High-end gaming PC build

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Let's say you want a PC capable of running a 2019 equivalent of Doom at 1080p and consistent 60FPS (more than that seems like overkill to me). What specs would you choose?

I prepared a whole post with links to the actual parts I'm looking into, but the site says I can't post links as a new user, so maybe I'll post it later. This is the list without links:

Case: Cooler Master Elite 130 Mini-ITX
Motherboard: ASUS Mini ITX DDR4 LGA 1151 B150I PRO
Power supply: Corsair ATX 750W
CPU: Intel i5-6600K 6M Skylake Quad-Core 3.5 GHz
CPU fan: Cooler Master Hyper T4
Thermal paste: DeepCool Z5 (how do I choose this stuff?...)
Graphics card: Gigabyte GTX 980Ti 6GB
RAM: Kingston HyperX 2x8GB 2400MHz DDR4
SSD: Kingston 480GB
HDD: Western Digital 2TB 5400RPM
OS: Windows 10 Home

Do you think this setup makes sense as a whole? Do you see something missing or some inconsistency/bottleneck?

Considering that I'm familiar with computer parts but have never actually assembled an entire PC, what tips would you give me to avoid unnecessary headaches? Things like "don't forget the thermal paste", or maybe other power supply / heat / noise / lifespan considerations.

Would it be inadvisable to go for a small form factor like this with this system? (Come to think of it, I haven't checked yet if the graphics card fits into the case.) Ideally this system should last unchanged for a decade (not future proof for a decade of course, but still running after some ten years if I'm not too unlucky).

Any input would be appreciated (including any input on good websites to ask about this kind of stuff in detail).

Thanks!

It doesn't.

Back to the drawing board.

At first glace, the only thing I would change if its within budget is the 5400 RPM drive, those are slow as all get out. If you plan on just storing 2 TBs of music or something, it'll probably be fine but even slightly old games installed on a 5400 RPM drive will take until the new year to load. Also that case completely sucks, you really need an standard ATX for the Cooler Master Hyper T4, also check RAM compatibility with the Cooler Master Hyper T4. Height can become a real problem, I have 4GB GTX 980 and I can say that its a good card even without the extra 2 GBs.

I would get this personally,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIAAEE43V6297&ignorebbr=1

In fact I have RAID with two of them and some other generic drives

Thanks for the tips!

I'm actually wondering if I'm buying an HDD at all. Maybe I'll buy a 960GB SSD instead, or maybe I'll buy that 480GB one and just use the portable 2TB drive I already have for extra storage. Odds are I'm only going to use the PC for games, and I'll keep using my laptop for everything else. The HDD would be mostly to compensate for my slow internet connection, so I can have a local copy of everything. Anything I'll actually be playing will be on the SSD. That HDD that I mentioned was the cheapest one I found that didn't seem to have reports of it randomly dying too early, and it was rated as "reliable for 24/7 use".

Cooling in general is one of the things I'm pretty clueless about. Is any special CPU cooling necessary for this CPU if I have no intention of doing any overclocking? (Considering how heavily games rely on video cards nowadays, it seems pretty redundant to even bother trying to overclock the CPU if it's not just for fun.) Do smaller cases in general make it harder to keep everything properly cooled? What case would you recommend if my priorities are small size and proper cooling?

This site I found yesterday is pretty neat when you're figuring out what parts to buy, or when you want to show your system specs to someone else:

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/HwR26X

I just don't know yet how far their "compatibility check" goes, or how reliable are their min/max power consumption numbers.

I made some relatively small adjustments to the initial list. So far the case still seems to be the best one for me, because I don't want anything flashy on the outside, and I don't want anything technically over-the-top on the inside either. And the Elite 130 seems to have very solid reviews, especially for this price range. I thought the video card wouldn't fit, but apparently it does (I'm still going to do more research on that to be sure, but it looks like it's just that the "product dimensions" I was reading included more than just the card itself). I really like it that it's small (and light) enough that I could take it with me on a plane.

I didn't know the i5-6600K was specifically meant for overclocking, so there's no reason for me not to buy the i5-6600 instead. The i5-6600 also seems to be way more energy-efficient than the current i7's, which I guess means there's no need for special cooling at normal speeds. Crucial RAM is cheaper than Kingston where I'm buying my stuff from, and apparently it also has more consistent reviews when it comes to reliability. The GTX 1070 8GB is a little more expensive than the 980Ti 6GB, but it seems pretty much equivalent in terms of horsepower, it's brand new (so it has a few extra perks that could eventually make a difference, or maybe it could outdo the 980Ti in future games), and it's much more energy-efficient, which I guess also means less to be worried about when it comes to temperature (and also means a 500W PSU is more than enough).

I'm still not entirely sure about storage, but I figure it doesn't matter anyway. Future expansion is nearly trivial, and for now 480GB is enough. So I'll probably just keep using my portable HDD for slow storage, and then eventually I'll buy an additional 960GB SSD (which I suppose will be much cheaper by then).

I'm pretty happy with this setup right now. I'm getting ready to open my wallet

Yeeeeeeeah

I forgot to add that I normally disregard such reviews as all hard drives fail and I go redundancy but I forget that not everyone has a RAID so that recommendation may have not been a great one. Having said that, Hitachi is normally under rated I find but I have had drive failure, not from that model but in general. Conditions matter, a lot and it looks like the drive I Iinked has more of a heat problem then a quality problem. Mine are running pretty hot really considering what I am cooling it with but for typical buy and use cases, the one I linked might be crap so in retrospect, take that with a grain of salt. Temperature and SMART monitoring are a must in cheap redundant drive setups.

Give me a day or so (holidays) to review your last few posts and I will have better recommendation and be more on topic.

