the only way for me to be sure there are not bottlenecks is for some hands on testing. You can just go ahead and ship it to me, at your earliest convenience, I’ll be happy to even cover shipping
Just please tell me you’re not hooking this up to a 24" 1080p monitor.
I actually have two “monitors” depending on what I’m playing but I usually hook it up to a 40" LED TV. It is great for strategy games and shooting games (not that I play a lot of shooters). For action RPGs, I find the TV is too big so I use my 27" monitor. Although now that you mention it the monitor I think is 1080p. Hmmm… maybe should I get a 27" 4K monitor? It does seem a shame to have such a nice video card that can do 4K and not use it.
This has sparked my interest. I have several months of rehab on my hands, and I have been thinking of something like this for a while. Are these the specs for a state-of-the-art gaming machine? Are you building it yourself, or having it custom built somewhere?
I think this is pretty high end. What I like to do is every three/four years I go fairly high end and then let the games catch up and surpass the system.
There are more expensive components but I’m not sure they’re worth. Like I could get a more expensive CPU to get more cores, but so few games already make good use of multiple cores I’m not sure it is worthwhile. It is always a guess.
The video card is the best there is I think. It isn’t even out yet. LOL But the reviews for it indicate it will be the new best.
Where I often don’t know what to get is with motherboard and memory. There’s so many options and I have no idea what’s best or even whether it has that much influence on gaming performance.
So that was one of the reasons I posted this. I’m kind of hoping we have some tech junkies who can say “Yeah that’s good” or “OMG, you’re getting the 270E, what’s the matter with you?”
Oh and this is custom built and I will be putting it together.
Yes my current drives will be transferred over. I have tons of space.
I guess there’s always a new best. At ~CAD$1,600 it is too expensive for my budget.
I’m not a big fan of ultra wide monitors. Just a personal taste thing I guess. I’m probably not going to get a new monitor in any case. I like my current setup.
Have you considered an mITX build? You may not be a candidate if you’re porting over a bunch of old HDDs, but that’s pretty much the only sacrifice the small size requires these days.
I’d opt for an ASUS PG279Q monitor. IPS panel, 2560 x 1440, G-sync, 4ms response time.
It has fewer pixels to push than the ultra-wide which is rarely of benefit in games anyway. Most games are built with 1920x1080 in mind. 2560 x 1440 is a great upgrade and provides a great experience.
I will add that with that graphics card make sure your case cooling is up to snuff.
Those cards just blow the hot air into the case. As a result you need to see to it that the case can exhaust the hot air and bring in cool air for the card.
The blower versions of the 1080Ti don’t keep the card as cool as things like that MSI but they have the benefit of exhausting all the hot air outside of the case. Presumably you can get better overclocking from the MSI but the difference seems minimal in practice.
Frankly I think the blowers work fine. I have some and they work great and the PC is (mostly) quiet. No right or wrong about it…just design considerations.
I should also add the M.2 drives seems to have literally zero benefit over SSD when it comes to gaming.
If you have a use that moves a lot of files around then they are great but you can save money using an SSD instead if this is just for regular use and some gaming.
I agree with most of what Whack-a-Mole says. I’d opt for the i5 over the i7. SSD is fine for gaming, hell, I do most of my gaming on a hybrid drive and only put games with long/frequent load times on my SSD. I’d say go for a smaller m.2 drive for OS and your main programs, and a larger SSD or Hybrid spindle drive for your data and games.
I’d say save even more money and skip the M2, just get a nice 300+ GB SSD as your main, and a hybrid 2 TB for data and games.
I don’t agree with the GPU blower style setup. There’s a big difference in cooling performance and your GPU will down clock once it reaches it’s thermal limit. Unless you mess something up, it should be easy to keep the inside of your PC at low temps.
It might be a good idea to save money here and there and maybe put it towards a new Gsync monitor. I personally love my ultra wide 3440x1440 monitor. It’s great for productivity, and the ultra wide aspect ration is really cool for most games, while being easier on the hardware than full 4K.
I have not seen any Founders Edition 1080Ti cards (which are all blowers) perform badly because of thermal throttling. They run in the 80C range but that is well within their limits.
If your card is blowing hot air around inside your case then its own cooling performance suffers as can the CPU performance unless you have good case cooling. That’s fine and totally doable but something you need to think of if you do not want a blower card.
Wait, his drive was listed as M.2 AND SSD also. I don’t know what M.2 is, can you elaborate? A new type of technology? Faster than SSD?
I will say I got a 250gb SSD in December when I built my current PC plus a 1Tb Spinny Platter drive for music and backups. I wish I’d have gone 500Gb SSD, but I might upgrade sometime soon. I have windows up and running in about 15 seconds and drive loading is all instant, SSD drives are the way to go…
Otherwise, that seems like a very nice system. There was a site that would let you enter all your system specs and tell you of any incomatibilities, but I can’t remember the name or URL. Anyone know?
Thanks for all the feedback. The new drive is intended to be an O/S drive. Maybe 500 GB is too big. Do you think a 250 GB would suffice?
I’m getting an i7 for two reasons. One, although an i5 is sufficient today, will it be sufficient in 3-4 years? I don’t know. Two, I use my gaming computer to run my AI research during the day when I’m not playing. So the faster CPU is worthwhile just because of my specific situation. Also, since some of my research uses AMP the GPU is worth it as well.
Don’t drop the SSD capacity. They have a tendency to fill up. Drop from M.2 to SATA before 500 GB to 250 GB.
If you have a reason to get an i7, then get an i7. Nothing wrong with that. You should treat the sound card and motherboard like this as well. If you have a reason to get a sound card, do so. (Quality of sound reproduction isn’t a reason.) If you have a need for the motherboard’s premium features, get it. Otherwise from a tier.
The monitor + GPU balance is in a really bad place right now. You haven’t provided enough information in this thread to make a good recommendation. You need to plan on buying a monitor soon (minimum CAD$500) in the near future to justify the 1080 Ti though.
Personally, I would shave costs everywhere you can and then try to get a 4K/144hz HDR monitor. Expect $2K. If that sounds unsavoury, why are you getting a 1080 Ti? (If you have a 4K/60 TV, that is a good reason and then just get a 4K/60 monitor.)
G-Sync with a 1080 Ti is dumb. Try not to waste money there. G-Sync solves a problem that the 1080 Ti doesn’t have: tearing. You want need a monitor that reduces motion blur. G-Sync at 4K would make sense though.
SSD = Solid State Device. The M.2 drives are also SSDs in that they use memory chips and have no moving parts but there are important differences.
“Normal” SSD drives run on the SATA bus and uses the AHCI (Advance Host Controller Interface) to operate. The thing about AHCI is it was designed for use with hard drives so it is not ideal for running SSDs.
M.2 drives use the PCIe bus and the newer NVMe (NVM Express…Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller) interface. (It should be noted it gets confusing because you can get M.2 drives that use the AHCI/SATA instead so buyer beware).
The upshot of it all is the M.2 (NVMe) can get stunning transfer speeds. Where normal SSD drives get around 500MB/s transfer speeds the M.2 drives can get 6GB/s transfer speeds.
Unfortunately most programs do not seem to be able to take advantage of that speed and real world tests show the SSD/SATA drives load the program just as fast as the M.2 drives do. Those M.2 speeds are real but the places where you can make use of that speed are limited.
