New PC Build Discussion

[EekParticipant 1162]

Howdy all, this will likely descend into a cesspool of technical geekery, but we have a wide array of people around here I thought I would kick off a PC build discussion.

It has been probably 10 years since I last built a PC with fully “cutting edge” components, and my current PC was started around a CPU that I had sitting around collecting dust for the better part of a year before I upgraded from my old PC. That was at least 5 years ago as well. So I am due for a new gaming PC.

Right now there are a few things I am looking to get into a new PC that weren’t available before.
– VR: For PC you have Oculus, and Steam/HTC. Right now I am leaning towards Steam because f~~~ Facebook. Also Steam has historically been a better platform for games.
– Optane: This is a new category of storage from Intel/Micron that will work kind of like a hybrid between RAM and an SSD. What this will do is work like a high speed persistent cache that is almost as fast as RAM, but won’t disappear if the power shuts off. This appear to be taking forever to come out, but the current Kaby Lake Intel CPUs appear to support it. I saw the early announcements of this a couple years ago, and the idea sounds awesome.

Now despite my stated desire to take advantage of an Optane system, AMD has been making some waves lately. Their new Ryzen CPUs are looking to be competitive, and at the very least their existence will likely save me hundreds of dollars even if I go Intel since a bunch of the Intel processors just got price dropped to better compete. I haven’t built a machine around an AMD CPU in probably almost 15 years. I did some stuff with the Athlon line, but at some point I got a few AMD CPU/Motherboard systems that were problematic in ways I never had issues with going with Intel so I have been on that bandwagon for a while.

A couple things I would like feedback on if anyone has experience:
What VR system do you have? Oculus, Steam/HTC, PSVR?
Are there any killer games for VR yet? I saw Resident Evil supports it, but I was never a huge RE fan.
Anyone with recent experience with AMD products?

[KevinStylesParticipant 2580]

I’m building a monster rig right now myself, i also haven’t built one probably since the Core 2 Duo days. What i’m building is based on an ASUS gaming motherboard, Intel i7 7700K 4.5ghz proc with liquid cooled radiator and the new Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti board that was just announced/up for pre-order. Now is an awesome time to build a new rig, all the latest gen parts just came out. Also doing dual Samsung M.2 960 pro SSDs in a mirror for faster loads and 3.6ghz RAM. Can’t wait to get this thing together, the video card’s going to hold me up though since it’s not shipping till the end of the month.

If you’re building for gaming, you don’t need any more than a quad core or more than 16gigs of ram. If you’re going to do other stuff that will take advantage of 6 or 8 cores and more ram then the X99 series might be a better choice, or even xeon if you’ve got lots of money to burn.

As for VR, I’d do a hard pass on that right now for a couple reasons. First is that it’s GEN1 , the systems work but they’re mostly built with off-the rack parts , they have wires everywhere and tracking isn’t 100%. Second is lack of any real compelling content, everything is mostly tech demos or small experiences. there’s like maybe 3 actual games and right now the Horror genre seems to be the s~~~ with VR, lots of jump scares. When Gen2 rolls around next year, we should start seeing smaller lighter headsets that work better and have custom designed bits in them and be cheaper. We should also have a decent library of software by then.

But if you really want to jump into VR today, the choice is PS4, HTC or Oculus that’s what you want to get. Oculus just dropped the price of the headset/touch controllers i think it’s 550ish now for the bundle. And HTC just did a payment plan option to divide it out to like 120 bucks/month or something to make it more affordable. Also HTC is coming out with a wireless thing for it later this year.

As for games, Resident Evil is a full size game not sure what VRs it uses other than PS4. Epic has a good one coming as well, i think there’s a starwars one too. Out of all the VR stuff available, the Samsung mobile phone thing is the #1 top seller, followed by the PS4, Oculus next followed by HTC in 2016.

I can’t really speak on AMD/ATi combos , was never an AMD proc fan , used to use ATi cards 10 years ago but then went nvidia when ATi was dropping the ball.

