First Self Build Advice Required

VoidDragon

New member
Good Afternoon Folks,

I am embarking upon my first self build at the end of the month and wanted some opinions on the part list below. The main uses for the system will be gaming (strategy/RPGs) and photo processing in PS.

CPU Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core £260.34
CPU Cooler Corsair H110 94.0 CFM Liquid £91.31
Motherboard Asus MAXIMUS VII HERO ATX LGA1150 £165.50
Memory Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-2133 £140.84
Storage Samsung 840 EVO 500GB 2.5" SSD £164.98
Video Card EVGA GeForce GTX 980 4GB Superclocked ACX 2.0 £449.99
Case Corsair 750D ATX Full Tower £118.79
Power Supply EVGA 850W ATX12V / EPS12V £106.99
Operating System Microsoft Windows 8.1 (OEM) (64-bit) £74.20



The main areas I would like some advice on are:

- Motherboard
- Memory
- Case (also like the Corsair 780T in white).
- Cooler (really not sure on this although I like the look of the Enermax Liqtech 240 cooler as well).

Finally any advice you guys could provide on a monitor would be awesome, is going the G-Sync route worth it? To help with this I will say that I tend to play strategy and RPG titles (Total War series, Dragon Age, The Witcher etc.).

Thanks in advance for your patience and support.


Dale
 
That looks like a very solid build, I would get a diffrent PSU though, something like ax/hx860i instead of EVGA but thats mostly brand loyalty thing. Also get 850 evo instead of 840, few pounds difference for much newer drive batch + controllers.

Mobo: might be a slight overkill but nothing wrong with it if you can afford it

Memory: I would get 32gb especially if you're going to be doing PS editing, more ram is always better for rendering times, exporting and alike.

Case is always a personal decision I still prefer my HAF 922 over most cases out there.

H110 is just fine, one of if not best watercooling hassle proof kits, just make sure if you change case you can still fit it in.

In terms of Gsync I wouldn't bother+ with all the talk about gsync not being limited by hardware but software, we could end up with nvidia allowing all compatible monitors to run without "gsync module" and even then people will eventually modify drivers to do it.
 
Thanks for the feedback Pr3d4t0r, not sure how I missed the 850!

The memory suggestion makes complete sense as well so that will be something I invest in. With memory is here a substantial difference bewteen say 1800 or 2133?

Ah I will have to explore non-G-Sync monitors then, interesting to hear it seems ti be software driven.
 
no difference at all between 1800 and 2133, not for PS work, if it was video rendering you might've saw some difference but in general even 1600 is fine, after that you won't see much difference, I would say get 1600 or 1866 cl9 and you'll be fine, anything higher than that non existent performance increase, you would make use of very high speed like 3gz ram in servers where ram is constantly being throttled and faster it is the better, that's not the case in most PCs.

And yeah there was some controversy about some laptops being able to run gsync with accidentally leaked drivers somewhere in north europe. its not a good time for nvidia, especially just after the 970 3.5gb high speed memory instead of 4gb.
 
no difference at all between 1800 and 2133, not for PS work, if it was video rendering you might've saw some difference but in general even 1600 is fine, after that you won't see much difference, I would say get 1600 or 1866 cl9 and you'll be fine, anything higher than that non existent performance increase, you would make use of very high speed like 3gz ram in servers where ram is constantly being throttled and faster it is the better, that's not the case in most PCs.

And yeah there was some controversy about some laptops being able to run gsync with accidentally leaked drivers somewhere in north europe. its not a good time for nvidia, especially just after the 970 3.5gb high speed memory instead of 4gb.

Nvidia seem to be enduring a bit of a facepalm phase at the moment!

Great I will use that advice for the RAM.
 
That looks like a very solid build, I would get a diffrent PSU though, something like ax/hx860i instead of EVGA but thats mostly brand loyalty thing. Also get 850 evo instead of 840, few pounds difference for much newer drive batch + controllers.

Memory: I would get 32gb especially if you're going to be doing PS editing, more ram is always better for rendering times, exporting and alike.

In terms of Gsync I wouldn't bother+ with all the talk about gsync not being limited by hardware but software, we could end up with nvidia allowing all compatible monitors to run without "gsync module" and even then people will eventually modify drivers to do it.

I agree with Pr3d4t0r on this one, I'd change the PSU for Corsair personally. But that's personal preference though.

RAM, I highly recommend 32GB if you're going to do some Photoshopping... I have 16GB and having some programs running in the background etc, those 16GB can fill it up pretty quick once you start loading up Photoshop with stuff.

Plus, it's always nice with some headroom on RAM in my opinion :)

no difference at all between 1800 and 2133, not for PS work, if it was video rendering you might've saw some difference but in general even 1600 is fine, after that you won't see much difference, I would say get 1600 or 1866 cl9 and you'll be fine, anything higher than that non existent performance increase, you would make use of very high speed like 3gz ram in servers where ram is constantly being throttled and faster it is the better, that's not the case in most PCs.

And yeah there was some controversy about some laptops being able to run gsync with accidentally leaked drivers somewhere in north europe. its not a good time for nvidia, especially just after the 970 3.5gb high speed memory instead of 4gb.

Yah, in a real world scenario, you wouldn't notice the 1600 -> 1866 jump really or the 1800 -> 2133 jump either for that matter, I believe.

1600 -> 2133 on the other hand, maybe... but still, I run at 1600 and it's all fine. I'd say it more down to if you really want to squeeze every little Hz out of the memory, then by all means go for it dude! :)

Hope that helped some, from someone who isn't as good as the rest of the lads here :P
 
A totally silly question but how would I go about making my build able to access my wireless network as I am to far removed to hardwire it?

Edit: might look at power line networking, what are people's experiences with this?
 
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