What do you think about this computer?

D

Danny942

New Member
CPU: Intel Core i5 2500k
CPU Cooling: Default heatsink
DVD Drive: Asus 24xDVD-RW Serial ATA Internal OEM Drive DRW-24B1ST (Black)
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB SATA II 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Internal Desktop Hard Drive Retail Kit - WDBAAY0010HNC-NRSN
Motherboard: ASUS LGA 1155 - Z68 - PCIe 3.0 and UEFI BIOS Intel Z68 ATX DDR3 2200 LGA 1155 Motherboards P8Z68-V/GEN3
Power Supply: 800 Watt 800W 120mm Fan ATX Power Supply 12V 2.3 EPS12V 2.92 SLI-ready PCI-Express SATA 20/24 PIN Intel AMD by KenTek
RAM: Corsair Vengeance Blue 8 GB (2X4 GB) PC3-12800 1600mHz DDR3 240-Pin SDRAM Dual Channel Memory Kit CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9B
Case: Raidmax Altas ATX Mid Tower Case ATX-295WB
GPU: ASUS GTX680-2GD5 GeForce GTX 680 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Anything you guys would change? I want to keep it within the $1300 range.
 
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If you are not OCing, drop the i5-2500k for the i5-2400. That PSU is flat-out garbage. It won't last long. Get a 650W XFX PSU.
 
azeem40 said:
If you are not OCing, drop the i5-2500k for the i5-2400. That PSU is flat-out garbage. It won't last long. Get a 650W XFX PSU.
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Yeah I had my suspicions about it. My question is, if I do downgrade to the 2400, will the gtx 680 bottleneck it?
 
Firstly keep with the 2500K, you never know what you may want to do in the future, and the 2500K will hold it's value for a while, so if you want to sell, you'd get more money for a 2500K system than a 2400 system. The stock cooler the 2500K ships with would be OK, but really you'd want something better. I've got an Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 cooling my 2500K, and I've got my 2500K overclocked to 4.3GHz, so I'd recommend picking one of those up. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186039

Honestly Danny, overclocking the 2500K with that board is as easy and click on a button, that's all you have to do. In the BIOS there are 3 options - Power Saver, Normal and Performance, click performance and you're done and overclocked to 4.3GHz - and your RAM gets overclocked too, to 1648MHz. I've been using the Performance mode for a week now and not had any instability at all.

That PSU is junk, get a Corsair TX750, 850W is overkill for all of this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139021

Everything else looks pretty good to me.
 
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vistakid10 said:
Firstly keep with the 2500K, you never know what you may want to do in the future, and the 2500K will hold it's value for a while, so if you want to sell, you'd get more money for a 2500K system than a 2400 system. The stock cooler the 2500K ships with would be OK, but really you'd want something better. I've got an Arctic Cooling Freezer 13 cooling my 2500K, and I've got my 2500K overclocked to 4.3GHz, so I'd recommend picking one of those up. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835186039

Honestly Danny, overclocking the 2500K with that board is as easy and click on a button, that's all you have to do. In the BIOS there are 3 options - Power Saver, Normal and Performance, click performance and you're done and overclocked to 4.3GHz - and your RAM gets overclocked too, to 1648MHz. I've been using the Performance mode for a week now and not had any instability at all.

That PSU is junk, get a Corsair TX750, 850W is overkill for all of this. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139021

Everything else looks pretty good to me.
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Thank you for the helpful reply! As I said, I did have some major suspicions about the power supply. One more question however. If I use this motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131835) will it badly bottleneck the gtx 680? I heard that the gtx 680 needs pci express 3.0 to run optimally, and it says on the newegg specifications that this motherboard has pci express 2.0 16x. Will this affect my performance too badly? I want to try to keep this system in the $1300 range, but if it means a bad performance hit, I'll just stick with the motherboard I originally posted.
 
Danny942 said:
One more question however. If I use this motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131835) will it badly bottleneck the gtx 680? I heard that the gtx 680 needs pci express 3.0 to run optimally, and it says on the newegg specifications that this motherboard has pci express 2.0 16x. Will this affect my performance too badly?
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You can buy a PCI Express 3.0 board if you like but there are no CPUs out at the moment which support PCI Express 3.0, only 2.0. There shouldn't be too much of a difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0, but the 680 is optimised for 3.0 yes. If you really must have PCI Express 3.0 functionality, wait until April 29th and grab yourself an Ivy Bridge CPU when they come out, because they will support PCI Express 3.0, and the Ivy Bridge CPUs will also work with that board too. The i5 3570K looks like it's going to be the 2500K's replacement and it also looks pretty good, so wait for that if you want PCI Express 3.0, otherwise, grab a 2500K now.

If that motherboard does not have any PCI Express 3.0 slots on it, don't buy it and get one that does have the PCI Express 3.0 slots, just in case you do decide to get an Ivy Bridge CPU in the future, then you can start using PCI Express 3.0 right away.

By the way a GTX 680 will work in a PCI Express 2.0 slot, just to clear things up. Hope my post wasn't too confusing for you.
 
Yeah, the difference for a 680 and 2.0 slot would only be in synthetic benchmarks. You'll be fine with 2.0.

