Thread: 2011 PC build suggestions at different price points (Updated 29.11.2011)

Reserved for future use

Nice one shumi, although i think you should include an AMD graphics card, the 6950 does outperform the gtx 560ti and can be had for around the 3k mark like the club 3d one here, only reason i have a gtx 560 is i got it at a steal But anyways, good guide bud...

Originally Posted by Pansyfaust

Nice one shumi, although i think you should include an AMD graphics card, the 6950 does outperform the gtx 560ti and can be had for around the 3k mark like the club 3d one here, only reason i have a gtx 560 is i got it at a steal But anyways, good guide bud...

Thanks and yeah I know I should include AMD, I just didn't see a chance.
And I know the 6950 is stronger (it does occasionally get beaten by the 560Ti though) however my recommended builds were intended to offer a certain level of performance and expansion ability at a certain price and since the 560Ti is only a little weaker (and on the odd occasion the winner) whilst being cheaper it suited the intended purpose for the recommendation better. For me the GTX560 (or the 6950 on AMDs side) is where high-end begins and that build is afterall just a Power Starter (and the 6950 proved more expensive), not the perfect high-end build for the budding enthusiast (though it has the potential to become that).

Nice Shumi,

I Would not include a CPU Cooler in the build as of yet rather take it out and change the HDD to a 1.5TB.
another thing I would change the CPU to a i7 2600(non K).
Usually a person looking at these will not likely OC, other then that it looks good.

Originally Posted by KweeZy

Thanks for the post.
I have a question though. I am in the market for a SandyBridge mobo, but can't distinguish the difference between the following mobo's. Which would be the better choice and why? Keeping in mind I am building a gaming rig soon.

Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8P67 EVO LGA1155 Dual-Channel DDR3 (New B3 Sandybridge) SLI/CrossFire - R2.3K one
Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8P67 Pro LGA1155 DDR3 (New B3 Sandybridge) SLI/CrossFireX - R1.9K one
Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8P67 LGA1155 Dual-Channel DDR3 (New B3 Sandybridge) CrossFireX - R1.7K one
Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8P67-M PRO LGA1155 DDR3 (New B3 Sandybridge) SLI/CrossFireX - R1.6K one
Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8P67 LE LGA1155 Dual-Channel DDR3 (New B3 Sandybridge) CrossFireX - R1.5K one

Thanks

The differences are all very subtle in this generation.
Basically the cheaper the board the less cooling it has (yes even motherboards have passive cooling these days).
Also the cheaper boards usually only support CrossFire and not SLI.
And lastly on the cheaper boards multi-card setups suffer since the 2nd PCIe-x16 slot has to share bandwidth with other slots which means in a multi-card setup it can't run as fast as the better boards or alternatively that you will lose use of the other slots it shares bandwidth with.

So let's look at the easiest first, the -M board, this means it's mATX which means it's smaller than a normal board and thus offers less expansion slots. These are mainly meant for small cases like HTPC, cube or desktop cases. They can of course be used in normal tower cases but I wouldn't recommend it due to the reduced expansion slots, put a graphics card on one of these and you basically lose the use of 3 of the 5 available slots, one because the graphics card is using it, another because the graphics card is covering it and the third because putting something so close to the graphics card would generate unwanted heat for both the card and the other component. Then if you try a multi-card setup the board is basically completely full.
All the other boards are Full ATX (normal size) and would be where I'd loook.
Now the LE board basically only supports CrossFire and if used in such a configuration loses the use of it's PCIe-1x slots due to bandwidth limitations, it also has less USB3 ports and there may be other things I missed.
The Vanilla P8P67 also only supports CrossFire and suffers from a similar bandwidth limitation on it's slots which which would limit a multi-card setup to running in a 4x/4x configuration which would impact the performance of the CrossFire setup.
The Pro for me is the perfect board in this generation. It's the cheapest board that can properly support a multi-card setup and supports both SLI and CrossFire in a 8x/8x configuration which whilst not perfect (since it should be x16/x16) doesn't have a major impact on performance of such multi-card setup. It also features a third PCIe-x16 slot but this one is once again subjected to bandwidth restrictions.
The Evo, well this would obviously be the best board out of the lot but I can't find much difference, it has an extra LAN port and a 3 additional switches which are nice to have (only if you're an overclocker) though not needed but otherwise it's basically the same as the Pro. It also seems to have slightly more cooling.

