PC Gaming | Info on rigs

[Fzero]

I've always been a console gamer really.
Apart from when I had my ZX Spectrums back in the day, and my Alpha the other year or so.

PS4 is getting too expensive, and I want to get into my Steam library more again.

So back to a Windows PC.

I was looking on Overclockers website for a Mini-ITX build, but was getting carried away and picking parts probably/certainly beyond my needs .. resulting in a machine which was looking to be ~£1000
I can't justify that right now.

I will be playing retro games via emulators, and Steam games, some games which are fairly demanding like GTA V and the likes.

I'm wondering about the CPU and GPU.

Would the i5-3450S be good enough?
Or is that a bit old/dated now, and really need to be looking at later generation like an i5-6600K?

Would the Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti 2GB be good enough?
Or would I really need something like GTX 950?

I suspect both the i5-3450S and the GTX 750 Ti would be good enough, but it's not an area I've much knowledge in, and so if anyone has anything to warn about these that perhaps I should steer clear of, or can confirm they are good, I'd appreciate it.
The price difference is quite a bit, and I'm seeing a build with these for just under £400 which is more affordable.

I do want it to be at least as good as a PS4 though in performance, things like frame rate and graphically.
I'd hate to part with PS4, get a gaming PC and it's not as good.

Any comments welcomed




edit:
And I know Windows is not the favoured platform here, but I do need a Win10 machine for a couple reasons.
I want to use the XBOX Elite controller which is supported on Win10 only [aside from of course XBONE], and I have a decent library on Steam already which is all Windows games.
So I'm not looking at a Steambox machine right now

 

[drock]

Those components will work fine, but you may want to up your video card a bit. Especially with a game like GTAV which is not very effecient you could use the extra boost. I see you looked at 2 nvidia cards, but in my experience you get more bang for your buck with AMD.

That CPU should be fine. It is a few generations back but really there have not been major advances in CPU power. Most of the work is done by the video card anyway on newer games.

I would look at an R9 280 as far as GPU. It will cost you a bit more, but give you more overhead.

 

[Fzero]

Excellent.
Cheers for info.
Yeah I was looking at Nvidia ones as read somewhere ... I think here in one thread perhaps ... about how more and more games have nvidia cards as their recommended, so in future more popular games may run bit better on those

 

[Klumpen]

And Nvidia makes gaming on Linux more easy and gaming on Linux is finally becoming a thing.

 

[TrashyMG]

Yeah AMD is fine if you stay in the realm of Windows, I found with Linux to be a real hassle driver wise. I know there is an open source AMD driver that is gaining maturity though so who knows after a while that may be better than dealing with the proprietary driver garbage.

 

[ekianjo]

Get a GTX960 if you are on budget, GTX970 if you have enough dough, and a GTX980 if you have too much money to care.
A gtx960 will run games like witcher 3 just fine in high settings.

DOn't worry about the performance vs a PS4, about every potato out there is more performing than a Ps4. The PS4 hardware is not even up to a low-range gaming PC nowadays.

 

[SNESFAN]

Comparing performance to a potato is a bit misleading. On paper yes, not very impressive, but for actual graphic quality and performance mostly though optimization, getting that level of experience it's surely a valid target.

Don't "PC master race" here, I think you need about a $500-600 build to hit that level I'd think. My family computer doesn't hit that level of performance, and it has a i5, but with a GTX 260.

The 960 is on par with my 770 I'm running on my personal computer and can be had for about $200. I can vouch for its ass kicking ability for 1080p gaming, if your goal is PS4 level, that would do well.

 

[Fzero]

I've got something ordered, should have it later this week.
I went with the GTX 750 GPU for now though, as this [below] was all built already on the offer I grabbed.


