Building a rig, need advice

Hi, I'm planning to build a desktop soon and was wondering about some of the components. Would appreciate any help as I'm quite clueless in these.

1. I'm planning on getting two GTX980Ti, but I'm not sure which version to get. The store suggested the MSI variant, but I'm thinking about GIGABYTE or ASUS. Any suggestions?

2. Is two 8GB DDR4 Ram enough for gaming?

3. Is two Ssd in raid-0 a must? Does it improve the gaming performance?

Thanks in advance

 

Yes.

Only loading times.

 

I run a Single EVGA 980 ti SC works beautifully. I cant see the point in SLI given the state of Scaling currently

I have 16Gb 4x4gb in Quad channel. I never breach 8Gb when gaming. I do however come close sometimes.

I run 2 Separate SSD's one for Steam, One for Origin. Never seen the point of putting them into raid 0

 

I have never had a bad experience with an EVGA card.

 

I use and have been using EVGA for the last 7-8 years. Nobody has a better warranty or customer service in the industry, period.

 

Why SLI?

(Hey that rhymes)

 

I like 120-180 fps in games especially on a 144hz monitor. I get a constant 140-160 fps depending on the map in bf4 with +80 horizontal and vertical view and +150 resolution scale with my sli classified cards. For me personally this makes for a very pleasant and competitive gaming experience... The games I play scale well with SLI and one card will not give me what I want. My 3-way sli kingpin cards can pull it off but when I crank up the resolution scale with my overclocks my system peaks a little over 1750watts which my ax1500i psu can handle but my 1500va UPS goes ape S&*^t screaming at me. Luckily it is on a 80 amp breaker..

 

16 GB should be more than enough for gaming. 8 GB pretty much always is enough. No reason to spend more than 2x8 now - you can always upgrade later and the prices are unlikely to be higher.

I wouldn't recommend two SSDs in RAID 0, unless you're benchmarking or something like that. Why?
- Twice the chance of losing all your data in a failure. May be acceptable if you have regular backups or don't care about the data, but undesirable.
- If they're on SATA, you aren't going to get any noticeable speed benefit unless they're slow SSDs. Most midrange and higher SSDs can bottleneck SATA III already. Perhaps random I/O would be a bit better, but I'm skeptical it would be worth the higher risk of losing data.
- If they're on PCI Express, they're already stupid fast by themselves, so you don't stand to gain much anyway.
- As mentioned, it'll only help with loading times, which should already be quite fast.

If you want X GB of SSD space, I'd recommend one X GB SSD, or two non-RAID-0 X/2 GB SSDs, over two RAID-0 ones. Unless the goal is to set the best benchmark time, in which go for it!

Holy frijoles that's a lot of power... and I mean the electrical kind in particular, though computing power as well.

But indeed, 144 Hz is one of two reasons I'd consider SLI/CrossFire, the other being native 4K gaming. If you don't plan to do either, I don't see any reason to bother with SLI. A single 980 Ti should handle 2560x1600 perfectly fine and be simpler to set up, not have compatibility issues, and consume less juice to boot.

No thoughts on MSI/Gigabyte/Asus/EVGA.

 

^ agreed. Don't go raid-0. Double the chance of a full drive failure and losing everything, not to mention unless you are using a $$ raid add-on card, your at the mercy of finding an exact replacement motherboard to recover your data should the motherboard fail.

 

Knock on wood in the many years of building oc's and the last 5-6 using ssd's in raid 0 I haven't had a failure. But I don't keep important data on the raid 0 drives, just is and games. I images and backups all the time of my systems. As several discussions I've mr. Fox and other I personally like raid 0 ssd's I can tell a difference in performance, game loading and general use. Failure rates are low on modern ssd's...
Sli is easy to setup, nothing really to worry about. I don't build these to be green and worry about energy. If so I'd use a chrome book or a MacBook and not build power houses. Most AAA GAMES support SLI so it makes it even better. If by chance I run across a game that doesn't then a single 989ti will do fine for what little I'll play it.

 

First is how much you want to spend and are you looking for DDR3 or DDR4?
Also get iNtel Processor don't get AMD they play last class to anything iNtel can do First Class. It will cost more but you will be more then rewarded for that choice. Also consider how much you want to spend.
1. Price your looking to spend
2. Tower, Mid-tower, Compact, Desktop???
3. How many Sata ports do you want the more the more expensive the board.
4. Processor if you can afford got 2011v3-I got Asrock z97 Extreme6 with everything used and maxed out with i5-4690k @4.5ghz MOD but this comes with a CoolerMaster 212. So if you decide to UEFI tweak the speed get a good something like CoolerMaster 212 or liquid before doing so otherwise you could wear out the Factory iNtel cooling fan overtime.
5. A ops...forgot makes sure your PS min 750watts 80-90% rated and if you can get 1K Watt 80-90% PS this will future proof your system and get you more connections to handle whatever you can through at it.

I go MSI all the way unless they haven't gotten one made yet and even then I wait. I used MSI 770OC and now MSI 970OC and will keep looking for MSI GPU. I got good Customer Service when I had to replace my GTX770OC with another one. Plus I like their MSI Afterburner software packages and the setups.

