Help me pick parts to my next build.

That's a lot of money on a cooler and PSU. Could easily pay for your Das Keyboard (or most of it) if you toned them down a bit.

 

Well the I7 2600 they use as the example there is $324 right now at Newegg. But it does come with a heatsink and fan. So that makes the price of the CPU better by far.
(One and one half times verses twice as much for the 2011 chipset version CPU I linked in above. I may need to check again and see if the CPUs I linked in have a slightly more expensive version with a heatsink and fan as part of the premium.)

 

Well the cooler is like insurance for the CPU. It is better to pay more initially and plan to reuse it for several builds. But now I see that some of the Intel CPUs actually come with a cooler, so that may have to be removed and those builds shuffled a bit.

As I said before, I plan to reuse whatever parts I can, but it was nice to have a worst case plan in place anyway. The PSU I chose was Seasonic, and they build awesome PSUs, And besides that, it is modular. That may well be worth extra.

 

All retail Intel CPUs come with coolers, and they're all... fine.

You don't need "insurance" for the CPU, because as has been said a number of times, they are practically immune to heat damage, but even then, you don't need a $100 cooler because it's just a huge waste of money if you're not running at 100% 24/7 and/or if you're not overclocking.

A decent, cheaper air-based cooler (e.g. the good ol' Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7) will do the job, but won't burn a hole in your pocket.

 

No, not all retail. Just the common ones. I clearly picked a poor choice for the 2011 chipset build. Take a look for yourself:
http://community.gaslampgames.com/threads/help-me-pick-parts-to-my-next-build.2895/#post-29386

I actually much prefer stock coolers wherever they are available. It has been a long time since I bought an Intel CPU though and I was not aware they still come with stock coolers in most cases.

Hmmm. I must have somehow missed clicking retail in the power search on Newegg. When I do that and "No cooler" it shows zero results. You are right. I get to eat my words above. Sorry.

 

One thing I must say. A $10 tube of Arctic Silver 5 is well worth the money. It is the best you can get.

There is enough there for a handful of systems, too.

 

I know it has been a long time since the last post here, but this is a subject I continue to think about.

I am wondering if it would be wise to try to save a small amount to build a weak system that will never be used for games, or to spend that and a bit more for a multipurpose build.

Right now a browsing and minor tasks system runs around ~$300 or so. But a gaming system will usually need a video card costing nearly that much. (A Netbook type system is what I considered for this. Probably an Intel Atom system for lowered power and heat.)

Each time I replace my system I reuse the drives until I can afford to replace them with more reasonable and modern versions. So if I build it, I can greatly reduce the expense. I will also reuse my PSU and any other parts that are not likely compromised or incompatible when I do

Considering all this, I expect a total cost of around ~800 for a new gaming build with just Motherboard, RAM, CPU, and GPU replaced. Then another few hundred to replace the storage drive and get a BD burner. (The expense of DVDs is losing value to BDs now days just like DVDs once did for CDs.)

I am picky about parts, and this may well cause me to overlook newer and better options. That is still the purpose of this thread. I want to hear if my figures sound about right or if I am missing something that I should reconsider. (I previously discounted Netbooks entirely due to them being weak systems with odd aspect ratios and lacking driver support to lock you into the single OS it comes with, but this may not be accurate anymore.)

I welcome discussion and even people telling me I am flatly full of shit. It would not be the first time.

 

If you do not have room for a PC the size of a credit card, then you have bigger issues. (Pun intended.)

Raspberry Pi is a great system for minor things. But I doubt it would be able to even crawl through any real game, not that I could care less. The price is right, and the energy used is negligible at best. I literally have light bulbs that use more power than it is capable of using.

If you have room for a system the size of a lunchbox, then you have more than enough room for a Raspberry Pi and the PSU and all cables. The biggest downside is that you would pretty much have to use another system that is always on as a file server for the Pi(s). They have no capacity for adding a hard drive or DVD/BD drive.

 

I have thought of dozens of good uses for a Raspberry Pi. Everything I do 9/10ths of the day could be handled on one of those little gems. And it would be easy and nice to replace standalone devices with a multipurpose box like that for things like a full Linux system with a fully configurable firewall and auto-updating blocklist, not to mention using it to handle all manner of other background tasks for the equivalent of a quarter worth of electricity annually.

And due to the tiny size, it could be overclocked quite a bit if placed in a jar full of non-conductive oil to leach the heat out of it. (from ~700Mhz to around 850-900Mhz depending on just how hot it gets and if you bother to use a fan to cool the jar or not. Ironically, even heavily overclocked the fan would use several times as much power as the system.)

But if I had the money I would get a real laptop and call it a day. That is a better solution for actual use. A Raspberry Pi would be cheap enough to get and keep as a backup in case of disaster, but not much more.

 

I guess that would only depend on your money situation. In the long run, you're probably better off just buying one computer. That said, I know that when money is a problem, you buy what you need, and hold off on what you actually want until you can afford it. But then again, I gave away my cheap computer to my nephew when I got my new one. I neither had the room, nor the inclination to use a slow computer, when I had a fast one available.

 

My current rig was bought as follows: Motherboard, CPU, and RAM all at once. That was ~500 and left me more than broke for months. Then when I could afford it, I purchased a GPU that put me back another ~250. Then almost a year later the drives I am currently using were purchased.

The only real reason to look into another PC now is that the one I am using will eventually cease to function. There is no performance difference between my current rig and a high level gaming rig sold now. Moore's Law was broken years ago it seems. I am running a six year old motherboard with a four year old CPU and a three year old GPU and nothing on the market for a reasonable price can compete with it.

AMD Phenom II 955 x4 CPU
AMD/ATI Radeon 5850 GPU (Better than a 6870 on benchmarks by 15%.)
Two 1TB WD Hard Drives (One internal and the other as a backup for the data on the internal, but external via eSATA.)
One Intel X25M 80GB SSD (This thing moves data fast enough that I rarely see loading screens at all.)

That $75 A10 Looks a lot better than the Raspberry Pi though. I will keep my eyes on those since they could hold me over while I save money for a real system to game on.

*Edit* To clarify, I used the integrated GPU on the motherboard until I could afford a real GPU.

And the 5850 is far superior to the 6800 line since they broke the naming conventions at that point. Before they made the 6000 series there was a pretty simply way to equate the performance between the different cards based upon the number of the model.

Now you have to examine the speed of the cores, the speed of the memory, the latency of everything, and the number of graphics cores to figure it all out. Or you can run a series of benchmarks to come up with useful performance data.

I would love to equate my GPU and any others I am examining to the rough number of Xbox 360s you would need to do the same work. But that would be an unfair comparison that would really only serve to piss off console gamers. To be fair, the modern console systems are too slow and old for most tasks a PC is used for in gaming, but they have one sole advantage in the way the GPU works:

Extremely low latency and a sort of antialiasing that is only a pitiful chore for the GPU due to it's design. (That is the greatly simplified way of saying it, and may not be entirely accurate, but it matches what the gamer sees.)