New Gaming/flight Sim PC - Advice needed..
 

Morning,

I'm looking at getting a new PC which will be mainly used for flight sims (Battle of Britain 2, IL-2/Cliffs of Dover, etc), but also other sims/games. the last PC I bought was an Athlon 700 mhtz with a TNT2 GPU, so I'm a little of of the game :). I've been doing some research and have almost settled on the following.

Case
COOLERMASTER CM690 MKII ADVANCED CASE

Overclocked CPU
Overclocked Intel® Core™i5-3570k Quad Core (3.40GHz @ max 4.60GHz)

Motherboard
ASUS® P8Z77-V LX: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, ATI®CrossFireX

Memory (RAM)
8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz, X.M.P (2 x 4GB KIT)

Graphics Card
2GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 660 - DVI, HDMI, VGA - 3D Vision Ready

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)

Power Supply
CORSAIR 650W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX650 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE

Processor Cooling
Corsair H40 Hydro Series High Performance CPU Cooler

Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence

Monitor
IIYAMA E2473HS 24" LED WIDESCREEN, 2 HDMI/DVI-D 1920x1080 (

plus some other bits such as wifi, KB, mouse, speakers, 2TD second HDD etc.. The above is from www.pcspecialist.co.uk and is a total of £1,262. I've heard good things about Chillblast so checked on their site and virtually the same spec PC came at £1,426!

So first, are the specs OK or should I look at changing anything (I'm at the top of budget already), and second, are PCSpecialist any good with the build, and just as importantly, the support? Is there anywhere else I should try.

Any help or advice appreciated.

Go for the H80i over the H80

Try and get a 256gb SSD over the 128 - which you will fill pretty quickly.

Probably want a 2tb 7200 rpm sata drive of some description.

No DVD?

Thanks. I do have a 2TB 2nd HDD included in that, but didn't list it. I also have a Blu-Ray ROM/DVD-RW but just didn't list it. It's the main components of CPU, GPU, Motherboard, cooling and SSD that I want to check I have right.

cheers

have you got a budget in mind?

As I mentioned, I'm near the top already with approx £1,200. this will need to include all the peripherals as well.

Cheers

have a nosey here

http://www.scan.co.uk/3xs-overclocked-bundles


3XS Radius - Intel Core i5 3570K - Overclocked to 4.5Ghz

i7 -3770
h70 performance liquid cooler
asus p8z77 mother board
16gb 1866mhz dominator ram
650w psu
2gb evga 660ti
win 8 home oem

£998 in total

might push the budget over a bit with screen case and HD though, but plenty of other bundles to play with.

also do full towers that you can spec up

Its perhaps a tad expensive but still a good spec for what you want.
The hard disk is going to fill up fastwith big games taking lots of room nowadays and the ram is a bit slow by todays standards and I would personally prefer to see 1866 as a minimum now.

Have you considered building your own?

Thanks. For the complete bundle Scan work out at about the same as Chillblast for approx same specs (as much as I could make them..

Thanks. I'll have a look at the RAM type..

I have though about building my own but not yet speced up the price going down that route. I'm fairly confident (I have swapped chips and installed HDDs/CD-ROMs,PCI cards before) but no built my own before. I image there's more to it than just plugging everything together though? The main components I see as being the case, power, cooling, MB, CPU, GPU, SSD, HDD, DVD. I image if the price difference what worth it I would probably look at doing this.


EDIT: looks like the i5 does not support RAM speeds over 1600 so not sure that is going to be worth doing, as an i7 will likely blow my budget..

1600 is max unless you over clock on i7 or i5 or i3 :thumb:

no hard at all

Missed this bit. I've seen the H80 cooler listed but not the H80i. What's the difference between these?

