Building a new rig. Advice/Help needed.

[Godfrey I of Leuven]

Hey guys As we all know there's a few interesting games being released in the coming months. Since I haven't had a new desktop in about five years, I think it's finally time to buy me a new one. Usually I use my PS3 for gaming, but after having seen both PC and console gameplay footage of Battlefield 3, I just had to get a new rig.

Unfortunately I don't know about computers, so I've been visiting a variety of forums and here's what I came up with:

-Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560, 1024 MB, 256 Bit, PCIe x16 v2.0 (€174.90)

-CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-2500 4x 3300 MHz, 4x 256 kB, 6144 kB, Sandy Bridge (€177.90)

-Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-650TXV2 650 Watt, ATX 2.03, EPS, ATX12V 2.3, 8 x, 8 x (€79.90)

-DVD Drive: Sony Optiarc AD-5260S-0B (€19.99)

-Motherboard: MSI P67A-GD65 (B3) (€149.90)

-RAM: G.Skill 8 GB DDR3-1600 Kit (Light-Retail, F3-12800CL9D-8GBXL, RipjawsX) (€57.90)

-Hard-drive: Seagate ST9250410AS 250GB (€43.49)

-Case: CM Storm Storm Enforcer + Window (€84.90)

-OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64bit (€139.90)

Total: €928.78

*I'm sorry if there's things on this list that make you want to come at me in a rush of anger and bloodlust. lol

Ultimately, I intend to run BF3 on medium - high with decent fps..


So thanks for reading, and I really hope you guys can help me here. Cheers! Oh yeah, Maybe it's interesting to know that I have a budget of €1100, so you are welcome to recommend other hardware.

[Godfrey I of Leuven]

/attention post

[Crazyeyesreaper]

if your building it yourself

get the 2500k so it will overclock, BF3 will be a cpu whore so more performance is always nice,

change the GTX 560 to a GTX 560 Ti, i say this because a 560 is just a higher clocked 460 1gig with ahigher price tag, 560 Ti or 6950 1gb or better for the gpu.

get a better HDD there dirt cheap Samsung F3 1TB

to make overclocking easy get a good aftermarket cooler

Hyper 212+ tends to be cheap and works well. also make sure to get some decent thermal paste, i like Noctua's NT H1 since its non conductive and compares decently the extremely expensive compounds

[Godfrey I of Leuven]

Thanks mate. Though I don't think I'll do the overclocking bit.. I'm not exactly self-assured when it comes to messing with techy stuff.

[Top-Tier-Tech]

I'd upgrade to a GTX 560ti and keep every other component you have the same, unless you set out with a goal of future overclocking It's a waste of extra money IMO. The 2500 is blazing fast with 4 cores @ 3.7Ghz. already when it goes under load.

Unless you chose a notebook HDD rather than a desktop HDD on purpose you might look for a desktop drive with 32mb cache for likely the same price as that notebook drive.

[Godfrey I of Leuven]

I have no idea what kind of HDD is best for gaming. I figured higher rpm would be better.. And this might sound dumb, but what's "cache" ?

[Top-Tier-Tech]

I have no idea what kind of HDD is best for gaming. I figured higher rpm would be better.. And this might sound dumb, but what's "cache" ?

7200RPM is standard on a desktop HDD, if you go with a notebook drive you would need a speacial adaptor to make it fit in your case. Notebook drives are quieter but more expensive, a smaller size, and cost more.

On Caches:

Hard drives utilize algorithms to pre-cache data, or to leave data in the cache memory in case it is requested again. Serial ATA drives also require a certain amount of memory to store incoming commands, because most products are capable of reorganizing these in order to process them as efficiently as possible, requiring little physical head movement. This feature is called Native Command Queuing (NCQ), and it also requires some memory to work

Basically I'd recommend you get a 7200RPM desktop drive with a 32Mb cache, it should cost about the same amount as the drive you currently have selected.