That will be plenty of RAM....I got 16gb and after all the loads and game I still have 10gb free....??? But if you can get more for cheaper then go for it get 16gb and if 32gb is in your reach go for it. Unless your doing DDR4 then that will be a expensive upgrade I would stick with 8gb then.

DON'T RAID...your not doing a server to make this a worth while investment. Use the 2nd....3rd or etc drive for storage and backup that will save you time and money in the long run. That is how I have my setup 1-SSD and 13 HDD and 1 SSD for my system Acronis Image. So should my main SSD fail I always have a image to restore back.

Where here to give our experiences in hardware upgrades and in the end that is up to you how you want to proceed with your upgrades.

 

My EVGA GT8800 broke when it was 4 years old. Got GTX260 as a replacement. 10 years warranty My current card is Gigabyte's 970 because it was cheaper.

 

1) I personally have experience with EVGA and XFX. Tossing another hat into the "EVGA's customer service is awesome!" tub, though I can't say anything about XFX's since my card hasn't broken yet.
2) 8GB is good enough for gaming. DDR3 or DDR4.
3) RAID-0 for SSDs is pretty pointless, especially since all it'll do is have a trivial impact on loading times (maybe worth it if you're playing Mass Effect? /s). Not to mention that it significantly increases your chance of failure for the whole array (one drive goes down, everything's gone).

 

Sorry for the extremely slow reply, work was insane past few weeks

1. I'm looking at $3750 or so IF I'm building next year when Pascal hit. If I'm building now, probably $2000 and upgrade when Pascal hit
2. I'd probably go with Full or Mid Tower. (Noctis 450 or Phantom P630 looks nice)
3. Sorry but I'm not that good with computers to understand this. Would you mind to explain ?

This is what I come up with so far

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/Axtun/saved/bVRxFT

 

Just get the largest high quality SSD you can afford and a large spindle drive for storage. You might be able to get a benefit from raid-0 but it will be minimal at best.

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Samsung-850-Pro-256GB/Rating/2385

Note the quote about all the drives effectively saturating sata 3.

Raid-0 with older ssd's made sense but you're really not going to get much benefit from putting two samsung 850 pro's in a raid-0 configuration. Would it be faster? Probably in benchmarks but you won't notice a difference anywhere else. It does have a cool factor though since you're already going SLI so why not Raid-0 if you can swing it. Dual SSD, Dual GPU now all you need is Dual CPU's to really make it sound cool.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

 

Thanks for the advice on the raid - 0.

This is what I'm coming up with based on what is available in my country. This build is to serve as a base until PASCAL hits and all I need is to swap out the graphics card.

PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QMxrbv
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QMxrbv/by_merchant/

CPU: Intel Core i5-6600K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($239.99 @ Amazon)
CPU Cooler: Corsair H55 57.0 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($49.99 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: MSI Z170A GAMING M7 ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($224.99 @ Amazon)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($99.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Corsair Neutron XT 480GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($219.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Barracuda 3TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($86.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Video Card: MSI GeForce GTX 970 4GB Twin Frozr V Video Card ($338.49 @ SuperBiiz)
Case: NZXT Noctis 450 ATX Mid Tower Case ($136.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Power Supply: Corsair RM 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($106.24 @ Amazon)
Operating System: Microsoft Windows 8.1 OEM (64-bit) ($86.89 @ OutletPC)
Monitor: Samsung S24D300H 60Hz 24.0" Monitor ($149.00 @ B&H)
Total: $1739.55
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-09-16 20:59 EDT-0400

Thoughts?

 

Get the i7-6700K... HT is pretty useful and 6700K should be better binned then 6600K... Other then that, you should be fine...

 

A few comments:

- You mentioned getting two 980 Ti's, or it's looking like going for 16nm next year. At any rate, if you're planning to upgrade it to two top-tier GPUs, you'll probably want a more powerful PSU. A top-end GPU can eat 300 Watts, particularly overclocked, and once you add in the CPU and everything else, you could well end up over 650W. You'll be fine with the GTX 970, but not if you upgrade to top-end, top-power GPUs next year. If you really want the 650W PSU and two GPUs, and want near-top-end GPU performance, R9 Nano in CrossFire or its successor might be the way to go - they use 175W each, so you'd still have plenty for the CPU and other components.
- You don't have a backup HDD listed. I always recommend this if you don't already have a system in place, since sooner or later you'll have a drive fail. Took 18 years for me and I was lucky and it was the backup that failed, but if I'd only bought 1 it may have been the one that failed and I would have been screwed. Toss in a 4 TB HDD for a bit over $100 and back up both the 3 TB and the SSD to it (with scheduled, not live, backups for the SSDs so as not to kill performance).
- If there's anything that's underspecced I'd say it's the monitor. IPS is nice for the better viewing angles and color reproduction, so is 4K or just 1440p. But even if you aren't interested in those, the monitor you have listed doesn't have features like left-right rotation or height adjustment - so if the height isn't right, you'll be stacking books under it. For something you'll be looking the whole time you use the machine, I personally recommend allocating a bit more of the budget to it if you can swing it.

 

Thanks for the advice
- I'll probably upgrade the PSU when I'm getting the upgrade next year.
- Noted on the backup. Will definitely get one
- I'm looking around my area for a better monitor. Hope to find one with a good spec and review.