Good luck with your build. I’d recommend building something 4K this year that’s VR ready for Gen2 next year.

[Repulsive RalfParticipant 356]

I have the Vive, tracking I would consider near perfect, the killer game is Elite Dangerous, Project cars if you like car sims, the zombie games really are fun, RE is said to be vomit inspiring, even on a monitor, Fallout 4 is due to be released for the Vive soon.

[anonymousyamParticipant 4605]

I’m not building but i am more expanding on the prebuilt pc i got over a year ago.

I’m getting a AMD Athlon X4 880K, a GTX 1050ti graphics card, 8 additional gigs of DDR3 ram and a steam card to go along with it.

So while i am not building toward a virtual reality PC i am just looking to play the modern games at decent framerates to replace the need for a 8th gen console with (so i will save more money so i do not need to pay 60 bucks a year using psn).

Just an east coast asshole who likes to curse, If you get offended by words like fuck, cunt, shit, piss, bitch or any racial slurs then you just scroll down.

[EekParticipant 1162]

Repulsive Ralf wrote:

I have the Vive, tracking I would consider near perfect, the killer game is Elite Dangerous, Project cars if you like car sims, the zombie games really are fun, RE is said to be vomit inspiring, even on a monitor, Fallout 4 is due to be released for the Vive soon.

I played some Elite Dangerous a couple years ago, and it is probably my favorite space game in terms of mechanics that I have played in years.

At one point I was pretty gung ho for VR, but right now there is no killer app that interests me.

KevinStyles wrote:

I’m building a monster rig right now myself, i also haven’t built one probably since the Core 2 Duo days. What i’m building is based on an ASUS gaming motherboard, Intel i7 7700K 4.5ghz proc with liquid cooled radiator and the new Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti board that was just announced/up for pre-order. Now is an awesome time to build a new rig, all the latest gen parts just came out. Also doing dual Samsung M.2 960 pro SSDs in a mirror for faster loads and 3.6ghz RAM. Can’t wait to get this thing together, the video card’s going to hold me up though since it’s not shipping till the end of the month.

If you’re building for gaming, you don’t need any more than a quad core or more than 16gigs of ram. If you’re going to do other stuff that will take advantage of 6 or 8 cores and more ram then the X99 series might be a better choice, or even xeon if you’ve got lots of money to burn.

As for VR, I’d do a hard pass on that right now for a couple reasons. First is that it’s GEN1 , the systems work but they’re mostly built with off-the rack parts , they have wires everywhere and tracking isn’t 100%. Second is lack of any real compelling content, everything is mostly tech demos or small experiences. there’s like maybe 3 actual games and right now the Horror genre seems to be the s~~~ with VR, lots of jump scares. When Gen2 rolls around next year, we should start seeing smaller lighter headsets that work better and have custom designed bits in them and be cheaper. We should also have a decent library of software by then.

But if you really want to jump into VR today, the choice is PS4, HTC or Oculus that’s what you want to get. Oculus just dropped the price of the headset/touch controllers i think it’s 550ish now for the bundle. And HTC just did a payment plan option to divide it out to like 120 bucks/month or something to make it more affordable. Also HTC is coming out with a wireless thing for it later this year.

As for games, Resident Evil is a full size game not sure what VRs it uses other than PS4. Epic has a good one coming as well, i think there’s a starwars one too. Out of all the VR stuff available, the Samsung mobile phone thing is the #1 top seller, followed by the PS4, Oculus next followed by HTC in 2016.

I can’t really speak on AMD/ATi combos , was never an AMD proc fan , used to use ATi cards 10 years ago but then went nvidia when ATi was dropping the ball.

Good luck with your build. I’d recommend building something 4K this year that’s VR ready for Gen2 next year.

My current PC does have 64 Gigs of RAM, but that cost a lot at the time, and I can’t say that I have seen it use more than 12 GB except when I did some silly things like setup a 32 GB RAM drive partition.

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