Another gaming pc build thread

[qasdfdsaq]

A 120-240GB SSD is plenty given the above requirements. Add a standard HDD and use the 120GB as cache. Any games you play will be stored on the SSD, any games you haven't played recently will be stored on the HDD - automatically.

---------- Post added at 16:24 ---------- Previous post was at 16:22 ----------

Originally Posted by Bulky

Yeah agree, what's the best way of managing the storage between the drives seeing as the ssd is only 250gb

Let the system do it for you automatically.

---------- Post added at 16:26 ---------- Previous post was at 16:24 ----------

Originally Posted by Bulky

Yes I do intend to overclock , but even so what changes would you make for better value just so I have options.

I would get a cheaper motherboard and a cheaper processor and a cheaper CPU cooler (unless you plan on extreme overclocking), and cheaper RAM. I would personally also get a cheaper GPU because the 780 is very poor value for money, but the alternatives are hot and noisy so many dislike them. There's frankly very little difference between the motherboard you picked and one that's half the price, even when overclocking.

[Uncle Peter]

The H80i cooler is fine and a fair few quid cheaper.

The H100/105 has a double length radiator and doesn't fit properly in some cases. It's also not much better than the H80i, certainly not for the extra money.

[techguyone]

I have the h80i and my spec is higher than the Op it's fine.

[damien c]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

Looks more like you are trying to build an extreme overclocking machine than a gaming machine. Unless you are intent on squeezing every last micron of performance out of your components, you could save a good few hundred quid by buying better value kit that gives 90% the performance for 50% the price.

Just the other day we built a gaming machine capable of a full 60fps in many games at 4K resolution for under £1500. And £500 of that was for the 28" 4K monitor...

I would love to see the specs of a pc capable of playing games at 4K at 60fps solid for less than £1000.

Even my pc will not play games at 60fps in many games, unless I dropped the details down to either medium or low.


As for the spec's in the OP, if you are only going to be gaming then grab yourself either the 4690K or a AMD 8350, they will perform almost the same as a 4790K but cost quite abit less.

The motherboard should be swapped for a MSI Z97-GD65 Gaming, as it's cheaper but will perform the same and overclock the same for Intel or a MSI 990FXA-GD80 for AMD.

Gigabyte boards and Asus boards have a habit of dieing after 16 months when you are overclocking on them, as the Sata ports start playing up, then the USB ports and eventually they stop picking up your ram and GPU's, from my experience.

The SSD should be upgraded to a 512Gb if you want games on it, as you can get a 512Gb now from Overclockers for £150, games are taking up more space on drives thanks to lazy developers.

The cooler should be swapped for a H100i as it performs better, and you should swap the fans for some Noctua NF-F12's as they will make it perform better and be quieter than the stock fans.

Graphics card should be swapped for either a Gainward or MSI GTX780, as the Poseidon card is useless unless you are planning on a full custom waterloop.

No mention of sound card but I highly recommend the Asus Xonar DX.

Everything else looks fine.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by damien c

I would love to see the specs of a pc capable of playing games at 4K at 60fps solid for less than £1000.

i5 4670K, GTX 780 6GB OC.

Even my pc will not play games at 60fps in many games, unless I dropped the details down to either medium or low.

So? No PC in existence gets 60fps in every game in the world.

Gigabyte boards and Asus boards have a habit of dieing after 16 months when you are overclocking on them, as the Sata ports start playing up, then the USB ports and eventually they stop picking up your ram and GPU's, from my experience.

Bollocks. Gigabyte and Asus make some of the most reliable boards around.

If you think your personal experience is representative, I know of several people including myself who have been running 50% overclocks on a Gigabyte board for 5 years, with all 10 SATA ports occupied and it still works flawlessly, even with the chipset heatsink cut in half and the northbridge running on a constant 70'c+

Given these 5 year old boards are still in high demand (mainly for overclocking second-hand Xeons) and selling on Ebay for £150+ I highly doubt they have a habit of dying.

