My new gaming rig :)

[nhornby51743]

After much deliberation I've finally treated myself to a gaming rig.

I've been a console gamer for the last 8 years so I'm looking forward to catching up.
I didn't have a budget but £750 hit the sweet spot between price and performance. I intend to upgrade to
an 800 series GPU when they land so I chose the GTX 770 for the mean time. I didn't go for the Caviar Black
as I'll be picking up a large SSD when they drop a little lower. Anyway, here's the spec:



Case
CORSAIR 230T COMPACT GAMING CASE - RED LED + SIDE WINDOW
Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-4590 (3.3GHz) 6MB Cache
Motherboard
Gigabyte Z97X Gaming 3: ATX, LG1150, USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, XFIRE/SLI
Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X BEAST DUAL-DDR3 2133MHz X.M.P (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 770 - 2 DVI, HDMI, DP - 3D Vision Ready
1st Hard Disk
1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 32MB CACHE
Power Supply
CORSAIR 650W CS SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET
Processor Cooling
Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler
Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
Wireless/Wired Networking
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT (Wi-Fi NOT INCLUDED)
USB Options
MIN. 2 x USB 3.0 & 4 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL + MIN. 2 FRONT PORTS
Power Cable
1 x 1 Metre UK Power Cable (Kettle Lead)
Operating System
NO OPERATING SYSTEM REQUIRED
DVD Recovery Media
NO DVD RECOVERY MEDIA REQUIRED
Office Software
NO OFFICE SOFTWARE
Anti-Virus
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
Warranty
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
Delivery
STANDARD INSURED DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (MON-FRI)
Build Time
Standard Build - Approximately 7 to 9 working days
Miscellaneous
FREE BOARDERLANDS: THE PRE-SEQUEL with GTX 770/780/780/TITAN GPUs!
Quantity

 

[bigben]

Few observations:
1. Upgrading from Gtx 770 to 800 series is madness. I have gtx 670 and they're still very relevant (slightly more powerful than gtx 760)
2. No need for the beast ram as you won't be overclocking, save the bit of cash and go for 1600mhz for 0 impact on performance
3. Get the caviar black even if you are getting a larger ssd, it will fill quickly. I don't have that many games installed and my games take up 500gb. As an idea, most of my games take up between 20gb and 50gb.

Other than those things looks good tho

 

[nhornby51743]

Hi,

I went for the 2133mhz as it offers a few extra fps in the games I intend to play, it was only £2 extra. I looked at reviews
and the decided the caviar black wasn't worth the extra £22. Upgrading to an 800 series may seem frivolous but I intend
to game above 1080p and would like the newest cards as the Maxwell architecture should work better than the current Kepler.


Cheers, Nick

 

[keynes]

I went for the 2133mhz as it offers a few extra fps in the games I intend to play,

Unless you are overclocking your CPU I don't think you will benefit from the higher memory bandwidth. Out of curiosity in which games the ram gives you more fps?

and the decided the caviar black wasn't worth the extra £22

I would prefer to have a slightly faster hard drive. You have a motherboard that supports SLI but not a suitable psu or case.

 

[nhornby51743]

Hi,

I've googled the ram comparison quite a bit on places like Tom's Hardware and seen that the
2133 offers better performance in memory intensive apps. The games that saw fps improvement
we're Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3 & Tomb Raider. There's videos on YouTube regarding this as well.
When I placed my order the lad I spoke to agreed that 2133mhz would be worth the extra £2.

I picked the Z97 Gaming 3 as it was the cheapest board after the Z97 HD3. I wasn't keen on the HD3 as the general
consensus is that it's price reflects it's quality based on its build and it lacks M2 support. The Gaming 3 matches my
build better colour wise

Cheers, Nick

 

[TheGeeza]

For £2 more I suppose you can't really go wrong. The price difference used to be quite a bit more. I doubt it would actually improve the fps in game unless you were on an APU though.

 

[keynes]

Hi,

I've googled the ram comparison quite a bit on places like Tom's Hardware and seen that the
2133 offers better performance in memory intensive apps. The games that saw fps improvement
we're Bioshock Infinite, Crysis 3 & Tomb Raider. There's videos on YouTube regarding this as well.
When I placed my order the lad I spoke to agreed that 2133mhz would be worth the extra £2.

I picked the Z97 Gaming 3 as it was the cheapest board after the Z97 HD3. I wasn't keen on the HD3 as the general
consensus is that it's price reflects it's quality based on its build and it lacks M2 support. The Gaming 3 matches my
build better colour wise

Cheers, Nick

Difference in price is small so it wouldn't hurt but from previous research I couldn't find anything significant at 1920x1080, also are you sure you can get the ram at 2133mhz without overclocking the CPU? I have read of instability issues running the ram at 2133mhz at stock clock speed but I am not certain about it.

 

[nhornby51743]

From what I've read it doesn't seem an issue and I'll be moving up to 1440p/4K next year. Plus you can always downclock 2133 to 1600 but not vice versa

 

[evvo123]

From what I've read it doesn't seem an issue and I'll be moving up to 1440p/4K next year. Plus you can always downclock 2133 to 1600 but not vice versa

Might as well go for it. Doubt it'll give a performance increase based on what I've read (excluding APUs as Geeza says - it makes a really significant difference there)... but for £2, I would (in fact I did... )