Hi everyone. Just wanted to share my very first PC build with you guys. I've been planning extensively for months and saving up money to build this thing, and let me say it was worth every penny. Previously, I played BeamNG on an old Dell laptop. It had an i7 3630QM and a GT 650M for graphics. Needless to say the gaming experience sucked. Could only get about 30fps on Gridmap at the lowest settings 1080p. Any map like Jungle Rock Island with a lot of vegetation was unplayable. Anyways, here's what I've got now: Asus Z170-A motherboard Intel i7-6700K (NZXT Kraken x61 for cooling) Geil Super Luce 16GB DDR4 RAM @ 3000MHz Gigabyte GTX 1070 G1 Gaming Samsung 850 EVO 250GB OS Drive Seagate 1TB Storage HDD EVGA 750 Watt Supernova G2 Gold Rated PSU All that wrapped up in a Phanteks Enthoo Pro M Case. I'm using an ASUS 24" 1080p 144hz monitor, and let me say, BeamNG looks absolutely incredible on it. Now I can play any map with ease. I was getting 110fps average on Jungle Rock Island at max settings on 1080p. I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's super fast and should handle games with ease for a while I'm hoping. This is the only picture I have on it for now. Excuse the horrible cable management and mismatched colors, I wasn't really going for a theme or anything, all I cared about was the components. Honestly it was a pretty intimidating task since I've never built a computer before. But I took my time and it came out better than I ever could have imagined. The DVD Drive is also temporary just so I could install some older games and programs from disks, then it'll come back out, that's why there's just a random SATA cable just hanging off to the right.
Good to see you took it upon yourself to build a computer dedicated to the task, man! You've definitely made some great choices overall, and it looks as if you've done well! The only thing I find odd is the brand of RAM...not that it's necessarily bad, just never seen this brand before. Sometimes a component company just comes out of nowhere and makes a good name for itself, though. I wish you well with your gaming experience, and I'm glad to see you're getting such good performance out of that machine!
Yeah I was pretty skeptical about the RAM myself too. I had never heard about it until I saw a guy on a tech channel use it for an editing build. It was only $10 more than the RAM I was previously going to go with, and I was getting 3000 mhz clock speed (the other RAM was 2400 mhz) and it also has LEDs on top of the sticks as well. It's been working well so far for the few hours I've had the PC running so I'd say it worked out so well. I can't wait to see how this PC runs the rest of my games.
To me, when it comes to RAM, as long as it has the lifetime, no-questions-asked warranty that many manufacturers offer, and I trust the manufacturer, I'm fine with obscure RAM. I plan to buy the super cheap DDR4 RAM from either Kingston, G.Skill, Crucial, or Corsair, because I know that it will work, and if it doesn't, I can easily replace it without hassle.
Well you can get 16 gigs of DDR4 for $60, so it's not even that expensive from a gaming PC point of view. I mean, you can easily get the same for twice or three times that.
It's actually sticking out the front of the case about an inch and a half. The radiator didn't leave me enough room to push the drive all the way in. So I just threw it in to install Windows and some games. I'll take it out and use an external DVD drive in the rare occasion that I need one.
That's a nice computer build there, I like the white trimming on mostly black - partial to that. I did a mostly black theme with red trimming/sparse RED leds (no LED fans just RED led's on the motherboard), with white expansion slots, cpu fans (2), and a little white light on the x-fi soundcard. Got the phanteks red cooler and love it (it's the T-something14 red model). Absolutely nothing went in that was not black/red/white So yeah, as long as it stays CLEAN, it looks awesome. Didn't choose water cooling on mine because power+water=BZZZZT BOOM (though, they do make non-conductive liquid). Good luck with it, and it's surely one rockin'-awesome beam machine.