I've got $500, and want to build a computer. What's a good build for my budget? I've got 2 so far: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/BombBoy4/saved/ZFGGXL EDIT: see post 14 http://pcpartpicker.com/user/BombBoy4/saved/9qNqsY EDIT: I3 is much better than the pentium, so scratch the pentium build. Any help on the i3? Spoiler: Games I Play Fallout 4 beamNG.drive CSGO Rocket league Spintires Overwatch
Go to this video and at 1:49 it will show how Fallout 4 runs on a 950 with a Q6600, that i3 build with the 1050ti should run it better than that. The 1050ti is probably a good choice.
You've finally got the $500 saved up? Just making sure because the market changes pretty quick, and we will likely have new Intel CPUs next quarter.
I consider $500 "all up" to be a pretty low budget. Desperate times call for desperate measures. Do you have any possibility of scrounging? Chassis are always available for free for those who look. Typical MicroATX motherboards will literally fit into chassis made 15-20 years ago! (-$30) Power supplies are sometimes available - especially when you're in the tiny power budget which your proposed system currently is (211 watts could almost run from a wall-wart ). You might need a 4-pin to 6-pin PCI-E adapter if you get a better GPU than the GTX 1050 Ti. (-$30+$5 = -$25 net) Hard drives are almost always available for those with a sweet tongue. 80GB and up SATA drives have been common for over a decade now - you can safely assume that almost any PC you can get your hands on today has at least an 80GB HDD and you could easily find one with 160GB, 500GB, 1TB, etc. The trick is to find an acquaintance , friend of a friend, etc... who has an old, useless PC. There are lots of those around, but you won't find any if you don't look. Discuss the issue of identity theft and why they need to ensure that the data on that HDD does not fall into the wrong hands. You can take care of destroying that data for them in exchange for the unwanted PC - it "has a few parts you could use". To hold up your end of the bargain, simply use software such as DBAN to destroy all the data before using the drive (and chassis!... and PSU! ... if it still works) to build your own PC. They have no reason to know that all the technical expertise required to destroy the data is to boot up the PC with DBAN and press a few buttons - they were just going to send that equipment to the landfill anyway. Later when more money is available you can purchase an SSD and a larger rotating drive. As for the parts list... I've avoided cards under ~$200 for a long time. This 1050 Ti doesn't look like much of an exception. For around 30% more money you can get around 50% more performance. (using a 1060 or 480) Ouch, apparently RAM prices bounced back up while I wasn't looking! Not much we can do about that. 1TB is a pretty small drive for $49. With 3TB at $95 and 4TB at $120 I'd look reaaaally hard at that 1TB drive before I bought it. Obviously this is the least critical part for a "gaming" build, but at the same time once the money is spent it's gone.... you may as well get something for the cash spent. If you can manage to get your hands on a used chassis, PSU, and HDD you're shaving off approximately $110. That leaves you with a remaining budget of $159 to increase the oomph of your parts. Personally if I was going to use the rig primarily for gaming I'd have to consider dumping every penny of that into the CPU and GPU. With that kind of dough you can go up to a top-tier Core i5 and a GTX 1060 while keeping your power budget at around 250W... which means that some random used PSU (many OEMs already use quality PSUs) should provide enough juice... http://pcpartpicker.com/list/R3yrm8 EDIT: Don't forget to factor in the potential cost of a Windows license. An existing OEM license won't transfer (only Retail licenses are portable from one system to another).
The HDD I'm actually getting is a Toshiba p300 1tb for 40 bucks, I just couldn't find it on the part list As for the windows license, I'm going to use Linux for just long enough till I can scrounge 30 bucks. (My dad can get a huge deal) The gpu, coming from a300 dollar laptop, a 1050 Ti is more than plenty for now, but I will definitely upgrade later on, maybe a 480/490 The CPU, I need something with a high single core performance (beamng.drive) and at least 4 threads. On the upgrade list Before you say that I shouldn't upgrade for a while, I just want a computer that can run modern games at medium-high settings, and as fast as possible
this is my build im gonna build after i buy everything on blackfriday with all the deals i should be able to get it fo around $500 --- Post updated --- forgot the link http://pcpartpicker.com/list/cZGYLD
How do you know that? Don't rely on sales you haven't seen. I'm not saying to not go out and buy the parts, I'm saying you may not have the money for all of the parts.