The SSD should be upgraded to a 512Gb if you want games on it, as you can get a 512Gb now from Overclockers for £150, games are taking up more space on drives thanks to lazy developers.

I wouldn't call developers deliberately putting higher quality content, better resolution textures, and lossless audio into their games "lazy"

The cooler should be swapped for a H100i as it performs better, and you should swap the fans for some Noctua NF-F12's as they will make it perform better and be quieter than the stock fans.

A casual overclocker like the OP doesn't need water cooling at all.

[damien c]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

i5 4670K, GTX 780 6GB OC.

So? No PC in existence gets 60fps in every game in the world.

Bollocks. Gigabyte and Asus make some of the most reliable boards around.

If you think your personal experience is representative, I know of several people including myself who have been running 50% overclocks on a Gigabyte board for 5 years, with all 10 SATA ports occupied and it still works flawlessly, even with the chipset heatsink cut in half and the northbridge running on a constant 70'c+

Given these 5 year old boards are still in high demand (mainly for overclocking second-hand Xeons) and selling on Ebay for £150+ I highly doubt they have a habit of dying.

I wouldn't call developers deliberately putting higher quality content, better resolution textures, and lossless audio into their games "lazy"

A casual overclocker like the OP doesn't need water cooling at all.

A single 780 6gb card will not give 60fps at anything more than Low quality settings, my 2 780Ti's will only give on average 45fps in most games maxed out and when you drop, the quality then you start to push to 60fps and that is with 2 cards that are more powerful than a 780, that is also with a 4930k which does perform slightly better than a 4670k in games and 16Gb 2400Mhz ram which was in the test machine.


I keep thinking to myself about getting a 4K monitor but I still get put of by the fact, that my £2500 pc will not run most games at 4K with 60fps minimum without turning, the details all the way down to medium or low.

To play games at 4K I would need to go and buy 3 Nvidia Titan Blacks, and then I would only get about 55fps maxed out at 4K, and if I dropped the details down or turned of AA I would get more than 60fps.

Have a look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPwtDta32wI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XA2pfk_L9dU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vefkanYechQ

I have had in the past, 2 Gigabyte X58 boards that both died within 16 months from overclocking, that were "Overclocking" boards, 13 Asus boards including Rampage II Extreme, Rampage III Extreme (6 boards in the space of 7 days), Rampage III Extreme Black Edition, Asus P8-P67 Pro (2), Asus P8-Z77-V Pro which is still working techincally but needs add in cards and finally a Asus Rampage IV Extreme on day 2 and now the Rampage IV Extreme that is currently on my test bench, which has sata issues, network issues and also PCI-E issues, and this board is not dieing due to heat as it's watercooled and cooled by a 1080 rad.

So my Experience with Gigabyte and Asus has put me off them and I don't recommend them to anyone, where as my MSI P67 motherboard is working perfectly fine with no issues at all.

Also Xeon boards are designed for being pushed at high temps and constant workloads as they are "Server" and "Enterprise" boards, try doing that with a normal "Consumer" board and see how long it lasts.


The SSD size of 512Gb is because of the developers being lazy, Titanfall looks like a game from 5 years ago but requires 52.8Gb of storage space with the first DLC thank's to, 35Gb of Audio Data that should be compressed and decompressed on the fly but is instead uncompressed on install, and doesn't sound much better than if it was compressed.

Call Of Duty Ghost's requires 40Gb of storage and looks like it was made 5 years ago, and also doesn't have uncompressed sound.

Battlefield 4 requires 40Gb with only 3 of the DLC's and yes they are big map's and it has decent graphics, but it is still to much space.

Crysis 3 looks better and sounds better than any of the games mentioned above and it only requires 15Gb, thanks to the developers not being lazy.

Metro Last Light requires 10Gb and looks better than all of those games.

Those games would take 160Gb on a SSD and then you have windows on top which can range from 4Gb to iirc 25Gb, then you have apps on top and potentially other games that will be installed along the way whilst keeping those other games installed, just makes sense to pay £150 for a 512Gb SSD instead of £110 for a 256Gb.