I'd always recommend the Pro (and not the mATX one, I mean the full ATX 1.9K one) budget-permitting UNLESS you're absolutely 200% certain that you're not going going to be running a multi-card setup, in other words will only use one single graphics card at all times.

Originally Posted by George S

Nice Shumi,

I Would not include a CPU Cooler in the build as of yet rather take it out and change the HDD to a 1.5TB.
another thing I would change the CPU to a i7 2600(non K).
Usually a person looking at these will not likely OC, other then that it looks good.

It's supposed to offer the perfect expansion opportunity. I do agree with you but the idea is that if I a person looks at these and then later once they've had the system for a year or so and learns about overclocking and wants to give it a shot they can and aren't first limited by a weak stock cooler. I also don't know how capable the stock coolers are this generation but if it's anything like Nehalem then custom coolers are needed from the get-go. Also keep in mind the automatic Turbo capability of these processors. AND changing the cooler at a later stage might prove tricky for such a person. I basically want this system to be able to become anything the user wants it to be at the cheapest possible price and that's the reason for my choice of the slightly weaker K processor and custom cooler. And as for the HDD, well that's the easiest component of all to switch out or add in so I'm not worried about just 500GB in there.

Edit...hmm, on 2nd thought I will add the 2600 as an alterntive.

Sorry about that missed the budget in haste to reply XD (post since deleted)

Ok let's do this propperly.

First I assume no OS is needed, or system assembly or a DVD writer/player.
Purpose of build: as much processing and graphics power as can be squeezed into the budget.

Processor: Intel Core i7 2600 (3.4Ghz)
Prophecy.co.za - Intel Core i7-2600 Quad-Core LGA1155 3.4GHz Boxed Processor (Sandybridge)
Motherboard: ASUS P8H67
Prophecy.co.za - Asus P8H67 LGA1155 Dual-Channel Dual-Channel DDR3 CrossFireX
RAM: Kingston ValueRAM 1.5v DDR3 4GB x2
Prophecy.co.za - Kingston KVR1333D3N9/4G VALUERAM 4GB DDR3-1333 1.5v CL9 Desktop
Graphics card: Club 3D GTX570 OC
Prophecy.co.za - Club3D NVIDIA GeForce GTX570 Overclocked 1GB GDDR5 320-bit PCI-E x16
PSU: Corsair TX650W
Prophecy.co.za - Corsair TX650W , Eps12V , ATX 12V V2.2 - 620w ( 12v : 624w ) , nv
Case: Zalman Z7
Prophecy.co.za - Zalman Z7 Tower Chassis - No PSU
HDD: Seagate 500GB Barracuda SATA 2
Prophecy.co.za - Seagate ST3500418AS Barracuda 500GB SATA2 7200rpm

Cost: R10061.57

If a DVD Writer is required
LG GH22NS50
Prophecy.co.za - LG GH22NS50 22x SATA Black & Beige

New cost: R10273.61

If cost is too far over budget reduce graphics card to a GTX560Ti such as this one
Prophecy.co.za - Asus NVIDIA GeForce GTX560 Ti 1GB GDDR5 256-bit PCI-E x16

Assuming you meant the Vengeance sticks you only need faster RAM if you want to overclock. 1333 is basically the DDR2 800 of this generation (and just like it is capable of some slight overclocking). Also neither the processor or motherboard allow for overlocking and you said you didn't want to overclock. The Kingston RAM will be fine..and you can't use the additional Mhz of the Vengeance anyways.

BluRay would impact the performance too much since severe cuts on both the processor and graphics front would have to made to accomodate it. Besides hard drives and optical drives are super easy to add later on.
I'd also say no to an SSD for pretty much the same reason, too much cutting would have to be done elsewhere to accommodate one. Personally I think SSDs should only be looked if the rest of the system is perfect and there is still budget left, not squeezed into a system at the detriment of other components. For your needs a stronger processor and graphics card are required much more.

