Planning on Building A New Custom High-End Gaming Computer

Post Reply New Topic

I've been thinking about building a new custom ultra-high-end gaming computer for a little while now. I don't claim to know everything about building custom rigs (component compatibility, cooling overkill, and the like) so I thought I'd post up the specs of the components I've picked out for it for review by the more tech-savvy people around here. I've built my own custom rig once before, but it wasn't nearly as advanced as I'd like this thing to be, so it didn't require a lot of extra spec-checking and cross-referencing and stuff.

So, here are the components I've picked out for it, taking the listed specs of each into consideration for compatibility (click each component name to view its specs) :

Edit: List has been revised according to suggestions.

CPU Chipset: Intel Core i7-2600K Sandy Bridge 3.4GHz
Chipset Cooler: Zalman 92mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
Motherboard: Gigabyte Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
GPU: EVGA Nvidia GeFoce GTX 580 3GB Video Card
GPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev.2 VGA Cooler
RAM: G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 32GB DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 Desktop Memory
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
Power Supply: Silverstone Strider Essential series 600W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply
Sound Card: Omega Claro Plus+ 7.1 Channel 24-bit 192KHz PCI Interface Sound Card
Case: Cooler Master Black Steel ATX Full Tower Case

So, what I'd like to know is:

1. Are there any obvious compatibility issues I might have missed with anything?
2. Will that case be big enough to house all the components comfortably?
3. Are the cooling components I have listed overkill, or are they not enough?

Last edited by Zokk on 11 Dec 2011, 8:57 pm, edited 4 times in total.

Why only 1333 RAM? You can do better than that. Also, no SSD? No 10,000RPM workhorse?

This motherboard i think would make a better base to build from.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6813131770
A hard drive and ram sould do fine without their own cooling fans. If you buy a Asus motherboard most have cooling pipes on the board no need for a chipset cooler.

Two things: Price, and customer rating. Primarily customer rating. No SSD because they're not big enough for the extroriuonate price you have to pay to get one bigger than 250 GB. And I'm building a high-end gaming rig, not a Pixar-tier 3D animation and rendering rig.

I actually looked at that board when choosing; didn't see anything significantly better about it. It's also $50 more than the other one. Thanks for pointing out the cooling thing, though; I'm never sure when it comes to high-end computer parts.

If that's the case then why the choice of a quadro card?

Because I don't want to have to replace it with a newer, better card every eighteen months or so just to be able to run recent games on anything other than low or medium on an HD monitor.

Future-proofing computer hardware is a fallacy these days. Something much better and cheaper always comes along before your budget period ends.

quadro cards are optimized for 3d/CAD work as far as I know and are not designed for gaming. Can someone with more knowledge confirm this? I thought the quadro 5000 was based on the same chip as a gtx 460 or something round there - just handles more 3d data at the expense of texture quality etc?

A top of the line GeForce will give you the same performance, better tuned for gaming, and save you a ton of cash than getting a Quadro, which is better suited for professional stuff like 3DS MAX.
A GeForce 580 or 590 will give you many years of an edge on games.
EVGA makes a 3GB 580 card for about $589 (currently out of stock)
But here's one built for water cooling for $729 which is in stock
Is the extra $1000 for the Quadro really worth it?
heck, my 9800GT is still holding up quite well for most stuff.

Quadro is over priced equipment marked up for business users.

Wikipedia page comparing Nvidia GPU features
Actually the GeForce 580 performs better than the Quadro 5000
Ex:
GF 580 floating point..................1581.1 GFLOPS...pixel: 37.06 GP/s...texture:49.41 GT/s...mem bandwidth:192.4 GB/s
Quadro 5000: floating point......722.3 GFLOPS...pixel: 20.53 GP/s...texture:22.57 GT/s...mem bandwidth:120 GB/s

Agreed with everything said about Quadro. That was the one thing that stood out most.

What is the price difference between DDR 1333 and 1666? The difference in real world performance isn't that big but so is the price difference. At least that's the case for 4GB sticks.

Another thing is that Gigabyte doesn't actually use EFI on that motherboard. Hybrid EFI = BIOS + 3TB disk support. It's not that big a deal. The only thing missing besides prettiness right now seem to be advanced fan control.

Yeah, now that I go back and look at it, I did go into Newegg's 'Professional Graphics/Video Cards' section just out of curiosity and then just browsed through them on a whim. Probably shouldn't have gone through there to pick out a gaming GPU. That GeForce GTX 580 is really nice, though. I'm probably going to revise the list and switch the Quadro out for that or something similar.

I also revised my original post to reflect the suggestions I thought were worth taking into account. Namely, the video card swap and the elimination of the HDD and RAM coolers. Also switched out the power supply according to the new, reduced power usage thanks to those changes.The suggested changes brought the total price down by over $1,000, so thanks a ton for that.

Are you planning to SLI at some stage? Because that board only supports crossfire and the second PCIe slot only runs at x4. Is there a reason you want an mATX board? If you were going to sli later then you will also need a bigger PSU.

Ah, I didn't notice that. But at this point, I'm not sure about SLI. An mATX board isn't really important; it is generally cheaper, though. I'll do some research on the differences between ATX and mATX anyway, though, now that you mention it.

Right now, I have neither an exact idea of what I want the rig to be able to handle, nor the money to buy the components for it. I figure by the time I do have the money, though, I'll know what more or less what I want out of it, and how to achieve that most efficiently when it comes to performance and price.