New Computer Build - The Saga Begins

[YellowKing]

Ordered my first parts today.

Case: Cooler Master HAF 922

PSU: Corsair CMPSU-750TX

I'm waiting on the Ivy Bridge CPUs to come out before pulling the trigger on the rest of the components, but I'm going SSD, 8GB RAM. Video card still up in the air - I've always been a loyal Nvidia fan, but it looks like the best cards in my price range are Radeons.

[Giles Habibula]

I've got nothing to add, except that I approve of your PSU.
I have the Corsair 650TX (52 Amp Single-rail) on one of my machines, and before I took that machine into semi-retirement, I had fired it up twice a day, every single day, for over two years with lots of heavy gaming, and that PSU was absolutely bulletproof. Quiet too. Never a single problem.

For my new rig, I wanted to get the 750TX, but no one in town had one in stock, and I needed it right away, so I opted to experiment with the Quad-rail (25 Amps per rail) Antec EA-750. That was over a year ago, and that too has been performing flawlessly.

All that to say: Has there ever been any consensus on the pros and cons of Single Rail vs. Dual or Quad rail designs? I've had all three designs over the years, and have been happy with them all, but IIRC, there used to be a mild debate over which was better. Or maybe it doesn't matter these days.

[YellowKing]

Pulled the trigger on the SSD:

Intel 520 Cherryville 120gb

NewEgg had it on sale for $150 free shipping. Great reviews and 5 year warranty.

[YellowKing]

Man it's hard keeping this thing under budget.

All signs pointing to Ivy Bridge being available this Sunday. Prices look to be in the $300 ballpark which is right in line with what I want to spend. Researching motherboards right now and the ASRock Z77 Extreme 6 looks like a good value of price vs performance. I'd love to have one of the higher end Asus boards (have always been an Asus mobo fan), but they are pricey.

The case came in today and I'm very, very pleased with it. It's waaay bigger than my current case but that's OK since I'm going to enjoy that extra room for the video card. Big honking fan on top - I don't expect ANY heat issues with this monstrosity, especially since it's designed so that you can run all your cables behind the motherboard. Red LED fans on front and top; I'm going to order an extra one for the side panel as well. It's probably going to sound like a freaking jet engine by the time I'm done, but I need cooling. My office stays about 10 degrees hotter than the rest of the house.

[soup]

hey yk, i am in the same boat as you.

waiting for ivy bridge to be available and then a total new build. this will be my first COMPLETE new build in a while. i have had the same antec case for about 3-4 builds now and its time for it to go. the new video cards are just too big.

that case looks nice. i really like antecs cases tho. can you compare build quality between that and an antec?

im also with you on the asus mobos and will almost certainly be getting one for this build.

anything else you've researched that a new build should be aware of? weird RAM requirements, etc??

[YellowKing]

Sorry, I can't comment on the Antec case question as I don't believe I've ever owned on. I can just say this one is AWESOME! Build quality is top-notch, no cheap feeling parts. Only con would be the unpainted interior - wish they had painted it black since there is a side window, but that's a minor nitpick.

I've finished the rest of the spec out. Here's what I went with and my reasoning.

ASUS P8Z77-V LE motherboard - ASUS has a ton of Z77 mobos out there right now and they can get confusing. I'm on a budget and didn't want to spend over $200, so I wasn't looking at the really high end Sabertooth and Maximum lines. The LE is the most full featured of their sub-$200 Z77 boards. I went with ASUS out of brand loyalty - I've always had ASUS motherboards and they've always been rock solid. Looking at reviews, their Z77 lines perform very well against other brands.

8GB GSKILL Sniper DDR3 1866 RAM - NewEgg had a good deal where you could get this for $50 with a promo code through May 2 (normally $60). I was tempted to go with 16gb, but again I'm trying to stick to that budget. I've read a lot that buying anything over DDR3 1600 offers rapidly diminishing returns on Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge CPUs. So I wasn't going to waste money on DDR3 2400.

