PC Build Thread

[keiri]

Um, yes...mostly.

It's one of the great secrets.

[82mm 4g63]

Originally Posted by WingsofWar

OMG NVIDIA! you upset me to no end! so i was looking at workstation card prices and stats with a friend of mine at his apt. And another friend of his walked in and said, "why are you looking at workstation cards?" I told him i need to build a 3d rendering PC. and he said.."are you stupid? just get a Geforce card for a fraction of the price and softmod it to run Quadro Drivers" im like.....wtf is softmodding?

Apparently Gaming cards and workstation cards share equivalent hardware. Ie my Geforce 8400GS is the same card as Quadro FX370 worskstation card. Difference is the drivers. All i have to do is use a program to trick the graphics card to run a different driver.

Well FUCK ME TO HIGH HEAVEN! i was all ready to put down $1200 for a workstation card too! and now your telling me i can get a superclocked GTX580 for a fraction of my budget and run a $3000+ Quadro 6000 graphics driver? I can run games AND 3d programs at the same time?

CHRIST!

That's pretty awesome.

There goes that 600$ budget.

[n2oinferno]

Originally Posted by 82mm 4g63

I'm going to be building my new Christmas present, this is what I'm thinking so far.
It's going to be my gaming rig and HTPC. If there's anything left from my bonus I really want a second TV to go dual monitor with.

Save 100 bucks and go with the 2500k for gaming. You won't see a difference. At least not if it's OC'd to 4.5ghz+ like mine. Also better hop on a 6950 2gb reference card fast if you're looking. They're being pulled from the market, and that means no more 6970 softmodding.

Originally Posted by WingsofWar

Well FUCK ME TO HIGH HEAVEN! i was all ready to put down $1200 for a workstation card too! and now your telling me i can get a superclocked GTX580 for a fraction of my budget and run a $3000+ Quadro 6000 graphics driver? I can run games AND 3d programs at the same time?

Yes and no. Games will run worse with the workstation drivers, and workstation projects don't run well with gaming/consumer drivers. I have no clue why, but my department felt the need to put a FireGL V5250 (yeah it's old) card in the very laptop I'm typing this up on. I want to run X1700 drivers for everyday use since the experience would be much more palatable, but it seems like I'd have to flash the BIOS of the card. Unfortunately, I haven't found any of my normal methods to back up the stock BIOS that work, and with a work laptop it's just not the risk.

As far as the above conversation about liquid cooling in a closed loop system, I love my Antec 620, and it was designed by Asetek, so the stock intel stuff can't be that bad.

[serialk11r]

Eh it's okay, video cards these days are so OP (lol excuse me for the silly abbreviation) you can probably play some games, just have to lower your standards. I played BFBC2 on intel integrated graphics for 2 months, THAT was torture.

Wait WoW are you even that into gaming?

[WingsofWar]

Originally Posted by serialk11r

Eh it's okay, video cards these days are so OP (lol excuse me for the silly abbreviation) you can probably play some games, just have to lower your standards. I played BFBC2 on intel integrated graphics for 2 months, THAT was torture.

Wait WoW are you even that into gaming?

I actually prefer PC gaming. But i never got into PC building, as a result i got stuck with a PC for 10 years that can only play Counter-strike 1.6 and Starcraft. Iv wanted to play BFBC2-3/MW2-3/SC2/DIII/Iracing/Crysis2. But eventually got stuck with console gaming, especially when JRPGs and Halo Series took up much of my time.

God....this is so annoying....I want to do both workstation stuff and gaming at the maximum capabilities of a single card, but im told you can only do one or the other or one has to suffer performance? Even when softmodded.

I hate technology sometimes.

[serialk11r]

Really, I wouldn't worry about it. I have a GTX460 hooked up externally to my laptop. It's being choked by an x1 pci-e 2.0 lane somewhat, but it is more than sufficient IMO. BF3 beta ran fine (until the stupid browser crap stopped working), BFBC2 I run on highest settings, everything is perfect.

[n2oinferno]

BF3 beta was set to medium too, and you couldn't change it. With that said, I'm running the release version on 1920x1200xUltra and it seems smooth to me. Well, client side at least... Godawful lag in a few servers. 2500k@4.5, 6950 2gb with 6970 shaders unlocked, and 8gb ram. So by no means a really exotic or expensive build. Maybe I'll boot up Fraps if I remember and see what framerates I'm actually getting.

edit: No graphs or anything nifty like that, but I played for about an hour and a half last night and framerates were anywhere from low 30s to high 50s, so definitely playable on Ultra with my current setup.

[82mm 4g63]

All this talk about new hardware got me all excited. So I just ordered my new rig.

