Need help for a Friend

Tech Support
1

Hey all,
So I have a friend who is wanting to build his first gaming PC, his budget for parts including the case is $1600 and we will perform the labor,
also if we can have the pre set amazon links that would be awesome.
also as for the case I believe he is looking for a windowed case.
Thanks again for your help in this matter.

2

A few questions:

  1. What does your friend already own (if anything)?
    Is the $1600 just for the tower or does it need to encompass tower, screen, keyboard, mouse, headset, etc?

  2. What is the secondary purpose of the machine (if any)? Gaming appears to be the primary function, but will your friend use it for video editing, CAD, coding, etc in addition to gaming?

  3. What games will your friend be playing?

  4. Does your friend prefer high refresh rate or high resolution? (Ie would he prefer a 144hz 1080p over a 60hz 1440p?)

  5. Does your friend need wireless onboard or will ethernet connectivity suffice?

3

Only a couple things I can add to what Infandus said. I really did mean this to short, oops. :laughing:

First determine what display you’ll be driving, then picking the rest of the components should be much easier. On that note, don’t bother with a 4K screen as getting hardware to make full use of it will push you way past the budget.

There are perfectly serviceable 24"-27" HD displays for under $200. They aren’t “gamer” screens, but I think there is a huge placebo effect for the vast majority of users for specs like delay. Lets be honest, is a few ms difference going to matter compared to human reaction time. One highly rated one I know of is the BenQ GW2760HS. Could someone do the magic to the Amazon link on this one?

The screen is also one of the most easily replaced parts, so I think a beginner is probably best cheaping out a little there and putting more into a solid motherboard, ram and SSD NVMe drive. There is a good chance they might want two screens down the road, so it could always become the secondary screen.

An Nvidia 1070 is plenty powerful enough for HD resolutions. However, consider that with recent price drops there is only $100 between it and a 1080 GTX. If after putting the rest together there is a little room left in the budget, might be worth considering.

As for what motherboard/cpu, I’m not so sure right now. Before the AMD Rysen came out, I’d have said an Asus Z170-A with a 6th or 7th gen i5 (or i7 if they might be streaming or processing video). However, all I have to go on AMD right now are benchmarks and some initial reviews, no personal experience. Just make sure the board supports NVMe SSDs. My personal pref right now is the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe (currently around $250 for a 500GB). If they need some bulk storage go with a cheap or hybrid sata hard drive.

I’m sure some may disagree with some of this. Feel free to chime in and correct me if need be.

Nom

4

Could you give us noobs a little bit of a run down on those NVMe SSD’s and what their advantage is? I’ve been doing a little reading into SSD’s but not enough to justify picking a new one up. is NVMe another term for SSD’s running through a PCIe slot?

5

BenQ 24" gaming monitors - amzn.to/2oOy1ni 2ms response time. The 27" is also available via the same link.

Buy a Intel Kaby Lake 7600K which beats the 1800X Ryzen in most benchmarks for 1/2 the price, the scary part that is with the 7600K running stock and the 1800X overclocked to 3.9.

6

M.2 drives are directly connected to the motherboard PCIe bus and have better performance in some use cases than a SATA based SSD. While the Samsung 850 series performs at about the max speed of a SATA III SSD, the the 960 series is 3x to 4x faster. For some games this makes a huge difference.

Samsung 850 - amzn.to/2pnMZCI
Samsung 960 - amzn.to/2pF0IrB

7

Just the tower

8

Ok - what about the other questions.

Also, what screen with the computer be driving?

9

Not sure I will check into this.
as for the monitor set up, I believe he will purchase one outside of this budget and in the short term hook it to a tv.

10

Ok - thats good to know - that said, knowing the resolution / refresh rate he plans to use is pretty critical.

For now, I will work with the assumption that he is aiming for a 1440p 60hz refresh, single screen system dedicated only to gaming.

Ill poke around newegg / amazon / etc to see what kind of prices are floating about and try to get a small list together some time when i find free time… soon TM as they say…

Also feel free to grab me in mumble! (or bring your friend along)

11

Cool, he is planing on purchasing the items late this month or early next month.

12

A decent place to start is as follows:

Processor: i5-7600k ($229)
Cooler: Corsair H-100i vs ($110)
Mobo: ASUS Strix Z270 Gaming ($187) - can save some money here by going with MSI or GIGABYTE
Memory: Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8) DDR4-3000
GPU: ASUS GTX-1080 ROG STRIX ($535)
Storage SSD: Samsung 850 Evo 500GB ($180)
Storage HDD: WD Black 2TB 7200 RPM ($118)
PSU: Corsair 760W 80+ Plat Modular ($150)

This is your pretty run of the mill top end gaming computer - totals out to $1590 before tax. This is built assuming the end user wants to overclock the machine.

If he does not want to over clock:
Change processor to 7600 non-k
Change motherboard to non-Z
Change the CPU cooler to a standard fan / heat sink setup instead of an AIO
Reduce the power supply wattage to ~600 watts

If the price is a little higher than expected:
Drop the GPU to a 1070
Drop the HDD to 1TB or get rid of the HDD

One way or the other, I would suggest looking for a different motherboard - a decent bit of money can probably be saved there (I just grabbed the cheapest one i saw after 2 minutes that had onboard wifi)

Since I don’t know if he has software, a case, fans, peripherals, etc - this is the best hardware he can get for that budget.

If he is missing the case, fans, peripherals, etc - then it changes things quite a bit - but with the basic information I have - this is what I would aim for.

Disclaimer - I put this together in <15 minutes, so should not be that difficult to save a decent bit of money optimizing the build for what the end user actually wants.

13

I’d suggest going with the M.2 version of the Samsung 850, better performance same cost.

14

Thanks for all the help!
Hopefully soon tm after we have his computer built he will join the adi family.

15

Totally missed that they were the same cost - yes 100% agree with this statement.
Just verify that any motherboard purchased has M.2 support (though the vast majority of them do support it now)

16

WOW, I’m normally really big on the NVMe drives, but the 850 EVO M.2 looks like a really good deal. Price is actually up a little from what its been. camelcamelcamel.com/Samsung-850 … B00TGIW1XG Comes with a 5 year / 150TBW warranty. FWIW, I just checked my one year old 950 PRO and it has 5.0 TB Total Bytes Written.