Also developers are making games on the pc require more Vram than they should, because the new consoles have "Unified Memory" and that is why the likes of Call Of Duty Ghost's and Titanfall both use 3Gb+ whilst delivering graphics that look like they should only need 1Gb of Vram.


As for the cooler, the Devils Canyon cpu's run hot but not as hot as the Ivy Bridge and Haswell cpu's, and given that the OP is looking to overclock then it would do there cpu a world of good to have a decent cooler on it, and with a H100i with Noctua fans on it, it will perform better than any sealed watercooler on the market and any air cooler on the market that is designed for a cpu for "Amatuer" overclockers.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by damien c

A single 780 6gb card will not give 60fps at anything more than Low quality settings, my 2 780Ti's will only give on average 45fps in most games maxed out and when you drop, the quality then you start to push to 60fps and that is with 2 cards that are more powerful than a 780, that is also with a 4930k which does perform slightly better than a 4670k in games and 16Gb 2400Mhz ram which was in the test machine.

Bollocks. A few things first. You seem to be under the impression the only games anyone ever plays are the most recent and most demanding games at maximum settings. Perhaps you feel turning anything down from "Ultra" is a mortal sin. Believe it or not, it's only the most hardcore gamers and overclockers that care whether their game is running at Ultra all the time or merely "Very high".

You also seem to feel that having ridiculously high memory clocks is actually a good thing, but that's another issue...

Notwithstanding the fact that scaling in SLI is pretty crap in many games right now, if you are only getting 45fps in "most games" with dual 780ti's then you are doing something seriously wrong. As you can see here a single 3GB 780 GTX can do an average of 37fps in Battlefield 4, 38fps in Bioshock, 22fps in Crysis 3, 69fps in Skyrim, all on ultra or max settings. Here you can see Dirt Showdown doing 59.4fps average at 4K on ultra, but more demanding games can fall apart. As you see here most of the games they benchmarked do 37fps+ on maximum settings with a single 780 GTX card, and with two in SLI all but one game averaged over 50fps, many doing 60-70fps at 4K ultra. So again, either your setup is broken, or your idea of "most games" is.

Course you mustn't forget review sites deliberately benchmark using the latest and most demanding games in order to stress the cards, not to give a balanced cross-section of most games that are played. Consequently, with a single card that can be had for £355 doing 30-40fps in the most demanding games at 4K ultra settings, less demanding games such as Call of Duty, WoW, KSP, CS:GO, Civ 5, TF2, or even (shock horror) Age of Empires will happily run at double or triple that set to maximum everything. Hell Team Fortress 2 gets 250fps and CS:GO 160fps on 4K, FTL gets 2500fps.

If you were to look beyond "OMG CRYSIS BATTLEFIELD CALL OF DUTY" and look at a more balanced cross-section of games here, at a more sensible mainstream resolution of 2560x1600 we see a single GTX 780 card managing to average, again on ultra/maximum settings:

123fps in Lost Planet 2
109fps in Just Cause 2
166fps in F1 2012
53fps in Metro Last Light
83fps in Dirt Showdown
32fps in Nexuiz
105fps in Sniper Elite v2
129fps in Sleeping Dogs
79fps in Hitman Absolution
58fps in Tomb Raider
74fps in Bioshock Infinite
100fps in Battlefield 4

All of which are still fairly modern, though not bleeding edge games. So with 6 out of 12 games in that selection managing 100fps+, and knowing that typically going from 2560x whatever to 4K yields a 30-50% drop in performance, then we can deduce half those games can happily run at 60fps on maximum settings at 4K. And those aren't particularly old games.

I keep thinking to myself about getting a 4K monitor but I still get put of by the fact, that my £2500 pc will not run most games at 4K with 60fps minimum without turning, the details all the way down to medium or low.

