First build advice

[Xcrazydude]

Hi,

This is the first time I try building a computer. I am not new to the computer world, (I have taken apart and put back computers and cellphones) but not an expert either, hence my post. I would like a setup that contains the most recent or top-of-the-line hardware and can last a few years, around 3-5, before I start looking at upgrades or it starts becoming obsolete (I know this can change drastically at any moment since technology is rapidly advancing).

Uses: Mainly gaming, web and movies. Occasional engineering programs.
Budget: Not really an issue although I would like to limit to 2.5K (at least for core components)
Country: Buying in the US, maybe from Newegg, but not sure if they ship to Puerto Rico, if not amazon I guess.
Brands: Sticking to Intel and Nvidia, unless otherwise persuaded. Prefer Asus MOBO and GPU.
No current parts.
May overclock if required, unless hardware can handle games at normal speeds.
Resolution: Up to 2k, don't want to get into 4k now.
Plan to buy parts within a month.

Before deciding to look for help I had chosen the following components:

CPU: Intel i7-4770K (haswell is the latest architecture if I am not mistaken).
MOBO: Asus Maximus VI Formula
GPU: Asus Nvidia GTX 780 (not sure if an earlier version with 1gb more of ram is better).
RAM: Corsair Dom. Plat. 2x4gb 1600Mhz 9-9-9-24 latency
SSD : Was looking at the Asus RaidR PCIe, but not really sure if it's worth it. Also looked at two samsung 840 pro and putting them in raid0 (read it's actually faster than the asus)
HDD : Two in raid1 for backup-backup purposes. (Have had some issues with hdd becoming bricks, unreadable)
No PSU chosen, no case chosen. One BR burner.

Notes:
I was also reading about water cooling the CPU, GPU and mobo, but not really sure since i've never done it.

Plan on buying a second GPU for SLi later in the year.

Going to be using a TV for watching movies and possible gaming, but eventually going to use two monitors, unless the games play well on the tv.

So, what am I missing? Is there something better? What should I do and not do? Overall, I want something that performs, looks good, and lasts.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Hubb1e]

CPU choice: yes
Motherboard: Overkill. Are you going for an overclocking record? I don't personally see any sense in buying a mothboard for more than $200. I'm not in the market right now so I don't know the best boards out there, but this is just throwing money away in my opinion.
SSD Just get one SSD for now and stick to a normal one. Get more space on it if you have $ to burn. The Samsung 840 pro is a good choice
HDD Use cloud backup instead of two disks as two disks doesn't really help you if your house is blown over by a hurricane.
PSU: Go Gold. Corsair, Seasonic, Antec are all good brands. Corsair HX 850W if you're planning on SLI or the 650W if you're not.
Case, can't help you there as I haven't built for a long time. It's also very personal which case you choose. I prefer modest cases myself. I went with the Antec Solo II but that probably doesn't have enough cooling for SLI.

Water Cooling: on the CPU it isn't really worth it as a good air cooler will work just fine. If you're going to stay at stock speeds, the stock cooler is sufficient.

SLI: For 2K gaming with a 780 you're not gonna see any benefit as the 780 is already too fast for 2K gaming. I'd personally stay away from dual cards unless you're going for a 3 monitor setup or 4K.

This build won't come anywhere close to 2.5K. Save the rest for a rainy day as anything above 1.5k isn't getting you a much better experience.

 

[Blain]

First build advice

Base your build around a high quality PS.

 

[Torn Mind]

RAID 1 is not a true backup. It does not preserve the system state from files changes from app installs, including malicious apps. You want to create system images. Windows has a native utility. Clonezilla is a free option, and there are others. You want to have copies of those images on multiple media if you want more redundancy

 

[Cerb]

SSD : Was looking at the Asus RaidR PCIe, but not really sure if it's worth it. Also looked at two samsung 840 pro and putting them in raid0 (read it's actually faster than the asus)

Just get a good single SATA drive that's big enough for your needs. The sequential speed gains if RAID 0 offer nil, in terms of useful benefit, unless you have some particularly niche uses for the array (such as high-bandwidth recording/streaming of competitive video game matches). IMO, the Crucial M500's recent pricing has been awfully aggressive, and makes for a good excuse to go with 480GB (or even 960GB, if you want). The Samsung 840 Evo is also a good one. You could spring for a Sandisk Extreme II, but I don't think you'll make any decent use of it, and it's actually a bit slower for common usage, if you don't push it.