This is what I have ordered:

Asus P8H61-I LX LGA1155 Mini-ITX motherboard
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8H61I_LX_R20/

Intel i5-3450S Quad Core CPU
http://ark.intel.com/products/65512/Intel-Core-i5-3450S-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_50-GHz

Gigabyte GTX 750 Ti 2GB GDDR5 graphics card
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=5160#ov

HyperX Fury 8GB 1866MHz DDR3 CL10 DIMM RAM

Seagate 2TB SSHD

Boxed up in the Thermaltake Core V1 Mini-ITX Cube case
http://thermaltake.com/products-model.aspx?id=C_00002373



Hopefully that is going to be fairly decent for me, I looked at the GTX960 and that's ab out half the price of what I paid for the PC.
Perhaps I'll use this for a while and when I can afford to lay down a bit more money on something more powerful, will do so.

How's that all looking though, in terms of standing up against my old PS4 for games like GTAV and Fallout4, where you really need something half decent?

 

[Mr_Loon]

If you could stretch to one of these for the OS and disk intensive games then you'll be set : 250GB SSD

 

[drock]

That build will be fine, but the GTA V PC port was inefficient. I wouldn't recommend to use that as a benchmark. What resolution are you playing at?

The 750 will play most games, but it will be the part you will probably want to upgrade. 2nd putting your OS on a solid state drive.

 

[Kev2442]

After all, PC gaming requires changing your card every few years to keep up with DirectX versions and stuff. So all the better to use the slightly cheaper-slightly weaker cards.
I don't think SSDs are really necessary. I've ordered one which should be coming in a few days, but I've managed without for years. If you really don't want to wait 3-5 minutes for the OS to boot, or if you need to stream data, then you might.
Seems like a good platform to me. My brother runs GTA V just fine in 1080p on a GTX 660, so it should pass well.

My advice for future upgrades : seek for NVIDIA x60 series, as they are the perfect blend of performance and price (except for the 960, watch out !) every 2 to 4 generations. That should be enough. I kept my 560 up until the 960 came out, then I invested into the 970
As for the CPU, look for Intel's i5 series, even the lowest end is good enough and not so pricey.

And the most important : always buy current-gen hardware. You may not save a few bucks, but they add new tech you might find useful at times.
For example : PCSX2 regularly adds new CPU instructions to help accuracy and performance. A few years ago they made use of AVX. You might want to check these sort of things if you're into retrogaming.

Edit : I forgot. Never trust watercooling and overclocking. They do add performance, but the price is not worthy compared to better chips.

 

[thatgui]

Asus P8H61-I LX LGA1155 Mini-ITX motherboard
https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8H61I_LX_R20/

Was this a cost choice ? This looks rather dated to me, it hasn't even a single USB 3 capable port, well at least its the B3 stepping so no "suffering" from the SATA bug. If size is a thing why not go with something like "http://ark.intel.com/products/50098/Intel-Desktop-Board-DH67BL" with the H67 chipset, you will have a bit more "new tech" added while you still can use CPUs for the 1155 socket

 

[Fzero]

Kind of a cost choice, but also this was what came in the PC that I saw. And the PC as a whole was in a price good for me now.

Well I would think myself as 'quite' capable of building a PC, in that I'd be able to hook on parts and such, but I thought I'd get one built for me, as the additional cost didn't seem to be that much more, and it would ensure that it was 'definitely' all hooked up correctly.
That was my original thinking, just in case I had built myself something but then wasn't quite getting the optimal performance from it due to doing it myself.
So I was looking on some sites where you can custom build, Overclockers, DinoPC and one other site.
Then I saw this PC for sale which was already built, and seemed to be good enough and wasn't too expensive for me.
This cost me £350 all in.
Looking at cost of all the parts, it's a bit cheaper and of course the headache of building it is gone.
It also comes with Win10 Pro licensed [which would be another £90 itself I think], and an xbox 360 wireless controller setup

I see what you mean about that board being a bit dated though, there's been a few revisions of it even too.
But, it sat within what I could get right now, but with a PC I'll likely do some upgrading of parts myself, I can now and then afford to throw down £50 - £100 on a part, so one month get a better board, then a few months later get a better GPU...
That's the plan

 

[Mr_Loon]

I can now and then afford to throw down £50 - £100 on a part, so one month get a better board, then a few months later get a better GPU...
That's the plan

As mentioned, by far the best upgrade you could do at that price is adding an SSD, upgraded my PC last year and by far the biggest boost in performance came from the SSD (Kept my 560TI GPU, plan to upgrade that later this year, but upgraded everything else MB, Processor, Ram etc.)