Again, bollocks. See above. A single £355 card in a £1000 PC (excl. monitor) will happily produce playable framerates in many games at maximum settings at 4K, assuming your idea of "most games" isn't comprised solely of Crysis 3 benchmarks. Indeed, if you look down the list of best selling PC games on Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...video_games#PC
Every single one of them will run at max at 4k and produce 60fps+

Going by Raptr's list at least 8 out of the top 10 games will run 60fps+ at 4K on maximum settings.

So again, either you are doing something seriously wrong, or your rather deluded perception of "most games" actually means "the most demanding latest generation games that benchmark sites choose to stress GPUs to the maximum"

To play games at 4K I would need to go and buy 3 Nvidia Titan Blacks, and then I would only get about 55fps maxed out at 4K, and if I dropped the details down or turned of AA I would get more than 60fps.

Again, bollocks. See above.

Have a look here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPwtDta32wI

Oh look, its Battlefield 4, Crysis 3 and Bioshock Infinite again. Wait, what did I just say?

I'm not even going to bother wasting my time with the rest.

I have had in the past, 2 Gigabyte X58 boards that both died within 16 months from overclocking

Good for you - we've already proven above that you're doing it wrong or just deluded, but my Gigabyte X58 board which is still flawless having run a 2.66Ghz i7 overclocked to 4Ghz for the past five years

13 Asus boards including Rampage II Extreme, Rampage III Extreme (6 boards in the space of 7 days), Rampage III Extreme Black Edition, Asus P8-P67 Pro (2), Asus P8-Z77-V Pro which is still working techincally but needs add in cards and finally a Asus Rampage IV Extreme on day 2 and now the Rampage IV Extreme that is currently on my test bench, which has sata issues, network issues and also PCI-E issues, and this board is not dieing due to heat as it's watercooled and cooled by a 1080 rad.

Good for you. In other anecdotal news, my housemate has managed to fry 5 Asus boards, several sound cards, an SSD and two CPUs with a dodgy power supply. Clearly, Asus boards are crap if they've stopped working! They must be extra crap because it's the Asus board's fault the sound card plugged into it was also fried!
[/sarcasm]

As is becoming a common theme here, if you are breaking 6 motherboards in the space of 7 days you are doing something seriously wrong.

And for anyone else reading, I personally wouldn't trust my PC building decisions to a guy who manages to break more hardware than an entire IT department worth of geeks and gamers combined.

So my Experience with Gigabyte and Asus has put me off them and I don't recommend them to anyone, where as my MSI P67 motherboard is working perfectly fine with no issues at all.

And in my experience with Gigabyte boards they're great, and I would recommend them, same with Asus if you can tolerate their horrendous website. Personally, all my MSI boards have experienced bugs that cause random data corruption on the hard drive so I wouldn't recommend them to anybody.

Also Xeon boards are designed for being pushed at high temps and constant workloads as they are "Server" and "Enterprise" boards, try doing that with a normal "Consumer" board and see how long it lasts.

Err, I was talking about consumer boards... Since when did server/workstation boards have overclocking features? Grasping at straws much?.

As above, it is exactly these Gigabyte EX58 consumer boards that are in high demand because of their reputation for excellent reliability, and even 5 year old boards are wanted because second hand Xeons are cheap, and the boards are great overclockers.

The SSD size of 512Gb is because of the developers being lazy, Titanfall looks like a game from 5 years ago but requires 52.8Gb of storage space with the first DLC thank's to, 35Gb of Audio Data that should be compressed and decompressed on the fly but is instead uncompressed on install, and doesn't sound much better than if it was compressed.

Well I'm sorry your audio system is crap, but leaving it compressed would have been lazier due to extra CPU cycles and latency incurred from trying to decompress 30 streams of audio in real time. They've found a solution that lets you have excellent quality audio without lagging the game to crap. That makes them lazy.

Call of duty[blah] Battlefield 4 [blah blah] Crysis 3 [blah blah] Metro Last Light[blah]

What did I say about "most games" again? It's becoming very clear your idea of "most games" [that only run at 45fps] does in fact, comprise primarily of spewing out meaningless benchmarks of headliner mainstream titles and not actually... enjoying a game.