It's good that you're getting a better price than $50/TB, but I still find 1TB small and not a good value per $ at that price. As for the GPU... I don't worry much about where you're coming from - you probably shouldn't either. (eg after you have this rig you won't care about your previous $300 laptop anymore) Let's focus on where you're going. A plan to "upgrade" from a 1050Ti ($150) to a 480 ($200) is basically a plan to flush money down the toilet. You'll lose a lot of cash in the process. Some people plan on regular GPU upgrades, they budget for losing a lot of money so that they can stay up to date. It's a feasible strategy, but only if you're getting sizeable performance gains and spacing all the spending out... and it's not really a money saving strategy. If you want a 480 (I'd go with a 1060 but the 480 doesn't sound like a bad option) why not just coast on the Skylake iGPU until you can "scrape up $50" to get the better card? Your losses on the upgrade process could hit $50 and you're exposing yourself to various risks in the resale market. IMO it's one thing to say that you'll buy a $200 card today and a $400 card next year. It's another thing to say that you'll buy a $150 card today and a $200 card [whenever]. I'm not sure what your CPU comment was in response to... clearly the i3-6100 will work fine, but as I demonstrated above the i5-6600 is available if you free up a little cash by building your rig in a used chassis etc. Nobody will ever tell you that the i3 is the better performer for BeamNG or anything else. Black Friday ads are starting to come out... but yeah, that sounds like a stretch to me!
How's this: (the Toshiba p300 is still there, I don't need any more than 500gb) http://pcpartpicker.com/user/BombBoy4/saved/ZFGGXL Edit-is an rx 480 really worth the extra 30 bucks over a 470 for 1080p gaming?
I use a lot of space for content creation etc, so I'm not necessarily a good standard to compare against. I do know plenty of people who only game and can't operate comfortably on 512GB. In any case that's both your call and an easy fix. Since you're having trouble with money, I'd put off spending money on storage for as long as possible... hence my suggestions above. Performance now, storage later. While we're on the subject... SSDs are nice and 512GB is pretty affordable these days. That's another thing to consider saving up for while running on a second hand HDD. In terms of RX470 vs RX480: 1080p benchmarks - http://www.trustedreviews.com/amd-r...iew-performance-benchmarks-and-verdict-page-2 many more 1080p and other (relevant) benchmarks - https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/RX_470_STRIX_OC/ Lots of people dislike stuttering, jitter, and poor or inconsistent frame times. If you find yourself among those people (this wouldn't be a factor of course with a $300 laptop - everything is poor) then you'll need to focus on more than "average fps". While there are specific factors which can cause the problems I mentioned above, in the most general sense the solution is to purchase "bigger" more powerful GPUs. Take a look at minimum FPS where available. Also take a look at frame times, often compared as 99th percentile frame times. Here is a pair of scatter plots showing performance and frame times to value: http://techreport.com/review/30473/amd-radeon-rx-470-graphics-card-reviewed/13 If you look through the benchmarks I linked to at TechPowerUp you'll notice that there are actually several popular games in their benchmark suite which will crush all 3 cards at 1080p. If we assume that future games will stomp on existing GPUs (they always do - eventually)... now is usually a good time to build some extra into your purchase. Ideally you won't "want" to upgrade in 6 months. The right purchase for future performance can be difficult to predict. Graphics memory is usually a "you have it or you don't" thing for any given resolution and quality settings - things start to suck if you need significantly more than you have. GPU processing performance is a sliding scale though. Just looking at higher resolution benchmarks is a decent way to get an idea, but that's all you get. Several things which simply don't affect 1080p gaming can start to come into play and skew your results. For that reason you may also want to look at some of the synthetic benchmarks and maybe some of the more demanding current-gen stuff as indicators of future performance. V-sync. It's a thing. You probably want it. Outside of e-sports, those who start using V-sync to eliminate tearing rarely go back... again, this may be a luxury you haven't had before with weaker hardware. Usually I'll personally accept performance slowdowns or stutter in order to get v-sync, it's a big deal. ... and V-sync can significantly reduce framerates vs what typical benchmarks show. I think that the old rule of thumb was "half", but that's not very accurate. I'd say that the RX480 is generally at least 15% faster today and it's hard to say how much faster tomorrow. Not less than 15% though... probably more. Today the 1060 is faster than either I think, and of course that will persist as well - generally the gap widens a bit as the cards age. Older mid/high end cards maintain some some vestige of playability while older low/mid end cards simply fall on their faces at some point.