I don't think SSDs are really necessary. I've ordered one which should be coming in a few days

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts after you've actually used one, IMHO with the low cost of SSD's these days they are just about the best value upgrade you can get for a PC, as well as the colossal increase in drive access speeds they operate silently, generate less heat and use less power when compared to standard hard drives.

Never trust watercooling and overclocking. They do add performance, but the price is not worthy compared to better chips.

From my perspective a small overclock, say 10%-15%, is a brilliant 'free' upgrade so long as your PC does not start to run too hot / experience stability issues. Overclock in 5% increments and carefully monitor the results is my advice for anyone going down that path.

 

[Fzero]

As mentioned, by far the best upgrade you could do at that price is adding an SSD

My PC arrived today

I will not be installing much onto it straight away, aside from Steam client and some emulators/front-end.

Currently it has a SSHD, with Windows installed.

Guess I need to first find out how I go about transferring the Windows OS license to a new drive...
...Then get myself a new SSD and install the Windows OS onto that.

I can then format the existing SSHD and use that for storage purposes mainly.

Question is, what should be on the SSD?
Obviously Steam as well, but I guess also any games installed via Steam should also be on that SSD?
In which case, I'd have to consider either getting a large 1TB SSD to store most my games on, or go for a smaller more affordable 480GB SSD and just uninstall games when not going to be playing them for a bit and reinstall as and when needed.

 

[Mr_Loon]

My PC arrived today

Cool, hope it's running well, gotta love that 'new tech' feeling

Question is, what should be on the SSD?
Obviously Steam as well, but I guess also any games installed via Steam should also be on that SSD?

Steam let's you install games to any drive you want, so what I do is put disk intensive games like GTA5 on the SSD and non intensive games on my HD. Works well for me, I've found a 512GB SSD to be fine for space so far. Prices are coming down so much I'm wondering if I'll ever buy a 'normal' spinning hard disk again.

 

[Fzero]

Cheers. Sounds good, that's what I'll do too I think then.
But going to install Steam onto my existing hybrid for now anyway ... as I want to get a little playtime in before I can treat myself to the SSD

So far I just booted it up to make sure it started up, which it did, and just a moment ago fed all the cables through my media unit and have it sitting pretty now under my telly.

Looking forward to a bit of Darius Blast, at last

 

[Kev2442]

I'd be interested to hear your thoughts after you've actually used one, IMHO with the low cost of SSD's these days they are just about the best value upgrade you can get for a PC, as well as the colossal increase in drive access speeds they operate silently, generate less heat and use less power when compared to standard hard drives.


From my perspective a small overclock, say 10%-15%, is a brilliant 'free' upgrade so long as your PC does not start to run too hot / experience stability issues. Overclock in 5% increments and carefully monitor the results is my advice for anyone going down that path.

Tried the SSD a bit while installing KXStudio, but I switched back to Windows for now as I heard AV Linux 2016 is upcoming. Will explain all of this sometime in my Linux experience thread.
It was impressive on boot times (about 20 seconds from power on to KDE, may be better with optimization) but I'm the patient kind, so other than that, it's not that useful for me expect for special use cases.
And the price still depends on the size you want. Still not a better value than HDDs for now, but you can get 240 to 480 GBs for a reasonable price. Got 480 on Amazon from 140€. And it's a SanDisk

While I do appreciate the idea of overclocking, current Intel CPUs are locked, and unlocked ones (the famous K versions) are much more expensive to my taste. Especially as you should think about upgrading the fan too.
That's why I think CPU overclocking isn't that great. But I may try overclocking my RAM if that's not too dangerous. I don't want to buy 16 gigs again...

Agreed on the Steam library separation. Should help a lot.
Welcome on the PC gaming team, I guess. Be prepared for awesome modding, optimized graphics and controls, but also closed-down servers, erratic framerate and random crashes-to-desktop !