Those games would take 160Gb on a SSD and then you have windows on top which can range from 4Gb to iirc 25Gb, then you have apps on top and potentially other games that will be installed along the way whilst keeping those other games installed, just makes sense to pay £150 for a 512Gb SSD instead of £110 for a 256Gb.

Which is why I said use an SSD cache. Only the parts of the game that are accessed frequently are stored on the SSD and all the "junk" which you clearly don't use will be dunked on the hard drive. A 40GB game would hence take 20-30GB of SSD space, leaving over 100GB free. Unless you intend to play 5 of those games simultaneously - but then you'd be getting 11fps and have to turn the settings all the way down to "normal games" mode...

Also sure, you can get a 512GB SSD for £150 on a short-term temporary offer for a particularly rubbish SSD with the lowest lifetime and endurance of any SSD built to date yet, but hey, you seem to enjoy breaking your equipment repeatedly.

Also developers are making games on the pc require more Vram than they should, because the new consoles have "Unified Memory" and that is why the likes of Call Of Duty Ghost's and Titanfall both use 3Gb+ whilst delivering graphics that look like they should only need 1Gb of Vram.

The only thing lazy is doing a console port in the first place. Yes, some crap developers are lazy. However many developers are making games for the PC that have been developed from the ground up to be fully optimized purely for PC and look and run great. But as above, since your idea of "most games" is quite literally "Battlefield, COD, Titanfall, Crysis" as you keep repeating, pretty much all of which are console ports, you probably won't have come across any properly developed games.

As for the cooler, the Devils Canyon cpu's run hot but not as hot as the Ivy Bridge and Haswell cpu's, and given that the OP is looking to overclock then it would do there cpu a world of good to have a decent cooler on it, and with a H100i with Noctua fans on it, it will perform better than any sealed watercooler on the market and any air cooler on the market that is designed for a cpu for "Amatuer" overclockers.

By "hot" you mean 60'c at full load using a tiny, slimline stock cooler?

Yeah, totally hot.

You can get exactly the same cooling performance as the H100i on normal settings with a £20 air cooler.

So yeah, now I've proven a single GTX 780 can happily play many games at 60fps at 4K (which was merely an example of how much money some people like to waste) and almost everything on max at more sensible resolutions of 1440p or 1080p, do you have anything meaninful to discredit the card that doesn't revolve around "zomfg *cry* it doesn't play Crysis on ultra!!!111oneoneone".

[damien c]

Yeah it's my fault that a board dies after a mild overclock on a cpu.

And yes in older games a single GTX780 will cope with those games at medium settings at 4K but as soon as you bump up the details, you suddenly drop below 60fps quite quickly.

Obviously every reviewer out there is also making the same mistakes as me if they are only able to around 45fps at 4K on 2, 3 and 4 cards, so maybe you should instruct them on how to get more fps out the hardware than the hardware can actually deliver.

What is funny though is that now that all the consoles have Blu-Ray drives in them the developers are suddenly now choosing to, not put any effort in to reducing the size of the games and it's just being lazy and yes uncompressed audio does sound better but not that much, unless you a stupid amount of money on DAC's and "Audiophile" grade headphones.

I notice that you didn't include the 4K number from this "Miracle" card that you have.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/638...w/index13.html

Hitman Absolutions manages to give off a pretty strong minimum. Looking above, though, you can see our average sits below 50 FPS, and we would say that's just too low to be playable, even with the strong minimum.

Under Tomb Raider, we see neither a strong minimum nor average here. We're slightly ahead of the R9 290 here, but overall the FPS number we're getting out of the MSI GTX 780 6GB Twin Frozr Gaming OC is just too low.

This is from the 4K showdown that they did.

Looking at the results, I must admit that they're really quite interesting. 3840 x 2160 is four times the amount of pixels as a standard 1920 x 1080 screen. That means that four times the amount of pressure is being placed on the video card. To put it into perspective, this one monitor, at this resolution, requires more power than a three monitor Eyefinity or Surround Vision setup.