HDD : Two in raid1 for backup-backup purposes. (Have had some issues with hdd becoming bricks, unreadable)

RAID 1 offers you availability, and is not a backup. If you want a backup, set up a backup, not a RAID. A RAID 1/5/6/10/etc. only protect you from failures on a drive, while a backup helps to protect the data stored on the drive. For example, if you were stupid enough to get Cryptolocker, RAID would still leave you hosed, while you could recover your files with a backup.

 

[mfenn]

I agree with the advice that's been offered thus far: somebody who "might" overclock does not need an extreme tweaker's board like the MVIF, RAID 0 SSDs are pointless for normal application, and RAID 1 is not a backup.

Here's a build:

i5 4670K $220 AP
ASRock Z87 Fatality Killer $130 - yes, the branding is ridiculous
Team DDR3 1600 16GB $135
Gigabyte GTX 780 $500
Samsung 840 EVO 500GB $302 - good price relative to the ~240GB drives, but could always get a smaller one
Seagate 7200RPM 2TB x2 $160 AP
LG BD-R drive $69
EVGA NEX 750 G $70 AR
NZXT Phantom 410 $90 - could easily get a different case if you don't like the look of the Phantom
Total: $1676 AR AP

You could add a second GTX 780 and be around $2200, but I don't recommend that for a 1080p TV.

 

[Xcrazydude]

Motherboard: Overkill. Are you going for an overclocking record? I don't personally see any sense in buying a mothboard for more than $200. I'm not in the market right now so I don't know the best boards out there, but this is just throwing money away in my opinion.

Wow! Would have never thought that! I had chosen that mobo in the first place because of the great integrated sound card, integrated bluetooth and the ROG armor which looks pretty cool. I'll reconsider. For bluetooth I could just use a dongle.

SLI: For 2K gaming with a 780 you're not gonna see any benefit as the 780 is already too fast for 2K gaming. I'd personally stay away from dual cards unless you're going for a 3 monitor setup or 4K.

Lets see if I understood: For 2K just 1 780; if going 4K add a second 780?

RAID 1 is not a true backup.

RAID 1 offers you availability, and is not a backup. If you want a backup, set up a backup, not a RAID.

and RAID 1 is not a backup.

Oops! Guess I kind of got that all wrong in my head. I was planning on using the SSD for the OS and programs, one HDD for all my documents and the second HDD as a backup to the first. I can just program weekly backups of the first drive, sounds a lot simpler.

Thanks guys for your suggestion, really appreciate it. I'll take another look with those suggestions in mind and let you know.

 

[riversend]

When you say "backup" make sure you know what you meant. There are gradients. You are talking about the lowest level, basically having redundancy in case of an unrecoverable storage drive fail. If you have a power spike (lightning, power surges due to wx, etc) or other catastrophic failure, this is not likely going to help you. Get a minimum of regular backups to some offboard system/storage, and preferably one that is not always plugged in, or is at least on separate surge/UPS protection. Think about what it is you really want/need.

 

[Cerb]

^ What he said. Make the 2nd drive an easy to disconnect USB 3.0 HDD, FI, to have something that is likely to not die if a power event ruins everything else, because you can leave it disconnected, except for backups every however-often.

 

[mfenn]

^ What he said. Make the 2nd drive an easy to disconnect USB 3.0 HDD, FI, to have something that is likely to not die if a power event ruins everything else, because you can leave it disconnected, except for backups every however-often.

This is a double-edged sword in my opinion. Yes, an offline drive is unlikely to get damaged by a power surge or whatever, but an offline drive also takes manual intervention to bring online. My experience is that a backup that isn't fully automated is a backup that never happens.

 

[Cerb]

This is a double-edged sword in my opinion. Yes, an offline drive is unlikely to get damaged by a power surge or whatever, but an offline drive also takes manual intervention to bring online. My experience is that a backup that isn't fully automated is a backup that never happens.