Thanks

if your going to overclock then the asus p8z77-v has more phase power control than the p8z77-v lx .. little bit extra but might be worth it, also has wireless bolt on if needed..
also faster ram is worth it if you can afford it 8gb 2133 is £50 ish and will work with your asus choice.
the samsung 840 ssd's have great reviews too...
h80i is the next generation slightly bigger rad and quieter pump if i remember..

also check out www.novatech.co.uk just done a quick look at what you want minus the keyboard etc and came in a bit lower..
never had any real issues with novatech either, all available quickly enough and customer service is good.

building it is very easy, there are plenty of people who can help if your inclined. or post the bits to stu ..:norty:

If ur interested in flight sim I have a saitek yoke, throttle controls plus rudder pedals I could sell?

[quote=andys;10974564]no hard at all/quote]

Thanks. I'll download and look at those later.. If I can save some money and turn that into better components it's definitely something I'll look at..

But isn't the memory speed tied to the CPU? The configurator I tried would not let me order anything above 1600 with an i5, even overclocked.

Maybe, but it's military (specifically WW2) flight sims I'm into at the moment so only looking for sticks rather than yokes..

Have you tried War thunder beta yet? ;)

i recently got the z77 v and 3570k, with 2133mhz ram all running fine.
basically the bandwith will improve, whilst there might not be alot of difference in the real world, i just fancied having it and it wasnt much more.it has a higher latency but thats the trade off atm...
you can get 1600mhz crucial tactical at c8 latency, basicly speaking it will be faster at making decisions due to needing to cycle less data..the jump from 1333-1600 is quite big whereas the jump from 1600-2133 is less..
been along time since i had to remember this stuff.
really only makes a difference if the cpu is overclocked.
stolen from
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6372/m...gp-with-gskill

Calculating this value is a simple enough formula:

2000 x (CL / Speed ) = Latency in nanoseconds (ns)

DDR3-1333 9-9-9 has a latency of 13.5 ns
DDR3-1600 10-10-10 has a latency of 12.5 ns
DDR3-1866 11-11-11 has a latency of 11.79 ns

Just seen the trailers. Looks good, though more "gamey" than a SIM, but looks like it may be worth a go once I get my kit sorted out.

I've watched these and found them very interesting and useful. I speced up the same components at various sites (Overclockers, Scan, eBuyer) and to be honest the costs are not that much different (£100 at most) for identical, or almost identical, parts. If the saving was greater I may have done this as it does not look too difficult and could be quite fun, but which such small savings I don't think it's worth the hassle. Are there any other suppliers (component or full systems) that I should try?

Cheers

novatech are quite good .. can get a bit of discount if your willing to ask for it.. but as you said £100 difference, that could go towards a "better" component too.

cclonline, aria

I've used most of them over time and have to say that Overclockers customer service and after sales is excellent, though its a trade off that sometimes they can be more expensive than the others.

Really surprised that nobody else has mentioned this.

Either change your Mobo or your GPU. The mobo supports multiple ATI garphics cards NOT NVidia. So either get a mobo with SLI and NVidia GPU, or get CrossFire and ATI cards.

If at a later stage you decide you want to add another card to go quicker you will kick yourself with the above setup.

EDIT: you really want 240GB SSD, 120GB is not enough for OS and games, and games love SSDs. You should also go for 16GB of ram as its not much difference in price, but makes a difference in speed.

Thanks for the tip. I missed that. I'll look at an alternative M/B. I was already thinking of increasing the SSD. I'll look at the prices for 16GB Ram as well.

Cheers

You are welcome, hope you like your new machine.

asus p8z77 v

sli or xfire compatible ...

Some of you lot like spending other peoples money don't you! :cry:




You don't need a SSD.... ditch it and throw the money at your GPU! This is a gaming rig afterall.

8GB ram is more than enough also. You lot need shooting! ;)

I've just done another check on ebuyer going through all the pieces, just to be sure. I don't know what I did last time but it now works out for a saving of over £300! This is with a change in motherboard and additional RAM. I'm going to recheck, but I think I know which option I'm going to go for now :)

Edit:
Damn, made a few mistakes on the calculation.. still not much of a saving after all. Still, the search goes on.. :)