EVGA GTX 560Ti Superclocked video card - I really struggled with the video card decision. Out of purely personal preference, I decided to stick with NVIDIA. I've always been a loyal NVIDIA fan ever since ATI screwed me over with some bad cards and even worse drivers years ago. Unfortunately, Nvidia didn't have a great solution in the price range I was looking for ($300). You can get a GTX 570 which is decent, but is outperformed by the Radeon 7850 at a lower price point. For this reason I decided to go cheaper with the idea I'd upgrade in a couple of years anyway. NewEgg had a deal on this one as well - $250 with $25 rebate. I went with EVGA because they offer lifetime limited warranties on most of their cards, and I've had great success with their factory overclocked cards.

IvyBridge CPU - Whatever $300-ish CPU I can get my grubby little hands on tomorrow.

Ultimately it's not *quite* as powerful a PC as I wanted to build, but I was able to build it completely within my budget. Besides, what I "wanted" to build is massive overkill anyway. I'm still playing A-list, current games on my current gaming PC which is 5+ years old (with one video card upgrade around 2 years ago). There's no reason to think this build can't last just as long. I'm very excited, especially with Diablo 3 and Guild Wars 2 right around the corner!

[YellowKing]

Had a change of heart on the video card. After crunching the numbers and realizing I was under budget, I decided to bump the video card up to the EVGA 570 Superclocked. It's $75 more than the GTX 560Ti, but you can actually get close to or exceed GTX 580 speeds with it - and the 580 is still a $400+ card.

[YellowKing]

CPU ordered! 3.5ghz Ivy Bridge quad core.

Everything should be here this week, and I hope to have it built and ready for the weekend. I'll post benchmarks once everything is up and running.

[soup]

yes! i see the new ivy bridge's up on newegg. Any reason you dropped the extra $30 on the .1GHZ speed increase? is there something specific that i will be missing?

still deciding on case. probably get a fancy antec one because im so used to them.

im coming from a duocore from about 5 years ago and its really starting to bog down in photo and video editing.
new cpu, new mobo and almost double RAM should fix that.

im currently running 2 SSD's, so those will be ported over. and if anyone out there is editing media, do yourself a favor and get 2 SSD's. 1 for system files and programs, and 1 dedicated to nothing but scratch discs and preview dumps. this makes a HUGE difference.

[YellowKing]

yes! i see the new ivy bridge's up on newegg. Any reason you dropped the extra $30 on the .1GHZ speed increase? is there something specific that i will be missing?

No reason other than pure gluttony. The $30 still kept me within budget so I went for it.

Also, I kind of fell into a happy accident. Newegg cancelled my first order because my stupid bank declined the purchase (hit their daily purchase limit or some such BS). So when I went back to try to straighten it out, I stumbled across some DDR3 2133 RAM for the same price as the 1866 I had previously ordered.

Most everything should be here by Wednesday, with an absolute worst case scenario being Friday.

[YellowKing]

Just an update - everything but the motherboard came in today. It's in town and should be here tomorrow so I can start the build.

I ended up buying another 8GB RAM to go 16GB. Overkill? Perhaps, but RAM is so cheap right now I figured why not.

The 200mm red LED side fan came in. This thing is going to look wicked with the red front, red side, and red bottom fans. I'm waiting to see how bright all that is before deciding whether I want to put some red cathode lighting in there as well. My goal is to make this thing look like it crawled from the bowels of Hell. Consider it my tribute to Diablo 3's imminent arrival.

[YellowKing]

Well, I'm definitely not impressed with the power supply so far. I'm going to have to RMA it. Would run fine for about 5 minutes then the motherboard would shut down to protect itself from inconsistent voltage. Hooked my old PSU up to it and it has been running fine for an hour.

I swear to God I've never had a PC build go smoothly.

Update - Returned the bad PSU for refund so I could go with a modular instead. Should be here Wednesday.

[YellowKing]

This build has been a never-ending nightmare.