That is something to consider, and an excellent "pro" bullet point for a NAS, and for cloud backup.

 

[Morbus]

May overclock if required, unless hardware can handle games at normal speeds.

Overclock is never required and the speed improvements are marginal, unless you spend a buttload of money on cooling equipment. If you're not an enthusiast, don't bother with any serious overclocking, or worrying about it.

Resolution: Up to 2k, don't want to get into 4k now.

So 1080p or 1440p?

CPU: Intel i7-4770K (haswell is the latest architecture if I am not mistaken).

Yes the latest. The i7 is a good choice, specially considering your high budget. The i5 is a solid and cheaper alternative, with identical performance on single-threaded applications and being nearly as good as the i7 on most games. The only difference between the i7 and the i5 is that the i7 has an additional 2MB of L3 cache, a stock clock 100MHZ higher and hyperthreading, that splits each core in half, allowing for a "kind" of octo-core CPU (though not quite). It's more future proof and definitely better, but if it's for gaming, might not be THAT much better.

MOBO: Asus Maximus VI Formula

Totally overkill. It's an awesome motherboard, make no mistake, but motherboards don't work the same as other components. Performance comes mostly from the chipset, Z87 in this case, and it's the latest, and price is affected by features. The Maximus VI has nearly identical performance to the cheapest of the Z87 motherboards (that cost 70$), it just has much more features and is better built. Which means: if you're not going to use the Maximus VI features, you're wasting your money. Wasted. My suggestion is go for a motherboard with a 12-phase auxiliary power input, that has at least two PCI-e 16x slots and plenty of space for RAM (so you can upgrade your machine in the future). Other than that go for Asus (they are basically the best at reliability and quality control) and for MoBos that have a good number of SATAIII/USB3.0 ports. A good sound chipset might also be interesting for you. Choose the other features as you see fit.

GPU: Asus Nvidia GTX 780 (not sure if an earlier version with 1gb more of ram is better).

Great choice. I agree with you, and I believe it beats the 290X, while being marginally cheaper and less loud. My suggestion is go for one that has a custom cooler, because they are more silent and cooler and usually come with stock overclock at a very small price premium.

RAM: Corsair Dom. Plat. 2x4gb 1600Mhz 9-9-9-24 latency

Those DIMMs have great timings, but maybe you'd want faster RAM to go with your machine? It's not that big of a difference in the real world, but it's still faster RAM, if you choose something like 2400MHZ or something.
As for the amount of it, it's enough for now, but you might need to buy some more in the future. It depends on how long you want to keep the machine. Most Z87 motherboards have a RAM limit of at least 32GB. I bought 2x8GB of RAM because I want to max it out when (if) I upgrade it in the future. You might want to consider that. Though 16GB is definitely overkill, have no doubt about that.

SSD : Was looking at the Asus RaidR PCIe, but not really sure if it's worth it. Also looked at two samsung 840 pro and putting them in raid0 (read it's actually faster than the asus)

It depends on if you really want/need the speed. If I had your budget I'd go for a larger Samsung 840EVO rather than a raid0 setup with the Pros. I'd get more space on the SSD which is great, and the EVO has near identical performance to the Pro at a fraction of the cost, so yeah. My suggestion.

HDD : Two in raid1 for backup-backup purposes. (Have had some issues with hdd becoming bricks, unreadable)

2x2TB? That's what I'd do.

No PSU chosen

Corsair for the win.

no case chosen.[/quotes]
Whatever pleases you, as long as it has good airflow, dust filters and room. If it looks cool on top of it, all the better. Features are also nice to have.

One BR burner.

Do you really need an optical drive in this day and age?

Notes:
I was also reading about water cooling the CPU, GPU and mobo, but not really sure since i've never done it.

I'd say forget it, buy a custom cooler for the i7, nothing too fancy, just to keep it nice and cool if you do overclock it a bit.

Plan on buying a second GPU for SLi later in the year.

Choose your PSU accordingly. Don't go bellow 750W, I'd say. 850W should be enough, provided they are real measures. Most PSUs overstate their wattage. Mine is stated at 650W and it actually measures 470W...

