce 1060 6gb, or a Radeon 470/480 (4 or 8GB), depending on your budget. The the 480 and 1060 are relatively equal. The 470 is about 10-13% slower than the 480, but can overclock (easily done via driver software) to essentially match the 480's performance. They retail for ~200 but I just picked one up for 150. All three models go on sale regularly.

2. Your main drive should now be an solid state drive instead of a hard disk drive. Minimum of 250GB, IMO. The Samsum EVO line is the sweet spot for price and quality/performance. The ideal budget setup is a SSD that your OS runs on with a 1-2 TB HDD as a secondary drive, but a single 500GB SSD is perfectly fine. SSD prices are currently silly low but they're supposedly going to increase due to manufacturer shortages.

3. I'd recommend 16GB of RAM for anybody buying/building a gaming PC. This one isn't as big a deal right now, but RAM is cheap and 8 gig won't be enough in a few years anyways.

If you can remove the GPU and HDD from the table and get it at a lower price, go for it. If not, I'd suggest getting basically that same PC elsewhere with the upgraded GPU, RAM and drive. If the budget doesn't these upgrades, that rig as it stands is still a fine option. You can always upgrade the GPU and RAM easily, and the drive as well (more annoying, though, since it would require a re-installation of Windows).

Keep an eye out on https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapcsales/ for sales. It's the single best resource for building a computer, IMO.

EDIT:

This deal is killer. If you can, jump on it.

The 4690K is a 4th generation "Haswell" i5 processor. Currently Intel is on their 6th generation of the i-series processors with the 7th generation due out sometime next year.

The i5-4690K processor (released June 2014) is currently $240 on Newegg. For the same $240 you can buy an i5-6600K (the most comparable current-generation processor: released August 2015). The 6600K isn't going to blow the 4690K away in gaming performance most likely. However, a GTX 1060 WILL blow away even a super duper overclocked GTX 960 and it won't be close.

This may or may not be significant to you and probably will not affect performance in most games, but that combined with the generation-old video card and no SSD, I would be wary of paying too much for this rig. You're essentially looking at a mid-range gaming PC from 2 years ago.

You didn't list a price with that setup but just be advised that in a computer forum we're going to call that hardware "old".

I'd like to ask for some suggestions on new RAM. I have an old build from 2009. My motherboard is an ASUS P6T SE. I currently have 6GB of RAM and my computer is just running really sluggish. It's almost as if the RAM is just worn out and exhausted.

I'd like to upgrade to 16GB. I'm not sure if 4x4GB or 2x8GB matters.

I'm not looking for high end, but something reasonably inexpensive and noticeably better.

Have you done a fresh install since then and are you running an ssd?

For 99% of games you won't need more than 8gb, a few ****ty console ports it helps to have 12gb or more.

Just buy some 1866hz ddr3 in 2x8gb ( triple and quad channel offer no gaming performance gains ). It's pretty cheap these days.

Looks like it would be about $80 - $100 or so to get up to 16gb. Remember that to use dual channel ram, it needs to be the exact same model.

PcPartPicker lists some ddr3-1866 crucial ballistix 8gb RAM for $42. Pair of those might help

No, I haven't done any type of fresh install or reformat. I don't know how to do that stuff and I'm super afraid of losing 7 years worth of everything I've collected -- like my own documents, ebooks, files, pictures, etc. I have a 1TB external HD, but I don't know how to do a full backup on it.

The one thing that stood out to me was that I wasn't able to play Fallout 4. The game was just unbearably choppy and my framerate would drop to 1. It doesn't have to be strictly related to gaming. I just want overall fast and responsive.

I was actually looking at the crucial ballistix RAM. Would you be able to link what you were seeing? I just want to make sure I'm looking at the same thing. My goal is to order them today or tomorrow.

Get an SSD, it'll make it feel much snappier and responsive than anything else.

Get a USB pendrive, grab the win10 media creator here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10

download and pick the "create installation media for another pc" and put it on the pendrive.

Follow an ssd install guide on youtube ( there are a billion ).

Fallout 4 was a buggy POS, so it might've just been that rather than your pc - whats your cpu/gpu?

My CPU is an i7-920. And my GPU is an ASUS Radeon HD 7770.

DO NOT UPGRADE YOUR WINDOWS