My 2010 iMac is giving me fits about Planetary Annihilation, so I'm thinking I'm going to replace it with a Mac Mini for my media streaming to my Apple TV & a gaming rig. I have been so far out of the loop on hardware and don't feel like reading through 37,945 articles on Tom's or Anand or whatever, so I turn to the T3d forumites! Wants: Not gigantic case. Micro-ATX or Shuttle style would be ideal. At least an i5 or equivalent. Not blow the bank price wise, I'll be putting it together over a few months so I'm not in a hurry. Upgradeability that is cheaper than Apple (lulz, so anything). What's the medium-high chips from AMD? What graphics card? USB 3 would probably be nice but I'm not going to be transferring anything crazy over USB as it'll be 99% Steam. I have an external DVD/CD drive, so I could probably even do without that in the case.
~$1200 you should be able to get... Antec P180 equivalent case latest i7 second-tier CPU Asus motherboard w/ integrated Intel video (it's pretty good unless you're building a real gaming PC, in which case get a PCI-E Nvidia) 16 gigs ram SSD old school backup drive I wouldn't bother with AMD currently.
I ran Crysis with mine! But put a real video card in there, even a $150 card would be fine for most games.
You can get a card with some real ooomph for $100-$150 these days, but like tweakmonkey says, integrated actually can do stuff now. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487026 IMHO, if you want to cut some $$$, go from 16gb ram to 8, get a cheaper case, and do some i5 variant. If you absolutely have to, forego the SSD in lieu of one really good spinner (but don't have to unless you have to )
SSD is a must IMO Makes a bigger perf difference than i5 vs i7 for most things, you'll save tons of your life staring at a screen waiting for loading If you're not going to upgrade again for 5-years or something I say fork out a little extra $ for some good stuff. What's i5 vs i7 and 8 vs 16 cost nowadays?
512 CUDA Cores?! Barracudas!? And I do love my solid state on my Air. Figure I'll do a smallish system SSD and then a secondary for games.
http://amzn.com/w/31H9A2WRJXMA8 No case though, you can get one on the Anandtech forums for cheap. Or this: http://www.amazon.com/Antec-P280-Black-Tower-Computer/dp/B005X3E5BO I picked up some Nexus Real Silent Case fans with an older version of this case in 2009/10 and it's still running strong.
Case wise I want something like these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147214 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352033
That second one looks like a microwave. blah First one looks nice and Appley which I know you like. Can you get a good motherboard and quiet/ mostly passive cooling in a case this small? Just haven't built one before with high end stuff. Also power supply? Many years ago that wasn't possible and I always doubted Shuttle's ability to keep up.
Well, it's not Shuttle brand specifically and looks about twice the size. Plus the one side is entirely mesh, so maybe? IDK, I figure someone on here has built PCs recently. :-X
I mean the Mini-ITX small form factor in general - how are the motherboards and can you buy an ample power supply that won't overheat but still supply enough juice for what you'd run on it.
Saw this build on the buildapc subreddit. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qvNjJx Also, buy as much as you can from Microcenter since there's one in Denver. No one is ever as cheap as they are.
Think I'm going to go with an i5 build: https://secure.newegg.com/WishList/MySavedWishDetail.aspx?ID=22577931
same. What's the price difference i5 vs i7? I don't understand some of these builds have $350 video cards but you'd run an i5? wtf. Curious to see whole parts list now.
Odd they let you share your wishlist publicly but don't provide a way to link it to someone. Anyways: Qty. Product Description Savings Total Price 1 Corsair Obsidian Series 250D (CC-9011047-WW) Black Aluminum / Steel Mini-ITX Tower Computer Case -$10.00 Instant $10.00 Mail-in Rebate Card $99.99 $89.99 1 Rosewill CAPSTONE-650 650W Continuous @ 50°C, Intel Haswell Ready, 80 PLUS GOLD, ATX12V v2.31 & EPS12V v2.92, SLI/CrossFire Ready, Active PFC Power Supply -$30.00 Instant $119.99 $89.99 1 ADATA XPG V1.0 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model AX3U1600W8G9-DB $154.99 1 ASRock Z97E-ITX/ac LGA 1150 Intel Z97 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel Motherboard -$5.00 Instant $15.00 Mail-in Rebate $139.99 $134.99 1 Intel Core i5-4690K Haswell Quad-Core 3.5GHz LGA 1150 Desktop Processor BX80646I54690K -$10.00 Instant $249.99 $239.99 1 SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE250BW 2.5" 250GB SATA 6Gb/s TLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) -$40.00 Instant $189.99 $149.99 1 SAPPHIRE DUAL-X 14-202-099 Radeon R9 280 3GB 384-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 CrossFireX Support Video Card -$10.00 Instant $20.00 Mail-in Rebate Card $239.99 $229.99
Supposedly for gaming the i7 doesn't provide enough of a difference in speed over the i5 and the extra heat generated isn't desirable. Of course, if this changes the 1150 mobos will still support Broadwell next year.
I'm happy with just the extreme ultra-low-end Haswell Pentium G3220, which is a neutered and spayed Core i-3 part, so I imagine anything with 4 cores will do you just dandy. The only real difference between a Haswell i-5 and i-7 is hyperthreading, and honestly, you probably won't lose much without this feature unless you run some heavily multithreaded monster apps for some reason. The Z-9X motherboard should leave you comfortably future-proofed for the moment, though lately, it seems as if every new CPU comes out with a new socket to put it in....
I'd go the i-5 route myself. If I were to build a new box. What I have is sorta doing the job. This is mainly because there hasn't been squat for games that I want to play and I'm not encoding vids anymore.