That would mean you need these two items as well
Prophecy.co.za - Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 32 & 64-bit Retail Pack
Prophecy.co.za - System Assembly and Software Installation - Increased Lead Time

New cost: R11912.45

Which is too much...this is gonna be hard, the only way I could see it working is scaling both the processor and graphics card back to these:
Prophecy.co.za - Asus NVIDIA GeForce GTX560 Ti 1GB GDDR5 256-bit PCI-E x16
Prophecy.co.za - Intel Core i5-2500 Quad Core LGA1155 3.3GHz Boxed Processor (Sandybridge)

Then it's back in line with budget at R10252.43 (though gaming grunt and future proofing have suffered a little)

A BluRay Read/Writer would break that again:
LG BH10LS30 R1 188.84
Prophecy.co.za - LG BH10LS30 Dual-Layer Blu-Ray Writer with Lightscribe - Black
New cost: R11229.23 (including removal of the original DVD Writer)

Don't forget that RAM is only one stick, you'll need it twice (when you view your cart there's a quantity column that's editable, so change the amount next to the RAM to 2 and update or alternatively just loading up the RAM and pressing buy now again should have the same effect)

As for the case, well that's basically up to you. The Zalman Z7 covers the most important base and that's having enough space for the really long graphics cards of this day (all the great cards these days are unfortunately on the very long side of things). Additionally it's wider than many of those other cases in it's price range and offers the basics when it comes to cooling so it's a great little case. In fact I'd go so far as to say it has only one flaw...those tool-free PCI card holders, they don't work and break the 2nd or third time you try to secure the card, but every 2nd case uses them these days so that's not a flaw specifically for this case.
The Z7 Plus doesn't really offer anything revolutionary over it's basic twin but the Zalman Z9 Plus, CM Storm Scout and Thermaltake Dokker cases are a little better and offer some improvements like out of the box SSD support (you'd need to get an additional adapter with the Z7) and extra cooling options as well as just well as well as just a little more class and quality. Not things you'll likely need since you won't be overclocking so you won't need the additional width for a big CPU cooler and air-flow won't be quite as big a concern either because of that but additional cooling and more polish is always nice to have.

Prophecy.co.za - Zalman Z9 Plus Tower Chassis with Window - No PSU
Prophecy.co.za - Coolermaster CM Storm Scout Black Chassis with Window - No PSU
Prophecy.co.za - Thermaltake Dokker Liquid-Cooling Chassis

(With the Dokker don't be swayed by that external HDD mount...I'd never use it since it looks rather precarious, but it's a nice case even without that)
Basically the Zalman Z9 offers 2 extra front USB slots and a fan controller (for those who would sacrifice cooling for some noise reduction).
The Storm Scout is the obvious choice for Lans with it's handle.
And the Dokker supports the strongest and thus longest graphics cards (300mm in the other cases which is long enough for 97% of the cards out there VS 320mm for 100% support).


And a 1TB Hdd wouln't cost much extra at all (basically just ~R150)
http://www.prophecy.co.za/seagate-st...m-p-87539.html

Builds and prices updated.

I've decided I will NOT be supplying any suggested AMD builds, in my opinion they've completely dropped the ball. Bulldozer is weaker in single core performance than the Phenom2s which are already way behind Intel to the point their i3s can almost surpass anything AMD does (unless overclocking, then you can have a chance...except Intel can also overclock on their K processors) at this point and in multi-thread performance are almost equal but just about nothing is multi-threaded to that degree so that's pointless. So I refuse to suggest what I consider to be inferior builds just to satisfy someone's brand preference for a moment (till they realize their mistake :P). If you're a die die die die die-hard AMD fan then try and snatch up a Phenom2 X6 while there are still some left, it's the only chip that remotely is worth it.
In addition AMD is leaving the desktop market which makes things even worse as far as their viability goes.
AMD Not Competing with Intel Anymore, Goes Mobile - Softpedia
So again I will NOT be supplying AMD builds.


Oh and I've updated all the builds again, unfortunately their price spiked thanks to the included HDDs, but o well.