Core i5 2500K
MSi P67A-GD55
G.Skill Sniper 8GB DDR3 1600
XFX HD 6870
XFX Core Edition Pro650W

$700, not too shabby.

Still looking at a new case and water-cooling, but there's no rush for either.

Can't wait to play MW3 on it!

[WingsofWar]

^nice!

[Guff]

Forgive me but I'm totally necro-ing this because LOOK AT ALL THAT 2011 HARDWARE!!!1! Was looking for a PC Build thread too, and didn't want to disturb the PC Gaming thread, since that's mostly about the games themselves.

Anyways...

I'm building a PC!

So let's make this the semi-official, back-from-the-dead, PC Build thread!


My latest build is a workstation Hackintosh that I'm building out of an early PowerMac G5. I've always wanted to do a G5 build but never really had a reason. However, Apple's abandonment of Pro users as of late, in conjunction with the lack of horsepower that my 2015 MBP 15" provides, was enough catalyst for me to go ahead with the project.

First, the case modding:





Removing everything was fairly straightforward with the right tools. iFixIt toolkit ftw!



The internal standoffs are just pressed or perhaps glued in and come out with pliers.



After much mocking up of the tray and IO plate I determined that this was the right place to cut and chopped away. You can see that I cut the black IO plate as well to get rid of extra metal and to get it to fit right.



Then, in went the Mobo tray and I screwed it to the IO plate with the supplied screws, which basically sandwiches the remaining metal on the PowerMac in between.



Had to do a little extra trimming here and there to get everything right. But it was a decent fit!



Then, after sanding down the surface, cleaning it, and then spraying Self-Etching Primer down, I applied a Grey Metallic color coat.



It's much more matte when dry as I did not apply a clear coat. I might apply a matte clear later on for durability, but I deff like how it looks now.








I'm pretty happy with how it came out. The color is very nice and fairly unassuming. Anyone who recognizes a PowerMac will be able to tell, but otherwise, it just looks like a handsome desktop case! Hopefully, I can sell some of the G5 stuff to make back some $$$ but I'm not sure if anybody even really wants this stuff...

Moving On!

So, as some of you may know, Hackintosh compatibility is often a bag of surprises. As such, it's usually easiest to stick with tried and true formulas from the forums. As such, my plans of having an X99-based, Broadwell-E, super-workstation was thwarted in favor of a more traditional setup with a Z170 board and 1151 socket CPU.

As such, here are the proposed specs: (Side Note: I haven't bought anything except the GPU yet because I'm on vacation and am waiting to get back home)

-Core i7 6700k
-nVidia GTX 980Ti (Already bought, got a screaming deal)
-Either a Gigabyte Z170X-UD3 or maybe an Asus Z170-A/E, etc.
-Corsair RM650X
-G-Skill Ripjaws 2x16GB 3200MHz (Not really decided on this yet)
-Samsung 960Pro nVME M.2 SSD (Haven't decided on capacity)
-Samsung 850Evo SATA (Larger Capacity for Mass storage)
-Corsair H110i w/ a couple Noctua NF-F12s
-Broadcom 802.11ac + BT4.0 Card from an iMac adapted to PCIE for easy integration.

Peripherals are still up in the air. Just need something 4k with decent color accuracy that won't break the bank. Probably will run a Logitech G-Series mouse and some mech. keyboard with Cherry MX Blues.


Soooooo, anyone else have anything in the works?

[FX86]

i built a gaming PC with an i7-3000 something series cpu and a gtx 960 with 24gb ddr3 ram and 500gb ssd but then i lost interest in gaming so i only watch porn on it now

[Guff]

Originally Posted by FX86

i built a gaming PC with an i7-3000 something series cpu and a gtx 960 with 24gb ddr3 ram and 500gb ssd but then i lost interest in gaming so i only watch porn on it now

You'd be surprised how many people do exactly that with their PCs hahaha.

4K porn is very CPU intensive!

[Guff]

Also, I ended up ordering a 27" LG 4K IPS monitor and 4x8GB of G.Skill Ripjaws at 2400MHz. Looking to grab a Logitech G403 wireless mouse and a Ducky Shine 5 RGB with Cherry MX Blues.

[Somerandom18]

i7-4790k
Asus Sabertooth Mk2
16gb 1600 MHz ddr3 @ CAS 9
2x Gaming G1 GTX 980s

256gb Samsung 840 Evo SSD
2x 4 TB WD Black HDDs

24" 1080p 144hz Asus monitor
24" 1080p 60hz Asus monitor

Logitech g502 mouse
Sennheiser game zero headset
Logitech g19 keyboard

Plan on replacing the 980s with a single 1080 ti when it's released.

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