I have a case to use already with a huge 10inch fan on the side for cooling and so on.
What I need is a new blu-ray/dvd drive, a HDD, RAM and lots of it, a new MoBo, processor, and a graphics card.
This new PC is mainly going to be used for iRacing and some other pc games and not much else.
Just want some insight on to what are the better processors, memory, and cards in todays world. It's been 6 years since I've built a PC so I'm a bit behind. The current one works okay for iracing but I'd like to play with the graphics turned to 11.
In reply to DirtyBird222:
Intel chips "do more" per clock than an equivalent AMD chip, but that's about all I know about performance computing these days. Go with a motherboard that will support more RAM than you install now. If you're installing 8GB now, buy a mobo with at least 16GB capacity. If it can't address it, it can't use it.
Other than iRacing, what are you playing? The low end cards serve only one purpose, and that's to get the video off the board/CPU. If you want to game, you're looking at stuff in the $100+ range. For what it's worth, my outdated card does me fine in my 3 year old C2D box with only 2GB of RAM.
Have you considered having 2 storage devices on board? May I suggest an SSD for programs and something like a 2TB drive for bulk storage? I haven't had an SSD in any of my own systems, but I've played with a few in the past. Think 3 or 4 second Windows load times with a decent setup. The read/write speed of your bulk storage doesn't matter nearly as much as it does for program files.
I'll second the SSD and more RAM than needed. My cousin has a machine with a SSD and 16gigs of RAM, using it for heavy engineering modeling, and heavy multi tasking. I thought my 10k rpm main drive and 8gigs of RAM was quick till I used his one day. I'm seriously debating on biting the bullet and making the upgrade for my work computer.
SSDs are quick but they're expensive and you need to back them up regularly because they can fail unrecoverably. When I was building my gaming PC a few years ago I went with two 10krpm drives in RAID0 instead of an SSD. Another option is to split your hard drive betweeen an SSD and HDD, and put the OS files on the SSD, you get most of the benefit that way without having to pay $$$$ for big SSD storage.
When I'm "out of it" this is a good page for getting back up to speed:
http://www.maximumpc.com/best-of-the-best
Sometimes the list is a little out of date but it gives you a good starting point.
+1 for lots of RAM, but on a gaming PC the video card is most important. Get a good recent GPU with as much video RAM as you can get, these days you should go for 3GB.
BTW one more thing, you must discover the wonders of positive pressure cooling. It's where you basically have more intake airflow than exhaust airflow, the opposite of the usual air cooling setup. It's very slightly less efficient but you won't notice that. What you will notice, is that once you have good filtration on the intake fans the computer stays CLEAN. No dust getting sucked into every crevice as usual.
Thanks for all the input!
I've got positive pressure cooling on my current PC. The 250mm fan sucks in and i have two small 2 inch fans pushing out.
It's no slouch but it's 6 years old, 256mb on the graphics card, only 2 gigs of ram, and about 320gigs of space.
Other games would most likely include call of duty or battlefield 3 maybe a flight sim. I don't have much time for gaming because I have all my gaming equipment in another room. If I can get this build done I can set it up in the living room and the SWMBO will be happy lol.
Not sure if it's still true, but you'll want a 64-bit OS to handle big ram. I operated on that assumption and used Windows-7 64-bit PRO and threw 16 gigs of ram at SWMBO's new data analysis machine. Combined with a 128-gig SSD it's the fastest PC I've ever used by a far margin. Cold start to ready to work in less than 20 seconds if you can type your password fast enough.
DaveEstey wrote:
Not sure if it's still true, but you'll want a 64-bit OS to handle big ram.
Is still true and always will be, a 32bit CPU/OS can't handle more than 4GB total, and that includes video RAM.
I have 12GB in my gaming PC but unless you're doing virtualization or something that guzzles RAM in mighty chunks, that's excessive and you should only go for that much if it's cheap like it was at the time for me.
On an average Win7 x64 PC meant for gaming, I'd say you'll get benefits up to about 8GB for now.
tomshardware.com also has periodic (monthly or quarterly) segments where they build gaming rigs for specific budget segments. If you have a target in mind, check out their builds and you'll be about as good as you can get.
