Look great to me. It is worth noting that the RX 480 scored less than it should have on Battlefield 4. Will that translate to poor performance in Battlefield 1? I don’t know, but it is worth considering.
Thanks, but it isn’t mine. A friend asked me to build one for him so I’m getting opinions before he starts spending money. I tried to convince my wife to let me build one for myself, but she said no because I got this last year:
What resolution is the monitor that this is being attached to? The only minor nitpick I can think of is that if 4K is involved, the video card should be bumped to a 1070. Hard to beat the deals that are out there on 480s right now for 1080p, though. (Not to mention apparently the 6gb 1060s are still somehow hard to find?!)
Also, some people don’t love OCZ as a SSD brand, though I’ve had no complaints at all about mine.
If your friend is willing to try overclocking (not that difficult or risky), Nvidia usually has much more overclocking headroom than AMD. I’d be looking at a GTX 1050 Ti or 1060 instead. The 480’s 8GB of VRAM sounds impressive but it’s only there to provide more memory bandwidth because of AMD’s inefficient data transfer.
A hybrid drive instead of the hard drive so that the most often used applications load much faster.
It should be pretty cheap to give your friend some more headroom on the PSU wattage.
For the CPU, your friend might be able to pick up a used 4690K for cheap enough.
Going to subscribe to this thread because I bet I’ll be buying a PC in the next year or two, and I want to remember that the PC Part Picker site exists…
The only complaint I had was with Microsoft itself. Their image downloader / builder refused to make a bootable 64-bit USB stick from a 32-bit computer. I had to use Rufus instead, which worked great.
While you’re not going to be overclocking on that platform, the stock Intel cooler is still going to be noisy. Look at the Noctua DH14 or DH15 coolers.
No question that Noctua makes the best air coolers in the market, but they’re pretty pricy and a bit overkill for an i5-6500. A Cryorig H7 would be much better value. Good cooling and noise profile, much fewer clearance issues.
I’ve got one of the small-scale Cooler-Master self-contained water-cooling systems, and it’s a wonder. Keeps the CPU quite a bit cooler than any air-coolers I’ve ever had, and is more flexible, as you can place the radiator part wherever it’s convenient, within a certain range from the CPU block part.
Yeah, I have a Corsair (H60?) water cooler and it works a treat. My only complaint was that the fans they provided for the radiator were kind of cheap so I replaced them with a couple Cougar Vortex ones that are more powerful and quieter. I really like the Vortex fans in general and they’re my go-to for case fans.
For air cooling, the usual gold standard is the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO. Everyone seems to love them (I had one myself and liked it; I just wanted to switch to water to decrease fan noise).
I’ve been looking at that Fractal Core 1500 case after seeing this thread. I built a HTPC with a Fractal Node 605 and love that case. I used a low profile little horizontal Noctua cooler on an i5-4690K and it works fine in the limited space.
I’m contemplating another mATX build, this case might be a contender.
I didn’t even consider case size when I said that. Something smaller/low profile would be in order. I personally hate working in small cases so didn’t think about it. Perfectly valid reasons to have a small case, I just dislike them for gaming builds since it’s a pain to get in and upgrade later or worry about cable management.
