Well, my power supply on the ol’ PC just went kaput. Loud pop and the smell of electrons in the air.
Now’s a prime time for a redesign, I’m thinking. Problem is, I have NEVER built a PC from the ground-up before and could use all the advice I can get on the components I need to run SC without any issues.
I’m an open book, guys. Got a budget around $950 and I’ll take whatever advice I can get.
I’d recommend reading this:
Sweet merciful rig!!
Hi DHawk,
the problem is… you simply cannot run SC without any issues right now.
The game is not finished yet and it is not optimized as well.
Even if you want to run SC in all it’s beauty on something like an 1080p or 1440p display, you already will need lots of GPU power.
As the game sligtly prefers AMD GPUs i’d say something like the AMD Fury will do the job quite good.
But if you want the best RIG for SC, i’d wait as long as possible …at least until NVIDIA/AMD bring their next gen GPUs with HBM2 on board aka Pascal/Gereenland. These GPUs should be really suitable to run SC.
The best thing you can do right now if you need the RIG right now ist to buy the best for your buck.
The RIG which was recommended by JayC is quite good but still it depends on your personal preferences and on the hardware you already have and might want to reuse.
Before you get started, the following questions should be clarified:
Right now the best bang for the buck is something like the RIG recommended by JayC.
The Sapphire Radeon NITRO R9 390 has an realy good price/performance ratio - the best 390 you can get right now.
The Skylake CPUs are really good as well. You may not need an “K” version and an expensive “Z” board.
16GB RAM is a bit of overkill yet but it shold be really helpful once SC goes live.
I 'd like to point out the Corsair RM Series 850 and the Corsair Hydro Series H100i are both overkill, but they get the job done good.
And one thing i’d consider as really important nowadays: get yourself a SSD 250GB+ - not only for the OS, but also for SC.
This will not only reduce the boot up time of your systems but will also reduce the time making you stare at some nasty loading screens as well. This makes any game much much more enjoyable.
Hope this helps 
Couple of things…
Unless you’re running an Ivy Bridge or Haswell series chip (and anything running on an AMD CPU) you’re going to probably need to upgrade to play SC next year. It’s going to be a real PC killer.
First, there are only K series skylake chips available at this time, and if you buy a K series chip you might as well overclock it since you spent the money on the chip. Also Z170 motherboards are the only motherboard released at this time for the 6600K and 6700K processors, so yes you must buy the more expensive motherboard.
The power supply is overkill, it’s even overkill if you want to run dual GPU’s you could save $30-40 on the build by cutting back… The cooler is a great cooler if you’re going to be over clocking, and I would recommend it or another like it for any K series build.
16GB of memory is about as low as I’d recommend going today on a new PC, although we used 2x8GB sticks on that build to allow Sam to upgrade to 32GB of memory down the road… that is overkill for the vast majority of people… you could save another $20-30 by going with 4x4GB sticks, and the memory will be a little faster in the process.
The 390 has slightly better performance than the GTX 970 on star citizen games… but it uses a lot more power and gives off a ton more heat… The truth is it’s a coin toss on which graphics card to buy between the two.
$950 is going to be almost impossible to do a Skylake build today, if that is your budget you need to either wait a year to do the build, or realize that you’re not going to be able to run the game on max settings at 1080p, or with high resolution monitors 2K or 4K at all.
Because the ram standard is changing to DDR4, I’d strongly encourage you to wait until you can put together a rid that uses DDR4.
H170 mainboards as well as B150 shold be availabe already. Newegg has offers e.g.
The non “K” CPUs are comming… within 2 weeks. (though i’d love to see some Xeons here…)
[url]http://wccftech.com/full-intel-desktop-skylakes-cpu-lineup-2-weeks-includes-core-i7-core-i5-core-i3-pentium-skus/[/url]
I’d always prefer an “K” CPU myself. But not everyone is keen on overclocking.
Sometimes it just makes more sense to save this 50-100$ premium and spend it on other components.
The best thing right now is having an Ivy/Haswell CPU, that is also my opinion. They are powerful enough and support PCIe 3.0.
@JayC
I know many people like the AiO cooling solutions. And they are good.
But the reality is they are not as good as they are hyped as in the most reviews and/or by the most people.
You can get almost the same performance from air coolers at half of the price. (techpowerup.com/reviews/Silv … ITE/8.html) And some air coolers have even better performance. Also it depends on how much you are going to overclock. The AiO coolers can be noisy and won’t last nearly as long as the average air cooler. I don’t say AiOs are bad. I just want to point out it’s something to consider. I’m cooling my Ivy [email protected] with an ancient Mugen2 and the fan is running at lowest speeds. I’m not even getting close to critical temperatures. Going to 4.5Ghz will force me to rise the core voltage and thus result in 10-15 degrees higher temperatures with the same fan speeds. That’s another story about Ivy CPUs and their ihs thermal paste 
Just a note on cooling based on real world experience. I run a 3570k it’s at 4.4 from 3.4 Ghz and I use a hyper 212. Temps stay below 50. I use Noctua’s thermal paste, works much better than artic silver, which used to be my go to.
If you don’t mind noise, which I assume we all use headsets, then air cooling is affordable and it can be Really good.
Appreciate all the feedback. Only peripherals I may replace will be monitor, as my current one is over 7 years old, and my joystick which will be replaced by a HOTAS.
Budget available in reality will be (S - Rig), S being the point where my wife divorces me.
I’ll have to review this in more detail as my schedule opens up later in the fall.
When you do start looking/buying, you near a http://www.microcenter.com at all? Aside from their(well everyones) price gouging of the new Skylake chips, their Motherboard - CPU bundles are pretty hard to beat. Just have to factor in the gas and taxes. But having someplace close to return just in case might not be a bad thing. If your close…
Hey MisFire,
There is at least one MicroCenter in the area that I’m aware of, so I may check there as well. I will definitely keep those types of deals in mind as I move forward with planning this rebuild.