I recently built my son a machine with similar parts, except we went for a Zotac 1060 for the GPU. I think it seemed like better performance/cost. If money isn't a restraint, go for a 1080, not a 980 the Pascal architecture is really good.

Next year I'll build another one for myself, if my life hasn't completely come apart at the seams first.

Whoa, so that's what a Hyper T4 looks like? Lol I had no idea. I'll just use the stock fan (which I just learned the 6600K doesn't come with. Another reason for me to buy the 6600 instead).

I guess the hardest thing to figure out is the difference between "what all the enthusiasts do simply because it's what all enthusiasts do" and what actually makes a difference. For now I'm trying to minimize the heat that will be generated to begin with. I'll make sure to do some extensive testing, but then if the temperatures seem predictable and low enough, I'll just leave it at that.

Money isn't really a constraint, but I don't want to buy the best GPU, because it's just way too expensive. It feels like a waste. So in the end I'm going for a 1070 . It's only slightly more expensive, but it's a lot more energy-efficient, which I suppose can make a big difference for my miniature-sized machine.

I don't know how much difference it will make for the overall temperature inside the case, but I'm also buying a "gold certified" PSU instead of the one I was originally looking into.

Nobody can guarantee you that any build will play the 2019 doom equivalent at 60fps 1080P (It'd be sad to still be gaming @ 1080P in 2019) because we don't know how fast graphics cards will evolve. Look at the jump from the 980 to the 1080 for example.

What I would build in terms of having a top performing system for 1080P today is the following (BTW the 980Ti is a last gen card you don't want it)

i7 7700K (comes out in a couple of weeks)
ASUS Z270-A (see above)
2X8GB DDR4 2400 Kingston Hyper X low profile
Gigabyte G1 gaming GTX 1060 6GB
Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SATA SSD
2TB Seagate ST2000 or WD black
Superflower goldengreen HX650
(or if unavailable, Seasonic SSR-G-650)
Corsair 200R
Cooler Master Hyper 212X
Windows 10 64 bit

EDIT: just saw your latest post. What is your current parts list?

Well, sure, no one can predict the future like that, but I think that description gives you a good idea of what I'm looking for.

As for screen resolution, I really don't care all that much about it. I'd probably need new glasses for anything beyond 1080p . To me it practically feels like it was yesterday when 800x600 was "high resolution". FPS does matter to me, as anything feels a lot more immersive in 60FPS, but, again, beyond 60FPS it would probably be more than what my eyes can notice, and it means A LOT of difference in terms of price.

So from my point of view, anything beyond 1080p 60FPS is simply not justifiable now or later, unless extracting the absolute maximum horsepower out of my custom-built PC were my hobby, which it's not. I'm only interested in simply playing games. After a few years, I wouldn't even mind maybe scaling the resolution down to, say, 1600x900 and dialing down the settings a little bit so I can still run the latest games at 60FPS or maybe 50FPS (or, more precisely, last-year games, because I don't buy any games at full price). This purchase is a one-off thing. I wouldn't call myself an enthusiast.


By now I've placed the order already, I just haven't paid for it yet (my bank's website is refusing to cooperate). I'm probably doing it tomorrow. This is what I ordered:

http://pcpartpicker.com/list/MXbNYr

Where I live there's really only one reputable store with competitive prices when you're buying computer parts, so some of my choices at this point are dictated by availability. I don't want to wait who-knows-how-long (maybe one day, maybe three months) for things that aren't really high priority to me.

I saw benchmarks comparing Doom running on a top-of-the-line i7 and on a cheap i3, and the gameplay performance was nearly identical, with the only significant difference being load times, so I figure 6600K, 6600 or 6500 just makes no difference to me (and the 6500 is the one they had in stock).

When it comes to RAM, I'm starting to question if there's really any difference at all between regular sticks and "gaming" sticks, other than aesthetics. I read some comments out there saying that "gaming RAM is a hoax", and at this point I'm inclined to agree. I know there's a performance difference between 1x16GB and 2x8GB, but again it doesn't seem to be significant for my purposes. (And I also noticed that the listed memory speed for that motherboard was actually 2133MHz... Oops!)

The SSD, well... I noticed that the final cost of the build was lower than my original estimate, so I thought, "well, screw it, I'm getting the 960GB one ". The $/GB ratio is essentially the same, and by all accounts Corsair seems to have the highest reputation for reliability in the market, with particularly consistent reviews for this particular model.

I did some more research on PSU's, and decided it was worth it to go for a more expensive one, not so much for the reliability itself (in that regard I guess a non-generic "bronze" one would be perfectly fine) but for the potential temperature difference. It might not actually make a significant difference, but overall generated heat is a high priority to me, so I think it's worth the relatively small increment to the total cost. Also reviewers seem to agree that it's a pretty quiet one.

It turns out that the Windows 8.1 license (and by extension also Windows 10) that I had bought for my Mac is a "full version" one, so for now I'm just transferring this license instead of buying a new one.

I realized I was forgetting the UPS unit, which is... kinda critical in the long term. Kinda silly to buy an expensive computer like that with all this concern for longevity without a UPS to go along with it. I can't find a description in English for the one I'm buying, but I remember my brother had one (and probably still does), and AFAICR he really liked it.

700VA, line-interactive, replaceable battery, 6 on-battery outlets, DSL line protection, USB connection with the PC, supposedly quiet (I guess that's the main potential catch, but then again I guess it's the same with all other UPS units, except fanless ones, which would probably be too low-power). I even like the design better than all other alternatives, and it's from a highly reputable industrial manufacturer. It looks like a solid choice to me (I mean, really... the thing looks like a tank! lol).