5punk

The time has come to replace my utterly decrepit gaming rig. Cast your wise eyes over and critique as you will, please.

MSI Radeon R9 280X Gaming Edition OC 3072MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card with Battlefield 4 PC Game £269.99

Intel Core i5-4670K 3.40GHz (Haswell) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £173.99

Gigabyte Z87X-UD3H Intel Z87 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £143.99

Seasonic 660w '80 Plus Platinum' Modular Power Supply £125.99

Plextor M5S 128GB Solid State Drive - (PX-128M5S) £83.99

Corsair Carbide 330R Silent Mid Tower Case - Black £74.95

TeamGroup Xtreem LV "Frost Edition" 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-19200C10 2400MHz Dual Channel Kit £59.99

Alpenföhn Matterhorn Pure Edition CPU Cooler £29.99


Total : £977.87

I think this works, though it has been a while since I paid any attention to hardware stuff.

Looks right to me (but I've not paid attention to hardware in years) I'd double the ram though, won't hurt and I doubt it'll get a lot cheaper.

Might also want an optical drive.

Aye, I was thinking about adding more RAM, but wasn't sure if it would actually be worth going beyond 8, and I'll be using my old optical - rarely gets used these days, so I wasn't going to bother with a new one.

You might want to think about one of these

Overclockers has evga modular psu's at 750w for £109.99. Never used them but I've never known a shit evga product.

Not sure why you need the U version of that mobo, a slightly less plush version such as the gigabyte z87-d3h has everything you need and will save you approx £50 to put towards more ram or a faster gpu.

Case is a choice of quality, looks etc, an antec 302 is plain, bit ugly and a very good case for £50.

Never heard of teamgroup, timings are a bit loose and it's quite cheap, probably ok, but a bit shit a well. I would probably spend a bit more on some corsair.

Would suggest buying an nvidia 770 gtx over the 280x as well. Slightly worse in bf4, better in most things and use less power/create less heat.

I'd go with Corsair or Enermax for the PSU as both have proven themselves to me by riding out brownouts, I'd probaly favour Corsair for price/performance.

Zalman's circular CPU coolers have always made more sense to me as they can push air out of the sides as well instead of trying to horse everything through a square.

I like Lian Li's aluminium cases as even the cheaper ones have nice little touches for when you're system-building like swing-out mountings and clip-in drive mountings. That Corsair one looks nice, but has grilles top and bottom which I don't like - I prefer to control the airflow front-to-back and not worry if I put stuff on top on the case. As a result though, the front and back of cases I select are usually both pretty much meshes, which does increase noise levels somewhat.

I usually go for nVidia cards as I'm more comfortable with the associated drivers and tools.

I agree with Pete on the mobo and RAM, not seeing what the mobo gives you and doubtful about RAM from someone I've not used.

Re Jack enermax psu since 2006, 1kw, still good.

Lian li case lovely, no cuts.

Drunk, tabular teams late translate

It's almost like he's trying to communicate with us.

*Takes note*

The PSU comes recommended, so I don't think I change that but the mobo and RAM will get looked at again. New monitor arrived today, nowt too flash, but it'll do for now.

I avoid Plextor like the fucking plague, them Maxtor and seagate have provided some of the most unreliable HDDs I have ever had the pleasure of destroying.
I'd recommend a Samsung but unfortunately costs more.
For a bit cheaper I have been hearing good things about the Kingston kit recently this is on sale right now

The Samsung 840 EVO is quite good and not very expensive. I have a 250GB model that I got for around $180 US which is a great price. The Samsung Magician software is also very handy. You can set it for RAPID mode which uses CPU and RAM for caching when possible for truly stellar performance:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7173/sams ... s-tested/5

Plus it has support for hardware level encryption if you're a paranoid type.