I really felt that these high-end single GPU setups would offer us more playable numbers in our game line up. While some of the older games, like Just Cause 2 and Lost Planet 2, manage to scrape by, moving to new games like Hitman Absolution and Tomb Raider are just a big no go.



We can't deny the fact that, outside of AA and AF, all our games are running at the best possible settings, and you do have room to drop those settings to bring the FPS up. One would hope, though, that after spending the money associated with a 4K monitor and a high-end single GPU video card that you'd be able to run your games maxed out. Looking through our graphs, you can see that, for the most part, it isn't true.



Then you throw AA and AF into the mix, and you see the setups crumble under their own weight. Saying that, the bottom line is that AA and AF isn't really necessary. Having so many pixels crammed into a 28-inch screen means that, at the native resolution, everything looks so sharp.



As for who the overall winner is, at $150 cheaper, you'd have to say that the R9 290X 4GB is probably the overall winner when it comes down to price and performance. At this resolution, you're probably not seeing the extra money that is associated with the GTX 780 Ti 3GB come into play enough. What is going to be more appealing, though, is the fact that the NVIDIA offering does offer more overclocking headroom, and in that scenario, we could see the FPS we need. If you found yourself hoping that you'd know what card to buy after reading this, you're probably slightly disappointed and just as confused as us. In the end, 4K really needs a dual GPU configuration. No doubt, this will be something we look at in the near future.

So please stop saying you can play games at 4K on a single GTX780 when everyone knows you need a dual card setup, and as a single GTX780Ti according to Tweaktown is not enough then a slower GTX780 is not going to be enough.

As for not trusting me, well thats your choice but the people I build pc's for and spec up would gladly tell you, that you would be wrong since only one person has had issues with the pc that I have built for them and that was down to there own fault, a cold glass of beer does not go well with electrical components.

Either way the op has got multiple recommendations so now it's up to them on what they want to buy.

[Bulky]

All the input is very welcome and appreciated, still not nailed the specs down but I'm not in a rush to commit I just want the highest spec I can buy for the money using high quality components. The graphics card is a no go as I've decided against a dedicated water cooling setup , I was going to run it on air until I could afford to upgrade to water , think I will get a GTX780ti instead. I'm also going to swap the cooler to the h100i. Still not sure about motherboard, I've not had a gigabyte board before (was my brothers recommendation and is what he runs and he overclocks the nuts out of his system). I had an asus p4p800 SE back in the day which never missed a beat ...... Decisions decisions.

[qasdfdsaq]

Originally Posted by damien c

Yeah it's my fault that a board dies after a mild overclock on a cpu.

Clearly, when nobody else manages to have boards die under the same conditions.

Overclocking by definition is forcing equipment to do what it shouldn't and by its very nature risky. However fact that I and many others have a board which you claim only lasts 16 months, work fine with a high overclock for 60 months would suggest the problem is not the board.

And yes in older games a single GTX780 will cope with those games at medium settings at 4K but as soon as you bump up the details, you suddenly drop below 60fps quite quickly.

Maybe you missed the bit where I pointed out "gaming" isn't all about Crysis 3 and other lazily coded resource hogging pile of junk console ports that you seem to obsess over. You may choose to only play overpriced, inefficient console ports that you get shoved down your throat by popular media, but not everyone else is the same. As I clearly showed above, hardly a single game your world seems to revolve around even makes the top 10 list of popular games on PCs right now. And I have to repeat - the vast majority of people (except in your head) are not so obsessed with perfection that they go slit their wrists as soon as their PC running Crysis 3 at maximum settings drops to a disastrous 59fps.