But I would go with the motherboard that stranglehold posted. Its the new Z77 chipset, has PCI 3.0, and is cheaper, so its a win-win.
 
vistakid10 said:
You can buy a PCI Express 3.0 board if you like but there are no CPUs out at the moment which support PCI Express 3.0, only 2.0. There shouldn't be too much of a difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0, but the 680 is optimised for 3.0 yes. If you really must have PCI Express 3.0 functionality, wait until April 29th and grab yourself an Ivy Bridge CPU when they come out, because they will support PCI Express 3.0, and the Ivy Bridge CPUs will also work with that board too. The i5 3570K looks like it's going to be the 2500K's replacement and it also looks pretty good, so wait for that if you want PCI Express 3.0, otherwise, grab a 2500K now.

If that motherboard does not have any PCI Express 3.0 slots on it, don't buy it and get one that does have the PCI Express 3.0 slots, just in case you do decide to get an Ivy Bridge CPU in the future, then you can start using PCI Express 3.0 right away.

By the way a GTX 680 will work in a PCI Express 2.0 slot, just to clear things up. Hope my post wasn't too confusing for you.
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The motherboard I posted has one pci 3.0 slot, but since I am actually not planning to buy this computer until late may, I should go for 2 slots correct? One for the processor and one for the gpu. So overall do you think I should go for the ASRock one? And one more thing, I thought that CPU's had their own little slot on the motherboard, and didn't use pci express slots. Or maybe you just meant that the pci express card would work together better with the ivy processor than the sandy bridge?
 
Danny942 said:
Or maybe you just meant that the pci express card would work together better with the ivy processor than the sandy bridge?
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I think I confused you there. Sorry.

OK at the moment, the Sandy Bridge CPUs do not support PCI Express 3.0. If you throw a GTX 680 into a PCI Express 3.0 slot on a motherboard which has a Sandy Bridge CPU installed in it, the GTX 680 will only run at PCI Express 2.0 speeds, because the CPU does not support PCI Express 3.0. It's not a big issue and you won't lose all that much speed, I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0 to be perfectly honest.

However, when the Ivy Bridge CPUs come out, they will support PCI Express 3.0, so if you throw a GTX 680 into a PCI Express 3.0 slot and the motherboard has an Ivy Bridge CPU installed, then the GTX 680 will run at PCI Express 3.0 speed. However, if you put the GTX 680 into a PCI Express 2.0 slot on a motherboard with an Ivy Bridge CPU installed, you will still only be running at PCI Express 2.0 speeds.

It's as simple as:
Sandy Bridge + PCI Express 2.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 2.0 speed (CPU and PCI Express slot bottleneck)
Sandy Bridge + PCI Express 3.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 2.0 speed (CPU bottleneck)
Ivy Bridge + PCI Express 2.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 2.0 speed (PCI Express slot bottleneck)
Ivy Bridge + PCI Express 3.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 3.0 speed (No bottleneck)

But I wouldn't bother waiting, just get the 2500K now. You probably won't notice that much difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0.
 
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vistakid10 said:
I think I confused you there. Sorry.

OK at the moment, the Sandy Bridge CPUs do not support PCI Express 3.0. If you throw a GTX 680 into a PCI Express 3.0 slot on a motherboard which has a Sandy Bridge CPU installed in it, the GTX 680 will only run at PCI Express 2.0 speeds, because the CPU does not support PCI Express 3.0. It's not a big issue and you won't lose all that much speed, I doubt you'd be able to tell the difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0 to be perfectly honest.

However, when the Ivy Bridge CPUs come out, they will support PCI Express 3.0, so if you throw a GTX 680 into a PCI Express 3.0 slot and the motherboard has an Ivy Bridge CPU installed, then the GTX 680 will run at PCI Express 3.0 speed. However, if you put the GTX 680 into a PCI Express 2.0 slot on a motherboard with an Ivy Bridge CPU installed, you will still only be running at PCI Express 2.0 speeds.

It's as simple as:
Sandy Bridge + PCI Express 2.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 2.0 speed (CPU and PCI Express slot bottleneck)
Sandy Bridge + PCI Express 3.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 2.0 speed (CPU bottleneck)
Ivy Bridge + PCI Express 2.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 2.0 speed (PCI Express slot bottleneck)
Ivy Bridge + PCI Express 3.0 slot + PCI Express 3.0 card = PCI Express 3.0 speed (No bottleneck)

But I wouldn't bother waiting, just get the 2500K now. You probably won't notice that much difference between PCI Express 2.0 and 3.0.
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Ok, I know what you're saying now. I am actually not planning to order the parts until about late may, so I actually may wait for the ivy bridge. Are they planning to cost much more than the sandy bridge ones? If so I think I will just stick with the 2500k.
 
they should be within 10 or 15 and out withing the next few weeks, so you'll be able to see. And there's no point in making a build now to order then, you do it when you're ordering so you can look at all the current sales and stuff. along with of course new parts
 
Danny942 said:
Ok, I know what you're saying now. I am actually not planning to order the parts until about late may, so I actually may wait for the ivy bridge. Are they planning to cost much more than the sandy bridge ones? If so I think I will just stick with the 2500k.
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No quote on prices yet, but when they do release, the 2500k is most likely to drop in price, anyways.
 
If you're not buying until late May I'd just go for an Ivy Bridge i5 3570K regardless of how much the 2500K costs, unless you're on a tight budget in which case yeah get a 2500K.
 
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