I was sitting here tonight cleaning up the boxes my stuff came in, and realized that the motherboard I got was NOT the one I ordered. It's only one letter off so for some reason in my excitement and chaos of the new build I just didn't notice it. The stupid fuck-ups at Tiger Direct (via Amazon) shipped me a P8H77-V instead of a P8Z77-V. P8H77 is a previous generation and supports lower memory speeds, has an older audio chipset, etc. Fuck that.

I've ordered the correct mobo which should be here about the same time my new PS arrives next week. I'm RMA-ing both the DOA power supply and the wrong motherboard they sent me. This means I'm going to have to yank my CPU off again, totally rebuild from scratch.

Next time I'm just going to have somebody build it, I don't care what it costs. It can't be more costly than the return shipping fees and restocking fees I'm going to have to eat after this debacle. I am so livid right now I can't stand it.

[Isgrimnur]

Back in my dat, we had Cyberpower build it with a P8Z68-V and we LIKED IT.

[godhugh]

Sorry to hear about your troubles YK. This is exactly why I went with Cyberpower this time, just don't have the time or patience to build them myself anymore.

[stessier]

Sorry this isn't going so well.

I don't care what it costs. It can't be more costly than the return shipping fees and restocking fees I'm going to have to eat after this debacle. I am so livid right now I can't stand it.

Are they really going to charge you fees when they are the one that messed up?

[YellowKing]

The motherboard will be a full refund; I did have to pay shipping to send the power supply back - I will try to get that refunded but I'm not optimistic.

[YellowKing]

Ok, now that I'm reasonably cooled down and sane again...

PSU was shipped back today, and I'll ship the motherboard back when I get the new one in. In the meantime, I've been running the system on the crappy board just to see how it's going to perform.

It's fast. Real fast. Played some Skyrim on Ultra smooth as butter. The SSD is ridiculous when booting Windows. I barely have time to sit down before it's at the login screen.

I'm also super-happy with the case. It is extremely quiet, extremely slick looking, and it keeps things really cool. CPU is running 31C with the stock fan. My old CPU ran a good ten degrees hotter on the best days.

It's going to be a killer gaming rig and I'm soooooo looking forward to Diablo 3 next weekend. Just have to hope they send me a working power supply and the correct motherboard this time.

[YellowKing]

The saga finally ends!

Got the new PSU and motherboard tonight. Build went smoothly. Got some minor tweaking to do to get it to recognize my RAM, but should be good from here out. Thanks for following my adventures. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program!

[Cylus Maxii]

Grats! Enjoy it.

[YellowKing]

Just wanted to give an update now that I've been running a few weeks.

I tried overclocking it last week using the Asus AutoTune and it worked fairly well. Got it up to 4.2ghz. However, because I bought two 8gb RAM sets vs 1 quad-channel kit, I think the OC was wreaking havoc with my RAM. I didn't have a ton of issues, but enough minor, intermittent crashes/lockups that I decided to forego the overclocking and just run everything stock.

I got all my refunds processed for the wrong mobo/busted PSU, so I'm a happy camper now.

[Giles Habibula]

Well, I'm definitely not impressed with the power supply so far. I'm going to have to RMA it. Would run fine for about 5 minutes then the motherboard would shut down to protect itself from inconsistent voltage. Hooked my old PSU up to it and it has been running fine for an hour.

I swear to God I've never had a PC build go smoothly.

Update - Returned the bad PSU for refund so I could go with a modular instead. Should be here Wednesday.

That's what I get for gushing over your PSU. I apologize.
If I may ask, which PSU did you end up replacing it with?

[YellowKing]

That's what I get for gushing over your PSU. I apologize.
If I may ask, which PSU did you end up replacing it with?

No worries, I just got a bad unit. I ended up getting another Corsair 750-watt, but I went with the modular version instead for better cable management. This one has been rock solid.

[Jag]

Pics!

[YellowKing]

Your wish is my command:

[Jag]

Very nice. Similar to the HAF that I bought for my 8 year old to assemble. Internal parts were much cheaper though. He loves the colored fans too

[Enough]

Awesome build YK!