Hell, I live with gamers who are obsessed with running all their games at a flat out 120fps at all times, who would totally crap on your idea of what you consider "gaming"

Also ironic you complain about developers being "lazy" taking up disk space, yet seem to swoon over games that perform like crap and have horrendously dumb and repetitive gameplay because... developers have been lazy with the actual code. You seem to profess that Titanfall looks like it's 5 years old because its actually efficiently programmed and runs smoothly, and has been reviewed to have excellent innovative and immersive gameplay while repeatedly banging on about Crysis which has receives considerably poorer ratings and gets constantly slated for poor storyline, boring repetitive gameplay and despite running ridiculously slowly, the graphics aren't even much better than Crysis 1

Obviously every reviewer out there is also making the same mistakes as me if they are only able to around 45fps at 4K on 2, 3 and 4 cards, so maybe you should instruct them on how to get more fps out the hardware than the hardware can actually deliver.

Obviously you've misread or have completely missed the bit where I pointed out reviewers are getting 35-70fps at 4K with a single GTX 780 card. But keep deluding yourself. Of course, everyone else is doing it wrong by not frying their hardware.

What is funny though is that now that all the consoles have Blu-Ray drives in them the developers are suddenly now choosing to, not put any effort in to reducing the size of the games and it's just being lazy and yes uncompressed audio does sound better but not that much, unless you a stupid amount of money on DAC's and "Audiophile" grade headphones.

See above. Your ignorance is astounding. You complain about file sizes, but then seem to only play games that run ridiculously slowly because the actual game code is poor.

I notice that you didn't include the 4K number from this "Miracle" card that you have.

Err, I did. Once again you seem to be ignoring every fact that proves you wrong.

And at no point did I say I had any of the cards mentioned.

http://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/638...w/index13.html

Haha. Did you even read that link? It's getting 72fps at 4K in Sleeping Dogs and 48fps in Hitman. Once again your astounding ignorance is showing:

You say you can't get over 45fps with two cards say reviewers are getting the same, then point to a review where they get 72fps with [i]one card. So basically, you're either blind or completely ignoring every single stat, even in your own links, that prove you're doing it wrong?

So please stop saying you can play games at 4K on a single GTX780 when everyone knows you need a dual card setup, and as a single GTX780Ti according to Tweaktown is not enough then a slower GTX780 is not going to be enough.

Please stop lying and trying to mislead people when there are at least five review sites above proving you wrong (and stop embarrasing yourself by posting links that clearly contradict yourself and proves you're talking bollocks)

As for not trusting me, well thats your choice but the people I build pc's for and spec up would gladly tell you, that you would be wrong since only one person has had issues with the pc that I have built for them and that was down to there own fault, a cold glass of beer does not go well with electrical components.

I'm wrong that my Gigabyte card has been overclocked for five years and is working fine? You're not even making sense. Learn to read. You said Gigabyte and Asus boards, especially X58 boards were crap and keep dying. I proved that they're perfectly capable of being not crap both through my own use and that of many others.

I've factually disproven every claim you've made and the only thing you can come back with is twisting the results published by review sites and suggesting that your own abnormally high rate of equipment failures is somehow representative? Get real. For every Asus or Gigabyte board you've broken I can list someone running a massive overclock a 5 year old copy of the same board and other similar boards to the ones you've broken 6 of in a week... I'm surprised you'd keep going back and using the same board again though that you keep breaking multiple times... Why not leave the working stock to someone else who can actually use it properly instead of needlessly destroying decent hardware just because you don't know what you're doing? I know plenty of people who would love to get their hands on an Asus Rampage III Extreme.

Anyhow. You're welcome to have your own narrow minded view of gaming revolving purely around the ability to play Crysis on max settings. But please stop deluding yourself into thinking the rest of the world is as misguided as you. Seriously though, you seem to be trying to discredit my claims on the basis of you can't do it, yet ignoring the fact that somehow, the rest of the world apart from you is managing just fine. And you try to assert your expertise and authority by bragging about how many perfectly decent quality motherboards you've fried? Get real. When dozens of review sites are getting better performance than your "dual 780 Ti" with a single cheaper card, and hundreds of people are happily overclocking 5 year old Gigabyte and Asus EX58 boards the problem is not the equipment, it's you. "Most games" only being able to run at 45fps on 2 780 Ti's is a complete lie when review sites have shown dozens of games running at 50-100fps with a single 780 non-Ti. And I already listed three games I personally saw other people playing yesterday at between 100fps and 2500fps at 4K.