Edited: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/vbWvbj Changed gpu to 1060 3gb Added SSD instead of HDD (did some calculations, all I need is 224 GB, will add HDD later)
So since I do not own a pc that has a core I3 in it I cannot say for sure but I would assume that beam ng drive would not run very well since the I3 is a hyper-threaded dual core which may not run this particular game very well. Other games should work fine but as far as beam ng goes you would be bottle-necking your gtx 1060 in this game.
BeamNG.drive relies on good single core performance, which this chip has. I wouldn't be able to run more than 4 cars very well, but I don't need that. In my case, the i3 should be fine.
I don't see any big performance difference, is there something I don't know? I know it's better for higher resolutions, but I'm just going to use 1080p.
In my opinion, you can never have enough, and considering the price difference isn't that big and you get twice the vram, I would go for it immediately. Though that may also be because I need some vram for rendering things. /shrug
You mention needing 224GB but you've selected a 120GB SSD. Hopefully I don't come across as too negative here, but I want to be 100% clear: using an SSD which is 256GB is "tight" for an average gamer. Using an SSD which is 128GB is miserable. Windows 7: 40GB / Hiberfile: =RAM / Pagefile: =RAM - So in your case that's 56GB off the top. Sure you could turn off hibernation, now you're down to 48GB for system files. Turning off the virtual memory with only 8GB will lead to crashes. The 120GB drive you've selected gives ~111GB of formatted capacity according to a random person on the internet. That leaves 63GB of free space. Current AAA titles are mostly >50GB, GTA:V for instance is 68GB on my system, it wouldn't even fit on that disk! Fallout 4 is around 28GB... and that's not the only game you play. You can probably save some space by going with Win10, but realize that eventually this will almost certainly turn into as much or more disk usage vs current Win7 installs. For new builds I never recommend SSDs of less than ~512GB (eg 480, 500, 512) because of the number of people I've known who found their 256 to be an inconvenience. 256GB is liveable. 128GB is a boot-only volume and requires a second drive to even operate normally under normal circumstances. It's one thing to say "you can get 80GB or 160GB for free" and it's another thing to go pay for 120GB. 100%, but if the bottleneck is at an acceptable level who cares? ... you may have missed a beat. BeamNG only needs a reasonable amount of single-threaded performance.. just enough to handle the Semi. Beyond that it's all about multi-threaded performance. You say that you don't need to run more than 4 cars very well, but think about it... Basically this game caters to a semi-elite market. People with old hardware can't run it well and are often told so by both the users and the devs. People with new hardware can run it well because new hardware is amazing. So here's what could be on the horizon... a new elite. Currently scenarios with 2 vehicles are included with the game. Mod scenarios sometimes include several cars but many users can't play them. Now that low-end Intel processors such as the i3 can run something like 4-5 pickups... (so maybe 2 semi's or 2 cars and a semi or something)... what's stopping mod authors from using that as the new minimum? Higher node/beam counts in mod vehicles, more vehicles in scenarios, etc. Basically think of it as feature creep. Just a thought. The bottom line though is this. You need a specific amount of single threaded performance, not simply high single threaded performance. I estimate that you only need Skylake to run at something like 2Ghz to get a Semi on each core. So this idea that you "need high single threaded performance" is a bit off IMO. Over the years I've seen tons of budget cards marketed based on "extra" VRAM which did nothing. We're a little past that, but the price difference is something like 20% and as stated... there's currently very little differentiating these cards performance wise. The question must be which is harder to deal with? Not enough VRAM or not enough GPU performance? Unless you are way below what you need, I think that VRAM shortages are a matter of backing off on anti-aliasing and texture sizes. I'm honestly not sure what's easier to deal with. EDIT: .. and of course the critical question is whether you're going to need >3GB for 1080p gaming during the lifetime of this card. BlueScreen and I discussed the topic a little over here. I think that the key reference from my posts was "This review on Guru3D has 3 pages of graphs specifically concerning frametimes and such things which one might expect to suffer with the limited vRAM - note that the only problems they scared up were above 1080p." ... at the time @BlueScreen was recommending "at least 3GB". I don't think that the landscape has changed much. So 3GB sounds OK to me for 1080p.