Going to be using a TV for watching movies and possible gaming, but eventually going to use two monitors, unless the games play well on the tv.

If you disable the filters on the TV (if you can), you should be alright. Some TVs will change the output of the computer with their static cleaners and it might make fonts a bit weird to look at.

So, what am I missing? Is there something better? What should I do and not do? Overall, I want something that performs, looks good, and lasts.

Well, apart from the RAM, the only thing that will not last too long is the VGA. They never do. You'll be good for a couple of years, three years even, if you go SLI, but too much more than that, games will start asking for something more. It's only natural. My own strategy is always use single cards, and go for mid-range ones, so I can keep upgrading every two years without spending that much money and always having max-settings on most games (since mid-range cards can handle all games on max settings on 1080p - for the most part). And you also have to consider the power cost. Two power hungry VGAs will cost you quite a bit of money at the end of the month, if you game regularly. That alone may cover the cost of an upgrade, after a few months.

 

[Morbus]

That is something to consider, and an excellent "pro" bullet point for a NAS, and for cloud backup.

If the computer is behind a nice UPS, isn't it theoretically protected from power surges? :\

 

[Cerb]

If the computer is behind a nice UPS, isn't it theoretically protected from power surges? :\

Theoretically, it's protected by the surge protector in the UPS, same as without the UPS part. In reality, **** happens, and surges can bypass surge protectors just fine (they reduce the risk, rather than guarantee prevention).

Overclock is never required and the speed improvements are marginal, unless you spend a buttload of money on cooling equipment. If you're not an enthusiast, don't bother with any serious overclocking, or worrying about it.

Agreed. A CPU to overclock is a little more expensive. A motherboard to overclock with ranges from a little bit to much more expensive. Then, you need to cool it.

If you're going to overclock, plan for it and do it, be it 400MHz (basically guaranteed) or 1GHz. If you're not going to, save $40+ on a motherboard, $10+ on a CPU, and $30+ on a cooler. It's around $100 saved, $100 to get a mild OC, or $100 to get a CPU w/ HT and maybe fast RAM. IoW, you have to spend more money for the opportunity, so if you want to do that, go ahead and do it, rather than spending that $100 for a, "what if."

The system will handle games at stock speed just fine, but some games will also run faster if you overclock. Games that can't run well at stock speeds of an i5 today are 3-5 years away, if not more.

 

[Xcrazydude]

I am planning on using a surge protector, but like Cerb said,

Theoretically, it's protected by the surge protector in the UPS, same as without the UPS part. In reality, **** happens, and surges can bypass surge protectors just fine (they reduce the risk, rather than guarantee prevention).

So 1080p or 1440p?

1080p for now since it's a tv, unless I find a good deal on a good monitor. Will try the disable the tv filters. Never knew about that.

Wasn't thinking on overclocking from the start, just came up as an alternative. It out of the picture now. So is water cooling.

Thoughts on the cheaper Maximus VI Hero? Still has the SupremeFX sound card; better sound card better movie experience, IMO.

I'd say forget it, buy a custom cooler for the i7, nothing too fancy, just to keep it nice and cool if you do overclock it a bit.

Which do you recommend?

Thanks for the further input. Was probably gonna waste money if I hadn't asked. I was acting like a little kid going for the most expensive hardware without accounting for more important or unnecesary factors.

 

[mfenn]

Overall I agree with Xcrazydude, but I want to comment on a few points.

Those DIMMs have great timings, but maybe you'd want faster RAM to go with your machine? It's not that big of a difference in the real world, but it's still faster RAM, if you choose something like 2400MHZ or something.

But what's the point if there's no real difference? Outside of synthetics and IGP gaming, benchmarks consistently show that there's no advantage. Better to spend that money somewhere else IMHO.

Choose your PSU accordingly. Don't go bellow 750W, I'd say. 850W should be enough, provided they are real measures. Most PSUs overstate their wattage. Mine is stated at 650W and it actually measures 470W...

Most crappy PSU's overstate their wattage. Anything from a reasonable manufacturer will be right on its stated wattage or even a little under-rated. 650W is more than enough for any overclocked single-GPU system. 550W is plenty for stock.