So please stop trying to mislead people based solely on your own clearly flawed experiences. All you're doing is showing off your own incompetence and talent for breaking stuff.

---------- Post added at 03:52 ---------- Previous post was at 02:34 ----------

Originally Posted by Bulky

All the input is very welcome and appreciated, still not nailed the specs down but I'm not in a rush to commit I just want the highest spec I can buy for the money using high quality components. The graphics card is a no go as I've decided against a dedicated water cooling setup , I was going to run it on air until I could afford to upgrade to water , think I will get a GTX780ti instead. I'm also going to swap the cooler to the h100i. Still not sure about motherboard, I've not had a gigabyte board before (was my brothers recommendation and is what he runs and he overclocks the nuts out of his system). I had an asus p4p800 SE back in the day which never missed a beat ...... Decisions decisions.

The real question is do you want to get the highets spec for specifically £1500, or the best performance for the money spec at a potentially lower price?

For example the GTX 780Ti is a very poor value for money card. Even the basic 780Ti is, on average over £100 more than the GTX 780 6GB example I posted earlier, and is universally slower in every single test. You could brag about having the fastest "stock" card, but you could also get a card that's faster and better in every way, for £100 less.

Similarly, you could look at the R9 290, which is overall about 20% slower than the 780ti, but costs 50% less (saving you over £200 off even the cheapest 780Ti). For the same price as an average 780Ti, you could get two R9 290's, which will be about 60% faster.

Same goes for all the other components really. Once you get high end, each extra 1% of performance costs exponentially more. You could build a PC that does 100fps in a game for £750, 110fps for £1000 or 120fps for £1500. If you really want to spend £1500, ignoring the fact it's actually a rather poor price point to aim for (being neither top end or good value for money, just halfway in between), then by all means.

Personally though, I'm happy with a machine that's 80% as fast as Damien's but cost half as much as his graphics cards alone.

I understand people who just want to buy high end for the sake of it (I used to be one of them) but know that the only difference between the spec you gave above, and a machine half it's price, is slightly faster CPU performance when you're doing more than 4 tasks at a time.

I used to be one that bought newest and highest but my wallet smacked me in the face and said no more

[Uncle Peter]

I decided to go for the R9 290 (XFX Black) for my latest rebuild - on the basis of bang for buck. Big sucker, I hope it fits in my case without fouling the drive cage :O

Surely top of the range everything doesn't really make sense unless you're going to spend your life sat on your arse playing games!

[peanut]

I have the GTX780ti card and it is fantastic. Though I ain't fussed with 4k, 1080p is fine for me, everything on Ultra with plenty to spare. I nearly went with the R290s but for noise and the problems associated with them I decided against it. The 780ti is silent (palit gtx 780 ti jetstream oc) was part of a new built and didn't mind paying out a bit more. I can't be done with SLI etc.

And as everything was new I ain't fussed with OCing either, not worth the risk when I don't really know much about OCing myself. If and when the time comes I have the mobo/chip and GFX card to OC that will be done by someone that knows what they're doing so will get more life out of my purchase when needed.

[Jimmy-J]

I'm going to sell my huge gaming tower and buy a laptop, probably one with an AMD A-10 CPU, that has a dedicated GPU.

I've never really used my current system to its full potential since buying it a few years ago.

[damien c]

Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq

For example the GTX 780Ti is a very poor value for money card. Even the basic 780Ti is, on average over £100 more than the GTX 780 6GB example I posted earlier, and is universally slower in every single test.

Please point out where a GTX780 is beating a 780Ti in every single test, considering a 780 has a cut down core and the 780Ti has the full core unlocked?

Vram is not going to make up for the card having it's main core reduced!

When I look at reviews for cards I look at them based on the reviews using games with graphics that are actually decent rather, than cartoon graphics or that are gimped because the developer doesn't want to much of a difference between the pc graphics and the console graphics, which has been happening for a long time but has only recently been made public.