I got my current desktop in July 2012, so almost exactly 3 years ago. The only difference seems to be that my i7 is 0.5GHz slower, and my SSDs are smaller. I guess my video card is a GTX680, and that's a bit old. But for some reason it is still powerful enough to play every game I have ever installed at max settings with full frames at 1920x1200.
PC hardware is not advancing as fast as it used to. Usually the plan is to buy a new PC about every 4-5 years. It's a plan I've been able to stick to for a long time now. I think I can make it some extra years this time if I just get more storage for photos and videos.
I think Quadros are only really acceptable if you're system is dedicated for a really specific purpose, like Solidworks/ Autodesk Inventor.
If you need more flexibility because you do video editing and say, play games get more GTXs. Or even have a second system setup of Quadros as a render farm if possible. Depends.
I'd avoid using quadros. The 900 series of Geforce are way more capable so, I don't think there's much to sacrifice in terms of having Geforce over Quadro.
Also, GTX 980 is a must for VR ladies and gentlemen. #BeReady
I think the only VR usage I'd be excited to use is HoloLens. The only kind of game I care enough about is racing games and before I get VR, I'd get a good wheel, pedals, and shifter set. And if I get that set, I'd need to see them to use them, negating the usefulness of VR.
Vacation money is in and I'm considering upgrading my computer. What is the second best Graphics card currently on the market, and what RAM should I buy?
Vacation money is in and I'm considering upgrading my computer. What is the second best Graphics card currently on the market, and what RAM should I buy?
nVidia GTX 980 for second best graphics card, should be quite cheap but on a quick check of the price it is currently selling at a higher price point than what I paid (I bought it 3 weeks after launch). The GTX 980 TI is the hotshit and is starting at $630 to 750 which is fucking crazy.
If you can wait, a little and more stock of the 980 TI comes out the 980's price will deflate otherwise you're going to have to go with an AMD 390 or an nVidia 970. (The AMD 390 computationally is 1.5x to 2x the performance of the 970 and has double the VRAM for if you are running multiple monitors or high resolutions). The 970 is not that far behind due to many tweaks and higher clock speeds and consumes far less power and is quieter.
i.e. pick between the AMD R9 390 or the nVidia GTX 970 or if you have lots of money get the 980 ti.
I guess I'll wit a little for the 980 to come down in price a bit. It is right on the cusp of my pricepoint anyway though. What manufacturer of the card is good? Should I just go with Asus or is there some other manufacturer?
I guess I'll wit a little for the 980 to come down in price a bit. It is right on the cusp of my pricepoint anyway though. What manufacturer of the card is good? Should I just go with Asus or is there some other manufacturer?
I would recommend the MSI Twin Frozr 2 or the Asus Strix, both have fans that come to a dead stop (I have the MSI). I'm sure the EVGA does this too however I didn't buy EVGA at the time because their heatsinks were mis-aligned on the 970 and 980. They have made new heatsinks since.
At some point what's $100 more for over-$500 hardware, that you will use daily for years? If you need it soon and it's the right part, I say get it at whatever the best current price is because waiting for discounts is rather speculative in any situation without inside knowledge.I like to find a price that's the absolute maximum that would be reasonable to spend in any fathom able case, then a minimum hardware need, and look for the best current price/performance in that space. It's worked for me well in buying parts for my CNC builds.
My old case, optics drive (which I hardly ever use anymore) and power supply should still work fine. Not sure if I should reformat my old drive from my current PC or just buy a new spinning disk for random data. Probably not worth cheapening out on that.
This will hopefully the last PC I'm buying (except for Graphics Card Upgrades).
This will hopefully the last PC I'm buying (except for Graphics Card Upgrades).
I don't understand. Also the motherboard you've selected is form the Asus business range which is stripped of a few consumer features and extra USB 3 and SATA 6 ports. On top of that it is the budget SKU of the business motherboards. Also doesn't support USB 3.1.
I would personally recommend a Z97 motherboard. If you're going for the minimum required I would go the Asus Z97-A/USB 3.1. All the functionality you would want from the more expensive Z97 motherboards for cheaper.
The Corsair RAM while being the value version is priced higher than faster RAM from G.Skill and Kingston 2x8gb sticks which have a lifetime warranty (not sure about the Value Select RAM.
Usually you want your CL ratings to be 9-9-9- whatever but it's not like it will make an amazing bit of difference to the performance of the machine just check for the lifetime warranty as the majority of sticks should have it.
Grab something made by Seasonic or Enermax, if they are too expensive pick a Corsair. The former 2 will likely last a lifetime. Seasonic power supplies are often rebranded by other companies so with a bit of research you may be able to get a cheaper version of a superior power supply. 80+ Gold would be my recommendation.
The windows 10 is really soon. Also, my latest photo import pushed one of my 500GB drives to the limit. Just ordered 1x 4TB and 2x2TB drives on Newegg.
It's really hard to buy plain old magnetic drives these days. Every drive seems to have a ton of reviews that claim the drives were DOA, dead soon after arrival, or otherwise crashy. There really isn't a drive model with glowing reviews.
Also, it seems like the spinning disk manufacturers are really trying to label them to milk people for more money. They are classifying drives as surveillance, desktop, NAS, enterprise, gamer, green, black, blue, etc. The low ends ones are cheap, and the enterprise ones are hundreds extra.
Clearly the success of the SSD has totally fucked up the market for magnetic storage. People who still have computers these days, instead of just tablet/phone, probably just have a laptop with one SSD. Everyone is also using cloud storage. Only nerds are buying magnetic drives for big local storage.
I went with WD Green drives as they were available, priced right, and seem pretty normal/safe/common.
Wow, that's odd. That could not be less true - Spinning drives are plentiful, reasonably priced, and usually perfectly reliable. Most people will have a portable HDD for storage, but it's mostly serious nerds who use cloud storage on any sort of regular basis, with the exception of putting photos on Facebook.
Wow, that's odd. That could not be less true - Spinning drives are plentiful, reasonably priced, and usually perfectly reliable. Most people will have a portable HDD for storage, but it's mostly serious nerds who use cloud storage on any sort of regular basis, with the exception of putting photos on Facebook.
Look at Newegg reviews. There are all the 2, 3 and 4TB desktop magnetic drives with a 5-egg rating sorted by most reviews. The most has 14 reviews.
If you go down to 4-egg territory you will see plenty of perfectly reasonable drives. However, even the ones with hundreds of reviews and four eggs still have like 20%+ 1-egg reviews from people who had the drive crash on them. 1/5 failure rate is not good.
On a modern computer, never use a single spinning disk. Pair them. Windows 10's disk management makes that super easy and plenty performant for the uses of spinning disks.
Comments
PC hardware is not advancing as fast as it used to. Usually the plan is to buy a new PC about every 4-5 years. It's a plan I've been able to stick to for a long time now. I think I can make it some extra years this time if I just get more storage for photos and videos.
1995 - 486 100Mhz
1999 - Pentium III 450Mhz
2004 - AMD Athlon
2008 - Core 2 Duo
2012 - i7
USB 3.0 appeared
PCIx 3.0 appeared
M.2 appeared
6Gbps SATA appeared
My PC is well past the point of upgrading anything.
1997 - Pentium 200Mhz
2000 - AMD k7 800MHz
2002 - AMD Thunderbird 1GHz (previous mobo/cpu failed)
2007 - Core 2 Duo
2009 - i7
If you need more flexibility because you do video editing and say, play games get more GTXs. Or even have a second system setup of Quadros as a render farm if possible. Depends.
I'd avoid using quadros. The 900 series of Geforce are way more capable so, I don't think there's much to sacrifice in terms of having Geforce over Quadro.
Also, GTX 980 is a must for VR ladies and gentlemen. #BeReady
https://www.oculus.com/en-us/blog/the-rifts-recommended-spec-pc-sdk-0-6-released-and-mobile-vr-jam-voting/
The GTX 980 TI is the hotshit and is starting at $630 to 750 which is fucking crazy.
If you can wait, a little and more stock of the 980 TI comes out the 980's price will deflate otherwise you're going to have to go with an AMD 390 or an nVidia 970. (The AMD 390 computationally is 1.5x to 2x the performance of the 970 and has double the VRAM for if you are running multiple monitors or high resolutions). The 970 is not that far behind due to many tweaks and higher clock speeds and consumes far less power and is quieter.
i.e. pick between the AMD R9 390 or the nVidia GTX 970 or if you have lots of money get the 980 ti.
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Windforce 3X OC, 4GB GDDR5, 2x DVI, HDMI, 3x DisplayPort (GV-N980WF3OC-4GD)
Motherboard: ASUS B85M-G (C2) (90MB0G50-M0EAY5)
Processor: Intel Core i7-4790K, 4x 4.00GHz, boxed (BX80646I74790K)
Memory: Corsair ValueSelect DIMM Kit 16GB, DDR3-1600, CL11-11-11-30 (CMV16GX3M2A1600C11)
Storage: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB, SATA 6Gb/s (MZ-75E250B)
My old case, optics drive (which I hardly ever use anymore) and power supply should still work fine. Not sure if I should reformat my old drive from my current PC or just buy a new spinning disk for random data. Probably not worth cheapening out on that.
This will hopefully the last PC I'm buying (except for Graphics Card Upgrades).
Also the motherboard you've selected is form the Asus business range which is stripped of a few consumer features and extra USB 3 and SATA 6 ports. On top of that it is the budget SKU of the business motherboards. Also doesn't support USB 3.1.
I would personally recommend a Z97 motherboard. If you're going for the minimum required I would go the Asus Z97-A/USB 3.1.
All the functionality you would want from the more expensive Z97 motherboards for cheaper.
The Corsair RAM while being the value version is priced higher than faster RAM from G.Skill and Kingston 2x8gb sticks which have a lifetime warranty (not sure about the Value Select RAM.
Usually you want your CL ratings to be 9-9-9- whatever but it's not like it will make an amazing bit of difference to the performance of the machine just check for the lifetime warranty as the majority of sticks should have it.
Graphics card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 Windforce 3X OC, 4GB GDDR5, 2x DVI, HDMI, 3x DisplayPort (GV-N980WF3OC-4GD)
Motherboard: ASUS Z97-A/USB 3.1 (90MB0L60-M0EAY0)
Processor: Intel Core i7-4790K, 4x 4.00GHz, boxed (BX80646I74790K)
Memory: G.Skill Aegis DIMM Kit 16GB, DDR3-1333, CL9-9-9-24 (F3-1333C9D-16GIS)
Storage: Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB, SATA 6Gb/s (MZ-75E250B)
Any input on this config?
I also believe I need a new power supply since the Graphics Card alone requires 600W. Any recommendations there?
Apparantly, 3 month battery life
Anyway, thanks for the help, sK0pe
It's really hard to buy plain old magnetic drives these days. Every drive seems to have a ton of reviews that claim the drives were DOA, dead soon after arrival, or otherwise crashy. There really isn't a drive model with glowing reviews.
Also, it seems like the spinning disk manufacturers are really trying to label them to milk people for more money. They are classifying drives as surveillance, desktop, NAS, enterprise, gamer, green, black, blue, etc. The low ends ones are cheap, and the enterprise ones are hundreds extra.
Clearly the success of the SSD has totally fucked up the market for magnetic storage. People who still have computers these days, instead of just tablet/phone, probably just have a laptop with one SSD. Everyone is also using cloud storage. Only nerds are buying magnetic drives for big local storage.
I went with WD Green drives as they were available, priced right, and seem pretty normal/safe/common.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007603 4115 600083978 600217643 600003300&IsNodeId=1&bop=And&Order=REVIEWS&PageSize=30
If you go down to 4-egg territory you will see plenty of perfectly reasonable drives. However, even the ones with hundreds of reviews and four eggs still have like 20%+ 1-egg reviews from people who had the drive crash on them. 1/5 failure rate is not good.